I mentioned in the past that Exoworld has now drifted from the original concept. Part of the reason why I'd gone for a very lite game is that I didn't feel like investing resources in it.

But I've been through some stuff that's been emotionally draining in the last couple months, and writing for Exoworld has become therapeutic for me. Like I've mentioned previously, it's based on setting elements I've been kicking around for years, so there's a deeply personal touch to it and I feel like I should go beyond my initial concept since I've got the interest and million-word writing goal for this year to make it feasible.

However, that also means that it's time to reconsider a couple things about the initial plan.

Marketing the Game

My initial focus for the project that morphed into Exoworld was to aim at players who want a full-bodied experience with a quarter of a D&D-style rulebook. By having a lot of systematized features and a minimum of content that requires rules exceptions, it would be simpler than a full-weight rulebook but have enough tricks up its sleeve to pretend it's more than it is.

Some of that comes down to the central die mechanic, which is a hybrid of a bunch of things I like from things like Symbaroum, GURPS, Eclipse Phase, and a couple other inspirations that avoids what I consider major pitfalls of some of those systems.

That mechanic is intact, but the scope expansion means that I'm going to need to market Exoworld to different markets.

One thing that I do like is that I am confident that the accessibility for Exoworld will be fairly high. It's got a novel and interesting setting, but there's enough retreading of familiar tropes that you won't see people freak out about it. I played a little of the demo for an upcoming video game called Outriders today, and while it's stylistically different it shares a lot of the tropes that Exoworld has (or so I think from what I gleaned while skipping most of the dialogue to get to the violence).

Since I don't think they aim Outriders at a hardcore sci-fi fan audience (I am a poor judge of this, being a hardcore sci-fi fan), this tells me that there's at least some market exposure to a lot of the concepts I'm introducing.

That's good, because one of my theories about sci-fi is that you need to focus very closely on anything that is new and novel while backgrounding tropes that are familiar with your target audience. The background tropes and conventions help to provide a further sense of the alien world you're creating for your readers, but you don't want to rehash territory that's too well-trod.

If you're a really iconic sci-fi writer and you write something like Stranger in a Strange Land or Snow Crash, your work will survive even in a fatigued audience because your skill as a writer swings it.

But none of the great sci-fi writers got famous by retreading old ground. I'm more of a passion project machine than a fame seeker, but part of my passion is finding things that are on the bleeding edge. That time's kind of creeping up on Exoworld, so I need to keep working at a decent rate.

Figuring Out the Hook

So, obviously cool sci-fi has its own market connotations, but I need to think about my target audience for this game.

It's built to be a lot easier to play than some of the traditional go-tos like D&D or Shadowrun (which I may be biased toward because they're my "mainstream" perennials), so that's an immediate upside.

One rule I have when I write for games is "assume the players are drunk." I don't drink, so I'm not sure how to pull that off, but I try to aim for a skill floor of "myself, on a bad day, with thirty minutes to read the rulebook" and figure out how comfortable I'd be.

When you have a game that's very complex, the chance that people remember rules decreases. People who are very skilled at games have an easier time at this, but they can still have issues.

So I categorize players broadly as novices, intermediates, experts, and grognards.

Novices have a very basic knowledge of the concept of a roleplaying game, and they're familiar with how games (as a general concept) work. They might have played video games and board games but not a tabletop RPG.

Intermediates have some experience with tabletop RPGs, but they've only ever really played socially. They might have skimmed a rulebook, but they're more of the passive consumer type who learn the rules by playing.

Experts are very experienced with tabletop RPGs, will read the book, and generally represent the "average" long-term player who isn't just in it for the social experience.

And grognards are the sort of people who understand the math, design philosophy, history, and evolution of games.

My goal is to make my games accessible to either novices or intermediates. When Exoworld was still the initial germ of what it would become, the former was probably possible. Things like the resource system that allow physical representation of game elements were an important part of this because of the visual and kinesic elements involved, and it linked some of the general "I know how to play a game" that people can be presumed to have with the ruleset.

Now I'm aiming more for that intermediate market. I think it's grossly underserved, because there is a decent market share of people who are used to things like actual play streams or video game adaptations of tabletop roleplaying games that are just waiting for a game that they can master and play.

Most of the "mainstream" games are more in the expert market. That includes things like Dungeons and Dragons, World of Darkness, and probably the average "big" game.

Some exceptions to this are games like Savage Worlds and Fate, where there's more of an emphasis on having universalized and generalized rules.

And that's what I'm hoping to do with Exoworld. That means that I'm already more or less to the greatest possible extent of mechanical weight with the current ways of interacting with the dice (d20 roll-under, Magnitude Rolls, and re-rolling on failures/success).

