Damage Fields Continued

We have some cool stuff that was worked on over the weekend that I want to talk more about--but simply don't have the time to. I'll touch on it here and then talk a little more about Damage Fields.

Stuff We're Working On

• ESP/Clairvoyance: We did a quick and dirty Psychic Detectives / Call of Cthulhu style game (but using a modern mythology that is based on some of the Internet monster memes like Zalgo). The playtest broke the draft rules in about .07 seconds so we immediately begin another round of revision on those. I like what we're coming up with and will talk about that as time allows.
• Levels for Fantasy/Post-Apocalypse: I believe our next playtest game will be in the Have-Not universe (possibly a 'revised' or re-imagined one). E. is working on an AP-based Levels system that will serve for both Fantasy and Post-Ap and other "leveling games." It involves a projected AP amount per level and the presumed AP value of gear (offense and defense). It's quite involved. It pretty much involves a progression that uses the Generic Archetype Traits (GATs) as well as our rules for weapons ("Wield") and armor gear ("Wear") which can also be exchanged for mutant or other innate (racial) traits.

Damage Field Thinking
There was some back and forth about Damage Fields. There are a few things that we need to iron out and some decisions.

1. Pricing. The general decision is that the test characters will be 50% Damage Field and 50% Defense. That's how we test weapons. Furthermore most damage fields (Burning Body) can be used as a HTH attack as well so really a damage field is an attack plus a very valuable "hits-back" effect. This will make them expensive. 
2. Hand-To-Hand Rule. Your basic Damage Field won't "hit back" against a gun or blaster. Many will not "hit back" against a sword (Medium Reach). In our herd there are two ranged characters (gun, blaster) and two HTH characters (sword, punch). We are going to assume that damage fields will be most prevalent in games where there is a lot of HTH combat and therefore double the effective prices for most of them even if the percentages don't bear that out (i.e. the damage filed effect will be non-existent in 75% of the fights if it hits only bare-handed HTH attacks).
3. Damage Blocks. It's clear there is a kind of block that does damage (think Blanka's electrical attack in Street Fighter). More prosaically we usually don't allow blocks with a sword to cut someone's hand off but you could and if you did, we could use this rule to figure out how to cost it. Finally there are moves like "Hard Block" where a hard-style karate block damages the attacker's limb. All of these can be simulated if we put a "damage field style effect" on a block.
4. Aura of Destruction. Right now we simulate an area-of-effect always on aura of destruction with a damage field but we could actually have a way to make it a separate effect that hits the target even if they do not attack and hit the owning character. A Damage Aura would 'pulse' once a round hitting all targets within its Reach. With some modifications to the simulator we could handle that.

Testing

We have also made some upgrades to the simulator that make this easier to test (and faster).

-Marco