Hotfixed Beta 0.75.1 Rulebook PDF - http://www.mediafire.com/view/?jj034imq1ihiz5f
Howdy folks! I know it's a bit early and everyone's probably a bit hungover from a night of sad or bitter drinking, but I figured now that the beta is out I should go ahead and explain some thing about our game, both as it is now and what's in the pipeline.
First, some excuses and explanations about the game:
1) Why so rushed?
Well, we set our deadline to the 30th for obvious reasons.
But unfortunately fate conspired against us in the final months. Between jobs, schooling, and a hurricane, we lost about 1-2 solid weeks of work time. And that's on top of us being terrible at scheduling.
Given the options of "hold back another month and a half" and "give the community something to fuss over, even if it's not finished" we decided on the latter.
2) Where's X powerset??
Most of the powersets we left out were left out for sensible reasons. Considering we basically revamped every single powerset from the ground up as it is, we didn't want to split our attention even further by tackling more complex powersets that just would not naturally work in a tabletop setting.
Illusions is the biggie, considering its age. Similarly, powersets that relied on systems our game just simply doesn't have at all, like Titan Weapons, posed a serious challenge. We do have some ideas floating around for how to fit some of the missing powersets in, and others are just a matter of adapting what's there (Dark and Elec Control, for instance).
Energy Melee's exclusion may very well have been an honest mistake or an intentional choice, I can't remember. We've always felt that a melee set that procs hard mez on every single attack is a bit much though, so it's going to need work one way or the other.
3) Where's Y power??
In most cases, powers were removed or shifted around because they didn't have a tangible place in the game. The old powers Flashfire and Stalagmites, for instance, were AoE stuns found in sets with non-standard AoE holds, but were really just AoE holds in everything but name anyway (recharged far faster, too). With Controllers being a bit more standardized, those powers lost a reason to exist.
Something that we are aware of are losses of "signature" powers within sets. Defender Storm Summoning is really cool, but it probably shouldn't be missing Lightning Storm, especially when Controllers still get a variant of it.
4) Where's Z system??
While I've spoken about things like enhancements elsewhere before, I can pretty much answer any question of a missing system with "Either we didn't need it or want it, or you're right and we should put it in." Anything more than that would require lengthy explanations of why we did what we did, and different ones for each system.
Some upcoming stuff that we're working on (after a break, because I think the crunch time nearly killed us):
1) Additional powersets and powerset clean-up. No-brainer.
2) A few campaigns. I'm personally piecing together "The Heart of the Hollows" and I know others are in the works.
3) Coming along with campaigns, the badge system. In short, adventures will award a badge on completion that gives a small bonus themed to the adventure. Characters can only wear one badge at a time but are encouraged to either keep one they really like or try out many as they come across them.
4) Cleaning up villain groups including adding demeanor stat blocks. We always intended diplomacy (or intimidation) to be possible with villains, we just didn't get a opportunity to stat everything out and add it.
Also, over time, we'll be adding additional villain groups as well as what are currently being called "Villain Mods". In essence, small modules that can be used to customize any villain group further. Two we have in mind are the Rikti Technology Pack (enabling Rikti Freaks, Crey armed with Rikti gear, or even the Warriors with Rikti swords) and the Ziggursky Correctional Pack (a set of restraints, props, weapons, and other things that give villains some "just escaped from prison" flavor).
5) Crimes in Progress, which are essentially our scanner missions. Basically just randomly-rolled, basic, plot-light missions for groups that want to get straight into the action or just want a short interlude between story arcs.
6) Infusing the game with even more character customization in the form of unique attributes. These are likely to be small bonuses designed to flesh out your character's personality. As such, they'll be rules modifiers that blur the line between powers and skills. Does your vigilante hate guns? +10% damage to any foe that fired a gun on the previous turn. Things like that.
7) The super special secret level 20 surprise system.
Hopefully that gives you some further insight into what's going on over here at GreatForge Studios. Have fun and fly high, folks!
Hotfixed Beta 0.75.1 Rulebook PDF - http://www.mediafire.com/view/?jj034imq1ihiz5f
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Friday, November 30, 2012
Beta 0.75.1 Public Release WHOO!
Good news, everyone! After a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, we are proud to release Beta 0.75.1 of the Great Forge RPG System!
Raw Google Docs Link (WARNING: Probably exceedingly laggy!)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tx9nuKs-ag_AxK5tEqPBFM678L2KNc0cbf4jTgV5qgM/edit
Mediafire-hosted PDF (Recommended!)
