Dev Diary - March 23

No major updates this month - real life has gotten in the way (preparing for a baby is pretty involved!) and some of the revisions I started last month have spun out into wider adjustments that are taking some time to completely resolve. In lieu of a development update, I'm going to talk about the biggest current revision and my rationale behind it.

When I designed the current Ability system, I siloed the different weapons off into five groups, representing how they're used in a combat environment rather than any specific traits. For example, A pistol and a shotgun are totally different firearms, but they're both 'close combat' weapons. These groups interacted with a matching set of Abilities - Vanguard is for running and gunning with close combat weapons, Marksman is for sniping with Precision weapons, et cetera. The Ranger class got all of these abilities, while the Nemesis and Engineer each get a limited set based on how they occupy the battlefield; the Nemesis snipes and skirmishes while the Engineer lays down covering fire and devastates the enemy line with explosives.

This worked fine. It was a perfectly functional system. But it created some pressures that, I believe, worked against the game if examined in detail. If you can get extra effects or actions from using a specific group of weapons, the system is  incentivising you to specialise and ignore 90% of the available options.

I realise that I am essentially plotting against the mythical Optimal Gamer in this train of thought, but that's my greatest, most secret shame - I am he. I must defeat the enemy called "I".

One of the central axioms of EREBUS's PCs, the agents of the Oracle, is that their struggle requires them to be resourceful. They have no central leadership or state to direct or fund them - they're repurposing alien technology to fight an overwhelming enemy force with guerrilla tactics. Having character options that implicitly limit what tech or equipment they will want to use works directly against that, especially when a big part of character advancement is acquiring packages of fun new toys that you can deploy in future missions. 

I had a couple of different avenues to explore in making the system a little less restrictive, and settled on the nuclear option - remove groupings altogether, and rewrite the associated Abilities to be more flexible. For example: the Vanguard Ability gave you a mobile attack that you could make with a close combat weapon. Now, you can use it with any non-Heavy weapon. Vanguard is now an ability set that allows you to specialise in being mobile and evasive, rather than being The Guy Who Only Cares About Shotguns (you can still be that guy - there's at least one shotgun per tech tier, including one that fires a lance of barely-controlled radiation that flays the molecules right off of the target.)

Obviously, this has created some grey spaces that now need to be filled in and clarified - a more inclusive system is harder to balance, and I'm sure when I get to the next round of playtests I'll discover holes you can drive a truck through. But I'm confident that this revision will lead to a more interesting, satisfying game.

See you next month!

- Max