Vote now, New system, need help. BADLY

Stop and step back, because approaching it in the way you are now is going to end up with an incoherent clusterfuck.

First and foremost? State your central design concept. What you want your system to do, how you want to achieve it and why this is different from what existing systems can do. That core design concept will inform a lot of your choices and will give your a direction which should help keep things coherent. Just grabbing everything that seems cool does not end in a good game, 95% of the time.

>>51904234
alright. good point.

Im trying to create something that allows characters to be diverse from each other, more than just player A chose this feat and Player B chose that one, but theyre both still warriors so they have essentially the same skills.

then I'm trying to keep combat engaging, too many times ive been in combat where its either convoluted and confusing that damage is a chore, or where you're so un-involved that you tune out unless its your turn.

then i want it to be accessible to all people, that anyone could read this and easily understand which things do what (using measurements in game terms rather than world terms)

Lastly, simple, i want to keep the character sheet to one page. i know this one won't be likely though. because if i wanted simple i would just have it be 6 stats and you roll under the relevant stat to succeed and thats it.

>>51904308

You're setting yourself some pretty hard goals there. Not impossible, but things that very few systems manage.

Allowing strong, distinct character mechanics and chargen choices often requires a certain amount of depth and complexity, more than a single page character sheet generally allows.

In the same way, engaging combat and accessibility are a bit tricky to reconcile, since making combat fun and involving, giving people real decisions to make etc, often necessitates a degree of mechanical crunch that puts people off.

Both can be resolved, and a system which achieves all four would be amazing. But I've yet to see one which actually manages all that in an elegant way. They're good things to aim for, but you're going to need some serious design chops if you're going to pull it off.

>>51904375
thanks for the tip. honesty helps.

yeah, for now character complexity I'm aiming for 2 things
1. you pick a class that gives you a bonus to specific skills
2. you spend points to improve aspects of your character how you choose. things such as attack/defense/skills/etc...

however that only works if your abilities aren't based off your stats, making it more complex/crunch as you said. as well as that current method makes classes a little pointless? they need to give more than just skills. I'm not sure what to do about that, if classes give you powers then we return to D&D if they don't then whats the point and how do you get powers/skills?

L5R i think did a good job, but only because of the sheer amount of classes you can pick from. but i don't think i can pull that off.

engaging combat, i want something that a single turn can happen in less than 2 minutes, but I've learned rolling defense makes things much more engaging and the players tend to enjoy it more.

>>51904486

I think you might actually be well served by looking at your game in an even more basic way, getting right down to the fundamentals.

At a foundational level, what things are important to it? What do you expect your player characters to be capable of, and how does the system value those various foci?

This is especially important if you go the pointbuy route, since costing two things the same when the system gives them completely different degrees of relevance is an easy trap to fall into.

Arbitrary skill lists are an example of this. A lot of games just write out skills that make sense to them without really considering how much use one would get. And if something quite specific like animal handling is costed exactly the same as an extremely broadly applicable skill like perception or awareness, the person who invests in the latter will get a lot more use of it than the person who pumps the former.

>>51904563
I'm looking to only be making a prototype at the moment, meaning in terms of abilities and skills it will be very limited.

capabilities for now are limited to move, attack, use. move is simple, attack is anything offensive, use is basically interact with something like drink potion or reload.

i may eventually add in additional things such as Overwatch, all out attack, defense stance, etc... but for now I'm trying to keep it simple.

Abilities, I'm not sure how it will be implemented but various abilities are a want not a need . you could either do it the Gurps way where the item you're holding really determines what you can do. or you can go like D&D where you get special abilities exclusive to you.

this is why i came here first, i have opinions but other people have more experience and wisdom, they know what styles work and which ones dont.

>>51904728

But what you're currently focusing on is the combat? That a PC's primary capabilities are the ones they use in a fight?

>>51904747
I'm currently putting the most focus on the character sheet than anything, what brings a character to existing.

Primarily point A to point B, Point A is the thing that determines point A. point A being the stat/attribute/skill that determines B how to do combat.

i figure once I've got stats on a page, i can determine combat second.

is this the wrong order to look at it? instead i should look at combat first because a good portion of the game is combat? and i can work out skills/health later?

>>51904806

Well, it's more that when I asked about what matters to the system, combat was the first thing you jumped to. Your assumptions about the system are important for figuring out where to start.

Are you assuming that every PC will be capable in combat, although in different ways? Or do you want it to be possible for a PC to focus on other elements of the game at the cost of combat? The former doesn't mean you need to neglect out of combat stuff, it's just whether it's one source of progression (spending the same XP on combat and out of combat stuff) or different ones (Each PC getting a certain amount to spend on in and out of combat, or different forms of XP, somewhat like how Anima does it).

>>51904837
ah i see, i mis read your earlier question, sorry.

thats a tough one, i hadn't put much if any thought into that, at the moment in terms of what theyre capable of i had only gotten as far as combat.

if i had to say right now i want the player to be able to focus on other aspects and forsake combat if they so choose. i dont see this being an issue, but maybe theres something I'm not seeing just yet.

thank you very much for helping me.

>>51904921

System design is something I enjoy, and it's always good to encourage people are interested.

