Hey again! It's time for another Q&A sesh! Our magical mystery donor's back with a question
about Saorsa as a whole, and one I have partially considered before in the past, but the phrasing
has led me to consider some other more recent developments that could be important as well.
So, time to stop being so vague and get into the question and then the answer! Let's start
with the question verbatim, shall we?
"hmm, has any asked/have you covered how you expect people to play the game. Like tabletopness
and larping?"
Answer time BIYATCH! ...I was being edgy. Or trying to. Failing maybe, but whatevs.
It's still answer time so deal with it. Now, Saorsa's a tabletop RPG. That means,
well, it's going to be compatible with playing on a physical table top with people rolling
physical dice and such. However, I also want to make absolutely certain that it's able
to be played online as well. Stuff like maptools or roll20 are kept distinctly in mind for
mechanics purposes. As such, the game's abilities, mechanics and so on are being built so that
it's both easy for a player to figure out the math bits like damage formulae without
using a calculator, and for a computer to be able to be programmed to define the mechanics
in a quantified manner. So yeah, Saorsa needs to be both capable of catering to human players
as well as machine intermediaries. An example of this is hex based vs square
based boards. Hexes are easier to measure out since diagonals are the same distance
away from one another, whereas squares have the issue of moving one diagonal space usually
means moving two squares - a vertical and a horizonal. I ended up settling on squares
because it's easier for players, especially newbies, to think of the board in squares,
and it's a lot easier for most people to draw maps on a square grid rather than a hex-based
grid. So... what about diagonals? Well, hexes would be easier for a computer to deal with,
but it can be dealt with by simply calling a diagonal move a 1.5 length distance to travel.
Yeah, I know, it's more like 1.41 in reality, but it's close enough for the purposes of
the game - it doesn't have to be perfect, just reasonably accurate. What that means,
though, is that in order to make it easier for players, moving one square will have to
cost a factor of 2 in order to avoid making players deal with fractions. What this looks
like in practice, is that moving a square vertically or horizontally will cost 2AP,
while moving diagonally will cost 3AP. This keeps both players and computers happy and
saves everyone a lot of headache all around. Now, aside from that, I used to do a lot of
role playing with friends over skype before we had tools to use a map for positioning.
As such, I'm making sure all the distances are listed in meters for range, not squares,
because that way it's easier for keeping vague track of how far away targets are even without
a map being used. Positioning is important in Saorsa from a tactical standpoint, but
I want it to mostly involve nice benefits for keeping track of where stuff is, rather
than being pretty much absolutely necessary like in a true tactics game or something like
D&D's 4th edition rules, where you practically couldn't play without a map.
And now we get to the LARPing part of the question, or Live Action Role Playing for
people who may not be aware of the term. Essentially, these are people who play their games in person
by acting out combat and such like it were a stage play, often in costume as their character
and so on. So I've known some larpers, but I've never done so myself. I'm WAY too shy
in person. If you think I'm quiet in my videos... yeah. Anyway, it means that I don't actually
know much about how things like turn order, range, and so on are normally handled in a
real-time larp battle. Like I can generally say spells take about 1 second per effect
to channel plus one second to collapse the spell lattice to actually cast it, but keeping
track of action points, but mmm, it's messy. Given that Saorsa's meant to be on the middle-high
end scale of high fantasy, where like you have characters able to leap about one story
tall if trained for it, can punch people so hard they go through a concrete wall, and
stuff like that... yeah. It's a bit hard to say that your typical LARPing would really
work with Saorsa because the game itself isn't super-realistic. Something like D&D assumes
mundane, normal humans in a world that sometimes has magic. Saorsa works within the context
that magic is really common and even warriors who primarily rely on their weapons and armour,
will still tend to be using magic to accelerate themselves or make their attacks and movements
more powerful on a regular basis. Personally, I think it's a bit too high of a fantasy setting
for LARPing to be fully compatible with it. It'd work fine in a movie or whatever though. Or VRRPing, which we'll cover later in this video.
