Asteria Rising: Update 6

This post will be a tad rushed as I was quite busy this weekend. In all honesty not much progress has been made with Asteria Rising due to my focus on the new Ruination of Bran. I will take time to state some ideas fluctuating in my head, and maybe by next weekend have a preview of more work on Asteria Rising done or Ruination of Bran version 2.

I had a sit down with my sibling whose head is less in the clouds. Bouncing ideas off, I found that my initial concept for a super complex disease system wouldn't work. Namely because this is supposed to be me making the game I and my core D&D group would want to play. Half of us have A.D.D. and four-fifths have their children begging for a butt whooping at every session—complex rules don't work with us because we can never stay focused on them.

To sum up an hour-and-a-half conversation, I went and reconsidered why I was making this game. The first reason was to have a Science-Fiction environment for playing D&D. Looking back through monster ideas in my memo App. I saw that all monsters were meant to be semi-realistic. That is a key factor of Science-Fiction—time is taken to make things believable—just hoping for suspension of disbelief alone would be Space-Fantasy.

My second reason was to make the wilderness dangerous. Looking through videos, mainly by the Web DM and Mathew Colville YouTube channels, there are references to old school D&D where just making it back to town was an achievement in itself. More importantly during my first campaign that I ever ran for D&D we skipped the wilderness 95% of the time.

My core D&D rarely got to meet, so whenever we had a quest the players wanted to just skip random encounters and keep any story telling to set the seen to a minimum. However, two of our better sessions dealt with random encounters. The first was for a one session quest where the party needed to investigate a new disease that was hitting very precise economic and military areas in town.

The party went to the first town on the road, did some investigating, murdered all the survivors, then kept traveling to the Night Owl's Inn. When they set out, I rolled for some hostile creatures I wrote down the week before. First day they [the party] were just told they felt like they were being watched in this open expansive grassland. That night I just mentioned there was a hawk in a tree looking at them. Second day, the hawk was circling them. They would scare it off, then it would come back from a different direction and hour later. Second night of what was a three day trip they set a whole field on fire in the direction the hawk went. Next the party marched down and got ambushed by a Deranged Ranger [hawk's owner]. Their main tank/healer the cleric in plate armor almost died. They all felt like they earned that victory as it was harder than the premade questcentric fight that came after.

The other time I did random encounters was more them being allowed to choose where they went in a region known as the Deadlands in my campaign world. They choose a random town on the map; I rolled for the number and types of minions. Then they fought a 12 shadows and some ghouls. After that they fought wraiths on their way up a tower to battle a Lich who used Death Ward—instantly killing one of them. The party had gained really powerful magical artifacts from a previous dungeon. Nothing had ever been able to hurt them afterwards until that moment. The wilderness was suddenly scary for the first time.

In both cases the looks on my players' faces was far more engaging and satisfying than most of the boss fights we ever experienced. They weren't expecting the fights, they didn't know what they were going in for, and they sure as heck felt accomplished/relieved when it was done. I disliked skipping these random encounters so often, but the players wanted to progress in the story and I obliged them. Making a game where the focus on exploration and what you find during was and is again a primary reason for Asteria Rising to be made.

So, I'm going to cut a lot more out of the game mechanics. Specifically things like that disease set up, the challenge rating system for monsters that D&D had because the players need to figure out something is dangerous on their own. Removing it will actually reinforce them being characters on an alien world who don't know what they are facing. In retrospect, I will need to make a section in the game document full of tables to randomly roll a monster to just patch together. I will keep having 3 classes with 2 sub-branches each. I will also need to find a way to create a very robust weapon and armor system, since there won't be a textbook of spells like in normal D&D.

I'm also considering reworking the Bonds, Ideals, Flaws, Personality Trait, and Backgrounds that D&D had. My players don't really role-play much. I like role-play as a plyer myself, but I don't stay strict to it. Making just a background option that changes starting equipment and having an overall alignment might be better. In other words, keep Alignment, Background, and player made Backstory, cut the rest. We'll see though as this is barely even an alpha stage I'm in on Asteria Rising.

Thanks for reading, hopefully I have something neat for you next week.