BCZ Retrospective XII: New General Upgrades.

Boy, it was a good thing I took that break. You wouldn't believe how much of a trash fire February was if I told you. Before we start with today's business and resume the retrospective, let's play a game! Guess which of all these PC components burned out or broke down during the last 30 days and needed to be replaced:

• Motherboard
• Power Supply Unit
• Hard Drive
• Monitor
• Keyboard

If your answer was "All of the above", then congratulations! You guessed right!

This time of the year is, almost always, a miserable experience. I cannot describe how much summer hates me, only that the feelings are mutual. Fortunately, now it is March and the Season of Suffering is over. The odds of my computer imploding when the power goes out are dramatically reduced and I can actually sleep more than 3 hours at night. I have upgraded from feeling constantly fatigued, anxious and uncomfortable to the mere existential despair of a meaningless and short stay in this crapsack world. It's great! I'm pumped to write about nerdy game design stuff!

So, we begin BCZ's Mecha chapter with General Upgrades. I said a while ago that Chapter 1 of BCZ had three main goals: To give more tools for the less powerful PC builds, to allow for a greater variety of PC builds and, lastly, to mechanically represent PC concepts that didn't have rules support in the core book. I believe that the General Upgrades are the clearest example for all three of these things. Let's have a look at them:

Defensive Technician and Master Technician

The story of these two can be summarized in four acts:

1. Problem #1: Most Techniques are underpowered.
2. Solution #1: Create an Upgrade line that makes Techniques stronger.
3. Problem #2: This makes the few Techniques that are already decently powerful into absolute monsters.
4. Solution #2: Make the Upgrades more generally weaker but stronger if used with the weakest of all Techniques.

Not all Techniques are on an equal level, and it was pretty hard to come up with upgrades that would moderately buff Zweihander and Missile Massacre ones without breaking the game when combined with Ground Zero and Reactor Overdrive. It may seem obvious in hindsight, but it actually took me two or three passes until I realized I could simply take away the drawbacks of Zweihander and Missile Massacre. It may not be the most elegant solution, but it is a practical one. Should there be further supplements, expect more abilities that synergize specifically well with underpowered Upgrades and Weapons, calling them out by name.

Portal Generator

In my first list of "Things I want in the game" that I made during the early planning stages of the expansion, portals and teleportation were near the top. The very first version used to cost very little Energy (1 or 2) and had a Range equal to your Systems. It was hilariously broken, increasing the range of all your weapons by your Systems and letting you have the perfect positioning for all of your area of effect weapons, most notably: Bursts and Lines. It took a few passes until the current version, which is still very useful even though it is something like ten times more expensive.

Power Conversion

Support specialists were weak in the core book. They were very versatile and could trivialize fights with Boss enemies, but they struggled to keep up with all the other PCs in most non-Boss scenarios. There were many reasons for this, but eventually I noticed that one of their big problems was that they didn't get any benefit from Tension, a free resource that every other build could make use of. Power Conversion was my first attempt at solving this issue and it went to print without any changes. It makes it a lot easier to play a Support specialist, who are very hungry for Energy, and lets them take other Upgrades and Powers that suit their role such as Jury-Rig or I Have Control. This may be my favorite General Upgrade in the expansion.

Versatile Model

One of the problems with point-buy systems is that they encourage you to get very good at doing one thing and only that one thing. In the case of BCG, that means the system wants you to use always the same one weapon in the same circumstances. You can be very good at melee brawls, an amazing sniper, or... Mediocre at everything else. I didn't like that. Versatile Model is an attempt to encourage PCs to diversify a little and to make a niche for medium-range units that don't depend entirely on duels or sniping. It also helps represent generalist units with many weapons, like most protagonist suits in anime series where everyone else has a specialty. It is not a very flashy Upgrade, but it's just strong enough to get the job done without risking being overpowered. I like it a lot.

Extreme Body

I was making custom Upgrades and Weapons for a game I was running, and in this game one of the PCs could transform into a wereshark with powers based on various sea creatures - echolocation like a dolphin's, electricity like an eel's, ink like a squid's, etc. I think you can guess where this is going from that introduction. I wrote an Upgrade that could be used to represent electrified skin and I liked it enough that I decided to make it part of the expansion later. I think the only thing that changed from the first version to the one that went to print were the Energy cost and the "you can't fly to avoid this ability" reminder text, because it was underpowered in all but the most all-in duelist builds.