Competing with the Alternatives

The nearest comparative title to Exoworld is probably Symbaroum, at least that I'm familiar with. Both are from the same school of design philosophy (so something like old-school Twilight: 2000, which actually has some similar traits, isn't relevant because it's in a very different philosophical tradition), and there's some shared DNA in terms of how the characters form, and the player-centric d20 is a common element.

Unfortunately, while I've long been a massive advocate for Symbaroum, I don't think it's got much of a market share here in the States (though Fria Ligan is hot in the industry right now).

The question here is why, especially given that it's available from a rather popular publisher.

One thing that Symbaroum always seems to suffer from is D&D fatigue. People are used to d20, and even though the jump from D&D to Symbaroum is very easy people feel like they're losing a lot of stuff when they switch over because of how Symbaroum comes across. Because they're both fantasy games and people think D&D is suitable for dark fantasy for a reason that still escapes me (yeah, I know, Ravenloft and stuff, but I'm not a giant d20 fan), they're considered equivalent for purpose.

This isn't really true, because D&D has a lot less going on under the hood than its setup and components make it seem like there is. There's some degree to which Symbaroum is a victim of its own success, because its core rulebook is denser than D&D's and covers more territory, but D&D comes in three volumes if you want the "complete experience" and has much more material.

One focus I absolutely want to hit on is the fact that Exoworld is quicker to play than D&D, even if you're not fully up to speed on it. It's a single-roll system with some very simple math. Building a character is highly systematic, and you don't have to figure out what classes do what and follow a strict level up schedule. Combat goes quickly but has high intensity.

Compare that to sitting around and waiting for the dragon's numbers to go down while the wizard's player is trying to figure out which page of his character sheet that spell he's looking for is on.

I don't really see as much in the way of direct competition in the sci-fi space. Maybe that's just ineptitude, but I swear that sci-fi games almost always go a lot heavier than Exoworld will. The closest I could think of is Scum and Villainy, which I like in some ways but haven't really taken any inspiration from.

But maybe I'm just off base. It's been a while since I was really serious about looking into the market, and information is scarce regarding sales numbers and marketing.

A note on Expertise

I don't think I've discussed Expertise on this blog before, and I don't want to look through.

All you need to know is that characters can get a +1 to +3 bonus to their roll based on their level of knowledge in a skill. I have defined some sample ones in the rulebook (e.g. Athletics, Medicine), but like Specializations in Hammercalled they're also something players can work with the GM to create.

Character Development

One place where I've always been fairly lazy with games is character development. Some of this is because there are only really three ways to handle this that I can find easy comparisons to.

Experience is an obvious fit for any game that's focused on individual attributes and traits advancing during play. Since Exoworld almost certainly has characters more in that vein than otherwise, giving loose experience points is nice.

The issue here is that there's some question about how to balance attributes and traits in such a system. If the Expertise system works as it currently does, having traits be more expensive is going to mean that attributes are the major XP sink unless players are going for fancy traits.

And as much as I like fancy traits, they're one place where overlap and my limit to add and balance individual game elements is going to come into hard conflict with reality. XP is nice as a system, but one thing I learned from Hammercalled is that it's easy to place yourself when you have three or four different game systems for XP to go.

Further, I'm definitely not giving gear via XP for Exoworld. While that system worked for Hammercalled's very specific way it handled gear as extensions of characters, Exoworld is more traditional with how it deals with stuff.

It's also out of the question that advancement this way will have elevated expenses as characters get stronger to put a soft cap on characters.

The next option are milestones. I'm actually sort of interested to see how this could work in conjunction with the Backgrounds to do a pseudo-class system, since you'd get points to boost attributes and traits but maybe offset Expertise to that.

I'd probably go for an XP to milestone system, and have classes each provide a set of Expertise bonuses. The question here would be how to handle potential multi-classing. It would also mean that I'd need the Expertise list to be ironclad. I don't think I'm at that point, and I don't know if it's even really possible to do that until a lot of playtesting has gone into the game, which leads to this death spiral of perpetual testing and iteration.

That's not a deal-breaker. At some point you hit a stable equilibrium of "good enough" and move on, but it's also harder to have an explicit list.

Another question would be, with milestones, how to handle the idea of progression. D&D just gives the ability to spend attribute points linearly, which is a theoretically decent option, but not in the probability's context space we're working in. Either attribute advances would be very rare, which is a problem because they're a much more important part of character development in Exoworld, or there would have to be some limiting system to stop any single attribute from getting too high.

The problem then is that you can have advancement that makes little sense. If you're building a character a certain way and hit a hard attribute cap, that doesn't feel engaging and rewarding.