The 'problem' is that... Well.

Is combat a key part of your game? Something you're investing a lot of time and complexity in? Then everyone should probably be able to contribute to it, to ensure you don't have players who are just left out during the longest and most mechanically engaging parts of the game.

There are systems which do things differently, Shadowrun as an example. Everyone should probably be able to defend themselves, but the system focuses heavily on spotlight balance, the idea that each PC is super-specialised and generally focuses on their own forte, meaning combat is mostly 'stay alive while the street samurai does the real work'.

However, exceptions like Shadowrun have very strong, specific design goals which justify why they have complex combat mechanics that not everyone engages in.

As for RPG's to look up, you might find some interesting stuff in Valor. It's a point buy game with a focus on tactical grid combat and building your own abilities that's been getting a decent amount of interest and praise lately. It should act as a good example for you if nothing else, and help you define your ideas more strongly by how you'd do things differently.

I've never played shadowrun before, for various reasons. but i can understand and do know that since people can be so specialized it might result in something like only 1 or 2 of the players being good at combat and the rest waiting for it to end so they can do the one thing theyre good at.

hmm, i can see how the works in shadowrun because you're supposed to be a specialized team of people, but i think i see what you're getting at.

allowing such deep customization to the fact that you can ignore combat might lead to a person being un-engaged with combat or completely useless, i hadn't seen this before. hmm, so it may be a good idea to draw back on the total customization and put maybe more focus on combat in characters.

i think thats what you're saying, but i could be wrong.

As for valor, is it valor the heroic roleplaying system? I've never heard of it til now but ill go look into it momentarily.

>>51904213

I'm going to be That Guy. I apologise in advance.

I went down this rabbit hole for a good ten years. I'm a social scientist and statistician, so I have the math chops. I've been a gamer for well over twenty years. I had much the same goal as you.

Then I discovered GURPS 4th edition and threw my work out. It really is that good. I'd tried 3e GURPS in the 90s and hated it as an overcomplicated beast of a game. Fourth, on the other hand, is clean and tight (though the core rulebooks could be better organized).

There's plenty of room to customize GURPS to be what you want via the setting/campaign options. Dungeon Fantasy, on the other hand, is a D&D style game that strips out the options and gives you good defaults to get playing with immediately (but being GURPS, you can always put options back in from the basic set). There's a box set coming this fall for it, or download the PDFs and start playing tonight.

Like I said, I went down this rabbit hole. It's fun to work these kinds of issues out, but now I think of all the time I thought about mechanics that I could have spent on worldbuilding.

Sorry, I know it's a meme, but it's a meme for a reason.

>>51905178

You got the gist of it, yeah.

Keep in mind, whatever decision you make (on whether everyone can/should be able to participate in combat) you can still build a system around it, but these are the kinds of questions that you really benefit from answering before getting too far in development.

>>51905236

GURPS is a solid game, but for me and a lot of other people no matter how much you customise it, it's still GURPS. That isn't innately a bad thing, but I and others likely value variety in systems and mechanics, and while GURPS can emulate almost anything other systems with focused mechanics on a single specific style or theme can achieve things in unique and interesting ways outside the scope of what GURPS is capable of.

>>51905236
No worries, i have tried my hand at gurps, and i dont really have any big problems with it honestly.

It does appear to be pretty solid at some things, but confusing in so many ways at first, the books wording alone almost turned us away.

Theres just something about it that didnt appeal to me as a system, and maybe if theres ever a 5th ed. ill look into it at least. and if this system I'm crafting doesn't work out ill be happy knowing GURPS is good enough.

That doesn't mean GURPS is bad. i just dont feel like it for me. but hey I've only been playing tabletops for 6 years, I've got time to experience more.

>>51905293
thank you, I'm glad I'm hearing this before i spend any more time, so far its only been about a week doing a little research.

im not sure how to make it so that i dont fall into the trap of allowing full customization that also leads to people being useless in combat.

From what i can think of we have, abilities and magic/psychic to allow for more than just shooting/stabbing.

we also have level ups granting you bonuses to attack/combat innately kind like anima.

in all Anima, GURPS, and 5 rings you can possibly end up having no combat capability but be very useful at things such as engineering or social. i guess that just a point buy problem then, any system that has point buy can risk having no combat ability. what to do. what to do.

>>51905293
>while GURPS can emulate almost anything other systems with focused mechanics on a single specific style or theme can achieve things in unique and interesting ways outside the scope of what GURPS is capable of.

This is wrong. Check out the splatbooks. Every one of them gives rules and suggestions for focusing GURPS around a specific theme or style.

The downside of GURPS isn't "jack of all trades, master of none." That's just a meme.

The downside of GURPS is that you're building your own system with the help of the books, so there is a ton of effort on the GM's part before you even begin the game for anything but the Infinite Worlds style of play. On the plus side, once the work is done at the start, there isn't much work during the game to be done.

>>51905616

There are still things that other systems can accomplish that GURPS cannot. Specific uses of mechanics and blends of rules and theme that make use of core mechanics built from the bottom up to support that can achieve degrees of mechanical nuance that GURPS cannot replicate.