The Tactician (Prototype)

Hey folks! It's been a few weeks since we last spoke, and that means it's been a few weeks since we did any work on the RPG! We've been heads-down on Flee, Mortals! and also Where Evil Lives which is the book the Lairs section turned into. And Arcadia still, and The Talent. And The Illrigger Revised!

But Flee, Mortals! is...done? The PDF is off to the printer for proofing, which will still take several weeks, but it's all just making sure the printed book looks exactly the same as the PDF. As developers? Writers, designers, artists, editors, testers? Our work is done. The PDF will spend some time going through accessibility, but otherwise...it's on to the RPG!

So today James and I had a meeting about designing our first class, for real. Until now we've been using prototypes which reflect some of our ideas about the real class design, but are otherwise just sort of thrown together to give us something to test the core rules with.

Currently we feel pretty good about the core rules: 2D6, Stamina, Health, Defense, etc.... So it's time to move on and actually try to design a real class! All the class abilities, subclasses, 10 levels, no dead levels!

That's going to take a while and probably more meetings before we're done but since we're kinda leaving the kludged-together prototype versions behind? I thought you folks might like to see what they looked like.

So...here's the old Tactician! :D This is v12 of the Old Tactician, so you may notice there are no references to the Cosmic Die or Surges in here.

If you've been following development thusfar, this should all make sense to you.

The real Tactician won't have an ability like Leading Strike. That was just James' way of, in the context of a quick & dirty prototype, showing everyone what kinds of things the real Tactician will be able to do.

The real Tactician will be able to taunt and mark (those might be two different subclasses? That's something we're working out right now!) and those will probably be in addition to doing something on your turn. Not built into an Action.

That's another thing; we think maybe you'll have a section on your character sheet labeled Actions and everything you can do on your turn as an action goes in there. As opposed to what you see here where everything is an "Attack."

Names are going to change maybe? I don't know if this game calls them Banes and Boons for the bonus dice?

Also I think the real Tactician will have attacks that target Reason? You can see every stat has an associated Defense. In the beginning there was no Defense there were only stats you could attack. So Might vs Agility.

Then we said "Nah we need something like Armor" and that's where Defense came from and that's why all these abilities target Armor (they should say "Defense!"). Then we said "No we need Defense, but we also need to be able to attack people's stats" and we haven't re-revised for that.

You can imagine how the Tactician would have an attack that's based on a feint, on faking-out your opponent and that would be an attack vs Reason. A sufficiently clever enemy will not fall for the fake-out!

Keep in mind, this is not a character. A character has an Ancestry, Upbringing, Career, and will start with all sorts of cool stuff like Renown, Contacts, Research, Skill Stunts, etc...

This is just something we whipped up to test our core gameplay loop. We already have other prototypes for Ancestries for instance.

Anyway, I hope that soon ("soon" who knows when really?) we can share the REAL Tactician with y'all, but we're only just getting started there. We have a lot of cool ideas for 10 levels of cool abilities! But actually winnowing them down into something useful and coherent, and making sure the Tactician isn't doing things better suited for a Fury or Shadow all gets ironed out.

In the meantime, hopefully this is a fun preview of how we think the Tactician would work at a very high level.