Wasteland Adventures

Design Document
By Khan Sweetman
Professor Holcomb
GAT212 Fall 2015

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GAT212 - Fall 2015

Pre-First Iteration/First Intentions:

Original Concept/Goals:

Wasteland Warriors was originally intended for one-shot sessions. I had a couple
reasons for this, most of them subjective.
o I like the idea of lethality, where characters can and do die frequently.
o Fast, brutal combat.
o Tactical feel, with meaningful combat decisions.
Eventually, I geared it towards multiple play sessions for greater opportunities for
character progression.
From the outset, I was aiming to make my final RPG a portfolio piece. I have found
that min/maxing entire classes in the past did not work well in the long run, so I
decided to min/max 212 within the context of 212. Thus, I put the bare minimum
into the labs, so I could make the best RPG possible.
o The product I am turning in is not portfolio quality. It will be some time until
it is there.

Character Creation:
Chose dice so that every step of the game feels like a game.
I chose 3d4 to curve the stats harder, to make them all closer to an average.

4d6, take two highest

25

20

15

10

0
2

10

11

12

Percent

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5d6, take two highest

25

20

15

10

0
2

10

11

12

Percent

(3d4, take two highest) - 2, redo 0s and 1s

30
25
20
15
10
5
0
2

Percent

I boiled the stats down to lower numbers, to mitigate difficult math done during the game.

The Guardian:
Originally, I wanted to put in more unique class features. However, I quickly scoped
that down so that I could put more polish into the project overall. I would rather have few,
good, appealing abilities, rather than a bunch of unappealing ones.

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The features I originally planned for the Guardian were: Indomitable, Overcharge, Boost,
and Full Integration. Eventually, I ended up putting in more abilities anyway, as I felt that it
would be a good way for gamists to have mechanics, and for narrativists to have thematic
elements. This pattern was repeated with the other classes as well.

The Gunslinger
The Gunslinger started as The Outlander. Outlander was supposed to be a versatile
fill class that just kind of worked. I had a hard time establishing Outlanders identity
though, so he eventually morphed into the Gunslinger.
The Gunslinger embodies the Clint Eastwood/Spaghetti Western Cowboy archetype.
He is still meant to be a versatile character that offers a more familiar option for players to
play as. As the original fill character, Gunslingers stats are usually centered on average.

The Hidden
I came up with Hidden when I was trying to come up with a non-combat class with
more RP value. She is supposed to be a stealth-based character who sticks to the shadows.
Instead of open combat, she prefers negotiations, and carefully picked assassinations.
I gave her an ability called Fear. Mechanically, it gives Hidden a bit of extra defensive
power. The real point of it was to give narrativists a mechanical/thematic element to play
with. It is presented as a defining personality trait to further reinforce the
mechanical/thematic mesh.

The Ronin
Ronin was the first class I came up with. He is a fusion between Jedi, samurai,
Cowboy Bebop, and post-apocalyptic badassery.
His sword is the biggest part of his role. He is meant to be able to confidently and
unwaveringly bring a sword to a gunfight. To make this possible, I made up Glow Swords,
Wasteland Wanderers version of a lightsaber. Of all the possible ways to give swords even
grounding with guns, energy swords seemed like the most elegant and cool solution.

Character Sheet:
Originally, there were ten skills:

(Strength) Athletics
(Finesse) Sneaking
(Finesse) Sleight of Hand

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(Acuity) Perception
(Acuity) Will
(Acuity) Survival
(Acuity) Knowledge
(Social) Persuasion
(Social) Intimidation
(Social) Animal Handling

After getting feedback from Alexandra the TA though, I decided that I should cut down the
skills a bit for simplification. Sneaking and Sleight of Hand describe different aspects of
stealth, so I just combined them. Someone good at sneaking would probably be just as good
at sleight of hand, so I didnt feel like it was taking anything out. Together, they became
(Finesse) Stealth. Will was a skill I liked for subjective reasons, but I couldnt think of many
contexts where it would appear, so I removed it entirely. Later, I added (Social) Animal
Handling to make Social more useful, and because animals ended up playing a larger role in
my world than I originally intended.

