It’s been about a year since we announced our open beta. We’ve gotten a ton of great feedback, and done a ton of play testing. We’ve made big changes over the past ~12 months.
The new changes we’re announcing in this post are the most massive changes we’ve made to the system since we launched our open beta. These changes are substantive enough that we seriously considered branching into 2 separate versions of the game; and maintaining both systems. We settled on making these changes, and not maintaining 2 branches of the system, because these changes really improve the speed of system interactions during play, and are more in line with our 3 design pillars: fun, elegance, & speed.
All of the changes below have been made across the whole wiki on Etherole.com. If you’re using that website, you’re using the latest version of the game.
Resource Mechanics Changes
Charge Resource Removed
We removed the resources called “charges” that characters used to spend to perform certain actions, or activate certain powers.
We had to rework ~120 out of 350 powers, re-write the combat (grappling) section, emotion section, character traits, antagonist statblocks, vehicles, and more.
Our rational for this change is bullet-pointed below.
- Charges were a vestigial system that were put in place to balance another mechanic that we abandoned over a year ago.
- Even as a vestigial system, we felt that the charge mechanic had some value in mechanically differentiating between characters with different attributes(Physical, Social, Mental).
- The amount of work to remove this vestigial organ is substantial, and we wanted to focus on writing new things, not retreading old ground.
- However, removing this subsystem will result in huge gains to elegance, fun, and resolution speed.
- We can’t ignore these gains. They’re core to our project.
- However, removing this subsystem will result in huge gains to elegance, fun, and resolution speed.
- Charges stopped mattering after tier 1.
- Tier 1 characters could run out of Charges.
- Tier 2 and 3 characters would almost never run out of charges, unless the GM contrived hard to make it so.
- If a mechanic becomes meaningless with slightly higher stats, it’s probably not a good mechanic.
- Different charge types had more/better utility.
- Endurance charges had the most, Cunning charges had the second most, and Willpower charges were in a distant last place.
- Fixing this issue wasn’t impossible, but it would have been a lot of work with the end-goal being to slap a bandaid on a vestigial organ.
- A potentially Sisyphean task.
Mana Changes
- We’re renaming “Mana” to “Energy”
- Everyone has it now. Not just special people, monsters, and player characters.
- All powers which previously had a Charge cost now have a higher mana cost.
Powers Changes
As noted above, we changed ~120 out of 350+ powers as a result of removing the charge resource mechanic.
We’ve also made a ton of other little tweaks to powers. We’re not noting them in full here; we’ll give a broad outline.
- All powers buy-costs adjusted
- Mostly slightly upward, but some down.
- All powers activation costs adjusted
- “Must have” powers removed.
- The “must have” powers only provided mathematical advantages on tests, and did not provide new capabilities or new fun.
- With the removal of these powers, we made changes to some core mechanics.
- Most notably: armor & weapons
- Example:
- The Unarmored Dodge power linked to the Mobility skill allowed you to forgo wearing armor while increasing your Dodge Defense. Instead of rolling (Physical + Mobility + Armor) you would roll (Physical + (Mobility X 2)).
- With a reasonably high Mobility skill, this provided a big mathematical benefit over wearing armor.
- This made it a “must have” power.
- It also provided a secondary benefit: perfect concealment. You weren’t wearing armor, so there was no way for an enemy to detect your armor, and no way for them to even have a chance at knowing how high your defenses were. This broke a core tenant of our design: Everyone should have a chance to know just how dangerous a character is.
- With a reasonably high Mobility skill, this provided a big mathematical benefit over wearing armor.
- The Unarmored Dodge power linked to the Mobility skill allowed you to forgo wearing armor while increasing your Dodge Defense. Instead of rolling (Physical + Mobility + Armor) you would roll (Physical + (Mobility X 2)).
- Example:
- Most notably: armor & weapons
Cosmetics
Cosmetics are really important in TTRPGs. We’ve created a section about cosmetics on the character creation page. This section should help players understand how to make the mechanics of the game match up with their character concept & the cosmetics that go along with it.