The Great Streamlining Part 2
over 3 years ago – Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 11:21:01 AM

Hey all! Was hoping to have gotten this out on Sunday, but the holidays made my work schedule quite intense. Things seemed to have calmed down a bit so here we are for part 2!

So this is the first half of the great streamlining section. Last time was the second half, but here on forward we're following things in order. This one is more numbery, but if that's not your thing just wait till next time where we dive into the first half of delicious lore updates.

The Great Streamlining

We currently have two playtest groups that I run, a more serious one made of veterans to the game and a more casual one with members of our discord channel. Both groups of people, no matter how serious, have been unbelievably valuable at identifying the core strengths and weaknesses of the game.

To me, the job of a designer is not to scrub every weakness away, but to make sure its core strengths and weaknesses support and strengthen the game’s identity. Around July, I found that some mechanics were serving a version of the game that was not as relevant anymore. Originally, Children of the Beast was intended to be an app-only game, which afforded it some high calculation complexity as long as the decisions being made were simple. And so the great streamlining began.

There is a bit of silliness to all of this: I didn’t intend this streamlining thing to be official. I did the initial changes as a bit of fun over a few weekends. But after some testing, the glorious reality of it consumed me, although there is still a lot more testing to be done.

Some of these changes took many iterations to get where they are now.

Weapon Styles

One of the first things bits tackled had to do with damage math. There was too much of it.

From an app or video game perspective, this was fine. Size relates to how quickly the weapon can attack. For damage, the base number was easily tweakable if we found balance problems, the stat bonuses were easily calculated in the background, and the dice were there for the player to roll and engage with. Lastly, traits were light special abilities for the weapons that tweaked how they played.

But I doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that with a pen & paper style it’s a fair bit of math to calculate every time you attack. Not impossible, we had people playtest with versions of this for years after all. But for some people, especially those initially learning the game, it’s one extra thing to get used to in a sea of things to get used to. Even veteran players would mess up occasionally, which is a pretty bad sign. Once again, it was easy to ignore in the days where we imagined the game required the app. But now the app is optional, it’s more of a support system and helps with online play, and the base game should reflect that.

I also didn’t like how user-unfriendly choosing your weapon was. Although there were some categories to help you out, they were mostly based on stats, which isn't a choice, it's a rules mastery check. There are interesting gameplay choices to be made, but this list doesn't help you find them.

So when thinking how to tackle this, my main questions were: How do I make a weapon list like that more manageable? What are the interesting choices to be made within that list?

Funnily enough, I technically had an answer with how we organized choosing a weapon in the app.When you choose a weapon, it actually walks you through several gameplay choices you should make. (There are some missing icons which will either show up as grey boxes or Missingno.'s from Pokemon)

Hopefully you can see how app-wise, choosing a weapon is smoother. So how could I reflect this in the book? As cute as a choose-your-own-adventure style weapon choice system in the book would be, there were too many choices and would be clunky as heck.

Was there a way to ask fewer questions? Really get to the core of what a player wants out of a weapon? That gave me the idea of weapon styles:

Each of the eight styles reflects a gameplay style for combat, with multiple weapons in each style for you to choose your damage type. This also opens up design space to allow future weapons to be added to a style, either officially or with homebrew magic. Also, the math itself has been greatly streamlined, with a more traditional "dice plus a single stat bonus" setup.

So let's take a look at the new weapon list:

This list asks one core question from the player (and a little sub-question): What feel do you want out of your weapon? Before, every type of weapon had a fast, medium, and slow version. This set of weapons makes the choice of having a slow, powerful weapon, or quick, weaker one a gameplay style choice. But you can also look at the weirder styles of gameplay, like the "vicious" weapons that do crazy damage when they critically hit, or the reach weapons that can’t attack when you’re adjacent to something. 

It also integrates melee and ranged weaponry as part of the style choice. Sure, there aren’t many trait combinations like vicious ranged weapons, but the list's greater simplicity allows easier homebrewing so you can create it on your own much more easily. 

