Game Design General /gdg/

Something I want to talk about that I have been thinking a lot about lately is this:
>For a complex dedicated system you need to provide something unique, and experience not catered to by other systems

For this I examined my homebrews and came to a conclusion. The most unique experience I ever game as a homebrewer was one of my first, years ago. It was founded on the concept of a hybrid wargame and ttrpg that would transition from the control of individual characters to units in large scale combat.

The original hack used Warhammer Fantasy as a base.


Essentially every Player would have a unit that they themselves own. This unit would generally be from 5-10 pieces. This unit would be defined by a "Standard Job" which every member of the unit has as a base for their stats, and "Promotions". Promotions came in a variety of flavors, including making someone a bannerman, musician, or leader of the unit. However it also gave specializations like physician, scout, woodsman, accountant, and more. Each individual piece contributed towards a unit's stats. A big part of the game was making sure your army was supplied, they had work, your pieces were outfitted, morale was high, etc.

These indivudal pieces each could be controlled and their specalizations made use of out of combat. Therefore you essentially have several characters each with their own thing.

Now the players together came to form an Army. An Army has both the units of the player's, but also Army Resources. These were often in the form of siege engines, monstrous creatures, and other strange units.

When participating in engagements both the Army and the Units earn XP. These are used to purchase those jobs I talked about earlier. For armies it is used to purchase tactics and clout. The army sheet has such things on it like Army Relations with various factions, your current contract holder, army resources (like the siege engines), etc.

>>50286873


Now I have gotten off track and rambled. What I wanted to talk about is that I do not know of game that tried to do this blend of having units, engaging in combat, and transitioning to controlling only a few pieces. What I want to ask /gdg/ is this idea something worth moving forward with?

As well I have had more ideas on "Unique Experiences" and the sort of niches one can try and fill. I have ended up throwing out a lot of old stuff in favor of this new design concept. The idea of if one wants to make a rules heavy system the rules must be used to anchor oneself firmly to a niche of a unique experience.

This isn't my first time making a system but it's my first serious attempt rather than theory-crafting and shit. I'm pretty sure it's bad but I was hoping you guys could give me some feedback and maybe push me down the right path.

It's a mesh of three systems. nWoD, Legend of the Five Rings Third Edition, and Risus. At it's core I'm trying to make a system that I can abuse a bit, know everything about, and make abilities and spells on the fly for my players (which I'm pretty alright at when it comes to the few systems I have mastery over).

So far it's Legend of the Five Rings Stats and rolling with nWoD for a point spending system for magic and abilities. I would just use Legend of the Five Rings but it kinda breaks once you take it out of it's setting and I think it's a tinge too complicated for my players at the moment (granted I may have made a system thats too complicated). I'm terrible at writing shit up in a way that's useful for anyone besides me so I already know that's something I need to work on, feel free to scream loser at me tho I probably deserve it.

I was also wondering if you could help me model the probabilities? I heard you guys do that and I think that's swell.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AitkuJpuNllonN-gOV_Dtl3kHJMxIV6gfJ9bzu_3Q6s/edit?usp=sharing

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Still working on Dragon Forest!

>>50286884
Not 100% my personal cup of tea, but I think it has potential. What I would like to see from a setting that choses this focus is an interesting setting with a unique dynamic of military role. Maybe orient yourself on the (from fluff perspective) small unit size. Alternate world contemporary military, mildly magical tribals that work closely with terrain, steampunk police forces... hope you get what I mean, a unique bend on military squad tactics. I wouldn't want to see vanilla medieval/fantasy battles and feel the scale falls short of the fluff.

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>>50287318
But it's really rough, and my notes are all over the place. Here's basic skills so far. Will integrate these two documents over the weekend.

>>50287349
Uh... I fucked that up.

>>50287349
>>50287362
Fuck it.

http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=14294824717397099067

>>50286764
>What part of your game can you simply not stop fiddling with?
The basic resolution of the game. Got everything down to tweaking, but I keep coming up with ideas for the resolution mechanics. Right now I think I've got a fix for an issue with my dice pook one-roll system I tried out.

The idea was you rolled a pool of D12's and needed to roll a stat as the target number for a success, and natural 12's 'popped', counting as 2 successes, instead of 1. You either needed to roll so many to pass or your opponent rolled their own and you have to roll more than them. Problem I was having was showing the power difference between weapons without pure dice bloat. What I have now is the power if the weapon lowers the number needed to 'pop'. So a weapon with Power 1 would count any dice rolled as an '11' or '12' to count as 2, so long as they normally would succeed. A really powerful weapon that lowers it to 7+ to pop, but need an 8+ to count would still discard 7's rolled.

