Removing Character Feats & Role Techs
The list of 32 Feats that grant minor combat bonuses and the Limit Techs that Gestalts & Ubermensch get based on their class role are going to be deleted. Because this changes all Character Classes considerably, they're all going to get some small tweaks as follows:
- All Character Classes get an extra Archetype Feat while leveling up. This is slightly weaker than getting 4 Character Feats while leveling up, but the Archetypes are 1) more impactful 2) more unique 3) more fun so it more or less balances out.
- Gestalt Classes get an additional Monster Feat and 5 HP. Gestalts need to compensate for the loss of Role Techs and they were already lagging behind slightly Riders and Ubermensch, so now they get to be the tankiest class type. I think it suits them, conceptually.
- Rider Classes get an additional 2 Speed. Riders were fine for the most part and should still continue to be, since they and Summoners lose the least. They still get a minor bonus to Speed to further distinguish them from others. RIP Fleet of Foot.
- Summoner Classes get an additional Monster Feat. Summoners are powerful but hard to play, very vulnerable to area of effect attacks and rely on Character Feats to improve their survivability and solve their mobility problems. Getting an additional Monster Feat should help fix whichever is the biggest problem for each specific build.
- Ubermensch Classes get an additional Archetype Feat, Basic Tech & Support Tech that can be taken from the list of ANY Character Class (but not Monster Classes) and lose 5 HP and 2 Speed. The biggest problem with Ubermensch is that, while powerful, they lack versatility. Everyone else starts with 2 Basic & Support Techs plus an extra noticeably powerful Feat from their Monster. Ubermensch instead get... bonus HP and Speed. Yawn. This change opens them up to lots of new possible builds and makes them a lot less repetitive to play.
But why am I removing Character Feats & Role Techs from the game entirely? Isn't that a little extreme? To best answer that I should first explain why they exist at all.
Character Feats are easy. See, I like PC customization (big shocker there, I know). At first all the Classes were just a big pile of Techs with Monster Feats tacked on... I feared this would make them boring from a CharOp standpoint and repetitive in terms of viable builds, particularly Ubermensch which didn't have Monsters at all. So I made the 32 Character Feats and allowed everyone to have some, giving Ubermensch an extra four. One of the things I wanted to do with Monsterpunk compared to BCG was get more from the Advantage/Disadvantage tradeoff mechanic, so I wrote in a bunch of Feats that granted conditional Advantages or inflicted conditional Disadvantages. Combined with conditional Advantages/Disadvantages from Terrain or status conditions, players would have to be maneuvering around the battlefield and combining their forces to stack Advantages in such a way that negated defensive Disadvantages and made things more interesting.
Role Techs have a more complex story. Originally Gestalts and Ubermensch could additional Orgone Points in combat if they performed secondary objectives based on their role (marking enemies, causing status conditions, healing allies, etc.), the idea was that these classes had conceptually higher orgone reserves since their energy wasn't divided between two entities. Because this was extremely powerful (consider that a single Orgone Point starts in power as a +5 HP heal and get better the more Limit Techs you have) I had to scrap the idea of bonus Orgone Points entirely. I flipped the idea on its head and, instead of rewarding in-role behavior with a power boost made it so that they had conditional but powerful ways to fulfill their combat role. At the moment, I thought that was a clever solution.
So what is wrong with them? Well, they're both boring. Worse, they're boring and bog things down. Role Techs had flavor, once, but now they just seem like they're tacked on to their classes because they needed something more and, instead of giving them something fun, they got some conditionally useful abilities. Character Feats slow down combat by making people have to calculate the total of Advantages/Disadvantages constantly and there's so many of them that players often forget one or more of them. While this is something I did have in mind when I made it so that they could be traded for a +1 or -1 to the result post-roll should someone forget them, they're still annoying to track.
