Hello again!

Thus far I've talked about making PCs and the various ways players can manipulate their dice rolls. For this update, I'm going to switch it up and talk more about the GM side of things. Specifically, let's talk about making Dangers.

Danger is my all-purpose term for the things that can kill a PC in a scenario. It could be a monster, an animal, an earthquake, a panicked mob, a sinking ship, and so on. The mechanism behind-the-screen that runs and paces these Dangers, regardless of their theme, are the same.

When you want to make a Danger, you need to make two decisions: What is its class? What is its difficulty? Those decisions establish the core mechanisms and stats.

Class defines a Danger's general theme and implies how the Danger threatens PCs. There are four basic classes, but more classes can be found in various genre kits (more on genre kits in a future update).

Class is merely a starting point for theme. It's a way to quickly categorize Danger tendencies and behavior.

Difficulty is simply how strong the Danger is, or rather, how hard the Danger is to overcome. It establishes how many hits a PC needs to pass a test against the Danger, and the threshold PCs need to reach to survive the encounter. Threshold is like a combination of HP and clocks from other games. It's what measures PC progress during a confrontation. There are four tiers of difficulty:

You are free to mix and match class and difficulty, creating Petty Brutes, Mega Nightmares, Boss Swarms, and so on. Depending on the scenario, you might even have the same class all throughout, escalating the difficulty with each new encounter. If you want to recreate Halloween and Mike Myers, for example, you might have the first encounter set to Competent Brute, the second to Boss Brute, and the third to Mega Brute. Or, you could have multiple classes of Danger, either to reflect the evolving strategy of a single Danger, or to introduce multiple Dangers.

Mechanically, the choice of class and difficulty finalizes what kinds of abilities a Danger uses in a confrontation. By default, there are three abilities (but genre kits add more):

All Dangers have an ability loadout. This describes how many of each ability they have access to. In total, a Danger always has six ability options, which map to the results of a d6 roll. During a confrontation, a GM rolls randomly to see which ability they use to harm the PCs.

So, when you make decisions about the Danger's class, you add two more ability options. A brute, for example, gets two more kill options. Because brutes lack subtlety, they really just want to kill PCs. Nightmares, on the other hand, get two more scare options. They're more interested in terrorizing PCs, feasting on fear before the kill.

Difficulty provides the last ability. Petty and competent difficulties focus on wearing PCs down, so they get an extra harass option. Megas, being the strongest and most likely to defeat PCs, get an extra kill ability. Here are two sample loadouts:

Mega Brute:

For the Mega Brute, two-thirds of the time the GM will use kill attacks to take out PCs. Maybe this is a giant kaiju destroying the city, or a robotic killing machine from the future. For the Competent Nightmare, half the time the GM will try to scare the PCs, debuffing them and whittling them down before killing them at their weakest. Perhaps this is an arsonist and murderer terrorizing the dreams of teenagers, or a devious hag taking revenge on those who shunned her.

In the full game, there will be other Danger classes and abilities featured in different genre kits. And, for GMs that like to tinker and customize, there will be extra Danger traits they'll be able to use as well. All of that is optional, of course. I want WiD to play fast and easy, but to have extra depth for folks who want bells, whistles, and variety.

Let me know in the comments, or in the Adventures in Lollygagging Discord, if you have any questions, and what you'd like me to talk about next! Also, tell your friends, your neighbors, those old high school friends you avoid on Facebook, and even your lifelong nemesis you swore to destroy. Every bit of sharing helps the project.

--Jeff.