>>50286873
>>50286884
>Dogs of War: the RPG
Honestly, the only game that I've seen do similar things is a video game called Kingdom Under Fire, where you play an RTS and have one unit that contains your commander, which you can switch to for hack n' slash gameplay when engaged. Always was a neat concept no one has really tried.

>>50287344
The setting would focus on the fringes of what essentially amounts to a dying empire, one far too large and far too long lived that is falling apart at the seems. The continual conquest, because of this, requires numerous soldiers like what ever the players are going to be.

The world itself I have done a fair amount of planning for and played with the ideas of different base world structures, but I have wanted to keep the idea of a decaying empire in the throws of decadence at roughly the technology level of the 1840s with relatively low power magic.

I was going to use concepts from another system I was designing for the setting simply focusing on a different country on the same continent. I could go into further detail on the ideas of The Range, The One Who is Two and Many, and a bunch of other bullshit. It would play with the ideas of cultural revolution and the like.

The need for Dogs of War, what these folks are, is born out of centuries of displaced populations and an ever growing war front. Small military forces, both recruited, paramilitary, tribal, and more are drawn into the conflicts spanning the entirety of the empire's enormous border.

File: skill_card.png (48KB, 745x1040px) Image search: [Google]

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>>50287372

Very rough mockup for a skill card.

>>50287786
Some basic world structure ideas is that the world exists upon "The Range" which is essentially a metaphysical slide ruler between the idea of pure physicality and pure emotion. Think of it as similar to how the Amber cosmology work in that the world humans exist on are on a midpoint. However instead of one being "bad" and the other "good" it is instead more like balancing points, the dips and peaks upon a wave exposing power.

The setting delves into esoteric religion, occultism, communism, cultural enlightenment, decadence, and more.

>>50287445
>Honestly, the only game that I've seen do similar things is a video game called Kingdom Under Fire, where you play an RTS and have one unit that contains your commander, which you can switch to for hack n' slash gameplay when engaged. Always was a neat concept no one has really tried.
I generally thought that in combat one would mostly only control their army on the level of unit by unit combat. Do you think there would be merit to being able to control individual units in the army itself during combat rather than just out of combat?

>>50287824
Not 100% sold on the font, but that's minor.

>>50287852
I'd keep it to controlling the combat unit instead of nitpicking the individual soldiers.

The Dogs of War comment was more about the old Dogs of War army in Warhammer, that had units with specific characters attached to each one. The idea is famous bands of mercenaries, like Leopold's Leopard Company or Ricco's Republican Guard. An idea is have player's play a mercenary company captain, they can name their company members and write their story, but gameplay wise, they still only have to worry about one or 2 "units" at a time, instead of an entire band of characters. It'd be like if it was a pirating game, where you have each player control a ship and its crew. The crew is numbers for the game, but that doesn't mean they can't come up with their own story.

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Fucking Area of Effect in my homebrew RPG. I've been fiddling and coming up with new variants for four years now and the current iteration ist probably the best (= best compromise between usable, intuitive, balanced and modelling what it's actually supposed to be), but I'm still not happy with it. Maybe some of you guys have better ideas.

>Universal RPG being more of a middle ground between GURPS and Savage Worlds in terms of rules-heaviness, leaning more towards GURPS
>Rules are supposed to be intuitive and playable, no huge chart dickery and going more towards arcadiness, yet not completely disconnected from reality. Stuff should feel right and play smoothly for the mostly "heroic, but not superhuman" tone of the game

>D6 dicepool success count system, numbers mostly range between 2 and 5 successes for bad to really good characters

>AoE is split into two types: (Names roughly translated from german, it's more distinct there)
>"Zone Attack": Stuff that can only really hit you once and either hits hard, or mostly misses. Tailswipe of a dragon, giant dropping boulder, launched javeline. Attackers throws one attack against all characters in the AoE
>This works fine

>"AoE Attack": Stuff that can hit you more or less, like shrapnell, fire lots of flying darts or smaller, falling stones. Attacker throws 2D6 against everyone in the area of effect, everyone in there dodges and eats the 2D6-Successes times the damage of the weapon as final damage.
>This works okay, but I'm not happy with it

What I really want from this is an intuitive to use AoE system that can catch characters really good at dodging (since the intuitive thing to do is "There's a ultra dodgey cyborg ninja, let's just flood the room with fire and grenades, he can't dodge that!"), yet at the same time not completely broken, overpowered and frustrating to be on the receiving end (so, no dodging against AoE at all is out of the question)