Like if you imagine Thor from the marvel movies, that's basically the kind of idea of what
you're looking at in Saorsa. Powerful, but not excessively over the top so.
From there, let's move onto video games. I know it wasn't mentioned directly, but it's
important to cover here. My background stems heavily from video game design, and because
Saorsa's drawing significant inspiration from games like Disgaea and FFT, and a wide range of MMORPGs, it's being designed
in a way that's easy to program into a video game because I'd like to be able to someday
make something along the lines of Shadowrun Returns, Planescape: Torment or Disgaea with
Saorsa as the base system. That Saorsa's already being designed so that it's easier to play
online with something like roll20, means it's really not that big of a gap to hop for being
fully able to be integrated into a video game. It's a little weird, but some things video
games do well, like lots of math under the hood, players suck at, such as calculating
percentage-based damage reduction for instance. I can't do that with players having to do
the math, so that's never going to be a thing in Saorsa, no matter how elegant I find the
percentage-based damage reduction formula to be. Also unfortunate is it that players
can do things computers suck at. It's the whole Moravec's paradox thing. Consider the
"wish" spell in D&D - it's completely open ended by its nature, and it flat out doesn't
translate well to a video game because it's so vague and ill-defined. It's relatively
easy for a GM to cope with it - sure, there may be severe balance issues with such, but
the GM can at least make the effect happen even if it may not be one they want to have
happen. Unfortunately, it's really hard for a machine to know what to do with such broad
parameters. Because I want to be able to some day make a video game out of Saorsa, as I've mentioned before, I'm intentionally
keeping the mechanics designed in such a way that they can transfer over into a video game
clearly as well without being forced to leave spells or abilities out. That limits the players
a little bit in some ways, but it also makes it much easier for me to balance the game
since most stuff is clearly quantified rather than mushy vague descriptions that change
massively based on the player's imagination. Saorsa was also designed this way because
it makes it a lot easier for a GM to quantify what players want to do that isn't in the rules
- the way the mechanics are set up, if you want to pick up a table and use it
as a shield, or swing across the room on a rope to kick someone, it's pretty easy to
attach quantified numbers to those actions for a GM - they can determine the action point
costs, the damage output, the range, stuff like that pretty easily, which means that
the tabletop version of Saorsa is easy for a GM to run, but it also means that it's pretty
easy to program in these concepts into a video game a few years from now.
Now, to that end, there is one point I want to make - because virtual reality is becoming
way more common these days, as is augmented reality, sorta like pokemon GO counts as,
Saorsa will work very well in these environments. Like you may not be able to LARP the high
fantasy setting of Saorsa all that well in person, but in a VR setup? As in Virtual Reality Role Playing? Or that VRRPing I mentioned earlier? Yeah, I just coined the phrase.
Yeah, Saorsa will probably be able to handle that fairly easily, and even the spell system could be mapped
out onto a VR setup pretty easily, like having a sphere as the spell and you pick a selection
with your hand to say... fire effects, then grab the cauterizing icon and physically attach
it to the spell, then squeezing the spell down in your hands into a tight ball, making
it visually representative. That's kind of how Saorsa's being built anyway
though - it's specifically made to be very visual in nature, where you can see what your
character is doing with ease. When I was doing my work writing short stories and ghostwriting
novels, that was always one of my greatest strengths - being able to present things in
a way where the reader could easily visualize what was going on, so I'm taking that same
skillset and applying it to Saorsa to help players really be able to see what they're
doing in combat for instance. This just happens to have the side effect that it would work
really well in a VR or AR setup, so while live-action role playing probably is out of
the question due to the somewhat superhuman nature of Saorsa's power scale, it's pretty
reasonable to think that, in a few years, you could very well have a virtual reality
version of Saorsa. Anyway, lots of stuff packed into this week's
video, and hopefully that covers all you wanted to know! And probably then some. =P
So with that, I'm out. I'll see you next time! <3
VRRP!
I know I pronounced it VARP...
But honestly, VRRP sounds good too. Like VROOOM! For a car. But uh... VRRP.
I may be easily amused.
As if that wasn't obvious.
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