10 More Rules (Nov 06 2026)

I have added 10 more rules to Randomly Generated RPG. At first it seemed difficult, but I realized that I could split one of the new rules into multiple ones. That’s why these four rules look really similar.

When anyone changes someone’s Mood, if they’re on the same team, the target gains 1 Defense.

When anyone changes someone’s Mood, if they’re on different teams, the target loses 1 Defense.

When anyone changes someone’s Position, if they’re on the same team, the target gains 1 Power.

When anyone changes someone’s Position, if they’re on different teams, the target loses 1 Power.

All basically just simple tweaks on each other. At first instead of checking “teams” it checked if you changed your own mood/position, or someone else’s. But that didn’t seem great, as very few abilities changed just your own mood/position. “Teams” is kind of a weird phrase but I decided to live with it; all players are on one team and all enemies are on another team.

As for why the rules were harder than I expected to make. The problem is some of them get messed up by abilities. The problem with a rule like “when anyone heals, they become focused” is that there are some abilities that both heal and change moods. If this rule triggered in between, the mood change from the ability would happen afterwards, basically canceling the rule. Having to carefully read the ability to see what the correct order is seems terrible. And I didn’t know if I wanted to change the abilities to get rid of this, as there’s a lot of them. That’s a consequence of positions and moods overriding each other. That’s why so many of the rules care about health, power, and defense, as they’re numbers that can easily go up and down.

At the same time, I didn’t want too many rules that triggered at the same time, e.g. at the start of a round. Due to how bad that part of the code is, I didn’t want to add in a way to make you choose the order of the rules. While I did rewrite some code, I didn’t know if I wanted to add the ability to choose the order the rules resolve. Instead I had to make sure there were no cases where the order of the rules would matter much. And finally I didn’t want too many rules that are just a benefit, or just a downside, they had to split the difference somehow. Although this wasn’t too difficult since they can help/hurt both players and enemies. But despite all these issues, I got to 20 rules anyway, which I’m quite happy with.

Another thing I changed was one of the enemies. For a long time there was a Wall that wouldn’t attack you, just get in the way. It sounded so funny, but it’s weird and bad that it’s the only enemy in the game that never attacks you. But if I changed its healing ability to one that attacks you, being a Wall doesn’t make sense. Instead I switched it to a Golem, which at least makes some sense. 

Now despite adding all these rules, I think perhaps it was a mistake to work on them first. As I’ve said a lot, the main code for Randomly Generated RPG is bad and overreliant on enumerators and would be much different if I felt like rewriting it from scratch. But I could’ve made a new game first, that featured that code rewrite, and then once it’s done, I can go back and rewrite Randomly Generated RPG. But now that Randomly Generated RPG has a nice 20 rules, why would I ever go back and do that, other than just for fun?

Also I’ve been listening to the sequel to numb numb this week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YHJoexs5TU