What about Storming the Wizard's Tower?

[Arvid]

Yeah, Storming! Are we going to see that game in print, and in what form? I was psyked about the system for creating towns and monsters.

[lumpley]

I give it 3 to 1 against.

[Arvid]

I give it 3 to 1 against.

Aw.

Your feelings on this?

[lumpley]

That's a weird question to try to answer. It's not really a feelings kind of matter.

But since you ask. If it were final - like with Afraid, say - I'd feel nothing but relief. Since it's not, I feel a reluctant curiosity mixed with an unsettled dissatisfaction, overlaid by a cranky kind of forced indifference. Kind of like I heard a weird noise in the innards of my car while I was driving, and it's worrying me but I'm trying not to think about it.

3 to 1 against is the very worst, feelingswise. It means it probably won't amount to anything, but I can't let it go yet.

[NinetyEightMPH]

Man, that's disappointing. I hope you can figure something out Vincent.

Cheers,

Rusty

[Paul T.]

Vincent,

For what it's worth, though, doesn't the game work just fine as written for three players? (And without the patch fix you posted a little later when people had issues with other numbers of players...)

That still makes it something worth playing, and something people can enjoy, doesn't it?

[Paul T.]

(A while back at the Forge you said the following, let me know if you've changed your mind:)

The serious mechanical problems are: it totally breaks for 5 players, and that's way too soon for it to totally break.

3 players, it works. 2 or 4, it's okay, but it shows the stress. 5 or more, breaks.

This is because players' capabilities scale inappropriately vs monsters'. It needs a serious redesign because there's no "just fix" for the kind of scaling problems it has -- they're baked into the foundation of the battle rules.

[...]

When you play it, modify the giving commands setup roll to:
- 1 die per hit, not 2.
- if more than 1 person is shouting commands at you, you choose one to benefit from; ignore the others and their dice.

-Vincent

[lumpley]

I haven't changed my mind, nope!

I have a notion how I'd go about redesigning - that's the "1" in "3 to 1 against" - but I haven't put in the work yet to even implement it, let alone test it.

(The notion is "hey Baker, you know how Poison'd has helping in combat but doesn't have this problem? Learn from that.")

[Paul T.]

Vincent,

I asked something back at the Forge, which you never answered.

Couldn't this "scaling" problem, in theory, be fixed simply be having more monsters?

If three players can fight one standard Storming monster, wouldn't six players be able to fight TWO standard Storming monsters?

That seems like an easy fix, at least for people who have the game and enough dice to give it a whirl. It sounds like you used multiple monsters now and then in your own playtests.

I can see why it might not satisfy your long-term ambitions for the game, but is there some reason that wouldn't work?