We’re in the new year, and my playtesting continues. Two things came up:

1. The combat rules are not as streamlined as I’d love them yet
2. I now have two groups, and I need a better way to manage timelines

The Timeline Challenge

Especially the second one is a good problems to have – it means I have people interested in playing the game!

But I want to have all the groups I run to play in the same world. There might be players who switch between the groups, and of course I want the actions of one group have an impact on the other one too!

This means that I need to get serious about timelines. Travel times become important, as well as keeping track of what monsters and NPC are doing when the PCs aren’t looking. For that, I already have escalation ladders: For every month of in-world-time that passes, the baddies will achieve a thing if they aren’t hindered by the PCs or other world events.

The result of that for example is that the Old Hallow Forge has been repopulated by monsters again, which has been discovered by the second group. And the first group will venture back towards Ogghas Tower next saturday, where they’ll see what happened after their last rather… hasty retreat.

But when there are different groups roaming the world, I need to choose when to synchronise their time: Either do it at the beginning of a session, which means that each and every session definitely will progress the timeline into the future, or I synchronise only at the end of a session. That way if the second group isn’t out and about as long as the first group was, they won’t progress the timeline – they’ll just catch up with the first group instead.

The first option will invariably progress time at a steady rate. The monsters and NPCs will get to do a lot of things, and I won’t have to backtrack events ever.

The second option leaves the time in the world progress slightly slower. The downside is that I might need to revisit changes more often, as there are a few more groups to handle before I can finally determine what the world does.

Currently, I’m doing that second one. I don’t want to progress time too fast, to not give the NPC too much time to react to the players, especially with travel times being the bulk of the passing time. It takes about a month to travel to an adventure site, then a few days of action there, then a month back. That way, years can fly past!

And with just two concurrent groups, things are manageable for me, even if I have to backtrack time occasionally.

Talking about combat

Now, the other issue is a bit thornier. I want the combat system to be interesting, leading to mechanical and tactical challenges for everyone involved, instead of just bashing weapons on heads.

To that end, I am tinkering with two different levers:

1. Positioning and movement
2. Defense as a tactical choice

In the earlier iterations, the ones I playtested most, that means that you kinda have to move and think about positioning, thus earning or loosing extra dice. And then you had to decide how to best split the dice you have into offense and defense.

In practical play, it became confusing when to add or loose dice, when a success gets cancelled, and how big an offense or defense pool is right now.

So, I’m tinkering with those rules a bit now, and one of the approaches is that I split up the order of actions between the “free move phase” and the “main action phase” quite forcefully.

1. First everyone rolls their basic pools based on equipment and skill to determine how many successes each has.
2. Then you jockey for the best position in the “Free Move Phase”
3. And lastly we determine attacks and subtract/add successes based on positioning.

Any bonus dice acquired through effects and positions will not be rolled in this round, but instead be put into a communal pool. Everyone can dig into that at the start of the round to take extra dice for their actions.

That allows strong characters to create more opportunities for the weaker ones, and will hopefully lessen the effect of “oh man, Mac is doing all and here I am, not contributing anything!”

The tinkering I have to do now is to figure out which skills I need to adjust to put dice into the pool, and which skills just give or take extra successes.

Part of that tinkering is reviewing shields and armor, because that subsystem isn’t the most easily understandable either. Right now, I’m pondering to make shields give extra defense dice – but that eats into the “you roll a unified pool at the start of the round” idea. So maybe the shield just allows flat rolls to attempt to deflect incoming hits whenever you get attacked?

I’m not sure, this will need a lot more thinking. I’ll get back to you sometimes next week, after the latest playtesting session!