Welcome to the 5th part of my self imposed game jam! If you’d like to check out the last part, you can see it here! The long and short is I’ve decided to give myself two months to fully design and build out a fully functional TTRPG game between the start of April and the end of May. Now that we’re in the last half of May, it’s time to really buckle down and get to actually playing the game itself.

Character Creation

I’ve already done some of this over the past little bit, but my first hurdle is character creation. When players make characters, there’s a few things they want. Their choices should be meaningful, the characters should be fun to play, and they shouldn’t all feel exactly the same. I’ve found there’s a few different ways to hit these goals. Since this game is class based, having there be weighted proficiency differences (such as hacking vs weapons) will intuitively give them a different feel when in the heat of the game, specifically with how combat works. Forcing certain classes to get up close and dirty versus ranged classes that are pretty flimsy but stay behind the front lines gives them a difference right off of the bat.

I’m still working on ways for the roleplay aspect of the game makes them feel different. I’ve incorporated a system for different backgrounds from before the game begins, however I’m still trying to work on some additional ways to make them feel different. Since this is a futuristic game and players can augment themselves, lineages have been replaced by different “chassis” they can be (think human, android, cyborg, etc). I can expand descriptions as is common, I want to make sure it doesn’t overlap too far into the world building that it ties the system intrinsically to a single story path that players are stuck to. Each table should be able to make their own story without having it conflict with any form of established lore.

Combat Testing

One I’ve been working on as I’ve built the game, combat testing is some of the more fun that I’ve had so far. Playing into the wargaming side of the hobby more, my primary goal is to make combat be only a few short rounds, yet with a heavy dose of lethality. Futuristic combat shouldn’t be long and drawn out in my mind, so it’s been a goal of mine to make sure that every roll is important to the round. My driving motto is to only have roles that are important. There shouldn’t be an overabundance of rolling, otherwise it gets boring to me. While I’ve had some difficulty so far with balancing, I think I’ve got a decent baseline to build upon, however I’m going to need to put together a full table to run through a session together at this point before I can make any additional tweaks.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it! These are my last few goals before this jam of mine is over. Once it’s done I am going to spend much of the rest of the year on cleaning up the game and expanding gear/enemies/lore so that it can be wrapped up as a nice, neat little package that players can get their hands on. if you’d like to stay up to date on any developments or other things I release in the meantime, please sign up for my newsletter below!