MYTHIC BASTIONLAND QUICKSTART IS HERE!
This has everything you need to run the game, the full rules section, and 12 Knights and Myths to get you started. Also filled with amazing art from Alec Sorensen.
This one accurately shows how it feels to return to Twitter in order to promote an upcoming Kickstarter.
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As I previously
wrote, balance isn’t about making things equal, it’s about preserving
interesting choices.
So I’ve been doing a lot of balance tweaking to Mythic
Bastionland recently, especially in the use of Feats and Gambits.
Feats are special things that Knights can do at the
cost of losing d6 points in a specific Virtue. When you hit zero in any Virtue
you’re Exhausted and can’t use Feats.
Gambits are special combat actions that an attacker
can perform by discarding an attack die showing 4 or higher. Stuff like
disarming, dismounting, pushing, pinning, or just an extra point of damage.
For Feats, a few things came up in testing that I
wanted to try to fix:
- Some
Feats felt extremely useful, especially the one that lets you
discard attack dice against you. You basically needed to learn to
use this one if you wanted to stay alive, and in some cases there were
very clear situations where using this Feat was a no-brainer decision.
- Some
Feats felt very niche in their use. One granted an indiscriminate Blast
to your attack, making it essential against Warbands and large groups but
you’d never use it in a duel. Because each Feat is tied to a specific
Virtue, which are rolled at random, it can feel bad when you realise your
high score is in the super-niche Feat, and your low score is in the absolutely
essential survival Feat.
- Having
a very low score in any one Virtue meant that you were at a high risk of
becoming Exhausted and losing access to all of your Feats, even if
you had a high score in the Virtue that Feat used.
So here’s what’s changed:
- The
defensive Feat that previously removed enemy attack die now rerolls them,
keeping the new result. Now it’s a bit more situational, best used when
that enemy d10 rolls a 9 or 10, instead of an absolutely essential cog in
the system that every player would expect to use multiple times per
battle.
- The
Blast effect has been rolled into the Smite Feat that grants extra damage,
giving you the choice of which effect to gain. So now there’s just one
Feat for both variants of “do a big attack”. Replacing this is a new Feat
that interacts with the Gambit system (see below).
- Dropping
to 0 in a Virtue now only prevents use of that particular Feat, and comes
with an additional downside. 0 Vigour is now Exhausted meaning you
can’t attack after moving. 0 Clarity means you’re Exposed. 0 Spirit
means your attacks are Impaired. You still really want to avoid
dropping to 0, but doing so doesn’t prevent you using the other Feats.
Gambits raised some of their own issues in testing.
- By
throwing a Smite onto your attack, granting an extra d12 attack
die, it was quite easy to dismount or disarm somebody, both things that can
be hugely impactful on a combat. In a joust the former might even end up
earning an instant victory. Similarly, it felt a bit too easy to just
shatter a wooden shield at the start of a combat.
- Sometimes
players want to try a disarm or dismount manoeuvre, but their specific
weapon just wasn’t very likely to cause the result. They could Smite to
increase their chances but it felt a bit at odds with the idea of a Smite
as a more powerful attack.
- It
felt a bit odd using Gambits to push or pin strong enemies. Naturally the
GM can just say “no, the ogre is too big to push” or grant the target a
Save, but I wanted some stronger guidance in place.
And again, here’s what I’m trying out:
- Gambit
effects that directly affect the enemy give the target a Save, and weapons and shields
are just trapped, not disarmed or broken. However, if you use a die showing 8+,
instead of the normal 4+ required for a Gambit, then it’s a Strong
Gambit and you bypass the Save or attempt a stronger effect such as breaking shields and disarming weapons. This means large weapons are
much more suited to perform strong gambits, especially if you add in a Smite,
but even then it’s not something you can count on occurring. A Smiting
Knight with a Poleaxe (d10) is just below 60%.
- A
new Feat, Focus, lets the attacker use any die to perform a Gambit,
instead of requiring 4+, giving a Clarity Save to avoid Fatigue. This means the high
Clarity Knight is more effective at spotting and exploiting the more subtle opportunities, but the high Vigour Knight is still more effective at
smashing shields and dismounting enemy Knights.
- Even
with the added complexity of Gambits I think it helps that none of these
effects feel essential and you only really need to think about this
little subsystem if you want to do something fancy, otherwise taking the Bolster
effect to cause extra damage when it makes sense.
Again, this is a bit of a call to action. Just because your game doesn’t lean into “game balance” in the traditional sense doesn’t mean there aren’t balancing issues you should be keeping watch for.
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