Badass Dragon Scavengers of the Void - Player Postmortem

[messana]

Specializations

@daneel

I really liked the idea of the specialities, would have liked to see more use of it.

@wisconsinplatt

Specializations needed more chance to be special.

@Donald_Petersen

Me too.

I hear that! This is precisely why I wanted to do a postmortem to see the player reaction to new wrinkles. I wanted specialization to feel special - that they opened doors and made it so your specialization could “see things no one else can see, do things no one else can do!” The flip side of that coin is “Oh, this mission is best for my specialization. No reason to take any other mission.” In BDSV, did specializations feel like a special opportunity? Like being railroaded? Or a half baked addition that could have been more fully baked?

Classes were intended to be available in the beginning, but I ran out of time with the development cycle and really wanted to meet my self-imposed deadline of starting by mid January. I would have left it out, but then @bizmail_public raised the idea of specialization in Round 3 and I wanted to respond to that and see where things went.

Badass Dragon Scavengers of the Void - Round 3 - Swan's Way

Tuesday Mission Update As any Prigononist knows, the path worth pursuing is upwards to greater complexity and onwards to more subtle interaction. Look around you – it’s happening! The simplest way is “every intelligence for itself,” Simple, boring, and barely worthy of (non-sentient) slime molds. We could also have an “organizer.” Bah!! Fascist crap I left behind when I defected from the Ring. We’ve started down a another road to complexity: Specialization. Our three “scientists,” Mark Wat…

I tried to add class-specific automation during the ‘easy week’ I gave myself with Round 5, but just couldn’t quite finish it. I do want to add it.

I thought about mission bonuses for having a full complement of specializations (which was introduced in the final round) but I kept coming back to the ‘keep it simple, don’t require coordination among multiple players because that puts people with less time at a disadvantage’. A lot happens in a life in 12 weeks, and we had any number of players moving, starting new jobs, and otherwise grappling with the many-headed Beast of Real Life.

The initial inspiration came from BDW: how would vehicle classes be modeled in a game like this? Everyone would have access to a special skill, TRAVEL, that burned fuel (mana) according to their class, and then the idea felt like it had general-purpose potential.

I toyed with the idea of having BLUE provide ‘mana’ and that each class would have different skills that could be deployed: DEFEND, HEAL, BUFF, etc - but I didn’t have time to fully flesh that out prior to start. On top of that, folks seemed to be struggling a bit with the new USE order and I felt like adding an additional mechanic would only make that worse.