Project Log #3.5 — Sparks/Stress/Burn
10 months ago
– Wed, Feb 07, 2024 at 09:44:24 AM
Welcome back to Project Logs! January hit me like a bit of a sledgehammer, hence the lack of updates, but I'm excited to make a triumphant return to devposting. In this log, we'll be covering a preview of the reworked Drive Stress system, which occupied most of my gamewriting time for January.
In IR:Starlight, Drive Stress was a predictable, single-purpose resource—it gated your power use in Combat, and that was it. Drive Stress gain outside a single scene was completely irrelevant (as it reset to 0 between scenes) and even in Combat, it served primarily as an uninteresting binary limit for most Cores—a complication (or even punishment) for not planning your power usage correctly. Boring!
Here's how Drive Stress and Burn will work in the ashcan:
The biggest change here is that Drive Stress now lasts for the entire mission! Every power you use, every roll you push in Ops (oh yeah, Ops uses it too! The Heat system from the Kickstart version? Gone, good riddance), every hit you take from an Orchid-strain? It's going to stick with you until you have some to get tuned up back home.
The binary "exceed this point and be punished" system of Burn Gates is also gone. You can freely accumulate as much Drive Stress as you like without fear... at least until something makes you Push Your Limits.
When you roll PYL, you now roll your entire Drive Stress pool! No more tracking a separate orphaned die value.
The high-level intent of this new system is that players will be gaining more Drive Stress much more often, and rolling to Push Their Limits slightly more often, but with a few more failsafes to prevent early, unlucky rolls from immediately spiraling into Drive Burn.
Speaking of failsafes! They're the third and most experimental facet of the Stress rework, and will likely be getting another iteration or two as development continues. For now, though, here's how they work:
Failsafes represent a middle ground between the short-term volatile gauge of Drive Stress and the long-term narrative one of Burn Scars. They're a precious resource that can avert catastrophe—but they don't actually clear any Drive Stress, so using them at high Stress totals is still putting yourself in a risky spot.
And that's the whole Stress system! I definitely expect to be tweaking this as I run playtests and get the ashcan into your lovely hands, but I'm very happy with the bones I've shown off here. I think they're going to make the game more dynamic, allow for riskier play, and keep things fast and exciting.
Now, some quick housekeeping:
- Backerkit tells me that 83% of you have entered payment info for your surveys! Thank you <3 The remaining 17% still have plenty of time to do so, and I'll be sending reminder emails once we're closer to the lock date.
- The ashcan is still in progress, as you can see above. I don't want to give a definitive release date yet until I have things more locked in—as mentioned before, January shook my delivery schedule up a bit but I'm getting my mojo back this month.
Looking ahead at this month, I plan on making a few tweaks to the core Combat rules, reworking some Drive Cores, and locking in the new, more flexible Weapons system. With any luck, you'll be seeing some of the fruits of that in March! For now, thanks for reading, and as always—
Spin fast, spin free, spin true,
Gwen
Brief Update
11 months ago
– Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 10:56:00 PM
Hi everyone,
This month's Project Log is going to be delayed due to an unexpected death in the family. I'm continuing to work on the ashcan and will post another update when it's complete.
Thanks, and happy new year.
Ashcan update + Sticker preview
11 months ago
– Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 03:09:06 PM
Real quick one this time—several of you have asked for a clearer view of the design of the drive core stickers beyond the fan-out on the KS page. That's a very fair request, so here they are!
I want to emphasize these are WIPs and will likely be going through some refinement before fulfillment starts, but I think they look pretty slick already. each sticker has a unique encoded border and the final designs will be holographic for that extra bit of stellar flare.
Also, as expected, the holidays have eaten up more of my dedicated editing time than I'd like, so I'm going to be moving the ashcan back to early january.
stay warm and have a bright, brilliant new year!
-gwen
Surveys have been sent!
11 months ago
– Wed, Dec 20, 2023 at 02:46:46 PM
As the title says—all backers should have an email from backerkit with their surveys now! You'll have until mid-spring of 2024 to change your selections and shipping addresses—I'll post another reminder as we get closer to the lock date. Thanks so much for supporting IR!
