Hi there! Last time, I covered the basic stuff that goes into each character. Now, we're going to go over what you need to make a character. There's really not much to it (which is the point!) so this one should be short. In general there are five steps. All but one of them (Class, which we'll dive into last) barely involve mechanics in the Crunchy Game sense - rather they're about defining how you interact with the world. ...
Hi there! As promised, v0.3 is done! This one was a more extensive change than v0.2. See the devlogs tagged as v0.2 -> v0.3 for more details on why I made any given change. Resources A third resource, Ammo, has been added to Frames. Tension and Ammo are distinguished from each other as follows:You may spend Tension to gain another action on your turn or reroll an attack. Tension is regained from Drops as usual (as well as from certain Build Traits). ...
Hi there! I'm gonna talk about a lot of the other basics now - Attributes, Skills, and Icon relationships. Death to Ability Scores So ability scores in 13th Age and its predecessors are awful. I don't like them, and in 13th Age especially they're basically vestigial. They act mostly as a gate for certain classes, as half of the noncombat calculation (alongside Backgrounds), and a way to screw up chargen. There's a few other things they do for combat, but it's not much of interest. ...
Hi there! I'm going to be writing a bunch of devlogs about everything in 36th Way, in pretty much the order I developed it. This one's about the most basic mechanics of 36th Way: rolls, Advantage, and Disadvantage. Why 3d6? 13th Age uses a 1d20 in a fairly typical way for most things: roll it, add your level and maybe 1 or 2 other things, see if it's bigger than something else. ...
Hi there! I want to talk a bit about one of the bigger v0.3 changes: Ammo. That is to say, I'm adding it. If you haven't read my initial 0.3 post and my Armaments and Dice post please do! But to recap, Tension is being split into Tension and Ammo: Tension handles rerolls and grants extra actions, while Ammo is used to activate Systems. Tension can be regained by Drops (and by another method - we'll get there), while Ammo is either only restored upon return or during some kind of mid-mission supply cache discovery. ...
Hi there! As noted in my last post, one of the things I'm changing in v0.3 is Attack rolls keying off Armaments. I'm going to dive deeper into that here, think out loud about the balance involved, and see where that gets us in general. There's a bunch of math ahead. You've been warned! I promise it's going somewhere though. Dice and Probability I covered this a bit in my first devlog about v0. ...
Hi there! So as alluded to, I have some ideas about what I want to do next to core. I came to these conclusions both by playtesting the game (and by replaying Armored Core) to get a handle on what kind of feeling I wanted to capture. Right now AF is pretty close to LUMEN CORE in a few particular areas, and these changes would do quite a bit to push that further away. ...
Hi there! Sorry for the radio silence. I've been working at ACES HIGH and also preparing a different project (to be announced shortly)! ACES HIGH is basically done pre-editing in its current incarnation. But "current incarnation" is the key. I've been thinking about the core mechanics and I'm going to make a few major changes to how certain things work - something that'll take things further away from core LUMEN and lean a little more some mecha concepts I wanted to emphasize. ...
Hi there! Tyrants were the biggest reason I decided to fast-track this expansion over creating premade missions. If you'd been paying attention to v0.1.0, you might have noticed that Prime enemies got a downgrade between versions. This is because originally Prime enemies were supposed to fill the role that Tyrants currently fill. But as I playtested, I decided they needed to be their own thing. A Tyrant is a serious enemy. ...
Hi there! In this post I'm going to be talking about the Campaigns section of the upcoming Aces High. Specifically, the mechanical bits: Crisis Advances and Moonshot Advances. Crisis Advances The idea behind Crisis Missions is that they're intended to add points of challenge and tension to an otherwise power fantasy-oriented game. But when the consequences are simply narrative, this can create a disconnect when the Aces' actions are otherwise unaffected by these encounters that are supposed to signify increasing danger to the place they call home. ...