bleedandevolve

[bleedandevolve]

Developer Diary: I Need a Medic!

Healing is a tricky thing in any sort of fighting game. On one hand, you want to offer a way for people to recover lost hit points (or whatever rad thing you’re calling them), but on another, you want at the same time make it viable and useful, while also making it not overpowered.

Like everything in design, it’s a balancing act. In our old system, you could designate skills to be able to heal, some could even heal status effects as well. This wasn’t necessarily overpowered, so much as it wasn’t accomplishing what I wanted. With the new battle system and trying to encourage people to play a bit more defensively, I looked at the ability to have healing skills and ultimately decided they wouldn’t fit well within the current system. Especially because, well, if someone put in minimal effort, they could heal themselves up completely after the end of every battle.

In addition to the healing skills, another way to heal in the old system was to “rest” and not take any actions. However, this led to people writing nonsense replies that had nothing to do with the roleplay to skip through that, or getting bored with writing it because they felt like they couldn’t continue to the interesting parts without healing up their HP first. So that obviously wasn’t working as intended either. The original idea behind this was to “force” people to roleplay and write while they waited in between fights, but really all it did was force people to either get bored or find easy ways around it.

While on a walk with another staff member, I began to lay out plans for a new healing system, called Respite. This would tie into our new encumber system, which would mean that a character needs to carry around a small item for every time they want to stop and have a Respite, which means a character would have to weigh how much they want to heal over how much loot they want to retrieve and bring back with them. It can also only occur outside of battle.

Respite, other than being a cool name, has some other features as well. It’s foundation is on something similar to a point system or “clock” that I believe is reminiscent of Blades in the Dark (I haven’t read through that one yet, sadly) where you have so many points to spend or clock “ticks” to spend on actions until your Respite is used up. During Respite, you can attempt to heal, cook, buff yourself, and otherwise prepare for the upcoming trials ahead.

There are also specialized Respite “abilities” that a character can learn one of, and it does something a little different from normal - like Meditation being able to heal both social and physical wounds a bit, or Scouting giving you bonuses against your future enemies and making your Journey easier. As a character uses this ability, like any skill in Bleed and Evolve, it begins to gain EXP and cost less clock “ticks” to use, making it ideal to specialize in an ability that is very beneficial to your character.

While I know this is a shorter entry, I also know that I haven’t written anything in a while and wanted to give everyone an update - we’re still alive and kicking! I will hopefully be making more Developer Diaries soon, as there are always more mechanics to explain, and I love going through the thought process that we all went through trying to bring the best out of every mechanic.

See you soon!

The Changes:

Non-pokemon skills not permitted to heal in battle, possibly pokemon skills not permitted to heal in battle either.

Respite items added that allow a character to go into a Respite “mode” when not in battle. This allows them to give themselves different buffs, craft, cook, and heal up. Clock “ticks” are spent to do different actions.

Special abilities that are Respite time only use were created that allow a character to get slightly different buffs depending on what they pick.

Potions and healing items become more important.

Characters can no longer heal by doing nothing.

- Thief

[bleedandevolve]

Developer Diary: The Skill System

I should’ve probably done this entry a lot sooner than I am, but it’s still in testing and I’m not 100% sure it’s staying exactly how it is (though the idea would stay the same for sure) for balance reasons. So while the core will likely stay the same, unless there’s some major imbalance, the numbers are subject to change on things.

With that out of the way, I wanted to introduce the new skill system! I’ve talked a bit in previous entries about why the system needed change, and despite being in beta, I always felt bad changing things on our members because they had gotten used to things being one way, and I didn’t want to make things more difficult for them to enjoy the roleplay. However, as I’ve mentioned before, there were always fatal flaws in the systems I created, and I at least partially blame that on the rush I was in to make sure the roleplay had something in place, and that I didn’t know a whole lot of tabletop rpgs at the time. I had always wanted Monsters and Men to be a challenging roleplay that instilled fear in it’s players with what would happen to their characters next, but I was so new to the whole thing, I feel like I failed to create that environment. With the feedback I’ve received and observed from Monsters and Men, though, I hope to remedy that in Bleed and Evolve.

Skills work largely the same in the regard that they level up and grow the same - using the same table as Monsters and Men. You gain skill points for using a skill, two for a success, one for failure. At certain numbers of skill points, your skill levels up, and the threshold for it to roll under to succeed goes up by 5, capping out at 95. However, after that, things change.

Instead of skill “trees”, you now have something more akin to a “toolkit”. These categories of skills (Ex: a Thievery category or “toolkit” may have pickpocketing, lockpicking, lying, and cheating as skills) are under the same Energy Pool umbrella. Energy Pool is used to determine how many dice you roll at once for these actions - taking over the action system we had previously where you could only take two actions per post. So, you can roll from one Pool at a time, like the Thievery one I mentioned above, say it has an Energy Pool of six. I roll six dice, and I can roll whatever skills I want for those from that Energy Pool. If the Energy Pool is three, I can only roll three. The advantage of this system over the action system we had before is that it acts as a skill point sink - to get a bigger Energy Pool, you have to spend skill points on it. In addition to that, it speeds up the action and keeps momentum going.