And that's how weapons have been streamlined. There is still a bit of controversy, as some players from the playtest groups are saddened that there are fewer weapons than before, and that stats aren't as important when making your weapon choice. Luckily there's a new weapon upgrade system that we're trying out, and it seems to be solving some of those issues. It is very new however and still needs a lot of testing, so I'll talk about it at a later time.

Attribute & Stat Streamlining

Oh boy, more numbers talk. I’ll try to keep this section short as it mostly comes down to one core principle: Each attribute should only do one thing.

We’ve got a lot of attributes for your character. The four major attributes that affect your skills: Body, Agility, Mind, and Spirit. And the eight minor attributes that boost your various aspects: Strength, Vitality, Dexterity, Reflexes, Logic, Intuition, Charisma, and Resolve.

Most minor attributes affected two things. For example, Vitality affected both your Blood (a type of health) and your Damage Resistances. The tricky part is, and where the confusions starts, is that minor attributes are made up of both a progress track and the bonuses you earn from that progress track.

Your vitality bonus that you had earned boosted your Damage resistances, while every point of progress you had made on the track increased your Blood. It’s a system that works, but it’s just a lot to remember, especially when Vitality is just one of eight minor attributes! And when most attributes affect two aspects of your character (with some annoying exceptions) it can be difficult to remember everything that happens when you increase a stat.

But I didn’t want to get rid of the progress track. Call me stubborn, but a huge part of this game is the feeling of evolution, both in the world and your character. This isn’t D&D where your character is mostly stuck with the stats they rolled at the start. You evolve and adapt your character as you play. Also, a part of this feel is the slow investment in your character, filling in one small box at a time. If it was just six boxes, each with an amount of skill points needed to reach the next bonus, it would completely lose its unique feel to me. As much as I want an intuitive game to learn, I am not looking to create a perfectly light, featherweight experience if it sacrifices the whole.

So let’s make each attribute do only one thing, and maybe use this as a jumping off point to streamline other systems. This may seem like a small, somewhat invisible thing, but it has huge implications for simplifying systems throughout the game.

The focus of each attribute also makes it possible in the character sheet to simply say what each stat affects as a light reminder (like a small box next to strength that says “+Damage”). Vitality now only affects your Blood, and no longer affects your Damage Resistances. Those were helped by your characters armor anyway, and Blood is still extremely valuable and fits within the theme of Vitality.

Speaking of Armor…

Armor Part 1: Evasion, & Deflection

Armor itself hasn’t needed too much updating, more the systems surrounding armor.

The biggest point of contention has been Evasion & Deflection, two stats that determine how easily you’re hit, and how easily you’re critically hit. If you have an evasion of 15, someone needs to roll a 15 to hit you. If you have a deflection of 20, every point they roll above 20 does an additional point of critical damage (and your deflection is always higher than your evasion). This is another one of those systems where I love the feel of it, but the implementation puts an undue burden on the people playing.

An attack might go like this:

Harriet the Hunter: “I roll a 23 to hit”

James the Judge: “You hit”

Harriet the Hunter: “Did I roll above their Deflection?”

James the Judge: “Let’s see, they have a Deflection of 17, so you rolled 6 critical damage.”

Harriet the Hunter: “Cool. I’ll roll my damage, then add my strength, then add my critical damage, and I’m in a frenzy so I deal… 3 extra damage on top of that. 18 slashing damage.”

James the Judge: “Bog-Sothoth, King of the Invisible Swamp has 12 slashing resistance, you deal 6 damage.

That example is even using the simplified weapon damage we talked about earlier. And it only gets more intricate when a player is aiming for a weak point, hoping to do enough damage to stun or wound the creature.

But taking out stuff will be difficult without seriously harming the game’s feel. Fact of the matter is, players LOVE how critical damage works. You're dice can critically explode, allowing you to roll yet more dice to add to your accuracy roll. If you're lucky enough they can keep exploding indefinitely, which means some lucky hits do crazy things. Lop the arm off a dragon with a butterknife kind of things. Although how easily those things should happen is up for debate among the playtesters, practically everyone I’ve ever played with loves the potential of critical hits, especially in the rare instance where they achieve one.

