I felt this would be a useful time to sort of recap the structure of TNP's current designs, such as they are.
The general conceit is that each class is based off of one or two dice, referred to as class dice. Within those designs, each class has two subclasses, but may also have additional methods of character customization (such as roles or domains.) But what does this really mean? Which mechanics are based off of the class dice?
Each class has 3 damage expressions: melee, ranged, and opportunity damage. Each of these will be represented using the class dice for that class, and there may be some variance from one subclass to another within each class.
In addition, reserves, surge value, and your engagement capability are all functions of the maximum value of a class die. Your initiative bonus (and by extension, your maximum HP) is also determined using class dice. Reserves are a resource you use to restore HP, typically outside of combat; surge value determines the minimum amount of HP you regain from spending reserves (under taxing circumstances.) Engagement determines the number of "open" enemies which you can group into a maelstrom, keeping in mind the abstracted positioning which the combat system uses.
It should be noted that in order to balance out the math and general utility of the class dice, 2d4 and 2d6 are used for some of these expressions (damage, reserves, surge value, etc.) in addition to 1 each of the 5 class dice.
Another cornerstone of ths sytem is using class dice as an attack (and damage) bonus. One each of the 5 class dice may all be applied to any given attack, but only one may be used to modify the roll; dice not applied as an attack bonus are not wasted, however, as they can still be used for bonus damage.
That all being said, saving throws and skill checks do not use class dice for their bonuses, instead using d6 pools; this is part of the reason why future designs are going to be pivoting towards using d6 mechanics for other functions (such as attack and damage bonuses.) Also, as you might have guessed from the context above, I'm leaning towards standardizing on something like 10 reserves, and possibly doing something similar for HP.
Characters start at level 0 and progress up to level 5, with two separate progression tracks, basically mapping to your core competencies plus combat mechanics, and to non-combat skills, respectively. The idea generally has been that a campaign would consist of 54 encounters (using a standard deck of cards, with jokers, for randomization) spread across the 6 levels (4/6/8/10/12/14 encounters at the appropriate levels, ideally.)
The "core mechanic" is that of a DC10, sometimes known as TN10 (target number) whereby the player-characters succeed at an attack roll (d20), saving throw (d20), or skill check (d10) by achieving a result of 10 or higher. Most notably, the mechanic of "players always roll" means that the designs are sort of incongruous; monsters do not roll to "hit" (only to deal damage) but rather the players must roll to be "missed." Under certain circumstances, opposed skill checks (rather than vs. a DC10) may be used. Monster/enemy types are planned to consist of minions and swarms (both of varying numbers of hit dice) as well as standard, elite, solo, and "archenemy" villains.
In addition to various additive and "pooled" dice bonuses, disadvantage is used as a penalty, with advantage being used as a bonus for checks (skill checks and initiative checks, only) and "mastery" being used in lieu of rerolls; this mechanic allows a roll of 1 on any given die to instead be treated as whatever is the highest number on that die. TNP does not use static modifiers (+2, -1, etc.) of any kind in its mechanics.
As you can probably gather, the system has sort of outgrown its simplistic beginnings, in order to provide a broader number of possible classes to play, while maintaining mechanical and mathemathical balance between those options. This is why it has become my intention to do some sort of a followup game, which manages to strip things back down and simplify them for ease of use. It has been my intention that the current designs of TNP will be compiled and formalized before the end of this year, but no real new development is taking place on its designs; all new ideas will be part of my future project(s).
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So, the intended schedule for this "semester" of the blog looks like this:
August: 1st/11th/21st/31st
September-November: 10th/20th/30th
December: 10th, ish (to make up for the missed post from May)
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