Each Energy Pool functions a little differently depending on your race. Humans can mix and match types, since they can only use three types normally. In the event that a jewel or TM is used on them, it becomes it’s own pool. Pokemorphs can have a limited number of types per the same pool, while pokemon have everything divided by type. Bursters are also divided by type when they burst, with boosters and unowns with gifts acting similarly. Warlords act a little differently - they can create Energy Pools based on specific pokemon, or “general bonds” they form with any pokemon that are weaker and are non-specific skills.

As of right now, triggering a skill works much the same as before. You declare a target number that you think is fair for your character to set the difficulty at. They have to roll the number or over to succeed and learn the skill. Because the action system changed, however, triggering and capturing are likely to change. Stay tuned! I’ll be addressing these things as soon as I feel like the skill system is in a good spot.

For skills, instead of making new skills in a “tree” every time you wanted something better and it getting so specific it was hardly worth it, things work much more simply now. You can “refine” a skill once, adding one cool feature to it, sometimes with drawbacks based on how powerful the cool feature is.

Of course, skill point numbers that different classes get when they’re starting will be adjusted to give them more leeway to get Energy Pool they need and skill levels they need to be able to do well enough at the start, and there are always auditions if anyone feels like they need more.

That, I’m afraid, is all I have for you for this entry! If anyone wants to hear about something in particular, or has any comments, let me know and I’ll address them in the next entry. It is possible that next entry I’ll be talking about situations and how they escalate and de-escalate, as well as some other things like the potential (and optional) “Bonds” system.

Until then!

The Changes:

Action system changed in favor of Energy Pool system to replicate the PP system in the games.

Skill trees chopped in favor of skill “toolkits” which group similar skills together under one category.

Generalized, Specialized, Expertise/Unique skills thrown out the window. Skills now have to be a middle ground of specific and general when they start (Ex: You can’t start with a “Fight” skill, you’d have to start with Sword Fighting).

Skills can be “refined” and given a cool feature in exchange for skill points.

- Thief

[bleedandevolve]

Monsters and Men vs Bleed and Evolve: Why change?

I’ve spoken a lot about Monsters and Men, our previous forum and name, and I realized I should have made an entry like this sooner. Basically, I want to address what’s with all the change and why.

I’ve already covered some topics, like how enemies are starting to become their own mechanic instead of having to stat out new characters, essentially, every time you want to beat something up. How starting gear got a bit of a change with the pokemon zodiac, and other things as well. I’ll try not to re-cover those topics here.

Story time!

When I started Monsters and Men, it was because I fell in love with tabletop rpgs and had no one to play them with. My cousin, who was the only Dungeon Master I knew, decided he hated running games and abruptly stopped. I turned to the internet, but knew I wanted something specific, that I didn’t want to reinvent my old forum Chasing Our Spirits, because when I look back on it, it felt like a colossal failure to me. I wanted something similar though. I wanted to take pokemon and “ruin” it so to speak, then mash it together with tabletops. Pokemon has always been my biggest love of any sort of fandom, ever since I was very, very young, and Pokemon Yellow came out. I got a Gameboy Color just for that, and it took me hours to figure out how to leave the first house because I was a dumb kid. I sobbed when the batteries died in my Gameboy and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t play anymore. I watched the Pokemon anime whenever I could, I even went so far as to demand the Pokemon mac and cheese shapes over any other kind of shapes (the shapes are the best tasting and you won’t convince me otherwise).

I joined a few other pokemon roleplays after Chasing Our Spirits was closed down, and realized it still wasn’t fitting what I needed. That eventually spurred me into making my own again. I tried to delve into the world of tabletop rpgs, of which I was completely new to. A lot of my cousin’s rpgs were improvised on the spot, with little to no mechanical involvement. Anywho, I contacted my old friend Amissa, who I knew from back when I started this whole mess, with a little rp in a pokemon collectible's roleplay section on their forums. The roleplay was Shadow over Alleos, which I also consider a disaster, but it did teach me a few things.

We started working on what would become Monsters and Men. She had more experience than me with tabletops at this point, but I spearheaded the mechanics, thinking that I could get by with what research I did on FATE and Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying System.

Oh how wrong I was.

It became abundantly clear to me immediately after we opened in beta that we weren’t attracting people who wanted to tell a story where dice played a role. They wanted to “win” the roleplay, and quickly broke my system to make themselves very powerful. Being young and naive, it took me a while to figure out how to put my foot down and start trying to fix things, not to mention my social anxiety making it difficult for me in general. But slowly, I kept trying to fix things, and improve them. Members largely came and went, though we had a few who stuck by our side (thank you guys, you have no idea how much that meant to me).

