Work continues on Phalanx RPG.

I’ve been playing the game with a group of foolhardy volunteers and running several combat encounters with them. These have helped to develop version 5.0 of the game, along with updates to all of the skill books alongside it.

The two things this version revises, is the way Armour and Shields work.

My initial aims with the system is to have armour slowly degrade as it’s used, with characters having to repair their equipment so that it remained usable. Previously, a tracker was used to display the current damage reduction the armour provided. Durability was used to compare against how much an attack exceeded the defence roll; if the difference exceeded Durability, then the armour was damaged.

None of that really worked. Comparing one number against another, when that difference was already used to supplement health damage, was confusing. The tracker wasn’t as visually helpful as I’d hope – indeed, the opposite was the case.

Now I’ve changed it so that armour works like health. An armour’s AV (armour value) is reduced from health damage. Once this happens, AV is reduced by the amount of armour damage the weapon does… and that’s it.

The new version is a lot simpler and has armour getting damaged more often, since this occurs each time the armour is used. The hope is that this will be a lot more fluid than the last system, and better align to what I’d hoped.

Shields were barely utilised. Previously, shields were used as a kind of reaction to reduce health damage. This didn’t make a lot of sense narratively, since they were utilised after the combat had been resolved.

In version 0.5, shields are now an active choice when defencing. Do you risk defending with your weapon in order to potentially harm your attacker, or defend with your shield and receive defensive bonuses? Shields take damage each time they absorb damage in the same way that armour does, but shields can take less punishment, making their use finite before they’ll need repairing.

Phalanx RPG

I did some 'tidying up' on the recent 0.4 version release of Phalanx RPG.

• The new version of the character sheet.pdf now has editable fields.
• Changed weapon types to weapon styles, since the word 'type' appeared a lot in the system and style sounds cooler
• Armours now carry penalties, which can be mitigated by certain skills.

Site re-design. 

I've uncluttered the website to make it easier to nagivate, by bundling the sections on the various Eras into 'World Lore'.

The Games now have thier own section, and each has a page dedicated to it.