Game Developer’s Blog

FFRPG – Allinav.

I have written previously about the game system that I was developing.  It continues to develop.  However, here I am going to talk about an off shoot of that development.  About mid 2014 a friends mentioned how long it had been since they had played an RPG.  Probably because I was relating my ‘old days’ of my RPG group that did so on a weekly basis [sometimes all weekend] and with a campaign that lasted over 18 months.  So I sprang an idea.  Part of the game system was going to be ported to RPG at some point in development anyway, so now would be a good time.  It would be fantasy, so I had to do a little tweaking with rules, but several months later I had a significant portion of the rules written and basically character generation and racial basics.

All of this then needed to be play tested.  I invited a group, and in January 2015 began a fortnightly gaming session to play test the game.  Starting at level 1 with a party of six players, I began testing the mechanics and simplicity of the world that I had created.

So over the next few blogs I am going to describe the steps along the way of developing

Pres first session.  The game mechanics started with a conversion of the Table Top stats across to being percentile stats fir the RPG.  This was very quickly thrown out and a second set of attributes were added to represent the variables between individual characters.  The stats were retained to represent the basic values of the different races. 

This brings us to the races that I chose for the Allinav world view.  I had to have Dwarves.  And wanted them to be the focused race.  However I wanted some of the other races to play off.  I also wanted to try to curb the more bizarre racial availability [at least to begin with] and this brought the player races to 6 playable developed races that were further developed.  Dwarves, Halflings, Pixies, Elves, Faeries and Humans.  Next was development of weapons, in classes, and skills.

The first game play session, 

First part of the first session was character generation, the main part of the problem encountered here - and this continued until well into the April sessions - was how the bonus and skills added up to achieve a target value.  Also skills which seemed to work a little to begin with, but required refining at a later point.  At this point despite the descript ion of they work being in place, morality was not applied and still has not really entered game play.  I would suggest that at this point the game play is not advanced enough to take special notice of morality.  For those who are curious to know, Morality is how this game handles ‘Alignment’.  Instead of applying a good vs evil approach to the game, the Morality expects that each player will consider how the act and interact with other people of the same race and others.

The first game session went reasonably well, all considered there was about 3 hours of play after an initial character generation period.  The party consists of six players; a Dwarf, a Halfling, a Faerie, an Elf and 2 Pixies.  This puts half of the PCs as flying characters.  Elements that are requiring work are those relating to skills and the summoning function.  Over the next few weeks the three people on the development team work out some kinks, the most important of which is the skills and how they function.  It took a second playing session where the skills are further tweaked and then an eventual upheaval on how the summoning will work also essentially turning summoning into a type of skill set.  Thus it can increment for points values much the same way that other skills can.

Skills are now split into five categories, 

Offence, defence, survival, social and summoning.  With the addition of a spread sheet that allows the player to just cross off the skills they want to increment, it allows for reference as opposed to multiple transference of skill data.  Summoning was the most contentious subject during this period.  In the Allinav world, there is not ‘magic’ as usual fantasy worlds.  In Allinav there are summoners – people that are able to focus their affinity with one or more of the five elements and the elemental plane.  This took a while to tweak so that it was not too powerful, but was also not so difficult that it could not make and effective change to the game play.  In latter sessions it would take a little further tweaking.

Game Designing Blog.

So, way back in the depths of antiquity [2009] I began a small project of writing a table top war game.  The original premise was a war game based in the near galaxy in about the year 3000 [from the human perspective].  It underwent  a few changes initially and a bit of history was written, and few races added to the universe.  Then I was getting a little bogged down in the detail, so I tamed it a little back to the basic mechanic, then wrote a partial game based on the same - developing - mechanic that was a campaign developing crew on ships, pirate ships, etc. 

A little while passed and the pirate game had introduced so many little tweaks and quirks to what was meant to be a generic system, that I tied it back to the basic mechanic again.  That was in 2012.

Life has a way of taking over from dreams that you play with from time to time, and this was no different.  I wrote the basic mechanic, and added a bit to the universe and that was about all that happened for over 12 months.  Then, in the middle of 2013, a friend of mine prompted me to continue.  Not encouraged, mind you, just nudged a little.  So the mechanic got its 2013 rewrite that was generic, and then that generic mechanic has now - slowly - been ported over to the science fantasy universe again.  I have done a fair bit of work since then, mostly on the universe, and lot of it is still a messy jumble in my head.  Mostly a time line for the galactic sector and the other races have been established, and reasons for why 'X' doesn’t get along with 'Y'.  In this setting, the human race is still the newcomer to this long standing - and occasional brush fire - that is the portion of space we find our self in.

Until today, it was all on paper, or electronic document, or still tucked away in my head.  Today, I actually play-tested the mechanic.  Did it work?  So far, so good.  Does it have anything overpowered?  Well, I only tested basic armour, basic cover, basic rifles, and then tested a machine gun.  By my rules, the machine gun is a little overpowered.  But that isn’t really wrong, because, machine guns ARE overpowered.  I am going to do some more tests, to see if initial theories are correct.  But I was surprised how well it ran for a very small play testing session.

It is also very satisfying to have finally got to that stage.  Is it a full functioning game?  Hell no!  It's a long way from that, but so far my initial mechanic designs are working.  And this is amazing in its own right. 

More to be posted here soon as I continue to finesse the process and develop the universe.  At this point 'Next Frontier' has gone from theory to practice, even if I'm the only one that gets to play it.