Game Design General /gdg/

File: Hellsgate Playtest v0.1.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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Bumping by reposting the latest version of Hellsgate.

So the warband archetypes in my skirmish game are the >Adventurers, a fairly balanced force focused on decently competent individual members
>The Dwarven Expedition, which relies on effective leadership and formations to make it's warrior excel
>The undertroll hosts who are essentially just a massive mob who drown their enemies in goblins while the one or two big threats mop up the enemies the horde couldn't
>The Dark Heralds, Which is a single highly powerful sorcerer or warrior who is supported by a cavalcade of banner bearers and musicians who announce his greatness and support him by acting as a missile screen and objective touchers
Does this seem like it could create significant diversity of play?
I'm also considering just adding a faction that is just a single monster, but that seems to overlap with the Herald a bit.

>>51863731
Sounds good. Only thing I'd watch out for is with the Heralds, balancing out one super character against everyone else. Depending on how your games mechanics work, it can easily slip into being too effective and steam-rolling everyone else, or too limited and unable to handle numbers.

>>51863238
This is a slog to read my dude

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Hello designers, nice to see you are still around and helping each other. I've been away for a while dealing with some shit in my life. Designing a game is tough to do when you're working 2 jobs a day and have one day off in the week. I also blame my own lack of focus. But my interest has been renewed recently and I'm brainstorming in my free time again. I even went through my game and many other games, looked for elements that I was missing, features common to other games, and rules that still need to be added, and wrote an 8 page outline of things to do. Maybe now I can direct myself to the areas that are needed soonest for a simple, playable version of the game.

It's great to look at the project list and see the work of other anons. I wish you all well, and hope to contribute more to these thread. Keep being excellent to each other!

How acceptable is it to use slightly different mechanics for different actions?
For example, using relatively simple d20 roll to target checks for unapposed actions, while using dice pools of d20s for a series of checks and opposed checks in things like melee

>>51867822
I think its fine.

>>51866204
It needs cleaning, but I lack an editor.

>>51866851
Good to see you're still working on things.

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Getting my 0.00.00 ready
Feels pretty productive

Struggling to implement relationships.

>Protagonists track their relationships by giving them a rating and a facet. A relationship at rating 0 indicates the two parties may vaguely know of each other, while a rating 5 relationship indicates that one party holds significant influence with the other. Each relationship is also described with a facet: a simple, brief summary of the dynamic between the two parties.
>Protagonists begin play tracking relationships with only the other protagonists; more are added as they meet major antagonists and prominent, recurring NPCs. Relationship ratings can be used in place of approach ratings when calculating a risk’s challenge level, assuming it makes sense within the relationship’s facet. Relationship ratings and facets can be changed using praxis points, as explained on page XXX. The Director may sometimes alter a protagonist’s relationship ratings with NPCs.
>For example, two protagonists may share the relationship “3: We die together”; should one ever be in trouble, the other could use their relationship rating of 3 in place of their approach rating to help their friend. Likewise, a protagonist who shares the relationship “5: Strikes fear into my heart” may find the antagonist using a rating of 5 against the player instead of their own approach.

Needs edited down. This part goes in the character creation chapter; the player and GM chapters have more advice on when to set/change relationship ratings and facets. But is this a good establishment of the concept?

>>51862497
>when you are finished with all the crunch but the document it is in is a mess and you are too lazy to bring it into order so that it's comprehensible for others
ugh, ACTUAL work!

Working on a whodunnit game where the players must determine the single correct answer by eliminating suspects using combinations of the clues they gathered. But I'm sick of crime and suspects. I want a new setting and situation for this kind of gameplay, but I'm struggling to think of a good one.

>>51877892
>Archeology, whodunnit 200 BC, whatissit?
>Dan Brown Illuminati treasure hunt?
>Medicine diagnostic, Dr. House?
>Technobabble Cyberspace Virus deleting?
>Alien first contact or cryptid encounter?
>Phoenix Wright, myguydidn'doit?

