Quote from: Spinachcat;1083011I really enjoyed reading your playtest. Made me want to run Kung Fu Gamma World.
https://mushroompress.blogspot.com/2019/01/lone-wolf-fists-playtest-part-1.html




I do know WTF you're talking about and I am interested in how you're implementing that.

Give us an example of play.

Man, being compared to Gamma World is high praise. Although I guess it's not really a comparison so much as "Your game reminded me of a good game" but hell, I'll take it.

Okay so, example of play. Let me pull out the one that made this latest re-write necessary.

So my players are trying to travel through a city that has a small army of bike-riding marauders parked in it; they weigh options like fighting their way through or pretending to be traveling merchants or something, but ultimately decide on traveling through the tunnel network underneath the city and emerging on the other side.

Blah blah, they run into  a dead god who inadvertently shoves two of them to the spirit realm.

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They also got behind enemy lines, but where so appalled when they saw the ruined part of the city the ruffians had smashed their way through, that they decided to fuck with them anyway. since 2/3rds of them were ghosts, they figured some sneaky sabotage was a good approach.

Enter the scene logic:

It occurred to me there were numerous ways to approach this scene. If I chose to do it moment-by-moment (like an action scene is paced) I would be doing it with combat rounds. This struck me as an inappropriate place to *start* the scene; they weren't really known to their foes, so they encountered them as a more passive force, more a set of obstacles than an active threat.

If I approached it at a slower pace though, it'd be something closer to a dungeoncrawl; the characters would be sneaking around, trying *not* to be seen by the denizens while performing their sabotage. It dawned on me that the messy take on stealth rules didn't really allow the kind of granularity that made this a satisfying experience; it needed a deeper delve into what the Senses skill meant in the context of different scenes.

But then one of the players prolonged a stealth action from a technique that essentially made him invisible; not only him, but his buddies two. His buddies who were already ghosts. This meant they were facing nearly no danger: this allowed them to approach the scene on an extremely relaxed timescale. Basically they just narrated how they were sabotaging these clowns; because they could just roll their Effort as many times as they wanted, the cap on their actions was the same as being able to "take twenty" in 3.0 terms on every action for as long as they wanted.

When I considered this, it made me keenly aware that it was too easy to get into a circumstance where you could max out as many actions as you wanted this way. Because of the way actions link to effect in the game world, this led to a sub-optimal resolution of the players being incentivized to reach this state and have a near-limitless, maximum effect on the game world. This is functionally similar to getting an "infinite loop" combo in a game like Magic: the Gathering; it's not strictly a bad thing, but it shapes the experience of play significantly. In this case, it's not really reflective of the brutal, dangerous and strongly reactive world I was hoping to evoke.

After letting them ruin those fools, I went back to the drawing board a bit on the skill and scene rules. The newest take grew out of trying to solve a LOT of problems at once by unifying both of them.

In the new take, the same skill makes different kinds of changes happen depending on the scene. To demonstrate, let's take Senses for stealth again:

-Obviously in an action scene like combat, you can be in a kind of binary seen/not seen state. Because you're sacrificing the limited action-resources of Effort and Prana to do this, it self-balances nicely as a tactical trade-off among your other options.
-In a real-time scene as above, it does something similar, but with more granularity: bad guys might be suspicious of clues you leave behind or noises you make, so your described actions have a bigger impact on the experience. My thinking is this will drive a more espionage-centric "metal gear solid" kind of sneaking gameplay.
-However, to reign in and clarify the effect of stealth on long-term, large-scale montage scenes, I couched the same result in terms of a long-term espionage campaign, quantifying the effect in those terms. So instead of "you're invisible, you wreck them" it's something closer to "You wage an espionage campaign against them and destroy their fuel supply"

I did that for all the skills, which solved just, so many problems. The social effects, for instance, were reigned in during non-montage scenes so you weren't casually turning entire populations into worshipers every time you spoke in a real-time scene. And the Power skill got a considerable boost in non-action scenes, because now it can be used to redefine the landscape by acting as a one-man demolition crew in montage scenes.

Also, our fantastic graphic designer Victor Andrade finished up a draft of the character sheet for the sister-game All Above Heaven. Check this bad boy out:

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And just like that, Vic managed to complete the layout for Act 1!

