Prime War – Lore Forge Games

We were very excited to get an email from Greater than Games in July of 2017 asking if we wanted to do some development work on the (then) core box expansion to our favorite game, Sentinel Tactics. We had been all but managing playtesting for the expansion’s content, and had actually designed some of the first rough drafts of the characters for both Prime War, and Rise of the Ennead, which was to have been a smaller expansion that was published alongside the core box.

We had been passionate fans of Sentinel Tactics, and were very bummed to hear about the postponement of the Broken City/For Profit expansions. As we assisted in playtesting for both that wave of content, and the Prime War/Rise of the Ennead wave, we started to explore what some of the systemic things were that had turned people off to the game. We began drawing up a draft of what it would look like to make a game like this from the ground up. One that had all of the excitement that had drawn us to it in the first place, but that wasn’t carrying the baggage of what was driving people away.

When we got that email, we sat down and got our ideas organized, designing a system that used nothing from the original except the general team-focused structure. We also tried to come up with a set of modifications to the Sentinel Tactics system, in case >G wanted to keep as much of the same framework as possible. We tried to keep ourselves as detached as possible, as we didn’t know what to expect from a meeting like this, and didn’t want to set our expectations too high.

As we sat down with >G at Gen Con 2017, we started explaining what we had identified as some core issues with the existing system and what we wanted to do to help improve on them. They listened to everything we had to say, but pulled on a couple of threads we had unintentionally dropped and got us to discuss the new design we had been workshopping for the last few months. They encouraged and built upon the pieces we described, including a neat iteration of our tournament ideas for how teams could be formed to have lasting narrative impacts on the lore as the game went on. Eventually, the weekend ended, and they left us with the guideline to “Make the game that [we] want to play”.

We knew we were fighting an uphill battle with a new design on two fronts: Sentinels players didn’t seem to want Competitive play as much as we did, and Competitive players wouldn’t look to a “Co-op brand” for a deep tactical experience. We decided to build the core system to support character-level combat and, after several iterations, developed a system that allowed competitive and co-operative play to coexist and thrive alongside each other, depending on what individual game groups wanted to do.

Fast forward to the first PAX Unplugged, where we had brought a printer, paper cutter, and scissors, as we had planned to show >G our playable prototype, but had been making edits up through the drive from VA Beach to Philadelphia. We had built out a set of 6 playable characters and a rudimentary group of co-op threats, and were nervous to demonstrate how this new system played. We needn’t have worried, as everyone loved it, and immediately jumped in to show us how this or that could be improved by the removal or addition of some other minor mechanic to help things run smoother or more in line with the theme.

We would end up going to St. Louis a handful of times over the next two years, and showing off in-progress content at the next PAX Unplugged and the next two Gen Cons. The Co-op system underwent five major overhauls by our count, two major revisions of the core system, and the characters required constant balancing to keep everyone in line with whoever felt best after a given change. We ended up creating content for 16 characters in the debut roster, as well as 15 for the remaster of the characters from the original Sentinel Tactics Flame of Freedom and Uprising rosters. We made six different cooperative arcs of 3-5 scenarios each, to be split between the two boxes, made up of something like 15 different “minion” classes, 7 “Lieutenant” targets, 10 “Boss” characters, and 12 “Threats”. (Threats would be the only concept that would survive to the last iteration, and incorporated many of the best bits of all of the concepts from previous iterations.) We eventually built out each different universe into their own “environment” deck, introducing some additional randomness and excitement into both the competitive and the cooperative modes. We would end up fleshing out four major competitive match types, a set of 7 different “Boons” for each faction, multiple tools for custom scenario building, and a set of scenarios to cover each of the old Sentinel Tactics playmats.

If you’ve not picked up on it yet, we Loved this game. We’re very sad to see it close down, and (like all of you, and everyone involved in the project) we’ll probably always have a little bit of curiosity for what it could have been. We are planning to take the Meanwhile system “on the road” to see if anyone has a home for it in their line, and are utilizing it to help practice our video game development skills; so who knows? You may see this project in some form or another in a little while. And remind me to tell you sometime about the alternate squad-based 1v1 game we made on my birthday after finally seeing some bigwig comic IP’s squad-combat game in person at PAXU.

For those interested: we will probably push out a Print and Play of 6-8 characters, a couple of maps, a rulesheet, and most likely a cooperative scenario. We’re still hashing out some practical and legal issues, but we want to show you all where the game is now, and let you all feel some of the joy we had (and still have) with this game!

–Smith at the Forge

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

Tag: Prime War

Prime War Postmortem

System Streamlining