So I approached this in two ways, a hard design change of removing deflection and changing how critical damage works, and a soft design change of adjusting enemy evasion and resistance numbers to be multiples of 5.

Removing Deflection was to get rid of another stat to keep track of, any stat I can comfortably do that with is ace. Next, Critical Damage was changed so that for every five you roll above their evasion, you get an extra 1d6 of damage.

Why that change? On the surface, it seems more complicated than just adding damage, but it’s doing a lot of subtle work. First, all weapon damage, heck, all damage in the game, is rolled with d6’s. If your weapon did 2d6, and you rolled ten above, rolling 4d6 instead is a boost you can physically feel. Second is part of that soft design change I was talking about earlier where all enemies have their evasion set to a multiple of 5.

The evasion change is not a hard rule, but all official monsters follow it with this change. Checking whether you rolled 5 or 10 above a creature’s evasion becomes much easier when they have an evasion of 15 or 20. Players don’t even have to know about this for it to be effective at reducing the strain of calculation. 

So as a quick gut check, try it out yourself and see which feels cleaner:

Old System: Deal one critical damage for every point you roll above their deflection

You roll a 27 against an enemy’s 14 Evasion and 18 Deflection, how much critical damage do you deal?

New System: Roll an extra 1d6 damage for every 5 you roll above their evasion

You roll a 27 against an enemy’s 15 Evasion, how many critical damage dice do you roll?

In the end, it’s still a numbery system. But even small improvements make a difference.

Armor Part 2: Shieldarms

We’ve been in numbers town for a while, so this should prove to be a bit more thematic. But first…

Shields are a pain in the ass.

There, I said it. They’re annoying, from a design perspective at least. A whole portion of your character sheet dedicated to an object that mostly just bumps up a couple numbers. I don’t like them, I don’t think they offer many more interesting choices that aren’t already covered by what type of armor you want. Then you must have rules for equipping and unequipping shields, a valuable rulespace dedicated only to players who without them would rapidly equip and unequip shields so they could experience all of the benefits and none of the downsides (Looking at you, Chris! You horrible, lovely man).

*pant pant*

At one point, I wanted to make shields more interesting, more than just a couple numbers. Instead of stats, shields provided cover, which takes away dice when people are attacking you. For those who don’t already know, skill checks are done by rolling multiple d20’s (the number of d20’s depends on your character's skill level) and taking the highest result. So, if you rolled three dice and got 14, 8, and 17, you would take the 17 as your result.

A shield’s cover would reserve one or more of those dice to be rolled later, which you then rolled afterwards to see if it hit your shield. For example, let’s say a shield reserved a die from your attack roll, and you rolled the same thing as before: a 14 and 8. If that missed your opponent, you would then roll the die reserved by the shield, which we’ll say rolled a 17.  If the shield die roll of 17 was the one that hit, the attack’s damage is severely reduced.

Neat, although confusing. It’s biggest crime, however, was that it was often forgot. When you’re attacking someone, it’s reeeaaally easy to forget to ask if they’re using a shield. Heck, it can be hard to remember as a judge. It becomes a question that always must be asked, and we already went over how much we want to reduce the steps of damage calculation.

To make matters worse, there isn’t often an incredible reward for remembering. Shields don’t always work, which feels terrible for a player using one or frustrating for a person attacking one. Out of all the mechanics I’ve talked about, this one had to go the most.

But I wanted to do something thematic with this one, as thematic solutions are often the most fun and preferable. First, regular shields are just considered part of armor passively. They don’t take up a hand, a shield is considered to be somehow incorporated into your armor as part of the armor’s stats, barely even a rule.

But secondly, and most importantly, some armors now have living shields, called shieldarms. So long as you have a hand free, these shieldarms can be called from a portion of your armor to form a massive, undulating shield with special abilities. For example, the “Moonskull” armor has a spined shieldarm that skewers those that attack you in melee range. The armor made from a hydra is covered in eyes and heads that can sense anything around you, even if invisible or lurking between dimensions.

