Game Design General /GDG/

doesn't this general normally have a pasta

>>54223786
the forced enthusiasm of these guys is annoying to the nth degree

>>54224074
Normally, yes.

>>54225421
Discussion about game design and mechanics. Whether it's comparing similar mechanics from published games, discussing houserules and homebrews or asking for feedback on original games and mechanics, it's all welcome.

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A thread dedicated to discussion and feedback of games and homebrews made by /tg/ regarding anything from minor elements to entire systems, as well as inviting people to playtest your games online.

Try to keep discussion as civilized as possible, avoid non-constructive criticism, and try not to drop your entire PDF unless you're asking for specifics, it's near completion or you're asked to.

>/gdg/ Resources (Op Stuff, Design Tools, Project List)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8nGH3G9Z0D8eDM5X25UZ055eTg

>#dev on /tg/'s discord:
https://discord.gg/3bRxgTr

>Last Thread:
>>54110999

>Thread Topic:
>implying this thread won't die with only four posts

I'm trying to smooth out a mechanic. I like the idea, but its clunky.

The current set-up is:
>Model chooses and target and measures range/LoS/etc.
>Both players roll 3 D12's and choose the highest
>Both players add the modifers relevant to their roll (range, cover, attack and defense skills, and such)
>The defense roll is subtracted from the attack roll, if the result is a 1 or higher, it scores one hit
>The difference is also compared to the weapon's RoF, each full RoF is an additional hit
>Each hit is a D12 plus weapon power compared to target's armor to wound
>Melee is similar, but the defense makes an attack roll and the highest hits, etc.

The problem is it feels front-loaded, you have all this mechanical math in the first roll, and then simple To Wound in the second. I like the idea of the To Hit having more influence on the attack, and it can let me do stuff like make rules for shotguns getting extra power instead of extra hits, or allow weapons with high rate of fire standout over slower, more powerful weapons. So in a game where the goal is about 16 actions a turn between both players, I'm wondering if its too complicated.

>>54223786
I try to right down a rulebook in more of a "note" fashion than any real fashion as soon as I start, just so I have a living draft to use as I playtest.

I leave critical rules and things out all over the place, just because It only needs to exist for my personal use at this point.

>>54226431
I'm confused as to the purpose of having 3 dice and having a compared roll at all, as well as ROF simply multiplying damage rolls instead of being a larger number of attacks or increased chance to hit.

>>54226830
The multiple dice is because the math is different than a single die or a combined roll. I haven't looked at 2D6 or 2D12 or something though.

Compared roll is to add interaction between players during an action. It allows the other player to feel like they have a say in what happens, as opposed to sitting there and letting your opponent murder you.

I've looked at having multiple attacks but it would either mean separate actions, like how Warmahordes does theirs, and I feel that's also clunky. Or back to the binary system of you hit or not, doesn't affect your damage the difference of the hit or not. I've also done "roll a die for each attack, opponent does the same, and compare to see how many attacks hit", but it also feels a bit clunky.

>>54226830
>>54227316
I've also thought of a pool system where each player rolls against their opponents stat, and each attacking success not cancelled by a defending success is a hit.

There a good trinary resolution system that isn't pbta shit?

>>54223786

Hello /gdg/. Is my first time posting here. I am caught in a rather bizzare situation. I am currently creating my own RPG, with a top-bottom design. I've broadly defined the concepts, mechanics and abilities. Howerver, I can't think of a decent resolution system.
The game is d6 based.

Anyone has tips?

Im doing a small CCG which is like a simplified version of our well known magic the gathering; but I'd like to add some depth to it; by using things beyond the game itself. What are some cool props to use on a CCG? (dice rolls, coin flips, rock paper scissors matches, triggering cards only when you wear a shirt of a certain color... etc). The game itself takes inspiration from Final Fantasy Tactics, with a card for each class and that.

To give you an idea of what i want: there is a "creature" (fighter in game terms) that has a huge combat bonus if you romantically like your opponent.

Of course, nobody can get inside your head to check that, it's you who must claim this bonus before the attack if you want. This can lead to awkward situations on a tournament; or to help you declare to that person you like.


>>54229838
>Howerver, I can't think of a decent resolution system.
>The game is d6 based.

I take it as that you've picked d6 just because, no real reason beyond it.
We can't judge without knowing a little more of what the game is about and what kind of feeling you want to achieve.
Write a little about what you have, we can't promise anything but for zealot hate fueled commentaries from amateur, full of ourselves designers but we can try to figure out something.

