The Cauldron Project

Blog for @hidrihime's Cauldron Project

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Lots of sci-fi and fantasy series have dinosaurs just sort of casually wandering around. Cauldron has dinocarids. 

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Went back and tagged the larger posts with “Core Post” for easy searching.

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Mmmm, oughta use this for smaller development notes between the huge posts to maintain itnerest, huh?

Well, I’ve decided I’m bringing Cauldron back a bit closer to its roots of being cartoonier, after playing a lot of Monster Hunter and realizing it has a feel very close to what I wanted.

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I. Have made. a BREAKTHROUGH with the focus system

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sorry for the long absence; gripped by crippling depression

not sure when next post will be but i’m going to try and post more monster designs over at @paperwasteland

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No updates for the month of October (not that I was on a consistent schedule or anything)-

doing a 30 day art challenge instead. You can see it @paperwasteland

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Focus

Sorry for the wait on this one, I've had a weird several weeks. So without further ado, another pillar of Cauldron's game mechanics- FOCUS!

In nature, a lot of survival is done by not fighting at all and many of the most incredible adaptations in our world are meant for fright and subterfuge, finishing a fight before it can ever come to blows. Some systems treat these sorts of tactics as various forms of debuff and such, but for Cauldron, we treat it as a core gameplay mechanic alongside HP, where you can specialize in, for example, terrorizing opponents out of fight. This is because alongside hit points, you also get focus points. Hitting zero focus doesn't immediately take you out of a fight (but it might be wise to do) but instead, at half or less focus, your monster has to make focus checks to correctly carry out actions, modified by its focus penalty (determined by what fraction of focus remains) and your empathy bonus. Your trainer can also lose focus, but effects like this are proportionally rarer and/or weaker, given that it can have a significant impact on your ability to do anything.

Unlike physical attacks however focus attacks are not universal; because you are appealing to a monster's perception it may for example totally ignore your startling visage if it just can't see anything anyway. All focus attacks are tagged with the sense they target. Some physical attacks may damage focus as well as they cause pain, which mostly can't be resisted in the same way as a visually-targeted focus attack. These effects are listed as targeting the "nervous" sense.

Like physical attacks, focus attacks come in a variety of flavors- Allure- distraction via appearance of food or sex Dazzle- pretty or overwhelming effects Irk- annoying, itchy feelings or grating sounds; can also refer to pain Confound- it's difficult to react to something that is totally unexpected or unrecognizable Frighten- fear is well-known to impede proper function even in rational beings Jump- a separate type because no amount of bravery prepares you for a good jump scare Daze- focus damage from a physical problem such as a concussion, suffocation, or a psychotropic toxin Exertion- focus damage you've done to yourself straining to outperform

All focus damage except Daze/Exertion is listed as a type and a sense, for example "allure/visual", and some effects CAN target multiple senses or have multiple types- one unusual attack targets "frighten+confound/visual+tremorsense" Daze and Exertion damage don't come with a sense tag because they target your mind directly, and thusly this damage can't be resisted. However, daze effects are always tied to a physical attack you may be able to resist instead. Exertion can never be resisted unless an effect explicitly specifies to override this rule.

Focus damage is relatively easy to heal, but you do have to spend an action to do so.

[cauldrongsi]

Apologies yet afuckingain for the huge delay in this one post, it’s just been such a weird few weeks for me.

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Sorry for the ldelay! I wanted to have a little illustration with the focus post, but have had an unexpected lapse in available drawing time.

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Okay we actually can make the focus system posts next, I solved all my problems with it a couple days ago and just... forgot. Thanks ADHD.

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The next few posts might be about the player character races, or at least showing off their designs. I’ve been working on them lately and they’re good a thing as any to show off in spite of the focus system that’s less developed than maybe it should be.

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Not that there’s an extreme amount of interest but for the few of you whoa re excited about this, the delay between posts is because the logical next step isn’t really ready to show off at the moment, and I need to decide what to show off next in its stead.

[cauldrongsi]

Empathy and Classes, part 2

The last couple of posts on empathy mentioned some things about balance and advanced classifications, let's get into that some more. The previous post talked about randomly generating your empathy from the available standard classes, so I'm sure one of the questions would be "how many standard empathy types are there?", and, well, since we're working with taxonomy...

The end of the table looks like this right now. Once I have a more solid idea about what the final monster roster will look like I can shave out things that don't appear at all. But since all 700 monsters won't be available at launch, what to do until then? For now, if you get a shitty empathy with less than three monsters for your first empathy type, you can also get a "consolation feat." That's exactly what it sounds like, an extra feat.  Alternatively, rolling one of the empathies above 95 lets you select a second empathy. When you first roll for empathy rather than one and done, you roll four times and can choose your favorite, or two of them if you roll above 95 on one of them. This is the only way to get two big six empathies, by the way. You can select a consolation feat only if the choice you ultimately go with qualifies, but of course this does mean that you're guaranteed one if you just get four terrible rolls. (To retread the last post a bit, normally you can gain extra empathy types by either extensively training with a monster class, or by spending a feat on it.) But I specified standard monster classes for a reason...

