Guns Blazing

The Final Overhaul Part Two: Combat
almost 2 years ago – Thu, May 23, 2024 at 09:58:49 PM

Changing the core rules meant changing combat. Fortunately, combat had less of a problem than the core system. Unfortunately, the changes I have to make are pretty wide-raning.

Turn Order

Something I really liked about the original combat system was that it had a structured version of a storygame's combat resolution. Combat was 'players do things, enemies try to interrupt' in a fairly naturalistic way with Stamina as both a restraint and a way for less pro-active players to make sure they go to do stuff.

But.

It was real clunky. At no point did it get the smooth back-and-forth I was hoping for, it had a hell of a learning curve, and it never clicked in the way I wanted it to.

As such, the current initiative system will be simplified slightly and made an optional initiative replacement. 

The new turn order system is a fairly traditional alternating activation system, albeit one that keeps the Stamina and Reaction mechanics.

Each round, players and enemies alternate taking turns. 

During a player turn, you spend stamina to take actions. You can take as many actions as you can afford with Stamina. When it isn't your turn, you can spend less stamina for reactions. Reactions are more limited than actions, and are generally strained. Each player gets one turn per round.

During an enemy turn, the enemy takes a number of actions determined by their statblock. Enemies have unlimited reactions, but don't react to other enemies unless they have abilities that allow it.

This is functionally the same as the previous system, except that you have to take all of your Actions at the same time. It forces characters to be more considerate about where they're ending their turn and how active they want to be on a given round, and generally takes flexibility from player characters.

Attacks

So the old purchase system is gone, and while that's pretty small for the narrative phase it's an enormous change for combat. The basic structure of how an attack worked was based on it, using purchases to load every action up with choices.

Now, that's all much simpler. Every combat action has two effects, one if it Succeeds, one if you cancel the Complication.

For example, Dodging lets you move half your speed on success and half if you cancel the complication rating. It's an opposed action, so the difficulty rating is always the opponent's role (0 if unopposed), and the complication rating starts at 2.

Attacks are a bit more complicated. Most of the old effects from an attack have been moved to the weapon statline. When you declare an attack, you choose one effect from your weapon or perks to inflict on a success. The Complication rating is based on your weapon's damage and your target's armor and lets you Wound them.

This means that an Attack succeeds if it manipulates the battlefield in your favor, but the complication in any violence is that whoever you are trying to kill isn't dead yet.

In practice, allies and enemies should be roughly as survivable as they were before, but you should be a bit less likely to instantly kill foes in cover.

As a change from before, when attacking multiple enemies with different dice pools, you use the lowest pool against everyone. Differential attack pools are an optional rule, but it's enough of a pause in play that rolling once seems preferable.

Conditions

Conditions have been overhauled to be more interactive and comply with the new bonus/penalty schema. The most important ones are Shock and Suppression.

Shock replaces the old Shaken mechanic. If you get Shock and already have it, you take a Wound and Shock clears. It covers near misses and minor injuries in a simpler manner than Shaken did.

Suppression has been adjusted slightly. Instead of clearing all of it with Rally, you clear an amount equal to the successes on the Rally action and you get to clear some at the start of your turn. However, you now gain Suppression much more quickly, especially with automatic weapons on the field.

Afflicted is a catch-all for effects like poison, radiation, terrible burns, and other effects that debilitate and injure. It gives a penalty to actions and, if the stacks are ever greater than your Authority at the start of your turn, give you Shock and reduces itself. It has replaced Irradiated.

Exposed is no longer a condition and is now a state of cover.

Gear

All weapon kits have different traits and a list of conditions and effects they can apply with successful attacks. They also now have a damage stat, while ammo tokens have been moved to the Properties section.

Mostly, they haven't changed much.

Playtesting

I'm starting signups for the final round of playtests! These'll be running through June. You can sign up here.

The (Final???) Overhaul Part One: Core Rules
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 03:00:49 PM

So, to my embarassment, the rules have been overhauled one last time. Let's talk about the problem, then what I did about it.

