Footfall is a stealth-action RPG that tasks you with using supernatural power to commit crimes. It’s inspired by Dishonored and Mistborn.
You do not have to have read the other devlogs first. This one’s a soft reboot.
Footfall Devlog: 0e Post-Mortem
So . . . why did the enemies devlog never happen?
I’ve actually taken multiple cracks at it over the last two years. It’s never made it past the first paragraph. I used to have a writing teacher who said “When you have writer’s block, that’s your brain telling you that something’s wrong without knowing what it is.” Normally this means there’s a structural problem, a narrative beat that doesn’t naturally drive the story forward, those kinds of things.
I suppose you could call “Enemies don’t fill the role you want to say they do” a structural problem. A massive one, in fact, caused equally by the stealth and enemy rules.
Footfall 1e Development Start
Yeah, I’m reworking Footfall from the ground up. I’ve spent the last week or so (which should’ve been finalizing a map for an adventure for the current edition) writing Footfall again from scratch in a blank document with minimal referencing to the original.
Make the game easier to run (standardized check difficulty, centralized stealth, simplified enemies, fewer GM mechanical levers).
Make stealth more of a core focus (solidification, cutting the stealth check, renewed focus on movement and environment).
Consolidate or cut unnecessary rules (skills determining carrying capacity for different item types, adrenaline triggers, and concussive force being different from wall damage have all been cut or consolidated).
Make rules text shorter and snappier (the physics portion has gone from 1035 words of rules text to just under 500).
These goals are presented in order of importance/massiveness of change. The reason I’ve ideated this as a new edition rather than a patch is simple: these goals have resulted and will result in massive changes to core mechanics of the system.
The d20, for example, is gone.
The task resolution in Footfall 0e is simple. Each character has five temperaments (Bold, Careful, Clever, Forceful, Swift) that provide a die size (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12), representing approaches to solving problems. They also have four skills (Fight, Move, Talk, and Tinker) that provide a flat numerical bonus (+0 through +6), representing aptitude for solving specific kinds of problems. You roll one of your temperaments (based on narrative description), add the appropriate skill, and see if the result is greater than the difficulty.
There are reasons to roll lower temperaments, namely resource generation, but that’s not that important right now. What I want to focus on is advantage and disadvantage. Advantage increases your rolled die size by 1 step (d4 to d6 to d8 to d10 to d12 to d20) and disadvantage decreases it instead (d12 to d10 to d8 to d6 to d4 to d2).
You may notice all of these jumps are + or -2 max roll, save for the jump from d12 to d20 (a massive +8). I initially justified this to myself with the reasoning that players would only roll a d20 in “exceptional circumstances” (to quote my original blog post on the subject). This was, strictly speaking, untrue. Players were rolling d20s all the time, which is why I introduced mechanical incentives to roll lower temperaments.
Those changes did mostly work, but the d20 had caused a different problem that I hadn’t accounted for: inflating difficulty targets. As a GM trying to adjudicate on the fly, it’s hell trying to figure out what a fair check difficulty looks like because you’re simultaneously weighing the average of a d20 (10.5) and the average of a d6 (3.5) at the same damn time.
My current fix for this in the 1e working doc is to just cut the d20 and the d2. Instead, you assign d4 through d10 to four of your temperaments, and the last one doesn’t receive a die. This has allowed me to standardize a difficulty of 6 with optional +2, +4, and +6.
The Death of The Stealth Check
Another problem with task resolution was how it impacted stealth. I had a very nice playtest GM record literally everything that they said in teaching players the game (which is absurd and I am so grateful, they did not have to do that). One of said statements caught my eye, which was that “Stealth mechanics . . . really break down to this: you describe yourself being sneaky, we roll, and a failure results in you gaining Notice; more Notice adds more Disadvantage to your Stealth checks.” Everything else in the game warranted discussion and explanation, the stealth system warranted a long sentence that kinda just reads “it’s the same thing everything else does”.
This was a bit of a wakeup call, particularly combined with the realization that I constantly forgot my own lighting and terrain mechanics (which just added advantage or disadvantage to the aforementioned check). I find it really funny that I said “If I’m not thinking in relation to Stealth, I’m not playing a Stealth game” in devlog 4, because players were NOT always thinking in relation to stealth. Some players saw building for stealth as a trap, because you’ll eventually fail and end up in combat anyway (which was untrue given how forgiving Notice ways, but the feeling is worth note). Some players looked at the game and thought it wanted you to be in combat all the time (which is the exact WRONG feeling to be evoking).
I’m a big believer in rules elide, and through precise elision create mechanical and narrative focus. In that framework, what happened here is simple: I created rules that elided too much, leaving stealth in a questionably nebulous state where it had objectively less focus than combat (which had more structured, cemented rules) or even downtime (you will pay your taxes or the constables will find you). The rules that added back some focus to stealth (lighting and terrain) were, unfortunately, GM centered and therefore could be easily forgotten in the forest of other mechanical levers the GM must be operating at all times.
I believe these problems arose from how disconnected stealth was from a more central tenant of the game: movement. In devlog 3 I define the two types of mechanical levers that players have access to as movement and interaction. Movement is physical and limited by hard barriers in the level design, interaction is more abstract and limited by dice and conversation (task resolution, basically). In designing stealth, I had relied so much on the latter that it made stealth feel abstract and wispy on both sides of the table.
So what am I doing to fix this?
Well, firstly, I’m killing the fucking stealth check.
The notice resource fills the functional purpose that randomization does in most games, allowing players a reasonable margin of error that they can recover from. With this in mind, we can redesign stealth to be more solid by tying it directly into movement and positioning.
How do you gain notice if not by failing a stealth check? How about we give enemies two means of detection:
Sight. Extends out in a cone in front of the enemy (facing rules already exist due to momentum). If you enter or take an action in this area, you are detected and gain 1 notice.
Hearing. Extends out in a radius around the enemy. If you move through or take an action in this area, you are detected and gain 1 notice.
These give us means of detecting, but they don’t define the limits that allow players to avoid detection. For that, we’re altering light levels and terrain. Rather than providing advantage and disadvantage, the light level you are in determines how close you have to be for an enemy to detect you via sight. Terrain does the same for detection via hearing, but only when you are actively moving through that terrain. This change centralizes movement and environmental awareness as the primary levers through which players interact with stealth, which in turn gets them asking things like “What’s the light level in here?” and “Is there a rug I can walk on to muffle my footsteps?” with more regularity (thereby reminding the GM if they forgot to write these things down).
This has solidified stealth’s mechanics to the point that I’ve decided to label it as another form of Encountering Danger, like combat. My hope is that this centralizes and emphasizes stealth in play and redefines enemies as perception barriers, which was a role they were lacking in previously.
None of the changes introduced here are set in stone, and they aren’t the only changes I’m making, but I think they’re strong examples of the kinda of changes I’m making and how my design sense has changed over the last two years.
These changes are core and sweeping. This means that, in producing them, more changes become necessary to support and/or respect them. Some have claimed that I’m basically making a new game. I, however, believe that this is the point of a new edition. I’m attempting to solidify the core concepts of Footfall further while also creating a new play space. If its identity is stronger and it’s more fun to GM, I will have succeeded.
Thank you to those who have supported me thus far. Please keep watching, I think you’ll like what I have in store.
