General notes on the design of Waves of Honor

So, the Fishblade jam. Kym discovered the jam and shared it with me, in our eagerness to make something, we started making tabletop games - completely missing that it was meant to be a TTRPG, we had no RPG elements on the 3 prototypes we made (perhaps we'll post those on itch as well once they're cleaned up).

Then we realised our mistake and started to work on a proper TTRPG. We both like playing D&D and other RPGs, sometimes a silly GURPS model, or sometimes some other, obscure and more complex one. So we started abstracting the absolute necessities for a role-playing game, and to that, we attached the theme... "A game where you roleplay as a fish, and the fish has a blade". The concept of Samurai Fish just came at us on its own, and we started to work.

Once I pitched the game to Kym, she started doodling, and her illustrations were just fantastic! "How could we not continue with it?" I thought.

Why cards?

It's true we're a lot more familiar with the d20 system, but I suppose I wanted to challenge our design abilities by developing a diceless game. Hopefully we did a good job and the cards aren't too clunky. We might revise the game mechanics depending on the feedback we get!

Character Concept

Honesty the first part that I came up with was to have players at the table yelling cool anime-style attack names at each other to accentuate their attacks and based the rest of the mechanics from that concept.

I wanted characters to be streamlined, and not constrained by the numbers on a character sheet. These Samurai are film action heroes, capable of doing wild feats seemingly effortlessly. 

I added only 3 attributes, mainly so they work in synergy with combat... ah Combat was a whole thing from the start, I might post another Devlog going more in-depth about it. Back to the character creation, yeah, it's all meant to be simple and flexible, so the players have a lot more agency over their character's capabilities.

The same idea goes for the Items, I added a few mechanics for some specific items, but to avoid constraining player's imaginations, I just added descriptions to others, to make people think:  "Would my instruments be useful in this scene? How?"  and perhaps they'll come with way better ideas for a whatever mechanic I might have planned for the item.

Resolve

Resolve is almost like what "mana" is for a mage in this game. This is the fuel for the cooler stuff the Samurai might do, from doing their Special Techniques to surviving insane situations, or just giving them the ability to surpass physical limits while still being "fair" - as it is a limited resource.

Yet I didn't want it to be too precious. One issue I found when playing D&D is that people tend to save their Inspiration for the absolute moment they 100% need to use it. So I wanted to include in the rules that 1: you can hold more than one, and 2: that you could earn it in multiple ways, through gameplay; from a lucky draw (jokers), or just roleplaying. And if you just hoarded them without using them, well, next session, you won't have the extra ones.

Honour

It's both a stereotype and kind of a joke to have Samurai care maybe a bit too much about their Honour, so I wanted to integrate this concept tightly with their characters. This is why the first step to create a character is to decide on your creed. You don't have to use the ones we provided, but you have to choose one. This way, it's not too restrictive on how you must play, as the players choose how many restrictions they'd like to play as.

When acting against your creed, you have a 10/13 chance of losing honour (and 1/13 chance to lose double Honour!), so it's best to stick to your beliefs and play that way, but sometimes the scene will demand a sacrifice! Losing Honour takes away some of your Ability Scores. This could be because your Samurai is distracted, or shamed of their past actions, so they can't really operate at 100% with that weight over their shoulders, and if it gets too heavy, they give up.

Levelling Up

It should be obvious to anyone who has played Skate Wizards that I lifted the levelling table and the XP gain from their game, it's very elegant and simple, and I felt this mechanic was right at home with the game we were making. (Seriously though, check out Skate Wizards -though I'm not affiliated with them in any way-, it's another light TTRPG with a funny theme and simple, wacky mechanics!)

There's a lot of flexibility as to how you create your character, and how you can grow their abilities. I decided to cap out the Ability Scores for potential balancing concerns. But even so, you won't be able to get everything on one character, and every character has the potential of being different from others.

Final Thoughts

Those are some thoughts I wanted to share about the general design of this game, it might have been a bit self-indulgent, but maybe it can inspire you in some way. 

I'll probably make a few more posts about this game's design, I still wanted to talk about Combat, and also the Adventure design, as I've had people ask me about that specifically.

We're still working on the project! So expect a few more sample adventures -hopefully!- before the jam finishes!