Heirarchial Change in Melee Skills

Get ready because it here it comes. Melee skills are being reworked to have greater hierarchy and more flexibility. Essentially "Basic Melee" is being changed to a fundamental melee skill, levels of which determine how many combat actions you can take in a round. To gain greater chance to hit however you will invest your skills into specific weapon types: Blades, Simple Weapons, etc.

All of this came about because of a disagreement about to handle to changing weapons. I won't bore you with the specifics as its already been decided. Look to see the web pages updating over the next week or so.

PUCS - Percentile Universal Combat System

Axis and Allies

This is unrelated to PUCS development but it was so cool I had to mention it. My friend has been laid up after some surgery earlier this month. We have been play Axis and Allies via Map Tool and its been a lot of fun so far. Below are some screen shots.

The Russian Front

The Battle Board

The Complete Map

I really remain impressed with this FREE, flexible and easy to use application from the good folks over at http://www.rptools.net. I eagerly await their 1.3 release coming out of BETA sometime this year.

PUCS website launched over the weekend

The PUCS website went public over the weekend. The DRAFT 2 Rules are publicly available there, however editing continues and the final DRAFT 2 PDF has not yet been created. A whole lot has been changed with regard to magic especially. Play testing continues and I think that spells are going to be revised for potency and cost before the final DRAFT 2 is released.

So what changed? Mainly spells. Previously you could cast a spell as many times per day as you had skill level in the spell. There was also a calculation to determine how long it took you cast the spell in melee. It worked fine, but was still clunky in play testing and really slowed things down in melee. So it was scrapped.

Now Magic is casts per round of skill level in the spell. That a huge change. There remain many balance issues to work out between cost of the skill and potency. Some competing plans are:

1. Make magic much more expensive then in DRAFT 1.
2. Make spells much less potent then in DRAFT1.
3. Keep cost and potency from DRAFT 1 the same but increase the hierarchy to get to powerful spells.

Personally I do not know what is the best answer is. I'm inclined towards some combination of 2 and 3. But then there are some complexity issues so where the balance will fall out, we still do not know.

There are others issues to work out too. If I cast spell X in melee, can I cast spell Y in the same round? Its a worthy question but not yet answered. If you let the cast switch up between spells in the same round you increase their effectiveness and potency considerable.

So please browse the rules at the PUCS web site and post any comments that you might have. I would like to hear what you think!