But I still felt like I was only band-aid fixing everything. I didn’t know enough about tabletops to really fix the system in a way that wasn’t tedious to use (our later system) or completely easy to break (our earlier system). While the later system made things harder and more threatening, the fact that you had to go through useless skills to make better ones and then drop the old useless ones actually made zero sense and I don’t know why I kept running with it.

In addition, I had the luxury of seeing a few sites try to mimic my system and watched how the system fared there. I kept coming to the same conclusion though: something needs to change. A lot of things need to change.

Let me show you the problems I had and how I’m addressing them:

Problem: Skills are tedious to use because so many of them are garbage. Solution: Revamp the skill system entirely. I’ll go over how we almost completely changed skills at a later date when I’m sure I have more of it figured out, and more testing is done, but suffice it to say, I launched myself into research. I started backing rpg manuals on Kickstarter, I asked for them for Christmas, I went out and bought them and began to hoard them. I read them cover to cover, things ranging from Pathfinder to Dungeon World to Fireborn. I’m still in this process, making sure that I’m not missing anything, to make sure that things are ready to go and hopefully in better shape this time when we re-open.

The problem with the old system was that skills had to be “Generalized”, then you could “branch” a skill when it reached a certain rank to “Specialized” which could do more cool things, and then “Unique/Expertise” which could do the best stuff, but you had to level all of those skills individually. Instead of being useful, it just created a step ladder of skills that you never came back down from.

Problem: Enemies take forever to stat up and it makes combat slow to a crawl and makes people (like me) not want to post ever. Solution: At first, my solution was that I was going to improve the skill system. However, when I figured one out that I liked, I ran into the issue that it would be impossible to do without a second person. And impossible to automate, even if I paid the big bucks to someone to develop it for Xenforo. Not to mention paying them to maintain it through updates! So then it clicked, as I said in the last entry...Why did the two systems have to be the same? Who said? Well, they were wrong. I’ll give you guys an update on the new enemy system soon, I promise!

Problem: Equipment is either too powerful, or not powerful enough. Solution: Tear it up and start anew. I’ve been through so many different equipment systems I can’t even remember a lot of them. But the one I have right now I’m pretty satisfied with. I hate to say it again, but stay tuned! I’ll go over the new system soon. Problem: Pokedex (and wiki pages in general) pages were all over the place. Solution: Fuck it, make a new wiki. Start fresh. (Noticing a pattern in how I solve these issues?) It will, of course, suck to move all of that information over, but we’re changing so much to begin with that it’s not even worth trying to fix up the old wiki. Problem: Lore is all over the place, or not covering things that people need. Solution: Hand it to our local lore nerd lorekeeper Aurora. She’s extremely passionate about the setting of Bleed and Evolve, and I trust her completely with it. We have a pretty great connection when it comes to what we want out of the world of Cimmeria, and I know she’ll give it her all. I really want Cimmeria to feel like a living, breathing world you can immerse yourself into and be completely taken away. Did you ever want to know how much metal and what kind of metal 100 scrap traditionally is? Weight included? We got you covered.

Problem: There’s no good way to restrict certain types of characters (escaped pokemorphs, ect). Solution: Meta currency, my friends. Separate from scrap, which is in-game currency, the meta currency “Diamonds” will be gained from different activities, like being a Storyteller. Diamonds can be exchanged for access to a rare character type, like an escaped pokemorph. Problem: Quests are very same-y and boring. Solution: Change the system! You can see what I did in an earlier entry, but the short answer is that the whole system needed to be gutted. We had it automated on Monsters and Men, but I would trade it in a heartbeat for what it is now. What’s the bottom line answer to the question I asked in the title? We changed because I hated the direction we were going. We changed because it wasn’t working, it was time for something new. And we changed because I knew more this time around. There are so many different reasons why we rebranded as Bleed and Evolve, but one of them was because I wanted to shed some of the problems Monsters and Men had. Not to forget about them, but to start anew. We needed to make way for something better.

On that note, I think I’m going to stop this entry here. Stay tuned for more Developer Diaries, possibly one tomorrow as an update to The Enemy Turn! - Thief

[bleedandevolve]

Developer Diary: The Enemy Turn

I don’t know about all of you, but when inspiration sees me, it likes to charge me head on in the face and headbutt me. And then I’m supposed to take what it dishes out and write about it. A lot. A lot a lot.

What a weird life us writers live.

Anyway! Today’s topic is the enemy turn. I don’t know how many of you have been Game Masters or Dungeon Masters, but you know what’s always been the bane of my existence when I roleplayed on Monsters and Men?

The enemy turn. Basically, anything that involved statting up a completely new character (sometimes multiple) so that I could beat them into the ground.

Now, granted, towards the end of Monster and Men’s lifespan, we had a lot of things automated. The enemy turn was not one of those things. We came close, spawning a pokemon was automated, but you still had to roleplay the pokemon, you still had to track things, their HP, their skill ranks, what skills they had, and it only got worse when there was more than one pokemon. Hopefully you never had to spawn a non-pokemon, because that had no spawner and you were on your own. This was especially annoying as a Monsters and Men equivalent of a Storyteller, because it was either take the time and effort to stat out a non-pokemon (or several) so your players could beat it up, or purely spawn pokemon. You didn’t have a whole lot of options, and putting all that work into statting out people and pokemon was tiring. I know at least for me, it made me not want to post in threads where there was a lot of fighting. But we were originally almost entirely fighting based, so there wasn’t much to be done to get around it.