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?jj034imq1ihiz5f
Keep in mind that this is a rough beta release. Known issues include:
-Energy Melee, certain other launch-era powersets (Illusion), and most post-release powersets (pretty much Dual Blades and beyond) are missing.
-Enemies do not possess demeanors yet.
-There's a notable lack of pre-made missions, including Crimes in Progress.
-Everything is basically crazy and untested.
Despite the slightly lacking state of the game as it is, we felt it best to release this baby into the wild now, rather than later, for what we feel are obvious reasons.
Our development blog has also updated its URL, it is now found at:
http://greatforgett.blogspot.com/
Feedback can also be sent directly to feedbackgreatforgerpg@gmail.com
We'll be updating our thread over on the Titan Network forums (found here: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,5103.0.html ) moving forward, so if message boards are your thing, feel free to follow us over there!
Please come and try out our system, give us your thoughts and impressions, and have fun out there! And stay tuned as we continue to update the game!
Raw Google Docs Link (WARNING: Probably exceedingly laggy!)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tx9nuKs-ag_AxK5tEqPBFM678L2KNc0cbf4jTgV5qgM/edit
Mediafire-hosted PDF (Recommended!)
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?jj034imq1ihiz5f
Keep in mind that this is a rough beta release. Known issues include:
-Energy Melee, certain other launch-era powersets (Illusion), and most post-release powersets (pretty much Dual Blades and beyond) are missing.
-Enemies do not possess demeanors yet.
-There's a notable lack of pre-made missions, including Crimes in Progress.
-Everything is basically crazy and untested.
Despite the slightly lacking state of the game as it is, we felt it best to release this baby into the wild now, rather than later, for what we feel are obvious reasons.
Our development blog has also updated its URL, it is now found at:
http://greatforgett.blogspot.com/
Feedback can also be sent directly to feedbackgreatforgerpg@gmail.com
We'll be updating our thread over on the Titan Network forums (found here: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,5103.0.html ) moving forward, so if message boards are your thing, feel free to follow us over there!
Please come and try out our system, give us your thoughts and impressions, and have fun out there! And stay tuned as we continue to update the game!
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Demeanors
Hey
there. Once again, I’m Brandon, and I’m going to talk a little about
Demeanors. Demeanors are the social side of our City of Heroes tabletop.
They represent how player heroes can interact with NPCs, including the
villains they’ll face.
When we first decided to include some sort of verbal non-combat system, we had no idea exactly what we wanted it to do. We had two rules.
1.) Everyone would be able to participate. In some of the other tabletops that we’ve played - Dark Heresy in particular - you have combat characters, and non-combat characters, and no one gets to be good at both. In Dark Heresy, Clerics are good at talking; they get persuasion skills, bluff skills, and so on. But they pay for that in not having the points to pick up combat abilities. So once combat starts, the Cleric’s job is to find somewhere to hide, maybe take a pot shot or two, and generally twiddle his thumbs until it’s time to interrogate somebody. We didn’t want to have that. Every superhero - especially in City of Heroes - is capable of fighting crime.
2.) This would not be a substitute for roleplay. We didn’t want to have a system that took the dialogue out of the players’ hands and put it solely on the dice. Part of the fun of tabletops is in creating a character and experiencing the world through his or her eyes. If we take all of the player’s creativity out and make it just “You rolled a 10, so you convinced the shop owner to give you free stuff,” it takes a lot of the fun out.
After a couple of iterations, we finally came to the Demeanors system we have now.
There are six Demeanors, which pair off into three groups. Sympathetic or Frightening, Honorable or Deceptive, and Logical or Absurd. When a hero wants to talk to someone, they pick a Demeanor to use in that conversation. Every NPC will be open to some and dislike others. For instance, if a hero is trying to get information out of a member of the Warriors, they’re going to be more persuasive if they take an Honorable approach than a Deceptive one. Trying to talk to the Carnival of Shadows, it’s better to be Absurd to fit in with their circus theme.
The player picks one of these Demeanors, rolls a D10, and then roleplays the conversation. If the GM feels that they have properly acted in the Demeanor they’ve chosen, he gives them a bonus to their roll, and then checks the final roll result against the difficulty on the NPC’s character sheet.
If the GM and players decide they don’t want to use the Demeanor system, they don’t have to. They can choose to simply make all of their social interactions purely roleplay, and it doesn’t hurt the system at all. It’s purely optional.
