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Grayboxing
🕑 Added 2023-02-10 18:34:55 +0000 UTCWe’re doing a weekly test on Fridays (alas, not every Friday, Flee, Mortals! and ARCADIA still come first) and tinkering with the rules for our new game and I want to make sure folks understand exactly what we’re doing and why.
You’re gonna see us talking about actual play. This isn’t paper-design, we’re actually trying out our ideas, as we have them, in a real gameplay environment. Here’s a dungeon, here’s some goblins, let’s go. Play. Record what worked and what didn’t. Revise. Play again!
So you’re gonna hear about ‘the Tactician’ or ‘the Conduit’ and you’ll get glimpses of how we think they’ll work. Like the Conduit has prayers that generate Wrath and prayers that generate Virtue and they can use these resources to attack/debuff enemies (Wrath) or heal/buff allies (Virtue) or combinations thereof. And maybe they roll the cosmic die at the beginning of every turn? Not for Drama, just to generate more Wrath (Chaos) and/or Virtue (Law).
That’s cool, we like that. But is that “how this character works?”
No.
Simulation
Because right now, even though we’re “playing” tacticians & talents & conduits & beasthearts, they're not real classes. They're simulations of our classes. They look cool! And are fun to play, but in reality we don’t have a single class level designed yet. We don’t even know how class levels work yet. Sure, we have a bucket of cool abilities labeled “Tactician” and they all describe “things we think a tactician should be able to do.” But we only did that because we needed SOMETHING to test our core rules with.
By “core rules” I mean;
- Custom dice with a small range of successes instead of a WIDE range of numbers.
- Attributes ARE dice. “Agility 2” means roll 2 attribute dice.
- Being proficient with something means you roll the proficiency die with a unique range of results.
- Facings include successes, one crit, and surges.
- Testing what the Crit does. A singular “take another action” effect that can only happen on one facing of the proficiency die representing being “in the zone.”
- Testing what surges do. Several facings on the attribute dice have surges, including facings with 2 surges, and they represent a burst of adrenaline, insight, or literally magic. “And something cool happens!”
- Your core actions do not require an attack roll, just roll for impact.
- Armor reduces incoming damage by an amount proportional to how much slower it makes you.
- Movement is important and many abilities move people around the battlefield and even slam enemies into walls or statues. Being hard to move is one way to be a tank (see Armor, above).
- Each side acts as a team, no individual-initiative.
- Each class has some resource to manage, and their coolest stuff requires a lot of resources, so battles get MORE interesting the longer they go. Some classes can tweak or ignore this notion in special ways to support a specific archetype.
- Some abilities are analog, affect many targets, and can be resisted. I roll for Impact, each target rolls to see how much of it they resist. The excess is applied as damage. (fire breath, lightning bolt, Rain of Daggers)
- Some abilities are digital and affect 1 target. Roll stat vs stat and if I win, you suffer the effect (hold person, polymorph, grappling).
That’s a lot! It is a LOT to test, it’s way too much to test while at the same time trying to test actual character design. Because real characters are pretty complicated. They have a Class, sure, but also…
- An ancestry representing physical differences between species (humans can’t breath fire!)
- A culture representing the various skills people from your part of the world tend to spend their time on (swampy country does not tend to produce excellent cavalry).
- A Career Path representing the choices they made growing up that led to them becoming a 1st level adventurer (like, university, or the military, or just…our farm was attacked by goblins and I sought out a legendary swordmaster to train me for revenge!)
- Skills that can be affected by some of the above.
- Attributes that can be affected by some of the above.
- Eventually, magic items that can break the rules and grant entirely new abilities.
- Eventually a Team or Organization that grants abilities that make your Team feel unique and different from other adventuring companies.
- And probably other stuff I’m forgetting.
We could try to figure out ALL of the above, characters and combat and core rules, before ever testing anything. Do it all on paper, write it all up in design docs, then argue about it all, then build something that incorporates ALL that design, and do our first test. I have worked on games designed this way.
It’s a bad process. You end up with a bunch of good ideas you haven’t tested, each dependent on other good ideas you also haven’t tested. With the result that A: it immediately falls apart and you don’t even get 20 minutes into your first test and B: it’s sort of impossible to figure out “which bit should we try and fix” since you just built a huge Jenga tower with every part resting on some other part.
As opposed to the process we’re using which meant after only working on the game for like a week and a bit, we were able to play an entire low-level adventure and it went okay. It worked, and it was fun. Huge advancement in a very short period of time!
We’re able to do that because when it comes to this huge box of features and design we call “a character” we just stubbed in some stuff that was quick and dirty, but also actually reflected our ideas of how these classes should work.
Grayboxing
In video games, this is called Grayboxing, or Graybox Testing. You just stub in temp assets to test your core gameplay loops. Because if you can get the team excited to test the game every day, when it’s literally just untextured gray boxes (hence the name) with no music, no dialog, nothing (or very little, like choice of gear) differentiating one character from another, if that’s fun…your game is gonna be fun. It might take a while to get there! But you’re gonna make it.
The practical upshot of all this, and the reason for this post, is that when you hear us talking about the Tactician, or the Cosmic Die, these are just ideas we like. And we’ve cooked up some temp design to act as a placeholder for the real thing (which we do not yet know how works) so we have something to use while we test the foundational principles of the game.
So we know two things; Those ideas are going to evolve as we continue testing. But however they evolve, they’re already pointing in a certain direction. Will the actual tactician be able to do all and exactly and only these things at 1st level? No way. But will they be doing stuff like this? Yes. Ditto the Cosmic Die and the Conduit and all that stuff.
