Waterbrick Down

I'd say everything, a percentile system can have a lot of variations though. You can go straight percentile (like Call of Cthulhu), you can go the D&D route where everything is broken into 5% increments, or you can dice pool systems where in percentage is never really calculated but is a approximated by the number of dice being rolled. Sorry, I should have said that I agreed about the faction equipment portion. My suggestion would be to do away with levels all together and stick to a point system by which things like HP, Mana, proficiencies, can be increased. One of the issues Herocia 1.0 ended up having is that everyone felt pretty similar at higher levels aside from the distinction between spell casters and non-magic users. The only difference was equipment and that just lead to power-creep, gigantic inventories, unexpected/over-powered synergies that couldn't have been planned for. By limiting player power and uniqueness primarily to their actual stats, you allow for better customization and as long as the starting system is balanced, longevity without things going out of control balance wise. Having skills be up to QM discretion is a hold-over from Heroica 1.0 that I think needs to go. While it does seem to superficially simplify things, it makes the job of the QM tremendously more difficult, because not only do they have to see if they're being consistent with their own previous judgments, but consistent with other QM's as well. What this means is that either people stop trying to use skills at all, they abuse them (i.e. diplomacy = mind control), or resentment develops because a player doesn't feel they're being treated fairly at either this particular time or by this particular GM.

I don't know if tying mechanics to faction alliances is a great thing to carry over from Heroica 1.0. While it helped to develop some character interaction with factions due to their faction accessibility, as a whole it seemed to more arbitrarily limit players or force their characters to go in a certain direction just because that was the only way someone could get a dragon. Sure factions can have perks, but tying important mechanics like classes or proficiencies, I think might be a little too much. I like the idea of a percentile system, the hard part is allowing for enough granularity so that there's enough of a spectrum for success, but not so much that the math becomes tedious.

Thanks to you both. You were there in spirit as the game wouldn't have been the same without either or you or any other player. It was a mosaic that each and every player placed their special part into. Who knows what we'll see in another year or two once the building itch starts striking some people. I've got another 2 weeks before baby number two arrives and I can say the break from daily posts has been refreshing. I've been introducing my 2 year old to Duplo and she's already loving it, I look forward to sharing the RPG side of it with her one day and hopefully the Eurobricks community.

I've still got the build up, if you want any.

It's definitely been one of my favorite moc's to recreate.

Yeah and apparently if you have over 1000 photos, they'll start deleting them come February starting with the oldest ones until you're below 1000. I just had to cull nearly 300 photos from my account.

A couple pics. Flickr is changing their hosting policy soon, I'm not quite sure how everything is going to be effected. But I'll try and ensure everything still stays accessible.

Merry festivities to all! Sorry I ended up spending most of the past week with family and didn't have any time for building or photos. The rest of my week is open however and I'll start posting everyone's pics here.

Not of all the heroes, just a couple scenes.

Yeah, that was the intention of the dice pool idea. My apologies if it came across that I was going to have a full rules set. I know people would like a Heroica 2.0, but I think people also need to understand why Heroica 1.0 came to a close in order to address those shortcomings with whatever comes next.

If I did that was in error. I should be clear, while I'm glad to put forth suggestions and comment on balance for new mechanics of a future game, I will not have the time to lead a Heroica 2.0. Finishing up Heroica 1.0 was taxing enough and with another kid on the way in a few more months, I simply can't commit to even playing much less running right now. Honestly, the break from the daily Heroica post has been very refreshing and while I absolutely love the community we created here, the break has been good. I don't believe the community needs a replacement right away, I think in order to create something that attracts new players and QM's, there needs to be some space between the two games and time to develop a semi-polished rule-set and setting, and have committed people to getting the game off the ground.

Should have these up in a few more days. If anyone else wants any particular photos, let me know.