Maneuverable Transformer

In core BCG, you Transformed either to adapt to your current Terrain or to switch stats from a mobility/defense form to an attack/range form. Either way, once you made the change, you rarely had much reason to go back to the other one. Maneuverable Transformer encourages Transforming units to behave more like Valkyries, changing forms constantly just to outmaneuver and throw off enemies. It used to grant both an offensive Advantage and a defensive Disadvantage at the same time with every activation, but that was a little too good for builds that arguably already could get Terrain specialist and Flight at no Energy cost. The offensive and defensive bonus were worth around 10 MP each, and the flexibility of having the one you need most is juuuust good enough to make it worth the 15 MP cost.

Nanopaste Skeleton and Superior Integration

I have written at length about how the Antimaims (the abilities that mitigate or heal the effects of Maiming) were the hardest part of the game to balance. It should come to the surprise of absolutely no one that the expansion needed to include a few extra ones to fix the weaknesses of the ones in the core book. Nanopaste Skeleton is a weaker Invincible Alloy that PCs can use until they can afford the stronger antimaim. Superior Integration is the opposite, a stronger Integrated Weapons that PCs can take once they've outgrown it and picked up a few extra Weapons to make use of it.

Pulling Field

The lack of tanking mechanics was a common complaint in BCG. You could Duel enemies to draw the attention of one of them and after that the best you could do was pray they didn't have a way to Disengage without using an Action. Pulling Field jumps on the gravity manipulation train flavor text of many of the new abilities in the expansion to justify punishing Enemies that attack your allies with Disadvantages. This is, arguably, much more useful than the free Attack you get from being ignored in a Duel, because it actually protects your allies where free Attacks just punish enemies after they've already hit your backline. Moreover, it doesn't force you to split your MP between offense and defense just so you can punish enemies effectively. I like it.

Skirmisher Frame

This used to give you an offensive Advantage and a defensive Disadvantage for each 5 Zones moved during your Turn. To put it politely, this was bananas. Boosted Lance already has a reputation of being nigh-unstoppable in games with large battlefields, no special Terrain, and no enemies with Speed debuffs. Imagine if it had  +2 to +4 to each Might Test and +2 to +4 Defense on top of that! The new version works well for units built around maximized Speed but also goes well with any build that likes to stay at medium range while moving around the battlefield. Like Versatile Model, this helps to represent anime conventions that don't fit the usual RPG molds of "stay in one spot and swing sword" or "stay in one spot and fling projectiles".

Internal Fortification

I've said before that BCG can suffer from being a bit too close to a game of rocket tag. This Upgrade helps mitigate that issue and enables proper defensive builds to withstand as much as double the amount of punishment when at sufficiently high PL. This ability is so handy to have around after PLs 2 and 3, that it was baked into the Oldtype Feature to make it easier for NPCs to access it.

Limit Engine

Probably the coolest Upgrade in the entire book. It is very strong and comes with a hefty MP price tag and dangerous conditions for making the most of its power. Limit Engine was originally called Spiral Engine and was created as part of a short Gurren Lagann blog-only supplement. Because it grants both Energy and Tension, which are used to power up all sorts of Super Robot hijinx, it is a perfect fusion of flavor and gameplay. This is my other favorite General Upgrade in the expansion and the competition within my heart between this and Power Conversion is a fierce one.

Warp Step

Would you believe me if I told you that my first idea for a teleportation upgrade was to let people use Systems in place of Speed ON TOP of all the extra effects that this thing already gives you? It was a very good pick for a sniper or a build with Artillery Frame. You could teleport anywhere you wanted and blow up everything with perfect positioning, like Zeorymer. In that way, the Upgrade was very true to its flavor, but the idea of replacing one stat with another was terrible and I was told as much until I removed that part from the Upgrade.

Transpatial Randomizer
I think that Transpatial Randomizer was a commission, but I can't find the design notes to confirm. The way I remember it, the request was worded in such a way that it made me think of a Rod of Wonder from D&D. I wish I could recall the specific details, but when I thought "Make something random happen" I immediately thought "Oooh, tables of randomly-activated unique effects! Or tables of randomly activated Powers! Or Support Upgrades! There's so much potential here!" I ended up going with a table of random Support Upgrades, as they're the single most varied category of abilitise in the game and using all of them would make for a sufficiently complex and wacky table with plenty of results. It is a really cool Upgrade... But, unfortunately, it is too good. All Support Upgrades are balanced so that they're worth spending an Action. That means Transpatial Randomizer gives you a free Action every Turn for 2 Energy and 20 MP. I bet on the inherent randomness of the Upgrade to balance it. In theory, one third of the time it would give you something useless (or a hindrance), one third of the time it would be mildly useful, and the last third of the time it would be a huge boon. In practice, you only felt like you were wasting your Energy with one of every five activations or so, while the other four were half good and half great. This should probably cost 2 more Energy to make it more of an investment. Some games would balance something like this by adding results that punish the user, but that's not how I roll. Other than that, I quite like Transpatial Randomizer, it's a pretty elegant take on the idea of making something random but fun happen.

