Creating Lumen Ryder #3: Expanding LUMEN's Class System
In this blog series, I talk about designing LUMEN RYDER CORE and sharing my experiences with developing it (as well as giving you a reason to buy the game). Hopefully, you’ll be able to benefit from reading this as I benefit from processing my design journey as a whole.
In its most basic format, the LUMEN engine can be broken down into the following elements:
A D6 Dice Pool where you roll and take the highest result
A Tiered Resolution System where dice results are divided into Failures, Partial Successes, and Full Successes (much like “Powered-By-the-Apocalypse” games)
Three Stats to determine how many dice you roll - aptly named Power, Speed, and Focus
Health, because this is a combat game
Resource, a limited point system for activating Powers
and Powers, unique things you can do to alter the course of battle
For LUMEN RYDER, I renamed Health into Armour (as per tokusatsu tradition), Resource into Combo, and Powers into Specials - mimicking the idea of “building up your combo” to active your “Special Abilities”.
Then building off these few elements, combat then consisted of:
Harm aka how much of your target’s health you could take away on a hitt
Range aka where you could deal Harm to a target from (divided into Close, Mid, and Far ranges)
and Tags that alter the way you fought in combat - these range from general to highly situational
Harm and Range by themselves are pretty damned solid, with three ranges presented in LUMEN (Close / Mid / Far) being a perfect number - not too much or too little. The real juicy bits here proved to be the Tags and Powers mechanics, the former of which I later separated into Boons and Drawbacks which gave you advantages and disadvantages depending on the situation.
LUMEN itself as an engine is quite easy to hack, and you’re able to make it as complicated or as simple as your game demands.
Here, I attempted to implement a very essential element of tokusatsu shows: different forms for each Ryder and options for the Ally to support the Ryders in combat (which I’ll talk about in the next post).
This meant that whatever character options players used for both Ryders and Allies, their decisions and abilities had to be meaningful in play PLUS that character options had to be varied enough that each form a player created would feel special and unique.
For example, Kamen Rider Kuuga (depicted above in Figuarts form) has access to 4 “Basic Forms” in the first third of the series:
A red Mighty Form that fights using its fists and is effective in close range and generally balanced between speed, power, and health.
A blue Dragon Form that fights with a staff and has lower power and health but excels at fast attacks in both Close and Mid ranges
A green Pegasus Form that fights with a gun and that overwhelms its user’s senses but excels at using focus to execute Far ranged attacks
and a purple Titan Form that fights with a sword and has very poor speed but makes up for it through brute force attacks at Close range and has very high armour.
Recreating these in LUMEN RYDER is dirt easy. For the Mighty Form, you could very simply distribute 2 points amongst your three stats and make them effective at Close range. Similarly for the Pegasus Form, you could give yourself about a 4 for your Speed and make your weapon effective at both Close and Mid ranges.
In the Beta Ashcan v1.5, your Weapon builds are restricted to a set list of pre-generated options with a preset amount of Stat points to distribute.
Early on, I leaned into this idea of only having X amount of Stats for your forms and “balancing” low and high harm weapons - unfortunately limiting myself and the players in what they could accomplish with the system (again, going back to the promise of “if you want to do something, you should be able to do it”).
Playtesters found this frustrating, opting for pregens instead because this “simple system” was too much hassle to use properly.
Thankfully, in the Full Version of the game (which will be released soon), I made the right decision to let go of all that and reconfigure everything into a flexible “Point Buy” system where you could freely customize every aspect of your Ryder’s form.
This meant you could be as practical or impractical as you wish, which means you can absolutely create hyper-broken glass cannon that could deal 10 Harm at Far Range but with pathetically low stats and Drawbacks that hurt you every time you moved - all possible by breaking down the LUMEN engine into its barest elements and building up from there.
In the next entry, I will discuss the specific expansions made to the Range, Tags, and Powers and what that process looked like in playtesting.
The lesson I learned here is that it’s better to be not too sticky with your own ideas. Playtesting is a gift in that it gives you the chance to look at your project from someone else’s eyes - revealing glaring flaws that you were too caught up to recognize.
It’s like taking your beloved baby game to a secluded spot behind the house and mercy killing it for its own good. Behead your darlings to make them better - something which thankfully does not apply to real people.