#tvwrites

So different Qualities would require different numbers of Beats to become active. The existing form of Qualities is ten unique trees, three ranks per. I think I can transplant that pretty much exactly, each rank is instead a number of Beats - so at character creation when you have only 1 quality, you'd take a Rank 1 Quality that becomes available after completing your first Beat. When level up comes, maybe you take some different rank 1 qualities to increase your range of options. Or maybe you take the rank 2 quality so upon completing your second Beat, you get a stronger thing. Or a rank 3 quality meaning after completing all three Beats, you can do something really significant.

My rough thoughts are: a quality/rank can be activated once per Adventure, and activating requires Showing Resolve.

So character building remains, quality slots remain, quality unlocks as milestones remains, everything's the same structurally, it's just to activate a quality you now need to complete your Crest Arc Beats and spend Resolve.

That's a great template concept, it builds Qualities into the core of the system instead of being an add-on, it encourages players to pursue their beats and rewards them mechanically for doing so, it's literally all good. There's only one question.

What's a Quality?

The role that a human character plays in DWS (and in monster battlers at large) is that of the non-combatant (mostly), who supports their partner and is supported by them in turn. Combat as communication is carried out between Digimon, and extends to the partners of the Digimon as well. When it's the human taking action, what are they doing? Negotiating, travelling, learning about the world, planning, and surviving.

Because of my determination to the narrative/mechanical split, I am resistant to making Qualities into "do X get Y" situations. I'd rather they be narrative tools you can invoke, things like "Right place at the right time" to be on the scene at the critical moment even if you were nowhere nearby. That kind of thing.

What I don't want Qualities to be is Get out of jail free cards. I don't want them to be "oh you just win" replacements for Skill Checks. Rather they should be ways to swing the narrative, steal the spotlight, take command of a scene, and allow players to claim focus when they most want it.

So at Level 1 you have 1 such of these, at Level 2 you've got 3, 3 => 5, 4 => 7, endgame you get up to 9. That's… kind of a lot tbh. In a four person game, that's 36 means to take command, but maybe that's fine? You have to spend Resolve to activate them, and even at endgame, 9 Resolve is a lot. Especially if some of the higher level qualities require more Resolve.

I think we walk down this path and adjust and balance, because I do like it as a path. I think this is the right approach. So now the question becomes, what does a Quality in this new style actually look like?

First of all in a general sense, a Quality provides a short phrase/statement/question that a player can invoke when they've completed as many Beats for the current Crest Arc as that Quality's Rank. Thus a higher Rank Quality is more powerful than a lower one, because it requires further narrative progress and becomes available later in the Adventure.

A Quality could be invoked during Tactical Combat, but it is not a Narrative Action but an enhancement. A Quality also does not cause a Skill Check, but may be invoked before or after a Skill Check to customise the result, depending on fit. A Quality has no mechanical "relieve stress or darkness, gain resolve, do a better skill check, remove reduced effect, give your partner a boost" features. None of those. That's not the business of a human character, mostly.

Let's look at Radiant, a Quality representing the attention/presence of powerful Light. Neither actively benign or malicious. I would want to persist this because it is a player's right to say "my character's getting a little bit weird with it. The world is starting to put a focus on them that may or may not be corruptive and ultimately it'll be us and the narrative that answers that".

Radiant overall is about expressing this Light, which is not an intrinsic part of a character so much as an attachment that has formed to them. Maybe they were destined for it. Maybe there was a seed deep inside. Planted when? Always? These are questions worth asking, and in a way while a Crest Arc is an Adventure-long character arc you're building, your Qualities are the Campaign-long character arc. Oh gosh I do like that a lot.

So let's actually try and make a Quality now. I've said they're phrases, so let's make some phrases, no wrong answers.

Reveal the presence of the Light

Draw eyes to the Light

Make manifest the presence of Light

Okay, rough concept. You might think this is the Crest Arc the Beacon for Light, but a Crest Arc has a narrative throughline and resolution. It has beginning, middle, and end. Instead a Quality is about escalation. Each of these steps is bigger than the last.

If you can reveal the presence of the Light, then those sensitive to it - for good and ill - will react to it. If you draw eyes to the Light, you are making a showing, gathering great attention, going beyond just those sensitive and declaring to the world. Finally, manifestation, great power acts through you. The scale is greater during an Adventure, but it's also greater at higher Levels. It's all narrative force, but when a player says "I want to use this Quality" as GM it's your role to say "awesome, what happens?" and then you workshop together what fits the current rank and level you've called on.