2d6 Base/Advantage/Disadvantage:
Wherever probability charts appear related to dice, they were calculated using the
Montecarlo method.

Normal Roll (2d6)

25
20
15
10
5
0
2

10

11

12

Percent

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Advantage (3d6, take two highest)

25
20
15
10
5
0
2

10

11

12

11

12

Percent

Disadvantage (3d6, take two lowest)

25
20
15
10
5
0
2

10

Percent

Cover:
When I originally made cover, I had trouble deciding how to differentiate heavy and partial
cover. +4 Defense for heavy, and +2 for partial was one idea. However, it makes it more
likely for a targets defense to go beyond the range of what is possible for the attacker to
hit. I changed it to disadvantage, then disadvantage with -2 to attack, but this felt like more
to remember. I then decided to implement criticals, so that firing at a target with too high
defense still leaves an opportunity to hit.

Damage:
Player characters were originally supposed to die in about three hits when fighting another
player character of the same level.

Three is a good go-to number.

Dying in three hits makes each hit feel important.

It works at level 1, but it didnt scale well, since I didnt implement a good way for damage

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to scale. In the next iteration, I will likely give players a second attack at fourth level. Since it
effectively doubles their damage, I feel that it is appropriate to make it a late game upgrade.
I figured that damage per hit should be about 8. It is a power of 2, plus it works well with the
way I implemented damage, which is: xdy + STAT. With the average player starting stat
being a 4, this means that when rolling with the middle dice in the table below (d8/d10), the
average damage is 6.5/7.5. Since damage is most likely to be dealt with a players highest
stat, usually a 6, the damage is bumped up to: 7.5/8.5. This allows me to depower weapons
by two whole die steps to make them weaker than average. Making weapons stronger is
less of an issue, since I can just have the player roll more dice. Rolling too many dice is not a
mind-straining issue at this point.
Average Expected Value (EV) of Dice
d4 d6 d8 d10 d12 d20
2.5 3.5 4.5 5.5 6.5 10.5
With the average damage being 8 per hit, players should start at 24 health. The way health
per level is calculated is:
Strength + Calling Bonus
Playtests and Montecarlo calculations placed the average strength at about 5, though the
average stat should be 4. Ronin and Guardians almost always had 6 strength. I felt that
calling bonus should be more significant than strength1, so I made the calling bonuses
relatively large.
Calling

Starting
Health
Gunslinger: 13 + 2d6
Guardian:
21 + 2d6
Hidden:
10 + 2d6
Ronin:
17 + 2d6

EV
20 + STR
28 + STR
17 + STR
24 + STR

Each level, players gain (on average) enough health to endure one more hit in combat. Since
damage scales too, it does not work out this way exactly, but it makes things easy to
mentally balance and calculate.
Calling

Health
Per LvL
Bonus
Gunslinger: 1d6
Guardian:
1d12

EV

3.5 + STR
6.5 + STR

Thematically, it makes sense that experience in a profession plays a greater role in a characters physique
than their strength alone. High strength characters ended up in strength reliant classes anyway though, so its
a moot point.

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Hidden:
Ronin:

1d4
1d8

GAT212 - Fall 2015

2.5 + STR
4.5 + STR

Dice I Used:
As the table above shows, the d4-12 set provides a nice gradient between expected values.
The d20 is rather large when compared to the other dice, so it has not been used yet. I
dislike the concept of a d2, since coins are not dice, and using one seems unintuitive to me.
The d100 is not listed because its expected values are too large, and it requires more mental
player computation than other dice that work on their own.

