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the-ampersand · 3 months ago

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Elemental Crystals devlog 1

This is going to be a series of posts about my musings and reasoning for designing the ttrpg project I am working on, Elemental Crystals (maybe a placeholder name). As it stands it could be defined as a Golden Sun inspired NSR, but it sits somewhat close to some trad sensibilites, so we will see if that stays like that in future devlogs. Let's dive in!

I have been a huge Golden Sun fan since it was published and given to me as a present from my aunt when I was about six years old. It has some very interesting perspectives and design choices that I have never found again in a videogame. I am not that much of a videogames guy to try to make a successor videogame of any kind. (I also lack the skills to do so and the will to learn them). I am a ttrpg nerd. So that's why I am writing a ttrpg inspired by Golden Sun and its mechanics.

There are two of them that I feel like they are the soul of Golden Sun and I wanted to translate to translate to ttrpg mechanics:

Magic unconstrained to combat/utility

The djinni based class system.

Let's investigate each one separately.

Unconstrained magic

Golden Sun has a cool magic system called Psynergy. Each character has te ability to cast a bunch of spells depending of their class and equipment, typical stuff. Most of the spells are battle focused. They are cool and bombastic effects that deal damage of an elemental type:

There are others that are only used in the overworld, in towns or in dungeons. Utility stuff to solve puzzles and interact with the environment:

But the coolest ones, in my opinion, are the ones that can be used both in battle and as an utility. Like Whirlwind, that can be cast to deal damage to enemies with powerful winds and to remove vines and leaves to open hidden paths or to release stuck objects:

This is not a really novel idea. (Pokemon does something very similar). But I always found quite amazing that there were spells that I could use to attack and to solve problems. There's a rupture from other rpgs like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest where your spells and abilities are almost exclusively constrained to the combat minigame.

I have previously said that I am not a huge fan of the distinction of combat as a separate minigame in ttrpgs with differentiated mechanics and procedures. In my opinion, following what Blades in the Dark proposed, combat can be treated just as any other conflict and can use the same resolution mechanics and procedures.

So, with all that in mind, my first objective is to make a magic system useful both inside and outside of combat. Because there wouldn't be a combat to be inside or outside of to begin with.

Djinni based class system

While the previous point wasn't exclusive to Golden Sun, this is The Thing that made Golden Sun special, even though you could finish both games without

In most role-playing videogames you can give your character a class or a job (this harks back to the very beginning of D&D, but can be traced even further back with different soldier types in wargames). Many games gave you the ability to change your class during the game or even on the fly. But Golden Sun took it to an altogether new level. It is quite a complex system and mastering it is difficult enough as to prompt some people to make half an hour videos about it. I recommend this one if you want to know more:

youtube

Or you can read the pretty in-depth guide of the official wiki:

The most important things of this system are:

You unlock new classes by collecting elemental critters called djinn.

The combination of dijinn assigned to a character and this character's "natural" class determine the final class of the character.

The class gives bonuses to various attributes and the spells available to the character.

The class of a character can change at a moments notice by "preparing" the djinn.

"Prepared" djinn can later be used to cast strong attacks called summons. And after a short rest, the djinn become available again, resetting the character's class.

No character can have more than one djinni more than the rest of the members of the party. You need to share the djinn.

This system felt like quite something special. You could just go through both games just by setting djinn of an element to its corresponding character and be powerful enough through level ups and grinding to beat almost any boss. But you would be missing out on the more exotic classes and spells. There were some secrets that you could only find by mixing up the djinn a bit. It also lead to some interesting effects in combat, like losing a spell at a crucial moment because you prepared a djinni beforehand or an enemy taking a character back to its "natural" class by disabling all their djinn.

This is really cool! I have never seen it anywhere again! It can also be quite difficult to pull off in a ttrpg because you don't have a computer telling you which abilities you have at a moment's notice. So this needs to get heavily simplified. That's the second objective, to build a class system similar to this one, allowing for shifting available spells and that requires cooperation and some planning between the different characters.

Summarizing

The plan is to create a ttrpg system that is able to:

Change the spells available to the characters with relative ease, exchanging among them something akin to the djinn of Golden Sun. Maybe Crystals.

Offer tools that are useful in many situations: either in combat, exploring dungeons or even in a social conflict. Because there wouldn't be a mechanical distinction between those.

It all needs to be simple enough to be managed armed with pen, paper and a rulebook.

Also, considering my own sensibilities I want:

As a proper nod to Golden Sun, I'd love the game to be centered around the Aristotelian four elements of nature: Earth, Fire, Air, Water. Maybe with some silly alchemy references, just because.

The system to be as streamlined as possible. The NSR movement has made a number on me and I prefer simple and minimalist system that puts the precedence on the narrative coherence of the world and avoids rules referring to themselves as much as possible. This includes:

No distinction between combat/out-of-combat (as previously stated).

No "builds" for characters. The character should be ready to go with one or two decisions. Mechanically simple (not plain) characters make for interesting stories.

No leveling systems that require tracking XP or something like that. Character progress and development could exist, but narrative should take precedence.

To encourage cooperation between players. The djinn system already does this, but I want to make sure I write it down.

The game should a degree of tactility or physicality. I would like to find a way to intermingle the basic resolution mechanic with the use of spells in a more satisfying way than just adding or subtracting bonuses, that would be great. (Think of Mothership's death mechanic) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E98kJ3UAm5U

And the thing is that I believe that I have found a way to do all this.