I think this is enough. I don't need to get verbose about describing each Quality rank, I can just write the sentence and then it's in the hands of player and GM to turn that into meaning, same as with Crest Arc Beats. You have a puzzle piece and now you're looking for the right narrative gap to slot it into. I like that as a playstyle. I feel happy, and contented.

Now the question is, what are the Qualities going to be? Given I wrote about Radiant, which is based off of the Crest of Light, one could suggest I invoke the Crests of Adventure further - but I don't want to do that. I want to write out character traits, both mundane and supernatural, that players may choose and then reflect in their character. If you take Radiant, you're not just taking it for access to its quality at the right moment, you're also saying there's something about your character. The presence of the Light is there. You might need to activate it via game mechanic, but it's part of your story. That's important.

So what else? Violence is here, there needs to be the capacity to say in a Digital World where violence is a form of communication, whether in seriousness or play, that your character can adapt to that. The path of Daimon Masaru CAN exist, but you have to forge it. Taking Violent 3, in whatever form it ends up, is an important step, but that's not the only step. You have to make your character story, through Crest Arcs and Qualities, lead you to that point. Lead you to any point.

I'm not entirely sure what further. I do still want to try for ten unique trees, and Radiant and Violent are two of them, but the rest of the existing Qualities are kinda unworkable for this. Passionate is a maybe. Welcoming is a no. Adaptable is a maybe. Bold is a no. Trustworthy is a no. Contemplative is a no. Attuned is a maybe but it will be the same as Adaptable. One of those but not both. Pitiable is a no.

What a Quality should be is something intrinsic that becomes manifest. Light is a supernatural intrinsic that becomes manifest. Violence is a mundane… okay intrinsic is the wrong word. Unless we're expressing the force of violence as being on the supernatural side that is made manifest. Violence is a choice. I guess in a way, Radiant is a choice, but made at the player level rather than the character.

Okay hold on that's cool. Characters make mundane choices and players make supernatural ones. So Radiant is something applied to a character by their player, supernatural. Violent is something a character chooses to do, mundane. Do I want a 5/5 split of that then? naaaah. The attuned/adaptable, something that connects a character to the Digital World, is def supernatural. Passionate, which is about expressing oneself with such forceful energy that others are caught up in your sway, is mundane.

Radiant, Violet, Attuned, Passionate, these are four I feel strongly about. What would the remaining six archetypes be? Terms to express and refine a character's nature? Maybe I open that up for consideration.

Level in Digital World Stories is determined by the highest Stage of your Digimon Partner. It goes:

Rookie = 1 Champion = 2 Ultimate = 3 Mega = 4

Anything pre-Rookie is treated as Level 1 because the expectation is for partner Digimon to start at Rookie, or at least obtain that very quickly into a fresh campaign. If a GM wants to deviate from that and spend a while in pre-Rookie forms, then I'm going to assume they're also confident enough to handle reflecting that in the system, hence I don't need to account for it.

There's a theoretical Level 5 representing post-Mega forms, but you're not actually meant to obtain it through natural gameplay. Rather its Milestones are meant to be available so doing Adventures at Level 4 still involves some form of character improvement.

So, the general ruling for gaining a new Level is like this:

Before a new Adventure, the GM will declare this Adventure will unlock a new Stage. Players will prepare a new Digimon character sheet for the upcoming Adventure, which will then become available during that Adventure. Notably, that Digimon will be one Level higher than all the other current Stages. So if you're Level 2 right now and the GM says next Adventure will grant Ultimate Digimon, you make a Level 3 Ultimate Digimon in advance.

During an Adventure, the critical moment comes, and you Digivolve to your new form - most likely going into Tactical Combat, but not always.

After the Adventure, because you've obtained a new Digivolution Stage, you increase the Level of all of your other Digimon forms, and your human partner increases their Level to match.

Honestly even writing it out like this, it feels… awkward. Maybe a Level Up should be done in advance of the new Stage? So in the case of "next Adventure is Ultimate", everyone Levels up to 3 at the same time as preparing their new Digivolution, and then run the Adventure at Level 3?

That's fine in theory but clashes with Milestones, as getting a new Milestone immediately after achieving a new Digivolution feels… off. That said, Milestones themselves are causing me problems now that Human Qualities are on the out.

The act of Levelling Up is interesting in terms of character customisation, but "number go up" is kind of mid as far as unique customisation goes. In truth the real character customisation of human characters is, right now, choosing your next Crest Arc and gaining access to its Beats.

