Dungeon Whatever v0.09 Changelog

This version is a pretty major update to a few core rules.

The overhaul is focused on two key areas: The Encounter system and Trainings.

The change to the Encounter system is the biggest one, as it removes the Focus die and Countdown die mechanics that were meant to dictate the pacing of Moves and other actions during Encounters.

The replacement is a single Momentum die that gets passed around and represents who is the active player in a turn. This is fairly similar to the Focus die with the big difference being that only the active player can make Moves, while other players can only make Contributions. This includes the World Player. This is a major restructure of turn and round order from how it worked before, with a focus on the active player making big Moves with Contributions more obviously playing supporting roles. It reduces some management from the Role Player side of things, but should hopefully still provide flexibility and a feeling of being able to play out a turn in a smart way.

There's also a new game currency in the form of Threat Tokens. This abstracts out the Countdown die's old role of building up towards a World Player's big turn. Threat Tokens also allow the World Player to respond to the active player in a new way even if the Role Players manage to hold on to the Momentum Die for long periods of time.

Contributions have been re-written to be clearer and also split clearly between Role Players and World Players since they act very differently.

The other major change is a  clean-up of how Trainings are created and organized, and how their bonuses apply. Trainings are now split into three ranks: Basic, Advanced and Specialized. Each rank of Training provides increasing bonuses, and are also linked to each other in a way that emulates a skill tree. Basic Trainings apply broadly, while Advance and Specialized Trainings offer more specific applications of Basic Trainings. This is essentially an alternate expression of most Base Attribute+Skill Bonus systems, but hopefully in a way that makes more sense and offers more flexibility. Rather than using predetermined attributes and skills, the way the ranks are organized are just by the number of words used to describe them.

There were also some other less impactful changes. The Partial Success result was also re-written to provide more guidance on how to apply it, and the application of Effect Levels is now less to do with Trainings and lies more in the domain of Gear. I'm hoping this will provide a bit more clarity on the purposes of each mechanic. The example Gimmicks and Character Sheet have also been updated to match the new Encounter and Training rules.

I'm planning playtests to test the updates to the rules, and hopefully they result in some good changes in how the game feels.