Faience
Greetings adventurers!
Ceramics are a magnificent thing and not something I would even dare to pretend to know the finer details of. Thankfully, I have a person for that. When a good potter friend of mine suggested that he could make a high quality ceramic that would deflect a blow, I was certainly intrigued and I knew my adventuring customers would be as well. One of the problems though, is that while ceramics are durable and can take a beating, they will eventually chip and break. It was then that it occurred to me that if you were to infuse the piece with powerful mending enchantments, well you could have a piece that just might save your life. Care to try?
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Design notes from Matthew:
I’m always interested in playing with alternative cost mechanics when it comes to TTRPGs. Eating actions, spell slots, HP, so on are all very common things that you would use when thinking about resources that are meant to be spent in pursuit of an end goal. That could be casting a spell, moving through a dangerous area, or a lot of other things. You typically spend the same resources over and over again, but with this item, I thought that it would be interesting if the resource was the durability of the item itself.
I had to be careful with this as I’m not a big fan of item durability in most game settings. It often feels like the game punishing you for doing the thing that you’re supposed to be doing. That’s why I wanted to use this opportunity to trade item durability for getting out of trouble to slightly vary this. It feels more like you’re sacrificing something to make sure that you don’t sacrifice something else that is much more important in that you’re sacrificing the HP of the item instead of your own.
The really interesting balancing point for me though was making sure the item had some risk and reward to it. It will indeed break over time. It’s unavoidable in that it doesn’t repair itself continuously but only after it breaks. I think that’s an important push and pull in that players will have to choose when it’s worth it to them to sacrifice the item. They can certainly get it back by picking up the pieces, but they better know that they’ll be able to do that.
I’m always interested in finding different mechanics to play around with and offering different ways to balance items over the course of the game. I think there will always be the meta answer to a problem, but I’m much more interested in offering options to folks to see if they can find something fun and interesting within the option, even if it isn’t the BEST answer.
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Say no to damage,
- Fernando & Matthew