After reading some posts on the RPG subreddit and reading through my manual of Dungeon World, inspiration finally struck me. I was in the process of writing down some things for the equipment system (more on that in another entry!) at the time, so I quickly wrote that down and began to toss around some ideas in my notebook.

The first of these ideas was a communal health pool. Then it became a combination of a health pool and conviction, which I quickly named “Morale”. Conviction is health, but for the social system, and I wanted people to be able to contribute in battle even if they were just yelling demoralizing things at the enemies. But Morale was a high number because it represented all of the enemies. This way though, you were only tracking one number, and one target.

Another thing I considered was the overall skill rank of the enemies. And I decided that it would be the “average” of the group that you would get, so they only have one skill rank, too. Of course, you can still do things like have Journeys that have enemies that are “two skill ranks above/below” your highest skill, but this way, from what I figured, you wouldn’t be lost if you decided to catch one of the pokemon involved in the enemy posse.

That posed it’s own challenge - what happens if you want to catch a pokemon that’s involved in the enemy group? So far, I’ve been playing around with that once you lower the enemy’s Morale, you get a post to do what you will to all of them. One hit will kill them, you can catch them, or you can let them run.

While we’re still working out the finer details, like what type the attack is that’s hitting you is, and what are good numbers for different scenarios, preliminary play testing is so far showing that this idea is not only simpler, but a lot faster, and that’s very valuable in a forum environment.

We are testing currently with the idea that enemies only can attack the amount of times that there are enemies (so four enemies could attack four times) but only if their last attack was successful. They get to keep going if they roll a success, so in one go, that enemy group could roll four successes and knock you on your butt. But if they failed even once, their “cascade” stops, and they have to wait until the next post to attack again. This also made it a lot faster to get through a fight, though, because you weren’t rolling two actions a turn for everyone. No, here you’re rolling multiple with Energy Pools and this new idea on how to do enemies. And like I said, that’s valuable, because no one likes fights to drag on for two pages worth of posts (we, unfortunately, had a member on MaM who had this happen to them) because everyone is constantly missing. I mean, sure, it’s not fun either to get instantly curb stomped, and it’s boring to hit each other constantly and not have anything happen. It’s all about finding a balance, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

I do fully think (and hope) this is a workable solution to the issue of enemies being a pain in the ass to stat out and track. As one of my fellow staffers, Aurora, put it, the fights also feel more cinematic this way, which is lovely when it comes to forum roleplay. I’m going to keep testing it and seeing what I need to tweak to get it to work, if need be I’ll go back to the drawing board, but this seems like we’re on the right track! I’ll probably write a follow-up journal to this once we have more solid information, but I’m really excited about the prospect of this and thought I should share it with you guys!

The Changes:

Enemies no longer rely on the same statting system as player characters and their pokemon.

Enemies share a health pool that is combined with their Conviction.

Enemies can only attack as many times as there are enemies.

Enemies share a skill rank “average” for their attacks.

Enemies have communal instincts that effect all of them as a whole.

- Thief

[bleedandevolve]

Developer Diary: Why Character Classes?

Characters can have a wide variety of skills that make up who they are. A person who’s sneaky, good with knives and pickpocketing will have a different feel than someone who is good with two handed swords, heavy armor and screaming into the void.

In a lot of tabletop rpgs, especially classic ones, there are classes for your character to be. Warrior, wizard, archer, thief....Sometimes they’re very flexible and allow for great character customization, other times they’re strict and require you to play into a certain archetype, which can develop your character in certain ways other than mechanically, whether you like that or not.

With Monsters and Men, when we started, there were a few things I wanted. I wanted character classes (then called “groups”, but it got confusing in my opinion with groups and organizations that were in the world) to be broad enough that it wasn’t making sneaky thief characters be bad and shady people. Over time, we added other classes, and even split some, like having Keeper be it’s own thing separate from Elite and Leader. New, more defined parts of factions emerged, and we added those, too. These were all used to give a sense of what the character should get for starting gear and give a general idea of what their lifestyle was like. We started running into problems when civilians wanted to have Danger Level A pokemon running around with them. I set out to solve this with the permits system, but that was towards the end of Monsters and Men’s life span. Until then, we were just restrictive on what a civilian could start with, which made them undesirable to play.

There were other classes who got left in the dust of course, and when everything settled and I could take a serious look at class balance, I realized there were it was worse than I originally thought. An example was that unown were all assumed to be the same starting wise, and after I started fleshing out other classes to have different starting gear based on different factors (Rangers had three choices, Adventurers had it based on their allegiance to a group, ect) I realized this wasn’t going to work out super well. So I set out to change the system, because I wasn’t happy due to the cobbled together differences between how a character class got stuff to start with, and I wasn’t happy that there were certain groups suffering for it.

