Expanded Rules in need of Playtest! Players Wanted!

As any of you who still check the forum may have noticed, ReginaldMcMuffin and myself have rekindled discussion of the rules and mechanics of the game, and would love the chance to start up a new game to test out changes as well as generate more ideas on how to improve/expand the game. But we can only do this by PLAYING the game, for which we need more sides! So let us know if you're interested by posting here

I'd be willing to help test, although I'm not sure I'd be the most reliable. Underopia will rise again!

Question for you guys, are you looking to keep most things the same or are you going to let the Artemis fight influence your rules, since that showed a lot of mechanics. (ranged special, turns in combat, combos (fire breatha and gas), attack rolls (they can miss thier hits), damage rolls (looking for a critical), protecting other stacks in the same hex, ect) There also needs to be a change in mountain side factions due to the huge bonus they get from terrain.

We played a small play test a few months ago, and we did find some problems. I was running my Underopia agains a mountain faction, can't remember which. Basically I couldn't get anywhere near his cities and he was able to get to me easy. Also, the treasury can be a bit difficult if each city has it's own. For ease of play I'd suggest just having a central treasury that could go to any of their cities.

Lastly scouting. I'd suggest saying that each scout/ character /city can see so many hexes around it removing the fog of war. While in comic they move scouts around to see the enemy, players sending those orders to the GM, waiting for a response, then submiting their next set of orders causes the game to really slow down.

HerbieRai wrote:Are you looking to keep most things the same or are you going to let the Artemis fight influence your rules, since that showed a lot of mechanics. (ranged special, turns in combat, combos (fire breatha and gas), attack rolls (they can miss thier hits), damage rolls (looking for a critical), protecting other stacks in the same hex, ect)

• Currently we do have the ranged special, which allows for a unit to attack without facing reprisal (the specifics of how that will go into the combat calculator are still a lil hazy)
  
• The combat system I developed does utilize a semi-turn based system, in which the attacking stack deals their damage, then the hist they take in return is calculated.
  
• No combo breaths yet, but that could be something we work out in the course of gameplay.
  
• Though the specifics of the combat calculator need to remain a secret for realism, there is a chance to miss.
  
• Leadership allows units to command their stacks' dispersion and how hits are distributed
  

HerbieRai wrote: There also needs to be a change in mountain side factions due to the huge bonus they get from terrain.
We played a small play test a few months ago, and we did find some problems. I was running my Underopia agains a mountain faction, can't remember which. Basically I couldn't get anywhere near his cities and he was able to get to me easy.

On the one hand, this issues seems to be realistic and in keeping with how erfworld function...mountain cities have an advantage. But on the other hand I agree it does seem excessively unbalanced, so my suggestion is to keep the benefits the way they are now, but also generate a list of "unique" bonuses that a side gets based on their favored terrain, and mountain wouldn't get any because the basic bonus is powerful enough.

HerbieRai wrote:Also, the treasury can be a bit difficult if each city has it's own. For ease of play I'd suggest just having a central treasury that could go to any of their cities.

This hasn't yet been addressed by a concrete rule, but I was already thinking about that and here's what I thought of. Erfworld cannon does state that cities have independent treasuries, yet upkeep seems to magically come from some collective treasury. To replicate this in game terms, here's my suggestion:

• Each city has a treasury. At any given time, a given city will hold x% of the side's Schmuckers.
  
• Upkeep shall be the sum of all unit's upkeep.
  
• When upkeep is spent at the start of turn, each city will pay x% of the side's total upkeep, which is equal to the percentage of the side's schmuckers they hold.
  

Seem reasonable? This would be very easy to track on an excel spreadsheet.

HerbieRai wrote:Lastly scouting. I'd suggest saying that each scout/ character /city can see so many hexes around it removing the fog of war. While in comic they move scouts around to see the enemy, players sending those orders to the GM, waiting for a response, then submiting their next set of orders causes the game to really slow down.

I agree this is a sticky issue that is hard to replicate faithfully in game mechanics. My suggestion would be that scouts can tell the terrain type of adjacent hexes, and whether or not it has any units in it (but not what side/race they are). Scouts could also be given "standing orders" such as a pattern of hexes to scout, and what to do if they discover an adjacent hex is occupied. Also, on plains scouts have clear line of sight to adjacent hexes already.

