And then... Ninjas!

+Erik McGrath

Sudden Death might be my favorite thing we've come up with at Inspired. It combines my interest in simple gameplay with ninjas, in a package that takes less than five minutes to play.

That's not to say I don't like complicated games, but I prefer ones where the complexity comes from the strategy, not from complicated rules. Go is a classic example of the type of complexity I prefer. It has very few rules, but a tremendous amount of complexity during play.

Sudden Death's rules are extremely simple, and while it is nowhere near as deep as Go, it does have some complexity in how one forms their opening hand and tries to control the flow of the game.

With that said;

Sudden Death

Behold the new prototype!


The card back is my doing. I painted the characters and did the text as well. It took this proof for me to notice the letters aren't properly aligned though. So that's the first thing to revise for the next version. Every time I look at it I find something I want to tweak. :)


The more important side has a lot more going into it. The art is sketches from +Laura Hamilton. All other layout is the work of +Christopher Andersen . He made the frame and sized the images to fit.

Playtesters Wanted

There's no substitute for playtesting in game design and the most useful kind is that provided by people who don't have the creators hovering over them or playing against them.

So we're looking for people who want to get a playtest version of the game and ruthlessly tear it apart while documenting the process. There will be a form for that and more info in our next post once we finalize our end. Until then, feel free to ask any questions you have or volunteer yourself to CJ or Erik.

Inspired update 8/15

+Erik McGrath

It's alive!

Time really gets away from me in the summer it seems. Time to talk about gaming to beat the heat.

Lately I've been going back to my original gaming passions: wargames and RPGs. The first Inspired-related thing I ever wrote was Celestial Warriors. Lots of fun, needs a new version. The first non-RPG game I've done is Battle Tank.

So I've gotten back to my roots by hacking some RPG settings and making wargame terrain.

RPGing

I'm working on two setting hacks that are both using FAE. 

The first is a genre blend of cyberpunk and wuxia that I've done some short fiction about and that I am calling Chrome-Fu. I've changed the approaches to use the 5 Chinese Elements and liberally provide boosts when people use the elemental generation/overcome interactions. The character sheet has the wheel printed on it to help people remember what those interactions are.

The other is a Magic the Gathering game where we blend FATE with actually playing Magic. The colors+artifact are the FAE approaches and there is a separate hierarchy of meta skills to handle how the cards interact with play. This determines some basic things like Library, Hand size, color identities, rarity, and number of lands.

Wargaming

My terrain binge has been mainly hills and natural features. The hills are pink insulation board cut up then painted brown to seal them. I use spray glue (which would dissolve the foam, hence the paint) to add screened dirt for texture and then green flock for grass. Different amounts of green give me some different looks so I have some that's pristine green ground cover and some that's pure dirt to use in heavily contested scenarios where artillery and fire would have denuded the earth.

The pieces are pretty square, because it takes a lot more effort and material to get more natural features. I have some more realistic looking pieces, but I needed quantity of features to cover the table and that meant saving time more than anything else. I still cut and sand the edges to get sloped sides, and several pieces have multiple levels. One actual advantage of square sides is you can fit several pieces together and get larger plateaus free from gaps.

Aside from basic hills I've made a significant amount of hedges to use as bocage in both 1/72 and 6mm scale. The 6mm hedges double as waist high verge for 1/72. All told I have about 30 linear feet of hedge now. I've also made a few dozen shell-hole pieces on 3" bases. I use them to show both pre-game shelling and for Boots on the Ground for in-game changes to the terrain.

My next project is wire and obstacles. Some minefields would be nice.

Other games

Lots of things are still burning in the background. There's been some bumps and some re-alignment of priorities lately. The bump is mainly demands on our time from the everyday intrusions of life. The re-alignment is due to research and game-playing. Some ideas are getting dropped or at least pushed way off due to lack of direction on our part, and in the case of Drachenheim we've had to do some soul searching about what it can offer that's different from some great, similarly dragon-centric games that have come out lately.

I believe we have the answer to that question though so more news in the weeks ahead.

Back in the Saddle

+Erik McGrath

It has been awhile since I've had much to say about what we've been up to. Too long really. But here I am and there are things to be said.

Card games

Chemistry is FUNdamental

Now with one of those names that burrows into your soul! More seriously, geeks like us believe that chemistry actually is fun and we want to see more kids getting into it.

To that end this card game teaches how to make Lewis Dot diagrams starting with the Rule of Eight elements: Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Florine (HCNOF). The main piece of information you need to play is the Rule of Eight itself. You need to know that CNOF all must have 8 electrons in their valence shell in order to be stable and that H must have 2.