Determining Base Accuracy/Armour Values:

Player characters were supposed to hit their target roughly two thirds of the time.
The base finesse that this was based on was 4.
Taking the aiming equation:
Finesse + Weapon Bonus + 2d6
And the defense equation:
Finesse + Armour
We see that the finesse in both equations cancel out, assuming equal finesse. Thus, Armour
must overcome Weapon Bonus + 2d6 one third of the time. Assuming a Weapon Bonus of 0,
Armour should equal 6, so that attack rolls of 2d6 will meet or exceed it two thirds of the
time. However, I did not want weapon bonuses to be based around 0, since I would have to
give negative values for inaccurate weapons, which is harder for players to do, and is a
negative play experience as well. I chose 2 for the base weapon accuracy bonus. Assuming
players are aiming at something of a similar level to them, it gives up to ~+31% accuracy, as
compared to having no bonus at all. I felt that this gave good room to move down to 0
bonus accuracy (+0%), in case of a really inaccurate weapon that I didnt want hitting often.
Compensating for the +2 weapon bonus, the average starting armour should be 8.

Death:
I implemented a system where players have three turns to stabilize upon hitting 0 HP, or
die. I decided that an unassisted player should only succeed at stabilizing 1/3 of the time.
This keeps death threatening, while allowing the players a hope of surviving. A 90% chance
to fail repeated three times has a 73.8% chance of succeeding once. Thus, I made the
difficulty rating equal to 10, leaving the player roughly an 8% chance to succeed three times.
Being assisted for all three turns gives the dying character a roughly 50% chance to pull
through.

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Final Project Iteration:

My Overall Goals:
As I go over things later in the documentation, I go into more detail on my goals. Here are
the goals as they were as high concepts:

Flesh out the world

Buff up the lore
Increase character customization and meaningful player choice
Increase character uniqueness
Increase narratavist appeal

Levelling Rework:
The Base Class
Level Features Gained
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

Core Ability, Talent

Skill Increase (2)
Core Ability
Extra Attack, Skill Increase (2)
Talent, Skill Increase (1)
Auxiliary Ability
Extra Attack, Raise All Stats by 1
Talent , Stat Increase (1)
Climax Abilities
Extra Attack, Skill Increase (1)
Win-More Ability/Talent
Stat Increase (1), Skill Increase (2)

To accommodate more player character customization and progression, I reworked

character levelling. Above is the table that I used as a base for the progression of the four
different callings. The template is there to ensure roughly parallel progression between the
classes. I deviated from it whenever I saw fit.

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Player Health vs Player Damage

Estimated DPS/Health2
Lvl
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

8
8
8
16
16
16
24
24
24
32
32
32

Max
Health
24
32
40
48
56
64
72
80
88
96
104
112

Health
/ DPS
3.00
4.00
5.00
3.00
3.50
4.00
3.00
3.33
3.67
3.00
3.25
3.50

6
5

Turn to Die

Damage
Per Turn

4
3
2
1
0
1

10

Level

Health / DPS

I tried to keep the amount of turns it takes for

one player to kill another to roughly the same number of turns (3 or a little bit more). This
was so that I could make grab the expected values as a base for a monster of a specific
challenge rating, and tweak values from there. The health/DPS comparison was done to
make sure that it will always roughly take the same amount of time for equally leveled
characters to fight one another. As the data above shows, the ratio got skewed in a few
places. I didnt think this was a huge deal, so I just left it that way.

Character Skills:
Playtesting made me realize that characters in my system tend to feel identical. One of the
ways I tried to break away from this was by expanding the total number of skills. That way,
players would end up with numerically different characters, which would in turn make them
feel meaningfully different, especially for gamists. The added complexity was a downside,
but the complexity wasnt so bad, and I feel that it was worth it. I added the following skills:

Strength (Resistance)
Finesse (Vehicle Handling)
Finesse (Sleight of Hand)
Acuity (Mechanics)
Acuity (Medical)

Health values are based on average expected base health and average expected health per level. Damage is
based on average expected damage and the addition of extra attacks through levels. It does not account for
abilities, talents, or other factors.

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Social (Deception)

I chose these skills in particular because I felt that they offered new, meaningful ways to
approach the world, and because they showed what kind of world my RPG takes place in.

Weapons:
Kellie complained that I did not have enough weapons, and that it made it hard for her to
make her module. I had similar complaints during playtesting. After looking at my weapons
table, I realized that I could afford to expand it quite a bit more. Expanding the table was for
a few reasons:

Increase character customization/meaningful-and-flavorful player choice.