Whew, that's two thousand words about the General Upgrades of Battle Century Z. I did say this would probably be the longest post in the series! At any rate, it's good to be back.

Next: Active Defenses.

Gimmick Out.

Ideas for Additional BCG Material

Before I got caught up writing about making pacts with monsters, I had a few ideas for BCG play aids and supplementary material. Right now, all these projects are on hiatus until I finish Monsterpunk. Some of them may be finished after that, while others will probably never happen.

The first of the play aids would be a GM screen. For simplicity's sake, it would come in the form of printable inserts to use with something like this: The main reason that I never made one is that BCG already comes with a fairly comprehensive quick rules reference. There are a couple of things that aren't in there (mostly expansion material like new terrain and the transpatial randomizer tables), but overall I thought there wouldn't be much of a need for one. The subject of a GM Screen does come up every now and then though, so I figured I would make one. To the five pages of the quick rules reference, I was going to add Ally Reinforcements, Troubleshooting and the Transpatial Randomizer tables. Adding up all this stuff made it go to a total of 13 pages - a little bit more than a GM Screen is meant to handle. It might be possible to trim it down to 6 pages with some creative summarizing, we'll see.

The second set of play aids I thought of were a number of random idea tables. These were pretty fun to make at first, including Character names that would be right at home in any Gundam or Tomino series, such as Tetsu Terfing and Akasha Apostolo. Mecha names forged in the fires of mount ham like God Grangunner and the Wingbein Powered. Weapons of every shape, color and flavor like the Lunar Gunblade and the Atomic Shotgun. Unfortunately I ran out of ideas around that time. I was going to try writing disguised company and product names (like WcDonalds and Starducks) when I got caught up in other things.

The third idea was to make a couple of ready-to-play missions that could be used for oneshots or as a starting point for longer games. The problem here is that BCG is a setting-agnostic system where the plot revolves around the character's goals and needs. Any given Operation should be tied to one or more PC Themes and help advance a larger plot which... Doesn't work well for a standalone oneshot concept. These issues, incidentally, are why BCZ features five operation scenarios without any plot to them. One way to go about this would be to use the setting in the core book, including premade characters and writing a story arc for them to cover multiple episodes rather than just one. This would be a much larger time investment though, I'm not there's enough interest to make it worth the effort.

There was also an idea to print a deck of ability cards listing what all the abilities in the game do, reminiscent of what D&D 4E had. The main problem here was one of production costs: The game has around two hundred Powers, Upgrades and Weapons between BCG and BCZ - not counting enemy or character-scale abilities. Illustrating all those cards isn't free - on the contrary, it is quite expensive. This is one of those ideas that were discarded and will probably never happen.

The last and possibly most ambitious of these ideas was to put out there a Custom Weapons Creation system. The big problem for custom weapons is that the system is inherently an exploitable mechanic and begs to cause balance problems. I originally thought this could be fixed by writing pages and pages of guidelines and advice for what to allow and what not to allow... But I really, really wouldn't hold my breath hoping for that to work. If it were to be released at all, it would come with a huge disclaimer saying you're on your own if there's any balance problems.

In the end I set all these ideas aside to focus on Monsterpunk. If there is interest for these, I may change my mind and go back to them earlier. If you want them and want them this year, drop me a comment.

Until the next update, Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk: The Summoners RPG.

It has been over two months since the last update about the Summoners RPG - long enough to get a better name: Monsterpunk. Let's do a quick recap of the last post before we continue:

In Monsterpunk it is not uncommon to have PCs control two units -and possibly more - at the same time. The first puzzle to solve here was how to do summon and summoner stats. The biggest problem was that none of the stat systems I came up with were simple yet intuitive enough to satisfy me. The solution I came to was to make a class-based system instead of my typical point-buy and stat-based approach. The second puzzle to solve was action economy. It is very hard to make characters balanced with each other when one of them needs two or three times as many actions to do what other characters can do in one. The solution was to limit the number of units controlled by a single PC to two at a time (at least for the base rules) and to give the classes with multiple units ways to 'cheat' at action economy by spending actions as if they were of a higher tier for their summon.

As for the classes themselves, there are four categories: Cavaliers (ride the summon to battle), Tamers (buff and support the summon), Fusions (fuse permanently with the summon to gain its powers) and Solos (no summon, but have increased physical abilities, psychic powers, better tech, etc.). That was what they were called back then. Now they're called Riders, Partners, Gestalts and Ubermensch - in the same order.

Now that we've got that covered, let's get to the part that ties all these things together: The Core Mechanic.

Puzzle #3: What's the Core Mechanic?

