Ahoy, heroes! It's been a couple of months now since I released When Sky and Sea Were Not Named. I want to give an update on where this game is headed and what I've been working on. 

The Future

Here's the big-picture stuff I'm hoping to release in the next version. 

• Skysea voyaging. Right now, the setting is pretty hand-waivey. I'm planning to commission a more detailed map of the near Skysea around Tel-Kanan. I'll also create more content about the four origins, along with mechanics for traversing the Skysea and exploring its various layers.
• Fleshed-out vehicles and mounts. This means more kinds of skyremes and other vehicles (magic chariots! flying carpets!), along with mechanics for the always-crowd-pleasing skyreme battles. But I want to look beyond just airships for this type of large-scale traversal and combat. The mechanics should encompass riding atop giant monsters, summoned stormclouds, and sentient islands. 
• Higher-level play. The introduction of legendary lore will be heroes' pathway to achieve 5 points in attributes (with one exception, this is currently impossible in the rules). Legendary lore must be learned or found on adventures. 
  
• More adventures! I've been testing a few new modules (and I still need to publish The Reaper adventure I've been teasing as "coming soon" since launch.)

Recent Testing

For the past few months, I've been testing out some minor but far-reaching changes to basic combat. Before I dive too deep into the stuff above, I'm hoping to get a handle on these changes and their ripple effects (not least since they'll require revising the hero sheets and all the NPC statblocks...) 

Warning: this next bit gets into the weeds!

Blocking and parrying

One of my biggest beefs with the current game is that you can use a sword or a spear to block arrows, lasers, and other ranged attacks. (Mechanically, this is because melee weapons add directly to Guard). Now maybe Achilles could block an arrow with a spear, but for most warriors, I feel this is unacceptably unrealistic even in a game with magic pool noodles. 

I’ve been testing a new way the guard bonus works for armaments. It becomes a conditional bonus that you add (or don’t add) to your actual Guard, depending on the incoming attack. This bonus "floats" alongside your Guard, which still goes up or down during combat. 

If you have a shield, its +3 block Guard bonus applies to almost all attacks. If you have a spear, its +2 parry Guard bonus applies to melee attacks against you, but not ranged attacks. 

Armor as Guard

Implementing the block/parry thing adds quite a bit of complexity and cognitive load to basic attack resolution. In the current rules, you already have to subtract your Guard and your Armor from the attack result to determine lethal damage—which is a lot of subtraction (especially for the Guide). Subtracting a third thing, the floating block/parry bonus, is a bridge too far!

To make room for the new block/parry mechanic, I’m planning on ditching Armor as a separate value. Armor will just add directly to your base Guard, which I think it makes sense in the same way that Strength adds to it—it's like having a thick skin. 

I’ll probably buff the values armor provides a bit too, since Guard, which can be reduced to zero, isn’t quite as valuable as static Armor for damage reduction. 

More ways to use and lose Guard

With Armor adding even higher values directly to Guard, some characters can now have ludicrously high Guard. This risks turning the beginning of combat into a boring slog of chipping away at a “wall of Guard.” 

To make this phase of combat more dynamic, I’ll likely add a “charge attack,” where you take -1 guard to inflict more guard and lethal damage on a melee attack. This will be a universally-available special attack—alongside jump-attacks, which will be simplified to encourage their use more. I’m also looking into creating more interesting and lethal ambush-like actions that can circumvent or overcome high-Guard foes. 

No-go: damage without subtraction

In an attempt to streamline combat even further, I also tested a new approach to lethal damage that gets rid of subtraction entirely. The idea: 

When an attack hits, it inflicts lethal damage equal to the roll. No more subtracting your current guard from the roll. If I roll a 7 to attack you with a sword and hit, you just take 7 lethal damage outright. 

In other words, this would have made Guard function more like a damage threshold than damage reduction (DR). To account for the much higher damage output, characters also would have had roughly 2.5x more Life. 

Now, I kinda liked this. Cutting this one step of subtraction really did reduce the stress of running NPCs in battle for me, speaking as a Guide who’s terrible at doing math in his head. I also liked that it made the beginning of combat, when everyone has high Guard, feel more dangerous—since any hit will inflict tons of lethal damage. 

However, it warps the flow and feeling of combat quite a bit—fighting becomes less about managing Guard, and more about how high the attacker rolls. It also makes Life feel more like D&D hit points. The balance math gets a little wonky, and there would be tons of ripple effects to deal with. 

Also, players familiar with the current system who tested this ranged from "ambivalent" to “I will homebrew this back to the old way if you change it.” And so, I feel I must ditch this idea. RIP, no-subtraction.