Dev Update II 0.9.30

A few times through the development of Tribulation, with small refinements from playtesting in combination with a few wild flights of creative fancy, a cascade of refinements fall into place. Solutions to persistent frustrations in the design spaces reveal themselves. In this update, a series of changes have brought the game leaps closer to its final form. I’ll discuss some of the major changes here.

Challenge refinements

Subtypes were not ideal. They were an effort to reduce the number of challenges and therefore the level of memorization and research expected from players. They had very little positive effect in play and tended to complicate the guide’s wording. They have been removed. In their removal, handling challenges were split into tinkering, concocting, and trapping challenges. Attack challenges were split into marksmanship and brutality challenges. Intrigue challenges were split into intrigue and wrangling. The phrasing changes that followed improved readability.

Combat actions

The changes to the combat round were largely focused on readability. But there were some changes to the function of the round. For example, now each character gets two actions a turn, and one of those can be a focused action. This does allow characters to attack and then move, for example, when they could not before.

Threat scores

Threat scores worked so well to improve foes, the change has been applied to recruitable agents (human and beast alike). Now, creating agents is a process completely exclusive from player character creation. Lists of agent features serve as a grab bag of refinements players can add to their agents if they choose. Or they could completely ignore them and simply determine the threat score and equipment of their agents and just into play.

Traps!

Traps have had a makeover. To create a trap, you can gamble with its complexity. The more features you give to a trap, the more difficult it becomes to hold the contraption together. This is reflected with an exponential increase in the difficulty to set (and disarm) the trap.
A trapping challenge is an acuity trial with its threshold determined by the sophistication of the trap being set or disarmed. The sophistication of a trap is equal to the number of features that trap has times itself. For example, a trap with three features will have a threshold of 9.

Format changes

Learning InDesign has been as difficult as it has been enjoyable. Taking a step back and looking at the guide’s cosmetic appeal, I saw some areas with room for improvement. Here are the main changes.

First, the red-scale background was a bit too much on the eyes. Changing it to greyscale improved the look considerably in my opinion. You let me know!

Second, the format of challenges and how they are displayed has been changed to a more natural layout to better fit in with their surroundings.

Third, all challenges in the test will be highlighted in Tribulation red. I wanted these to stand out. With the background change to greyscale, this red highlight works well.

Page references

I learned how to link page references to headers with InDesign. Now, as the pages continue to move around in this phase of design, the page references will automatically move along with them. To that end, page references have been listed throughout the guide.

More to come

Tribulation has solidly planted its flag in the domain of “endless supply of features”. The goal was to make every aspect of a character narratively expressive. There are negative consequences to this design decision as well. For one, character sheets will have a lot of blocks of text as opposed to simple number boxes we might be used to. Another negative consequence is that lists of features are spread throughout the guide that players will need to return to and reference often. To reduce this burden, I plan to release master reference sheets for each type of feature that can be readily available on the table.

The Desperate Fortune tribulation included in the guide still needs a lot of work. This will be my primary focus, and more art is incoming!