Trying to work out the base method for demonstrating combat speeds

I'm currently at this for Combat Factors

Combat Factor - 1
Imagine Picking up a Needle off the ground, extending your arm fully above your head, then dropping it, Combat Factor 1 is the time it takes to perform that action

Combat Factor - 2
The time it takes for the needle to hit the ground from CF-1

Combat Factor - 3
Is the time it takes for the needle to hit the ground if thrown at it

Combat Factor - 4
Is the time it takes for you to hear the sound the needle makes when it hits the ground, or the speed of sound

Combat Factor - 5
is the time it takes for a sound wave to travel from one end of the need to the other

Combat Factor - 6
is the time it takes for a sound wave to pass through the eye of the needle

Combat Factor - 7
is the time it takes for a beam of light to travel the distance of the needle

Combat Factor - 8
is the time it takes for a beam of light to pass through the eye of the needle

Combat Factor - 9
Is the time it takes a beam of light to pass through the diameter of a hydrogen atom.


I'm basically trying to get an exponential system of time growth for actions in combat, so it can scale from classic sword/shield combat to anime bullshit levels

>>51877892
How about a single best route, otherwise known as "the traveling salesman problem"?

>>51864032
I understand your position and agree, but when you say, "Depending on how your game mechanics work," is there something you were thinking of specifically? What mechanics tend to make balancing more difficult? In the "Ogre" context?

>>51867822
But it's that really a different mechanic? Or is it confusing?

Sometimes minor mechanical inconsistencies can be confusing, like having all sorts of modifiers that modify the roll OR TN, while wholly different mechanics are easy to distinguish and use.

>>51879366
This is as brilliant as it is retarded. I would give actions time cost, give everybody 2 or 3 action points, and then determine how many seconds 1 action point is with during combat.

>>51879901
Normally you'd have 4 actions per round in my system, not sure on the scale on things though

Factor 2 is of course just double that to 8 actions per round

Factor 3 could be 16m and so on from there potentially

Are there any good in depth books on the subject of designing board/card games?

videos are fine too.

File: Triad System (Trio 2.0).pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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Hello again.

I've been working on a pseudo-universal rp system based on three stats, three dice sizes, mechanically diverse powers and a few skills as flat bonuses.

Out of combat it uses the difference between roll and difficulty to provide non-binary success or failure. In combat it uses rolls to create dynamic resource pools.

I've tried to test it myself and I'm slowly making improvements, but any feedback would be welcome.

File: TriadCharSheet.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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Same guy as before, just adding the character sheet.

>>51879758
So the biggest challenges I've seen of the "Ogre" vs. army are action economy, threat range, and damage absorption.

For action economy, its how many things can the Ogre do compared to the a group at equal cost. This means both in quantity and quality. Let's say each model gets one attack. At a base level, the group wins out in quantity, so its down to quality. If an attack from a lesser guy has a 25% to remove another guy (2 D6 rolls, 4+ followed by a 4+, really basic idea), and the Ogre's has 69%~ (2+ followed by a 2+), then the quality of the Ogre's is 2.7x the worth of the regular grunts. So the quality makes up for the quantity in that regard.

This also leads into the damage absorption. The simple math used in the previous example is heavily reliant on it. If the model's take more or less to remove, then that quality takes big jumps in effectiveness. Needing an extra hit to remove obviously halves the effectiveness of each attack, but even shifting up from a 4+/4+ to needing a 5+/5+ has the same effect. So it can be easy to either over protect the Ogre, or weaken the quality of the Ogre's actions too much.

Threat range is the last one, and the least of the two. Simply put, multiple models can be in more places than the Ogre. This one is also a bit more finicky for balance. Even if the Ogre gets multiple attacks, if it can only reach so far, it can only reach so far. This was a common (and still one) in Warmachine, where their "Ogre" models, the Warjacks, either had a 2" or 1/2" range on melee attacks, their most effective attacks. Simply giving their weapon Reach made their threat range 4x more effective. This also covers movement shenanigans. Looking again at Warmachine, you can get some ridiculous things like a model that can one hit each attack being able to move after it kills, and make more attacks. This is more effective on something like the Ogre, since they have better quality of action, versus a regular dude.

>>51879923
Wouldn't it be the other way around? You're describing less with each factor, being more specific per round.

It's just so crazy. The amount of time it takes light to travel the width of a hydrogen atom? Why?

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I was wondering if anyone knew of ways to calculate probability for dice rolls in a more complex way than the ones in the OP
My system's stats go from 1-6 (above 6 being super-human) and I'm trying to find ways to roll where having 6 in something is unlikely but not impossible.
None of the OP rollers include reroll X, nor anything weird like "roll 6d6, how many pairs"
If someone knows statistics and can tell me what to look up I'd be very grateful, as all I find when searching dice probability are websites for craps 'strategies'

>>51875519
Food for thought: Monster Hearts has a mechanic called Strings. Many checks let your character take a string on someone or gives them a string on you.

