Working To. . .
Once again we come to add to the News. This time it's less explaining what Mass Actions can handle and more what we haven't had the time to nail down. it's a "Why are these important" and "why we aren't going to get them done"?
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In the world of Powerpunk, science and technology occupy a funny space. During the Cold War, technology was viewed as a necessary median; “the only true measuring stick for a nation’s greatness” necessity. It was a grand love affair, with the known limits of science being reestablished almost quarterly and the great nations treating scientists like rock stars. The East and West both took to collecting doctors, professors and engineers, like children collecting trading cards. Giving them larger budgets than many of them had ever dared to imagine, these scientific minds were tasked with finding and cultivating any potential advantage against the opposing bloc.
It was amidst this age of political desperation that all avenues of science, including the fringe sciences, were being treated with open minds and open wallets. This was a glorious time for scientists who started signing up with grant after grant and put real effort into experiments and inventions that they hadn’t ever thought they could complete. This was the age of “hypertech”. Super-science tools capable of bending terrestrial and celestial energies into fuel for weapons and vehicles, bending minds, transforming the body of a person into a walking arsenal of bio-weaponry. These tools that pushed through the established limits of the scientific field and into storied fiction appeared in every field. All the while the tensions of the Cold War grew closer and closer to the brink of open conflict. I ran my first D&D game at the age of 12. It was a pre-made adventure from a magazine and had a redemption arc for a villain who forgot they were a villain, emphasizing that compassion begets compassion and “hurt people hurt people”. I loved the idea and couldn’t wait to see it all play out around my living room table. It was a disaster. The players were all older and more experienced than I was. They convinced me to let them bring their “usual” characters from another DM’s game with all their gear and within ten minutes the game was laying in broken pieces while they cheered one another on, whooping and hollering with sadistic glee at having broken the adventure so thoroughly. I was mortified and never wanted to run another game again. I was GM for my group until I was about 32.
The near collapse of this project made this more of a priority, then there was the mental toll that our dissolving partnership inflicted, the thousand cuts of everyday responsibilities etc. I found that there was nothing in the GM tank. I figured that with time and mental recuperation things would come back to me. Twenty years of running not only D&D but a variety of other ttrpgs had shown I had a depth of ideas for story seeds and though the games rarely saw a storybook conclusion, I was sure I would be ok. Then something happened. I am a child of the arcade stick, raised to put my quarter on the screen, trained to detest cheese and never take chip(Damage) for granted. All of that was to explain that our combat mechanics are greatly inspired by arcade fighting games. The idea that advanced moves sacrifice something from the character in order to gain a different effect. Not being able to move for a time in order to pull off a ranged melee attack, taking more time to recover from throwing a powerful blow, the move itself having a cool down of it’s own or it using up some form of energy.
We've finally done it; we've put together several practices for the prototype of the game. With these done we'll be able to test every inch of the game! We have Proto-Traits; what you roll to accomplish tasks and actions. Proto-Physical and Proto-Social combat styles; what you can get to make you better at combat and customize your characters fighting style. Proto-Practices; what shapes, hones and customizes your characters out of combat action like; crafting, medicine, investigating, profiling, sporting and more. PROTO-POWERS; Absorbing dangerous energies, Transforming into strange creature of your own making, Controlling the minds of the weak, bending the laws of physics and nature and uddles of Noddles More! As for this blog; we're going to shift slightly from our system development blog style to shed some focus on the setting. In the coming weeks we will post the names of the four Exims you'll be playing around with. As well as a small overview of the powers you'll be able to choose from as that specific Classification. We're also looking to finally building a "gen-you-ein, bone-ee-fide" project page, yay... Last; as you all may know we're doing this on a shoe string budget and we now have enough saved up for more art. We have a few artist in mind but we are open to suggestions. The four pictures will be for the aforementioned exim classifications and we'll be looking to nail down a overall art style for the game. Ethereal Deep Diver "Sam" | Stock & Bull Entertainment
