1E vs 2E / Bundles

I've made a two devlog posts about this game where I talk about things I want to change / add to Goth Witches.

Metacurrency Revamp

Adding Aspects

In both of these posts I talk about some pretty big changes that would require altering massive parts of the game as it currently exists. I've ultimately decided that most of these changes would be better for a second edition of Goth Witches.

The reason I'm making a post about this is that I worry that my previous two posts might be dissuading the people who read them from playing the v0.55 PDF that currently exists, which is currently being downloaded a lot becuase it's been in a couple of big bundles. The WIP PDF for the first edition of Goth Witches is not going to change radically; things will be added, but very few things in it will be rebuilt from the ground up.

The first edition will essentially be an "old school" game inspired mostly by Ghostbusters, Risus, and PDQ games like Ninja Burger 2e and Truth & Justice. The second edition will have more detailed metacurrency systems, Aspects, and other things like that. It might have completely different resolution mechanics for social interactions vs everything else.

These are the big changes that will be made to the first edition:

-I will add Dramatic Editing to the game and make a few of the changes I mentioned in the metacurrency post, just not all of them.

-There will be at least 3 full adventures included in the book [so far the PDF has one].

-After playtesting, I might change combat and damage. The biggest change I can foresee if damage temporarily subtracting from stats rather than Player Characters having HP.

-There will probably be something related to currency / a stat to track a PC's relationship with their parent(s).

-Relatedly, I'd like to make a big table in an Appendix section detailing the inflation of the US dollar since the 1950s, so that groups can set their games during any time in the last 70~ years with an increased level of versimilitude.

-Add some rules for getting around town, so that movement / travel isn't just handwaved.

-More detailed procedures for creating a supporting cast.

Other things will also change before the first edition is finished, like adding artwork, making the capitalization of game terms more consistent, etc. But those are the gameplay changes, and like I was saying earlier, most of them are going to be adding to what's already in the game rather than changing what's already in it.

2E definitely won't replace 1E from my POV. 1E will continue to be a game that can be taught in 5 minutes. 1E will run very fast and be extremely simple. 2E will most likely be slightly slower and more complicated. Both editions will serve different needs, with 1E probably being more comedic and 2E being more serious.

You might be wondering, if I'm planning on starting the second edition basically right after I finish the first edition, what kind of support the first edition will receive, if the second edition will be a seperate product on itch.io, etc.

I'm thinking of making 1E its own PDF, and making 2E its own PDF. Both will be available for anyone who owns or has purchased Goth Witches on itch.io. Eventually I will combine both editions into a single file that will be available for purchase as a print-on-demand file, since I don't foresee the total page count of both editions together being longer than 250 pages.

Any adventures will be combatible with both versions of the game, and if the stats and such between the two versions are radically different, I'll just include stat-blocks for both.

Anyways, those are the plans. I haven't released an updated PDF in roughly three months, and I'd definitely like to work on that soon. I've been doing so much writing for websites lately that I've been too spent to work on the game, but I've been doing a lot of reviews for Cannibal Halfling so I feel like my game design muscles are still improving.