Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Fantasy Boyscouts and Resurrecting Old Projects

Been a while since my last post, so time for a quick update on what I've been working on. 

  • Working on Lookouts adaptation of The Adventurer's Tale after being truly inspired by one of Penny Arcade's latest projects.
  • Being wowed by another awesome map from the Tao of D&D
  • Scouring my contacts for someone with good pdf layout skills and a little free time they're willing to offer up to help me finally turn A Wanderer's Romance into a nice pdf
  • Realising more and more that Greywulf speaks a lot of sense
  • Considering bringing Inheritance back onto a front burner to see if I can improve it significantly and eventually have a completed document for mechanics and fluff


It's the last of these things I want to talk about today.


Back when I spoke about Inheritance in January there were two main areas I felt needed improvement. Firstly the setting needed to be made more accessible and presented alongside the rules in the document rather than seperate in a wiki. I have an idea for how to do this, but it can wait for now while I deal with a more mechanical issue. This second problem was that combat options mostly consisted of "attack" or specialist options like disarm, grapple, charge and so on. I wanted to present more options for character that just wanted to hack away. In addition to this issue there was often a rather high "whiff factor", which I've come to hate in games. Here's how I plan to tackle both of these, without going too far into specific Inheritance mechanics.


Attack Focuses

At the start of a character's turn they may choose an Attack Focus if they wish. This will provide both a bonus and a penalty in combat.


Speed: The character gains a +1PL bonus to their Initiative roll but suffers -1PL to hit on all attacks.

Damage: The character gains a +1PL bonus to Damage rolls but a -1PL penalty to their Initiative roll.

Accuracy: The characters gains a +1PL bonus to hit on all attacks but suffers -1PL to Damage rolls

The desired effect of this is that if a character is whiffing a lot in combat, be it through missing or being unable to hurt a target, they can shift their focus as required. On the other hand, it needn't slow down play as the DM is advised to not use them for NPCs and Monsters and even the players can ignore them if they wish. 


Bring on a playtest!