Poise This word brings a fun topic to today's post. Poise deals with balance and equilibrium. As a game developer, this is one of the biggest focal points for my TTRPG — and honestly, for just about everything I do in general. Technically I could roll straight out of yesterday's post about stature, since I was already dabbling into playtester classes there. But I won't. Instead I want to talk about how I'm approaching the whole balancing-abilities-without-breaking-things problem. Especially since I have between 7 and 9 abilities per class, and 27 classes total. Yes, I know that's a lot of classes. But it makes sense, I promise. I have three general categories I call "archetypes." Each one contains 9 classes, each unique in what it can do. I kind of hate games where you pick a class and get locked into one particular aspect of it, so this is my workaround. Look at World of Warcraft — why do I have to be stuck as Alliance if I want to roll a Night Elf? Why can't I roll a Troll Druid? (Yes, I played back before Cataclysm hit.) Same energy from Lineage 2, Black Desert Online, the list goes on. I don't like that feeling of constraint. So in my world, you pick what kind of class you want to play, and then find which archetype fits your style — or you flip it and start with the archetype and find your class from there. A good example is a Zerker, a Monk, and a Warrior. All three of them are in different archetypes, yet all three are mainly some form of melee or unarmed combat. The Zerker uses aether to summon weapons from their tattoos, the Monk uses traditional unarmed combat, while the Warrior uses technological enhancements to "level" the playing field. That's the real reason behind 27 classes. In practice it's more like 9 classes with slight variances and similar results, each one reflected across all three archetypes. Because balancing. Yesterday's post already had me admitting I haven't had much time to actually sit down and balance abilities within the classes. Once the next round of expeditions starts (this week, actually!) I'll be finessing that a lot more. Right now each class runs 7 to 9 abilities, split across different types: core, passive, risk, and some classes even have capstones. Thankfully I only have 5 playtesters right now and none of them overlap with each other. I do have a few clustered around the same archetype though, so that might make my life easier or harder. Not sure yet. I'll figure it out when it happens. I'm also fairly sure the ability-balancing process is going to end up as its own dev log eventually, especially since I'm building all of this into FoundryVTT to keep gameplay running smoothly and take some of the manual load off myself. Funny how the same instinct that keeps 27 classes from turning into 27 wildly unbalanced power fantasies is the same one keeping me upright the rest of the week. Speaking of equilibrium — as a solo game developer, I have to pick and choose when, what, and where I do things. Outside of the game dev, I stream 4 hours a day, 4 times a week over on Twitch. Just celebrated 6 years, and I'm always chipping away at improving the setup and automation bit by bit. If you want the technical side of that (the actual implementation stuff) that lives over on Byte Vortex. Then there's the dreaded household chores (yay, adulting), plant mom duties, dog mom duties, and then the hobbies. Dear god, my hobbies are vast. I've had ADHD since I was a little kid, so if you know anything about hobbies and ADHD, you already know my struggle keeping equilibrium. I do amigurumi for my Sunday vending here in Mexico, plus sewing, robotics/electronics, modeling, reading, and writing/blogging — and I'm probably still forgetting a few. Finding poise across any of that is a fight with myself pretty much daily. I do my best, and that's about the best I can offer. I'm glad I've mostly learned how to live with myself and still get things done. Might not be on the schedule I'd like, but at least I've made peace with that. This week especially is going to be a good example of poise: new expeditions kicking off, playtesters diving in to new territory, weekly schedules, the works. Poise isn't a nice idea anymore. It's the job and it's worth doing. Links: Patreon Ko-fi Mastodon Byte Vortex Cheshire Gaming Twitch