Hi again! I’m Blake Barton, and I’m still working on this post-apocalyptic roleplaying game with no name.

I missed posting last week due to an episode of mold, sweat, illness, and a predisposition for apathy, and I was about to miss today as well, but I wrote up a task in my Trello board tonight that I thought might serve as a sort of consolation post (not that anyone was asking for that, but it makes me feel better).

As a solo developer, I don’t have a team I can regularly bounce ideas off of. When designing, I do tons of research so that I know as best as I can what’s been done before — both what works and what doesn’t work. I also pull from my own experiences, filtering between what I enjoy playing (and running) in a game and what I’d rather avoid in the future if I possibly can.

I remember running a playtest for one of my other projects, Cardbearer, that at the time had an initiative mechanic for combat that mirrored popular d20 fantasy rules. I had the players roll, rolled for the enemies myself, started trying to sort the values in ascending order, and accidentally burst out “Oh my GOD. I am sick of sorting initiative.”

It’s the kind of insane thing you need to hear yourself say out loud to really hear it. I was tired of sorting the initiative order, a mechanic I’d been dealing with in other games for years, a mechanic that I hated and, blindly, put in my own game.

That was my eureka moment. It’s my game. I don’t need to put in the mechanics I hate. Seems obvious, but it felt liberating!

“I’m You, from the Past”

What I’m getting at here is this: when you’re working alone, it’s easy to develop blind spots, and sometimes you need to hear something before it clicks. In programming, there exists a phenomenon called Rubber Duck Debugging, which is a way of working through problems by literally talking to an inanimate rubber duck about it. When we externalize our issues, we get them out of our own heads. Even the slightest recontextualization is enough to alter our perception, breaking stagnation that formed without us even realizing it. I can’t count the number of times in college I called a TA over with a problem, started explaining the issue, and found the solution mid-blabber.

As I mentioned earlier, I use Trello to manage tasks for myself (like a lightweight Jira). Any thoughts I have about the game, no matter how insane, go into the brainstorming category of my board. If I’ve got a place to put that thought in the rules themselves, I’ll make a comment in my Google doc. I don’t need to take action right that second, especially if I’m not confident about the merits of the thought. I just need the thought to marinate.

Some time later — could be minutes, hours, days, or even months — I’ll see that comment or card again, and I’ll be reading it with fresh eyes. Most of the time, I won’t even remember writing it in the first place. I trick myself into a faux collaboration with… myself. Sometimes I’ll agree with the comment and work to make the change. Other times I’ll have grown since I wrote it and realize I was getting at the wrong angle.

No matter what, I reply to myself, leaving a record for the next time. When I do this enough, I realize just how cyclical my train of thought can be. I’ll have an idea that I think sounds great, go to my board to see what I’ve got related to it, and find that I had the exact same idea three months ago. But because I have a living record, I can record any new insights, using my scaffolding of knowledge to stand on my own shoulders.

“Lord, I was Born a Ramblin’ Man”

For an example, here’s a card I wrote a few hours ago in all its unedited insanity. I wasn’t writing this for anyone but myself:

Big (Scary) Idea: Remove DT damage categories and have two DTs — Normal and Radiation (like New Vegas)

Here’s the deal. In order to make different DT categories feel important, I need a lot of different armors, but I don’t want to instantiate a bunch of different armors. I’m not sure that’s interesting or fun in this game.

In New Vegas, there’s one damage type (kinda – there’s also poison, fire, and radiation). Energy weapons differentiate themselves from guns via more interesting means than just damage numbers. I’ve already started down this path by adding critical effects for each damage type, so using a weapon with split damage types actually yields greater opportunities for interesting effects in combat, which is good!

If I just had Normal DT and Radiation DT, I’d be closer to the template idea I’m taking weapons down, but for armor. Instead of having leather armor and raider armor that have four different axes to differentiate themselves, I can just have light armor that has 1 DT and can look like anything that would be light armor.

GM: “You find some scrapped together armor next to the body of the dead raider.”

Player: “I take it, how much armor does it give me?”

GM: “Uh, it seems pretty light, so let’s consider it light armor, meaning it has 1 DT.”

[Then I’d need to figure out the radiation side of things, but two is still way simpler than 4. I’d probably just create a “lead lining” and “heavy lead lining” mod to add radiation DT.]

It’d also let me cut out the damage type categories from the game. The more damage types I add that fall outside of another category, the more I feel like the categories only cause confusion.

Also, I’m generally giving creatures less energy DT anyway, and energy weapons already deal more damage than ballistics, so I’ve been double dipping this whole time.

Ideas to differentiate energy weapons (more than they already are):

• Deal more damage (already done)
• Recharging ammo (mentioned but I don’t have concrete rules for actually doing the recharge/recycling)
• Easier to crit with (bring back the precise tag?)
• Can charge them to deal more damage (I do this in Augur, so why not here?)
  • Charge (→) (END): Charge up a held energy weapon. Its next attack [deals extra damage and uses more ammo]. If you do not fire the weapon on the next round, it overheats (cannot be fired for a round).

Conclusion

I’m not doing anything with this tonight. I’m going to sleep, let it sit, and look at it tomorrow with fresh eyes. If I feel inspired, if I feel the juice, then I’ll kick it into gear.

Get those thoughts out! Read your own writing! Embrace how crazy you really sound!