A Walk in the Dark A look in to the mind of an RPG designer

To Crunch or Not To Crunch

Development has continued on the Atomic Age RPG... Granted, not as fast I would like due to personal and "real life" issues (how awesome would gaming be if we didn't have to do things like, you know, pay rent and eat food!) but it's moving along.

This past week I've been focusing on two things:

1. Rewriting the rules so that they have more fluff. Right now, except for entirely new material, it's 90% text from the SRD which... let's be honest... reads like the owner's manual to a 747. It's presentation of the rules is as raw as it gets, and it isn't exactly as fun a read as the 13th Age book is. I'm hoping to fix that.
2. Seriously reconsidering some of the new implementations I'm doing. Besides the all new classes, races, monsters and content, there are a few major things I'm creating exclusively for The Atomic Age:

• Radiation sickness
• Disease and toxins
• Gun mechanics
• Vehicles and driving mechanics
• Hacking

#2 above is the one I have the biggest issue with right now. You see, I'm a crunch guy... As a mathematics/computer science major, I love crunch and can't get enough of it. But 13th Age isn't exactly designed that way... it's meant to be "rules light", comparatively speaking. So it's hard to do certain things without becoming what 13th Age isn't.

Some things could be unavoidably complex... Yes, I could make vehicle rules be no more than one paragraph, but do I really want to? I'm not the kind of person that would make it a single paragraph and expect the DM to figure out what to do with that. I want to write rules, but is doing so a direct violation of everything 13th Age and the Archmage SRD stands for?

Let's take the firs example above: radiation sickness. Or let's put it in terms I'm actually using: the distinction between radiation damage and radiation exposure.

Radiation damage is just that: raw damage, no different than any other. Radiation exposure is how much radiation your body soaks up; it may not be immediately lethal, but it probably won't be god for you. But how do I quantify that? At what point do I decide "OK, you've had enough exposure... time to start feeling icky."

So I conceived the concept of a "radiation tolerance", which is half your maximum hit points. Once you get exposed to an amount of radiation that exceeds your tolerance, your sickness level increases one stage. And it keeps stacking... For example, you start at Stage 0 but if your tolerance is 20 and you take 50 exposure your stage is now Stage 2 (with 10 points to spare).

So what are the stages? Here's the list I currently have...

Stage 0: No adverse effect.

Stage 1: Your Constitution score is reduced by 1d4.

Stage 2: Your Constitution and Intelligence scores are further reduced by 1d4. When you use a recovery, you only recover half the hit points you normally would. On a full heal-up, at the GM’s discretion you may start to experience one small, cosmetic mutation that may not fully develop until your exposure increases or until you go a long time without treatment.

Stage 3: Your Constitution, Intelligence and Strength scores are all further reduced by 1d4. You cannot use any recoveries until your radiation level is reduced. On a full heal-up, at the GM’s discretion you may experience one significant mutation (see Advanced Mutations on page XXX).

Stage 4: All your attributes are further reduced by 1d4. During each full heal-up, you must succeed in a hard Constitution skill check (see Environmental DCs for Skill Checks on page XXX) or die.

Stage 5: Death.

The problem with this is that now I'm introducing another mechanic: ability drain. Every time this happens you'll have to recompute everything: armor class, defenses, max hit points, attack rolls, etc... etc... etc... Do I really want that? This feels very... 3.5E/Pathfinder-ish.

So I thought of an alternate list:

Stage 0: No adverse effect.

Stage 1: You take a -2 penalty to all attack rolls and skill checks.

Stage 2: You take a -2 penalty to all defenses, and when you use a recovery you only recover half the hit points you normally would. On a full heal-up, at the GM’s discretion you may start to experience one small, cosmetic mutation that may not fully develop until your exposure increases or until you go a long time without treatment.

Stage 3: You are vulnerable to all attacks against you, and you cannot use any recoveries until your radiation level is reduced. On a full heal-up, at the GM’s discretion you may experience one significant mutation (see Advanced Mutations on page XXX).

Stage 4: Death.

It's one stage less because I'm honestly running out of things to penalize.

So all of the above, with the addition of details on how to reduce your exposure and whatnot, takes up two pages of a Word document, which would translate to about a page and a half (sans art) in the final format. For a game whose rules on invisibility take up three small paragraphs, that feels like a lot doesn't it?

Again, is that such a bad thing? If I had to simplify it, I'm not sure how I would... any more and I might not as well include it at all.

This happens with all the other sections I mention above as well. Vehicle rules are like six pages right now, and that might sound absurdly long but, to me anyway, it feels right. So I have to force myself to adjust my way of thinking and create new rules that have the same design ethic as the rest of the document. Well that or create the entire damn game from scratch, which is not something I think I can do in any reasonable amount of time.

Anyway, I'll revisit these rules some of the day I suppose. I still got a lot of text to write for my icons in the meantime.