It's Too Easy

Since the game started development a fairly constant issue has been that checks and combat has been too easy. The game's core system assumes trade-offs, that you're picking whether you want to succeed or avoid consequence, rationing spare successes for precious advantages. In practice, players were just...aggressively succeeding at most rolls without the need for such tradeoffs.

Due to how Strain worked, it was too punishing to deploy often outside of combat, and weighted too heavily towards skilled parties inside of combat. Players could reliably just win gunfights by standing in the open (or in cover) and opening fire in the reactive turn, which wasn't ideal.

This made some bonuses inconsequential, and anything that inflicted penalties on a foe absolutely ruinous. Speed Kills made Vanguards nearly untouchable to most foes, for example, and plenty of characters didn't bother pursuing Mastery since they could reasonably expect to bulldoze most checks without it.

It's Too Complicated

The structure of rolls made them difficult to explain. Individual checks could have helpful little flowcharts made for them and once you got what they were going for it wasn't too bad, but people needed to stop and ask for clarification far too often and, uh, the successful case was way more mental overhead than you should be asked for in a new system.

This was especially noticeable in combat: Players often got the flow of combat right immediately, and then blanked on how shooting a gun worked or when they should dodge instead of shoot.

While the purchase mechanic was cool, it wasn't justifying itself in mental overload and in the time it added to every interaction with the rules.

Pursuing a Solution

So any solution had to do a couple of things:

• It had to make the game simpler
• It had to make reactive play in combat more threatening, ideally in ways that make weak opponents more dangerous
• It had to make the game faster
• It needed to reduce successes across the board, but only by a couple per roll, and it shouldn't affect d10s too badly
• It still needed to do all the cool stuff I wanted the Ahadi engine to be able to do

The Change

The change was surprisingly simple:

• D6s are now classified as Trait Die, d10s are now Skill Die. This has no mechanical effect, but all bonuses now provide Trait Die and are harshly capped.
• Dice now succeed on 5s instead of 4s.
• Strain and Mastery now manipulate successes on dice rather than changing target numbers. 
• Purchasing has been simplified down to two factors associated with each check: Difficulty and Complication.

Making all checks a little harder is a negligible drop to Skill Die, but a 33% decrease in chance-to-succeed per Trait Die and a 25% decrease in successes generated. As most dice are Trait Die, this significantly cuts the expected successes in any given die pool without reducing the maximum result.

Strain and Mastery now upgrade/downgrade die results, both rewarding having additional Skill Dice. Strain downgrades two Trait Dice or one Skill Die, Mastery upgrades two Skill Dice or one Trait Die. So characters with high Skill are more likely to lose one success to strain or gain two from Mastery, and ones with less get the opposite.

Instead of a bespoke list of Purchases, all checks now have a Difficulty Rating and a Complication Rating. You use your successes to meet these, and can choose to meet one or the other if you don't have enough successes to do both. The intent of the original rule is preserved, but it's much easier to explain "Difficulty 0, Complication 3" than it is to list off a set of potential negative outcomes to purchase away.

On the downside, I now have to reformat every check and rework all the guns.

I'm still in the process of implementing this change, and while I think this is the last overhaul of the core system likely to occur, it's very possible that things will change after playtesting.

Playtesting

I'm planning on doing some drop-in, drop-out playtesting throughout May and June while I get the game finished. There will be official recruitment posts on the discord, but I'll put some sort of sign up form here when the time comes. If you want in on what's hopefully the last phase of major Guns Blazing revisions, keep an eye out for it!

Ramadan Update: overhauls and editing
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Apr 03, 2024 at 05:44:40 PM

Ramadan Mubarak! I hope you're all having a great month and have something special planned for Eid.

This is going to be a short and poorly formatted update.

Good news: Chapters have slowly started going to the editor and I have a provisional New Schedule.

Bad news: the game needs some more overhauling.

The new schedule is to get the book through layout by the end of July and shipped to backers by the end of October. However, final play tests and furious mathematics after those play tests indicated that some of my issues with gameplay were down to core mechanics rather than specific implementations of checks and enemies.

