I haven’t had any today, but I hope to enjoy vanilla ice cream on many days this summer!
Went to the office, ate some tacos, did some work.
Read (novel): Firebreak (Craig Schaefer): Second volume of highly sus magic school in Schaefer’s multiseries universe, our heroic lesbians continue to be awesome but also have teenager problems to go with their magic problems. Very cliffhanger ending, since this is supposed to be I think five books.
Read (manga): Dandadan vol 13 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Now we understand Vamola’s backstory, so it’s time for the heroes to rally!
Written (game design): 520:
Wait, how could I forget about the stochastic variant of door #3? Save
vs Ambush or lose half your HP! Or possibly lose all of them, or the
attacker gets the bonus attack dice. Anyway, this is pretty much exactly
why I thought of Save vs Ambush in the first place.
How do saves even? They’re for situations where the player might
avoid a bad outcome, so dice are appropriate, but it’s not really
an action. They feel like they should be d20 rolls, but are they
like actions? Is there a Difficulty? How would it be set? What does
a failed die do? For saves, failure and consequences are the same,
so that part of the action mechanic doesn’t really apply. Are saves
always D1, so they’re simple pass/fail? Or higher difficulty, to
allow for more granular outcomes like 1d6 attack or one round of
paralysis for each bad die?
How does this interact with HP? Earlier I had a bunch of saves
besides Ambush/Traps (Poison/Sickness, Curses, Possession/Compulsion,
Restraint, Falls, Influence), but where do the saves come in as opposed
to hits at 0 HP? I said earlier that I want to have effects actually
take effect, not fizzle, so a save up front isn’t right. Still thinking
about spell attacks going against MP, but for now let’s say every attack
goes through HP until it gets a hit.
Save vs Ambush or Trap isn’t about taking a hit (in D&D it would be the
Perception check against the hidden pressure plate or the ninja sneaking
up behind you) so it’s fine as-is. Save vs Influence is for resisting
social skills from NPCs, which probably don’t go against HP, so that’s
okay too. The rest I’m not sure about. Would it be nice to have
characters with varying levels of resistance to different kinds of
trouble? I think it would, but are save ratings the way to do it? Maybe they
instead have varying amounts of “armor” to subtract from the wound die
when they finally take a hit?
No, I’m wrong, a save isn’t the correct mechanic for resisting NPC
social skills. This isn’t a game where only the players roll, so the NPC
makes their action, and if they succeed, the PC target gets a bribe of
experience points to play along, which they can turn down if they really
want to. This also works for Possession/Compulsion, but because it’s
less of a choice for the character, they get some negative effect (maybe
just a wound) if they decline the experience points for playing along.
The other saves aren’t about things that affect character behavior
directly, so I don’t think the bribe mechanic fits. Modifying the wound
die is better for those.
Save vs Ambush is not like any of those, so it should be a different
mechanic, probably integrated with however we roll initiative.