Red Lily Adventuring

It’s unfortunately been quite a long time (over a year!) since I last updated this blog. Life really happens fast and I’ve done a lot of gaming and game development since the last time I was able to make a blogpost. I am fairly confident in saying that the current build of Blademaster! (the game that was Bloodfall and then Amulet) is the final form and we’re only doing a few tweaks in full playtesting. I was able to run the first of these playtests this past weekend and it revealed a lot, both of what was going right and with where my design was too clever for its own good.

The game is fundamentally based on the chassis of the BRP/Mythras/d100 roll under percentile engine with a few quirks imported from my own tastes and experiences with the OSRa and Old-School gaming. Blademaster! is simultaneously an attempt to improve on my favorite games in the d100 family tree (particularly Stormbringer 4th edition), a homage to some classic designs, and an attempt to provide a game system for the setting that I have run games in for so long and begun in earnest to write fiction within. I hope that people get to enjoy it eventually but for now I can share to y’all what I learn in this process.

COMBAT

The combat system of Version 1.0 is where the most obvious and crippling problems have shown up. A few of these are problems that I inherited from the games I was drawing from and a couple of them were the result of me trying to be a bit too clever. The first and worst of these issues was definitively a me problem. I had recently been obsessing over a few extremely crunchy games that use extremely small increments of time in combat to excellent effect and thought that something similar would work here. It did not. The biggest issue was that I had made the means of calculating which Segments characters act in require too much adding and subtracting which slowed things down and made it be recalculated every round which made it feel much too fiddly. This did not have the payoff I thought it would and made the combat drag in weird ways that took the interest out of what should be an extremely tense series of events.

There are two ways to rework this system. The first would be to simplify the calculation process, only having it happen once at the beginning of combat and then bake in more payoff to the granularity by focusing in on every blow & parry even more. The second would be to abandon the Segments system and Modified Dexterity Rank altogether and rework the combat system to only care about the resolution of each 12 second Round without the blow by blow action a more granular system allows for.

I have chosen to go with the second solution for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, after playtesting the system it has become apparent that a sword & sorcery game feels best if combat is quick and snappy. I really don’t want resolving combat to take up more than five to ten minutes at one time and using a more granular system is contrary to that goal. Secondly, this solution helps with the other big problem with the original system, namely that I had accidentally made DEX a sort of god stat. Not only does it factor into attacking & parrying but it was also the only Attribute that interacted with the Segment system meaning that if your DEX was high enough you got too many actions and if your DEX was low enough the character was essentially entirely unplayable. Big problem!

Speaking of attacking and parrying leads us to the other major problem that came up with the combat system and one that I’ve been aware of when it comes to the BRP engine in fantasy gaming for a while now, namely that once combat exceeds one on one fights there are way too many dice rolls flying around. To be fair, this is not a problem for every table and plenty of people enjoy the granularity of attacking and parrying but I have wanted to find a way to speed this up for a while now. Luckily the BRP system already provides us with an excellent means for this: the Resistance Roll. By condensing each Melee into a Resistance Roll with the PC as the active agent we can determine the entire thing in one roll. This system obviously still needs to get tested which I will have the opportunity to do in a couple of weeks but I am extremely excited for how much faster this can be without sacrificing any real granularity.

LOCATION CRAWLING

Location Crawling is the other spot that we tested that showed some minor hiccups, not really with any complaints from the players but with things that I noticed from the Referee’s side of the table. My original plan was to have Location Crawling work a bit like a dungeoncrawler board game (think HeroQuest and the such) but here again two major problems reared their ugly heads. First off, this is entirely too much prep work on the Referee’s side of the table. Sure, some Referees enjoy the work of building out an entire dungeon with terrain and the works for their groups but this is not reasonable to expect as a baseline and something that I have found overall detracts from games in my opinion. The other major issue is that this sort of a system, even in its lightest form, is too rigid for the improvisational and flexible method of Refereeing that makes old-school style play and skill-based BRP like systems really sing.

Another minor gripe that I found myself having with my own system is that I quite like testing player skill and player mapping during a dungeon crawl. It’s one of the elements that initially drew me to the OSR and even as I have drifted away from the lighter rules systems/rulings over rules philosophy and delved back into classic or trad-esque style play with crunchy simulationist skill-based systems it is an element of old-school play that I have brought back with me from my archaeological trip into the first decade of the hobby.

The solution to these problems has been quite a bit simpler and something I came to the conclusion of during the playtest session itself: simplify the procedure and take away the map. It is a simple but elegant solution and one that probably doesn’t need a lot of explaining especially to the average OSR veteran. Describe the room, resolve any actions, roll encounter checks, then move on to the next turn.
 

CONCLUSION

The biggest takeaway from this round of playtesting has really been to not let your own clever ideas get in the way of good gameplay and to kill your darlings early and often. I don’t think I am going to entirely throw away the more granular combat systems, they might make the basis for a really good dueling system later on in the core rules or a supplement. I hope this dev diary has at least been a little bit interesting. I think that the Blademaster! core rules should be finished for publication by the fall and then I hope to do a round of crowdfunding so that we can put it into a nice layout and acquire some really nice and evocative art for the book. I do plan on updating this blog more regularly with more dev diaries, updates to a few previous essays, and general thoughts on gaming.