I had a class and action system in mind but I still didn't have thought up the way players would roll dice to solve problems yet. I couldn't do the good old "dice + stat to beat a target difficulty number" approach, because I didn't have stats. In fact, without stats there's little room for any of the things that make interacting with game mechanics fun and interesting. This was a big roadblock and I'd love to say that I came up with the answer entirely on my own.

But the solution didn't come to me until I was shown a different RPG's core mechanic. The game in question is Strike! In Strike! You roll 1d6 and consult a table with 4-5 results. The results for rolls outside of combat go from catastrophic failure to critical success with other interesting results (success with a cost, unexpected twists that throw the situation off the rails, etc.) in between. Combat results include missing and hurting yourself, doing damage and having a special effect, doing damage or having a special effect (player's choice) and doing double damage plus the effect. The PCs' affect this result by changing, say, 3's to 4's (giving you damage and effect when you would usually only get one) or giving the player the ability to roll 2d6 and choose which roll to keep. Thus, everybody rolls the same 3-4 tables which they'll probably memorize after a few rolls. As a bonus there's no need to do math with bonuses and penalties, which keeps the pace of the game flowing smoothly.

This, dear readers, is one of the most novel and elegant core mechanics I have ever seen. There are as many things that I adore about it as there are things that bother me, but since this isn't a review of Strike! I'll keep to the part that is relevant to our story.

I knew from that moment that I wanted to have a table of fixed results as an universal mechanic. Of course, I would do it differently. Here is Monsterpunk's Table:

Here is what those terms mean:

Success
You did the thing! Go you!

Twist
Something went wrong. Not only do you fail but you also have a new problem to deal with. Maybe you got wounded, maybe you set the place on fire, maybe you succeeded but in a way you didn't want, as if an evil genie granted you a wish.

Success with Twist
You succeed BUT you also have a new problem to deal with. Basically it is both of the above as one result.

Success with Bonus
Also known as a 'critical success'. If a success is usually a step forward in advancing the story, this is a step and a half forward. Maybe you finish the task much faster than intended, maybe you gain a clue for what to do next, maybe you impressed an important NPC who now looks at you favorably.

Base Effect.
What your ability always does. The weakest abilities don't have a base effect - a result of 1-4 means they miss. The strongest abilities always do something, like inflicting status conditions or high automatic damage, even without getting any bonus effects.

Bonus Effect.
All combat abilities have three bonus effects. Some effects can be applied two or three times while others can be only applied once. Hence, you can get up to three bonus effects on top of the base effect - if your ability has one.

What I really like about the d10 is that it has just enough randomness to cover a wide range of results while still being fairly predictable and intuitive. You can tell at a glance that there is only a 40% chance of total failure at any given time, but the highest possible result is very rare at 10%.

Here's some more probability calculations:

In this system Advantages and Disadvantages matter a lot more than they did in BCG. Having a single Advantage to your roll makes it more likely to get a success with bonus than a twist, but a Disadvantage gives you a 64% chance of total failure and a mere 1% of amazing success. This makes managing your Advantages and Disadvantages a tactical priority. It is a much bigger factor than an extra +2 damage on top of your 13 damage attack and I really like that.

With all the important rules well on their way to being solved, it was time to lay the groundwork on the nonmechanical aspects of the game: Setting, tone, mood and all those things.

Why "Monsterpunk"?

I figure I should start with the title.

Monsterpunk is a hybrid of Urban Fantasy and Science Fiction. Like most -Punk genres, Monsterpunk has its roots in science fiction, exploring worlds and societies where amazing technology has led to a dystopic way of life... Except in this case there's no artificial intelligences or genetic engineering or other scientific advancements as part of the setup. The foundation of the setting, the thing that changes everything and makes the world a different place, is the sudden arrival of fantastical and mythological creatures that proceed to take charge.

The game takes place several generations after this change, a long enough time for Humans to be no longer at the top of the food chain on a worldwide scale. People are now servants, nourishment and, quite often, playthings of their new masters. The Monsters need humans as a food source, with the "civilized" Monsters feeding on the psychic energy of living humans bred specifically for this purpose, while others just plain eat people's brains. Most people chose to side with the former against the latter, and the resulting conflict is how the world ended.

Yes, it is a post-apocalyptic world. Satellite networks and power plants are dangerous infraestructure to leave in the hands of potential human resistance factions, after all. Life in the controlled territory of the larger Monster factions means following their rules and paying them tribute (which means feeding them) in exchange for their protection from other Monsters and maybe a nice mid-1900's lifestyle if they're nice and care about electric grids. Outside the territory controlled by any given Monster faction, you're struggling to survive in a hellish wasteland where everything is trying to kill you.

