I've played a lot of good games over the years with class-based systems, I had a lot of fun with them, and I wanted to write my own. Otherwise, burnout, writer's block, and disaster. After fifteen years, I need to occasionally try new things to stay interested and keep my brain fresh. So why change? Why throw out a system that's been working great for fifteen years? The answer is: Because I thought it would be fun to write a class-based system.
Because of this, you will need to shift your tactics occasionally. Also, sometimes the characters will be off doing their own business, so you will have to play someone else. Thus, you will always have to do without at least one of the classes. The other two will be selected from characters in the game, each with their personalities and issues and each of which is one of the four classes. Your party will have up to three characters. The classes are Blademaster, Shadowwalker, Shaman, and Sorceress, and each plays very differently. Avadon: The Black Fortress will have four character classes, each with entirely different pools of abilities. It's worked very well.Īnd yet, Avadon will throw all that out the window. All characters were able to train in the same pool of skills. So, before I got too far, I had to make several big choices:Īll of Spiderweb's games have had skill-based systems. Lots and lots of decisions, and a lot of time spent balancing each one. And there are a lot of decisions to make. It's a chance to correct all the mistakes you made over the previous years, and then go and screw up in a whole new bunch of ways. It's a chance to do something new and exciting, but if you have too many changes your fan base will be angry. The gritty details of the numbers and abilities and treasures and other things that help make role-playing games fun.ĭesigning a whole new game system is both fun and terrifying.
The first article was about the unusual way in which I first came up with the idea for the series, and the second article was about the long and dry process of choosing a mood and theme for the game. Time for another developer journal about the creation of the first game in an all-new series, Avadon: The Black Fortress.