You can spend a String on another PC to:
>Add 1 to your roll against them (choose after rolling).
>Subtract 1 from their roll against you (choose after rolling).
>Offer them an experience point to do what you want.
>Force them to hold steady in order to carry out a certain action.
>Add an extra harm to whatever harm you’re dealing them.
>Place a Condition on them.

You can spend a String on an NPC to:
>Add 1 to your roll against them (choose after rolling).
>Add 3 to your manipulate an NPC roll against them (choose after rolling).
>Cause them to falter, hesitate, or freeze up momentarily.
>Add an extra harm to whatever harm you’re dealing them.
>Place a Condition on them

>>51881446
>None of the OP rollers include reroll X
Anydice can do that with if/else statements.

>>51881446
You could work it out yourself, that's honestly how I tend to do it.

What you're doing is laying out every possible outcome. XdY has Y^X possible outcomes, and depending on your mechanics that can include a percentage of outcomes which involve further rolls.

Pairs for die pools is tricky, though. Hmmm. For 2d6 the odds of a pair is 1 in 6 (no matter what die A is, die B has a 1 in 6 chance to be the same thing). But for 3d6 the odds of a pair is...

>216 possible outcomes.
>6 of those have all 3 match. (1/1/1, 2/2/2, etc.)
>1 in 6 outcomes (36 outcomes) have die A match die B, but 6 of those 36 outcomes are the 3-of-a-kinds we mentioned already. Same for A matching C and C matching B. Sooo that's 90 additional outcomes where a pair occurs?
>96 outcomes out of 216, so a pair is a 44.44% chance (4 times out of 9)

I'll also note that you can't get more pairs than 1 per 2 dice being rolled (naturally) and HAVE to get at least 1 pair if you're rolling 7d6.

>>51867822
It makes your system harder to learn. The more you do it, the worse the effect gets. Using the same dice in different ways can increase the confusion further.

>>51879366
Why not just state things in terms of "approximately ___ seconds"?

>>51880080
Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun" for a genuinely useful breakdown of what a game *is* (short version: interesting challenges we can learn to overcome), and "Hobby Games: The 100 best" from Green Ronin press is 100 essays by game devs breaking down cool mechanics of 100 different games they liked.

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Drafting out details of Bloodborne RPG combat system.

-A hunter PC would start with 8 base stamina (either points or dice pool?), leveling stats can improve it to 12 and runes can grant up to +3 additional.

-Recover 2 (?) stamina at start of your turn. Taking no major action grants 4 (?) additional stamina. Some actions (attacking) cost stamina, some don't.

-Typically light attacks cost 1 stamina and heavy attacks cost 2? (this may be emergent result of other mechanics?)

-Any time you hit with an attack, you can spend stamina to make a follow-up combo attack, and another if that one hits, etc. Many weapons have properties which alter these baseline conditions.

-Reactive Evade: Any time someone attacks you and hits, you can spend 1 Stamina Die to force a reroll. (Limit one reaction per attack.) (Spending stamina dice when it's not your turn means you recover 0 stamina at the start of your own turn)

-Ready Evade: Minor action, 1 stamina. Your next Reactive Evade is free. Benefit lasts till start of your next turn and stacks if you do this action twice.

-Reactive Shot: Declare before attack roll is made against you. (Limit 1 reaction per attack.) Roll ranged attack with Snap Shot penalty (shotgun penalty is double that of pistol?). If your attack roll beats theirs and is enough to hit, you Stun them and they make no attack.

-Ready Shot: Minor action. Next Reactive Shot has no Snap Shot penalty. Benefit lasts till start of your next turn.

-Charge Attack: Major action, 5 stamina, ends turn. If not staggered, you can make a Charged attack (triple damage and automatic Stagger on all enemies hit) as a major action at the start of your next turn.

>>51880529
It's time relative to Factor 1, so like Factor 9 is Super Saiyan Blue, Kaio-Ken X10 Goku, Or like the flash, or like Saitama

>>51881668
Not nearly as stupidly fun

>>51881689
Tracking it down, thank you

>>51882281
I feel like this would make every character turn take forever to resolve. What's your core resolution mechanic?