So Example stats: Hero A HP: 11 HP Strength: 1 Skill: 1 Smarts: 0 Proficiency: Bladed Weapons (1) Equipped: Beam Sword (2), Impulse Shield (2) Enemy A HP: 7 Strength: 2 Skill: 0 Smarts: 0 Proficiency: Bladed Weapons (1) Equipped: Energy Axe (3), Ion Plating (1) Round 1 Hero A attacks Enemy A: Hero A's Dice Pool (3 [starting] + 1 [Skill or Strength] + 1 [Bladed Weapons]) vs. Enemy A's Dice Pool (3 [starting] + 0 [Skill]) = Hero A rolls 2 success + 2 Successes (Beam Sword) = 4 vs. Enemy A rolls 1 success + 1 (Ion Plating) = 2 Total Damage = 2 to Enemy A Enemy A attacks Hero A... I'm not the biggest fan of the weapon armor interaction, but I'm not sure how to incorporate them yet. The idea is that any player can use their highest stat to attack, but only Skill helps with defense rolls. Strength gives a bonus to HP and Smarts allows for more proficiencies. So characters can invest in Strength and they'll have lots of HP and do well with attacks, but sacrifice going lower in the battle order and not having a lot of proficiencies. Characters that invest in Skill can be good at combat and don't take a lot of damage, but when they do get hit they don't have a lot of extra HP to soak up the damage they also don't have a lot of proficiencies. Characters that invest in Smarts can do well attacking, but don't have a lot of defenses or HP, but are great skill monkies and usually have access to magic.

So I've been thinking about different systems, what are folks thoughts on a dice pool system? You'd roll a number of d6's, 1-3 is failure, 4-6 success. Then it would be # of success vs difficulty level or an opposed roll against an opponent. Stats: HP Strength (also gives bonus to HP) Skill (also functions as Initiative) Smart (also gives bonus to # of proficiencies) Actions: Attack: 3 dice+ Strength/Skill/Smart Dice + Proficiency Dice + Weapon Rating vs. 3 dice + Skill Dice + Armor Rating = # of successes = Damage Defend: Add Skill Attribute Dice to player’s next Defense pool Rally: Add Smart Attribute Dice to Player’s Attack pool Magic: 3 dice + Arcana/Nature/Religion Proficiency Dice vs. Spell Difficulty Level Any other action: 3 dice + Attribute Dice + Proficiency Dice vs Difficulty Level Difficulty Level Simple: 1 Successes Skilled: 3 Successes Difficult: 5 Successes Impossible: 7 Successes Max Dice Pool = 10 Character Creation Starting Points: 10 points, 2 Proficiencies, 5 HP Proficiencies cost: 1 point Attributes cost: 2 point HP cost: 1 point Level ups would give points to spend. Example Proficiencies: Short Range Weapons Long Range Weapons Artillery Blade Weapons Blunt Weapons Athletics Acrobatics Sleight of Hand Stealth Arcana History Investigation Nature Religion Piloting Insight Medicine Perception Survival Deception Intimidation Performance Persuasion

I've avoided blasters for the melee "knight" classes, but I'm open stylistically to them. I think the trick to balancing ranged and melee weapons comes down to damage type. We setup a weakness triangle: Energy: Blasters, Beam Swords Kinetic: Bladed Weapons (swords, spears, knives), Crushing weapons (Maces, Staves, Hammers), Crossbow Bolts, Natural Weapons (Claws, Teeth, Talons) Elemental: Flame Throwers, Ice Guns, Tesla Coils, Magic Energy Armor: Weak to Kinetic Weapons Kinetic Armor: Weak to Elemental Weapons Elemental Armor: Weak to Energy Weapons I agree, having something that can accelerate winning battles quickly would be very helpful. One of the RPG systems "13th Age" uses something called an "escalation die". Basically the first round the escalation die is 0, round 2 the die increases to 1 which means everything rolled increases by 1 (i.e. your to-hit values) which results in both the enemies and heroes landing hits more often which accelerates the end of the battle. The escalation die continues to increase to a maximum of 6. I think by divorcing damage calculations from row and having row only be a determining factor for targeting would go a long way.