The part of the system that I’m most proud of is that it also fits perfectly into combat. In one of our playtests, the Tanker decided to try to convince one of the Family goons they were fighting to give up. He rolled a Demeanor check in the middle of combat, using up his move action, and he succeeded. The Button Man was moved by the Tanker’s speech, and he chose to turn himself in.
It’s among the last of our systems to be completed and tested. We now have finished fleshing out powers and enemies, and we’re putting the last few changes into the Skills system.
As I said, we’ve already begun internal playtesting. So far, we’re extremely happy with the way the game is playing, and we can’t wait to open it up to more testers. Keep an eye on our Youtube channel, on this development blog, and on the thread on the City of Heroes forums. Thanks for following us this far, and I’m looking forward to playing with more of you in the future.
When we first decided to include some sort of verbal non-combat system, we had no idea exactly what we wanted it to do. We had two rules.
1.) Everyone would be able to participate. In some of the other tabletops that we’ve played - Dark Heresy in particular - you have combat characters, and non-combat characters, and no one gets to be good at both. In Dark Heresy, Clerics are good at talking; they get persuasion skills, bluff skills, and so on. But they pay for that in not having the points to pick up combat abilities. So once combat starts, the Cleric’s job is to find somewhere to hide, maybe take a pot shot or two, and generally twiddle his thumbs until it’s time to interrogate somebody. We didn’t want to have that. Every superhero - especially in City of Heroes - is capable of fighting crime.
2.) This would not be a substitute for roleplay. We didn’t want to have a system that took the dialogue out of the players’ hands and put it solely on the dice. Part of the fun of tabletops is in creating a character and experiencing the world through his or her eyes. If we take all of the player’s creativity out and make it just “You rolled a 10, so you convinced the shop owner to give you free stuff,” it takes a lot of the fun out.
After a couple of iterations, we finally came to the Demeanors system we have now.
There are six Demeanors, which pair off into three groups. Sympathetic or Frightening, Honorable or Deceptive, and Logical or Absurd. When a hero wants to talk to someone, they pick a Demeanor to use in that conversation. Every NPC will be open to some and dislike others. For instance, if a hero is trying to get information out of a member of the Warriors, they’re going to be more persuasive if they take an Honorable approach than a Deceptive one. Trying to talk to the Carnival of Shadows, it’s better to be Absurd to fit in with their circus theme.
The player picks one of these Demeanors, rolls a D10, and then roleplays the conversation. If the GM feels that they have properly acted in the Demeanor they’ve chosen, he gives them a bonus to their roll, and then checks the final roll result against the difficulty on the NPC’s character sheet.
If the GM and players decide they don’t want to use the Demeanor system, they don’t have to. They can choose to simply make all of their social interactions purely roleplay, and it doesn’t hurt the system at all. It’s purely optional.
The part of the system that I’m most proud of is that it also fits perfectly into combat. In one of our playtests, the Tanker decided to try to convince one of the Family goons they were fighting to give up. He rolled a Demeanor check in the middle of combat, using up his move action, and he succeeded. The Button Man was moved by the Tanker’s speech, and he chose to turn himself in.
It’s among the last of our systems to be completed and tested. We now have finished fleshing out powers and enemies, and we’re putting the last few changes into the Skills system.
As I said, we’ve already begun internal playtesting. So far, we’re extremely happy with the way the game is playing, and we can’t wait to open it up to more testers. Keep an eye on our Youtube channel, on this development blog, and on the thread on the City of Heroes forums. Thanks for following us this far, and I’m looking forward to playing with more of you in the future.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
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!
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!
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Intro Video
I've recorded a video discussing the rulebook so far and giving an idea of what we're working on right now. Take a look!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBckiIDhSSA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBckiIDhSSA
Friday, September 7, 2012
Welcome!
Welcome to Great Forge Studios' tabletop roleplaying game! Over the next three months, we are kicking into overdrive to ensure that the game is in a playable state by November 30. On this blog, we will discuss our design process, our goals, and our progress as we push for that deadline. Keep an eye on this blog, where we will post videos, diaries, and anything relating to the development of this game.
Great Forge Studios is:
Brandon Trost
David Kligman
Sarah Jedrusiak
Ryan Coe
Great Forge Studios is:
Brandon Trost
David Kligman
Sarah Jedrusiak
Ryan Coe
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