The PCs take the role of a mercenary company - they're tough, relatively independent survivors. Like in most RPGs, combat is expected (in case the table didn't tip you off) to happen often. As mercenaries, PCs are in the middle of a brewing storm between warring factions, having the option to side with any of them or stay as independent as possible. The former means taking on missions to secure uncontrolled territory, sabotage other factions and suppress internal attempts at rebellion. The latter means making a living in a ravaged world where brain-eating monsters roam the wilderness, everything is poisonous and the weather is always extreme.

Regardless of the path they choose, horrible things will happen to them along the way, testing the limits of their sanity and their own humanity.

There's a bit more to it... But, to be honest, I spent most of my Monsterpunk time during the past two months tweaking game mechanics instead of writing lore stuff so the ideas are not fully developed yet. Mechanically speaking, the game is more or less ready for playtesting so there'll be more news soon.

Until next time, Gimmick Out.

The Summoners RPG

The Summoners RPG is something I started earnest work in relatively recently. Inspiration for it struck just this past March, with the first playtest being this last week. Since then, my leisure time has been spent on this, Shin Megami Tensei IV (Finally playing it like four years after release. Not that odd for me.) and then Persona 5 (Like two weeks after release. Very odd for me.). Of both, I would say that SMT IV is the bigger influence and the one that sparked my interest in going ahead with this project the most, but don't get me started on them or we'll be here all day talking about Summoner Videogames instead of Summoner Tablegames.

First, in case you're not familiar with Shin Megami Tensei, or SMT, it's a JRPG franchise in which every game is full of monsters, deities and legendary humans from pretty much every mythological stripe and a suspicious favoritism for Japanese history. The main appeal is that you're often negotiating with these enemies to make them join your party. The stories are often post apocalyptic cyberpunk(...ish? there's magic along with technology, so it's more like magipunk) or begin when the apocalypse is right about to begin, offering multiple endings to let you rebuild society and create the dystopia of your dreams find the least sucky option from a bunch of terrible, awful aftermath scenarios.

I've spoken about making a Summoners RPG in the past, but never really got around to it. Back then I wasn't really sure how much it would take from SMT. That was mostly because there were a couple of system puzzles to solve before I could really begin. Now that they're in place, I can make the game. Let's start with said puzzles and how I solved them.

Puzzle 1: The "managing stats for multiple units" problem.

Numbers and math are one of those things that RPGs make use of a lot, whether you like it or not. You have your stats, the enemy has theirs, HP totals go up and down in the course of the fight while buffs and debuffs modify these stats and a lot of the games' tactical elements involves doing some mental math to figure out whether something is a good idea or not. In BCG there are two separate sets of stats (for the character and mecha) and a plethora of ways to buff them, debuff them, use one in place of the other and even ignore dice rolls entirely when using a specific stat. I like working with numbers even if I'm not the biggest fan of math, because they make tactical combat more fun.

So my first instinct was to try for a similar approach, giving PCs and all their Summons their own stats for story and combat scenes. It... Well, it was such a mess that I scrapped it halfway through writing it up.

The worst part isn't that it is complex, because complexity is part of the charm when each PC is its own mini-army. The worst part is that most of the mechanics are useless and won't ever be relevant. How often is a Minotaur going to use a Charm or Intellect skill? How often is a Succubus going to roll Vehicles or Electronics? How often is a Zombie's... ANYTHING going to be relevant? Writing all that stuff down is a waste of time and effort.

After this I transformed all the Summons into a pile of combat stats with some story scene abilities. The Minotaur can use its raw strength, tracking and and maze-navigation skills out of combat. The Succubus is a master of diplomacy and deception. The Zombie... Well, I still had no idea what to do with the Zombie but I figured that I'd solve the problem later. This approach alleviated the issue somewhat but it had the problem of inflexibility. What happens when a Summon is hit with a debuff meant for PCs that they don't have the stats to handle? Should they be immune to those things? Then why are your Summons immune to, say, fear and sickness outside of combat but still susceptible to it in the middle of combat? Should they just use your stats? Then why on earth is the nerdy wizard's Minotaur passing its Intellect Tests and the Succubus terribly incompetent at anything that doesn't involve Charm or Intellect? WHAT DO I EVEN DO WITH THE STUPID ZOMBIE IN A SITUATION LIKE THIS!? It looked like there was no elegant solution to what I was calling the "Stats with multiple units" problem.

What alternative was there to using stats? Well, stats can be replaced by tiered skills (instead of having stats, you just have a list of things you're good at with different bonuses for each) if we want to use a point-buy system of some kind. We could also go class-based and ignore stats entirely, making the things you're good at part of your class. I don't have anything against the former method and I think some games use it fairly well (FATE in particular) but it misses what makes point-buy exciting for me (the number-juggling and potential modeling or simulating of nearly anything you can think of), so I decided I'd try to make the idea work with a class-based system.