I like the orc mage and the last space rogue. The trick if finding the right balance between sci-fi armor/weapons but without making it too clean and too techy. A couple more figs: Cyborg Warrior Undead Lancer Cleric of the Unending Sun

My point was to have the connection, Olegaia, but essentially make it and its history both physically and knowledge wise cutoff from Heroica 2.0. I agree with the point of clean slate in that it bares no requirement upon new players to have any previous history with the first game, but I think we can still have a nod to the former game with it being so far back in the timeline. Just a thought. A little Figbarfing to get the wheels turning. Too fantasy? Too sci-fi? Too steampunky?

Magic is either simple (i.e. heroica) where the only variety is the element of damage or through the usage of scrolls, or complex with set spells.

Those banners. Thanks for roughing out an example class, CMP, that's pretty much what I had in mind as well. Aside from expanding on that for all the rest of the "classes", I think we need to at some point discuss the magic system. In Heroica RPG, magic simply worked like a weapon with ammo. The Spellcasting job trait allowed for some variety outside of combat, but other than that, the main goal of any spell caster was to acquire all of the gems. Once they had them, there really wasn't any difference between one mage and another. I think in the end, the ether system simply didn't work. High level spell casters almost never ran out of ether. There was never the weight of whether or not one should use magic or should reserve it for a more dire situation. On a completely different note, setting idea: 500-1000 years after Heroica RPG. Olegaia has been made nearly uninhabitable, residents fled the planet through the gate under Eubric to the city of Anámesa a portal between worlds and have built new lives for themselves living among the much more technologically advanced cultures and worlds of the known universe. Here a new organization was born out of the roots of Heroica Hall and from it, heroes once more offered their aid throughout the worlds. Cosmological wise, I'm a little reticent to go full on planets. While I like the D&D spelljammer concept of planes, I think it'd be cool if we had our own unique interconnected cosmology. Current ideas are the solar system (real life/most sci-fi), world tree (Norse mythology), world tortoise (Asian mythology), wheel (D&D).

I know it's gone a little quiet lately, but I hope to do some Figbarfing and rules work this weekend for Heroica 2.0. Stay tuned

So much to comment on. I'm in agreement I think with most folks that effects became too ridiculous and added to the challenge of keeping things balanced. I really recommend the addition of resistances as opposed to immunities, while it may make the math slightly more complex, I think it yields great strides in terms of efficiency of combat creation. On the subject of equipment and weapons, I'm a little more torn. I think there is something special about unique items and the freedom that comes in creating them just like the freedom of race creation. They are great ways to have players remember past adventures and help build the lore of a setting. If anyone could go out and buy a "Holy Avenger" sword, would it really be that cool if you took it out of the hoard of a giant space dragon? I don't think the answer to lessening the complexity of the game is getting rid of unique weapons, but making sure they don't break the statistics of the game in the first place. Concerning Job Traits/Skills, I agree once they are learned they should be kept for a character. However I think this needs to be counterbalanced by the fact that if players focus more of their advancement on gaining new job traits/skills they give up the opportunity to hone the ones they already have. I also think job traits/skills should have some form of pre-requisites as this will help cut back on people picking and choosing to create the most "optimized" build for the entire game. Initiative I'm fine with, but as CMP mentioned we need to keep the heroes and enemies actions separate in order to cut back on all of the conditional actions. Regarding stats, I agree with CMP I think level is a necessary evil in order to keep everything in balance. It creates a common denominator that can always be depended upon for rough calculations and approximations. However I do think that it should have less of an impact on things like combat in comparison to Heroica RPG. On a completely different subject, I don't know if we're considering keeping elemental damage, but I think it would be beneficial to also create an armor/weapon type triangle of weaknesses. Thus giving some flexibility both to heroes and to enemies for specialization. i.e. A character could have blast armor which is really good at absorbing energy weapons, but terrible against piercing physical weapons. This would allow enemies to be potentially dangerous to certain heroes without totally disregarding their investment in armor.

