WyshMaykers Designer Notes - Things We Tried

In WyshMaykers, characters can make anything they can imagine come true with a wysh. When building the game a few things that we tried just didn't feel right, and no amount of Wyshing could make them work for the game we wanted to create. Here a few of the things that ended up cut out or re-worked for the game.  

***Wyshing as a Stat or Ability***
WyshMaykers uses -U- the Game of Stories for its mechanical game base. In -U- anything that is not an attribute, a Study, or an Item is an Ability. When we first began, we made the power of wyshing an Ability. Since dots in an Ability could be used and added to an attribute when attempting that Ability, it gave players 2 chances (at minimum) to make a successful wysh (X + Wyshing Ability). When going through the game with that, it made wyshing feel a little cheap and the math of X + Wyshing + Studies or Items was more cumbersome than we liked. So... we nixed the idea of characters having that Ability. Less math, the better.  

Our next though was to have Wyshing as its own attribute along with Action, Thought, and X. We quickly found that X just wasn't getting used all that much as a lot of the social aspects of the game that X usually covers was being done by the players and not die rolls (guess we had very social players, huh.).    

Finally, we opted to use the core rule of -U- the Game of Stories that the X attribute stood for anything not Action and Thought... including wyshing. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  

***Colleges***  
Wyshing is a pretty broad ability. It lets a person do anything they can imagine. One of the ideas we toyed around with was a list of subjects people could wysh about. Players would then have to buy a study in a certain area of knowledge and could only make wyshes about that part of knowledge. For instance, a character could have Water Wyshing as a Study; this would allow them to make wyshes only about water and things involving water. This, however, led to a lot of game-world questions and answers we didn't like. Who taught them how to wysh about that area of knowledge? Why did they get so limited? How in the world do you limit that? The questions got worse as we started coming up with the colleges of knowledge. In the end, we decided to allow characters to be able to wysh about whatever it is that they knew about. Much easier to jump in playing and a whole lot less questions to answer. Don't worry though, we will probably still use the idea in a later game.  

***The Human Factor***  
One of the things that we personally find intriguing is the normal people vs not-so-normal people conflict in games and fiction. The idea goes something like this: Super-powered individuals can do things that normal folks can't. So what happens when the super-powered people decide that normal folks are wrong? How does the normal folks protect themselves and regain control of their own destinies?  

Because we liked that idea, we played with an anti-Society of non-WyshMaykers hunting down those with the power of wyshing. The idea, however quickly fell apart, and the Setting did not really support the idea beyond a single campaign. Instead, we decided to just concentrate on the struggles within the WyshMaykers.  

To see what worked in the game, feel free to pick up your own copy of WyshMaykers ( http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=94202&affiliate_id=229603 )