Ending animated creatures

Weekly updates:
I finished making the first draft of the main section of my rulebook.  I set up a game in roll20 to play with friends (I still need to contact people about playing).  I played one game with Sarah, though none on my own.  The game went okay, though it has me rethinking Soul Touch (I think I'll still keep it, but maybe not make it a demo-game ability).  I'm going to try to play today.  I'm also getting itchy to add new abilities, which will hopefully motivate me to playtest.  

Ok, for today...

Illeria is a skirmish-level game, meaning that you bring a party that has four to seven characters.  There are a lot of great things about this, particularly the low bar to entry.  However, it means is that you can't bring a horde of weak characters, which is a play style that I really like.  To fix this, I wanted characters to be able to have minions.  

I originally envisioned two types of minions: summoned creatures and animated creatures.  I wanted them to feel different to play.  Summoned creatures were meant to feel like wild creatures that they could lose their mind at any minute and attack their owner.  This made them a high-risk-high-reward strategy: they are strong, but if you lose them they may come after you.  Animated creatures were meant to be 100% loyal, but a little clunky.  In earlier versions of Illeria, you had to choose particular attack modes for them (such as targeting one character, or going after the nearest enemy).  Eventually I decided that was too many rules, and just made them act like other characters.  Either way though, these were meant to be a lower risk strategy: animated creatures would not be as strong as summoned creatures, but they would never turn on you.

A drawback I've noticed for either type of minion is that beginners to wargaming struggle to play them.  Basically, most new players can handle a team of five characters (which is 10 when you consider both worlds), but if each character controls three minions, then that becomes 20 miniatures (40 in both worlds), which ends up being overwhelming.  Sarah has been one of these people, and she's often suggested I remove them.  I've also wondered if the reason I don't have trouble is because I made this game, and I've wondered if more experienced players would struggle too.

Both kinds of creatures have always made the game harder to make.  First, they require their own set of rules to control.  Second, they become harder to balance; for example, explosive attacks are much more damaging, but four weak minions can bog a strong character for a long time.  It has become a running joke between Sarah and I that her advice when I have a problem is to get rid of summoned and animated creatures.  I've often been given the advice, "Kill your darlings;" i.e. that one needs to be open to eliminating one's favorite parts of the game if it will make the game better.  But it has been really hard.  Honestly, part of it is that the rules are just so interesting, and I worry that a game with just melee combat, archery, and magic would be too boring (which, as I write this makes me worry that the game might not be interesting enough).

That said, a couple weeks ago I decided to get rid of animated creatures.

What finally did them in was the new way I'm implementing differences between the two worlds.  In earlier versions of the game, both worlds worked about the same, so it made sense that you could have magical creatures in both worlds from turn one.  However, in the more recent version, the physical world is devoid of magic until you take actions to link it to the spirit realm.  I've struggled a lot with how to make animated creatures work in this setting.  One idea was that the animated creatures would start in the spirit world, and the player would need to send them back and forth.  Another idea was that the player would start with deactivated animated creatures in the physical, and would need to activate them.  Both of these created problems, and I found myself needing to make up new rules to fix them.  Eventually I just said, "enough is enough," and entertained the idea of taking them out.  I found that this simplified my game significantly.  Part of what spurred this on is my goal to be done by May.  Maybe if I'm way ahead of schedule, or if I release expansion rules, I can put them back in.  But for now, they're gone.

I do plan on keeping summoned creatures in, because I think I figured out a way to make them work in a really neat way.  (and as I write this, I've almost wondered if it would be better to eliminate summoned creatures, and give one more chance to having animated creatures jump between worlds)

I think one nail in the coffin as well was that when I told Sarah this, she told me that despite years of hearing about this, she had only just realized that there was a difference between summoned and animated creatures.  So, maybe they didn't really fill in different niches the way I thought.