Philosophy, writing, and reviews!
This week I’ve mostly been working on some combat stuff, both for social and physical combat, in Ostravia. I also learned the basics of PHP, which is related to some of my more recent work in Ostravia. Long story short, it’s time to get really into crunch mode on the combat mechanics so I’ll have something to showcase in the Kickstarter.
Continue reading “Project Update: Combat and the ABACUS Large-Scale Dice Tester.”
ABACUS is built to be an ultralight system that allows for a high degree of detail and flexibility. Put simply, it attempts to do everything for everyone without becoming too much of a burden, in part due to modularity and a universal design principle that focuses on parallelism and an easy to understand structure inspired by grammar and linguistics.
Continue reading “Project Update: Designing ABACUS’s Event Philosophy”
Ostravia is the new official title for the ABACUS’s system upcoming Gothic fantasy game. It’s meant to be both an Orchestra-lite and an examination of how ABACUS can be tweaked to fulfill a variety of roles, and being a grim Gothic fantasy set in the times of the Fourth Crusade, it’s got a lot of interest to historians and scholars that a lot of fantasy games don’t have, namely that it is also an examination of the social and political structures of early 13th century Europe. Continue reading “Introducing Ostravia”
For those (few) people who were familiar with the original version of Orchestra, it used a system I called ABACUS-PH; this was when Orchestra had more storytelling inspirations than realistic ones, and the prior system was very different, but the core attributes are going to be rather similar. The core ABACUS system is a measurement of any character’s intrinsic attributes: Agility, Brawn, Awareness, Cunning, Understanding, and Sympathy. When combined, these form a basis for providing a framework for further character development. Continue reading “Project Update: ABACUS”