The System Changes

I needed an extra week to push some changes into the Myriad system, and the players finally reaching their goal of the Aegis Order castle seemed like a good time for a pause while I modified their skills. Due to the horrors of holiday time scheduling, there may be even more time. I'll be using the time from any missed sessions in the near future to prepare for other games or to make preparing games less time consuming in general.

I used 'Fate of Sideways' as sort of a beta test to make sure everything was ready within an environment I was already familiar -- a campaign I had already run once before. However, the Aegis Recruits campaign has taught me so much more about what is important to add to speed up prep time for sessions in a much shorter amount of time. Because I had already run the previous campaign, I didn't need to prepare as much, so many of the things that would help in that area went overlooked.

 All of these changes are geared towards lowering the amount of time it takes me to prepare for a session with some global keywords that also help teach players specific universal mechanics. 

Here is are some rough 'patch notes' of what I've accomplished so far in the last week or two. Its been pretty productive as I've found myself really inspired to clear minded on why all of this makes sense moving forward.

CHANGES

New keyword system makes player skills, weapons, and creatures more consistent and easier to understand. All the keywords that can be automated are, easy to add more.

Ex: A 'Suffer' skill deals damage to the user of the ability equal to its keyword value (Suffer 15). A spell can add 'Suffer' to all of a creatures abilities and the tooltip updates on all of them to display the value to players. There is no additional setup time in the future with this keyword other than tagging it.

Another more complicated keyword is 'Mark'. The Mark status effect can be applied to creatures with certain abilities. A Mark keyword skill automatically targets all Marked creatures within range, doing whatever that skill does. This can give some interesting positioning choices as a skill that heals all marks may not want to be near marked enemies. Or if an enemy marks the players, you can consume those marks yourself with a supportive mark skill.

Consumed/Applied marks are tracked per player for use in other abilities. (Heal 1 for each mark applied this combat) All of this is completely handled by setting the keyword 'Mark' on a skill as I'm making it. Making future content and creatures for individual sessions should be much easier due to these kinds of universal additions.

Adrenaline is removed. The adrenaline  visual display on tokens is now a keyword called 'Empower'. An Empower skill scales based on how many stacks of Empower a creature has, and then all of it is removed once an Empower skill is used.

Exert keyword takes the place of higher cost Adrenaline skills. You may not use a skill with the Exert keyword while you have Exert status. Exert skills give you the Exert status for # of turns. This allows stronger abilities to be used earlier on, or a decision if timing it for later would be better.

Reworked how all Guns function based around the Empower keyword. The Reload skill for guns gives +1 empower on use (capped at # to represent fully loaded) Guns deal more damage, penetrate more targets, and gain range per each Empower. Empower gained from other sources will continue to scale the effect of the gun beyond the Reload cap. Wealth cost of firing the gun is no longer modified from reloading (increasing damage efficiency improves cost efficiency).

Weapon tooltips show min to max damage range and are updated as weak/strong% changes happen. Calculates players 'Bonus Damage' and adds to value. Easy to further refine for accurate damage expectations on tooltips.

All weapons / skills have to be re-generated due to various tooltip and code structure changes. Most skills rebalanced in favor of being more flexible and incorporating keywords. (Before many of the stronger skills were gated by Adrenaline) 

Ex: Skill 'Shred' triggered Bleed and cost 1 Adrenaline. Now it applies bleed to a target that does not have it or triggers it on a target that does. This means less skills are needed to be acquired before you can benefit from their archetype goal.(necessity of random level ups)

The absence of Adrenaline also means you do not need to invest in Adrenaline Gain / Max Adrenaline, which is difficult to do when levels are random.

Average weapon damage can be determined for use in skills. Gun rebalance makes this a viable tool in martial skills, because their base damage is reasonable. Ex: Attacks of Opportunity can be based on your average equipped weapon damage.(Haven't started using this yet, cautious about balance of average damages and dependency on it. Noteworthy because I thought it would be fully impossible within the system for a few months now)

Possibly fixed unoptimized attacks against many targets not printing out results while server is live. Needs testing with multiple people on a server.

'Define' tool to print out explanations of keywords/anything into the chat when players ask. Almost all mechanics have explanations here. This is also helpful as it leaves an explanation in the chat window for twitch chat to read at their own pace. (Players also have access to this to look things up themselves under their Misc options on their token)

Optimized DECLARE for future enemies even further. Large strings of target types are automatically evaluated (like the Great Clam did, but that was manually done specifically for that creature. I didn't think it would be possible to automate multiple targets, but I woke up this morning and had the instant epiphany)

Declare target can have an override. Ex: spell that forces a creature to always target the 'Highest HP' target so they feel less threatening. Ex: Random Elite modifiers will also make fire related elites target enemies with the most Burn. Much like the keyword changes, I shouldn't have to touch this stuff ever again!

Massive overhaul of skill / weapon tooltips to improve optimization and ease of use for me. Specifically for skills, any change to tooltip structures in the future should be very easy global changes. Weapons are still a mess, currently evaluating if that matters and how much time should go to adjusting it.

Fixed how all status effects are removed at end of turns when acquired during your own turn. This was surprisingly complex as every status effect comes with a different player expectation. For example, the Great Clam applied 1 Vulnerable to an enemy and 1 to itself. Its turn would end, and it immediately lost 1 Vulnerable -- you would expect it to keep the Vulnerable for 1 turn. On the flip side, if a creature gains Strong during their turn to buff their damage temporarily, that is expected to be lost at the end of the turn, otherwise you would get it for 2 turns (being removed at the end of your next turn). There are many more exceptions here that were overlooked.

Creating new images for many of the existing status effects to match the setting with unique symbology. Some status effects may need to slightly change and keywords need some new ones. Improved all tooltips of status effects to automatically include the status effect image to help players learn them faster. With these looking like Occult symbols that may be found in a ritual, it has been a good time to think of associated lore for what they mean in that context -- other than just their mechanical status effect representation. Here is Exert:

Started a 'database' of sorts for monster skills. Currently, every skill is generated at the moment it is applied to a token. This is why global changes to tooltips and such are so significant. This is a much easier way for a few specific scenarios to just copy existing skills onto a creature that needs it spontaneously.  For example, the Burning elite who may want to randomly acquire 1-3 fire related skills. (which are then automatically added into their Declares)

This current party really wants to force a poor npc to read a book. I can feel it. I may need a pool of Madness abilities to quickly apply to somebody really soon, so that is a work in progress.

And there is probably more, but thats the bulk of it!