Hi!
Sorry to interrupt your logs with this GIGANTIC WALL OF TEXT, but I've run a oneshot in a slightly tweaked version of your patched system, and I thought I'd comment here with my post-game assessment.
tl;dr The system was fun and good, we made some tweaks, your patches were really useful, and overall this is a cool but slightly broken system that we'd like to run again; read more if you want details.
First off, the changes that were made so that we could run a simple 4 hour game that anyone could quickly pick up, were the following:
- Took out most of the classes -- we went with Youkai (of a few schticky types but all with basically the same racial parameters), God, Human, and Ghost.
- Took out Focus stance for simplicity's sake
- Removed Religion (was irrelevant to our scenario as a mechanic; any religiosity was a schtick thing we assumed players could do on their own)
- Removed Fandom Points and anything that could be bought with them; gave players 15 extra spell card points at the start of game to make up for this.
- Disallowed the use of any given spell card more than once a fight, for balance and schtick reasons; first, enemies in Touhou never clone their cards in a fight, and second, there is little reason to create more than one spell card if you can use it more than once. You guys did fix a lot of the spam-card problem when you changed Invincibility and made bombs no longer refresh when you lose a life. (I'd rather the PCs have lots of cool cards than have PC98-bombs for flavor.)
- Doubled the effect of Resilience on hitbox; this was entirely necessary because otherwise hitbox never got high enough to be an effective defense stat.
- Took out "points" from battle effects and instead made Graze give you 1/5 of a life every time you succeed at Grazing. This was a reasonable concept that we did not balance well, but it has potential and flavors like the games. Gaining lives from Graze means that someone with low Strike actually harms the party against a high-hitbox target because they end up healing the enemy. We're thinking of changing this to +(fraction) Bombs for every successful Graze.
- Capped chargen stats at 7.
- Re-flavored hitbox to be "you are hit but not damaged" -- for example, bullets simply passing through the ghost, or missing the object-body of our tsukumogami.
- Said that you can "break" spell cards by hitting someone during their card in battle; this causes spell cards to have a cooldown requiring a full night's sleep. This wasn't relevant to our oneshot, but it was a change, so we're posting here.
- Lives refreshed after a night's sleep rather than at the end of an Incident, because this allowed for more difficult fights and makes multi-day Incidents not so punishing as a result.
- Took out almost all mechanical benefit for every race. Humans got +1 to a non-combat stat; the prism youkai threw out random elements for standard attacks; the ghost got to phase through things. This was mostly used for flavor and interesting interactions; we had few enemy elemental weaknesses, and larger benefits showed up in the types of non-combat magic they could use.
- I know it's a little deviant from the universe, but we dictated that if spell card fights have no rules, you are knocked out at the end of losing all your lives, and you can die if you are coup-de-grace-d at the end of the fight after being rendered unconscious. (I like darker universes.)
Problems we still saw with your current system as is we ran it:
- Strike is essential. You can't sacrifice Strike and actually do much in battle. This means that the correct option for any player who wants to have an actual effect on battle should pump their Strike as much as possible. We had someone who decided to go with a low-Strike character who had some hindrances to work around it, but she still never really hit anything.
- Cunning is effectively useless. Initiative matters only in the first round of combat, and if you don't oneshot the foe, it's as far as we can tell irrelevant. If the battle goes on a long time, one extra turn doesn't matter. Also, all my characters had Cunning 2 and nothing bad happened to them. (Because of this problem, they put nothing into that stat.)
- There is no way to gain CP. I assume you meant for the GM to hand it out, but there are way too many point types in this game, and there were no rules for when to give CP. Originally, Fandom Points gave you this, but we didn't like the meta-game schtick of Fandom Points. We'd rather this be rolled into level-ups like stat gains were.
- Invincibility was awkward, though not clearly flawed, but it might want to change because the solution to invincibility was to have people delay their turns so that they didn't have to take potshots at invincible enemies. Not allowing delaying turns, locks players out of the fight. This might be the one time initiative matters, but if you can't ever change initiative order in battle by delaying, this turns initiative into a really punishing stat that prevents slow (compared to their team) people from ever fighting due to spell cards providing invincibility. Being slow compared to the enemy is one thing, but having initiative relative to your team matter results in some people feeling useless while other people carry the fight.
- Your die Sets (+ and - D6 dice) are clunky and awkward and equivalent to 2D6 - 7 as a formula. This isn't an incredibly annoying problem, but maybe plunk it in the rules for folks who don't like distinguishing dice and just want to add dice.
Other potential problems (like things not covered in oneshots)
- Growth. There are two clearly superior stats if you follow growth upwards; these are Strike and your choice of Hitbox or Evasion. Pick one of those and throw all your points in it, or if it's rate-limited as to how many points you can put into these, pick Strike and one defense stat and jack them both up as high as you can. Doing anything else results in enemies and allies rapidly becoming much stronger than you. Possible solution: decrease growth rate to less than a point per level and cap stats with a cap that increases more slowly than you gain points. This prevents players from focusing on the two aforementioned stats.
- Small changes in stats massively affect hit chance, especially if stats are all close to each other, such as near game start.
- Spell cards don't grow well, even with our patch. It's fairly easy to optimize spell cards even with the one-per-bomb flavor. It's fine at chargen, but in late game cards will start looking a lot like each other. We're still musing on how to fix this.
- It is my associate here's opinion (he played and is helping me write this, as the resident Mechanics Nerd) that having combat and non-combat stats be the same thing, is problematic. Anyone who wants to do a specific optimization for combat suddenly finds their character's personality changing to fit a certain pattern that may not actually be related to what they want their character to be like. Personality and battle should be relatively independent (although feel free to line them up, but mechanically enforcing this is a problem).
Good things!
- The battle system is amazingly Touhou schticky. We had all kinds of insane collisions between spell cards and had so much fun with this. At one point we had 3 spell cards going off in the same turn. This is basically how actual multi-way danmaku fights would actually go.
- With our patch, hitbox and evade both were valid and useful defensive stats on their own, and it was reasonable to have characters pick one or the other. We couldn't tell which one was clearly better, although this does discourage people from splitting between both -- you had to choose one. We consider this fine and even a good thing. (We didn't want hitbox being a dump stat.)
- The battle system is easy to pick up, although we did dump Focus to make this easier. We were able to introduce new players to the system, chargen, and run an entire oneshot in 6 hours.
- Battles were fast-paced. No one got bogged down in die-rolling or number crunching.
Further questions:
- You did mean to eliminate spell card use during Focus, right? This is what I assumed, because otherwise there is no good reason whatsoever to be not in Focus all the time.
- What can you do to make late-game spell cards interesting, besides World Effects? We understand that Last Words and Survival Cards are cool, but we want normal spell cards to get cooler as well.
- Depending on how much you trust the GM, it may be good to dramatically reduce the number of classes and allow player creativity, not to mention having tons of classes both feels like you're telling the players "here's all the variety you get" as well as providing lots of complexity for newcomers. Also, if there are set large benefits for being a certain class, then some players feel compelled to choose classes based on benefit, not on personal preference. If some GMs want to play around with the complexity of your fine-grained classes, that's fine, but note that it can be simplified so long as the GM and players have a good working relationship.