I knew that I wanted four or five distinct types of character builds represented: A pure "Tamer" type who lets the Summons do most of the work, a "Cavalier" who rides them around in combat, a "Solo" type who at most uses a familiar and does most of the fighting themselves and lastly a "Fusion" type that has fused with a Monster permanently and become something greater than human. Summons could, likewise, be distributed into categories very easily: The tanky melee type, the long range blasty type, the sneaky status condition type, etc. I divided those ideas into classes and things seemed to work okay this time. Sure, there weren't any stats to play around with, but in lieu of that I introduced all sorts of status conditions to compensate. The Minotaur can stun you, knock you down and push you all over the place. The Succubus can charm but also cause fear and incite rage. The zombie can poison you and... Uh, maybe grapple you or something. At least the example Zombie can do THINGS in this scenario.

The big draw of classes is that they're flavorful. As long as there's enough of them, they can be a bit narrow in what they represent yet pack enough cool flavorful stuff to compensate. One kind of Cavalier specializes in riding flying units like Dragons, Chimera or Pegasi focusing on physical skills with some area-of-effect magic. Another Cavalier is a more Reaper-like class that rides undead steeds throwing curses and plagues at enemies. One of the Fusion classes is a monstrous cannibal like if Eva 01 met Venom from Spiderman, using shapeshifting abilities to strike down enemies and heal from their remains. Another of the Fusion classes has combined with a self-appointed divine being that can use the power of song to heal allies and pacify enemies. The Solo and Tamer classes took a bit more effort. Riding Dragons and playing a Symbiont are some of the most obvious "I want to do this" choices for a fantasy game where you control the monsters or become them. Solo and Tamer classes don't have that luxury, as one minimizes the monster aspect while the other minimizes itself to focus on the monsters. Eventually the Solo classes ended up disregarding the monsters entirely becoming alchemists, psychics and power armor users. Who needs Summons when you've got THE POWER OF HUMANITY? FUCK YEAH! And the Tamers? Those didn't solidify for me until partway through solving the next problem. Which is...

Puzzle 2: The Action Economy.

If you're not familiar with the term, "Action Economy" refers to how the most precious resource in turn-based games is not your HP or your money or whatever else you've got but your own Turns. Turns can be transformed into anything, usually more HP for you or a reduction in HP for the enemy. It is why gaining extra Turns, or Actions as they're most often called in Tabletop RPGs, is one of the most powerful things you can do and is usually what enables the most broken and degenerate overpowered builds in these games. Most well-thought out games give everybody one or two Actions per Turn and make it very rare or very costly to cheat around this. BCG gives everybody one Action and it costs a lot of energy, GP, or your future Turns to grant yourself free Actions to use Support Upgrades or follow up to your own attack with your Funnels. Most tabletop RPGs acknowledge the issue and tell you to make rare the 4v1 encounters against a single Boss Monster because even the most overpowered and stat-inflated Big Bad struggles to keep up against people who act 4x as much as they do, or 2x in the games that just give the Bosses additional Turns.

The Problem for the Summoners RPG is that having multiple units per PC necessitates some tweaking of the model. If you have three units on the battlefield, they all need to do things when it is your turn. How do we balance that with someone who has two units? And with someone who has only one? If the classes with more units on the field had more actions, but they were very limited in what those actions could be used for, it could work. Say, the Tamer classes get 3 Actions instead of 1 per Turn, but those two additional Actions can only be used to move into position. The problem there is that it limits the design of the Summons themselves way too much. A fire elemental that does damage to enemies near it is balanced when it is a single unit that has to move and attack to maximize its usefulness every turn. It's not balanced when a Tamer has two of them and doesn't really care about attacking because it is spreading passive damage auras all over the battlefield without even making an attack.

One thing became clear after the first few tries: There's no balancing having three units with having one. Two? Yeah, two is easier to manage, but three is just too wide a gap. If I balance for one then having three ends up feeling like half your team does nothing. if I balance for three then having one unit makes you feel like you're playing 33% of the game that other people are playing. If I balance for two then it pisses off both of those teams while being slightly closer to a sweet spot but not being quite there.

This problem took quite a long while to solve and I don't remember all the things I tried along the way, but at one point I looked at the classes and so many of them looked like they wanted to have one unit (Solo, Fusion) or at most two units (Cavalier) that I discarded the idea of having two Summons on the field. Tamers would have to be satisfied with just one of them. This way I could balance the Action Economy around having one unit, I could just treat the classes that ride their Summons as if they're just one and tweak some numbers for the Tamers to make their Action Economy deficiency worth it.

