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.