That's it, folks! Just thought it would be fun to talk about "the stuff we're testing" and "the stuff we needed to stubb in to test the other stuff."
Comments
rayoman67
I have just joined the pateron. The more I read the more I want to try this "game". I had a similar thought while driving to work for 1.5 hours about not actually using attack rolls for your core stuff. I like this concept that you all have come up with.
Edward Bennigsen
Blades in the Dark has this, but you get XP when you _fail_ an action. It creates this really fun dynamic where you feel like your characters are learning from their mistakes.
Edward Bennigsen
correct. I would use "continuous" vs "discrete"
Anthony Lee Phillips
I love the idea of rethinking "abilities." I was recently thinking that in real life, an ability is something you practice. Ya know, you go to the gym to level up your strength... And that maybe "XP" should actually be, like, something your abilities earn, not your character. The more you do dexterity rolls, the more dexterity you have (in the long run). If you exercise your wisdom or your intelligence, or your charisma, those things become better over time. Just a stray thought I wanted to share, might be fun and useful. Love that you sages are rethinking abilities.
Murilo Trigo
Really cool update. What the meaning for the "analog" and "digital" descriptors in this context? Range of results vs binary results?
Gavin
I wasn't sure about this at first glance, but then I'm like, a very popular system changed its numbers based on the philosophy that it "sucks to waste you turn on a miss" so they upped the chance to 75% to make it much more likely to succeed. And so the part of me that appeals to tradition said "yes, this is the way." Then I was kinda like, well this takes that philosophy to the logical extreme, that if it "sucks to waste a turn" then maybe turn "usually not wasted" into "never wasted." And *then* I thought, "yeah, I can't think of a time when everyone at the table was like 'holy shittttt' on a single attack or spell roll, but I can think of many times where a mage would grab like 900 d6's for a fireball and everyone would be eagerly anticipating the damage amount." And then I was like yeah, the degree of success/effect awesomeness of the action or spell is really the thing. I'm down with this idea and hope it winds up working in practice.
Gavin
"...swampy country does not tend to produce excellent cavalry,,,"| Obvious not met swampfolk alligavalry.
Chris Dowdell
I'm very interested in purchasing the special dice for this rpg. I'd also love to purchase a GM screen. Matt, would you consid er adding a GM screen - with a sleeve to store it in - to the crowdfunding campaign?
Luca Mita
It's always inspiring reading about your process. I'm proud to support you guys in everything you do
Francesco Passero
Wow, not rolling to hit on most abilities still seems like so OBVIOUS, and yet we've done it for oh so many years. It is roughly cutting in half the amount of (boring) dice being rolled, and substituting it with exciting dice. Love it so much. In the spirit of keeping the experience fast, simple and effective, I'm curious about how (and if) you're going to implement "creative" actions in combat, like what the Thief could do in 5e, through wonky rules and DM interpretation. Stuff like disarming a target, pulling down an enemy's pants or slamming a bucket or a sack on their head to temporarily blind them, throwing dust in their eyes, putting acid or dirt the spellcaster components pouch so that their casting components are gone, etc... Just some fun stuff a mischevious sabouteur of the battlefield could do. Maybe for the more "rogueish" class? Just a thought. Keep up with the good work!
Chris Dowdell
Thank you for the update, Matt. I'm excited about this new system! Very excited! New dice. New, streamlined rules. New character class titles. And, it's still heroic - fight them monsters - fantasy. GREAT. I've missed watching The Chain. Soon, I'll be able to create my own Chain with MCDM rules! Thank you, Matt and team. I will standby for more updates, as they become available.
Martin Heim
Following the example of spending surges on dice to activate cool abilities (as demonstrated in Descent), I think it would also be a cool idea to have the same happening with magic items. Something like: You roll a magic/relic die, see how many surges you get and based on that activate one or more abilities/powers of your equipped items (again, as seen in Descent with increased range, more damage, pierce, etc.). For example, you could have a lightning bow that gives an extra damage die for 1 surge, or have the arrow transform into an actual lightning bolt for 3 surges, etc. Then I could imagine having some items that add to your overall pool of magic/relic dice (Amulet of Arcane Power: Add 2 dice to your pool). Might mean in the end maybe too many dice with too many surges to figure out what to do with, but thought I mention this idea as it lends itself pretty well I think for the kind of resource management and having various tactical decisions to make during an encounter that you seem to be going for with your game. Anyway, thanks for keeping us in the loop, greatly appreciate these posts!
MCDM Productions
We move when the thing we're testing works! :D
Roman Penna
Gray boxing makes a lot of sense to me. Got to test in stages. I couldn't imagine testing both the lairs and monsters for Flee Mortals at the same time. Got to do it all in stages. Makes sense to me!
Sampson
Super cool. Are there specific things you guys are looking for that'll indicate when it's time to move out of the simulation phase, or do you just suddenly know (based on intuition and experience) when you've figured out all you can with the core rules?
MCDM Productions
If it doesn't say, it's Matt.
Rian Dickson
Sounds damn cool already! Stoked!
Jacob Montague
A question: who writes these posts? Is it Matt? James? Hannah?
Jacob Montague
This is a very helpful post! Thank you for clearing things up.
Stuart Cook
The “classes” that have been in tests so far have just seemed like NPC statblock a to me. I’m sure there’s a lot of work to take those from statblocks to 1st level characters, and I’m excited to see it! As a DM and not someone who feels like they want to make their own rpg, seeing class design happen live from the ground up seems like something my games could really profit from.
Schoopdoop McGoop
Using video game design methods for ttrpgs. Very smart and very efficient. Once you know how the game works, then you can start breaking it.
