I love playing games. As a kid, I’d play a lot of board games, and then one Christmas, my parents gave me a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. From then on, I mostly played roleplaying games (and a popular TCG). Years later, I’ve gotten back into board gaming with a vengeance. I love the social aspect, the puzzling challenges, the joy of winning and the frustration of having well-laid plans crumble to dust. I even love my shelf of shame. But one thing that frequently bugs me after having played a game, whether I won or lost, is the Game Over feeling.

No matter how hard you fight or how great your success, everything is washed away once the game ends. But in a roleplaying game, when the game is over, your character has often improved in some way and you can reuse that character in a new game. That feeling of achievement and continuation was a big part of what drew me into rpgs way back when. These days, awesome board games do exist that tap into this, but still I want more. I want a character I can reuse across different board games, and this was one of the major motivations for creating Bastardium.

The second bit of inspiration for Bastardium came from the freedom of rpgs. In a roleplaying game, you’re not bound by premade cards or other game components but can create and add anything you can think of to the game. All you need to do is write your idea down on a piece of paper. Sure, you lose some fancy art, but you get creativity and imagination in spades. Qvarfot and I want players of Bastardium to feel like they’re creators, inventing fun items and cool powers for their personas. This extends to the games themselves, and we can’t wait to see what sort of designs people will come up with.

To that end, we decided on universal components for Bastardium. Minor components like tokens and counters will be included alongside a deck of sixty cards that can be used as modular board pieces and/or as playing cards. Some other things we would like to include are special cards, standees, bags, an hour glass, and a large board with square spaces on one side and hexagons on the other. At this point, both board and cards exist as completed prototypes, but we are designing the premade Bastardium games for cards only, since the board may be too expensive to include in the final box, depending on how eager the crowds are to throw their funds at us. 

Bastardium has seen a lot of iterations of the conflict resolution system. One of the earlier versions used 2d12 for skill checks, which had a certain elegance. However, the narrow statistical peak around a sum of 13 didn’t feel quite right when playing. Qvarfot and I wanted something else. Increasing one die to a d20 gave us a flat probability distribution from 13 to 21 with a decline at both ends. This made results from 13 to 21 equally likely at a 1/20 chance, but 2 and 32 quite rare at a probability of 1/240. Interestingly, the lack of a single, most probable value made the dice results feel more balanced. In addition, the heft of a d20 quite frankly felt more satisfying than that of a d12, when rolling the dice. More importantly, keeping the Trauma Die as a d12 meant that the effect of your persona being beaten up was felt less acutely, reducing the severity of the death spiral to a more managable level.

Now, rolling two dice and adding them (to a base) is fairly simple as far as game mechanisms go, and I’ve spent a lot of time considering whether this really was a smart choice. There are, after all, a lot of other ways we could go about it. Ways that would give the player a greater sense of control. Of course, having randomness in a game does fly somewhat in the face of player control, but there was no question that we wanted the randomness, because of the excitement that comes with it. Yet, why not allow for some form of dice manipulation that would give the player some agency? Our solution was to do both. We wanted Bastardium to be as accessible as possible, while still reasonably complex, and so stuck to a purely random roll for the base rule, but allowed experienced players to add an extra level of strategy when designing their personas, by picking traits that opened the possibility of manipulating the dice.

One other point merits discussion. When rolling d20+d12 versus a target value (the Crux), we employ a simple success or failure criteria, which may be viewed as somewhat unambitious. Afterall, we could have different degrees of success or failure, rather than a(n arguably) boring “nothing happens”. So what gives? Well, one thing we’re aiming for with the core rules, is speed, and calculating how much you’re off by (the Gap) takes time. Add to this the fact that element checks are used in very different situations and would complicate the design of detrimental effects too much, and we once more decided to go with the simple choice. Having said that, we may yet include an optional layer of differentiated failure (called Aftermath).

All in all, our core design choices were very much informed by a principle of simplicity, with strategic possibilities added as optional rules on a persona-by-persona basis. The idea is to free up design space for making the individual games (which can then afford greater complexity, as well). Specifically, we consider Element checks an important interface between the core rules and the games that use them, and have left this part of the design space largely uncluttered. We couldn’t quite keep our grubby hands to our selves, though; as evidenced by the possibility of taking a battle into Sudden Death mode. Still, this shouldn’t be a problem as the choice to do so is made by the players, and, furthermore, the battle system isn’t really meant to be tampered with in the individual games.

Coming soon…

Nothing to see here… Yet.