>>54223786
Hey, Im designing some additional content for Barbarians of Lemuria. What would be a good trigger for a powerful but debilitating rage, like that of a warp-spasm for those who are familiar. I want it to trigger during combat and provide a buff, but cause damage until the subject is knocked unconcious, making small engagements as part of a larger plan dangerous because they could incapacitate the character. Im not sure what the trigger should be though. I dont want to have the player roll to save each turn, that would be a pain.

For reference, BoL is a 2D6 based system. Anybody got any ideas?

bumplestiltskin

>>54227801
Blades in the Dark

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It's been a month and I still haven't settled on an inventory mechanic I like.

My game is more similar to FATE, conceptually; it's based around details, like aspects, and using verbs to change them. I'm aiming for something rules light and narrative focused. But I just can't figure out a good inventory/items mechanic!

I thought about making something more like D&D, where you have what you have and that makes a certain weight. But I felt that this raised a lot of questions about, "how do weapons work, how does armor work, how does weight work, what different kinds of items can you have?"

I thought about something more like FATE, with items as simply being extra details, but that raised other questions about how to govern these.

My ideal mechanic would be:

>completely explained in under one page, including all subtypes of items (like weapons or armor)
>have some way to limit how much a character can carry
>have some way to track how many uses an item has
>have some way to add various extra details to individual items (even if this is simply appending them to the item detail itself)
>allows characters to gain/lose items as easily as possible

>>54231443
If they're already rolling once, bake the save into that roll - i.e. on a 1 they get triggered till they roll a 6. Sorry, not very familiar with BoL.

>>54230235
I've picked d6 only because it's the most common dice, but I could technically balance it around d10, or d100. I just dislike the use of different dices.

Main concept is noblebright set in a postapocaliptic alternative past. Around 180, humanity discovered a strange source of energy called "metaenergy" or simply meta, whose main characteristic is that it did not obey the 2nd law of thermodynamic. This lead to numerous shenanigans, until circa 1850 a lovercraftian catastrophe struck the world, causing the sun to turn black, general eldritch tentacle madness galore and so on.
However, itbecame soon apparent that use of meta (and in particular, meta-fueled lamps) held back both the now-mutating powers of sunlight and the mutated beasts.

Fast forward 60 years, civilization is beginning to recover, and the first actual search parties are being sent to explore, research and scavenge.

The theme I'm going for is colonialism/adventure with an hint of horror. It is mainly a game about explorers exploring and killing a shoggot or two while doing it.

>>54223786

Jesus, I couldn't past the 5 seconds mark. What a fucking faggot.

How can I use anydice or your goodwill or google to find out the % of rolling triplets on 3d6?

>>54236728
Here you go: http://anydice.com/program/c3e3

The probability is 0.46%.

>>54236882
Thank you. After posting my Google-fu went the right way. The chance is too low to be used as a game mechanic (2,7%).

Now I have a new, worse problem.

I found out that the probability of rolling doubles on 3d6 is around 44% (16/36), but now I'm struggling to see the probability of rolling doubles on a 4d6 drop highest/lowest (without dropping the chances are around 72%).

>>54223786

Honestly I think rules should be purposefully made even more esoteric and obsfucated. This is the best way to weed out normies, casuals and critical role shitters and leave in people who actually care about games.

>>54223786
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuThpe-Rgxs&list=PL3eVql0CPrVim0xLlubU2vA-3JCe1cWaM
>Two lecturers trying not to talk over each other
I'm worried already

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IUaGQhlPwo

I only watched the first 5 minutes but starts pretty good.

>>54234971
Check out Lamentations of the Flame Princesse's encumbrance system. Often regarded as a gold standard for rules light

How do you feel about metacurrencies?

I'm working one into my game. There is a pool of ten tokens per player, which is divided evenly at the start of the game. They are traded to the GM to achieve various positive effects for the spender's character, and the GM uses them to add an additional dramatic effect to a player's roll before putting them back in the pile. The other players award them to each other, one at a time, for good roleplaying.

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Good to see this thread it up!

I'm experimenting with ways to convert real life ranges into tabletop ranges - this is for an air combat game, specifically missile and radar ranges.

I want closer ranges to be larger on the tabletop (so 12" is a missiles range, or even up to 24"), while longer ranges are equal to less on the tabletop - so a radar with a range of 200 nautical miles is only about 48" on the tabletop.