The cards list the base valence electrons, the approximate electronegativity and the formal charge each element has with each possible number of covalent bonds.The Group # is also listed to help new students start to see patterns in the chemistry of the columns on the periodic table. These prototypes don't have the full atomic symbols with mass and number but they will in the next iteration.

Flash of the Blade

I've been rewriting and going back and forth on this one for a long time now. At this point it's finally starting to work. At issue is the complexity of sword fighting and the constraints of a card game. The goal is to have something that emulates the decision making and physical realities of a fencing duel without being so technical it bogs down.

To that end I've hacked the number of unique cards down to twelve and built a pair of 41 card decks to test my new design.

Sudden Death

This game is done (more or less) and is off to the draft/prototype phase where we get something like Gamecrafter or DriveThru Cards to give us a better version than the prototype we are using. We'll hand a few out to get people playing and do some demos at the local game stores.

If that goes well we'll be looking to try and get it into production again with finished art.

Mind... err, Soulflayers.

+Erik McGrath

New Stuff

16 Bit Tactics needs more monsters. It needs me to work on the gear section as well but monsters are more fun and so they win out.

So to that effect, today's post comes with an updated monster doc. I've added damage affinities (Weak, Strong Absorb) to all the existing entries and as you can guess from the title and the adorable creature pictured here, I have also added Flayers as a monster type.

Flayers blast your mind. At low levels they aren't that scary, all they do is squiggle with their tentacles and spray ink at you (Blind). Mid-level ones have the irritating ability to dispel your positive statuses and high level ones have Mind Blast. And that's always bad. One thing to note is that all these attacks also deal full, normal, dark element damage. So they can't just be laughed off and the statuses removed. You'll need items or plenty of MP to handle these guys.

Next Up

The monsters are still on my mind so here's the upcoming ones: Hydra, Demon, Dryad, Coerl, Chocobo, Automaton, and Minotaur. 

In addition to the additional types of monster will be variant monsters. If you look at the doc now, you may notice that all dragons breath fire and that all flan are water-type. Those are some obvious ones begging for variants. In most cases a variant is as simple as just changing the element of an attack and altering its damage affinities to conform.

Sometimes though, you aren't just switching out a power but adding a new one. Maybe you want to make one of the monsters a spellcaster, so you give it Thundaga. In this case, the monster might be more dangerous than another monster of its level so you need to increase the XP awarded. To figure out how much, I'll be going to the school of B/X D&D and counting special abilities and then setting an award based on that. 

The current XP/AP system only uses level as well as relative number of monsters and PCs to determine the XP/AP award. It doesn't count monster type.

Links

16 Bit Tactics Monsters

16 Bit Tactics Core Rules (unformatted)

Now with Undead

+Erik McGrath

Ah, holidays. This entire time of year, from Halloween to New Year, tends to get devoured and all I have to show for it is a couple new monsters for 16-Bit Tactics.

Undead

Skeletons and Ghosts make their first appearance. I picked them to get a physical and a non-physical undead up and running and, of course, because I have LEGO figures for both. I have zombies and mummies as well, but those two will have to wait. 

Skeletons have a mix of attack types as they level: a melee attack, a ranged ice attack, and an AE drain. Their physical attack does the most damage, but the others have status effects and can be useful against those with low M.Def/M.Eva. They are pretty typical fighter types otherwise. Good DEF, middling M.Def, high HP.

Ghosts have only magic dark attacks. Two are melee; one sleeps the other drains and poisons. Then they have an AE ranged dark blast. They have lower HP but top rate EVA/M.Eva, and since they are insubstantial they have Resist Physical. So even though they have no defense (it's the same as their evasion ratings so it almost never applies), they still take half damage from all physical attacks. Best break out the spells on these guys. They also float/fly and no one seems to like fighting them for some reason.

The unique part about undead though is that they don't stay dead for long. When reduced to 0HP they gain a countdown effect. When the countdown runs out they revive with half HP. The only way to stop this is to apply an effect that cancels Doom. Holy Water is one way. Reraise is another. If those aren't options you still win the battle if all the enemy are KO'd, so you can time it to take all the undead down within 3 rounds of each other.

Elemental Effects

One major thing adding undead has made me think off more is how to make the elements more distinct. As of right now there is really no difference between them and few abilities reference an elemental type other than to color the damage. Clearly this will not do. 