One idea could be to give pools of points (e.g. X attribute points, Y trait points, and advance your Expertise from the background to Z), but that seems like a complex solution for the problem of players choosing to attribute XP in ways that break the mold of the game.

A third option would be to have characters grow as they use their skills. I don't think this is a good fit for Exoworld, mostly because there's no opportunity for characters to use traits they don't have. When I think of other games that do this, they have much more of a list approach where every character option is available and characters just start with very low values in things they aren't good at.

Another problem with the growth over time method is that it can add a substantial amount of overhead to play, and with a single d20 you're not able to do a strictly probabilistic method.

I could always do something like tallies to just build up a list of successful/failed/attempted rolls, but the question there is how it should work from a mathematical perspective. One challenge here is that more active players (or more daring ones) are going to roll more often than others.

I've liked a way that some other games have done this where you take a sort of session debrief approach and assess what the character did in the session to give them progress. The problem is that it's an extra step, and I don't know how often you can ask players to do that in practice. I've never had experience with these games first-hand, and it seems like it runs contrary to my goal of making a game that you get to just pick up and play.

However, I do like this mechanic for several reasons. I remember Earthdawn (or at least one edition of it) having a dedicated recorder role. That meant that someone from the party kept notes and got in-game XP for it. While that was a little iffy in some regards, it certainly had value for making the game smoother to run.

Another benefit is that it feels organic. While complaining about a post-session debrief being a time-consuming endeavor, I shouldn't overlook the fact that the point expenditure or level up process caused delays in a lot of the games that I've run, including Hammercalled. The difference is whether you're putting them as an explicit part of a session or if players just bring them to the table regardless.

I think it's also just an interesting thing to get right. I'm not sure how I'd do it.

Another idea I've had is some sort of narrative advancement process, where characters deliberately pursue certain activities within the game world to level up. That's mostly just for the Spurned with their Adaptations, but it's not something that works for everyone. However, I do like the idea of maybe doing a reverse XP system where characters gain resources they can spend on training to level up. Some of that will have to wait on me figuring out gear.

Difficulty

One idea I've had floating around in my head for Exoworld is that the GM can control the setting and storytelling invisibly by doing things like setting difficulty modifiers and calling for player characters to react to things. The idea is basically that if you want a heroic-tier game, you just let player characters do what they want with the rules as written.

If you want to slog through the mud and have the player characters face every challenge, you simply make more things come into play. Resource depletion should be a very serious problem for characters, and losing a point of Health should feel like suffering an injury, not just watching a bar go down.

One thing that I don't like about this in other games is the overt handling and the configuration setup. Shadowrun and Cyberpunk both have character creation methods that are based on the "level" of the campaign. The problem with that is the occasional knuckle-head who messes it up, or the last minute shift by the GM to change the mood of the campaign. Another issue, especially in Shadowrun and (potentially) Exoworld is hitting a point where characters just "age out" of the system and become functionally immortal. Then you're stuck with some really odd situations where players and DMs are doing spreadsheet math to figure out what fights can work.

With Exoworld, I want difficulty to be very much down to the storyteller and also a system that can function episodically. A lot of tabletop roleplaying games can't handle pacing well. Sometimes there's a partial nod to this through scene types or special rules for different phases of play, but I don't like the extra weight that adds and I generally think that those mechanics just don't work in practice like they do on paper.

I don't want to have specific downtime mechanics, which I experimented with in Segira, for instance. Action doesn't have to be dangerous, and a GM can give players a feeling of accomplishment through storytelling or through forcing them to confront the mechanics. The idea is to give them the choice about this, rather than to lock them into things.

Maybe you want your game of Exoworld to be an Alien-style death spiral where you're constantly losing people to modified fauna and just hoping to survive. Or maybe it's a longer saga where players are going through a heroic epic.

The tools should be there, but they're for the GM and they're not the domain of the players.

One thing that I've seen done in games like Legend of the Five Rings is a mechanical adjustment for difficulty. L5R had a system where you'd multiply characters' health, which would make them much better at surviving combat.

I don't like something like that. Even if it's reversible. While it works for L5R because of its very specific genre type and the gameplay surrounding combat, it's not a candidate for Exoworld. That's not just for mechanical reasons, either. I want to make sitting down to play as easy as possible and having a bunch of questions to ask and answer before starting is not the best way to do that.

Wrapping Up

I had a nocturnal migraine last night, so I haven't gotten a lot of work done. I'm mostly just thinking on paper here, but I think it'll be productive in the future. Not sure how much of this is interesting to anyone else, but it's good documentation for the process.