Give more variety to combat.
Flesh out my world more.
Stop complaints and enhance player experience for above reasons.

Character Customization/Progression:
One of my main goals for final turn-in was to make character customization and progression
more substantial. To that end, I did several things:

Introduce Talents (see Talents section).

Increase level cap to 12 from 5.
o This required making a lot of abilities, and it took long time to do. I couldnt
come up with a faster, more elegant alternative to making a lot of abilities.
Change character sheet.
Introduce new skills.
Make new weapons.

Talents:
I added Talents in my final version. They are akin to the Feats of DnD. As characters
progress, they pick up a few.

Their main purpose was to make character customization a thing. It wasnt much of a
thing before their introduction.
They were designed to be roughly as powerful as calling abilities. This was to make
balancing easier, its simpler to balance Talents and abilities if theyre supposed to
be roughly equal.
When I went to Alexandra for advice, she recommended that I make things that have
nothing to do with combat.
I worked to ensure an absence of overpowered abilities. I left in underpowered

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abilities for world-building and narrative purposes.

Lore Additions:
Feedback from Kellie led me on the path to adding more lore to my RPG. As it was, it was
inadequately described, and it was hard to tell what the world was like. This was
understandable, since even I didnt really know what the world was supposed to be like until
this iteration. My main goals for lore were approximately:

Flesh out the world. Make it easy for the user to see the world with their minds eye,
and to know whats going on.
o Make them know what the conflict is.
o Make them know what adventurers do, and their role in the world.
o Kellie wanted to know the interactions between the races, so I addressed
that at various points.
o Describe races in more detail. Since they arent cookie-cutter elves, dwarves,
etc, I need to describe them more to give users a clear picture of who they
are. I also wanted to avoid making races into stereotypes, as they are in many
fantasy/sci-fi settings. Archetypes yes, stereotypes no.
Inject more hooks and usable content.
o I felt like it should have been easier for Kellie to make a module, so this part
was important for usability.
o Part of this was having a more complete world. Kellie was rather creative and
resourceful, so she was able to make a nice module off of my communities
section, but I feel like I should have more usable lore. The 9+ pages of
usable lore requirement is a good reason to do this as well.
City-states are a core part of my world, and I made sure to make them much more
clearly defined in this iteration.
o I put a lore section for them in the intro, and gave five examples. In addition, I
made a How to Make a City-State section in the back.

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Playtesting & Feedback

Project 2 Section:
Playtest 1 Notes:
Playtester: Leo, Jesse
Playtested: Character creation

Leo chose Ronin, Jesse chose Technician.

o Jesse chose Technician because it seemed the least combat focused.
Received complaints about lack of a medic class, or ability to heal whatsoever.
The classes lack role playing equipment. The system as a whole lacks RP equipment,
come to think of it. Its mostly geared towards combat at this point, and it needs some
non-combat things to balance it out right now. Looking at the system as a whole, there is
very little that does not directly relate to combat.
The classes need non-combat rules/mechanics/backstory.
Starting equipment rules need tweaking to accommodate having an actual items system.
Its kind of hard to customize characters right now. There are only four classes and races,
and there arent many choices in character creation. I might want to add feats, so that
players can customize their characters more meaningfully.
Shock knife is way overpowered.
Players complained about not being able to have significant weaknesses in their stats.

Playtest 2 Notes:
Playtester: Linus
Playtested: Character Creation

Chose Gunslinger
o Gunslinger just appealed to me
o Likes guns
Fuck yeah, lets do it in regards to rolling for starting gold
o Might want to add rolling to determining HP?
Might be nice to have an other column for Items & Equipment in Character Sheet.
Would be used for cost and stuff.
Less confusion when rolling for stats than I thought.
Likes that Book organization mirrors character creation
Man, thats fuckin cool in regards to Crow
Might want misc RP information on character sheet?
Need unarmed strikes in weapons table
Took a little digging to find items

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Need to buff health after redoing other numbers. People die in 1-2 shots now. I
originally planned for them to die in 3 successful hits.
Linus didnt do skills during creation, only noticed it afterwards. Need to explicitly
mention it in character creation.

