Hey everyone!
We wanted to give an update about the recent changes we’ve made to the core system. The game rests on a few major pillars: Round structure, Combat, Movement, and Environments, and there have been major upgrades over the past month with the intention of sifting down each of these pillars to find the simplicity and fun inside.
Round Structure: We previously had each player select a card secretly from their hand, reveal those cards simultaneously, then execute any actions in a 20-step action order. This was tedious, and made tracking who had gone and who still needed to go a fairly frustrating hassle. We have now reduced the 20 action orders to 5 Action Phases, with Start and End phases before and after the Action Phases for use by environment cards. This makes it very easy to go through each phase individually, ask if anyone has any actions during that phase, take those actions, and proceed to the next phase very quickly.
Combat(or more specifically, Dice): The three classes of dice used in the game had, up until recently, been more or less identical, except for the slightly reduced odds of guaranteed success as players went from the d4s to the d12s. Since day one, we wanted the different die classes to feel like they represented different types of skills, and different levels of proficiency. The d4s have now been changed to be reliable successes, with a slight bit of maneuverability if a blow doesn’t quite land(3Hit, 1Shift). The d8s are now truly the jack of all trades, with half of the faces being a success, one as a Vital hit, one face as a Shift, and the other two faces as our conditional successes(Opportunity and Support). The d12s are now all about the power, with four Vital faces, but also introduce three blank faces, as this is power with much less control. The other five faces are made up of three Support and two Opportunity, allowing a power player to make the most out of very large hits, if they can position themselves.
Movement: The Shift faces on the dice that we mentioned earlier are fairly new as well. Play had often become more static once people had closed in on each other, with characters preferring to lob attacks until someone went down in a blaze of glory. Adding the Shift face, which allows attackers or defenders to Shift one extra hex per die that shows that face once the attack has been resolved, has breathed new life into combat, especially for characters at range. Now, characters that want to stay away from the chaos may find themselves being closed upon by the very enemies they are attacking, and characters that want to be a little more mischievous can slip away after making their attacks.
Environment: The environment has been a major facet of the game since the very beginning. Players need a reason to fight, a reason to fight here, and a reason to fight now. Integrating environmental Objectives that allow the players to gain bonuses, trigger hazards, and acquire alternate paths to victory keeps every match fresh and exciting. We’ve cooked up a more straightforward way to identify what each environment card does, how they interact, and how players can trigger them that has made utilizing this aspect of the game much more welcoming to newcomers, while allowing veteran players to maximize the utility of their specific character’s abilities.
Thank you all for checking in, we can’t wait to show off how everything looks!
–Smith at the Forge
Lore Forge Games 