                                 (Monsters not shown to scale) In addition to actual taxonomic classes, there are several special types. Phytoid, fungoid, zoophyte, mycozoa, mycophyte, dulcian, eclectizoic, biomecha, neuromecha, macrobe, zombie, ooze, and unknown.

The first five are various combinations of animal, plant, and fungal design. Biomecha and neuromecha are varying degrees of mechanization. Eclectizoics are monsters created from such a variety of gene sources that they don't qualify as any one or two classes anymore. We can talk about the other five in their own entries some time in the future, especially the dulcians.

Each of these special classes has an empathy penalty on commands as the neurology to control a body that's half machine or half fungus is somewhat alien compared to the mind of a standard animal monster, as well as for balance as they tend to have abilities unfathomable to normal animals. Most of these classes can pair with one or two standard classes, and/or even with each other. There IS a zoophyte faerie biomecha, and a zombie mammal ooze. If you want to specialize in weird monsters like these, you can take feats to lessen or eliminate the penalties to empathy.

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Empathy part 1, addendum

Something I forgot to mention on the previous post on empathy, but conveniently brings us to a bit more of what the next post was going to be, is that you are encouraged to randomly generate your empathy on character creation and build around your result, instead of just picking one of the good ones. Which implies that there also bad ones, and certainly not every monster class has an equal number of monsters within it- there are over thirty spiders alone, whereas four or five is considered a very respectable amount for some classes. How's it fair then that you can get all of insects, or like, just seed shrimp specifically? Well, maybe it isn't. Life is like that. BUT! This is where we bring in the concept of the Big Six* (may be more by the time a releasable product is available), the groups that have so much population and diversity that within them that the ability to empathize with the entire group is equivalent to several standard classes. Currently the groups big enough for this are the mammals, reptiles & avians, ray-finned fish (actinopterygii), insects, arachnids, and clawed crustaceans (malacostraca).

"Worth several other empathy types?" What does that matter? Well, you actually CAN get multiple empathy types. Typically by spending a lot of time training with out-of-type monsters and growing together. But only if none of your empathies are Big Six empathies. You can have one empathy with a bunch of monsters in it, or a bunch of more eclectic empathies with harder to counter variety.

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Empathy, part 1

So! One of the major things to get at for understanding Cauldron as a game system is the concept of *empathy*. In many games and shows focused on monster-training, trainers often have an affinity for a specific type or kind of monster, yeah? So why do you suppose that is?

Well, for Cauldron, this is because of empathy. Every sentient or quasisentient organism has empathy with one class of animal (or animal-like organism) which makes the handling and care of this type of animal easier. Think of like an intrinsic understanding of the basic workings, physical and mental, of a certain kind of animal.

With Cauldron's science theming, classes are literally taxonomic, as in...

Which means your classes often look like this:

But you don't have to know taxonomy to enjoy Cauldron, don't worry.

So what does empathy DO, gameplay-wise? In many monster-training games, your monster will always obey your commands and there's generally nothing anyone can do about this. Not so in Cauldron- if you openly command a monster, opponents can react accordingly. Makes sense, right? But how do you then command a monster silently? With empathy, of course!   In battle, you and your monster have separate turns, and you have the option to command your monster on your turn with a 100% success rate, or use your trainer turn for another action and attempt an empathy check on your monster's turn to command it empathically, giving you some strategic options even in the simple action of commanding your monster. Your empathy type gives a simple +4 bonus to this empathy command if it matches, and there is no penalty for lacking empathy, so you can use any monster you want. Some monsters and advanced classifications (plants, fungi, biomechs) may impart penalties, but lacking empathy will not. In addition, your empathy type provides bonuses to some of your class abilities for applicable monsters.

Next post will talk more about monster classes and empathy balancing.

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So what is Cauldron?

Cauldron is the setting and system for an independent TTRPG I (@hidrihime) am very slowly but very passionately developing, a monster-training setting and system set in a sort of bright future, solarpunky themed world that riffs off a variety of video game and RPG tropes. Aside from a few "anomalies", tech level is based on an idealized version of what we can theoretically already do, or could if science had better funding. Thematics are heavily based in real-world science, specifically biology. General setting tone is more on the goofier, cartoonier side, and intentionally steers away from more cynical themes.

It's a D20 system, somewhere between rules-medium and rules-heavy (think Pathfinder), though you wont typically have to track that many things at once. A lot of design focus goes into playing with rules in unusual ways, like one would find in a trading card game. A total of ~700 usable monsters planned, encompassing such varied creatures as mammals, reptiles and other vertebrates, to mollusks, echinoderms and arthropods, flatworms and likely even many animal taxa you may have never heard of, as well as crosses between them, plant and fungal monsters, biomecha, and even microbial lifeforms.