“The Future” as a term calls to mind images of great gleaming towers, lights and high tech toys that borderline on magical. Scientific breakthroughs that allow for exploration of what we in the present call “The Impossible”; be it the deepest seas, distant stars or different timelines. The technology of the future is the key to those wondrous notions because in “The Future”, people remain a toss up. Yes, it's at a Library but beggars can't be choosers! Hell they made this Boss poster for us! We'll be teaching people how to RPG using our System and Setting. If you can make it, AWESOME! If not, don't fret, I'll be posting the best bits here on the site. Ethereal Deep Diver "Sam" | Stock & Bull Entertainment
(Gulliver = Head, dva = two: Nadsat) I hate having to figure out how to say the same thing in another way over and over. It’s a strain on my mind and if I am lucky I can get it past you readers once or twice but then when you figure it out; you see I am just saying the same stuff with a twist. So, here is a rare straight shot; we used to have 6 guys at our best and now we are down to 2. It was not easy and it was not kind; I have gone through romantic breakups that have hurt less and healed faster. Some time last year we sat down and evaluated where were we going. What did this project mean to us and where did this project fit in our lives. For two of us it fit well enough that we could continue moving on, for everyone else; life has more pressing matters. It hurts to say- type those words; the guys that are no longer working alongside me aren’t just my friends, they were my new family. I suffered alongside these guys, lost sleep, shed sweat, tears and I had great experiences with them. I suffered through terrible experiences and they were the rocks that I turned to when I couldn’t let my actual family see how worn down I was. I wanted to make every concession in the world for them but in the end this project is nearly 10 years in development. If it takes anymore time; we wouldn’t even be an also-ran, we would be a never-was. The two of us that are left have to do the lion’s share of the work now. So all the rule clean up, fiction and setting clean up and expansion that we had to work on has to also be done alongside being the voices and faces of the company. We have to talk to artists, run playtests, look for places to test on the cheap, keep the lights on, set up commissions, basically design AND business. It was always supposed to be a growing experience, a shared learning experience and stumbling was expected but now we know there are no reinforcements. The woods are darker and scarier now, the path is twistier and every mistake seems more grave, every wasted opportunity seems more dire however we have less overhead, less gatekeepers to ideas and no seeking approval. We know who to blame for missing posts here and elsewhere and can rectify it appropriately so while there are no reinforcements, we are also focused entirely on what lies before us. I hope that we will find our groove quickly and that we will earn the patience and forgiveness of those of you who have stuck around have given, if you are new, pardon our dust and mess from our growing pains. Dev-X | Stock & Bull Entertainment
Good news everyone! We tested the demo, it proved everything we knew and everything we didn't know! Let's thank Chad from NYC Tabletop RPGs for letting us crash his wework gamer space. His crew runs tabletop games over in Brooklyn, New York and all are welcomed. If interests are peaked check them out on meetup, drop in on their comfy discord chat or if you're feeling frisky throw some coins at their Patreon. In spite of me leaving some important docs at home, forgetting everything I was going to do with the premade adventure; It went better than I thought it would. The system handled everything the players wanted to do. We were able to see physical combat and a number of powers "in action". Among the boys in the lab, there were worries, concerns one could say; if people would be confused by the wording, how fast people would pick up on the internal logic and the system, the concept of your powers being used through your normal stats in order to make them feel more like an extension of the character and of course the powers themselves. Now we know which were “shadows” and which were actual problems. I will now share with you all the shadows that loomed in the darkness, the terrors in the night, that this demo has dragged into the light. The first “shadow”, the learning speed and comprehension. What I mean is how long it takes to understand the system and how long until players start actively exploring out from the normal bounds of basic tabletop gaming. You can learn something but until you’re comfortable with it you won't venture deeper into it and we needed to know how long till they got comfortable. Answer, not long whatsoever. Once they knew their stats and they got a few tastes of how much they could actually do the floodgates opened. The taste came in the form of an out of combat medicine check that revealed a bullet wound was made by a large screw, not a bullet. The use of telepathy to skim the minds of the enemies, transforming into a tiger for stealth attacks, high density body blocks and face destroying super speed punches. Somewhere in between these points each player came to understand just what they could pull off and began to dive deeper. Fears dispelled, the”shadow” was just a jacket on the chair. Second “Shadow”, Basic combat and out of combat. Ease, Balance, and Versatility are the cornerstones of combat in any game. Now when I say combat I really should be saying conflict because any time you want something to go one way but circumstances say otherwise, there's conflict. Wanting to beat a villain, pick a lock, break