Manifest Rpg

Leveling Up is an important part of RPGs. Really, it’s an important part of gaming in general; whether increasing your character’s options, adding troops to your army, or personally getting better at “the game.” While I certainly appreciate the latter form of improvement, I do want to add a more concrete mechanical form of “leveling up.”

In the 0.1 version of the ruleset, this was handled with the total of a Manifestation’s Tier and Bond. A “first level” Manifestation would only have 1 Tier and 1 Bond, while a higher level Manifestation might have 3 Tier and 2 Bond.

In the 0.2 version of the ruleset, the Tier/Bond system has been replaced with a single Emotional-stat mechanic, with Tier representing a Manifestation’s “Level.” This is much simpler and easier to manage, but what does a higher Tier actually do?

Originally, Tier was a kind of “level” mechanic. It evolved into a counterbalance to Bond, so that you could either have a controlled, stable, and crafty Manifestation, or a high-Tier rampaging monster, uncontrolled and high-damaging. It was a nod to the basic trope of “strong or smart.”

That’s been simplified with the single-number stat mechanic we have now, so what use is Tier? Well, “level” wasn’t the only way all the monster-collector games ranked their different mons. A lot of them also had “evolutions.”

Time to bring that back, I think.

One of the big questions raised by this restructuring is: how to handle LP?

Hit points drastically effect how a game plays: how abundant they are, how easy they are to lose or regain, and any other uses for them all have a significant impact on an RPG. Are Manifestations fragile or robust? How many turns, on average, will it take for a Manifestation to kill another Manifestation of the same Tier? A higher Tier? Lower?

Can LP be used for other purposes? Are some special abilities fueled by LP? Can any Manifestation spend LP to boost their POWER or CONTROL, or only ones with a specific passive? Can Manifestations heal their own LP? Other’s LP? Is it only the Agent’s job?

I can answer that last one: for Manifest v0.2, I want to keep healing as an exclusive Agent ability. I also want Manifestations to be fragiler than not, thereby giving weight to the decision of healing a Manifestation vs re-summoning it later. I also don’t want the game to drag, and fragile units can help speed things up. None of that gives solid numbers, though — a 100 HP wizard is pretty fragile if a dagger does 500 damage — so how do I decide how much LP to give Manifestations?

Last time I went over some issues regarding the die-pool, namely its size and where it came from. I looked at a few sizes and found myself torn between an average die-pool size of 5 or 10.

Thankfully, an easy solution has presented itself — doubly easy because it will be simple to change if I need to.

Die-Pools are built by totaling an Agent’s emotional stats and dividing by two. Human average is 2 apiece, and I’m currently playing with Agents having a 10 to 14 stat-point limit, so that naturally puts the die-pool in the 5 to 7 range. If I decide to switch to 10, then I drop the dividing-by-two bit. No fuss!

Oh, also I came up with a better name for Sync. Now, ability rolls will be divided into POWER and CONTROL.

Last time, I went through what I learned from the first playtest of Manifest v0.1, and made a quick-and-dirty skeleton for moving forward. This time, I’d like to…well, start moving forward.

First and foremost, I’d like to take a harder look at the basic Stat-Investment Power Roll, and see if I can’t find ways to smooth it out, both ludo-narratively and statistically.

So, let’s go to Anydice!

I was originally planning on doing a few different playtests before commenting, but the first playtest was pretty definitive, and I feel good about its results.

Thanks to the efforts of “P,” “C,” “S,” and “W,” (Names obviously hidden to respect privacy) I have decided which die-roll mechanic to use going forward. The winner is the third option, Pooled-Single-Number.

I’ll come up with a better name by the end of this post.

The art of playtesting is a rich one, and I don’t have the time or the energy to spell all of it out.

Instead, I’ll detail the things I want to explore with playtesting, and how I will do so.

Last time I looked into a whole new ruleset. Now, I’d like to put all the rules I’ve come up with so far in one place, slot in some numbers, and see if that shakes anything out. The following are three different rulesets with…wait, three?

I told you this would happen. After the last post, my mind kept working, and shook out a few more ideas, as well as some polish to previous ones. When my brain gets wandery, it gets wandery.

First, let’s go over the universal basics of all the three rulesets:

I knew this would happen.

My brain goes through phases. I tend to get interested in something, and then as my excitement starts to wane, a new idea drives me in a new direction. In some cases it’s a whole new subject or project. In other cases, its a fundamental rework of the project I’m working on.

To explain: After describing the system to one of my friends, he made a suggestion that grabbed my attention. I liked it enough that I started rethinking the entire Power Roll mechanic. The idea that my friend gave me was “what if the Manifestations give you a pool of dice that you can distribute between them for actions? That way you can decide where to put your energies.”

Now, I had given a fairly bare-bones description of the full(ish) ruleset, so I needed to adjust a few things, but the result is…well, I could say simpler or cleaner, but really what appeals to me about it is it’s different. I’d had a good length of time to get used to the other way of rolling, so this new idea was, if not better, at least new.

Last time I explored the strategic impact Agents had on the game. This time, I’d like to get down to some brassy tic-tacs, and look at one of the most important and fundamental aspects of Manifestation Combat: Abilities.

Abilities are anything from basic moves to special attacks. Each Manifestation has at least 1, possibly 2. They can be active, passive, reactions, stances, or anything similar. They are, in short the possible actions any Manifestation can make.

Each active Ability also has a Sync ability: when a Power Roll is made, any die that shows equal or less than the Manifestation’s Bond level causes a special effect. This can be adding damage, conditions, free movement, or anything that a regular ability can do.

On second thoughts, we could turn Sync from an Ability bonus to a Manifestation bonus: the effect will therefore be the same whichever ability the Manifestation uses.