Armored Saber - v1.1.1

Hello Pilots!

I'm pleased to announce and release Armored Saber - v1.1.1! This has been quite a long time coming, and I'll explain why it took so long. But before that, let's jump straight into what's new, what's changed, and what's been removed.

• Added a new gameplay section: VISTA Academies Guide to Pilots. This guide will give players what they need to make their own pilot characters. These systems have been made and designed with long term campaigns and story arcs in mind and should provide players with more opportunities to have their characters grow and change with the game.
• Many systems have been updated and changed to make games more interesting, and less reliant on randomness. Including:
  • In the Pilot's Guide to Mecha, the venerable System Failure rules have been removed. After serving their purposes, they have been reworked to make the game much fairer. Now, players need keep track of Fuel Cells. Which do a much better job of denoting how hurt a Mecha is.
  • Using the Pilot Rank system in the VISTA Academies Guide to Pilots, players can now upgrade their Mecha by increasing their attributes, or even gaining new Mods. As a consequence, the old Increasing Attributes section has been removed.
• The Quick Reference Sheet has been updated to reflect these major changes.

There are other small changes and tweaks all throughout the documents, such as formatting changes and spellchecking. These are overall less sexy than new documents and systems, so they won't be listed from here on out.

As for WHY this update took so long, it was mostly me wanting to make sure the rules WORKED, before I pushed them into the main game. Unfortunately, I don't have a great way to consistently test these features and ideas. So, I decided to let all of you tell me if they work, or if you don't like it. So, I insist, please let me know if any of these rules or changes I make are things your table decides to ignore. It really does help!

And with that, I wanted to talk about one OTHER thing surrounding the Armored Saber universe: Names and lore.
Armored Saber, from the very beginning, has been designed to be lore and universe agnostic. You can easily take the rules provided and put them into any world or setting you desire, and that was by design. However, I have had friends who have play-tested in the past mention that the names of certain aspects, and the story of the world in which this game takes place, seem to be lacking. In particular, terms like Mecha and Pilots were immediately singled out as something that might be improved.

If you share this mindset, or just want to make your voice heard about the game, I've made a simple form that you can fill out! It shouldn't take more than a few minutes, and it really does help. If you just want to grab the game, and you don't really care about the names of things, or the lore of the game, then feel free to skip.

That's it for me! I hope you enjoy playing Armored Saber as much as I enjoyed making it!