Actually hold up, levelling up before new Stage doesn't work because a starting Adventure would, at least half the time, involve getting Champion Forms as well, and starting at Level 2 is stupid.

As a property, Level is a requirement, I've got a lot of values derived from it that trying to excise it would make more problems than not. And there's already a measurement of overall Campaign progress in the forms of Digivolution Stages: when you all get Mega Digimon, you're heading into the final stretch. That's just the truth.

But what does Levelling Up mean? For Digimon it's pretty minor - the only dynamic property Level applies to a Digimon is the potency of its Technique Modifiers (things like Status Effects, Buffs and Debuffs, etc), and a few Qualities. And frankly when it comes to Tactical Combat, previous Stage Digimon aren't really relevant anyway. For the most part the value of a prev Digivolution is in narrative uniqueness, and Attribute Negation. That's why there's a number of Qualities available for Digimon that grant narrative effects. Honestly I'm starting to question whether the Partner Skill Milestone - which is a Milestone a human character takes that then grants their Digimon partner a Skill - is a good idea, as you can and probably should just take a Skill-giving Quality instead.

But the death of Partner Skill as well is really rough for the Milestone design. It cuts Milestones down to +2 Core Stats, +1 Skill, and +1 Overflow Limit. At that point it really would be best to just make a human's progression also be discrete at the Level Up point, rather than a little more after every Adventure. Which I struggle with because it means an Adventure that doesn't lead to a Digivolution has no mechanical reward. This puts a squeeze on the Adventure structure itself which is a serious problem for me because I really like it.

Adventure, Interlude, Adventure, Interlude, Adventure, I like the discreteness of them. And using an Interlude to set the focuses for the next Adventure, and have players involved in building what comes next, is good.

Because each form of a Digimon exists as its own character sheet, I was always resistant to complex Level Ups for Digimon. They're complex enough at the making stage when you get to choosing qualities and then building Techniques. So I was always happy with Digimon being made and then being almost entirely static after that point. The only variability is the changing Level, which causes Digimon of lower Stages to just slightly outpace their peers. Though that also lacks significant mechanical impact as Tactical Combat really should be at the highest current Stage. And you don't need a mechanical reason to narratively be like "I'm tougher than I was before since I got a new stage".

Let's try and take a step back and rework this: What is my goal of having a Level?

For Digimon? I can't really say it's anything important. There isn't really an act of "Levelling Up" for them, that involves incremental improvement. They get all their new stuff in one hit, new Digivolution Stage, and their old character sheets become mostly obsolete. Usually the Rookie one remains relevant because players tend to run around at the Rookie Stage during Narrative Play, but when you get Ultimate Stage, your Champion form loses relevance real fast. That's part of why Attribute Negation still exists, and also non-combat Qualities you can pivot your character into. And then just narrative tools provided by having a physically different form.

The only grand value of a "Level" for a Digimon is a numeric property attached to Stage to differentiate it. Level back-porting to previous Stages to make them slightly stronger than equivalent Stage Digimon who don't have higher Levels is neat, but non-essential as lower Stage Digimon really shouldn't be doing much Tactical Combat.

Okay what about humans? Level acts as breakpoints for human progression, you can progress in upgrades up to a certain point, but then you need your Digimon partner to progress to unlock your next batch of progression. That I like, and in saying that, tying human and Digimon Level together is good. A human pushes it forward to the next barrier, then a Digimon knocks the barrier down, and then a human progresses again. But what does that actually mean, mechanically? Right now it's the Milestones, but without Qualities the Milestones are sooo dull.

I think that… Level is good for Digimon as is. A discrete value applied to all Stages, that has minor but notable impact on overall power by interacting with Qualities and Modifiers. And I like that Level is equal between Digimon and Human. And I like that humans make incremental progress towards their next Level, Adventure by Adventure, but the remainder happens all at once when their Digimon partner takes the next step.

So what really matters is determining what the incremental progress for humans should be. Core Stats. Skills. Overflow Limit. These are number go up types of upgrades, fine but flavourless. How Resolve increases is slightly more complex, my intention is one after every Adventure, but this can cause Resolve to balloon pretty significantly, as the GM limit on calling for Resolve is controlled by Level. That's part of why, originally, I intended to add additional ways to spend Resolve.

Maybe I need to take a page from Realis, and look at the Sentence structure. Making and refining true things about a character, that become invokable narrative tools. But again, I struggle to make it something core to the system and not an attached layer.

