N-N-Double Feature
April 4th, 2011
Hello, everyone. Today's article is actually going to be two separate mini-articles, both of which are about the "behind the scenes" scoop on the design of one of our products, but one of which is about A Necromancer's Grimoire: Marchen der Daemonwulf, while the other is about The Ebon Vault: Secrets of the Staff. I'd write more about each of these, but, at the rate that we put books out these days, it's hard to find non-theme week article time to talk about this sort of thing. In fact, it's already been quite a while since either of these books came out, and I'm only just now getting the time to talk about them. I suppose I could have made the articles fight to the death for the slot, but… this just seemed more humane, somehow.
Lunacy in Design
The first design feature I want to talk about is actually a group of related class features referred to generally as the "lunar" mechanic. The lunar mechanic, which is used in a goodly number of the class features of the lycaonite class in Marchen der Daemonwulf is generally designed to make the character (and, by extension, the player) more sensitive to the phases of the moon. It does this by providing benefits which are dependent on what phase the moon is currently in, and sometimes even providing penalties when the moon is in the "opposite" phases, creating a cycle where the character's power waxes and wanes along with the moon.
The reasons to avoid this sort of design are pretty glaring to most designers, I'd imagine, but let me go ahead and lay them out for you, as they probably wouldn't have been so obvious to me back when I was a layman:
Firstly, it requires a new sort of bookkeeping that players and DMs usually don't bother to pay attention to: the phase of the moon/time of the month. Usually this sort of thing is simply glossed over in the game, and on the rare occasion that it matters, the DM simply makes something up. In order for the lunar powers to really work, the DM and the player need to both keep track of where the moon is at any given time, and, while this won't be so bad once they get used to it (after all, it's easier to keep track of things when they matter), it's undeniably an extra thing to worry about.
Secondly, the very nature of a character with inconstant power does not lend itself ideally to a balanced game. Sometimes the character will be much more powerful than the rest of the party, who will be frustrated and feel useless (not to mention that the DM may feel frustrated if the character is so powerful that he easily tosses aside the tough boss encounter). Other times, he'll be far less powerful, and then he will be the one feeling frustrated and useless (also, he may get himself killed).
So why, then, did we do it? There must be a pretty compelling reason, to fly in the face of so much design common sense. Simply put: it's a werewolf book. Though the phases of the moon aren't always associated with lycanthropy (especially in folklore), they are very frequently associated in that way (especially in more modern werewolf media). It seemed very important that we introduce something in the book that has to do with the phases of the moon.
Normally, if someone wants werewolves and phases of the moon, they simply make the transformation occur at the full moon, symbolically wash their hands of the matter, and move on. There's a slight problem with that approach: if it's a werewolf book, then it stands to reason that players are coming to you because they want to be a werewolf, like, a lot. As in, more than one to three days out of the month. Now, it's true that sometimes the werewolf template includes other triggers for transformation (such as a successful "control form" check or being hit in combat), but generally speaking, making the transformation occur on the full moon is actually more of a pain to track, long-term, than making it occur regularly. Also, older werewolf legends have the transformations occurring every night, and that was something we wanted to put in here.
If the moon wasn't going to cause the actual transformations (again, we wanted a transformation each and every night), it needed to do something else. The obvious solution was that it would make the werewolf more (or less) powerful depending on the stage of the moon. Thus, while a werewolf might transform every night, he would still be most feared on the night of the full moon. There were all kinds of different things that this might affect: attack, damage, DR, ability scores, saves, etc. And, to be perfectly honest, in order for the mechanic to be fun and worth worrying about, it's important that it have a noticeable effect: there's not really any more book-keeping in tracking the moon for four different changes (that all happen at the same time) than for one change. So, we decided to basically have the moon do it all.
I guess one of the things about being a good designer is knowing when to break the rules. In this case, we did it specifically because it was what the werewolf class that we were working with wanted, and, I think, it came out well and made the class interesting and unique, and a fun play experience. Time will tell, I guess, whether or not it was really the right call. In fact, if you've played a lycaonite, and would like to share your experiences, please write me and let me know what you thought of the lunar mechanics.
Well, that's all for today. Join me next week, when we'll be going epic. In the meantime, never be afraid to howl at the moon.
Pay-As-You-Go Spellcasting
Inspired largely by the creative success of Advanced Arcana and its use of mechanical themes to make it more than the sum of its individual spells, when we set out to create The Ebon Vault: Secrets of the Staff, I knew that I wanted to give staves the same kind of treatment. Though the new mechanical twists we tried on staves in Secrets of the Staff may not have quite as much of a unified theme as the spell mechanics of Advanced Arcana (whose theme was exploring the "cost" of a spell in time and spell slots), I think it's a great success in its major theme of "make staves interesting," and, to be perfectly honest, staves were in such a boring place that that was a difficult goal in and of itself.
Of the new mechanics for staves introduced in Secrets of the Staff, my favorite, I think, is the gemstaff. The gemstaff mechanic could probably have come straight out of the pages of Advanced Arcana, as it explores the idea of what it should cost to recharge a staff. Instead of having 10 charges, which can be recovered one per day by sacrificing spells (or the old system, of having 50 charges per staff), a gemstaff actually has no charges, but is instead powered by a spellgem, which is essentially a "battery" of a number of spell levels to be cast. The advantage of the new style of staff is obvious: carry around extra spellgems, and you can cast spells from your staff all day. The disadvantage is also pretty clear: spellgems are non-rechargable, and they cost in gold. Basically, it changed the price of "time" into a price of "gold."
As a quick aside, I believe that this is more than simply reversing Pathfinder's change of making staves rechargable (and thereby more than just a big wand). Admittedly, it's far more in line with that old model than with the new one, but it's also far from the same thing, mostly because the spellgems can actually be moved from gemstaff to gemstaff, allowing you to spend those same charges on a variety of different staves, as the situation requires.
To make gemstaves even more interesting, there were a variety of different sorts of spellgems that can be inserted to power spells. For the most part, this is just a matter of the exchange rate of charges per spell level (one of the most difficult part of designing gemstaves was figuring out how to standardize the value of the charges, which basically involved having them be based on the level of the spell, as opposed to being all willy-nilly like on normal staves), but some spellgems actually have special abilities which apply to spells cast with them.
Well, that's all for today. Join me next week, when we examine the world beyond level 20. In the meantime, pay for the spells you need, not the ones you don't.