Each armor has only one special ability, so those that have a shieldarm have it as their special ability, but I find it so much more satisfying than choosing between a buckler, shield, or tower shield.

I can’t wait to get art for this.

All right, next time: Lore & Mysteries. Have a great Christmas and see you all again real soon!

The Great Streamlining: Part 1
over 3 years ago – Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 08:54:10 AM

Hey all! After the last update I got a ton of private messages on both discord and kickstarter asking me to split up the massive update. So you know what, fair enough! I'll split it up into smaller parts over the next several weeks, as a sort of bizarre advent calendar.

The update's full massiveness has three main sections:

• The mechanics update section, known as "The Great Streamlining"
• Lore: Mysteries and Catalysts
• And finally the Production, Budget, and Timeline section

Today will be the first half of The Great Streamlining, which originally was intended to focus on weapons, armor, and stat updates/simplification. But if we're not posting this update all at once I'd rather show the second shorter, yet more provocative, half of this section first: the narrative mechanical updates of Descent, Dreams, & Revelations.

Since it is the second half of a section it might feel a bit en medias res, but hey it's a cool place to start off!

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Descent & Dreams

One of the other issues I’ve noticed over the years is a subtle one. We have a lot of special abilities a character can gain, and a lot of them have limited uses like "twice per rest" or "once per story arc". You might gain 5 or more of these limited use abilities as you play and keeping track of them all can be a bit difficult. It’s nothing exasperating on its own, but if I want to reiterate a theme across all this streamlining it’s that small difficulties add up over time.

Like the shieldarms in the last section, I wanted a thematic solution to this problem, one that makes the feel of the game shine through more. And so came Descent: as you use straining abilities, your character doesn't lose uses of abilities but instead “descends” into corrupted madness.

Sure, not the most original idea, but in execution this is not about punishing players for using cool abilities. It’s not intended to be like Dark Heresy where you roll on a table of 100 different, often debilitating insanities or mutations every time you tempt fate. I want to have the play experience change to fit what the characters are doing and enjoying. If they're descending a lot, they will become more powerful monstrous beings. While if they don't, their dreams will reward them with access to mysterious forces and entities curious about their potential.

When you use a descent ability (which is any ability that was previously limited by a number of uses), you either descend once or twice depending on how straining or corruptive the ability is, marking off boxes as you go. At first, you are fine, if a bit stressed out. Normal humans can "descend" about five times before they simply become too exhausted. But hunters can push themselves further than normal humans. After a certain point, you are in “Chaos”, a state in which your latent corruption is beginning to emerge as your superego weakens.

So here’s my trademark non-artist portrayal of the descent track:

As you can see it's got 10 steps, although the final number is still being tested. Once you have marked past the halfway point, you are now "in Chaos". Being in Chaos has no rules of its own, it is just a state of being. But as hunters play they will notice two consequences as they look at newly gained abilities:

· Most “Humanity” abilities that you gain through normal gameplay cannot be used in Chaos.

· Most “Corrupted” abilities maximize their effects in Chaos. For example a hunter with the assassin mutation gets their normally random bonus damage from their special ability maximized until they are no longer in Chaos.

Finally, if you reach the bottom of the track you have entered “Bottomless Chaos”. You can still use your descent abilities as often as you would like, but the future negative dream consequences for descending have maxed out, which we'll get to later.

So how do you get rid of descent, and remove yourself from Chaos? By Dreaming, a state you can reach while resting (whoda thunk).

Resting has gone through many, many subtle iterations, but the current version being tested is you can choose at any point not in combat to rest, while at the end of a "story arc" your characters dream. You can think of it as a short rest / long rest dichotomy if you’d like, but it has bigger implications here in CotB. The time needed to rest or dream doesn’t really matter, minimum 15 minutes.

Resting is simple, it restores all your willpower, the largest pool of health you have, and you can spend skill points you have accrued. You could do this after every combat just fine.

