Today is Free RPG Day! Head out to your Friendly Local Game Store and pick up some cool stuff, try out a new game, and buy the father in your life that Father’s Day present you’ve been putting off. Dads love RPGs!
So you may have noticed that it’s been a while since I posted about progress on the game. Well, that’s because it’s been a while since there was any. Now there’s been some!
It occurred to me that I have been using the word Funzor(tm)* for a while now, without explaining what I mean. A Funzor(tm) is a unit of fun. Something which is fun is possessed, therefore, of one or more Funzors(tm).
* The ™ is sarcastic. Anyone else remember “Nazi(tm)” from the Indiana Jones RPG?
Now, the solution to the Trust dilemma was simple. Stupid simple. Really.
You’re going to want to hit me when you realize how dumb I was before. And really, I deserve it. But here goes:
It became clear to me that tracking Trust separately from Confidence was broken. Badly broken. Trust was supposed to always be a value between 1 and Confidence -1, unless Confidence was 0, in which case Trust was 0, t00. That by itself is too complicated for Ultrablam! It is seriously lacking in Funzors. I should have known that the fact that I never felt satisfied when I explained it mean that it was broken. Mea culpa. On top of that, how are you supposed to keep track of it, exactly? Let’s say you start a session with 5 Confidence and 3 Trust. OK, no problem. But now you get hurt and spend 3 Points of Confidence to recover from Unconscious to Injured to Fine. Now, you’ve got 2 Confidence and 3 Trust. Which isn’t possible. And you’ve been following all the rules, tracking Confidence, and paying attention. Now you’re in an invalid state. That’s just wrong.
I envisioned Trust as Confidence you have in other people. That’s it. That’s all it is. The rules saying Trust had to be less than Confidence were arbitrary and prescriptive. It’s entirely possible for someone to have little Confidence in himself but lots of Trust in others. So coming to the conclusion that Trust and Confidence were the same thing in different places, meant that we were doing all the above tracking and calculating to figure out a number that we already knew. So, I’m getting rid of the box “Trust” on the character sheet, the rules for determining initial Trust, the rules for tracking consequences to Trust, and all that jazz.
I’m keeping the core component, which is; when you have Confidence in another Character, that’s Trust. All the rules apply. It’ll even be referred to as Trust, but it’s just Confidence that’s on loan.
Less work, fewer rules, same effect, more Funzors. Win.
Well, if you’ve been following along, you know that Ultrablamtacular has been undergoing some changes lately. Well, in the past week or so, two important changes have made themselves known to me. They’re not in the game text yet, so here’s a real sneak preview of what’s to come.
Well, it’s been a long while since the last post. Sorry. The bad news is, the latest playtest, right before the long weekend, revealed a largish hole in the game that I really didn’t expect to find at this point. The good news is, I think I’m on the road to fixing it. Read more…
Here’s a guy who made a bunch of D&D monsters. In origami.
Credit where it’s due: You could run a blog for years and have people think you’re clever, just by stealing judiciously from BoingBoing, which is where I got this link.
While writing about stuff I like, I skipped something else I like because I wanted to save it for a separate post. This one. Because it’s something I like, but it contains something I didn’t like for Ultrablam. If you’d like to read the story of why I didn’t go there, and how I got from there to here, then read on!
I just wrote a long post about something I didn’t like. I feel like I should post about some things that I do like, to sorta balance the cosmic scales.
I know I keep talking about game development and software engineering. Sorry. But they’re two activities I engage in and when I find areas of similarity between them, it sort of catches my attention. Read more…
