As I said during my last update, I'm trying to write a novel in April and as a result progress on Exoworld has slowed down. I've done some small parts of fiction pieces and other stuff, but nothing major so far in April.

But I've been thinking about how to refine the system and the game as a whole going forward as we reach the playtesting stage of development.

Cuts

I'm cutting some player options to help refine the game.

The most obvious of this is getting rid of the Reaction as a playable faction.

This makes sense for a half-dozen reasons, but there are two main reasons:

1. They serve as a mystery antagonist and I want the GM to be able to use the Reaction however they want.
2. The idea of creating something which serves as a mechanical grab-bag is not great with Exoworld's system (or in general, though you can pull it off if you're a brilliant designer).

The Reaction's Role

The reaction is a hive-mind, and it's very non-human in its function and role in the universe.

The whole point of the setting is to provide players with some opportunities to explore and face challenges, and having it be something too petty and known is an odd taste.

It also was changing a lot by its inclusion as a player-focused element.

On one hand, Exoworld is fairly hard on the science-fiction scale. We play fast and loose with numbers and make a number of "maybe we'll figure this out" assumptions over the course of the setting.

As a gameplay element, though, the Reaction were pegged as a "magic user" class.

First, this doesn't really match the genre, and felt like a forced inclusion.

It also meant that they were doing things at odds with the hard science-fiction nature of the setting.

Now, they're bordering on the line of a sufficiently advanced machine, given the raw computational power available to the Reaction through the Gray March.

But the individual drones aren't nearly as strong. They can be horrible things that go bump in the night or explorers seeking out a world that is as alien to them as it is to humanity.

But they shouldn't be warping reality. They don't have the concentration of nanomachines that make the Gray March so weird, and they have every reason to keep their identity secret since the Gray March is actually relatively vulnerable (e.g. by an Exemplar orbital strike).

Also, the resources system was getting weird. It felt right for the Reaction to have a unique resource, and they probably could have had one just for themselves. But other factions don't make sense with their own unique resources (to say nothing of the terminological confusion this can introduce), and instead I'm moving for them to have unique uses of existing resources through Traits.

Keeping Mechanics Sensible

Talking about mechanics, one issue with the Reaction was that they'd need their own set of Traits, which were becoming issues because the involved actions at odds with the Reaction's reasons for sending out drones and also caused serious power issues.

On that matter, I've been thinking about how to handle balance.

With an attributes-combination system, we really have 80% of the characters' data (measured by relevance to gameplay) in a single 8-number array.

Then things like traits and gear just add flavor to individual characters.

So one of the important questions there has been how to figure out the various elements of things.

Attributes and Traits are the key elements present during character creation, and they're also going to be a pain and a half to balance during character development and advancement.

I foresee a somewhat arduous path of balancing these two elements out.

It's important to be careful here in a way that I didn't have to be in Hammercalled.

In Hammercalled, characters had a third layer of skills, which is approximated by Expertise for some characters in Exoworld but is not part of the core character template (they're handled as traits).

The upside of the three-layer approach as opposed to the two-layer approach is that it created more player choice in developing characters.

And, because players wrote the characters' skills as specializations, it offered a unique advantage.

Namely, a player could always choose to put something unique to their character on the sheet.

With Exoworld, you have Attributes and Traits.

There are only a handful of attributes, and they range across basically 4-11, with numbers above 8 being very rare.

Traits are unique, but they're each a bespoke game element with hand-tailored rules. As a designer, that means more work but also more places to consider balance interactions.

You don't want to have things be too boring when they interact. Two options that do the same thing or obsolete each other are not good to have competing for players' attention.

But you also don't want to break the entire game system with an unexpected synergy.

One way around this is to have a lot of compartmentalization, which I'm doing by giving each background its own contingent of traits for certain situations.

We might broadly divide these into combat, social, and environmental traits, though the exact boundaries are fuzzy and there's no technical underpinnings to this.

The advantage is that we just have to compare each background's traits and the general traits, and not the sum total of all traits, when considering balance.

The downside is that you're limiting a lot of what players might be otherwise able to get freely.

Vision

One advantage of turning the Reaction into a non-player element is that it makes the sort of campaign that would likely spring up on each of the continents clearer.

Titania - dealing with the Exemplars' totalitarianism and the Reaction's menace.
Oberon - the problems that emerge when the Originals finally have their gold rush collapse.
Umbriel - cold war conflict between the Spurned and the Originals who were placed on Exile despite it already being lived in.
Ariel - survival out on the bleeding edge of terraforming.
Miranda - bloody civil war brought on by Exemplar social engineering and a shortage of resources.

Wrapping Up

I haven't gotten a lot of progress done on Exoworld, but I am refining the vision to make it more and more like what I'm hoping to achieve with it.

The game side is lacking, but the setting is coming along well. And given that normally my problems flow the other way around, I think we're in good shape.