Saturday, July 14, 2012

Open-Ended Condition Lists

We did a little more design on Project Delta, George's tabletop BYOB minis game. We simplified the condition list, and it made me think of the huge condition list in DnD3 and 4. In both games, the condition lists are huge, exhaustive, and have tons of special rules. These are incredibly simulationist rules, with one-offs and special cases. Delta had a similar long list, and remembering and applying all the conditions on the board was a huge chore, with frequent references to the rules during play.

DnD4 adds special conditions to powers, like a power that gives a -2 to hit to a figure until the next turn/removal roll/etc. This complicates play exponentially, with applied conditions and power-based conditions all applied and timing out on different times. When we played DnD4 with our public group, condition tracking drug the game to a crawl, and it was easier to combine and simplify all the modifiers to keep play moving.

In Delta, we chose to simplify the condition list down, and the game played better. Stun, daze, and disorient are really the same stun-type condition, so you only need one to cover them all. SBRPG has a huge hazard list, with conditions mixed in there, but there is a lot of reuse among the hazards. SBRPG followed an object-oriented design, where you started with a small set of conditions-as-hazards, and those built on each other. It could have been cleaned up, and most likely will be in version 2.0.


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