Today I want to talk about characters and dice. This has been the hottest topic internally for weeks now and a great start for some feedback from potential players.
Here is a (UNFINISHED!!!!) concept for our character sheet. You can see slots for gear/weapons (2) armor (1), inventory (to the right) and "Level Up" Abilities, which you pay with good old hard cash (and yes we know there is a spelling mistake in Experience) ;). Then there is the fatigue/wound bar (the reddish boxes), which has a clever design: You can exert your character to activate special attacks or move further inside a sector (which makes you put a certain number of black cubes onto those little cube holes from the left). However if you are wounded in combat, you put some red cubes into the bar from the right. If those meet you are down...So essentially, the more wounds you have the less you can exert yourself. And the more you exerted yourself in an attack, the more likely you are to go down from receiving wounds. This works great as you decide your level of risk vs power each turn and males medics like Fox be in high demand.
Now the main issue is about the lower left section named Skills.
The game knows three type of non-attack skills which are frequently used to solve side-missions and on and off the battlefield: Leadership, (used to recruit Militia or affect allies), Mechanic (repairs depleted weapons and armor) and Medic (heals wounds). The dice you see there are somewhat nonsensical, but expect to have 1-3 dice in each section. Now we have different quality dice, as mentioned in another blog entry which each result in more likely and a higher number successes. So the different colors denote different quality dice.
But which to choose? This has been one of the biggest challenges: We want dice to be "recognizable" as the same type (so for example all three get black colored printing), but at the same time it should be obvious which one is "better" than the others. Then we have to pay attention to red-green blindness and we want the dice to be readable in print. And we need one "Evade" dice color on top of the three.
We started with white-red-black, which works nicely in the sense of "escalation", but is the same as our fatigue/wound colors and thus confusing. We then went with various combinations from the "Defcon" range, but once you put green and red, you get into issues with color-blindness.
We are now at green, yellow, black, which is less logical in the escalation sense and not 100% ideal to spot on a printed sheet. And we continue to work on alternatives :)
Any suggestions? Feel free to contribute!
cheers
primetide
