(this developer blog post counts as #1 of the NSiS Entires)
At first it seems like it would be a great waste of time to create a temporary game system to then be replaced later with the “real” game system; it just doesn’t seem sensible at first but eventually it starts to make a little too much sense.
If you were wondering why Planet O-oot does not have a lot of game mechanic information up on the site yet… That’s because it’s been horribly up in the air for a very, very long time. Besides switching systems more then once, we’ve had a lot of aspects half-baked and then set aside to be completely redone later (or forgotten and rediscovered). In an effort to try to create “continuous progress” instead of gaining ground and then having to re-gain that ground a second or third time; we will be creating a whole batch of temporary information just so pages can get done enough to be published on the website.
The most likely first place where you will see the NSiS (Necessary Stand-in System) are probably the “Step 3” and “Step 4” sections of character creation. You will also notice that entries of this developer blog will start getting tagged/categorized with that acronym as we are going to post a lot of “rough drafts” related to it before then putting a page together for each bit.
Given that this entry is the first to mention a Necessary Stand-in System, let’s explore some of the driving motives behind it’s current structure and some of it’s early features (that could entirely change later):
- Start Simple, Build-Up Overtime
We found that during play testing there was a lot of confusion around players doing heavy customization of their character’s stats up-front because they were not familiar with the setting, so often felt they “built their character wrong” only after one or two sessions. In an attempt to avoid this in the future, we are attempting to create a system that starts “narrow” and expands in choices as your character levels up. However, please don’t misinterpret this as trying to “dumb things down”. Rather, we are trying to create a direct connection between progressing through game sessions and expanding your character’s bag of tricks. - Taking Focus away from improving Attribute Stats
Each Player Character is meant to evolve in complexity as they level up; starting off very simple and uniform in nature. You will find that modifiers can be added on top of your base stat block attributes, but that none of your attributes, themselves, will change over time. This design choice is meant to streamline initial character creation, so that the focus will be on getting the first game session started faster, so that you can begin to get a “feel” for how you will want to grow and develop your character as they level up in the future. The core idea will be to enhance your character by adding new skills, abilities and better equipment to them over time but they will remain as naturally strong or fast as anyone else of their species or tribe.
Hopefully this will lead to a sense of your character being “better” then non-player characters because of the time (and resources) they’ve invested in improving themselves, but that they are not now on an entirely different level of existence… Which hopefully means that NPCs might remain a more competitive challenge overtime and will never truly become easy to “mow” through. - Leveling up your character:
Each combat encounter, puzzle solved and NPC interaction can and will generate EXP. In this game, experience points (EXP) will lead to the party collectively getting to level up. It sounds pretty standard (and it is) but the process will play out a bit different as described by some of the design choices listed above. EXP will function as the “currency” to “buy” skills and abilities to then apply to your character, OR the EXP will count towards filling a “meter”, which upon level up will dispense a certain number of points that can then be used to acquire new skills. This is still a very undefined, unexplored aspect of the system. - How Wisdom rolls work
Often, in table top games, there will be a separate “wisdom” and “intelligence” attribute in the stat block. In this game, we’re trying to do it a different way; now intelligence remains a stat, but all wisdom-related situations are dealt with through Skills and Abilities. If a player has no wisdom-type skills or abilities, their roll will be based on their intelligence. However, if they do have a skill or ability that specifically fits the situation, then that number is added on top of the character’s intelligence attribute.
The idea of a generically “wise” character fits in well with a Fantasy setting, wherein the world is run on a series of intersecting magic systems that a character could develop a strong general “understanding” of. Meanwhile in a sci-fi setting, the world operates in more realistic terms and most of the technologies in use are so complex or unrelated that it would be hard for one to justify having a broad sense of “knowing” or “insight”. - Awareness as an attribute
This number represents both a character’s ability to perceive the world around them and their ability to be sneaky in the world. With other games, these two concepts are usually assigned to different attributes in the stat block such as Dexterity and Wisdom, but for our system we are combining the idea of being stealthy, being aware and being able to detect things into it’s own stand-alone stat attribute.
This is meant to, again, reflect a difference in how setting genres work; biologically speaking, there are many creatures who are naturally stealthy while being incredibly slow, dumb, or not-nimble. The way stealth is usually handled in a Fantasy setting revolves around the assumption that the Rouge as a character class is a major part of the world ecosystem (like the Wizard, or Fighter character class). In this setting, most creatures and aliens who are “stealthy” are never “trained” to be so and might lack quite a lot of grace or cunning.
For now we’ll stop and pick up more information musing later. The next NSiS specific developer blog post will probably either discuss aspects of how the actual stat block will work (with the six attributes that make it) or go into how in-game items/equipment will be organized through naming; that is to say the name of the item will have very particular information built into that tells you how it will work within the system.
Again, none of this is terribly world-shattering or completely new in concept. Our goal is just to create something that both works as a stand-in and as a way to start experimenting with ideas we might want to keep into the final version.
– Admin P.