The intention of the Passionate Quality was to represent big risks for big gains. Rather than allowing a mixed success, taking a gamble on a binary pass/fail at a critical moment, representing how passion can either make or ruin a situation.

But Full Successes are more common than Fails in most situations, even if Mixed Successes are more common than both of those. The odds are bad. And we have a generalised means of negating Reduced Effect now that I'm happy with, rather than the custom means that many Qualities provided.

I do like the idea of, at a pivotal moment, having to weigh it all on a coinflip, but I just don't think the current odds permits that as a good idea.

So I haven't really discussed Interludes here yet but they're periods of quiet between Adventures where you restore stats, level up, and prepare for the next Adventure. There's a handful of Interlude Actions players can take, and this Quality is meant to add another.

That being said, I'm probably going to be reworking Interlude Actions to allow all of them, rather than a chosen one. So I'm not sure about this.

The intention of "Share a Campfire" was to allow a player to put some narrative focus on an individual or group, but the use of Crest Arc and the "Create a Focus" Interlude Action both provide that option instead. And actually using the Token of Warmth is difficult, one of my players has one right now in the current Adventure, but the relevant characters aren't readily available to call on. The timing was never right. And a Quality that can't be used isn't a Quality worth having, the only really useful thing Share a Campfire provided was a roleplay prompt.

This is one of my "I want my players to nominate part of the world to be interested in" qualities. A player chooses an Element, and that Element grows in focus. But, as we've said, generalised ways to create narrative focus are now being added to the game, eliminating a lot of this. The ability to grant an additional element to a partner is good in theory, but I've got big plans for elements and frankly this would be a thorn in my side.

I think "I'm interested in this element" is best done by looking at the chosen elements of player Digimon, and any nominations players make via narrative focus actions. There's nothing from Adaptable I need to translate.

Bold is all about trying to succeed even when it's Reduced Effect, but the use of Resolve to remove Reduced Effect completely kills this Quality. Also Inspiration is being converted into Resolve, so like, this Quality's super dead.

The Daimon Masaru / Marcus Damon elephant in the room. The capacity for a human to fight, to hurt, a Digimon. I don't want to outright deny that capability from players, but I also don't want it to be simple to obtain. Remember what I said about how humans are narrative and Digimon are systems, and to cross the divide requires a serious investment? For a human character to become more Digimon-like, to gain the ability to interact with the system and thus battle Digimon on an equal footing, requires significant narrative investment.

I've just realised that the Spirit Evolution approach, reskinned, could definitely open up possibilities to human characters. Like if you narratively pursue this kind of digital strength, unlocking the ability to fight could be, behind the scenes, the same as having the ability to Spirit Evolve. I'm not sure, that feels like a significant jump. I'd really prefer some kind of midpoint where a human gets access to like, the Basic Tech Action which involves an Accuracy and Damage stat. But do I want to codify that in some manner, or leave it to a GM to design independently? I don't know, I don't have a good answer here.

Some friends have been helping me run combat playtests, and one of them has their human character using this Quality which allows them to hit surprisingly hard - 2d6 isn't a huge number, but it's also not nothing, and being able to do it via Skill Check is very effective.

I probably need to talk more about human capacity for fighting digimon in its own dev diary eventually, I need to create a better solution for this because, frankly, I still feel Violent is too easy. I don't begrudge the player using it at all because I made it available, but I want gaining that capacity to involve stronger narrative action. We'll come back to this, but "I take this ability" is not how I want to go about it.

This is a lot of jank that is done better by the cleaner implementation of Crest Arc Beats and Resolve. Rank 1 is slightly interesting in that you get insurance for Make a Contact but also as GM do I want my players to have that? Make a Contact with someone dubious and untrustworthy already!

This quality was designed to encourage players to interact more with world-building and lore, to focus in on something that interests them and gain a benefit from it, and also to allow more studious characters to prep an advantage in advance. It came up just last session, but the capacity for study was difficult to establish and kinda shoehorned in, study in advance didn't become available and the conditions for that are too specific and narrow.

Plus if I want my players to go "I want this bit of lore to be important" we have that ability now. So this guy's out.