I already have the Resist keyword so to make this work as a minigame that encourages characters to buy different elemental abilities I need to add two more keywords: Weak and Absorb. There will be no Immune condition since I don't like when nothing happens. With this system either you get less damage, more damage, or you heal the target. 

Undead typically Absorb Dark and are Weak to Fire and Holy. To get this in I will be using some of the white space left on the monster sheets to add an Elemental Affinities section that will list how they react to each element. Broader traits like the Ghost's Resist Physical will not be spelled out here since they are so powerful they will continue to occupy a Support ability slot.

Coming Up

Other things in the 16-Bit pipeline include:

Mounts (Kweh!)

More Monsters (demons, machina and some classic heavy hitters like Behemoth)

Boss Monsters 

Summons

Links

Only Monsters is updated. The others are for convenience. 

16-Bit Tactics Jobs
16-Bit Tactics Gear
16-Bit Tactics Monsters

16 Bit Tactics Usable Rules

+Erik McGrath

As promised, I have been working on 16 Bit Tactics. Below are 4 links to get all the current parts of the game. With these you have everything you need to play, but not everything I want to give you.

What's Missing

In particular there are no guidelines on how to set up battlefields, nor are there any stats on how the power of characters and monsters compares at different levels. A Level 2 creature is undeniably more powerful than a level 1, but I have't crunched the numbers to tell you how much more dangerous it is.

Summoners are also incomplete. All their job abilities are costed and written up, but what their summons actually do is not detailed. This is because I can't decide on what they should actually do. I am torn between them being one-shot spells like in many of the older games, or if they should actually create a minion on the battlefield that the summoner can then control.

The first method makes them similar to Black Mages but with added utility, since some of the summons have status or support effects as well as nukes. The second method makes Summoners much more tactical and would serve as a good base for when Beastmasters are introduced. It would be simple enough to make a monster template for each summon and then let the summoner spend their actions to command the creature each turn.

Any feedback is appreciated.

The Gear section is very bare bones as well. I have not finished the costs of equipment because I haven't finished the loot system for Tactics yet. So this means I have no information on what items you should expect to have by level and there are, as of yet, no consumable items.

What's Coming

Next on the docket is formatting the rules document, then combining everything into a single file. From there the monster section needs to be expanded with more types of enemy, and consumable items are a must as well.

To get to the consumables, a robust loot system is needed so that you know how much GP to expect for each character and what a defeated enemy should leave behind.

A full character sheet is on the list as well. Right now I just use index cards to note what a character has equipped and its cumulative stats. The Job tracking sheets are used to keep track of AP gained and spent.

And with that said, an experience system is needed. How much XP and AP should a character earn? Currently that amount is 1XP and 1AP per level of the defeated enemy. Add up all the enemies and then divide this among the PCs. Since it's linear and the power curve is a very steep linear curve it makes lower level enemies much more valuable for the effort expended. I've also thought of squaring the level of a monster to get its reward. I don't know if this will work yet. 

Finding the right number to level up is tricky as well. 100 is too much and 25 is too low to just be linear. I think 25*(current level) looks reasonable. That would mean that it takes 1125XP to get to level 10 which gives you enough AP to completely master 2 Jobs and make progress on a third.

16 Bit Tactics Links

Rules - No Format
Gear
Monsters
Jobs

16bit Games and 32bit Issues.

+Erik McGrath

Lately I have had what can only be termed catastrophic computer issues. Luckily all my Inspired stuff was backed up outside my machine. Unluckily I had to re-find all my programs and get them installed so I could work on things. I am almost done doing that.

Once all that is settled it's back to work. My current plan is to do some more with 16 Bit Adventures. Once I have an adventure module for each level up to 10, I can call it done. I also need to work more on 16 Bit Tactics and get those monster stats finished. With jobs, enemies and gear done, the skeleton of the system will be usable, after that it's how battlefields should be built.

Personally I use LEGO

This is a 32x32 blue plate divided up into an 8x8 grid using 2x4 blocks. Ultimately I plan to get colored plates to more clearly show the grid but for now I settle for changing the orientation of the blocks. This is a good size for a 3v3 or 4v4 battle. It gets cramped with more and feels a little empty with less, besides which a 2v2 battle is in itself too small for Tactics to handle well.



Each color is a specific terrain type. Green is grass, yellow is sand, blue is water, tan is earth (I don't have brown blocks), and grey is stone. Counting the water as HT 0 there are 5 different HT values shown here. This breaks up line of sight and gives an advantage to the high jump rating jobs: Thief, Ninja, Monk, Dragoon.