into a place, pass by unseen, win a race, keep someone alive; all these things would have some form of opposition ... conflict. That's what we tested as well, normal strikes, weapon strikes, power strikes, out of combat tasks and challenges as well as power assisted tasks out of combat. Other than one problem-child among the powers(We'll probably talk about that in a different post) it all went awesome sauce. Basic combat works which means we can implement more advanced combat options in the form of “COMBAT STYLES” (also a future post). Combat styles will add a crunchy layer to combat that lets you flavor how your character throws down. Out of combat actions worked too which now allows us to bring in PRACTICES, all the things you know and know how to do outside of combat (Ha! Not a future post, we already touched on it in a previous post but since changes are being planned, well, we will get back on it. In a future post). Fears dispelled, this “shadow” was jus- CRAP WATER BUG! Could have been worse. Finally, the last “shadow” were things we knew before going in; Social Combat and the Demo. Full Disclosure, we actually started retooling Social Combat just after finishing the demo but the retool would take us a while to finish so we just went with the version that we knew wasn't going into the final version. You might ask "Et tu, Brutus!?!"; hear us out, since inflicting emotions is a large part of social combat in both versions and we wanted to see what people thought about the base idea we continued. The demo's layout was, to put it kindly, a little on the messy side, it was our first time making one but I don't think we did that bad. In the adventure we have easy, medium and hard options of running the encounters but they're right on top of each other which does add replayability but makes it difficult to read and the NPC list at the end of the adventure leaves much to be desired. It helped us learn though so we can say with confidence the next demo will be better. It'll have more focus on the setting, not just test the basic system and it will test some of the more advanced system options and who knows; maybe it'll even look good. Fear dispelled, it was the monster from the closet just hiding under the bed. Wait, what? Once again we cannot thank NYC Tabletop RPG and the people that helped us test this out enough. From right to left; D,M,K and J(Thumbs Up). Ethereal Deep Diver "Sam" | Stock & Bull Entertainment
"NPC, thy hight is conveyer belt, ferry me deeper into immersia!" - PCs (Player Characters) Move the story along: the raison d'etre of all NPCs (Non Player Characters). Exposition-Dump-R-Us, vil-tagonists, or windows into how the world views you and your cabal of characters. NPCs (Non Playa Chumps) work to enrich an experience while you grind for experience. Now you may be wondering, why I'm slap boxin' the significance of these GM-faced masses? Simple, the Bulls of Stock have been busy paving the future stomping grounds of your Project Powerpunk characters. This feat has lead to Pinky-and-the-Brain-levels of pondering on NPC; non player created people, places and parcels (Yes I am illuding to the idea that places and items can be npcs). Whether it's a dude in black fleeing across the desert, millions of voices crying out just to be silenced, or even a bustling city full of life, all have a purpose that must be served. NPCs (Narrator Provided Companions) matter as much as you need them to. Depending on the importance of the area or people, you can dial up or down the details of NPCs you create. The importance of NPCs can be dictated by your players’ interaction: the more interaction with an NPC (Narrator's Personal Cat's-paw) your players have, the more important that NPC will become. If your players frequently visit Colgate, the weaponsmith, a burly woman wanted in four cities for aggravated assault on an anvil with deadly skillz, then they would naturally reserve more Fs for the happenings in her life than that of the seldom seen state governor's. So when your players next visit Colgate and discover her daughter, Dentyne, had been kidnapped by a band of rollerskating street barbarians, you know it's about to go down. It becomes a cycle: GM add details to an NPC, PCs will invest more interest into the NPC (Nobody Puts babies in a Corner) and the game master gets to add more details to that NPC's life. Working on Project Powerpunk, we found ourselves asking how do we go about building NPCs for the game? Do we bang them out as if we were making an adventure for any old campaign? Unfortunitly that's not enough, we realized we needed to build the Big Daddy Kane NPCs (Naturally Procreating Cores) that all other NPCs will come screaming out of: the setting, tone, theme, and mood of Project Powerpunk. These are pretty big NPCs (Necessary Plot Components) and they serve as the precursors of all future NPCs that we, and eventually you as game masters, will create. They dictate the basic motivations and emotions of the average poor, middle, and high class person. To help each cog like NPC (Narrator's Player Containers) move in unison to suspend disbelief and to better immerse the players and GM. After days of batting and boiling down phrases like "bucket of crabs", "Zero sum game", and "take a penny leave no penny", the developer known as Dev X pulled two words out of the dark cauldron: Needless Desperation. Sam | Ethereal Deep Diver
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