Kickstarter

Good day, everyone.  Things are going well for the Kickstarter, and we are within reach of the 50% mark!  We need to get this far so that the whole world can see how viable the project is, and we have faith we'll be there soon.  As of this writing, if a single $40-or-thereabouts backer were to think "Yes, I'd love to be immortalized as a character within the Arcana Agency world, and possibly come back to haunt the author when he has to write me into the (hypothetical) sequel," and raise his/her pledge to $500, we'd hit the mark!

And that's in addition to the effects of word-of-mouth, for which we are also grateful (please tell your friends, your neighbors, and any neighborhood pets who own credit cards).  We hope to share news about other sorts of publicity shortly, but that's all under work.  We certainly need your help!

Next, the interview continues.  Many thanks to the commenter who asked about game design and balance.  An excellent opportunity to dive into the guts (and the history) of the mechanics!  Fair warning to those who (somehow got this far into a gaming project and) can't handle technical details: this update is plenty detailed.

Part 4. THE RULES OF THE GAME

My basic credo when writing The Thief of Memories was that the rules be secondary to the story.  I wanted a very rules-lite game experience, so as not to detract from the events of the plot.  So, we have just five main characteristics - Strength, Reflexes, Knowledge, Insight, Charm.  I figure that this is the absolute minimum I could get away with in any sort of detective story.  In my first draft of the story (the first 100 or so paragraphs that I wrote when the game was still in app format), I bundled Strength and Reflexes into one single, overriding statistic that represented physical force, dexterity and constitution all rolled into one.  It later got unbundled somewhere along the way, and streamed into stats that are a shade more Dungeons & Dragons than I initially planned.  Ho hum.

But why did I want it to be rules-lite?  I like games that go easy on the rules.  I think the best RPG experience I've had was a game of Amber Diceless Roleplaying where every single player was backbiting and scheming to come out in front of the others.  That game is really light on rules, and it's brilliant.

So, when it came to setting stats for Humphrey, Strelli and Shanigan, the basic principle was to look at the reality of that character - how good or bad were they in each of the given areas - and to think about game balance only so far as it didn't contradict the strengths and weaknesses of the characters (essentially, the character came first, the "points" surrounding that character came afterwards).  I saw early on that Humphrey's point total was a little weaker than the other two ("16 points total" instead of "17 points total"), but it's something I quite consciously chose not to worry about.  The sad truth is that Humphrey just isn't as well-rounded as the other two, despite being "in charge" of the New York branch of Arcana Agency.

In terms of game balance, the point totals don't make a huge impact.  There are a few game-specific reasons for that:

1) Every characteristic test in the book is for a specific character, i.e.: "Shanigan must make a Charm test, difficulty 9".  So the tests written for Humphrey are balanced for him, taking into account that he's slightly weaker overall than the others.  In future books, there may be options where you can choose which character makes the test, because in future books the characters' statistics won't be quite as rigid as in this book.  They'll have had more time to develop.  That is:

2) There are several areas where characters can gain (or lose) characteristic points.  Humphrey begins a little weaker than the other two.  But depending on how the reader lets things develop, he could go flying into the lead.

3) And then, for the truly math-oriented, 17 to 16 characteristic points represents only a 6% "drop in power".  And that's basically nothing.  RPG's where you have to "roll up" your character (earlier D&D editions, Dragon Warriors, MERP etc.) are a little out of vogue just now, but in these games it's not at all uncommon for one player to roll way better than another when generating a character.  The player who rolls poorly is likely more than 6% behind a teammate at the start of the game - but can still pick up more treasure/experience etc. along the way, as in point 2, above.

Then we get into specifics.  One of the project's backers (thank you for your comments) pointed out that Shanigan's Charm should be higher than Strelli's, because Shanigan is a good-looking guy.  I go back to what I said about each of the game stats covering a wide area.  Charm covers good looks, yes - but it also covers persuasiveness, charisma, leadership ability and so forth.  And while, okay, Shanigan has a certain Irish ruggedness about him, Strelli is a sharp guy.  He trained as a lawyer - he has a brain, he's practiced in making a persuasive argument, and he's earned that higher Charm score.  In The Thief of Memories Strelli has TWO potential love interests.  Which one he ultimately goes for... well, maybe the player will get to play that out in future Arcana Agency stories.

Lastly, considering the roll mechanics themselves.  The initial mechanic I considered was that of the original Arcana Agency app ("The Evil Eye" or "Prologue").  To test one of your statistics, you'd simply roll one die (by shaking your iOS device), and try to score less than the pertinent statistic.  That wasn't bad, but I didn't like that there was no easy way to raise or lower the difficulty of any given test.  So I changed it.  It's no secret that I'm somewhat in love with the Fabled Lands gamebooks - Arcana Agency's mechanic for stat tests is, shall we say, heavily inspired by the system in those books.  It allows for higher or lower difficulty numbers, and it fit neatly with the stat levels I'd set for Humphrey, Strelli and Shanigan - which I'd settled on because they were more or less consistent with the stats given for Humphrey in the original Arcana Agency app.  It fit too well for me to ignore it.

Oh, and there's no "combat" per se - not as you'd find in a Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf gamebook, at any rate.  It's a detective story, after all.  A combat bonanza didn't seem necessary, or even appropriate.

. . . TO BE CONTINUED

(Please note that we do not own Dungeons & Dragons, Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, Dragon Warriors, Middle-earth Role Playing, Fighting Fantasy, or Lone Wolf.  Neither do we own Fabled Lands, but we have permission to mention that one.)