Project 4 Section:
I went to Alexandra the TA for feedback on how to improve my RPG. I mostly had questions
about character customization, narrative appeal, and non-combat sections. Notes I made
while getting feedback from Alexandra:

I might want legendary talents. It would be a good way to give players something to
look forward to as they levelled up.
o NOTE: I ultimately decided not to do this. It would have taken a significant
chunk of time to make enough legendary talents for them to be meaningful,
so I spent that time elsewhere.
Armor customization
o While this idea was cool, I figured players would mentally do this anyway, so
building in a system for it seemed like it would just add complexity.
o I added images to the final iteration, which included images of armored
characters. Hopefully, that should inspire the process of mentally customizing
amour.
Regions
o I was a little torn over describing regions. To do this effectively, I felt that I
would need to describe many regions, and that doing so wouldnt ultimately
flesh out the world as much as I would like.
o It would also go against the idea that city-states are unique, and that they
arent categorized well.
o In the final iteration, I decided to compromise. Instead of describing regions, I
would mention that city-states often draw cultural influences from the
regions civilizations they were came from. This broad, general stroke gave a
vague sense of what city-states could be like in terms of culture. This was
obviously not enough, so I described several example city-states in the lore
section.
Character sheet
o In my feedback to JT, I mentioned that everyone has a character sheet, so
they should look cool. I decided to follow my own advice and redo the
character sheet. It didnt look any cooler, but I did add a few things.
o I added gender, and age to the character sheet. This was for narratavist
players, and it was more of a token effort than a genuine one. I spent more
time on the lore

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Make content that's not useful in combat

What is the conflict?
'X' factors/big players
Resources to manage
Forces in the world
Names of skills, city states
o There was a +2% bonus for having good names. I tried to do this, but I dont
think I really got it down.

Playtest 3 Notes:
Playtesters: Glen, Bryan, Leo
Playtested: Mini-Session

We got through character creation, and a little bit of a combat. I intended to get through
more, but we encountered much more problems much more quickly than I anticipated,
and the entire process went much less smoothly as a result.
The problems seemed to be rooted in balance (characters effectively doing on anothers
jobs, just being better than other characters, stealing the spotlight, etc.), and a myriad of
small issues, needling the RPG down to significantly less than it could be. Some issues
are more dramatic and concerning. Roughly transcribed from my notebook:
Might need list of Callings during character creation.
Needs more skills?
o Technical skills
o Mechanical
o Medical
o Driving
Guardian Power Suit stacks too well with other stats. A Guardian with high Finesse is
virtually untouchable.
o Leo made a Guardian. Glen made a Hidden and could only hit him with a critical
hit. Bryan made a Gunslinger, and was in a similar situation.
o It was suggested that I take the DnD route and limit the amount of defense that
characters can get from Finesse. I will do this.
Various clarification issues
o The Hiddens Cloak of Shadows is equipment? Yes? Maybe? Yes.
o Can I put skill points into points Ive already been given?
o Reword starting health?
Stat rolling is inelegant.
o Bryan had to redo it twice, Glen once.
o Character creation in general is pretty sub-par. It took longer than I would have
liked, and Bryan remarked that he had to do a lot of flipping through pages.