Digimon Attributes make me crazy. I eliminated Families from DWS - they exist in narrative theory but in mechanical practice they don't do anything, they were replaced by a Ten Elements system that's basically the exact same thing but more intuitive to work with. Digimon have an "Attribute Negation" ability that allows them to get through Reduced Effect, which I forgot to mention previously, it's the only means of overcoming Reduced Effect they have. So there's a minor, yet mechanical, ability of Digimon to excel in Narrative Play, providing you remember you have that effect which even I forgot here lmao. But musing on it I do think Attribute Negation for Digimon is a cool tool, it's like a single point of Resolve per Stage you have, but you gotta use it at the very specific right time, it's more mechanically constrained, as a Digimon should be.

The purpose of this Quality is to make players engage, to give them questions they can ask so they ask them of the GM. It's like converting PBTA actions into activatables for this system. This is actually the thing I like the most, an activatable that asks questions. Maybe that's my line, I should create Qualities like this that grant my players direction on question asking.

Not even going to lie here I'm obsessed with whatever is going on with Kairi in Adventure. Her association with Light is not benign, Homeostasis is a motherfucker, and some form of eldritch light lurks about her. "TV? You like it when the light is Eldritch?" Shut up. Shut. Shutttttttttt. Yes.

Anyway I like it when my players' characters are little freaks and becoming corrupted in cool not-entirely negative but not entirely-positive ways. If any of my players are reading this and thinking about the whole thing with Ranamon's gifts look, I'm me. I will not change this.

Anyway the ability to just activate Radiant is neat and all but in practice I think I'd rather do this via narrative and my own GM style, rather than bake it into the game mechanics. So yeah, Radiant dies in favour of me just doing it by GMing instead.

Joke Quality that everyone loves. Get out of jail free card if you're willing to say you're the guy who sucks, plus you've got depression. I don't actually like Get out of Jail Free cards though. Roleplay and Skill Check your way out of a bad situation. Or make the situation worse. "No that doesn't actually happen" is bad game design and this quality was a mistake. It dies.

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Okay what's my grand conclusion here? I liked Attuned. I like the idea of Qualities being custom, PBTA-like actions, that let you ask questions or make truths about the world. I think I could design for that. That being said, I don't know if I'd be doing the same kind of ranks approach, and nine quality slots would start being too much for human characters. If I cut it down to one per Level, you'll get 5 in total. If I make Ten unique Qualities, that's going to leave a lot of players feeling very samey. If I have to make more than ten unique qualities I'm going to get seriously overwhelmed.

Uses of that Quality per Adventure? So you can take a new one or an additional use of an existing one? Ehhhhhh that doesn't sound fun. What are the other notes from Qualities about things I liked?

The coinflip of Passionate, some way to gain combat capability, and that's basically it. I need to spend an entire dev diary theorycrafting combat capability, that's not what this one's for. The passionate coinflip… I don't think a coinflip has a place in the current odds. Players are incredibly likely to get a mixed or full success when attempting a skill check they're capable of. I think coinflip falls into the bin of "it sounds fun in theory but it doesn't fit the system, so I gotta let it go".

All that leaves is the question-asking of attuned. Maybe I create, like, an "Advanced Skill" for each of the fifteen skills you can use to ask questions/make statements of the world that creates narrative effect? That's not bad per se but it is… additional? It's not core to the system. The gameplay would run fine without such a thing, it'd just add a little bit of extra flavour to character build and a bit of lubrication to the act of Narrative Play, by giving players a little mechanical fallback that then does more Narrative Focus.

Okay, with that thought in mind, I'm going to go ahead with 2.2 without Qualities, and make a future note to try designing these PBTA-like/Narrative Focus skill-based actions, which should refine gameplay on the Narrative Play side but not significantly change it. Simply give some further direction and guidance on play.

Something like that.

Okay what about Leveling Up? If Qualities are dead for now, the Milestones become only four: +2 Core Stats, +1 Skill, +1 Partner Skill, +1 Overflow Limit. That's… very uninteresting. Do we kill Milestones and just make it Level Up only? That may be wisest but also it feels… flavourless. The Qualities added a special flavour that flat "number go up" doesn't. But they were also empty flavour in that they mostly didn't do anything. I liked that after every Adventure a human got something, but Digimon only got their stuff when they gained a new power threshold - analog progress where you're constantly moving vs digital progress where everything happens in a single tick.

That said I'm kind of unhappy with Level and Levelling Up in general rn, so maybe I talk about that next time.

Let's quickly make a diary todo list. In a non-specific order:

Leveling Up

Humans in Combat

Interlude Update

Theorycraft Beats

Encouraging partner interaction

Gaining new Digivolutions narratively and mechanically