Design Goals, part two

The last post was mostly about world building goals in the last post, so this one is more about game mechanics. Specifically, bookkeeping, and how I want to get rid of it.

Bookkeeping creeps in to a game in a variety of ways, and there are a variety of ways to stop it. Let's look at a few of them, under the cut.

Money

Most games in the modern day hand wave the issue of how much money the PCs have in their bank  accounts or their wallets. If we can do this with dollars, why not do it with gold pieces?

Adventurers' finances generally have three states:

• Flush with cash, generally due to having made a big score recently. 
• Just enough to get geared up for the next mission.
• Dead broke, and on the verge of being forced to get a real job. 

And that's generally all the detail you need.

Spells

Tracking spells is a pain for spell casters, and it's one that only gets worse as the Player Characters become more powerful. CW drastically reduces the number of spells a caster can prepare. A Wizard with only two or three spells ready is pretty typical. The upside is that most of them are not limited once a day. If you have magic missile prepared, you can fire them off all day. You don't have to spend the next morning memorizing spells to get them back.

Even better, many spells have shifted to a ritual format, which means you don't need to waste a spell slot on them. These are the spells with a long casting time and expensive, hard-to-find components.

The restriction to all this flexibility to the difficulty of swapping out spells. Preparing new spells is a ritual in itself. If you want to swap that magic missile for something new, you need to spend some time and money re-configuring your brain. It's not something you can do on the road. Choose your spells wisely, you're going to be using them for a long time.

Health & Healing

This is a big one for old school games. Ever-escalating hit points are probably the worst way to handle a character's toughness. The fact that it takes more healing magic to cure up a higher level character makes it even harder to understand.

Thankfully, Fate's own stress and consequences system is probably the best alternative in any RPG. PCs are tough and hard to kill, but getting hurt is painful. Violence has consequences other than death. This grittiness is a big departure from old school, and a change for the better.

Next time: world building!