Progress Update: Patches for 1.17 begins today!

The first big edit of Bunker Radio begins.

The First Round of Playtesting

The work to bring the game to a fully finished state and ready for formatting to publish is well underway. As of now, preliminary system testing is ongoing, and I am now writing the first patch.

 

CHARACTER BUILDING

The first item to fix is the broken character building. Right now, the ability boosts gained even at the 80 skill point starting point nearly maxes out the ability boosts. So the ability boost needs to be expanded, or at least modified so it doesn't cap out so quickly.

 Combat seems to work well, if possibly a little convoluted.

COMBAT

Combat seems to work well, if possibly a little convoluted. I was trying to make a simplified combat system, but instead made it super high stakes, and with a lot of steps involving adding various numbers and modifiers. I may modify the system, or start over from scratch, and write something simpler.

Either way, I will be including a combat checklist so it is immediately obvious what the steps of combat are. Right now it's too easy to forget to spend ammo after each combat, or roll a resilience check for losing a combat. Fighting multiple enemies also needs work. I may add a rule allowing the player to fight a bunch of enemies all at once, having each enemy roll his own d20 and running a combat instance for each (the player only has to roll once).

Also of note is that defense score may be broken as well; the system currently averages the ability boost from 2 or 3 different abilities, and uses that as the defense score for the given scenario, but the results are honestly kind of samey. I'm going to find a way to break things up a bit and make the defense scores better represent your skill in melee, firearms or the "other" category.

 

TECHNIQUES

Some other minor modifications to make include page 2 of the character sheet, which has way too many lines for techniques per column right now. The page ends up looking like Hades' contract from Hercules. The character sheet also needs reminders for how much techniques cost.

The point buy economy may need modification as well. It costs 5 skill points to open up a skill line, but then only 1 skill point to buy a level 1 technique? Not sure that works.

 

SKILL MODIFIERS

Also, the skill modifiers may get modified to a minimum of +0. The reasoning behind this possible change is that there is a limit to how negative a score can be, but no limit to how positive a score can be. Because of that, it may make the game more fun to simply even the playing field a bit and allow the natural die roll be the lowest possible number. This also fixes any possible "negative results" edge cases (in which the modifier subtracts more than the total of the roll.

 

COMMS

On a positive note, the communications system, with propagation checks works wonderfully as is.