I fooled around with this site to generate graphs from an equation - and talking to a maths major gave me the idea of using 2 equations at once - joining in the middle. But I'm not sure how practical this will be and if there is a way to do this kind of thing with one equation.

Does anyone know an equation that might work for me? or have any suggestions on things to try out? it would be nice to have a single equation I can plug ranges in nautical miles into and get a range in inches for the tabletop. Using 2 equations would give me more accuracy, but I would need to know the crossover point...

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>tfw GM chapter is the size of the previous four chapters combined
fug

>>54242258
There's a reason why the DM guide is an entire book in D&D. There's a lot to cover.

>>54241832
I like them, personally.
IIRC, the OSR folks tend to dislike them more often than not.

>>54234971
I remember Heroes Against Darkness had something pretty light and quick and covers what you need. Might want to look into that.

http://heroesagainstdarkness.blogspot.com/

>>54230235

This sounds really creepy and like a general bad idea.

>>54230235
>To give you an idea of what i want: there is a "creature" (fighter in game terms) that has a huge combat bonus if you romantically like your opponent.
>Of course, nobody can get inside your head to check that, it's you who must claim this bonus before the attack if you want. This can lead to awkward situations on a tournament; or to help you declare to that person you like.
I don't mean to be harsh but I honestly can't believe you think this is a good idea. If someone told me this was an actual game mechanic my first thought would be they are trying to pull one over on me.

Yo, any horror games (board-games or books) that makes you play as the ghost or evil mastermind?

Something like house in the hill board game.

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Bump with one of my first historical rulesets

>>54241832
I do like metacurrencies, as long as they aren't just a "break the rules" card. Doing things inside the game system like re-rolls, fudging dice rolls a little, stealing initiative, etc., where you still have to follow how the system works, its just gives you a bump.

>>54235865
>It is mainly a game about explorers exploring and killing a shoggot or two while doing it

sounds very cool to me.
Systems are something made for tastes; many of them work, you just have to see which one works for you best.
Have you checked simpled6? google it, is a one page thing which can be easyly hacked and I've used a lot with good results; maybe you can work up from there.

>>54242821
>>54242904

Yeah I know it's a little weird but I'm not afraid of that. Not all cards must trigger deep issues though; and as I said, nobody forces you to admit/state you like someone, you can just play with no bonus.

>>54242147
For relative increasing distances working with zones would be better than inches, no?

What are some games that pull off horizontal development well? Instead of gaining increasingly crazy powers in a narrow field, gaining a wider variety of abilities.

>>54230235
Sounds like tze 'fun' rules from AoS initial release. Certain boni were applied if ypu had the longest beard or spoke with an orc accent or shit like that. Everyone hated the and dropped them asap. Don't do this.
Also check the un-sets from mtg, they have similar stuff going on.

>>54241832
Overwhelmingly negative.

They are immersion poison to me.
I also hate the idea of bribing people with boni (or XP) to do good roleplaying. It won't make a bad player good. It makes the way you roleplay this incentivize scramble to secure a bonus. I don't want to feel pressured to do overt stunting constantly or feel like I'm wasting things mechanically. Likewise I don't want to rate other players persistently. You get a conflict of interest. Do I want the group to win or am I honest and don't reward a player for underwhelming or mediocre roleplaying? I much rather look at the other players exploits in character.
As a GM you will have situations where the player maneuvered themselves into a bad situation and proceed to unload their good roleplay points from a unrelated situation to suddenly be loaded with bonuses when they were crawling through a ditch moments before.

I think metacurrency is such a step backwards when you want your game to have narrative freedom, because they impose binding rules in an area where they were non before. It is baffling and only undermines a story.

>>54249124
No traditional games really come to mind, but a game that focuses on equipment based skills would be ideal. A vidya that does this is the first Guild Wars. You learn, hunt, or otherwise gain access to some 300+ skills for your two professions, but you can only bring 8 at a time. The more options you have access to, the better you can prepare for upcoming challenges.

One of my own games is probably going to go this route. Character progression is pretty free form, but your niche depends on what abilities you decide to bring.

>>54247468
I want to be able to measure distances in inches though. There are no squares or hexes on the table for this game.

>>54249124
Traveller. Skills cap at 4 and take months to train up.
The more skills you have the longer it takes to train new ones.

