WOIN Looking for help with homebrew

KnightOfTigers · Oct 22, 2018

I've been working on a N.E.W. homebrew for a few months now, but have hit a few roadblocks. Rather than giving up on the project entirely, I thought it would be best to reach out to the community and see if I can find some potential collaborators to brainstorm with.

The project - tentatively called MacrossOver - is an unofficial, not-for-profit setting featuring elements taken from the mecha anime Macross Frontier and Gundam 00, as well as space opera series such as Space Battleship Yamato and Outlaw Star. The aim is to create an internally consistent universe (which has so far come together really well) and establish a robust yet simple skill list and mechanics oriented around piloting giant robots roughly 10-20m tall.

I'm primarily looking for collaborators who are familiar enough with W.O.I.N. to help out with balancing issues. However, experience with the aforementioned source materials would be great for getting input and assistance on the races, mecha combat rules and general world-building.

The current homebrew document is about 27 pages long (including formatting, rough in-universe timeline and table of contents) plus some scattered txt files, so please don't think I'm going to just foist a half-baked idea into everyone else's lap and do a runner; this is a project I've worked very hard on, and I fully intend to keep doing so. Just need a helping hand to broaden the experience base behind it and help breathe some life into something I'm sure people will enjoy.

daniiren · Oct 22, 2018

I'm not familiar with the source material, but I do have a (relatively) simple piece of code that simulates certain combat encounters. It's not a complete combat simulation, but I've used it before to look at critical fail probabilities (here), damage from special ammo (here), and a comparison between armor types (here). It won't auto-balance weapons and stuff (it's a planned feature), but it is useful in seeing if something is over- or underpowered. I can furnish you with it if you want to muck around with it yourself (it's written in python), or it's super quick for me to change a few parameters and run it myself. It's not (yet) an intelligent simulation, but it does roll dice and add modifiers faster than the average human.

Morrus · Oct 22, 2018

I'm also not familiar with any of the properties you mention (I think my giant robot knowledge is generally limited to Transformers and Battletech). I can try to answer specific questions here, but only on the WOIN mechanics side; I won't be much help with the background material.

KnightOfTigers · Oct 26, 2018

Oh, Python, cool! I started learning a bit of Python over the past year, but haven't really had a chance to play around with coding much outside of generating characters from arrays and stuff.

I guess my first and biggest question is: How much content is too much?

Specifically, how many races/careers/skills are ideal in terms of having enough to make an interesting variety of characters, but not so much that players are paralyzed by choice? For context, I have established 7 player races, which covers the usual 'racial archetypes' like "Strong Martial Race (like Dwarves or Klingons)", "Intelligent Tech-Savvy Race (like Gnomes or androids)", "Supernaturally Inclined Race (like Elves or Eldar)" and "Vaguely Animal Race" (like Kobolds or Saurians). But is 8 perhaps too many?

And as for skills, I have wound up with 80 skills(!) across 14 categories, which to me feels like a massive amount of bloat. But is this a 'normal' number off skills for WOIN?

Morrus · Oct 26, 2018

7 races is fine. I don't think there's much danger of having too many (after all, the upcoming Galactic Sentience Catalog introduces about 40 more!)

For skills, it's a keyword system, so there's an infinite number of skills. The ones in the book are just examples. Basically, if you can think of it, it can be a skill.

KnightOfTigers · Oct 27, 2018

I see... Ideally I'd like to reduce the skill list to something small and measurable; I've found that large skill lists - to say nothing of infinitely long ones - tend to engender confusion ("What skills would be good? Is it worth spending a skill choice on this?") and buyer's remorse ("I haven't used this skill at all... I wish I'd taken THAT instead...").

If I could somehow compact my skill list to... say, something neat and tidy like 36 skills among 6 categories, how might that affect the mechanics and game balance?

Morrus · Oct 27, 2018

KnightOfTigers said:
I see... Ideally I'd like to reduce the skill list to something small and measurable; I've found that large skill lists - to say nothing of infinitely long ones - tend to engender confusion ("What skills would be good? Is it worth spending a skill choice on this?") and buyer's remorse ("I haven't used this skill at all... I wish I'd taken THAT instead...").

If I could somehow compact my skill list to... say, something neat and tidy like 36 skills among 6 categories, how might that affect the mechanics and game balance?

That would involve rewriting every career and race if you're using anything from the core books. If you're only using hour own careers and races, then you have complete control over what skills they offer anyway.