Does that help clarify your questions?

As promised, here is a tentative list of additional terrain benefits to help balance out mountain-capable.

• Plains: Your units use only half move to pass through plains hexes (or ¼ to move along roads built in plains)
  
• Light Forest: You can build farms in light forest hexes, which produce 200$/turn
  
• Heavy Forest: Lumber mills you build in heavy forest hexes last 20 turns before converting to farms.
  
• Swamp: You may give your units the “water-capable” special for only 1 point.
  
• Hills: Your level 3+ cities may have tunnel and dungeon zones
  You may build mines in hill hexes that produce 250$/turn (motherlode boosts production to 500$ for 5 turns)
  
• Tundra: Your level 3+ cities may have tunnel and dungeon zones
  Farms you build in tundra hexes produce 100$/turn (subterranean greenhouses)

Volcano and Water are not (currently) valid choices for favored terrain, and Desert favoring sides would be similarly hard to attack as mountain sides. Do these seem like reasonable balancers?

I'm just wondering how desert sides would be hard to attack like mountain sides.

I'll post more when I have more time.

Since desert inflicts damage, and has a defense penalty, units who come to attack you will already be softened up by the time they get to the city, and they will be easier to strike preemptively because your units don't suffer those ill effects.

I would be willing to help playtest the updated rules. But why do tundra-favored sides get bonuses, but not deserts? They're basically the same, except scouts can't see units in nearby tundra hexes, and all units lose 1 defense in tundras.

Ah, I think I had a spacey moment cus for some reason I didn't think tundra did damage.
However, now that I look at it, tundra farms would normally produce less than desert, so tundra is at a disadvantage compared to desert. But maybe desert should have a less powerful bonus? any suggestions? maybe units always know the direction to the nearest oasis?

Well, the current tundra bonus balances out the farm production difference and does nothing else, other than give them the option of having three city zones they have to watch for enemies. I'd say they're pretty much even, as is.

Alrighty fair enough.

BTW, I have copies of the caster rules and the spell list. I will see if I can load them to google docs and share the link.

Here is the spell list. It has never been completed.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LIWDsxeax9ky_vwYNDOuaVtw0AZLcvaxe2W0SdKGWJE/edit?hl=en_US

Here are the rules for Dark Arbiter's ErfWorld. New Erf uses the caster rules from this document and ignores the rest of the rules.
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B6CKjNNVk0lwNDAzNmRiZjItODYzMi00Y2NjLTkxMmQtNzQyODIzYTBjZGI2&hl=en_US

Let me know if you are able to view the documents.

Well besides the links being the opposite of what you label them as haha, I got both of them no problem.

I also have had access to the same spell list and re-shared it, ReginaldMcMuffin and myself have been adding to it in tiny amounts. (Findamancy, Croakamancy, Hat-Magic and Rhyme-o-mancy)

As for the caster rules...I think the ones I developed are a lot easier to understand. These rules look familiar, so I believe I found an earlier version of them as posts on the erfworld.com forum, and that's what I extrapolated on to create "new" caster rules. There really isn't much difference between the two, the only different things mine does are:

• Introduced a juice "cap" that is higher then the daily juice, like in the comic.
  
• Casters may have the ability to cast from other schools JUST within their Class, (Naughtymancy for example) or from all schools
  
• Class-wide casting is more common, while all-class casting is still very rare
  
• Casters have the chance to develop class-wide casting at level 5 and 10.
  
• Juice that can be spent outside a caster's school is randomized, between 10 and 50% (10-25% if they develop the talent late)
  
• Linking is explained more throughly (and in my opinion is more realistic)

Here's a link to it, lemme know what you guys think
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v5MGFZP2z4JvLotAwFgCXUMM_53chBlAcEbOyvJJe4I/edit?hl=en_US

The caster rules look fine to me. I'm ready to play, but I am going on vacation the first two weeks of September and I might not have time or an internet connection while I am gone.