We've got an intro adventure for the outer-space gonzo version of this game that's been in layout hell forever. We're finally done with it though! You guys can grab it on Friday, I'll post a link right here for ya'll.

And here it is! Get your mitts on it for free you wonderful elfgame players!

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Still beavering away on this. Ya'll probably saw our awesome ad banners on this very site; I've been really happy with the coverage there!

Been busy with some of that deep-level design: did another playtest draft, which although incomplete is available for all patrons (even for a mere dollar, should anyone be interested in checking out the compiled version of the rules as I write them).

Did a playtest, too! Brendan Davis of Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate fame and his crew played with me and we even made a podcast out of it!

So work continues. I'm actually going to be diving into some design tonight, including the strategic-level play promised by Montage scenes, and possibly the Minor Dharmas of the different clans, so I can more concisely communicate to players what their clan is "about" in terms of it's expectations and demands of its heroes.

Stay tuned, folks!

Quote from: Azraele;1088248Still beavering away on this. Ya'll probably saw our awesome ad banners on this very site; I've been really happy with the coverage there!

Been busy with some of that deep-level design: did another playtest draft, which although incomplete is available for all patrons (even for a mere dollar, should anyone be interested in checking out the compiled version of the rules as I write them).

Did a playtest, too! Brendan Davis of Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate fame and his crew played with me and we even made a podcast out of it!

So work continues. I'm actually going to be diving into some design tonight, including the strategic-level play promised by Montage scenes, and possibly the Minor Dharmas of the different clans, so I can more concisely communicate to players what their clan is "about" in terms of it's expectations and demands of its heroes.

Stay tuned, folks!

Oh yeah, speaking of which, your ad expired a week ago. You got an extra week of free ad space because I was out of town last week and didn't take it down. Thanks for your patronage and send me a DM or email if you want to renew!

Quote from: RPGPundit;1089506Oh yeah, speaking of which, your ad expired a week ago. You got an extra week of free ad space because I was out of town last week and didn't take it down. Thanks for your patronage and send me a DM or email if you want to renew!

Thank you for that! I may indeed as I continue fervently working on this project!

Anyway: Not dead yet! Just been incredibly busy for these last few months

Here are some blog posts as the mechanics continue their inevitable march towards glory!
Playtest Part 2
Gods and Monsters
Fresh scene design paradigm
Fresh Power Mechanics
New Agility Mechanics
New Endurance Mechanics
Fresh Hea-.... No, wait, Content rules! I meant to say that!

Also, the character sheets for All Above Heaven and Lone Wolf Fists are totally available on DTRPG now, for use in your playtests and homegames and such

Finally, I leave you with some lovely new art by our resident post-apocalypse landscape maestro, Kazuki Shinta:

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Working on the Gupt Kala and some example content this week: Stay tuned!

One more blog post before the looming 9-day workweek swallows me.

Oh, who am I kidding. I'm just gonna write instead of sleep again. Stay tuned folks.

What's sleep? I'm sure you meant "Create an entire Gupt Kala again!"

Now to see about these bleeding eyeballs of mine....

WHELP, it took a few years and an embarrassing amount of effort, but I finally got the playtest in a nice place and I'm doing the final goings-over before uploading right now.

I am incredibly impressed by how much the internal art elevates the whole work; gonna see about getting just a bit more maybe before I finalize that upload. For your viewing pleasure, I want to share this page of which I am particularly proud:

On second thought, this link will probably work out better

Alrighty folks, playtest is finished! Go grab it here and tell me your thoughts.

And our kickstart is live! Come on in and GET YOUR FIST ONNNNNN

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One last good necrobump: our round 2 Kickstarter has begun, if any ya'll fans of FISTS want to get your asskick on in the post apocalypse.

Also, general Q&A if anyone wants to pick my brain about the game.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lonewolffists/tian-shang-lone-wolf-fists-0

Okay one more bump

First of all, WE ARE FUNDED BABY YEAAAHHHHH so get ready to be able to buy this game even if you've slept on my KS (you jerk!)

But also, had a fantastic session tonight that is mildly punctuated by crying toddler (all the best are!) but is nonetheless incredibly informative about the rules and very listenable and fun!

Blast from the past: I just got her released, folks! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/416442/Tian-Shang-Lone-Wolf-Fists