So I settled on a modular system, but wasn’t sure how to make it work. I’m always huge on customization in anything I do, I need everything I have and do to be unique to me. Not sure why, it’s just how I roll. It’s why, for the most part, I find video games much more restrictive than tabletop rpgs, and part of why I ended up making Monsters and Men in the first place over trying to learn to code and make a video game.

After some discussion among the staff, and my own love of basing things off of the zodiac signs, arcana cards, and the like, I decided that we should jump in with something different. It would have been nice to do this by year, and make everything very different every year, but we settled on month and day range that a character was born, due to it being much more flexible. In addition to this “extra” system of getting goodies, everyone would get starting gear based on rank in their character class.

So, let’s do this with the pokemorph class first. Pokemorphs were always a tough one for me, because I never wanted to give players of them much. I wanted to actively dissuade people from playing pokemorphs and only pokemorphs, because we never had enough Keepers for all of them, and you know, diversity. Diversity is good.

Pokemorph starting gear would be broken up by Danger Level, but it would really only provide you with skill points and maybe a few other minor things. The real goodies you would get would come from your character’s birthday - not year, but month and day range.

Cimmeria, because I want to make this less complicated for people, follows a twelve month system, and uses English names for said months. While I would have loved to do custom month names, I feel like I would lose people in the shuffle, there. I know it would make more sense for Cimmeria to have different month names, but less confusion for potential new members is good.

In addition to the month, there is of course the day range. This is represented by the minor arcana of either cups, swords, wands, or coins. So, for example, the first week of the month would be wands, the second week cups, third week coins, and last week swords. This would give you one extra starting item, while the main items would be coming from the month in your character’s birthday. This way, people would be relying more on their birthday to get items they wanted, instead of their character class.

So, your starting class gives you skill points, your birth month gives you items, and the day you were born gives you a single item. While it’s less unique in the sense that it doesn’t provide every class with every play style some sort of bonus that applies directly to them right away, I also like the uniformity it gives. I hope to make the items given by month and day diverse enough that it’s a strategy to pick when your character was born, and that many different kinds of characters can make use of the items.

I also wanted to make civilians more appealing. So, in addition to re-balancing the Danger Level of a lot of pokemon, ultimately I decided to create the Pathfinder license. You have to be a civilian of a settlement that is 21 or older, and you have to pass certain tests. When you finish and succeed, you are permitted to have up to Danger Level B pokemon, which should improve the diversity of what a civilian can have drastically. In addition, with permits, a character could have an Danger Level A pokemon while being a civilian, but I would expect that the character knew what they were getting into and that the pokemon was sufficiently tame and behaved. I considered making it so that you couldn’t have Danger Level A pokemon who were wild as a civilian, at least not legally. Pokemon who are bred by humans are often domesticated and therefore dumbed down and less dangerous. Adventurers were changed as well, so that they weren’t strictly better civilians. Now, an adventurer needs to not be settled in one place, unlike a civilian, who lives in one location primarily.

The last thing on my list to do, and actually the thing that started this whole mess of me digging into character classes, was sorting out how someone goes up in rank or changes class in-game. Before, it was kind of a vague system where you had to have a mod heavy thread after “a lot of development” and prove your character fit the new class. Although I’m not one to dissuade creativity, I did change how it works so that it was more mechanically sound and had better direction for people looking to change their character class. For example, you now can change your character class after six threads, but you won’t gain anything from the new class’s starting gear, as it was before. I’m still hashing out the details of what it takes to rank up in the League and Crusade, but it’ll be on the page soon!

I’ll stop rambling your ear off here, but I hope me trying to explain my thought process has been helpful to someone out there. If anyone has any topics they’d like me to cover in the next entry, let me know!

The Changes

Starting gear largely removed except skill points.

Starting items determined by your birth month and day.

Pokemon zodiac created.

Older civilians allowed B Danger Level pokemon with Pathfinder license.

Adventurers given slightly more restriction.

Class and rank changes quantified.

- Thief

[bleedandevolve]

The Rules, and why they needed to change

Have you ever looked back on something you did years ago and realized how bad it sounded, or at least regretted it? I’m willing to bet a lot of people have at least one thing like that.

Writing is hard sometimes. Being in charge of things is hard. When you combine these two things, things can feel like they need to be rushed or fixed or changed completely. Sometimes a combination of all three. I was a very inexperienced admin when I started Monsters and Men, having only been an admin three times previously, and on two of those occasions, it was for a very brief period of time. MaM was opened for about three years, and the rules I wrote for the forum had barely changed in that time period.

When we were redesigning into Bleed and Evolve, I realized there were things I wanted to change about the rules, but didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. Here’s what I wanted to accomplish:

Content Warnings - I wanted to add these. After being exposed for so long to people who used the phrase “triggers” incorrectly, by making it interchangeable with “dislike”, I wrongly assumed that everyone would. And that just from the site’s premise, they should understand that everything wouldn’t be rainbows and Butterfree. I also thought that Player Profiles having dislikes and triggers listed on them would help people, but what I didn’t realize was a lot of people either didn’t make a profile, didn’t read the other profiles of even the person they were currently roleplaying with, or both.

