journal.wiredreflexes.com

We decided to not implement the idea of dice pools into Corrosion for the simple reason that it’s a complex mechanic to maintain. Combat Pool, Magic Pool, Karma Pool, Hacking Pool, Control Pool…I’m not looking forward to implementing that. At first it seemed like that wasn’t much of a problem; the lack of dice pools just means that the progression through the game gets controlled a little bit since it means fewer dice to roll and thus less successes on your test. A case could be made to implement the Spell Pool, as it’s dice that usually get split between the Sorcery test and the Drain Resistance test. You could assign them fifty-fifty, or with whatever division you’d like to apply. Combat Pool becomes harder, since it’s situational. People will generally keep some dice back in order to assist dodge rolls or Damage Resistance tests when needed. Corrosion needs to be quick and you don’t want to have to decide how many dice to assign to one test and to the other between one round and the next.

So we chucked them, thinking that the lack of situational modifiers like visibility, movement and range would balance each other out.

Yesterday, right before my brother fell asleep mid-conversation (okay, that might not be entirely true), we discussed how many actions a player can take and what mechanism governs how much you can do. We have to limit a player’s actions, if only to keep the pressure on our webserver to a minimum and slightly distribute the amount of play users put in.

At first, we thought we could govern that by using the stun monitor as an indication of a character’s fatigue. So instead of the possibility of taking damage on a player’s stun monitor, all damage would be physical and the stun monitor could be used to keep track of amounts of actions left. Over time, say every 15 minutes or so, you’d get an automatic 1 box of stun wiped off the stun monitor. Unfortunately, that would break from the SR3 rules we’re looking to implement, and it would mean a limitation on gameplay – no more stun-dealing weapons and spells, for instance, no target number penalties based on stun damage received, etc.

However, we came to the conclusion that another stat was needed – action points. If all damage was physical, there’d be no reason to not cast spells above your magic rating, since drain was going to be physical damage anyway. You could cap it by not allowing any spells with a force higher than your magic rating, but that would damage some of the versatility of a mage or shaman. Weapons or spells that dealt stun damage would by and large have a far more dangerous reputation than the ones that deal physical damage, since the amount of actions you have are the most valuable commodity in the game. This would mean that during PvP people will start using stun weapons just to fuck with each other and I am not too keen to have to start dealing with grievers. It’s one thing if you lose some life (essentially some nuyen since you can always get patched up) rather than losing your ability to generate some money and experience.

That and more made is re-evaluate our decision to use the stun monitor as an indication of action points. Now we’re still looking into how many action points someone gets. Currently set to 10, perhaps we’ll have to turn it up to twenty if it turns out to be too little. Also, we still need to firmly determine what will and what won’t cost an action point.