A few months ago, jdrakeh came up with an entertaining short-term RPG design contest. The details are here:
The Great Conjunction (RPG DESIGN CONTEST). I pitched in a contribution called Eightfold, a retro-inspired, fairly rules-light offering. The latest draft revision is attached to the message.
While the Grand Conjunction's limits and themes were highly useful for sparking ideas, inspiration isn't really all that handy when it comes to sniffing out the holes and traps of a design. And I'm pretty sure there are some fairly nasty sinkholes hidden in the system that I just don't have the perspective to spot.
One of the selling points of Eightfold is in the dynamic resource management of magic. In brief, characters are all magic-users of one kind or another. They have a very limited number of "flux tokens" representing their ability to boost their innate flow of magic and fuel spells. This token pool refreshes every eighth hour. Petty innate powers can normally be triggered at will, but more potent magic requires a higher flow of the corresponding magical Octant to activate, and boosting an Octant takes a flux token and a combat round to accomplish for each level to be incremented. Characters can't normally walk around with boosted flows; they recede back to their normal background level within about five or ten minutes.
Therefore, players have to decide when to expend some of their limited store of hoodoo; a store that's used for both combat-related magics and out-of-combat effects. Their lot is further complicated by the fact that other magic-users can attempt to block their boost attempts with their own magic, or augment an ally's casting with the right powers. It's intended to be something of a minigame, working together as a coordinated group to bring up powerful magic when needed or to function at a lower level when reserves need to be kept or magical "noise" needs to be prevented.
Of course, with this kind of combinatorial mix, it's certain that somewhere in there, there's a trivially optimal combination waiting to be born. Some non-ridiculous mix of powers and spells is in there that gives a solo caster unlimited flux tokens, or lets him walk around all day with boosted magic without having to pay for it.
Given the number of number-crunchers here, who can tell me where this system is most broken? The most relevant places to look are probably character generation, the Action Test chapter, and the Magic chapter.
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