Paper Story v1.6.2

It took a little longer than planned, but 1.6.2 is done and dusted!

This version is currently going through the approval process at SAGE 2025! If Paper Story gets the green light, that link should take you straight to the SAGE showcase, so fingers crossed! I'm really hoping they get sucked in before they realise it isn't an elaborate Olympic Games homage. Time will tell!

As per usual, most of this version is rebalancing, refining and getting things to read well on the page, but that amounts to an awful lot of changes in an awful lot of places. I won't go into details here, but there are some key highlights worth a mention:

• Relaxed the negative Trait limit; you can now use 3 negative Traits at a time, plus 1 more for every 2 levels.
• Initiative and First Strikes have seen a pretty big re-write with some new examples. Initiative now dictates how many allies you can partner up with at a time, and First Strikes are streamlined to rely on your Initiative check result.
• Big change to Spontaneous Spells – you now have to unlock your Spirit along with your dicepool. Spirit unlocks at twice the rate (i.e. one payment gives you 1d6 and 2 Spirit).
  This is bound to be a significant change as it makes low investment spells less reliable. To help offset this a little the rules for bonus dice/Spirit have relaxed somewhat, so now Boosting Magic is more viable. The unlocked Spirit also contributes to some spell variables (like Curse duration, or the number of Technique traits), effectively providing more bang for your buck on low-cost spells. Hopefully this isn't controversial – we all know that Magic has had it pretty good for a very long time, but I'm hopeful that this makes it a bit easier to wear a careless spellcaster down and force them onto their last FP reserves.
• Trickery now only dodges individual strikes, not attackers. This is a pretty heavy nerf, but I feel like it's an important one to give more weight to the choice between Dodge and Guard – multi-hits are easier to Guard, while single-strikes are easier to Dodge.
• Reactive Steady can be used to resist all statuses that are being applied – you don't have to roll separately if the same attack adds multiple statuses.
• Reworked Cloned Copies to try and make the mechanic less crunchy, less cheesy, and more fun. In the process the illusory clones were split out into their own Trait – so now there's Clone, and Mirage.
• Added Blarggs and Bristles for a small handful of fun new species.
• Consolidated all the wacky elemental subspecies into one, Elementalist-! It's kind of a doozy, but it has to be to cover the wide range of options available to these creatures. It should be more straightforward to make the type of elemental themed character you want now. There's a bunch of options but I think that will result in stronger theming for whatever you're going for, whether that's a simple Fire Bro or a blazing Pyro Guy!
• Rebranded Spirits to Elementals, and expanded on their available traits to make for more options. They now have Adapted ("Environment") and some adjustments to their text to accommodate Elementalist-. Also, new assets, new flavour and optional +1 Defense! Wow!
• Added Bestow, Versatile, Drip-Feed and Limitation Traits! Versatile and Limitation are especially interesting, giving you some really open-ended tools.
• Counter, Drain, Fear, Minion and Scaling have had some particularly spicy changes. Minion especially I think I may have gone too far in places - hopefully it doesn't break anything too badly, my goal was just to streamline the process.

There's much more to this, of course, and you can see the full scope in the changelog. I am hopeful as ever that this is my last major revision, but the curse of the editor is there will always be something that can be improved upon. I'm pretty proud of the overall package though, and hope these changes feel meaningful and valuable to your stories, too.