Update: Conflicts, Feedback, and Moving Toward Character Creation

This week the Conflicts in Action, Part 1 page has been finished. Originally there was only going to be a single page dedicated to working out conflicts, but for clarity's sake I decided to create a part 2. Part 1 focuses on individual level conflicts, martial and social battles. Part 2 focuses on large scale conflicts, called command conflicts and command actions in TWE. Wars and naval engagements fall into this category. The part 2 page will also have guidelines for handling miscellaneous forms of conflicts. None of these mechanics are particularly new. Everything is still using the Judge Two System and the rules for contested actions found on the Action Descriptions page, the guidelines here simply explain how to relate those same gameplay mechanics to new situations. I also did some simplifying of the social conflict mechanics to emphasize what was unique about the system while downplaying some of its crunchier elements. There are still significant analogies between martial conflict and social conflict, and between all conflicts for that matter, but mechanically, social conflicts now involve fewer bonuses and penalties from circumstantial sources than the other kinds of conflict. I think this helps to keep the conflict focused on the actual conversations and less on the moment to moment game-y tools at everyone's disposal.

With the conflict mechanics wrapping up, the "hard" part of the game design is nearing its end. Most of my efforts will be moving toward character creation and advancement for the next few weeks. The outlines of the Atrian kind page is up, which will give people some idea of what a race in TWE looks like, and my next few Sunday updates will be talking about the five kinds, five callings, and twenty character classes available in TWE. The first up this Sunday will be on classes since I recently made a rather radical (and I think fun) decision to reboot the classes from their original forms into something more unique. All of the classes in TWE are now unheroically heroic. That is to say, TWE does not have any of the conventional adventuring, military, or magic wielding classes that most fantasy rpgs have. In a sense, the classes are more mundane, in that they are sorts of professions an average person might come to have. In another sense, the classes are more exotic, since they are more about transforming mundane skills into the sort of epic adventuring skills that players will recognize from other fantasy settings. There is no "fighter" but there is a former acrobat who dances beside a giant pole-arm that they can cleave their foes with. There is no "assassin" but there is a former physician whose blows can cripple and paralyze an opponent's vital points. There is no "wizard" but there is a former fortune teller who can predict an opponent's movements and hypnotize people with a snap of the fingers. Classes in TWE are about putting the skills of one's former life to use in a new life, a life of action, intrigue, and danger.

I am looking forward to putting the details on the classes together, and exploring how the character classes in TWE interact with other aspects of character design to give players a whole host of customization and advancement options.

- ABH