The Road to 2.0
Well I missed my August 31st deadline for the Summer Update. Here’s why:
I was too busy with other stuff! Carving out time to work on the Summer Update was a challenge, and while I did succeed, I also made a fatal mistake…
Scope creep! I tried hard to stick to the plan, but in the end I gave up and accepted that what I really wanted to do was make the big overhauls to the game I’d been dreaming about for the past year+. I’ll talk about some of the – as yet, untested – large changes next, but obviously if you make changes to your core engine you will have to rebuild a lot of the rest of the vehicle too.
Ch-ch-ch-changes!
Attacks
In the current version of Magewinds certain attacks may have a split profile, meaning they have a Heavy or Light variant. The attacker chooses which version to use, places a card indicating their choice facedown in front of themselves, and then the defender declares whether they will Dodge, Deflect or do nothing. When making an attack with a split profile the attacker also has the option to Feint, to bait a reaction out of the defender and leaving them exposed. Then the attacker rolls a number of dice equal to the attack’s Power attribute, and any result less than or equal to the target number (Precision - Evasion) is a hit. The amount of damage dealt is equal to the number of hits minus the target’s Armour. Very simple and very easy to reason probabilities about. High-Power attacks tend to have less Precision, and therefore you’re making a tradeoff between guaranteeing hits and actually doing damage.
Now, I have some frustrations with this system that have only festered over the years.
One frustration is that attacks must be split into two categories: those with a split profile and those less interesting ones that don’t.
Another frustration is that because the outcome of attacks is easy to reason about probabilistically, the actual dice roll itself is not as exciting as it could be; you may roll a lot of dice for a powerful attack, but drama is modulated by the law of averages. Or the attack just auto-hits! Yawn.
The last and most important frustration I have is that it’s hard to extend – the design space feels so restrictive to me. Perhaps a better designer would have no difficulty adding things like good rules for critical hits, or attacks that have effects other than just damage, but I struggled terribly. So it was time to rethink the whole thing.
I knew I wanted to keep the attack and defence choice mechanic. That feels like a core part of Magewinds’ identity. But I needed to find a way to make it work for me and not against me when designing new fighter types that feel different from each other. After much head-scratching I had an epiphany: I could flip the choice on its head, and make the defender be the one who puts a card down.
I was never going to add more kinds of defence choice: Dodge, Deflect and do nothing are plenty, so the three cards should be used for them instead of attacks. This way means the attacker can have many more than three options to choose from, those options can be much more distinct from each other, and every attack can make use of the choice mechanic. Feint is now always an option, rather than only being available for split profile attacks.
I like this paradigm shift a lot, but we’ll have to see how it holds up in testing. I think the number of attacks available to choose from could become quite overwhelming for players, so I need to be careful not to add too many.
When looking at the dice mechanic, I also knew I wanted to keep Power, Precision, Armour, Evasion and Toughness working more or less the same. They’re simple. But I had to choose one to change, and I chose Power. It’s no longer how many dice you roll – you now always roll one die. Instead, Power is how hard the attack hits, if it hits. The amount of damage is still decreased by Armour in the same manner.
This turns the dice-rolling part of attacking into a fingernail-biting spike in tension rather than a moment of mathematics. It may still be possible for an attack to be so Precise as to auto-hit, but these can now be rare. A secondary benefit of doing things this way is that it’s easy to see how to add in critical hit rules, and use those to modulate any extra effects, like additional damage or Armour penetration, the attack has.
I’m happy with these changes, but I’ve yet to get them in front of people and see how fun they really are.
Overloaded Terms
I don’t like it when games overload words, and despite my efforts Magewinds is guilty of this sin, having Attack Actions and Attacks, a Movement attribute and Move action and movement as a general concept. With some carefully-chosen word replacements, I’ve pretty much gotten rid of the most obvious ambiguities. This makes me happy.
Unfortunately, when you rename things in the core rules, that is a breaking change that means you need to update everything else. Fortunately I was doing that already for the above attack system rewrite.
Timeline
I have rewritten the Core Rules. Consequently I’ve rewritten Tempest Crusaders, the fighter rules pack, and I am midway through rewriting Into the Tempest, the scenario pack. Nothing I’ve rewritten is final – I have a lot of testing ahead.
Looking forward, I’m reticent to set a date for anything – a lot of other things, many of them much more important than this, are happening in the next few months. All I need to do, however, is get together enough material to playtest with people again. Once that’s done the momentum will build on its own.
Thanks for reading!
Some Magewinds fighters I painted recently.
Three magi, meeting up. (Photo by Rich)