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>>51885116
It could, yeah. I'm undecided on the core mechanic, but with that combo system (option to dump your stamina into doing extra damage, leaving yourself vulnerable) a dice pool mechanic is looking alot better than roll+modifier vs. TN.

>>51885541
I'd definitely agree with this, but the caution I'd give would be to watch if Stamina = dice pool since that means your stamina is your most important stat, bar none.

I've long thought that Bloodborne (and Dark Souls) could be done fairly well in a modified One Roll Engine, with Stamina possibly representing some kind of bonus dice pool that can be used with multiple actions.

>>51881689
>Hobby Games: The 100 best
What a neat book.

>>51886126
Assuming so, I can just tie it to level rather than making it a stat you choose.

Does anyone remember that homebrew game Lost Source? Whatever happened to that? It seems like it underwent some rule revisions, but 1d4chan and google aren't giving me anything.

>>51877892
My brain is just not working today. Some of those suggestions could probably be made to work, but I just can't put the pieces together. All I can do is ask again and hope someone has an idea.

>>51867822
If the mechanics are explained and designed to suit the action I think this is great. The problem is arbitrary differences. Give some more examples.

>>51875519
You need a really dumbed down summary of what this is trying to simulate at the beginning. It sounds interesting but I feel lost reading it until the end, which means I have to go back and re-read the start.

>>51875569
Presentation is my favorite part. I love organizing ideas in a way that's effective

>>51879366
Sorry dude this is very pretentious and doesn't inspire anything but a headache

https://youtu.be/QHHg99hwQGY

I thought I should share this video.

Lots of great advice but I was especially interested in the "3 types of players" stuff. The more I've thought about it, the more true it is.

Anyone else taking notes from this?

File: Working Class Heroes.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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Admittedly I haven't looked at this in ages but I'm curious for some feedback.
Kickass / Watchmen esque basic unfinished rules.

The plan was to manila envelope missions to players with intel before game-day and on game-day execute the missions.
Admittedly the system could probably be used for any modern era game, but that was the idea at hand. Come to think of it I think I originally was trying to make a Payday The Heist RPG.

>>51894612
That was actually very cool to read. I haven't seen such a well written design doc on here before. Makes me interested in playing

>>51894989
Oh wow thank you!
Not to belittle your compliment (really thank you!) any critiques or problems you had?

>>51895122
Proficiency. I get the idea that it's experience bonus but it just didn't click the way other parts did. And I guess this us linked to the skill table, which doesn't present the information in an educational way. I get all the ideas separately but their relationships are unclear.

>>51895377
Ok I will overhaul that section. I think I will explain proficiency first and then how it is applicable to skills.

File: The Archetypes.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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I'm working on a PbtA hack called Subrosa. Literally any feedback, even just telling me it's shit, would be greatly appreciated.

The "playbooks" called Archetypes are in the PDF and the rest of the rules are here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1c2jOt_kze4tKZd52dGGlGKW5yuoi7xTVcTaX4aGpJfQ

>>51900048
I'm enjoying this one. An intriguing idea.

I keep making mechanics without being satisfied with them. I can never quite come up with HP/wounds that I'm happy with. I want it to be simple and easy to keep track of, but have narrative weight at the same time.

>>51902843
Well, what have you tried?
And what about each option ruins it for you?

>>51902885
Here's a few ideas I tried but did not like and why:

>Just HP
It's very simple to keep track of, but is a narrative binary: you're either healthy as a horse or on death's door. This is for a more narrative system, so that won't do.

>HP with thresholds
So you have 25 HP and each time you lose five you get a narrative wound. Better, but at that point I began to question having a set limit/countdown instead of something more freely flowing.

>Wounds with thresholds
So every time you get 5 bumps and/or bruises, you take a narrative wound. This is getting a little hard to track without some kind of tokens - imagine tallying up to 5 then erasing it all the time. This is kind of like Halo: x amount of regenerating shields, y amount of non-regenerating health.

>Just wounds
It's simple to track (just write "broken arm" or whatever), but a little too deadly. You can only accumulate so many wounds without a buffer before you start looking like the black knight. Also difficult to quantify what exactly is severe enough to constitute a wound without invalidating attrition.

Additionally, I've toyed with making armor a resource in this game so that instead of being a constant reduction in damage taken, it is sacrificed when dramatically appropriate to prevent a wound (or in the case of HP, to regain x HP).

