Was Bored

Was bored yesterday and did some doodles for a joke anime/webcomic idea me and a friend had. The joke was simply that she would be the heroine, but win through dumb luck with a shield called Plot (Plot Armor). I would have a character based off me as a bumbling villain.

All the drawings were done in pen, no construction lines. It was mainly practice for human figures; I need more practice. Still, the general concepts are there. Lo is the savior of Writeland, a pun of how we both are Technical Writers. Her shield Plot is made to look like an art palette, and her spear to look like a paint brush. I image she has meta powers, like painting new things onto the comic page.

Our savior's best friend would be based off her real life best friend. Mo's inspiration loves playing elven mages, especially in Dragon Age Inquisition. She would always be around to help Lo, but would act as a good emotional rock and friend when around. Mo is probably a part of some Mage Guild or other organization.

Using the nick name my buddy gives me, the villain would be G. The Dark Lord would actually just be doing it as an internship that got out of hand quick. The outfit is made to be someone in a business suit with some armor pieces placed on top of it. The power of the Dark Lord would also be meta, rolling dice to alter events. Essentially, the power of randomness.

The pizza clan is a joke because both are based off people with almost a decade of experience in pizza chains. Quen is based off my buddy's husband, bug burly gentle giant. Mat-kun's inspiration is an anime enthusiast. His ninja character probably talks about nerdy things with Mo when they meet.

Nate is based off a boyfriend Mo's inspiration has. His inspiration knows a fair bit about computers, so I made him have electric base powers. Nate and Mo would both be in the Mage Guild, but Nate is more hermit like and wouldn't show up much.

That's the silliness I've gotten up to. Next post should be an updates on Asteria Rising. I've started working on it more.

Asteria Rising: Update 10

Asteria Rising has work being done on it again. I ran it by my local game designer group, Little Rock Game Designers (L.R.G.D.). The main issue I found was people thinking the game needed to either incentivize the narrative elements of the game, alter the wording of the attributes, or completely remove them.

Attributes

The attributes are leftovers from when Asteria Rising was a science-fiction homebrew [custom] setting for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). As rules changed over time, so did the amount and importance of these attributes. At the last biweekly game design meeting (07 February 2018), I was given suggestions on my game. The people suggesting could only judge based off what I explained and the character sheet for Asteria Rising.

Person	Suggestion
B	Remove attributes
R	Incentivize using narrative
J	Use different attributes

To make people focus more on creating fun narratives and less on numbers for combat, power players/ murder hobo antics in D&D, the attributes were focused on. The person who suggested to remove the attributes entirely [B.] had been playing D&D since he was a child. He disliked the attribute system because he had seen all problems with people playing the table-top-game purely for numbers start with the attributes.

R. simply believed the narrative aspects of the game should be incentivized some how. Either by moving the attributes to another portion of the character sheet, making them less prominent, or to increase the incentive to focus on narrative based games for the Game Master (G.M.).

Character Sheet 1 for Asteria Rising v0.15

Now, J. thought it might be better to change what the attributes are. Nothing specific, but to simply offer something new for players to work with. Say strength, constitution, and dexterity were combined into a single attribute, Body; something related to a character's mental abilities, Psyche; so on.

Moving forward I want to try removing attributes. The reason for this is that none of the skills, even those for combat, are tied to attributes. Within the current version [0.15] of Asteria Rising the attributes have little use. Constitution lost its usefulness once poison resistance, fatigue resistance, and disease resistance were placed into combat skills. Strength mainly affects carrying capacity, which could be a passive based on class instead. Dexterity is used for avoiding attacks, yet something else could take its place.

Removing these attributes will require me reworking both the classes and equipment sections of the Asteria Rising document. I'll save the current version [0.15] incase I need to revert back to using attributes. I'm hoping that their removal will simplify the game further, without taking away from its depth. Once I've made progress on this I'll post again.

Have a great week.