>>54252566
It shouldn't be terribly hard to keep the zone idea and replace those squares with inches

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>>54242147
Just use one formula with a smarter scale.
A logarithmic scale sounds just like what you want.
Something of the form
>y = a log10(x) + b

>>54247065
>nobody forces you to ... you can just play with no bonus
If this game is inspired by MTG and FFT, then people are probably going to want and need that competitive advantage.
You're implicitly pushing people towards those things by otherwise forcing them to play a suboptimal game.

Runefag from last thread here. Been thinking on a magic system. I want something free form, with as few lists as possible.

Since there will naturally be four runes PCs are ostensibly pretty good at and four they won't be, I think a good starting foundation is only casting spells of runes with which you are aligned (have 60%+ in that rune). You can use expendable ruins earned on your quest or cooperate with your fellows to cast other runic spells, though.

I also plan to use metacurrency to judge the power of a spell, the more you spend (from 0 to 3), the more powerful your spell. You earn metacurrency by pleasing the gods, much like in King of Dragon Pass.

But what's a good, flexible scale of power for magic? This has baffled me for awhile.

>>54256440
This. If the right way isn't also the fun way, people will play the unfun way instead of the wrong way.

>>54256567
>flexible scale of power
What exactly do you mean by this?
I think the concept of power to levels (counted in metacurrency cost) is pretty straightforward.
But what does flexible refer to?
Does it mean easy to scale up or down?
Does it mean generically applying to utility and combat spells (or anything else you throw at it) alike?

so, im working on a play-by-post diceless systems for lols

so far the idea i got is that every player bullshits to add up to two stats that are relevant to a given DC, and try to beat the DC. If they cant beat it they can either spend some form of token to grow their "roll" or take some form of damage.

Sound good?

>>54256670
I mean, how do you quantify the difference between investing 1 Favor and investing 2 Favor in a way that isn't highly restrictive or implicative (?) of the kinds of spells you can cast?

For example, we'll say Air with 0 Favor, that might be like running pretty quick or a great leap. And then 3 Favor might be summoning a small cyclone around yourself or flying. So what are 1 and 2? And what does that say about Fire, or Death?

I'm thinking right now about this:
>describe what you want to do
>GM tells you what rune that's gonna be and how much Favor it's gonna cost
>you still have to roll

Pretty simple! But it feels a little mother may I and doesn't give the GM a lot of pricing guidance besides.

>>54257703
Maybe scale it by natural human abilities?
Like
>0 - Great realistic feats
>1 - Slight superhuman feats
>2 - Minor external forces
>3 - Major external forces
E.g. for Air
>Run quite fast
>Confidently leap between highrise rooftops
>Wind giving you a boost, allowing you to glide, or cushioning a fall.
>Flying

How do you guys feel about PbtA-style GM moves? I was initially kind of repulsed but it has been growing on me. I see it as kind of like bad GM insurance.

Ideally, it won't limit the GM because the moves should be flexible enough to conceptually cover most conceivable problems the PCs could suffer, and well-designed moves will not only inject genre flavor into the game but also keep the game moving forward.

One of my biggest pet peeves as a player, and one thing I always try to avoid as GM is the simple "No," or "You fail." It grinds the game to a halt and doesn't give the players a lot to go off of. Instead of saying "The wall is too high to climb," I try to add something like, "The guards hear your grappling hook clang to the ground - you hear them coming to check what the noise was." This tells the players they have to do something to avoid escalating the situation (or embrace it and escalate).

>>54255353
Why have zones at all when all you need to measure are inches?
What I'm trying to do is rather to convert zones into inches.

>>54256281
yeah a log curve will probably work better. I'll fool around with a few, cheers.

>>54257936
This just might work! I think I'm going to adjust the scale so that a 0 Favor use of your runes is just using them normally (for example, Air represents direct imposition or violence, so Air 0 is just a normal intimidate/attack roll; the Man rune represents civilized things humans do, so 0 Man might be writing a poem but 3 Man might actually a magical law). Then you have to spend something for actual magic. If it costs 0 I'm afraid players will use it too often for the tone of this game.

I want the metacurrency to come from doing behaviors that please the gods, just like KoDP, but that has two problems I'm confident can be solved. This kind of gives the GM a little too much power over this mechanic, and because so much of my game is based around collaborative worldbuilding, it might be difficult for players to create gods who feature balanced ways to please.

Bump for the night.