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Character sheet needs work

o Needs a place for movement speed.
o Needs a place for stats
o Place to write skills needs to be bigger
Talents need work
o Maybe a bit more
o Talent that buffs stats is horribly imbalanced. Basically made Leo the rock-star of
the group, while taking away from Glen and Bryan.
o Droids getting Talents is kind of weird.
Flavor text is a bit lame.
Items
o Silenced weapons? Cut, too much effort.
o Need to write in grenade subscriptions somewhere
o Rename flare grenades
o Maybe put an inventory limit? Glen was walking around with 24 Molotov
Cocktails.
o Magnum sucks
o Oversized is just a qualifier right now. Mechanically, oversized weapons are
identical to other weapons. Might be worth imposing a Strength requirement.
o Needs more weapons.
Weapons for different stats.
Oversized melee weapon. Im cooler than that Overwatch guy.
Timed explosives
Characters all feel identical, especially ones of the same class.
o Glen suggested giving the Guardian AoE support effects to make him into
something other than punch people guy.
Callings feel identical.
Do you add stats to skills?
Needs fall damage?
Armor in general needs to be curbed.
Callings should probably indicate what stats they need. Glen accidentally built a very
weak character, which felt very bad.
I dont think I have critical hits anywhere.
All explosives have the same blast radius. I think Ill just leave it this way.
Cover rules are hard to remember. They should be less complex and more intuitive.
Hidden should probably be reworked a bit. Made more useful outside of combat.
Things need to scale off Social and Acuity.
o Classes? Glen suggested making a Technic class that scales off Acuity. Leo
suggested scaling energy weapons off Acuity. Both are good ideas, and I would
like to implement both. Not sure if its gonna happen at this point.

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o Making weapons scale off of different things would let me group the weapon
table into what things scale on. I was having trouble with organizing the table
anyway, so that would be nice.
o I dont really know what to scale off Social. Glen suggested a Bard class, I thought
maybe a Psychic? An Animal Handler class might be cool.
Im not telling the narrative through mechanics as well as I could be.
I might need a city-state creation system. I kind of wanted GMs to make their own citystates anyway, so this might just be necessary.

Post-Mortem Section
I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and there are a lot of things I wanted to add, change
or improve when I turned it in. As I heard Holcomb approximately once say, Games are
never finished, just abandoned.

What I Did Okay:

I feel like I made a lot of stuff. A lot of us developed a habit of somewhatsubconsciously comparing word/page counts. My RPG was on the higher end of the
spectrum, so I feel like I must have addressed or at least glossed over many things.
o When I read Glens, Aubreys, JTs and Jesses RPGs, I felt that I had addressed
more mechanical aspects. However, they tended to have much more fleshed
out lore, and their focus on other aspects of the RPG made them much more
interesting to read, and I kind of would rather have played their RPGs. Thus, I
focused on lore in my final iteration.
Mechanically, my RPG was pretty well-rounded. I felt that I mechanics fairly well,
though I was only able to do one mini-session, so this is basically fairy-magic
guessing.
o I didnt address socializing that much, but I felt that this was fine. Adding a lot
of rules to socializing seems strange to me, but that may be just because Ive
never played a narrative-heavy table-top RPG. Socializing isnt something that
requires a lot of simulation, because we can actually just talk to one another.
Fighting, we cant do, because that would be bad. Thus, more rules for
simulating/playing combat.
I had pictures.
o The salt I felt over not being able to work with an artist has rekindled my
desire to work with an artist. It was a non-issue, and not at all a big deal. In
retrospect, my first iteration wasnt an RPG that was geared towards people.
o In order to make things look pretty, I pulled a bunch of pictures from the
internet. I had trouble conveying the world through the images, since parts of

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my theme doesnt have a lot of precedent. The post-apocalypse part was

great, and very easy to find good pictures for. There were no pictures of sixfoot praying mantises however, and it was hard to find pictures for my Crows,
too.

What I Did Less Than Okay:

My lore kind of sucked.

