Thursday, January 30, 2014

Minimal News

  • Good post over at Hack and Slash on the nature of heroism in RPGs, and how incentivizing heroic play actually makes it less heroic, because heroism is about risk and sacrifice.  I quite like his Solution #4, which ACKS supports through reserve XP awards (karma).
  • By request, added functionality for generating characters of just a particular class to the Henchinator script.  Not elegantly, but it does work and doesn't break anything else.
  • Been playing a lot of Crusader Kings II... poorly.  Yesterday I learned about the perils of legitimizing my bastard sons, having foreigners tutor my heirs, being captured on the field of battle and imprisoned, heretic court chaplains, and inbreeding my heirs.  On the plus side, I also learned how to strip my vassals of their titles and claim them for myself without incurring tyranny penalties (wait until they rebel, crush the rebellion, then revoke their titles for treason)!  It's a process, but one which yields a wealth of inspiration for a domain-level ACKS game.  Loyalty rolls for everyone, all the time!  Hopefully tonight I will not lose my duchy.

1 comment:

  1. John, I read the post at Hack & Slash - I agree with his points overall. In-game reputation should be the go-to 'reward' for heroic action. I was mulling that question over while driving yesterday, and the answer that I came up with was "put things into the game world that the players/characters will give a hoot about". Make the players care what happens in the game world to their beloved person/town/location/whatever if the Big Baddies come and lay waste to it. Heroism is seeing a need, and filling it - and being the only one(s) who can.

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