:: It has been an interesting and trying week, and the LGS co-owner has been kind enough to give me a break this week, as it would have been just Tyb's player and him at the game; my sweetie working this evening.
* Armed with various graphic representations of the probabilities of the 2d12 task-resolution mechanism, I've re-tooled the Referee's Spectral Index. I am eager to reveal it, but will hold off doing so.
--I think it will dramatically reduce the Referee's in-game work-load, as well as open-up the intuitive floodgates on rulings. But only for those who are willing to use it in that fashion. Fortunately, the system hasn't become dependent upon its use, and therefore cannot be sunk by its non-use.
* Having recently played in both B/X and Pathfinder games, I am very glad to have reduced the fiddly-bits of the skills to the ten categories, as a long list of discrete skills has proven, in my opinion, to be unnecessary, impractical to operate (find, maintain, etc.), and does nothing but simply add a bonus to an Ability Score check.
--My solution has been to list examples within each of the ten Skill Areas, and even to include Concentrations, but not to track the improvement of individual bits within them. A 'clever' descriptive mechanism facilitates the latter feature.
---As a character advances in Magnitude, the Player simply notes which Areas will receive their increase, and the entire batch improves, with Concentrations keeping their head-start in pace.
* A recent discussion on Dragonsfoot regarding the discrepancy between melee/muscle-powered ranged and Ancient tech weapons in most (all?) editions Gamma World reaffirms my decision to up the former categories weapon damages by a factor of 3, while still retaining the lethality of the Ancient tech.
--This isn't a CR-balanced sort of world, but with but a simple equation, a Referee can set damage output 'on the fly', so that TPKs are unlikely to occur for all but the unluckiest or most foolish of parties.
* I think that the Referee's Manual will be the most enjoyable portion to write of the proposed three, as very little of it will be mechanical in nature, and most of it will simply be one (of various) Referees talking to the reader in practical (and sometimes rather esoteric) terms about the art, business, and sciences of the Refereeing trade.
--The rest of the details are still under the hat...
* I'm hoping to have a small pre-production booklet ready in time for the North Texas RPG Convention in early June, covering the 'fall-off-a-log-simple' Character Generation, Equipping, and Combat sections, to be handed out along with the PreGens and SitRep handout, but no promises. ;)