Specifically, Checks (especially combat checks) remained difficult for people to understand and smooth difficulty curves were counterintuitive with the system as it stood.

My revision to the core rules is currently with the editor for developmental editing. There will likely be further changes to the rest of the book as a result through late April, at which point were going to be kicking off a final round of playtesting on the discord with the final draft of the core rules and character creation.

A more detailed update will be around after Eid with a look at the changes and why they were made.

The Post Wedding Update and New Timeline
about 2 years ago – Fri, Jan 26, 2024 at 09:09:47 AM

Sup.

I'm an honest man now! Got married, had the happiest day of my life, moved to Virginia, forgot my laptop charger and was functionally unable to work for about ten days....busy stuff all around!

I'm still acclimating over here, and working through the backlog that comes from having to reschedule a lot of freelance work because of the wedding, but I've started to settle in.

The Good News

Moving across the country isn't as expensive or budgetarily disastrous as it could have been. I don't need to do anything special to get Guns Blazing to, and over, the finish line.

Additionally, basically all the freelance writing is in and most of the high level backer rewards are done. Its just the Create-an-Enemies that are still on the queue for the optional paid-for content.

The Bad News

Two months of production disappeared into the nexus of a desi marriage and moving to Virginia. Catching up on work is going to eat more, and I am yet to be as productive in Virginia as I was in San Jose. I am farther behind than I expected to be at this point.

I need to finish my rework of the narrative mechanics, rework many of the perks and enemy designs, and then finish the chapters on running the game. Then the entire thing needs to get edited.

I'm currently aiming to have all writing for the book done by mid-April, with the rest of the timeline being contingent on how long it takes to get editing, art, and layout done. My goal is to have the books out to people by September at the absolute latest.

Backer Art Roundup
over 2 years ago – Tue, Dec 26, 2023 at 03:33:16 PM

I'm getting married on New Year's Eve, so there haven't been many updates. While I'll have a new production schedule outlined once I return to work in January, I'd like to leave you all with a roundup of art from the last few months.

First, some backer art from the Band of Misfits and International Volunteer tiers!

The BOO is nominally in charge of supernatural imports to the United States. In practice, they're the all-in-one supernatural intelligence wing for the government, and have the latitude to match. The good news is, they might be sympathetic to your cause and have resources to spare, the bad news is that they're definitionally American, and will not hesitate to act on it.

The Order of the Lighthouse is a secret organization nominally dedicated to spreading truth, democracy, human rights, and free information throughout the world. In practice, they're a very European organization with an avowed hatred of nationalism and nationalistic movements and a decentralized structure that often works against them.

Katyinka is a Crimean/Ukrainian backer character. She's one part international superspy, one part femme fatale.

The Bandoqchi are the world's premier heavy infantry: Well-trained Mysoran soldiers with some of the first, functional modern body armor. Her gear is based on the experimental Bashford Dean armor from WW1, but aesthetically modeled after pre-colonial indian equipment.

The Bandoqchi have also been my personal nightmare in balancing the Guns Blazing Wargame, where they have single-handedly required me to rewrite the Mysore faction twice.

The Green Band Logo! The Green Band Logo was designed to be fairly simple, the sort of thing you might see printed on the organization's eponymous green arm-bands. The Seal of Solomon was chosen for its mystical connotations, and Farsi was used instead of Arabic due to its Iranian backers.

The British Tommy are going to be a default enemy for a lot of campaigns, and are the elite British infantry option in the wargame. They're well trained but unarmored: Even steel helmets were a controversial piece of kit for much of world war 1, and with that conflict handwaved away the empire largely isn't bothering.

On the other hand, the lack of WW1 also means that the average Tommy is a member of the experienced, battle-tested British Expeditionary Forces rather than a poor conscript with no idea what he's walking into.

This is the Example Art for the Skills section. It showcases our iconic Engineer making turning a period automobile into the 1925 equivalent of a Toyota Hilux. 

And with that, I leave you all for the new years! Enjoy!