Let The Games Begin.

We spent a few hours thinking of skills based on out character cosmetics and characteristics whilst also thawing into consideration the balance of each team. We did this by giving characters of each team similar moves without being completely identical.

We came up with an interesting idea fr a skill related to a quick assassin type character where the player must first nominate a number from the die before rolling, and if the player was successful they would then assassinate the other hero reducing hit points to 0. The idea behind this was the low probability of a person rolling their nominated number in exchange for a very high chance of losing a turn for nothing. When we asked Dean for his opinion he pointed out a few flaws in the skill. First of all that there would be no chance for the other player to defend themselves from the attack, resulting in what would appear to be an unfair death. The second and most important thing pointed out was the risk/ reward ratio was off (like I mentioned before, "for every action the must be an equal and opposite reaction"). One thing that Dean suggested was to increase the penalty for missing, and the way he suggested this was to have the player lose all their own hit points if the miss. Though I liked the mechanic, I now thought that the risk far out weighed the reward at at 1/6 or even a 1/10 (without taking in to consideration the player must first nominate their own number adding a level of uncertainty to probability), in comparison to a 5/6 or a 9/10 chance of suicide. We spoke for a while about how the player would feel being on either end of the attack, and if the death would make the player feel cheated or not, then we began to discuss more mechanics to make the ability a bit more interesting and a bit more balanced. An idea that came up was making the ability inactive through the game until that specific character reached a critical level of hit points. Other members of the group didn't seem too enthusiastic about the idea, however I found this to be the perfect solution to the problem. This would remove the appeal to get in and try and insta-kill your opponent in the first few moves of the game, it lowers the risk and keeps the reward the same to the person rolling by basically saying, "there's a high chance I will die if I don't do anything, this is my last chance". This gives the player an all or nothing move that can't be used to disrupt the earlier stages of the game.