Project Log #2 — Ashcan Pattern Preview!
12 months ago
– Thu, Dec 07, 2023 at 12:15:56 PM
Welcome to IR's second Project Log! This one is on the very tail end of the week; I'll endeavor to keep future posts closer to the 1st of the month.
Here's what's been going on in November and what I'm planning for December:
- Surveys are just about ready. I'll be sending out the Backerkit smoke test (a small, randomly-selected batch of surveys to catch any final errors) tomorrow, and assuming nothing catastrophic reveals itself, the full wave will be sent on or before Tuesday the 12th.
- The ashcan is coming along well. Most of the "hidden" assumptions I worked into the Kickstart edition for streamlined play (like the Sparks system) are now explicit in the ashcan rules text, and I've finished the alpha versions of all four new Drive Patterns. I've also started work on a really exciting revamp of the entire Drive Stress system based on some of the concepts in the Kickstart. It's still early stages but I think the final version will be more exciting, less fiddly, and help unify the stakes of Ops and Combat play. This subsystem likely won't be in the first ashcan but I'll be showing off a preview in January's Project Log.
- I'm still hoping to get the first ashcan released by the new year, but with an unexpectedly busy December, it's looking like less safe estimate than I anticipated. I'll post another update closer to the end of this month if it looks like I'll have to delay—the latest I expect the release is the second week of January.
- Also around the new year, I plan on updating the Kickstart with some light balancing, additional typo fixes, and some really cool additions I can't talk about just yet. Stay tuned for those.
Now that the housekeeping's out of the way, I want to talk about the revised Drive Patterns included in the ashcan. IR: Starlight Edition had four patterns—Heavy, Balanced, Light, and Ultralight—with very little differentiation between them other than some stat numbers. This meant choosing a pattern was mostly an empty, entirely numbers-driven decision. Boring!
In Overdrive, each pattern will still have different stats (though the stats themselves have changed slightly from Starlight), but will also offer unique abilities that reflect a more specific fantasy. First off, the two returning patterns, Heavy and Ultralight:
Both of these are leaning into the power of their respective "weight classes"—Heavy as the immovable, implacable juggernaut, and Ultralight as the blink-and-you'll-miss-me, risk-loving razor butterfly. These have both playtested very well and are relatively close to their final iterations.
Next, the two patterns new to Overdrive: Tactical and Exotic, replacing Balanced and Light respectively.
These are full-on replacements for their Starlight counterparts, which represented "middle of the road" options that weren't very interesting conceptually or in practice. The Tactical pattern is focused on extreme versatility with its large variety of Terrestrial (formerly Mounted) weapons, while Exotic is the volatile, ability-heavy "mage" archetype. The themes here are pretty locked in but the specifics are still subject to change (Exotic in particular will likely be getting another pass when the reworked Drive Stress system rolls in).
I also wanted to note some of the new pattern stats on display here:
- Vent is a limited-use resource that lets you clear Drive Stress and statuses in combat without needing to seal breaches. (If you've read the Kickstart, it's just a rename of the Clear stat).
- Mount Points/MP are a rework of Starlight's weapon mounting system. When fully implemented, most Drives will have less weapons overall compared to Starlight, but will have substantially more flexibility in what weapons they equip (everyone can have two Projected weapons, for example!) This also means I can make "bigger" weapons (like Ultra Blade, Sledge Driver, and Heavy Cannon) more powerful in exchange for giving them higher MP cost, instead of having to balance them occupying the same mount as a lighter, weaker weapon.
As a long-overdue side effect of the pattern and stat reworks, I'm also removing the pattern restrictions on Drive Cores entirely! Some of you might have noticed a hint at this in the Kickstart—Suvi is an Ultralight Aries Core, which wouldn't fly by Starlight's pattern selection rules! I'm looking forward to seeing the wild combinations you come up with.
That's all for this Project Log! Thanks for reading, stay warm (if you're in the Northern Hemisphere), and spin fast, spin free, and spin true. <3
-Gwen