What I ended up going with is giving everyone a Simple Action, a Utility Action and a Primary Action for their Turns. Primary Actions are used for attacking, healing or other big effects. Utility Actions are used for moving, guarding or other important but not-quite-primary abilities. Simple Actions are, mostly, for class abilities like tanks taunting enemies to come at them and healers removing status conditions from one or more units. Tamers instead have abilities that let them 'upgrade' actions for their Summons. For example, a Tamer can use a Simple Action to let its Summon move around using its regular walking speed. It is still a little bit tight, but the rest of the Tamer package seems strong enough to compensate for it.

The big problem for Tamers now was that they lost the one thing that made them stand out conceptually. Without having a whole menagerie accompanying them, they're like more boring cavaliers. They're fine, I guess, but they're closer to being D&D archetypes than I'd like. I thought long and hard about how to make having one powered-up Summon feel special enough to sacrifice the much conceptually cooler idea of riding them to battle or fusing with them. Then I realised that one of my favorite videogame franchises had the solution to my problem. That franchise was Drakengard.

The main characters of the Drakengard series have made a pact with a magical creature, like a Dragon or Fairy or Golem or whatever else is around. A pact is a magical bond which links their souls (if one of them dies, they both die) and powers up the human at a great cost. For the protagonist of Drakengard 1 the pact cost was his ability to speak (therefore playing into the 'mute main character' trope), this produces a lot of dramatic ironies like a bard losing his ability to sing or a glutton losing his ability to taste food. The more powerful the entity, the greater the price, with one notable tremendous loser from the first game having made a deal with a petrified dragon and losing his... Hair. No, really. It's as ridiculous as it sounds. The pact beast often makes this deal to feed from the humans' emotions, though often they both make the pact because they're in a pinch and need the power boost to survive. The games focus a lot on the relationship between the character and the monster they're bonded to, often showing a surprising amount of chemistry. Watching a mass murderer  bond with a condescending and aloof dragon is strangely heartwarming. This, in addition to giving me a few sinister ideas for the character creation process, became the key to giving the Tamers something unique to base the classes around: Their relationship and the circumstances under which they entered a pact.

A Necromancer uses forbidden magic to bring back a lost loved one, only to find their personality... Different afterwards. They're helpful and even seem glad to be back, but there's something extremely offputting about them and you can't shake off the feeling that it might just be a different being using the body and memories of the person you knew. For the Demon Hunter class, a spirit descended from the heavens one day and promised an angry human wishing for revenge the ability to enact justice on their mutual enemies. They are partners rather than friends, and at some point their buddy movie is going to hit a bump in the road when they disagree vehemently on whether to spare the demonic child or kill it to be on the safe side.

This was a very recent discovery, so recent that these new and more interesting tamer classes weren't finished in time for the test that happened this week. I plan to finish writing them down later today, actually. If you were wondering why "The Summoners RPG" doesn't have a more fancy title, it's because I'm showing you my working process so early in the project that I have no idea what the final title is going to be yet.

Puzzle 3: Actually, this post is getting a bit long.

I've got a neat new core mechanic and game setting/general tone and feel to talk about, but the former needs a lot of words while the latter could use some more time to refine the idea. So we'll set them aside for the next post.

Until then, Gimmick Out.

Its been a while.

It feels like it has been a lot longer than two months since the last post... Which might be because it has been almost three, now that I think about it. So what have I been up to?

I wrote some play aids for BCG (GM screen, random tables, interactive character sheets) but they feel half done and unpolished. They've been put on the backburner though, because they're a lot less interesting to work on than the things below.

I got RPGmaker (version MV, from 2015) as a gift and have been tinkering with it in trying to adapt BCG's mechanics and storytelling style to a JRPG format. This objective was met with varying degrees of success and at times it seems just plain impossible. I've not given up though, I'm going to keep at it. I do really like the way how much the engine has grown over the years (I used to tinker a lot with RPGMaker 2000 in my early teens) and it seems decently robust. Makes me wish there was a Tactics Maker, I would be all over that.

I've also written the skeleton of another tabletop RPG! This one is about making pacts with monsters and going to battle alongside them, with each player controlling multiple units at once. Think Drakengard meets Shin Megami Tensei. Its a very different game from... Pretty much any other tabletop RPG I've played before. I find myself questioning my usual design methodology fairly often and that makes it a very fun project.

They're very early projects and I can't promise I'll have anything to show soon, but I do want to write about their design process so I'll be updating here regularly about them. Relatively regularly, at least.

Oh yeah and I have to do the BCZ retrospective at some point. That'll happen sometime soon(ish?) too.

Gimmick Out.

What next?

