Devblog: What, Why, and How

Hi there, folks. Sarah here. With all the attention we've been getting over on the forums, I want to make this first devblog be a bit of a history lesson, as well as explain just what it is we're up to over here at Great Forge Studios and hopefully answer a lot of questions we've been getting.

A Brief History Lesson

About two years ago, give or take, me and Brandon were hanging out on Skype as we generally do. It was around this time that we were flirting with pen and paper games, something we hadn't had much experience in before. There was a D&D game here or there, I think this was prior to our games of Dark Heresy but just barely... Point is, we were chatting about this and that.

I reminded him of the Eden Studios City of Heroes roleplaying game, a project from the actual Dr. Vahzilok and company that had sadly never seen the light of day. (Best we can tell, once Cryptic sold the game to NCsoft, there wasn't much communication between parties regarding the rights and such, and the project languished.) But! A long time ago, they did release the City of Heroes RPG quickplay guide, for free, on a digital RPG store, and I had quickly snagged a copy.

I had actually seen parts of this quick play guide before; way back at Origins '05, I believe it was. Me and a friend demoed the game (or at least a rough approximation of it, the GM was quick to simplify mechanics to keep things moving), and actually had a lot of fun for the brief time we messed around with it.

I sent a copy over to Brandon, and this was really the first time I had ever looked at it all that closely myself. Our first impressions upon going through the PDF were...poor.

Being a quick play guide, and not the full rulebook, lots and lots of mechanics went unexplained. Basic explanations of certain stats and numbers were even missing. It would actually be somewhat difficult to run a game using this.

More importantly, the more we dug through the guide, the more we found ourselves dissatisfied with the way they translated City of Heroes from MMO to PnP. Don't get me wrong, from everything I know, Eden Studios is a cool bunch of folk, and I don't doubt they put effort into the product. But from the example we had, we just didn't like their take on things. It felt more like a superhero pen and paper game injected with City of Heroes flavor instead of a more thorough translation. (Being from about the Issue 4 era of the game probably didn't help!)

One of the things I got hung up on personally, which is extremely relevant to where we are today, is that there were charts in the guide explaining exactly how many pounds X points in Strength allowed you to lift. Similarly, exactly how many yards you could move based on your Agility score.

This was before I was more experienced in tabletop RPGs, admittedly, but measurements and hard numbers still tend to bother me. My first exposure to these kinds of games was a friend urging me to pick up the D&D 3.0 handbook. Boooooy was that a mistake. I was a bit young at the time, but even now trying to chew through that book and understand the rules is a pain. How much of that is D&D 3.0 being a byzantine mess and how much of that can be blamed on the book itself being badly laid out, I cannot surely say.

Back to us. Brandon and I were apparently feeling cocky that day, because one or both of us said on a lark "Hey, we could finish this. Or make it better. Or both.". And with that bravado, so began our own attempt.

Design Goals

One of our earliest design goals was to make a numbers-light system. This was due to myself and David's hatred of math and general inexperience. But it wasn't an absurd position on its face; this wasn't simply a personal bias, but an edict to try and keep things simple for the sake of new and casual players, an attitude that the MMO had taken often. Eventually this design goal rusted away bit by bit, though, as smaller numbers meant bigger headaches for actually designing the game. This design goal has slowly mutated into a blanket rule of keeping things as player friendly as possible. Not necessarily perfectly simplistic, but something that anyone can hopefully follow along with.

Another design goal, one that has remained absolutely unchanged since the game's genesis, was to allow for characters to be easily converted from the MMO. After all, everyone has a favorite hero or two (or thirty) that they always play, including us. With how our game is structured, it's about as simple as knowing what powersets your character has, along with some basic leveling up, if you're trying to jump ahead in levels. In short, it shouldn't be much harder than a quick respec.

