Wu Tang Flan Ain't Nuthing Ta Mess Wit

+Erik McGrath

Enter the 36 Chambers

Its  time for some 16-Bit Adventure. Particularly its time to face off against some of the most brutal and deadly of all monsters: the Flan. 

Flan are a type of ooze that tend to have magical or special abilities while retaining the ooze trait of being highly resistant to physical attacks.

Unlike in the video games though I am not cruel enough to make them just take half damage from all physical attacks so instead they just upgrade their defense. Any hit under their DEF is halved one more time, so they take quarter damage from hits under their DEF and eighth damage if under their 2DEF. Hits above DEF deal normal damage so its still possible for physical attackers to take down common Flan in a single action.

I have included the PDF below for people to have a look. As always I'm keen on getting feedback, especially of the sort where people point out what I forgot to include.

Downloads

Fiasco at Five Burrows.

16 Bit Adventures and Sudden Death updates

+Erik McGrath

Wu Tang Flan Ain't Nuthing ta Mess Wit

Prepare to enter the 36 Chambers of the Wu Tang Flan and defeat all nine powerful members to free the settlement of Five Burrows from their tyrannical rule and depredation.

Five Burrows was a peaceful town set into the rolling hills before the Wu Tang came and turned the old monastery into their lair. From there, the Ricearector and its disciples raided the town and carried off all its treasures, leaving barely anything  in the shops and fields. Most of the disciples are amorphs of one kind or another with flan taking on all the leadership roles and more common oozes used as foot... er, slimesoldiers.

New PNP 

Ninjas may end up on the back burner from time to time but they are never far away. To the right is one of the new cards for the Sudden Death PNP pdf that you can download below. If you want to see us finalize the art and get it printed on actual cards then download it now, play it and tell us what you think.

Downloads

Sudden Death PNP

16 Bit Adventures Current Rules

16-Bit Adventure in Roll20

Shifting gears to online-mode

+Christopher Andersen

As we've mentioned before, +Erik McGrath and I have been working to shift Roll20 into something that we can showcase, and give to others to showcase online.  To that end, the basic framework for a 16-Bit Adventure is under construction at Roll20.net so that we can run some one-shots of the system.



I have set up the Roll20 campaign to make it easy for GMs and players to use.  Everyone will start on the Character Selection screen, where you all can choose your Job, which sprite you want to use (Boy or Girl sprites available for all jobs), and then configure your tokens for use in Battle.

Maps, Splash Screens and Tokens to Populate Them

Character Selection

GMs can add their own Worldmaps for the adventure at hand, and then throw the party into nostalgic Battle screens against the monsters rolled for the encounter.  There are currently Battle scenes for encounters in the Forest, Plains, Desert, Caves, and Castle.  GMs will have access to a monster token page which has tokens preset for all of the monsters currently in our Rules document, complete with HP values to make it fast and easy to simply copy and paste them into the Battle screen at hand.  Eventually all tokens will also have other information formatted into them (such as XP values and Loot Tables) to make it even simpler to get through a random encounter quickly and without the hassle of having to consult the rulesdoc every time.

The Plan

The hapless party encounters an Ogre in the forest

Initially the plan is to use this campaign to run a few games ourselves when we have a free night, and eventually copy it and hand it off to any GM who is interested in running this with their own gaming group.  If all goes well, all images, sprites, et al will transfer with the copy and it will be easy to transfer our game to new GM to take the reins and run with 16 Bit Adventures.





So if you have any interest in giving 16 Bit Adventures a try as either a player or a GM, let us know and we will include you in any announcements when we schedule our games.  And as always, comments and suggestions are welcome and encouraged.

Shifting gears and folding wings.

+Erik McGrath

Battle Tank: Escape From Giant Robot Island

It's really fun to say that title and even better to write it down and talk about it again. On August 19th I made a post and mentioned doing a Battle tank PNP since the realities of making a board game with the number of pieces we want are too cruel. 

There has been little time to work on this due to competing gaming thoughts and real world issues so I have done the best I can to gather the raw materials and put them in one place. 

Battle Tank PNP PDF (full size)

Battle Tank PNP PDF (reduced)

For best utility and proper size make sure you Fit the images otherwise they will print uselessly small instead of the 8" or so they need to be. Auto-orientation helps too. The full sized file is 300dpi and too large for Google to preview it. The reduced version is much, much smaller but it shows in the image quality.

You will notice that the tokens are the original, square prototype. That will be the first thing I tackle but for now I wanted it to be out there where people can actually use it. Once those are done it will be time to look at expansions.

Expansions

One advantage of PNP is that the only thing between expansions and players is getting the image files finished. I'm really looking forward to Assault on Laser Shark Lagoon and the new rules and goals it adds. Since it is a Battle Tank game there will of course be tanks, and amphibious ones at that, but there will also be boats and depth charges and sharks with laser cannons and an undersea base. Also there's a kraken.

