Continuing with Ostravia, we’ve seen some significant progress in terms of setting development, namely in that I’ve started to finally make Ostravia a tentative map. I’m not very good at cartography, so it isn’t pretty looking, but it’s sitting there and forming a basis for future progress. In short, not a lot of interest beyond a few musings; I’ve tried to have a couple proto-playtests but finals and the like have been messing with scheduling and they haven’t pulled through.
Fortunately, we’re still seeing development progress, because I’m always working on mechanics even when I’m waiting to see more get made. Hopefully I’ll get some more stuff done on them soon, but I’ve mostly been doing tiny changes not really worth worrying about. In any case, combat’s seen a major overhaul, being turned into a more light version. I decided to strip out weight and carrying capacity requirements. They’ll be soft-capped; most people will be able to carry one weapon and one armor (technically, medieval armor is pretty much always layered, but we’re going to overlook that distinction for the mechanics), but this won’t be explicitly stated. My prototype character sheets have two spots for stuff, and statistically everyone’s carrying daggers at all times (medieval knives were large and multi-purpose, considered a valuable and ubiquitous tool, and could function like daggers in an emergency).
Similarly, this paves the way for making the statistics more simple. The way things look right now is simply having a damage, accuracy, and parry rating. I contemplated including armor piercing, but this is likely going to be a special weapon quality rather than a common value, so for the most part weapons only get these three statistics (four, if you separate damage/degree damage). Armor is simplified to damage reduction, degree reduction, and defense. Defense is more or less analogous to Armor Class in a d20 game, while the damage and degree reductions have been touched on before.
As is, combat is ludicrously lethal. Most solid hits will incapacitate all but the toughest or best armored people, and even a glancing blow can represent a significant injury. Most “kills” will likely be converted into “wounds” on player characters to lower the lethality level, meaning that players suffer a quasi-permanent penalty (removed automatically following a sufficient amount of character advancement, whatever the final milestones for that turn out to be) to an attribute.
Hopefully we’ll have more interesting stuff soon. I’m hoping to double back into social combat soon, which is going to be interesting.