Right now, I'm thinking of going with just wounds and allowing players to sacrifice one armor to prevent one wound. But I worry it will be too dangerous in a lighthearted game.

>>51902843
This was more of an idea for a video game, but one idea I have been thinking about lately is multiple HP bars where each determines the rate at which the others recover. If a bar goes negative, it causes negative recovery(bleeding).

>>51901458
Thank you

>>51903061
Wounds with some kind of buffering sounds like the way to go. Your idea of using armor as a spendable reasource seems interesting. If you want to scrap the gear management aspect you could use accumulatable plot-armor points or something instead.

Stats in my game are used to derive various other things. So far this is what I've settled on:

>Power:
Extra action at 5, 10 ,15, and 20. At each of those thresholds, also gain Martial Dice that can either be added to damage or used to make Maneuvers. Determines complexity and number of weapons the character has proficiency with.

>Defense:
Stat = Health per hit location. Also determines proficiency in different types of Armor

>Accuracy and Evasion (Separate stats):
Helps determine quality of an attack. Attacks are either misses, glancing blows (50%), hits (100%), or crits (200%)

>Magic:
Stat = Mana (which is per round). Increases damage done by magic equivalent to stat.

>Magic Defense:
Reduced damage taken by magic. Possibly determines quality of healing. Possibly increases Mana by 50% stat.

>Speed:
Determines movement speed. Increases chances of landing an Attack of Opportunity. Might increase Initiative.


My question is, does this look relatively equal as far as density goes? All math is based around scores of 0-20 between levels 1-20. Doing some napkin math makes it necessary to have 30MP at max investment, so I'm having questions about whether to make the Magic stat equal to 1.5 MP per point with rounding rules, or whether that extra 10 MP should be in MDef. Other things like Power compared to Defense look different, but Defense being both HP and Armor (which is damage reduction) makes defense very powerful alone. And then Speed also looks weird being both movement speed and reaction time, but it looks to be potentially too weak without all that coverage.

Bump?

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How important is it to balance stat value?

>Start running some number sims
>tfw your system may be too swingy, since you can't decide if the results are accurate or just really bad rolling

>>51875519
It looks pretty sweet but I can't say for certain as I don't quite grasp the system. And a few points as well:

>Protagonists begin play tracking relationships with only the other protagonists;
wouldnt this negate the possibility of a PC having an established background? Like having a family for example?

Also would it be possible for two character to have different ratings at the relationship? Like a platonic lover or something like that?

>>51879366
I would put some rough numerical estimates as well for good measure, but if the idea is to scale to anime retardation levels I think it could work. Hell, shit got so ludicrous I kept giggling.

>>51882281
I really liked the idea of dice-pool based stamina. But perhaps 8 dice (assuming here) is too much for base, and everything should be reduced a bit, just for sake of not needing too much dice / time per turn.

>>51903061
I agree with >>51903359 , buffering would be a reasonable middleground IMHO

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I Have some questions regarding attributes and balancing. I'm making a homebrew for a space-opera thing using 2d10+ skill + atribute to hit a target number Not exactly inspired i know, i'm sorry as the core mechanic.

I want to establish a base number for an average person with average skill to complete a task, with around 55% chance of success. However, I'm not sure how I should make the attributes and skill ratings in terms of bonus. I was considering making them vary from 1-10 (max human, non-augmented) and act directly as the bonus, however I'm also tempted by the idea of making a more fragmented 1-20 or use like the d20 system where the average stat grants no bonuses. What is your opinion on this?

Another question: I was thinking of dividing Dex into two separate attributes, one being entirely focused on hand-eye coordination and the other on full-body shenanigans in the attempt of not having a God-Atribute and also not having to question "but what about a fat /k/ommando, he can shoot but not somersault"

One more thing: I was thinking of expanding the idea of the mental stats and status of a character. I'm planning to have a sanity (long-term mental damage), a stress (short-term) and emotional bonds to people and ideas (like in Delta Green) , but i'm not so sure what else to put. Any suggestions?

Bonus: What is your opinion in having a stat for a character's creativity? Either artistic/expressive or in general

>>51900048
That font is garbage. Can't read.

>>51907703
If the player rolls against his creativity score to see if he has a creative idea and then you provide him with one, that might cheapen any real creativity shown by players in the game.