Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Dungeons & Dragons: Ace Attorney (Part 3)

Not every character in the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series is an attorney.  In fact, there are any number of absurd characters worth memorializing as Dungeons & Dragons characters that are anything but attorneys.  As I put the final touches on Apollo Justice, I realized that there was another character from that Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney that I wanted to make into a character to go along with Polly.  It only made sense to build his "assistant" and Phoenix Wright's adoptive daughter, Trucy, as a D&D character.
Notable illusionist, Trucy Wright!
She controls her enemies.
I decided I would experiment with Illusion magic and see how an Illusionist Mage would turn out.  The class feature "Illusion Apprentice" makes all targets hit by arcane illusion spells to suffer a -2 penalty to hit the caster un of Trucy's next turn.  An illusion feat, Phantom Echoes, causes all targets hit by an arcane illusion spell to grant combat advantage to Trucy until the end of her next turn.  Both of those effects seemed best described as a trait, so I wrote it onto the front of the card.  Enemies hit by Trucy's illusions will be highly motivated to stay away from her as they not only get a penalty but she gets a bonus to hit them.

The Phantom Echoes power had another peculiar feature that I spent some time mulling over.  If the attack had an effect which imposes a condition that a save can end, the granting of combat advantage is tied to that save roll.  This was only applicable in one case, with Trucy's daily attack power.  Instead of writing an exceedingly cumbersome traits box that separated that fact, I instead decided to implement it directly into the attack power.  So, her feat is actually split across a general trait describing every power and a subtle change to the single attack power that behaves recently.

It was fun putting together a few PW:AA characters and I hope to continue to get that chance moving forward.

No comments:

Post a Comment