|
 WEAPON
& ARMOR DESIGN
We could have provided lists of
statistics for every piece of armor and weapon we could come up with. And
it would have been lengthy, considering this is a universal system. And no
matter how complete we tried to be, gamers everywhere would have been
complaining that the particular weapons or armor they wanted wasn't
listed. So instead, we came up with a
weapon-and-armor design system. Now you can design exactly what you want,
which can be quite amusing and fun. You'll be left wanting nothing.
Rolegamer Democracy -
What's this?
There's a funny story as to
how this happened. I had found that gamers loved a wide variety of weapons
and armor, so I wanted to include lists of every piece of armor or type of
weapon I could think of, covering all genres. When it became evident that
doing this would be a massive undertaking, and ensuring consistency would
be next to impossible, I knew I needed to come
up with a quick method for us to generate hundreds of weapons, and I needed to do
it fast. So I called my kid brother to meet me at a local bagel shop so we
could figure out what to do. I outlined ideas of how to quickly do this,
meaning to have him do some of the grunt work ("You take the swords, I'll
do the bows"), and after coming up with this framework for generating
weapons, it occurred to me that it made more sense to just include the design
system in the rules instead of pages and pages and pages of stats.
We playtested and streamlined the system, whipped it up, and incorporated
it. The entire process took about one day, with a week of tweaking. Besides a few tweaks based on gamer suggestions
after the Internet release, it's pretty much what it was when it was first
designed. And it works like a charm. And like many other things in AQ!,
it's fun to make your own stuff!
|
