In a brief addendum to the last post, the battlefield mechanic(s) have also inspired the following revelations which I want to share because the more I think about some bits of design, the more implications spread out and I think those kinds of connections might be of interest to anyone following the devlog here.
1) I haven’t been sure what kinds of abilities The Diminished Power should have outside of some gestures toward doing interesting magical support (to differentiate them from The Empowered Child, who is a glass cannon), which is why there haven’t been any Design Principles for the different classes/playbooks thus far. BUT, after looking at the Battlefield and constructing in my notes the kinds of things Enemy Heroes can do, I realized that I can build The Diminished Power’s endgame abilities around mimicking some of those Enemy Hero moves (not merely fire breath: DRAGON breath) and/or manipulation of the Battlefield (e.g. creating cover against enemy heroes, canceling terrain effects for a turn, changing the terrain for a turn, etc.). Knowing what the fights are going to be like really does help the design of the people who are going to be fighting on them.
2) Also, because I want to be able to make things more granular for the purpose of mechanical specificity, I’ve divvied up the environmental effects into
Which also means that just as I’ve decided to build some of the higher-level stuff for The Diminished Power would be around manipulating the terrain, that means I can also say what kinds of things other characters can do at higher levels, too. The Outsider can change weather for an area or The Soldier being able to ignore certain terrain effects (for instance, I decided last night that they’re just flat-out immune to the negative effects of corpse piles from the jump) or The Killer being immune to certain hazards because they spent a few years in Australia developing an immunity to iocane powder.
3) Eventually make printable tokens/cards/markers for the different environmental effects. Still figuring out how to create the zone overlays and whatnot, but a series of simple symbols (like those found at game-icons.net) with a legend to the side or featuring a simple evocative symbol with a number beside it would get a lot of the effects across. Lots of ways to simplify it because the zones on the battlefield should be fairly large (something like 4x4-6x6 on a grid).
4) Much as miniatures or tokens would be just fine to represent things, all this means I can suggest that on top of miniatures or tokens, the larger and more notional map means people could just grab action figures if they want. Might make a thing saying that if you can mark off spaces on a big children’s play mat, you can just do it that way. All that matters is that you can mark it off well enough to have distinct zones. If you have a play mat with a city on it, you could just section things off into zones, attach any weather, hazard, terrain or structure tags and boom. Map.
Anyway, some simple observations about The Process