Thorny but beautiful business!

My friend Johannes joined me in testing the combat mechanics again and again. I thought I had a pretty solid system. Man was I wrong! It based on 6 sided dice, and you had to add and subtract… it was a mess.

I personally don't like mental arithmetic very much. I want to know as fast as possible what stays on the table and what disappears and still have a multifaceted combat system.
The problem was: How do I test dice that are not produced yet. Yes I could do it mathematically on a piece of paper, or cut out little pieces of paper, glue it onto D6, D10 or D12 and trial and error. Well that’s at least all the ideas that came into my mind. I am not very good at math, so I always need people to help me. I'm not a big fan of sticking little snippets on dice either. I have to find another solution to finding a good combat system. Fortunately there is an app for anything now.

THE APP STORE AS A LIFE SAVER

I found an app in the Apple App store that allowed me to simulate any kind of die and it allowed me to put emoticons onto it. There is an emoticon for (almost) EVERYTHING! This gave me the possibility to make 600 dice throws for various combat situations in just a few hours, getting a feeling of how the dice would play out.
Then I built new 12 sided dice with custom symbols and printed them.

Wow, a wonderful battle system without mathematics, what a feeling. You roll the dice, re-roll some of them, depending on which human models are on the area compare the dice rolls and remove the losses. I wanted a dice system because it is exciting and makes "lucky punches" possible with a 8,3% chance.

A new demon miniature

Here you can see the model of "Krampus", my interpretation of an old European child punishing monstrosity. My idea was a creature that sewed itself a beautiful face. It plays a flute like the pied piper but it is actually an extension of his face like a trunk. Children's toys are attached to his body with chains and some of the children play on his back.

The rest of the month was more testing and more painting while the printer was printing nonstop :D

It was an interesting month and I was able to solve a lot of important problems. What I learned was that I have to be ready to quickly throw away ideas that do not work or are too complicated or not fun. I really want a complex game, but what I don’t want is a spreadsheet-esque book-keeping apalooza!