16-Bit Adventures updates

+Erik McGrath

As promised I have made an updated PDF.

It includes the static damage changes as well as the tweaks to single target spells.

16-Bit Adventures Downloads

16-Bit Adventures Rules PDF

Trouble at Castle Funfstein.

+Erik McGrath

The trouble was that the Good King's evil brother staged a coup and threw our heroes in the dungeon since they were known do-gooders.

They promptly escaped, and sans weaponry they fought several battles to get their gear back and then several more. We stopped before they finally got to face off with the Usurper.

Many things were learned in this Lv5 test.

Calculating Damage

Frankly its much too slow to use the rolled value when there is also division to be done. The solution is to give each character a static value to add to their other bonuses and each hit just does that much damage. The static value added is calculated the same as for magic attacks: half the max rolled value of your ATK die. 

We had crits doing 1.5x normal damage but I think they will need to go back to 2x. The reason being that the Dragoon could roll 3 crits and not drop a standard, Lv5 soldier. With DMG 15 his crits did 22 and Grunts have 100hp. If he used Jump his DMG went to 19 which still doesn't cut it. Granted this was with a Lv4 Spear but even with a Lv6 Spear (which was randomly in a chest) his numbers are 17/23 (crit 25/34).

So it takes a Lv+1 weapon and 3 crits on 3 attacks (12 on a d12) to one-shot an on-level monster. That's much too low a chance in my opinion. I want to see it be more like a 50% chance using appropriate gear for your level with your normal attacks.

My thought is to improve the rate at which DMG increases both by weapon and base. Right now the top-tier damage dealers have a DMG of [Lv + 6] for their base and Weapon Lv x1 for sword/spear, x2 for Axe or 2hand Sword and x3 for 2hand Axe. 

The alternative is to change the monster hp math. Its a lot easier to just do that, but if I narrow the numbers too much then there isn't enough difference by level for them so I will be looking at both methods and coming to some middle ground for the next test.

DMG and M.DMG

Specifically the trade-off between them. Today we discovered that our Lv5 Paladin healed for 12 when using Cura AoE. When you are routinely getting hit for 30 that's not good. 

The culprit was that even fully armed and armored plate, shields and swords don't help your M.Dmg. The fix was to just add half their DMG to M.Dmg because that's how Rods and Staffs work in reverse. This helped by upping the AE heals from 12 to 16 and single target from 22 to 26. Hi-Potions heal 50hp. so the AE stuff was good but the single heals were not that valuable, especially not in battle. 

Dark Knights would suffer similarly in this regard. 

The issue is compounded by having both a low M.Atk die and a slowed progression. I'm confident that they could go to the normal progression while keeping the D8 and become better without worrying the White Mage. For comparison a WM with a Lv5 Rod and Robe would have a Cura of 48 AE and 63 single target. Which, come to see it in print like that, is not that great for single. I think Cura needs a boost there as well from +5hp/die to +10. 

I expect the revisions to be done by midweek and I will update the PDFs links then.

16-Bit Adventures musings

+Erik McGrath

Final Fantasy XIV is the Very Devil 

If you were wondering where I've been and what inspired has been doing there you have it. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about FFXIV is an MMO that just came out and like all such things it devours the souls of those who play. Naturally, most of the Inspired family is playing. 

16-Bit Adventures

Adventures!

+Christopher Andersen and I have been discussing doing some more adventures for 16-Bit Adventures like the ones we did for Firstown and Secondville. So as of now my goal is to make an adventure path designed to take PCs from level 1-10 and fight a horrible Endboss and if they win they will save the world. 

We will assume 4 PCs as a base and provide notes and suggestions for how to make it work for more players. Normally it means just making the random encounters have more or fewer monsters and adjusting Bosses to account for the different damage being given and received. As is the math for Bosses is pegged at assuming they are worth about 5-6 monsters so I'm hoping it will be easy to make it work for other numbers without needing too much effort.

More Bits!

At this point the basic engine of 16-Bit is done. It needs a lot of formatting, perhaps more than I am capable of providing, but the gist is solid. 

For here I want to work on two things: Switching Jobs and Tactics.

Switching Jobs

Right now you pick your job class and then you just follow it as you level. Since the inspiration for 16BA is mainly FF5 I think its important to capture the real essence of that game by having a core level for your character as well as job levels which add abilities and traits. I've not yet decided if it will be comparable with the current system but I would like it to be. 

Tactics

This is the most requested thing about 16BA, when will it be able to do FFT. For my view it has to come after job switching is in the bag and it will require modification of a fair part of the system. Not only will it need movement and facing rules, but weapons and spells need ranges, you need terrain, etc. The biggest change would be to the monsters though. Fights will take a lot more time in a Tactics environment than the bare bones system currently in place. Not to mention monsters will need to be adjusted just like PCs.

In all its a lot of work I've got ahead of me, and a lot of FFXIV standing in the way. I will try to get it done week by week.