Alter the RPG Rating - For a while, I flipped back and forth on being 3-2-3, 3-2-2, or even 2-2-2. I wanted to give people freedom, of course. But I personally had two things I really didn’t like - heavy description of gore, and sexual content. We’ve always been fade to black when it came to actual sex, because I’m a sex repulsed asexual and I didn’t want that kind of thing in my “house” so to speak. Gore (and lots of depictions of blood) just make me nauseous. So I wasn’t ever sure how to elaborate on exactly what I wanted. With the Content Warning system though, I was ready to settle in at 3-2-3. For me, and I explain this in the rules, that means that language and violence had no rules, but sex was still fade to black.

Better explain the “don’t be a jerk out of character because it’s normal for people to be jerks in-character in-universe” rule - This one I almost felt like didn’t require a rule, so I was resistant to putting it up at first. See, in the Bleed and Evolve world, Cimmeria, homophobia is rampant because people want as many babies coming into existence as possible. Transphobia is a lot less present, but with one major group’s culture in particular, it’s also an issue. There’s other social issues as well, but we’ll cover that in a different entry. The point is, we have a lot of places where people could express opinions that, while it wouldn’t seem out of place in Cimmeria, would be very unwelcome in the out of character side of things - not even just bringing in me being on the trans spectrum, and being in a relationship with a demigirl when I’m afab. It wasn’t just for me, I wanted other people to feel comfortable, too. I wanted to make it clear that we wouldn’t tolerate hateful behavior, but I always felt that I worded the rule poorly.

IC Actions = IC Consequences - Unknown to me, people actually take this rule as “an admin will ruin your day if they don’t like you” instead of it’s intended “Don’t prank a sleeping Dragonite and expect plot armor”. Cimmeria is supposed to suck. People die a lot. I didn’t want people going in thinking that they couldn’t die so they would repeatedly break the setting for funsies. It breaks the immersion for me and my fun when that happens, because I’ve (and my other staff team members have too) spent a long time crafting and creating this world. Don’t get me wrong, I want people to be creative, but I also get frustrated when there’s setting breaking.

The old rules also had a tangent that was on the funnier side of things about how sexual content needed to be tagged, even before the fade to black. I realized that didn’t really get the point across, though, so I set out to change it to something with maybe one funny comment at the end, and a lot shorter and to the point. Until now, sexual content was the only thing required to be tagged.

While I fiddled with the rules a couple times to find something I liked, I’ve largely settled on them and will be putting them on our wiki tomorrow. There are, of course, rules that stayed, like having to be 16 or older to join. I’ve always considered bumping it to 18 or older, but I’ve always been worried that it would cut our niche member base to being even smaller. I guess I’m still undecided on that, but will have a decision made by the time I post the rules up officially.

Liquid time was of course staying, which means that characters can be in more than one thread at a time in different locations. Face claim rules were staying, especially that they weren’t required. I’ve had people tell me that was a selling point for them, and although I’m sure it would reach a slightly bigger audience if we opened up face claims to being able to use real life people, I’m just not a fan. So we’re sticking to drawn art, animanga, video games - you get the idea.

No character limits and no word count requirement. These were big for me to have on my own site. I’m personally the type of person who wants to have a large cast of characters, to experience all the things that I want to in the world of Cimmeria. I’m sure there are others like me. Word counts were something I was never a fan of, and originally this rule started off as “match your partner” because I didn’t want people feeling slighted when someone wrote less than them. I realized that was between the players, and not really something I should be trying to gatekeep, so the rule was changed into two: “communicate with your partner(s)” and “we have no word count, if you’re unhappy about something, talk to your writing partner”.

Having to have an out of character account was something I debated on a couple times, after reading that several people didn’t like it. Being the pushover I am, I would change it from needing to have an OOC account, to not needing one, and back again. I’ve now settled firmly into people needing one, just because it helps with certain aspects of the site, like acting as a Storyteller.

The last thing I wanted to touch on was avatar size, and it’s a minor point, but one I felt I needed to make anyway. I really loved having huge 250x500 avatars. It made me feel like no one needed to use a signature. Without a plugin though, Xenforo (our new forum software) is unable to go beyond 192x192. This is both a blessing and a curse, because now no one (myself included) has to find as big of avatar pictures as they used to. It’s a curse because, well, as I said, I really liked that we could have such big avatars.

Whew! I think that’s all for this entry guys. Thanks for reading!

- Thief

[bleedandevolve]

Developer Diary: Death System Rework

Cake or death?

Most people would choose the cake for their roleplay characters. There’s a big divide between forum roleplayers and tabletop rpg gamers, and that’s that one is usually okay with their character potentially dying, whereas the other is staunchly against even the idea. The tabletop rpgers will usually either have another character already rolled up already, or not find it to be a huge deal if they die. Forum roleplayers are usually very, very against their characters dying in my personal experience.