So talking with Dragonator, we have freedom in our design and we can contact him if we need anything from the site logistically. With that in mind, the only two stipulation I'd like to hopefully limit the community to: A. Whatever we design it should be LEGO based. I'd say Heroica RPG is the default standard, if we want to put more requirements in place to ensure LEGO is actually more closely integrated into the system I'm fine with that. B. Whatever we design should allow for RP. Again I'd say Heroica RPG is the default standard, if we start making this simply a tactical combat game or independent one off games like mafia, I believe there is a better place for that. With that in mind, here are some of my starting thoughts. 1. Concerning theme/genre, while I have immensely enjoyed the high fantasy theme of Heroica RPG (and have subsequently bought a couple hundred dollars worth of LEGO to fit that theme), I believe changing the theme will allow for newer players to come into the game without feeling pressured to have not participated in the first game. It also allows an opportunity for those who don't enjoy high fantasy to participate and hopefully renew the player base. However I think it is worth noting that we have a fair amount of our existing player base who still enjoy high fantasy, thus I think the compromise should lie somewhere in the middle. Science fantasy is an inbetween genre which mixes the "sciency" aspect i.e. star-ships, aliens, ray guns, robots with the fantastical i.e. supernatural/divine forces, magic, cryptozoology. Some of the best examples of this feel or look are probably: D&D's Ebberon or Spelljammer settings; Piazo's Starfinder, League of Legends, some subgenres of steam/diesel punk; movies like John Carter, Disney's Treasure Planet, Disney's Atlantis, Dune, Flash Gordon, some aspects of Starwars. With all that being said, I don't think I would mind there being nods back to Heroica RPG's roots. 2. By making the theme wide it'll be pretty hard to not fit most things into the genre, but I think if we give folks boundaries regarding technology level that should be enough to help constrain things. 3. Mechanics... there's a lot things to cover here. I do believe one of the main reasons QM's burned out with Heroica RPG was the amount of time it took to not only run battles but also set them up, especially for high level heroes. The game's progression system led to a few different factors (keep in mind these are generalization of trends): 1. Heroes had more consumables. Consumables take the random aspects out of combat, instead of relying on a 1/6 chance to become Encouraged, you can drink a mead and be immediately Encouraged, 2. Heroes had more complex gear. When a QM has to worry about one character's weapon being able to deal 4 different status effects, that means four different rolls and I have to make sure that if one of those rolls does occur it doesn't completely make the rest of the battle trivial. 3. Heroes advanced classes made them more capable no matter the enemy. Part of this is tied to enemies only act on heroes turns, but statistically speaking as heroes advanced in levels it became more and more difficult for enemies to actually do damage no matter if they were a rat or an elder dragon. All of these things combined made QMing more difficult and more importantly made balance something that couldn't be maintained in the long run without extreme deviations from the rules. So when it comes to mechanics I think there are a few main categories that'll need to be figured out. a. Character creation race: I loved Heroica RPG's openness in character creation. It meant you could have an orcish wizard or a gnome barbarian and never be penalized for your character decision. It also meant players were free to create their own races. With that being said the openness did leave a lot of vagueness when it came to other aspecs of the game. Skrall is an ogre, can he objectively lift more weight than Matthias who is a gnome? Heroica RPG didn't have a way to answer this and thus it fell upon QM's to make an off-the-cuff decision. If this was only a single game run by a single QM, they could ensure consistency, however in a game spanning 159 quests and over a dozen QM's, consistency is difficult to maintain. And without consistency players get agitated when they came to expect something, i.e. Skrall is stronger than Matthias, and a QM makes the opposite ruling. I know this is a silly example, but it demonstrates the drawback of a truly open system. Therefor I would propose a compromise, we create racial features of which any race can be categorized. These racial features allow for the openness of character creation but also allow for some consistency between QM's and between quests. Example of features would be: Big: these races have bonuses to things involving strength, Quick: these races have bonuses to things involving speed, Mindful: these races have bonuses to things involving thought. b. Character creation class: There are things to be said for and against classes, in the end however I believe it helped give structure not only to battle roles but also character concepts. While I think we should keep classes, it's important to remember that we can only have as many classes as there are variables in the games mechanics to emphasize. If there are only two stats: How much damage you do and how much damage you can take, that results in two classes, etc. c. Random probability: Heroica RPG is a d6 system and is a fixed percentage system. With that in mind, it meant that things that allowed for rerolls of the dice were extremely powerful. I think a continuing to use a d6 system is good because it is simple, however from a balance perspective we need to be better aware of how easily balance can be thrown off by messing with the probabilities. d. Character progression: I think a system that is not tied to more powerful classes is a good step. In most systems there are two types of advancement, horizontal; i.e. being able to do more things and vertical, i.e. doing things better. Heroica RPG was ultimately a strictly vertical progression system with a few smatterings of horizontal. This ultimately led to powercreep and essentially an arms race. I think by allowing for more horizontal advancement this will keep things more easily controllable. I think the skill tree idea is a very good start and I'd lobby that incorporating an action system where in character's actions themselves in combat or social situations are not determined by a die result, but where the die results details how well the perform that action is a much better fit. e. Combat: I'm ok with the D6 system, but I agree with previous criticism that enemies need to have their own minds and have to have their actions independent of the heroes. A smart enemy might figure out that they need to take down the healer first, however in Heroica RPG you simply need to make sure the cleric never targets that smart enemy. By divorcing these two things I think that will go a long way. Also on the subject of combat, while I don't think playing on a grid is the way to go, I think we can land somewhere in between. I can't recall the game but every combat encounter consisted of front and back rows and the heroes/enemies arrayed in a line. Heroes and enemies could only target those either directly in front of them or on their diagonals. Back rows could only be hit with ranged attacks or if the entire front row was cleared. Enemies and heroes could spend their turn moving between rows. I think something like this might be a good compromise between the totally open system of Heroica RPG and the full on tactical combat of historical miniature battles. f. Social encounters: I think social encounters need some rules behind them. While I know most folks liked the simplicity of the Diplomacy/Intimidation job traits, there was a tendency to assume the traits worked like mind-control. That's not to say those with the traits shouldn't have an advantage in those situations, but I think there needs to be some sort of statistical element that allows for potential failure. Likewise such a system wouldn't exclude any from attempting social interactions simply because they didn't have specific job traits. 4. For a forum based game, I wouldn't go much more complex than Heroica RPG especially for those running the quests/game. 5/6. While I'm fine with the initial design being a democratic process, I think at some point for continuity and for speed, the direction of the game should be handled by a core team. I think in order to encourage more people helping with the running of the game we should also incentivize QM's/GM's by allowing their work to effect their own characters progression in some way. One of the hardest part of QMing is it often means my own character can't participate and thus ends up never progressing. Endgame, while I like the build your own battle die mechanic and love the freedom of design it gives players, I think it would get really time-consuming for QM's to have to check each individual's battle die build every time they run a combat. Additionally, when-ever a new technique was added it'd need to be weighed against all other techniques to ensure it was properly balanced and couldn't be abused with other combinations.

