Johnstone Metzger – I’ve got a design question about a bit in Dungeon Planet. Why did you decide to give the Alien Soldiers no ‘attack stats’? I see ‘Attack’ as a move, and I get fictional positioning, but this one gave me pause.
(I have some ideas – attack stats would put too much definition on them, forcing them into a certain mold; they’re really just cannon fodder for the PCs, while they can ‘attack’, they’re not going to do much to the PCs…things like that. But I’d like to understand where you were coming from.)
It’s hard to remember my exact reasons for that, honestly, though I think either I mostly wanted to get the text in there in some form, and/or I was using the simpler stat blocks in DW as my template and didn’t think I needed anything more.
But your instinct is pretty good–it’s just not a really exciting thing for the PCs in this genre to get chopped to pieces by foot soldiers. Captured, sure, and the hordes can conquer cities, but it’s the Space Wizard who commands the warlord and his hordes that they have to fight in the end (or the fearsome Death Lizard of Mars, etc), if it’s going to be suitably swords and planets. So yeah, I didn’t really have a compelling reason that damage dice and stuff should be included. So I just didn’t.