July has been somewhat of a slow month with well-deserved vacation abroad. But I managed to sneak in some work the past couple of weeks once back in Norway.
- A combat playtest happened with my French group, to discuss my planned evolution of Soak. Bottom line, I want to remove Soak.
- Reason 1: There is a lot of “subtraction time” in combat, which also includes repeated noise turn after turn (“You take 9 Damage, I ignore 1 Soak because of my Vicious1 , subtract your Soak, that’s your Wounds”).
- Reason 2: I want to simplify the game wherever I can. At the moment, we have Damage and Wound, two different concepts around life loss. I’d like to streamline them to a single one.
- Reason 3: I want the game to be viewed as “fun lethal”, you can die pretty fast if you are careless but that’s OK. The concept of Soak, reducing damage (therefore giving at least the associated idea of protection/you’re safe), is antinomic to my goal.
- The replacement system will assess all of these, speed up combat and be more tied up with cards.
- A lot of pondering to simplify the game and get a snappier experience for the players and less “mental charge” on the Referee. The number of enemy types is decreased from 3 to 2, the number of Equipment slots from 9 to 8, still pondering with merging Legs Slot and Trinket Slot to go down to 7.
- A good chunk of work was on Maze of the 4 Queens, the first module for Loop ‘n’ Loot. It has been playtested during Arcon 38, the validated rooms have been put in a book layout (29 rooms, 11 left to design). They also each got 4 random events. I did a bit of refactoring on the dungeon creation as well adding more opportunities for just corridors. I removed the glitch effect (ex: a probability to have a room fully underwater for instance) because too much mental charge on the Referee.
And to conclude, here is a sneak peak of that module!