When we were Monsters and Men, death was strict. If you (or your pokemon) hit below 0 HP, that was it. You were dead. There was a chance of you coming back, but you were basically at the mercy of the staff because there was no official mechanic in place to determine if you got to come back or not. And again, forum roleplayers are not normally the biggest fans of other people getting a say in what happens to their character. Which is understandable, it’s easily abused when it’s not a defined mechanic. It wasn’t handled the best, which I completely acknowledge. But, if I can offer up a note on that, it was in part because I was completely new to tabletops and had no idea what I was doing.

As a forum roleplay with tabletop mechanics, we’re kind of in a limbo. We’re trying to please both sides in some ways, and that usually doesn’t work out well. It caused more harm than good in many situations for us, and I wanted to address that with the death mechanic in particular. If I learned one thing from Monsters and Men, in the two years I ran it, it’s that in general, it’s just hard to please everyone as staff, with your world and mechanics, so you’re better off just trying to make yourself happy. In my humble opinion, anyway.

As someone who hoards characters, it dawned on me that I would actually be upset to permanently lose most of them. I’m very attached to them - and I’m willing to bet that a lot of people are attached to their characters, too. That, combined with the above, made me start wondering if there was a way for us to change the death system so that it was fair, and wasn’t the end for every character who dropped below 0 HP.

I started looking into the mechanic of “saving throws” that other tabletops rpgs have. At first, the idea I came up with was a “death saving throw”, and made a solid mechanic out of what would happen to your character after they dropped below 0 HP. You rolled dice, and fate decided on if you were saved by a legendary (at a cost), miraculously revived on your own (at a cost), nothing happened, or you were dealt a death blow, which meant that yes, you really died. This solved some problems, by making a mechanic out of something that used to be up to the staff. However, it didn’t quite do what I wanted yet. We had never had anyone quit because they died, though largely people were careful and only lost pokemon. We had one character die, but be brought back, and two (I think) pokemon die in the span of two years.

My experience with the player who had their character brought back is something I reflected on when I was trying to change the death system. They didn’t like that they didn’t get to decide what happened to their character as a result of them dying. And many people on forum roleplay resource sites, even if they’re just the vocal minority, will say that it’s a deal breaker if you can die, and/or have stuff done to your character without your permission. I had to somehow cater to the tabletop rpg nerd in me, but also make the game accessible to others. We’re a niche roleplay. I don’t want to make it any harder for people to join us.

In addition to that, Cimmeria is supposed to be a harsh and unforgiving place, and I wanted the mechanics to reflect that. I didn’t want people left and right punching Yveltals and then having no consequences happening to them. It would break the setting, and that, for me, is really hard for me to take.

So, getting to the point, I came up with two different death systems, one for player characters and one for their pokemon. When a player character dies (even if they’re a pokemon), they make a choice. Either suffer a major consequence, or die for good. Major consequences would be things like being turned into an unown, or otherwise being indebted to a legendary, losing a limb and probably gaining an instinct to reflect that in the process - basically, things aren’t going to be the same for that character ever again. It opens up a lot of character development potentially - if a character dies and is brought back as an unown, that’s a huge life change. That’s a lot of plots that change. That’s really what I wanted. There’s a consequence to your actions, and that’s reflected in what position your character is now in who died.

For owned pokemon, the system for death that we would use would be the one I detailed that I had originally - the “dice of chance” so to speak. You would roll when the pokemon died to see what happened to them. While it still could be interpreted as too strict, a roleplay can continue if you lose a pokemon. Losing the character themselves is putting an end to the roleplay through their perspective.

Now that I’ve rambled your ear off, I’ll put up the summary of this developer diary.

- Thief

The Changes:

Death system completely reworked, two separate systems made for player characters and player owned pokemon.

[bleedandevolve]

Developer Diary: Quests Rework

Hello hello and welcome to the first Developer Diary on this tumblr! With Developer Diaries, we hope to share the thought process behind changes and implementations of different mechanics and lore. And hopefully not just ramble into the void, but it’s possible that’ll happen too.

Today’s Developer Diary is focused on quests. Quests are an important part of the roleplay, it helps people develop their characters and push them forward both storywise and mechanically. It ties in with the three thread types we have - modless, modlite and mod heavy. The different thread types determine if a Storyteller is involved at all. A Storyteller (or ST) is someone (anyone! it doesn’t have to be staff) who moderates the thread and makes things happen. Originally, these guys had to come up with a lot of things on the spot. Sure, we provided prompts in the form of what pokemon would appear more likely in the quest, and what the quest’s goal was, but other than that, they were on their own. It made it a lot of work to be a Storyteller (then called “mods”, the name change is because I noticed people get confused between a staff moderator and a “mod” for a thread).