I'm trying to create a rules-light game where players can create new powers.
I'm having a bit of trouble with phrasing one of the rules.
I you extend a previous power it must be one-step-removed from it, that's simple.
But completely new powers must be inspired by the world around them, e.g. there must be a lit matchstick/candle/campfire/etc. nearby to create the power to make a small flame at your fingertips.
How can I write this clear and brief?

>>54258630
Imagine a battle in 2 zones, field and sea. Aircraft dogfighting in one zone treats the inches as X. But if one in the field/sea wants to shoot one in the sea/field, on top of his zone inches distance, each inch in the other zone counts as Y (greater than X).

This can streamline the math.

>>54264407
>one-step-removed from it
I only understood this in reference to your next paragraph, for what it's worth.

I would just write that players need an in-world, fictional circumstance to inspire new powers and give some examples.

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Hmmm

>>54264407
Magic requires a physical, pre-existing source. Spells can modify one, small aspect of a physical source or of another spell.

>>54267466
And now that I've just thought of it, you can bake in limits to how often you can piggy back off an existing spell. Perhaps rolling a spell failure check off a day or d10 or something. 1 is failure, each additional modification raises the failure TN by 1 (4 modifications fail on a roll of 1-4, succeed on 5&6, etc)

>>54267466
>>54267530
While I appreciate the ideas, I am actually actively avoiding such concrete solutions.
Trying to keep things abstract and unconstrained.
>Powers are either original or derivative.
>An original power is inspired by something in the world around a character
>A derivative power is different by one thing compared to the power it is based on.
Actually might be good to add combinations of powers too.
>A combination power is a simple combination of the two powers it is based on.

>>54266091
You're right, I should probably just use some more words explaining this stuff explicitly.

>>54267380
I really like the mark and exp stuff, but a lot of confounding phrasing in here.

Make "natural marks" the general rule and say:
>For certain skills that can be practiced you can spend 1 EXP to obtain a mark
Also what's this about needing previous ranks?

Either fix your terminology or explicitly split it out into stats and ranks/specializations/abilities per skill.
Because stats, skills, and skill specializations (all with ranks), and abilities (which apparently depend on a single skill each) is confusing.

>>54267934
Yeah it doesn't roll out the tongue very well, thanks for pointing that out, i'll try to word it better once I make some changes to it

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>>54264840
Its a miniatures game though, generally aircraft are moving all over the place. Measuring distances in inches is the simplest way to work out distance.

Its ok the "convert real life distance to inches via equation" is working very well - just need to find the right equation. The math is only done during the game design phase - players never have to worry about it.

Any tool for quick prototyping card games? I'd hack something togather in html/css but I'm burned out from work.

>>54270692
I heard of some tool that lets you export spreadsheet data as a series of cards - keep the thread alive till I get home and I'll look it up.

>>54270692
>>54272374
Back. Try data merge, with InDesign.

What do you guys think about games that are divided into phases, like Burning Wheel or Ryuutama?

>>54270692
Use a standard playing deck and just write a table of what the regular cards actually represent in your game.

How many rolls per action is too many? Does your game have to-hit rolls, critical confirmations, hit location rolls, item expenditure rolls, armor rolls or other things? Or is everything wrapped up in a single go?

>>54223786
>want to design TCG
>decide there's no way in hell for an indie TCG to survive
Should I just convert my ideas to an LCG? Is there any better way of making a self-contained card game than just a draft cube?

>>54278721
As few as possible that still allow for the most flavor and tactical options.

My philosophy is to make the main focus of the game more in-depth, and glaze over the less important factors.

So a game about tactical gun fighting should have decently complex gun rules, while diplomacy and wounds could be handled more simply.

A game about air combat where the players control aircraft should have in-depth pilot and aircraft modeling, while AA fire and attacking ground targets can be simpler.

In your case if you want attacks to be the main focus of a game, I would have a single hit roll with the armor factored in, followed by a damage roll which could potentially have the hit location written in as flavor text.

You can always use modifiers to help lower the amount of dice rolled. Armor for example could be a modifier on a damage table.

Say if you have a hit roll and a damage roll, players could specify a hit location they're trying to aim for and that could modify both the hit roll and the damage roll.
So aiming for the head would make it harder to hit but do more damage. Aiming for the chest would be easier to hit and do less damage, especially if armor is being worn, etc.

>>54223786
Well I enjoy their discussions on game design greatly, and it got me to buy The Characteristics Of Games, which was both the best purchase and one of the most interesting reads of my life. I dislike their approach in their panels on playing games, though i can't exactly say why.

