Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The Real Plan

So the ultimate goal is to create a system that accounts for the growth of the player as a natural leader of those around them. Eventually running a camp, small town, city, then kingdom or anything in between. Ideally it would allow and even guide players towards situations where the players go solo away from their people, or let them simply send their underlings. The key in the system however, is scalability.

With a system bearing 100 levels (in my head ideally) so as to allow slow development overall but still have many landmark points. The stats could become very biased as specialists get huge bonus' and huge weaknesses and generalists become good at nothing causing difficulties for encounters (with skill checks, combat or whatnot) being hard to gauge. Part of the challenge is to help ensure there are limits (prerequisites) that establish peaks in power till the next level or whatnot, but the ability to let the players still feel like a specialist and build a character they desire.

Also is the difficulty in finding an appropriate dice system. There are plenty to choose from, Savage world DX system, D20, Success based D6, GURPS D6, Success D10, flip a coin, roe sham bo, put a bunch of dice in a bag and pull one out whenever you need to come up with a die for the player to roll... Right now I'm looking at a D10 system. As in if I had to choose a die to use alot it would be that one, either solo or in it's D% role. Since most people think in a base 10 system, and it's a lot easier to calculate the odds of rolling multiples, it should work best and probably would be very scalable.

Scalable is important. As it stands in my head I have multiple areas of the game with multiple levels of scale. Single fighters to armies, local prices to world economy, level 1 targeted abilities to level 100 enhanced citywide firestorms. The trick and challenge is keeping it easy, simple, powerful, balanced and scalable. The rules for a party of characters should not differ too much from the rules for army combat, but should be different enough to allow the players to experience the scale. Ideally introducing no more than a few new rules at each scale level and not jumping scale levels too often.

More to come...

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