o I kind of wish I had a story or two in there somewhere. By the time I decided
that was a good idea though, I had already put other things in the sections
where stories would have been appropriate. It worked out, since the other
things I put there were pretty okay.
o I still dont feel like I fleshed out the world very well. Part of the issue was
definitely picking the entire world as a setting. I probably should have picked
a region, and zeroed in on it. Jesse did this for his RPG, and it worked out
pretty well for him.
Choosing the entire world meant that large sections always felt
empty.
In order to address lots of the world, I had to choose places all over
the world to describe. As a result, much of my lore didnt synergize
well with other parts. They had the same tone and feel, but it would
be hard to use multiple parts of my lore simultaneously.
o My legendary section was pretty half-baked.
It was about a page, and didnt address legendary items or creatures
that well. I originally wanted legendaries to be like legendaries in
Pokmon: awesome, unique entities that drove adventures. It ended
up being more of a hand-wavy theyre cool, go get em kind of
section. I feel like GMs could still work with it, but I could have done
better.
My systems werent that elegant.
o I had too many mechanics, and the mechanics I had didnt offer that much
depth of gameplay. When I designed them, I felt that they were okay, but
playtesting made me rethink that.
Clarity was sub-par.
o There were many times during play-testing that I had to re-explain things, or
players had to flip through the rule book to find the info they wanted.
o I could never find a good section for Talents.
Characters felt identical/overlapping.
o I got this feedback from Bryan and Glen while playtesting. My Callings all
inspired the same kind of, punch-stuff personality characters. I struggled to
get past this in the final iteration, but I never quite got it down.

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Characters were very specialized and linear. It was hard to make the character that
you wanted.
o When I was making Callings, I came up with ideas for the kinds of characters I
wanted, but looking back, I only provided progression for becoming those
characters, not any other characters.
o Ideally, people would be able to make whatever kind of character they
wanted, but it was very hard to deviate from four Callings I put forth.
o This was because I didnt offer enough ways to personalize characters. There
was no real way to mechanically give a character backstory aside from
Talents, Skills, and head-canons, all of which were rather sub-par ways for an
RPG to address player narrative.
o I would have like it if Callings had choices in the abilities they obtained as
they levelled. As it was, their Calling abilities were explicitly given to them,
and there was no choice involved. This meant that the core of each character
would feel identical to all other characters of the same Calling.
Lacked narratavist appeal
o There was no built-in way to build narrative into your character. I wanted to
do backgrounds, similar to DnD, but that didnt happen. I think the core
problem with my final iteration was that I didnt put enough time into it.
o Jesses narrative systems were pretty great, if a bit complex. It made me think
about how my player characters ultimately boiled down to different flavors
of stabbing people. I enjoy (in-game) stabbing people as much as anyone
else, but for a role-playing game, I feel that I should have had more roleplaying.
Some stats were kind of useless
o Acuity and Social were rather underpowered. There wasnt much use for
them, and if you wanted to play a mentally-focused character, you would
have to sacrifice your combat abilities. I tried to balance this by making
energy weapons scale off Acuity, but I really needed an entire class that did
this. I didnt have time for this, so this was just a flaw I pushed under the rug,
instead of really fixing.

What I Would Change:

Reorganize it.
o I never figured out what was wrong with the table of contents. I spent some
time on it, and it wasnt working out. Since it didnt gain/lose me points, I
decided to put it off until I put it on my portfolio website.
Make characters feel unique
o A character is a players interface into the world. If the character sucks, the

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GAT212 - Fall 2015

entire experience sucks. An easy way to make a character suck is to make it

feel the same as other characters, or like lesser versions of other characters.
o Add more Talents. More Talents would give me more opportunities to tie
narrative and mechanics together, and flesh out the world through numbers
and abilities.
o Add branching paths/Calling choices to Callings. This would help characters of
the same Calling feel different.
o Add two more Callings: one for Social, and one for Acuity. Id probably do an
Animal Handler/Ranger/Merchant for Social, and a
Technician/Engineer/Explosives Expert for Acuity.
Redo the Bestiary
o The final Bestiary had maybe 30 minutes put into it. This was one of my
bigger regrets, since I wanted monsters to be a big part of the world. I just
got pulled in a lot of directions over the course of the project, and never got
around to it.
Playtest it more
o Playtesting is still the best way to make a game better. I didnt get enough of
this done, and theres not a whole lot to say about it.
Redo names
o The names in my system didnt really enhance the experience. They even
detracted a little in a couple of places. Calling doesnt reflect the combative
core of each Calling, and could probably have had a better name.
Build narratavist appeal into the characters
o Again, there was no real mechanical way for people to give their characters
backstory.

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