Monday, March 4, 2013

Playing Harder vs. Playing Longer

One of the things that's hard to gauge between games is how to make it so that people can participate throughout the entirity of the event, but make it so that they can't trivialize hard content by blowing all their skills.

In WAR Accelerant, we used a method utilized by a number of Accelerant games, which is Attribute Pools with limited refreshes.  There are 6 Attributes in WAR Accelerant.

Fire, Water, Air, and Earth are the basic attributes.  Most skills require spending one of these four attributes, and you can keep using these abilities until you don't have any more of that attribute.  All these pools start at 3, but you can buy them up for CP equal to the new level (the 4th point of Air costs 4, the 5th point of Air costs 5, and so on).  Buying up these pools gives you more stuff to do in each battle, and allow you to effectively play harder.

Spirit is a special attribute that allows you to refresh your various attribute pools.  After 5 minutes of rest, you can choose to spend 1 Spirit, which refills all of your Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. Since this requires a 5 minute break, it's less likely that Spirit is going to enable your character to do more in a single combat. This pool starts at 3, but you can buy it up for the CP equal to the level, just like basic attributes. However, you will be able to go on more modules and use more of your abilities. So buying up your Spirit will allow you to use your attributes more often, allowing you to effectively play longer.

Most characters are going to want to purchase some attributes during character creation. From a purely mathematical standpoint, Spirit is better, since it generally grants you more Attributes per day than the individual attribute pools. A base character would get 12 effective attributes from Spirit, where as buying a base attribute would only get you 4, and they cost the same amount. But there may be times where you need to pull out all the stops, and a character with more basic attributes is going to have deeper pools to draw from when things get tough.

It's worth mentioning that there are a few passive abilities that allow your character to keep playing regardless of how many attributes you've purchased. A lot of abilities reduce the attribute cost of the first Ability you use after rest, allowing characters with 0 Attributes remaining to use some abilities that cost 1 or more. But that may not be enough.

Ask yourself if your character is still going to be fun when you're out of Attributes. If you don't think you can pull it off, you may want to invest in more attributes (most likely spirit) and be careful not to run out. If you're happy with how your character will play when you're out of abilities, you might be ok to buy more abilities before you buy up more attributes. But the choice is yours.

You may have noticed that I didn't mention the last Attribute. Well, that's because it doesn't really apply to playing longer or harder, since it's a fixed pool. Fate is a special attribute that allows you to use some of your Daily skills a few times, but costs nothing to buy up, if you meet the prerequisites (which are certain CP levels.)

I know this seems like a lot of stuff to keep track of, but remember that in Accelerant, this is going to be the majority of what you need to remember. After playing a few games, it'll probably become second nature.

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