Decision Paralysis

Hey everyone! Got another draft chapter for this week's post, all about Feats in Tabletop Arcade. I won't waste your precious time by explaining the whole Feats system idea here, since I already did that in previous dev diaries and you should (hopefully) get the idea from the draft chapter. Creating this draft definitely helped me learn some more about designing this game, mostly by running into walls with trying to create certain stuff. For example, I'd initially wanted to include a "Permanent Boon" feat - it seemed like a neat idea that could give a bunch of options without needing loads of extra work. But when it came to meshing that idea with other ideas for certain boons it just didn't seem like there was a good way to make it work nicely. Most of the example feats I've included in the draft are definitely more on the simple side, and are mostly focused on altering the basic game statistics of your character. In future posts, I'll probably r...

Hey everyone! Just a smallish post this week, got the draft chapter on skills in Tabletop Arcade for ya'll. I've had this draft chapter done for a while, and to be entirely honest I thought I'd already released it. This has been a pretty slow week for making progress on TA, but I'm hoping to have something a bit more interesting for next week's post. I went over my main intentions for the skill system way back in dev diary #5 , and they haven't really changed a whole lot since then. The only main addition here is how learning languages is dealt with. I wanted to fold languages into the skills system to streamline the game somewhat, but having characters make ability checks to use languages sounded absolutely awful. Here, characters improve their languages in the same way as skills, with their associated skill bonus translating to a level of fluency. As it is now, it mostly relies on roleplay to work, and I'm interested to see how well it will work in pra...

Hey everyone! In today's dev diary I'm gonna take a quick look at different advantage systems in tabletop games and settle on an advantage system for Tabletop Arcade. When I talk about an advantage system here, I mean the system that translates circumstantial advantages to solid mechanical bonuses a character gets to a particular roll. The keyword here is circumstantial, characters only gain these bonuses temporarily, to particular rolls, or under particular conditions. There is clearly a lot of variety in these systems, so I want to lay out the goals of this system in Tabletop Arcade. For one, it should be simple to use. All else being equal, cutting down on the time it takes to do admin at the table is definitely a plus. I also want to preserve bounded accuracy - in summary, you shouldn't be able to stack advantages over and over again until the results of your roll  are as high as you want. It may sound strange that I want to promote ease of use in TA after the abi...

Hey guys! Finally got that draft chapter finished and I'm really excited to share it with y'all. The chapter is all about constructing your own custom abilities using a set of rules. This draft chapter really was a struggle to create, and has given me some anxiety and doubt about whether or not this kind of system is viable or fun. Though in the end I reckon I'm fairly happy with how it's turned out. First of all, I want to stress that this content is largely untested and unbalanced. When deciding the cost of various ability traits I mostly just guessed at what a good number would be, and compared it with the other traits that had already been given costs. My primary goal for this chapter is just making the system fairly easy to use and not confusing. Ideally anyone will be able to translate an idea into a solid, usable ability using this chapter, so I'd really love any feedback on places you think this can be improved. Current Issues I'll avoid going i...