Monster Kart Monday #12: Ch-Ch-Changes
October 7, 2013 NewsMonster Kart Monday
Life has a funny way of throwing us curveballs, doesn’t it? One day you’re gearing up for a new Kickstarter campaign, the next day you’re not even sure where you’ll be during the time the campaign was supposed to be running.
Unfortunately that’s the case here. I’m sad to announce that, due to that crazy thing called “personal life,” the MKM Kickstarter campaign will not be launching next week. It’s still in the works, but at this moment I have no idea what’s in store for me over the next month and it wouldn’t be feasible to run a campaign during such a tumultuous period. Hopefully things will flatten out and return to normal soon, but for now we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
In the meantime, I’m going to continue work on Monster Kart Mayhem with as much time as I can spare. I recently received some great feedback from the Google+ RPG Playtesters Community, and I hope to incorporate some changes to the game that will make it even better. Now that I have a bit more time before the KS launch, I can lock in a few of those ideas before the final product has to go to layout. Every cloud does have a silver lining.
Some of the changes I’m looking at include:
- A method for incorporating the narrative (role-playing) aspects of the game into the mechanics.
- A method for causing players to decide between Pace and Maneuverability; for example, if your Pace is greater than your Maneuverability, you may take penalties to your Maneuvering checks. Essentially, this represents driving too fast to control your car, and it balances characters who have an incredibly high Speed Trait.
- Balancing some of the characters’ Perks and Quirks. For example, Frankie has a +1 bonus to all Traits while some characters only get a +1 bonus to a single Trait some of the time. Frankie’s Perk is inherently better than most other racers, so he needs to be rebalanced a bit.
With the extra time I have before launching a KS campaign, I hope to be able to improve the core system. Thanks to the nature of the game and how it’s built so far, this shouldn’t have any major impact on the four add-on adventures that have already been written.
I’ll also continue to work on adding more add-ons as time permits. Previously, the goal for the KS campaign was to offer each of the add-ons as stretch goals. I’d still like to do that, but perhaps in the future I’ll have 5 or 6 add-on goals instead of just 4. And that will make the printed Monstrous Edition all that much better, too.
Thanks for being patient with me and with MKM as I wade through some of life’s challenges. I’ll keep you all posted about the progress and any additional news that comes up!