I still need to playtest all this to hell and beyond. And to actually write it down. But I think there's something that could be really cool in all this. And I would love you to join in and either give some critics and opinions or tell me this is nonsense. I hope we will have some interesting conversations along the way!

Anyways, thanks a lot for reading. I will be writing the next devlog asap!

#golden sun #ttrpg design #rpg #ttrpg #elemental crystals devlog #Youtube

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that-house · 2 years ago

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Field of White Flowers Devlog #1: Enemy Minions

uh. we're pretty solidly into development so this being devlog #1 is kinda weird but I wanted to talk about a new mechanic I developed today and said "fuck it. devlog time"

first off, quick list of recent bug fixes/content patches:

nerfed Stand Behind Me, a power which allows allies to Hide behind you. Made it so that the person being Hidden behind has to act more often to shelter their allies, putting them more squarely in harm's way

added Shock, a new debuff that stacks up over time before damaging the target

replaced an unused Aggression Power, Brutal Cleave, with a new Shock-based Power, the creatively-named Shock Trooper. applies Shock to all enemies at the start of combat, maintaining Brutal Cleave's niche AoE potential but in a more interesting and synergistic way.

buffed Witch Stance to work with Pyrrhic Victory for easier conversion of debuffs into damage

changed Catharsis and Burn Twice as Bright to both provide a conditional +1 bonus to Contests with another +1 bonus locked behind a more difficult Condition (Catharsis now gives +1 if you're in a favorable matchup, and an extra +1 if your enemy is in a disfavorable matchup, while Burn Twice as Bright gives +1 if your enemy is Hexed and an additional +1 if they're Cursed)

Bathe in Gore (stacking bonus to hit whenever you hit) no longer stacks infinitely and therefore does not automatically win encounters at a certain point (while this seems incredibly obvious in retrospect it's a holdout from the earlier days of the system when it was geared towards PvP and HP numbers were lower)

nerfed Hunter Stance again (who knew that doubling damage in a low HP system would be broken). it used to work like Wrath in Slay the Spire, doubling incoming and outgoing damage. It now doubles all incoming damage, and doubles one source of outgoing damage per turn. No more Combo Finisher + Showstopper hit six times a turn combo

Now, to explain Minions, I have to first give a quick rundown on the basics of combat in Field of White Flowers:

the big thing is that players determine initiative order, in every way. players may go in any order, as many times in a row as all the players are chill with. if your DPS has a four turn combo and you don't mind sitting there for a few minutes, they can go hog wild.

on a player's turn, they pick an enemy to act against, and that enemy simultaneously attempts to act against them. Field of White Flowers aims for the sort of high power bullshit where players can fight armies, and so it's fairly easy to represent an army with a single statblock. thus, a whole army can be a single "enemy" that a player is fighting on their turn

however, I did want to add an option to spice up encounters with the addition of extra enemies. this was a problem, as by default there is nothing stopping players from just fighting the weaker enemy first, scaling some of their abilities in a lower-risk environment, and only targeting the boss when they had a big ability ready

...okay i have to introduce one more concept to fully explain minions. i lied when i said that players always determine who acts in combat and when. there is a mechanic called the Initiative, that certain actions pass to the GM, who can spend it on fucking with the players and also allows the boss to target a specific player. Initiative is passed by interacting with some key element of the environment (such as attempting to shatter a crystal maintaining the boss' shield), by bringing downed players back into the fight, and by failing to hit a Minion.

Minions provide the boss with some bonus while alive: maybe a bonus to hit, or a source of healing, protection, debuffs, or damage. They aren't super difficult to kill, often only requiring a turn or two to bring down, but if you swing at them and miss, the boss gets Initiative. Essentially, while you're swinging at the weak enemy in the fight, there's always a chance that the boss gets to take a super turn and kick your shit in. You don't have to kill the Minion (or Minions, if your GM is a freak) but doing so will make the fight far, far easier if it works.

Some fun example uses of Minions:

Use a Minion to represent a magical bomb that has to be destroyed before turn 7 or it explodes

For a huge boss, represent its limbs with different Minions

A brutal up close boss and a Minion sniper who uses Initiative (generated either from failures to kill the sniper or from helping allies downed by the boss) to do a ton of damage

A team composed of a leader and a few Minions who support the leader in different ways, mirroring some of the roles of the player characters

A loyal bodyguard Minion who outright prevents players from damaging the boss (though they may still want to attack the boss to apply debuffs)

As a little closing remark, there are a few other mechanics in the game for adding extra combatants to fights without adding a whole extra combatant:

Supporting Cast, a Power that players also have access to, which gives you a posse of mercenaries, zombies, summoned fiends, or what have you, which can be spent for short term gain at the cost of getting weaker when you run out. In a similar vein is Shadow Clone, which creates clones throughout a fight that you can spend to avoid hits and hit more often

We Are Legion: for all your “this is a whole army” needs: much higher stats that lower over the course of a fight as the players scythe through hundreds of troops

Power Couple: empowers two of the enemy’s combat actions, one of which is disabled when the enemy falls to half HP as the players kill one of the matched set. the players get to choose which enemy they kill and thus which action they disable

And of course, as with all things Field of White Flowers, you can flavor things however you like. You don’t need these effects to make an enemy statblock that represents multiple people, I just aim to streamline the process.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask! I mostly just made this post because I have to talk about FoWF or I’ll die, so go ahead and give me an excuse to talk about it more!

#field of white flowers #fowf devlog #ttrpg design

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