Upcoming post-playtest revisions

Generally, when making a game, you'd want to playtest it as soon as possible. However, in the context of a game jam, this could be harder considering the short timeframe, even more if it's a TTRPG best played with big groups of people. Even so! We got to play with a good-sized group recently and see first-hand where the game needs ironing out.

We still don't have the specifics on how exactly we're going to update the rules (otherwise, this would be a release note rather than a devlog!), but we'll share some actionable feedback we got and what our plans are moving forward.

Earning resolve feels subjective (much like D&D 5e "Inspiration")

This is one of the pitfalls I wanted to avoid when designing the Resolve mechanic. For a GM, it's hard to keep track of each Samurai's code of honour and what actions would reward Resolve or challenge their Honour. And sometimes, they might get so enthralled with the PC's performance that the scene has already moved on by the time they realized they should have awarded Resolve points.

To address this, we want to give more agency to the players on how they receive Honour. They'd write Virtues as part of their Creed in the character sheet, maybe 1 to 3 "tenets" of some kind, and (perhaps once per scene) they'd be able to claim the Resolve themselves after acting a particular way, without the need for a GM to judge whether the action was "worthy" of Resolve. 

Losing Honour

The Honour rules were intentionally vague and loose, hoping for creativity and friendly discussion. Instead, this brought confusion to the table. From a player's point of view, what they're attempting might be smart and valorous, but from another player's point of view, their fellow Samurai might be doing dishonourable and callous acts. Both sides are right, and the table is split on this moral quandary. If the GM judges in favour of either, there will be dissatisfaction.

This will be a fairly big change; we're adding a section under Honour that has core "Tenets" or "Ideals" that all Samurai must strive for, regardless of their Creed. We're designing a clearly defined list of Values or Principles based on the principles of Bushido (from 3 major Samurai eras: Sengoku, Edo and Meiji). If any Samurai acts against these, they will have to make an Honour Test, no matter the reason. This will give the players the choice to engage in activities, fully knowing if their actions will have severe consequences beforehand without the need for subjectivity.

In addition, we'll rework how the Creeds work, not only we'll add the Virtues that will generate Resolve (mentioned above). But also "Sins" or "Flaws" that will trigger an Honour Test for the Samurai should they engage in such acts.

Reworking Resolve - no more "I dodge" button

I'll keep it short for this one. One current use for Resolve is to avoid damage from an attack. This would be cool, in theory, using your awesome Samurai skills to evade deadly blows, and for players: it is! But for the GM, it almost feels like cheating! It just leaves a bad taste in your mouth to have Villains completely avoid damage from a well-earned hit or an exciting critical hit.

Not sure how we'll change this, but it definitely needs to change.

Standardizing the Special Techniques

While the overall notion of doing amazing stunts by spending Resolve via their Special Techniques was achieved,  some people might find it hard to gauge whether an effect is particularly game-breaking.

The intention for the Special Techniques was to have a "WOW!" moment in the game, and the original rules are very loose to enable this epic silliness. But after seeing them in-game, these are most definitively exploitable, and the consensus was that we should limit these somehow. However! We still want these to be a big part of the game and allow each Samurai to customize their own techniques as they want. Using the Special Techniques should definitely be impactful but shouldn't feel game-breaking.

To address this, we'll add some "templates" or "snippets" that people can mix and match together to create custom Special Techniques, for example: "deals X extra damage", "damages every enemy in the scene", or "can be used outside your own turn", etc. In addition, we're toying with the idea of spending more than 1 Resolve per technique, possibly to a max of 3,  to further increase the intensity of the Technique, whether that means higher numeric values, more "snippets", or something else entirely... we're not sure yet.

Finally, for the aesthetics, we'll leave all that entirely up to the players. As some would say: flavour is free! So if you want your blade to shoot icicles, turn into a laser katana, or slash the fabric of reality to unleash a massive demonic hand that does your bidding, all that is still allowed! The only bits that we're standardizing are the "mechanics" part.

Uses for Special Techniques outside of combat

This was also another design intention of ours that we failed to communicate properly (and to back it up with mechanics!). Creative uses for the Techniques were always in my mind when designing the mechanics, for example: if you have a Technique that normally allows you to teleport behind your enemy before attacking. It would make sense if that same Technique would allow you to traverse safely from rooftop to rooftop.

That being said, I didn't write anything like that in the rules, so I can see how it wasn't immediately obvious that it even was a thing that players could do.

We will, of course, add this intention clearly in the rules, and we could even include some "snippets" or "templates" specifically for out-of-combat situations. Maybe we won't count the "utility" ones towards the combat ones. We're not sure yet. 

Reworking "Advantage/Disadvantage"

This was a case of tunnel vision. Advantage/Disadvantage is a brilliant and elegant mechanic from D&D 5e that I wanted to incorporate into this game. 

Turns out: it wasn't that great. Mainly because it depends too much on an "on the spot" judgment for the GM, and this could generate friction within the table and could even be disruptive in future sessions when players recall a situation when someone was granted Advantage by doing something, so not having Advantage for this new hypothetical case would be unfair.

To keep the spirit of this mechanic in the game and for it to be in line with our goal to give players more agency over the story by spending their Resolve, we'll replace the current Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic with a new option where players can spend Resolve to increase or decrease the difficulty for an Ability Check by a set amount.

More defined uses for Ability Scores.