This leads to the next problem, one that is partly shared with Role Techs, that they could be fun instead of annoying, but they aren't. That's because there's too many of them and they're, for the most part, on the weaker side of things. Role Techs don't suffer the complexity problem, but they do suffer from being marginally useful. Also, they're the worst part of character creation and leveling up. Picking your Techs? Fun. Picking your Archetype and Monster Feats? That's a big factor deciding what kind of character you'll make. Picking Character Feats & Role Techs? Gets old halfway through. Add all these things together and both Character Feats and Role Techs take more from the game than they add to it, so I'm deleting them from the character creation process.
By doing away with the tons of weak abilities and giving everyone more of the strong abilities, the loss of customization and power is minimized and PCs get to have more cool stuff and the game flows faster. I may make some additional tweaks to the class changes posted above, but I think you get the idea of the direction I want to take them in.
Rewriting or removing the Sanity & Humanity rules.
Okay so... This one is a bit more complex to explain. Let's start with what Sanity & Humanity are supposed to represent. A big theme of the game is the difference between humans and monsters and what it means to be human. As a mechanical reinforcement of this theme, Sanity & Humanity give PCs have an arc about going bad and getting better. Loss of Humanity wasn't just supposed to end in the PC turning evil, but in an actual transformation into a monster.
Yes, all packmakers (including Gestalts) could transform into a different kind of monster (much like Demons can transform into Angels) by turning into a Fiend, a kind of monster utterly possessed by a singular obsession that it pursues with psychopathic glee. The idea was that PCs could slowly warp over time into such a being and either do some course correction before it was too late or go berserk until the party pacified them, depending on what would serve the story better.
The problem here was that I couldn't come up with any good rules for this berserk mode transformation and it seemed like the kind of rule that needed a lot of story baggage to support it, so I ditched the Fiend bits and figured maybe I could come back to it later in an expansion or something if there was interest in it. I kept the Sanity & Humanity rules because Sanity is part of the Vitality/Sanity/Wealth trifecta that keeps the Twist/Success system going and Humanity plays into the game's focus on Negotiation as a thing, so I figured they'd do more good than bad.
I, uh, have had some passionate discussions on the subject as of late that have led me to change my opinion on the matter.
Y'see, my experience with mechanics like this has been mostly a good one, because I've always used them and seen them used as roleplaying incentives, so I tend to underestimate the potential for things to go wrong with them. Unfortunately, we live in a world where paladins falling for bullshit reasons is so frequent that it is a meme, so I can't really just throw these rules at people and expect them to use them in a way that is fun for everyone. Iy mind, while permanent retirement from Sanity & Humanity are options, they're better used to tell stories of human weakness and redemption. It is a temporary retirement until the party heals the PC from the brink of total assholery... Or, failing that, about allies that turn into antagonists.
I guess I could've communicated that better. Whoops!
Point is, something must be done about Sanity & Humanity. But what, exactly? Well, Humanity isn't a big loss as it is disconnected from most other rules, but Sanity loss/restoration is a common twist/success result and something would need to replace their loss in gameplay terms.
The one idea that comes to mind would be writing in again the discarded plot element of humans transforming into Fiends and replacing Sanity with Humanity entirely. This would be, in essence, the deletion of Humanity as it exists and giving Sanity a makeover in terms of what it represents in game. I still don't have any clear rules in mind to represent PCs that have become Fiends and they would also need a page or two of advice telling groups how to handle the going berserk scenario, concluding in how to either bring them back to Humanity 1 or making them antagonists permanently.
I guess I could just... Not have special rules for this and just write advice instead. That works, I suppose. It's quite a bit of work but the idea is conceptually cool enough that I'm willing to go there. I'm a lot less sure about this one so, while feedback is always appreciated, it is most valued here.
Coming this Christmas
And that's what's going to be worked on next. If things go well this'll be done right before the end of the year. We're approaching the time of the year where hardware around me starts to explode so fingers crossed that all goes to plan.
Gimmick Out.