The third major design goal was to maintain the flavor of the MMO as much as possible. And this wasn't just a matter of keeping all the names for game elements and mechanics. This came down to game feel. Remember that dislike for exact measurements for super strength and super speed? Our relative, adaptive combat system was born from this. To us, City of Heroes' combat is less about "I nuke that mob 30 feet away with a fireball 15 feet wide" and more about "I fireball that mob over there!". Our system seeks to make combat both simple to understand at a glance but also dynamic and deep, much like the MMO.

Our fourth design goal is a bit more...unconventional? We want our game to encourage and foster communication between players, and between the players and the GM for the sake of collaborative storytelling and gaming. We intentionally included lots of places in the game where players have to make choices as a party, places where players can creatively find a solution to a problem and be rewarded for it, and places where the GM can alter the game on the fly in order to keep the players invested. The more talking, inventing, and good-natured arguing the game can create at the table, the stronger the social experience!

Lost in Translation

However, not everything can make its way into the world of tabletop unchanged. Moreover, there are things from the MMO that we simply fundamentally dislike as game designers. This isn't meant to be a bash on the MMO, nor an ego trip where we tear out things we dislike for no reason. The point is to keep the best while fixing the worst.

For instance, before the introduction of IOs, enhancements were mostly a dead end system. They allowed for some strategic slotting choices of your powers, but the actual system of buying, combining, replacing, finding, and using enhancements was a chore and little else. Our game doesn't really have a place for enhancements (we cut the maximum number of levels in half partly because of this, partly). Our only source of inspiration was Eden Studio's game, which left them mostly unexplained aside from lots of little +1 bonuses on powers, which we found dull.

After the introduction of IOs, enhancements became a balance nightmare. I won't mince words - I personally strongly dislike the way IOs were handled, both the system itself and the gigantic bump in power they provided. It's not a big surprise that finding a way to implement dual enhancements and set bonuses was indefinitely ignored in favor of other ideas for our game.

Instead of enhancements or IOs, we have the Perk Grid and Demeanors. The Perk Grid is a 5x5 grid that you only ever get five points to spend (one every five levels). These perks are permanent bonuses that start out small, but can stack into truly potent advantages. Imagine your super speedster having a massive bonus to initiative, ensuring he always acts first in combat, or your Blaster being wily enough to shrug off mez for free some of the time.

Demeanors are still in the works, but you can think of them as Personality Power Pools. They may include advantages and disadvantages that color your character beyond their powers. Cold Glory is a sparking, smiley Golden Age doofus with a heart of gold. He's so Polite that he would never hit a girl, giving him a -10 to accuracy checks that involve hitting a female opponent, but by being so Polite he might be far more persuasive in convincing an uptight NPC into coughing up information he needs to Save the Day!

On the flipside, there are elements of City of Heroes that we've intentionally teased out into proper systems. In the MMO, disarming a bomb is a simple matter of clicking the glowie. And apparently, every hero in the city knows how to disarm bombs by default! It seemed natural to construct a Skills system that allowed characters to be powerful (and weaker) in more ways than combat. Skills cover the basics of superheroism - detecting hidden traps, understanding dangerous chemical formulas, hacking computers, and of course, disarming explosives. These are backed up by skill specializations; the ability to pick more particular topics, entirely customized by the player, that allow their characters to be super amazing. Anyone might have some experience in Occultism, but Nero the Bloodmage would quite obviously have knowledge above and beyond the norm in the realm of Blood Magic.

There are other changes we've made here and there as well, such as how we've handled overlapping powersets between ATs, inherent powers, Brawl, but those can wait. We'll have more detailed devblogs in the future about each of these individual systems and changes, but I hope I've given you at least some small glimpse into our design ethic here at Great Forge. Please keep in mind that our game can and probably will continue to change over time. We are constantly dedicated to iterating our system, and many previous designs have already been fundamentally altered or outright tossed out. In short, please don't crucify us for not including IOs (currently, at the moment, yet). :P

And thanks for reading!