Jan 28, 2018

Temporary Hiatus

My posting usually takes a hit during the summer (winter for the northern hemisphere). Between power cuts, heat waves and assorted holiday activities, writing these updates tends to feel less like a fun side activity and more like they're taking up my time from other things or simply from resting.

The next batch of posts are very dense with information and I don't want to half-ass them, the very next update is possibly going to be the longest in the retrospective (certainly the longest to date, if not the longest even counting future updates), so I'm going to hit the pause button for now.

Updates resume in March!

Jan 14, 2018

BCZ Retrospective XI: Limit Powers.

This is the last category of new Genre Powers and it has slightly more history than the others. A long, long time ago I wrote a series of blog posts about adapting anime to the BCG rules. The two series I picked for this were G Gundam and Gurren Lagann. For Gurren Lagann I decided the game should care about Tension more than the usual, and among the results were the prototype versions of these Powers. You can read more about them here. See if you can spot what else from that post made it into the expansion!

A small bit of trivia: In the early drafts of the BCZ, these were called Spiral Powers and the Rush Powers were called Limit Powers instead. I needed a new, setting-agnostic name for these, and 'Limit' sounded just right. I think Rush Powers got the short end of the stick in the end, but "Limit" fits these three much better than the other trio.

I Am Helping!
We begin with a Power that was commissioned very early on, it came in the form of the name plus its flavor text, meaning the mechanics were up to me. The idea of a Power that makes things easier while also making them harder is very amusing, but it took some effort to make it fun to play with and not just fun to read. This went through many iterations, during which it was a General Power most of the time. Sometimes it did bonus Damage but caused a Blast, other times it created Extreme Terrain under the enemy and you. It was an okay flavor fit, but it felt a bit forced. The final version is very weak on paper, especially under Tension 5, but the mechanics click together in a way that makes them larger than the sum of their individual parts. Suppressing the toughest enemy around is one of the easiest ways for anyone to contribute to the fight, but also makes it harder to move. Using this when Tension is 5 or higher means that forcing the enemy in place hurts a lot more than usual. Even if you only get the second effect by using Tension boosters, it is still a nice extra chunk of Damage. Of course, the problem is that Extreme Terrain doesn't distinguish between friend and foe, and one of the most effective ways to lock an enemy in place is to Duel them. This means that this Power is often going to hurt a friend (or yourself, if you're the duelist) on top of causing a nice chunk of collateral Damage. With this final version the flavor felt more natural and less forced, which I rather like.

Jinxed!
I really like the idea of making your enemy's Weapons carry the Overheating/Unreliable drawbacks as a defensive ability. Unfortunately, doing that in place of just boosting up your Defense or punching the enemy harder is a bit weak. Luckily, I had to make three Powers that had very weak base effects but got considerably stronger after Tension 5. Coincidentally, they both hurt much more when Tension is high than when it is low. This all together meant I had to give a Power like this a try. Sadly, while it is conceptually cool, it suffers from a fatal flaw that is obvious in hindsight: It is a Defensive Power that needs you to survive to Tension 5 in order to get full benefit from it. If everyone is packing Limit Engines or spamming Tension-boosting Powers then it is great... Otherwise it comes online a little too late to be reliable, which is what you want from your Defensive Powers. Whoops!

Pierce the Heavens
This one is a straight up copy and paste from the Gurren Lagann post. I feel it is the best of the original bunch (that's why it has the best name!), embodying everything that the mechanic is good at: Punching things very hard. I don't have much else to say about it, it is easily the most straightforward to use and probably the one that makes you feel the most like a badass.

And that's the last of the Character abilities from Chapter 1. You are now entering Robot Land, Population: All The Animes.

Next: General Upgrades.

Gimmick Out.

Jan 7, 2018

BCZ Retrospective X: Boost Powers.

One of the things I wanted to do with BCG's regenerating Energy stat was encouraging people to take a variety of Upgrades and Weapons with different Energy costs that would be used differently each turn. If you had 4 Energy, you could Boost your Beam finisher, use a cheaper Beam and Antigravity or use an Overbooster and leave some open for an active Defense. It is a neat idea but it is almost always more efficient to buy exactly the things you need and use them every turn.

But I wasn't going to give up. In the expansion, I thought of another way to encourage using Energy differently every few turns, in the form of Boost Powers.

Chain Explosion
And we start with a Power that is exceedingly exploitable. Limit Engine gives extra Energy and Tension. Power Conversion transforms Tension into Energy. Organic Barrier lets you stockpile Energy from one Turn to another. Make a Support Build with 8 base Energy. So you have (8 + Tension + 2 per Threshold Levels lost) x 2 Energy at your disposal. Let's say you lose a single Threshold Level in Turn 1 and then stockpile a bunch of Energy during Turn 2 for Turn 3. That's 24 Energy total. This Power does 51 Damage in a Blast (4). Yeah, it's kind of broken. This needs a Damage cap, like say... 10? Or maybe 15? On the plus side, I'm glad that the Chain Explosion Strat is impossible to run into by accident, you have to deliberately be trying to break the game with it, so everyone can agree to just not use it. It is also 100% useless against solo Superbosses, so it is not like it is invincible.

Shoot it Down
This one is a lot more balanced than Chain Explosion, and while it is not necessarily bad, it is the weakest of these three. Maybe it should've been repeatable. At least that would make this something you can build around, though that might make it exploitable by making high-Energy builds with a bunch of Assistants. Or it could keep the current use limitation and cause two Disadvantages per point of Energy spent, which would be less risky. Alternate buff idea: Have you noticed this doesn't say 'an Enemy's Might Test' and instead says 'a Might Test'? This is a typo. You can technically use it on your own stuff, which is largely pointless as all it does is weaken the attack, but it gives me the idea that this could apply to your own attacks in the form of extra advantages instead. The flavor text would still work! Beam Confuse makes about as much sense offensively as it does defensively.

I Have Control
This is extremely powerful, though it is limited by the enemy's team composition which you don't have any control around. At first, you didn't have to pay Tension in Energy to use this Power. The cost was added later to give it a time limit duration and keep it from being an autocast that would happen at the beginning of every appropriate battle. The name isn't the best fit, but there weren't many options for it so it ended up sticking around.

I like these three. One is largely okay, another slightly overpowered and the last one is gamebreakingly powerful. All three make people use Energy differently depending on the circumstances (except Chain Explosion in the broken build, but that's not the most common use of the Power... Or at least I hope it isn't.), so I'm calling them a success. Balance could be a little bit better, but when isn't that the case?

Next: Limit Powers.

Gimmick Out.