In the same vein, we had modless threads. We had tables for what you would encounter based on what you rolled, but the system was stiff, oftentimes directing exactly what the encounter was (social or fighting or even just picking up an item), with an exact pokemon, whether it was special at all, and generally speaking, they were boring with not a lot of freedom. However, they were the best way to rank up skills and have things happen, so a lot of people did them.

After reading the tabletop RPG manual for Ironsworn, I got hit with some major inspiration to change this stiff system into something a little more loose, and able to tell more of a story. For those of you who aren’t going to bother clicking the link, Ironsworn is a tabletop RPG that’s able to be played solo - that means no GM, and just one person going on a journey. I was really intrigued by this because I started the original version of Bleed and Evolve (then called Shadows over Alleos) because I had no one to play tabletop games with. And I want people to be able to write their own stories easily in the roleplay, character development and relationships are incredibly important to me.

What I gathered from Ironsworn was giving the player more agency with the quest. People who do forum roleplay heavily favor agency over letting dice dictate everything - and I agree, to an extent. I personally prefer to have dice add a randomness and flavor to what I’m writing so that it doesn’t feel as predictable to me.

So I looked at Ironsworn’s mechanic for how characters go about their quest in the world of the Ironlands, and came up with this idea. Modless quests would, instead of being stiff, become more relaxed. Sure, there would still be tables for things when you wanted or needed them - both pokemon and events on separate tables. But instead of those tables being specific, they would just include a list of pokemon, and a list of loose events to push the quest forward. You would still be provided a prompt  on what the character needed to accomplish in the quest (example being “go to a shrine and bless this amulet”), but you would determine how the character reached that end point.

You would need to complete a certain number of rolls before the quest would end still, as was with the old system. However, you would determine how those rolls came into play in the story your character was going through. These rolls also wouldn’t be linear and based off of the tables. Nope. Like Ironsworn, they would be retooled to have outcomes, determined by the dice. In Ironsworn, they’re referred to as “Strong Hit”, “Weak Hit” and “Miss”. Here, they would be referred to as “outcomes” as well, and would be called “Conquest” “Triumph” “Botch” and “Fiasco”. You can also break these terms into a much easier terms to understand, “Strong Hit”, “Weak Hit” “Miss” “Bad Miss”. Here’s how they break down:

Conquest - You succeed at whatever it is you’re trying to do, but you succeed too well. Success comes at a price.

Triumph - You succeed, but not as much as you would hope.

Botch - You fail in what you were trying to accomplish, but not by enough that it’s catastrophic.

Fiasco - You both fail in what you attempted to do, and cost yourself something in the process.

Regardless of the roll on these “challenge dice”, it moves the story forward. You can’t keep attempting the same thing over and over again, so the story must move on. There is no “redo” button. Battles proceed with the battle system, and make use of our skill system instead of “challenge dice”. However, how many battles, and if there are battles, is up to the player. Until a battle of some kind is initiated (a fight, social combat, or contest), the challenge dice are king.

Let’s run through an example, to make this clear. Let’s say my quest is to bless the amulet I was given by a farmer who is highly religious. Okay. I decide I want to venture out into the woods, and roll the challenge dice, a 1d4. Maybe I roll a Fiasco instead, and find myself lost in a desert. Cimmeria is an odd place, that could happen.

So now I’m in the desert. I decide to roll to find a pokemon to interact with. This time I roll a Conquest, and while I find a pokemon, I find a lot of them. But maybe they’re friendly enough when I tell them I’m searching for a legendary pokemon’s shrine. They point me in the right direction after I use social combat to persuade them to do so.

I go through a few more rolls to get to the “end game” requirement, which is perhaps five rolls total. I then can end the quest, but I have to roll a challenge dice to see how it ends. Maybe for this I roll a Botch. So while I make it to the shrine, nothing happens to the amulet when I try to bless it. From here, it’s up to me how I want to officially end the quest. Maybe I go back to the farmer and use social combat to convince him that it is, in fact, blessed. He hands me a handsome quest reward and I’m on my way.

Quests this way will not only be shorter than our original system where you had to roll 10-20 times to end it, but have more uniqueness and flavor for each character that goes through it.

Modlite threads can also benefit from this system. But instead of the writer interpreting a dice, a Storyteller does. Instead of having an event table to roll for and a pokemon table dictating what pokemon show up, these things would be chosen by the Storyteller. This not only eases the load on the Storyteller as far as having to carry the weight of the story, but presents some agency in a modlite thread for the character. It’s more collaborative instead of leaning heavily on one person or the other. Additionally, it opens more quests up to more types of characters. I remember that many quests on our old forum had the restriction that of “no pokemon”, which made it hard for pokemon characters to find quests.

I believe that’s all I have to say on the matter! I’ll provide a tl;dr at the bottom of the journal for the people who didn’t want to read all of that. For those of you who did, thank you! I hope to write more things for you to read in the future about my thought process for these mechanics and lore things.

- Thief

The Changes:

Quests reworked heavily to favor more story instead of stiff mechanical encounters.

Quests renamed to Journeys

Mods renamed to Storytellers