I should have seen it coming. When designing a set of rules for a TTRPG, the players will always come up with things that weren't accounted for, and this is great! But having players thinking outside the box, attempting actions that weren't obviously classified as either Might, Reflex or Willpower - then having the GM make an "on the spot" call just caused confusion and chaos.

We'll expand on how to use each ability. We like the current simplicity of only 3 stats to keep track of. So, we'll do a more thorough job of defining within the rules which Ability Score should be used for which situation, hopefully covering a lot more ground, so these "on the spot" judgment calls are rarer if not gone.

In addition, we'll add a "Pure Luck" check to the rules. We can have two variants for unmodified draws. The 50-50 or "evens or odds?" and a 1-in-4 "Call a Suit". To be used for those actions that don't rely on skill at all.  While some people might have figured these out already, it would be good to have it written down in the rules.

Rebalancing Ability Scores.

We got feedback that Willpower feels too strong compared to Might and Reflex. I agree... a little bit. Like in any game that uses a deck of cards, being able to draw more cards than others is very much an advantage. However, drawing a few more cards and "getting faster to that crit" might not be much stronger than always having a decent attack or defense bonus, no matter what you draw. In our opinion, combat needs way more testing before we can confidently make a decision on this.

If continued testing suggests that Willpower is indeed "too" strong, we might change how the Face Cards interact with card drawing. For example: Drawing a Jack might force you to play it. It feels too early to try something like this, but we'll keep a close eye on this subject.

One area that needed a change was the Starting Ability Scores. Initially, we liked the idea of heavily specialized characters from the start, these being the 4/1/1, 1/4/1, and 1/1/4 builds, but we'll try starting the game without these spreads for now. For starters, the character creation feels cleaner without clutter and a bit more varied, allowing players to still have enough of another Ability Score to experiment while still having heavy investment in their preferred Ability Score.

"Once per Day" becomes "Once per Session"

This is a bit of leftover language that we left in the game while we weren't completely sure how we were going to structure Adventures. In some items' descriptions and other places like Resting, we mention a "Once per day" effect. Moving forward, we'll replace these with "Once per session". 

We have no current plans for an "Adventuring Day" or how many days a campaign should take, and after discussing it for a while, we decided that we could do without these. Not only is it simpler to remember, but now no one has to track the hours or days or anything within a gaming session. It becomes a simple yes or no question.

This also opens the door for some items, or perks, or other mechanics that interact with this "Once per Session" restriction. Perhaps a new item could be "Camping Gear" that would allow your group to take an additional rest within a game session. Or a luck-based perk that would allow you to use the "Once per session" item without consuming its use.

More Decks!

We originally designed the game to use a single, shared deck of cards because, in most households, you'd probably have one or two decks of cards lying around. We got this feedback from one of our players, and we really liked the idea of everyone using their own deck of cards. Not only are decks of playing cards very affordable, but managing your own deck could become an interesting mechanic on its own!

When using individual decks, players can tell which cards have already been drawn, so they know they won't come back again until you reshuffle your deck. So, for example: if you draw 3 Kings in one turn, the rest of the deck is much less likely to have another King for you to get a Critical Success, so it would be in your interest to shuffle your discard pile back with your deck ASAP. Of course, you're not allowed to shuffle your discard pile with your deck until you run out of cards... unless:

This mechanic could also allow some interesting interactions. The sensible thing would be to require Resolve to do some of the following:

• Shuffling your discard pile with your deck.
• Peek at the top X cards of any deck, and reorder them as you want (either at the top or bottom of the deck).
• Discard the top X cards from any deck.

And any other options that we might think of further in development. It's exciting to think of the new possibilities this brings to the table!

I think we won't 100% replace the original design, but rather add the option to use whichever mode you prefer. If some people prefer to use just the one shared deck of cards, great! The game was made with that in mind. But if your group would prefer to have a deck per person, that's just as good!

The Big One: Action Economy

When I was designing combat, I was worried it would be too dependent on Action Economy (meaning:  in theory, having more turns than your opponent makes you more likely to win), and foolishly, I thought that by keeping the rules light this problem wasn't going to be too apparent, and my initial playtesting backed this, but once I took it with larger groups the cracks began to show quite quickly. Villains that I thought were overpowered ended up going down extremely fast. While in that particular session, the Villains kept drawing garbage cards despite their huge stats, they still lost. Pitifully. 

Our current fix: We'll add an option for GMs to spend Resolve to grant the Villain a turn after each PC for a whole round. This would, in theory, balance the power level between a Villain and the PCs (and even might be slightly in favour of the Villain, as they are meant to have better stats).  This should still allow for flexibility when a Villain is accompanied by several Minions, so the enemy numbers don't immediately overwhelm the players.

If it turns out that they're still underpowered because the GM has to spend too much Resolve on keeping the Villains active with many players, we might consider just having that mechanic as the baseline for all Villains.

Game Versions

To keep within the spirit of the jam, we'll be keeping a "Legacy" version of the game as it is in 1.0.3, clearly labelled, to show what the game was when we submitted it to the jam, and we'll keep updating the game according to further feedback starting on version 1.1.0

We hope to finish and release version 1.1.0 soon! But we can't quite give an estimate yet.

Closing Thoughts

All that being said, we still really like how this game turned out. We love the theme and will keep working on getting the game to a state where we're satisfied with the project. Thanks for keeping up with the game, and we hope you have a great fun time with Waves of Honour!

And if this interests you, please give us a follow if you haven't already to keep up with updates to the game (and maybe more games that we might develop in the future!)

Call to action, call to action, call to action!

Cheers, 

TopKexx