Resurrecting an Old Design

Now that I'm back into the groove of design again with Napoleon, Blown Apart, I'm finding myself thinking more about other designs. I have a thing that I'm just starting to tinker with that I'm currently calling Extraordinary Popular Delusions. I have been turning over in my head a different design on the French Revolution. I actually signed a thing (more soon!). But, the thing that's had the most motion is an old thing. I have revisited Killing Monsters and Taking Their Stuff.

When I last left that design, about ten years ago, I had created three major versions of the game. I didn't actually end up documenting them all here, because I was pretty discouraged with how things were going. The last post I put up here was after I put together a full prototype of the first major version, with a full set of content. This was a bad idea, probably - I put a lot of effort into all of that, and it turned out the game didn't really work.

There were parts that worked great, though. In particular, the combination of class + skill resulting in a character was neat, the way that you had a pool of dice that were your health was cool, the way they could either absorb damage or be spent for special abilities was a very nice resource tradeoff. The combat system, based (very) loosely on Cribbage was working pretty well for the first fights. So what was the problem? Scaling.

The way that basically any dungeon crawling game works is that everything gets bigger. The characters get more powerful, the monsters get more dangerous, the loot gets shinier. KMATTS is no different. I don't want to buck the conventions of the expected fiction. I want to make a game that gives players some real resouirce management challenges, sort of the same kind of feeling as a classic roguelike, but in a very familiar package. Anyway, in KMATTS, you pile up loot and become more powerul, resulting in rolling more dice and fighting monsters with more dice. But that's where the problems came in.

The way combat worked, roughly, is you roll a pile of dice, the other side rolls a pile of defense dice, the defense dice cancel matching attack dice, then you score the roll. Echoing Cribbage, you score damage for pairs, for runs of three, and for two dice that sum to 7. But, as your dice pool gets larger, you get more and more combinations, and kind of any die becomes useful in some way. Defense dice also frequently match, so they don't really have much impact. It just became a chore, and the number of dice kind of blurred out the importance of any one die. The central limit theorem hauled everything into the same groove in the last couple fights, and it just made you wonder what was the point.

Well, I tried some alternate systems, two more major revisions, and neither of them worked either. So onto the shelf it went, massive pile of content and all, and I just stopped thinking about it. Until recently. I had a bit of inspiration for the original, Cribbage-y combat system (which was the most fun of the three major revisions). Specifically, what if runs were all that mattered, but length of the run in particular? Your runs would be more fragile, so defense would be more significant, and you could differentiate characters by how many runs they scored. You would need some luck to get a full run of 6s, but it would be a big result. It would still feel like dice combos were critical, but you wouldn't get that slot machine thing of scoring thirty different small combos and the tedium of counting it all up.

It seemed promising enough to try out. And so I did. There are rules available. There's a Screentop prototype. I'm back, baby!

By the way: do not play this. It's going to be bad. This thing is going to need a lot of revision. But, dammit, it's nice to be working on it again.