Earth Delta Design Diary, 5/2/2010
Earth Delta Design Diary, 5/2/2010
Lest anyone suspect, due to long silence, that Earth Delta (Lizard’s take on classic Gamma World style play married to Fourth Edition Dungeons&Dragons rules) is moribund or slowing, you are wrong. Well, mostly wrong. It’s true that work post Alpha 1.4 is a bit less frenetic than it has been, but that is due more to time and other distractions than to a lack of passion. A few notes on what’s happening:
It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time
Lizard has this little problem. He tends to get these brilliant ideas that turn out to be a lot more work than he imagined. For example, when doing the Babylon 5 Guide To The Galaxy, he decided to document every single system on the two-page map in the core Babylon 5 RPG rulebook. Glancing at the map, Lizard didn’t know how many worlds there were. It turned out there were around 200, and tracking them down required researching all sorts of obscure material produced over the years for JMS’ excellent universe, and discovering that while JMS is one of the greatest storytellers of this generation, and he can and always will write circles around me in terms of plot, dialog, characterization, and damn near everything else, he does need a wee small bit of help on his worldbuilding, in that I found no less than three different "first colonies" on Luna. I managed to work them all into a semi-coherent narrative, however.
This has nothing to do with Earth Delta, per se, and I don’t know why I sometimes slip into third person.
Anyway, as those who read the 1.4 alpha of Earth Delta know, I decided to add enhancement feats to the mutations, to help distinguish them more from items, and to balance the fact that your mutations stick with you. I’m really trying to avoid making it easy to retrain or change mutations once selected; I know the 4e paradigm is that you should be able to "respec" at any time, even changing race or class when the New Shiney comes out, but this is an attitude which seems to be driven more by marketing concerns than by what makes a good game (and is symptomatic of WOTCs apparent drive towards a more modular, pick-up-and-play style game, instead of focusing on worldbuilding and long term campaigning, but that’s another rant). So after doing a small handful and liking the results, I "shipped" the Alpha and settled in to do the rest.
Oy! (That’s Jewish for "Frak!")
Some come very easily. Some take a long time. Insert "Just like women!" joke here. This is almost pure mechanics, often very formulaic, a lot of "+1 to this" and "triggers on that". I am trying to avoid extremely repetive structures, such as following the same A, B, C pattern with "cold" crossed out and "fire" written in, but at the same time, I don’t want too many issues of balance introduced by the feats — meaning, if a mutation is balanced but the feat chain for one is more powerful than the other, it unbalances it. This is very hard to get perfectly correct, and a lot depends on circumstances the game designer cannot control. Someone who takes disruptive field will be regret it if the party almost never encounters robots. On the other hand, if the campaign involves a massive campaign against Turing’s Children, not only is the base mutation useful, but the enhancement feats become almost essential. Thus, the omnipresent viking hat. It’s at least partially the DMs responsibility to either a)Tell a player "Look, that mutation won’t really help you that much", or, b)Engineer the campaign to play into the player’s choices. Doing either is fine; doing neither is the mark of a bad DM. (If the campaign focus changes, so a likely-useful ability becomes less so, then there’s a very good justification for introducing events to change a mutation, with the player’s consent.)
This has also been an exercise in going over all the mutations, fixing typos, missing sections, improper formatting, and doing another balance pass. Seeing them all flowing by in sequence gives me a better overview of how they look in comparison to each other, as opposed to simply deciding if a mutation "sounds good" in and of itself. If one mutation gives Resist 5 (Fire) and another in the same slot gives Resist 10 (Cold), with no other factors, obviously, something’s wrong.
Just as an example of the process in action, here’s Agony Tendrils, one of the earliest mutations I wrote up, as it appears in Alpha 1.4:
Lvl: 7
Power (Daily): Free action. When you score a critical hit, the target cannot regain hit points (save ends). At 27th level, this becomes an Encounter power.
Vestigial: When you score a critical hit, the target cannot regain hit points until the end of your next turn.
Appearance: This power may manifest as:
- Raw nerves hanging from your arms and wrists.
- Barbed spurs that shoot from your fingertips.
- Strangely wriggling tentacles growing out of your forearms and shoulders.
And here’s what it looks like as of the current draft, which will either be Alpha 1.5 or Beta 1.0, still not sure:
Lvl: 7
Power (Daily): Free action. Use this power when you hit with a melee attack. The target grants combat advantage and cannot regain hit points (save ends both). At 17th level, the target cannot regain hit points until the end of the encounter. At 27th level, you also gain hit points as if you had spent a healing surge.
Vestigial: When you score a critical hit, the target cannot regain hit points until the end of your next turn.
Heroic Enhancement: When you score a critical hit with a melee attack, the target takes 1d6 psychic damage.
Paragon Enhancement: When you score a critical hit with a melee attack, the target takes 2d6 psychic damage and is slowed (save ends).
Epic Enhancement: When you score a critical hit with a melee attack, the target takes 3d6 psychic damage and is dazed until the end of your next turn.
Appearance: This power may manifest as raw nerves hanging from your arms and wrists, barbed spurs that shoot from your fingertips, or strangely wriggling tentacles growing out of your forearms and shoulders.
As you can see, it’s been considerably powered up. In general, monsters rarely heal, so tying that power to a daily which required a critical hit was… foolish. Now the daily works whenever you hit, and imposes a more useful condition. I changed how the power scales, and the enhancement feats help define the idea that when you hit someone, they get hurt. (I may go back and make those encounter powers, because as you approach epic level, you score criticals pretty often, and doing this even 2 or 3 times per encounter could be a bit much.)
So, yeah — work is definitely continuing. Not in the usual "I mean to get back to this project soon, honest, guys!" way of most such projects, but in the "I am not playing WoW right now because I’m working on Earth Delta" way. (Other than my break to write this.)
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