Dreaming restores both your health pools (willpower and blood), allows you to spend your skill points, and begins a shared dream with your group of hunters. You group has more favorable dreams the less the grroup in total has descended. If one or two people were in Chaos, there will only be a low chance of a nightmare. But if many people are in Chaos, or even Bottomless Chaos, a nightmare becomes very likely. Once your dream ends all descent is removed as well.

The chance of a good or bad dream is random, you roll a certain amount of "dream dice" depending on the size of your group, but lose dream dice for every person in Chaos or Bottomless Chaos. Rolling higher nets you a better dream. So in the middle of a tough fight where another use of your descent ability would prove extremely useful, but using it would descend you into Chaos, that descent only has a chance of turning out bad for you in the future. And the future’s far away! What’s the harm.

If you do roll low enough to get a nightmare, your corruption increases and your body itself will grow a mind of its own. At first, this may manifest as a growth or odd mutation, but the more nightmares you have the more powerful the rogue mind within you grows. It will have desires of its own, and even if it's not innately evil, there might soon be conflicts if you disagree. Currently, I'm wanting the nightmare growth to be a hivemind amongst the players, so that if multiple people get growths they won't have to worry about interacting with what amounts to 2 or more extra characters in the party. So multiple players might have different nightmare growths, but the growths are all part of the same mind. 

Of course, if you really overdose on nightmares, your characters will become overcorrupted and mutate into abominations. This is essentially the only way to truly "die" in Children of the Beast, although some players have made up houserules for playing as mindless abominations so hey, who am I to judge what a "normal" character should be.

Middle of the road dreams, where you didn't roll especially high or low, provide small benefits like allowing you to visit your hometown in your dreams as if you were actually there. This allows you to upgrade your town or forge new weapons that mysteriously show up in your backpack when you wake up.

And for those with considerable restraint or radical luck, rolling high on the dream dice will you get rewarded with access to the Drift. The same Drift you enter when you die, but this time in a more intentional way. You can enter the dream world or interact and deal with the Elder Deities that guide humanity beneath the surface of perception.

After the shared dream, your descent is removed and you can begin your life again. I can talk more about the types and content of the dreams and nightmares in a future update, but I don’t want this section to dominate the current one.

In the end, descent does have a bit of a punishment element to it, but I hope a more engaging one than simply being a penalty for using your cooler abilities. I personally like the risk/reward factor to it, and that most of the risk is not felt immediately so you can enjoy your reward while you still can. Perhaps the descent system is not as much about cutting mechanics or simplification like some of the other changes we’ve talked about since it technically added some rules, but I think it makes the experience run much more smoothly, which is in essence what streamlining is about.

Revelations

Speaking of adding rules though, there is one addition here that is not strictly an attempt at streamlining: Revelations!

Revelations are an attempt at adding a more roleplay focused mechanic. It’s still experimental, and I’m currently trying to work out a few kinks with it, but it’s led to some really engaging player-made moments.

So what is a revelation? If one of the main aspects of Children of the Beast is exploring and discovering mysteries, the idea is: why not do that for your characters as well?

Each player can have a revelation for their hunter, once per story arc. A revelation is a reaction to another person, creature, event, or otherwise cool thing that your hunters encountered, allowing them to take control of the narrative for a brief moment. So a player could say “that awesome thing? That’s actually tied to my backstory, and this is how”. The player then explains this revelation about their hunter’s backstory, and so long as the group thinks its cool, it becomes true for your campaign’s world.

The judge is then allowed to ask a single leading question about the revelation. For example, we had a player in our discord campaign reveal that the village they just discovered was one he had been exiled from, and now he must hide his presence there. I then asked him, “What did you steal from this village to cause this hatred, and why won’t you give it back?” We’ve had some really cool roleplaying moments result from this, and the coolest part to me is that we didn’t have to spend hours making up this village as a part of his backstory, it was just an organic moment that happened in play.

