Hello there! First of all, congratulation on the developing of this fantastic game, it works really well and have tons of potential! I have two questions to the designer, tough. Since HP are always full at the start of a combat and they usually reset from one to another, how would make sense to mechanically handle traps or obstacles outside of combat that makes sense to inflict some kind of penalties/euhastation to the characters? These are few of my own ideas:
- Start the next combat with fewer HP than normal.
- negative Escalation (so that it instead subtract from the Total, and slowly reset and eventually become normal).
- Disadvantage on all rolls in the first round of combat.
- Inflicting temporary Burdens (this is probably more fitting for representing penalties outside of combat).
And how to determine if the players can avoid it or not? I presume by using Asset to avoid them in case the Asset makes sense for the obstacle/trap in question, but I'm afraid it willl feels punishing since Assets can be used only once per session each.
Thank you for reading it and very curious about your answer (hopefully)!
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Hi, thank you!
If I had to do traps as a thing I’d probably do Asset-spend to avoid them, yes. (This isn’t so bad, players can use Determination to get it back if they really want and they can always just choose to succeed but gain a Burden.) Generally speaking I’d probably just avoid the standard “generic dungeon trap” thing: if I were going to use traps, I’d probably treat it as like, a big setpiece.
If you do want to give some sort of minor penalty for it, starting combat with a few less HP, having disadvantage on round 1, or acting after enemies on round 1 sounds about right.