BCG and BCZ are out, and those the primary reason this blog exists. Now that they're done, I'm left wondering what I should be doing next with what I've learned. I'm not going to lie, I was close to burning out a few times during the last year and if you had asked me a few months ago, I'd have said I was quitting it... But it is highly probable that even if I were to quit, I'd end up coming back.

I say this because I know myself: I was in elementary school and I would draw these maps of places to explore and I would invite my younger siblings to do adventures there. Likely inhabitants and challenges in each area would be planned beforehand, but they would have the freedom of choosing where to go. I was GMing before I knew what GMing was. By high school, I was experimenting with RPGMaker and making custom Magic: the Gathering sets and I realized just how much I liked tweaking rules and structuring gameplay around having specific experiences. So I might take a break but, if I do, it is going to be temporary.

This brings me, at last, to the subject of "what the crap it is I'm going to be doing next???" To be honest, I'm not quite sure yet. I'd like to do something smaller than BCG, large projects need an important time and money investment and I'm not in the position to do that right now even if I wanted to. It is probably going to be anime-themed and action-oriented, because that's the kind of thing I like doing.

BCZ explored a lot of what you could do with the BCG rules, but there's a few things that didn't pan out and I would like to explore them with a system of my own or hacking someone else's. One of the things I really want to try was a game where you don't just control one character, but a character and all of their minions, most likely some kind of summoned monsters a la Pokemon or Shin Megami Tensei. I tried to include that in BCZ but it didn't work out and it got removed - much like the hack for giant characters if you remember that draft I posted a long time ago.

There's also the things that BCG and BCZ already do but don't focus on, which is to say, most kinds of non-mecha action. You can use it to run anything from Sailor Moon to Saint Seiya with transforming heroes, and it will work just fine. But imagine if the whole system was designed around them or even around characters who don't need to henshin at all.

Then there's the robots. I don't know if you've noticed but I really, really like robots y'all. If BCZ hadn't tapped out most of BCG's unused design space and included all the hacks I could fit that don't need rewriting the whole thing, I would be looking for More Cool Things To Do With Robots within BCG.

For the time being, I think I'm going to write a series of posts about how many of the rules in BCG + BCZ came to be & how they evolved over time. That should push my brain into figuring out what to do next and provide you all with something interesting to read.

Gimmick Out.

A Change in Perspective

As a teacher, I would rather help students figure things out for themselves than spell everything out myself. As a designer, I'd like my work to speak for itself objectively without adding my subjective bias to an introduction of it. In my ideal world this would be the formula for success.

Sadly I live in the real world where students need things explicitly spelled out and hype is the most effective form of marketing. I am okay with not being rich and famous, but I do want this to be the best game it can possibly be. The more thoroughly I explain the game, the more feedback I get on it, and the more feedback I receive, the better I can make the game. So I do need to invest additional effort and both talk about the game some more and reach out to people with it.

This brings me to the current poll. Running games in the style of anime series is, obviously, a thing that BCG is suited to. Chapters 4 and 5 give you some good starting points but don't actually tell you quite how to run, say, a giant robot world tournament in the style of G Gundam. Previously I would have refrained from writing about this, because I think figuring this stuff out for yourself is part of the fun of GMing, but I figure it should be useful inspiration to someone.

For the next few weeks I will be elaborating on how to run games in the style of the various polled anime series. An aside: I chose those series because I figured that "Names starting with G" (with some leeway to have more than just super robots and Gundams in it) was as good a starting point as any.

Also I forgot about Gravion and Godannar. Sorry.

And now: Blogging

It became painstakingly clear through the course of the year that, even if I were to stubbornly try to publish BCG entirely on my own, it wouldn't live up to my standards. I mean I could just pick up everything I have right now, publish as an electronic game only on DriveThru (with a Print on Demand option) and call it a day. Some think of crowdfunding as "That thing you do when you want to get easy money from people.", I see it as admitting that you need help.

I keep my cards close to my chest, only cryptically hinting at what I am planning and I never ask for help without offering to pay back with a favor of some kind. Which is not really asking for help as much as it is negotiating for mutual benefit. Basically I am allergic to asking for help.

Last week I spoke of how I'm now working with fellow designer buddy LawfulNice to publish this thing together. I am making another person deal with shoddy webpage coding, sending faxes back and forth (Who the hell still sends faxes???), and of course putting money up front in my stead.

Also he has to deal with all of my nagging which costs less money than any of those but takes just as much patience.

I'm just trying to convey just how much of a paradigm shift it has been for me to try crowdfunding BCG. Anyhow, the next weeks should be interesting,  the campaign may or may not start next week but if it does I will still be doing this short series of posts on sundays. There's still a few days to go until the poll closes and I'm curious to see which series wins out.

Let's see what happens next week!