There are however, some creative restrictions. The kind of revelation you can have is decided by your chosen theme. Your theme reflects what kind of character you are, and hopefully telegraphs to the judge what kind of campaign elements they like. The themes are Adventurous, Modest, Weird, and Dark. You also choose a background as a simple descriptor of what your character’s life was before they became a hunter, from Daredevil, to Guardian, to Wanderer, and these determine your starting items and skills (With player feedback, we even added a Dark Souls-esque Unfortunate background that gets absolutely nothing). Your revelations do not require to tie into your background, only your theme, but it can be helpful thought food.

So as an example, in our veteran campaign, the players came across a hive of fungus creatures made from half-converted humans. One of the players had a Weird theme, and used their revelation to state that they recognized one of these people as coming from their home sanctuary long ago, and that they, the player themselves, were the unfortunate cause of the fungal plague as it was somehow produced from their own body. I had my own plans for the cause of the fungus, but that was so cool that we just decided to run with it.

A common desire of players is to have their character's story tie into the main plot. Revelations have been an exciting way to express this desire in a more traditional style roleplaying game.

And thanks folks! Next time I'll post the other half of the mechanics section, which by my count is twice as long and twice as numerical. I know a lot of people don't care about math but I hope there's something in there that all of you can appreciate! After all, math should serve the story not the the other way around.

Finally, thank the discord crew for keeping me on track. A lot of great discussions go on there, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't talk on kickstarter, and they've been really helping me a lot lately. Love you guys!

See you all again very soon for part 2!

Update on the Way!
over 3 years ago – Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 08:45:10 PM

Hey all, the past quite a few months have been horrifically silent here on the kickstarter, but I want to put to rest any fears about the project being abandoned.

Actually progress has been quite fun! I have a veteran playtest group and a discord group that meet up every week. I've been streamlining a bunch of mechanics, slowly laying out and building more and more lore, it's been really satisfying. 

But I'm terrible at finishing kickstarter updates, that is for sure. However, for the past week or so, I've been solely focusing on fusing an amalgam of all the unfinished updates that have accrued over the past months, and I asked the discord crew to keep tabs on me and make sure I finish it (which they have been very good at!). It's massive, at over 20 pages, possibly overly-detailed, but it's coming, and coming soon. It'll go over a great deal of mechanical updates, lore updates, and give just a general overview of the project's budget and timeline (and since most of this time has been spent on rulebook development, very little of that budget has actually been spent, just as a heads up).

As with all things of mine it seems, it's taking longer than expected, which is why I wanted to post this update-update. I've been a bit too terrified to dive into the comments section lately, as I realize a lot of what's been said there I likely deserve, but there genuinely has been a lot of cool stuff in the making. I know actions speak louder than words, so I'll be looking forward to showing you more very soon.

Thanks,

-Nicholas Kitts

My God, it's Full of Updates
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 02:51:07 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Morbid Happiness
almost 4 years ago – Mon, Jun 01, 2020 at 05:15:13 PM

Hey everyone! Today we finally have a new rulebook update, which includes the complete locations and random encounters for all those environments we talked about, as well as a smattering of other small updates over the past month. Check out those random encounters (they start on page 179)! I hope they help illuminate the world in your head.

 Children of the Beast Rulebook Update 

Full Speed Ahead

So first off, a real thanks to all of you keeping up with these updates. This week I've got some great, if somewhat morbid, news.

I broke an arm again. Well, that's not the good news per se. This time it actually happened at work, slipping on an unusually slick floor after a rain up here in Washington. But more importantly, it's not as bad as last time (especially since it's my left, non-dominant arm this time). I'm not able to do my day job, but I'm getting worker's comp while I'm away, and pretty much have as much free time as I want. 

It may seem kind of f'ed up (and in the end it kinda is), but I'm genuinely excited. Managing both work and the project had become a real struggle, and now I'm free to work only on Children of the Beast for the next month. Injuries are never fun, but I haven't really had an opportunity like this before. 

It's a weird contrast. Last year I didn't have health insurance, and the arm break was a real financial strain such that I avoided pain medication. Now I feel fully taken care of and have a clear focus during a freaking pandemic. Life is strange.

Anyway, I'm excited to fill in a lot of gaps this month. You all have a great week, as best we can in these trying times.