Scars of War Dev Blog Update
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 747
- Removal of mana. No mana anymore. Actions use stamina, casting spells included. This provides a natural balance since swinging heavy weapons and wearing heavy armor drains stamina, the same resource you use to cast magic. Which explains why mages don't like heavy armor quite logically.
- Moving away from character (levels) to a large degree. I used to do the Dungeons and Dragons thing, where going up levels gave you more hit points and a bunch of skill points to spend. No more. The game still tracks your level based on how much experience you have earned, as a relative measure, but it has little effect beyond that. There is one thing I'm tying to it, but I'll discuss that later. Most of the system doesn't care about level.
- Directly spending experience on character development. Like I said, you used to level and gain skill points to spend. No more. Now it works like Vampire:Bloodlines. You spend your gained experience directly on skills and traits whenever you have enough to buy the skill you want. You want to purchase an expensive trait, save up for it.
- An extra attribute was added : Willpower. Mage types had no attribute tradeoffs during character creation. It was all about Intelligence. Willpower was added to add another dimension, a choice. Intelligence is essentially mental Agility, Willpower is mental Strength or Toughness. It ties into hitpoints, stamina points, mental resistance and the power of your spells. The system is better now that there is more than 1 attribute for mages to focus on.
- Build point system. I'll elaborate further, let's just say character creation works more like Shadowrun than DnD now. There are more interesting choices and trade-offs during character creation, which makes the whole thing more enjoyable, IMO.
- Less is more. By which I mean I decided that fewer skill levels are better. More distinct differences per level. I don't know about other people but personally I don't like systems like the Elder Scrolls, where skills rank 1-100 and every so often you allocate a percentage point or two. Ugh. So what difference is there between 57% and 59% again? None really noticeable to the player.