Sweet, so sounds like we have ReginaldMcMuffin for a GM, and for players:

• Myself (Morlock Wells)
  
• Twoy (Narnia)
  
• IR-LFNT?
  
• HerbieRai?
  
• Nihila? (expressed interest on the erfworld.com forum but hasn't checked in here yet)
  
• Possibly a friend of mine IRL
  

Am I missing anyone? (HerbieRai hasn't been on recently, so not sure)

I'm interested, but I won't have much time later next week.

With the linking thing, linking is one of the gamebreakers of the comic. It's hard to really create rules for it, since it literally breaks the rules. Still, I'm interested to see what ideas you'll come up with for said caster links, so I'm not against it. Generally speaking, though, the higher level your casters are, I'll give more leeway in terms of what you can do with linking.

If you can, see if you can add spells to the less battle-oriented casters to give them a utility in battle (makes sense in comic, as otherwise Janis would be pretty useless in helping Parson rush the portal, though it may also be difficult to implement. Just see what you can do). Based on the XP thing, battle-casters will level more than non-battle casters as a matter of fact. Maybe an XP boost to casters who literally don't help in combat whatsoever?

Tomorrow, I'll do some work on the map.

Yeah, I did my best to at least create ground-rules for how a link even functions in the first place, because some links do have simple, routine uses. (example, Maggie/Sizemore is a superior way to upgrade cities, and the Eyemancer Table, while an advantage, wasn't exactly a GAME-BREAKER, so players may come up with link ideas for things like that.)

I'll see what I can do, one of the things I did for casters in general was remove the cap on how much experience they could gain from spending juice each turn, which should level the field a bit. I'll see what I can do about general offensive/combat spells for casters, but some just aren't built that way.

Okay, a quick question:
a) What rules were you going to use for Fabricating Magic Items that provide specials? I proposed some rules a while back that I think thetobias was looking at, but it's all your choice.

Also I might draw up a different side for the playtest, but then again Snowpoint is a tundra side and it looks like we'll need someone to test out the balancing of that.

In the game rules I updated the mathmatical forumal to determine how long the Fabricate special would take for stat improvements, and then in Dollamancy I put in a "spell" that explains how to create items with specials. I didn't know you had proposed anything, let me know how mine compares to yours, tell me what you think.

It looks good. Mine was a bit different, but I'm interested in seeing how yours works in play.

Okay, since no one's objected to the idea, I think I shall design a new side for this playtest, mostly because while IR-LFNT has a unit with 2 casting specialties, I want to see if it's actually balanced to let a Knight-class unit have the same--what with the new mancies manifesting at every level. I think it should be, and I'll limit my use of it if it turns out to be.

Hopefully, I'll have it up by tomorrow, in the side board.

Cool, looking forward to seeing what you come up with
My side should be a good as a control to test if Mountain has indeed been balanced by the other favored-terrain benefits, as well as the Fabricate rules *Crosses fingers to get a Dollamancer as my 3rd caster*

On a semi-related note, I have nearly completed VERY complex Excel spreadsheets to make running the game MUCH easier. They include:

• A Combat sheet for the GM, which with one click calculates a single round of combat when given the units participating.
  
• A "Side" Workbook which with a few simple clicks will track upkeep, income, city stats, and units.

And finally on an almost unrelated note, how exactly would you all like to do this, technically speaking. I don't think any of the people who still check in on the forum have administrative privileges, so we can't create new sub-forums that are private. Should we do it by email? or create a new forum using this hosting service? (I defer to ReginaldMcMuffin to make a final call, since the GM does have the hardest task so his convenience should be considered, but some general opinions would be welcome)

Dark Arbiter used Google Wave, and I thought it worked very well.

We could also run it using a combination of Google Documents and the Erfworld Your Games forum.

Well unless I'm very much mistaken, Google Wave no longer exists....lol (however gmail in general is very good)
I'd be a little worried to use a public forum, cus there'd be a big temptation for people to metagame by seeing posts that they shouldn't have knowledge of.

I logged onto Google wave today. I can send invites to anyone who wants to check out the game that we played. If I send you an invitation and add you to the "wave" where all my orders are posted you can read all 52 turns that Dark Arbiter ran for my side.

I will keep my side as it was originally created.