Alrighty folks, figured I'd kick this off. First a qualifying note, I'm still waiting on Dragonator to give some feedback on how much freedom we'll have in designing the follow-up to Heroica RPG, so until we get some inclination everything is tentative, even the possibility of there even being a Heroica RPG 2.0. That being said, I know a lot of you have ideas and have been itching to discuss the potential successor to the last 7 year project, so I've got a couple of questions I'll put out there for general discussion and to get the creative juices flowing: 1. What should be the overall theme/genre? 2. How closely should the theme/genre be followed? 3. What aspects of the game should be covered by mechanics? i.e. skills, combat, social interactions, character creation, etc. 4. How in depth should the mechanics of the game go? 5. Will the design of the general theme/genre and mechanics be group work-shopped or left to selected individuals. I.e. how democratic should the development process be? 6. Should the running of the game be democratic or managed by select individuals?

Added to 159's wrap up post. Regarding Heroica 2.0, my plan is to start a separate discussion thread as soon as I hear back from Dragonator about how much liberty we have in designing the next game. My first thought is to try something different theme wise to potentially attract new players in addition to revamped mechanics, but I'll leave that for the thread.

It was simply a task for Torald to complete, nothing more. The book definitely had its own agenda, mainly making it to the city between worlds and potentially causing havoc there. Torald actually did a really good job of unknowingly thwarting both Rosier and the book by stepping into the portal.