>>54276039
Works great for a board game like Eldritch Horror, so I imagine it works fine with roleplaying games if you're okay with the gamey feel it gives.

>>54264407
Give Fate a look and draw ideas from there. Notice how it describes everything as broadly as possible.

>>54278771
You could still design a TCG for your own fun and practice.
But yeah, for market viability an LCG would work better.

>>54278721
I've tried to do a one roll resolution system (technically 2? Its a roll off), but can't get it to work in a way I'm happy with. Right now I'm using a roll-off followed by damage rolls system.

>>54278771
LCG is a better business model.

>>54280126
That's an interesting source, thanks.
Not personally a big fan of the examples and the amount of words used to describe things, but it's definitely a clear way to write things.

How do you make healers useful without making the game brutal or making the healers obligatory (that is, without a healer, you die)?

I think it'd add more to my homebrew than it'd subtract, but I'm not quite sure what kind of health/magic system would make it work.

Of course, healers would have use besides healing (for example, one of the "healer" classes would be The Cook), but again I'm not sure how to make them work.

>>54281668
Take a look at Dungeon World's moves. I'm sorry, but I don't have any of the links or PDF with me ATM. Maybe in a few hours if the thread is still up.

By the way, how are you ruling the creation of powers? Point-buy?

>>54282148
>How do you make healers useful without making the game brutal or making the healers obligatory (that is, without a healer, you die)?
I don't think this is possible unless you move away from "healer" and into "support". I can't think of a single game that does dedicated healers well. In fact, I'd say your question boils down to "How do I make healers necessary but not necessary?"

A lot of video games have tried this and as far as I know they've all turned into pretty miserable clusterfucks.

>>54282148
Make healing more general

Or if you want specialized healer, make it do big heals and nothing else

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I made this sheet to my friend's game, it's pretty heavy OSR, but I liked trying my hand at more complex character sheets. Mostly asking opinions about the composition. The first page is super busy compared to the rest, but I tried to make it in a way that it works.

>>54282148
Make healers into a convenience. Make healing otherwise slow and very dependent on rolls, slowing the pace of the game if you don't have one with you.

Also, avoid Specialization superiority. Don't make a healer that only knows how to heal (A cook who is useless except for making gourmet) better than one that can also contribute while fighting. Make the healing options shallow, but make them useful at all stages of the game.

Like, make healing skills something that level up naturally as the characters do. For the cook, for example, make food restore a % of health, or have the amount healed be affected by the one who is healed. Hard numbers on healing things make them kind of inefficient on higher levels, or require continuous specialization toward that thing.

One thing you can do, is that characters' hit point pool never gets larger, or that you use alternative HP methods, such as rising wounds against rolls or something. One of my favorite methods for this is possible in step-dice games. You roll your toughness die against the amount of wounds you have, and need to roll over the number.

The kicker is that different healers could do different things with this. Some could remove wounds, but a cook, for example, can give a boost to the roll itself (A full belly bonus, if I may say). A bad roll will still make you kick the bucket (or at least, make you fall unconscious), but your chances of survival are much better.

>>54282148
Already have the PDF, thanks anyways.
Dungeon World's rules seem to be way crunchier than the basic rules I'm trying to go for.

I'm ruling power creation as once per (party) level, with an initial power for each player at the start of the game, except you don't keep track of levels explicitly.

All this half-assed explaining reminds me that I should really just finish up a prototype ruleset soon, so I can share specifics.

>>54282148
So, one way to keep healers from being necessary but to keep combat brutal is to assume 0 HP is out of the fight and fucked, but not yet dead.

Lasting wounds for falling to 0, but much more generous rules for dying. I won't say steal from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but keep in mind that it was one of the first RPGs to use a meta-currency simply so it could be as brutal as possible on characters but still have them survive their hardships.

Is there a good example for non-combative systems in games? This point came up earlier in a conversation with a friend and we're both struggling for ideas. A lot of it is just 'social combat' or targeted rolls.

>>54282148
People are going to find the most optimal ways to play whatever options you offer, so you'll need to know yourself how healing interacts with the rest of the game.

Dnd 5e has healing, and it isn't necessary, but it also isn't exactly the most desired role to have filled. Healing is better used to stay out of the unconscious state rather than continually getting topped off in combat.

The early days of Guild Wars 2 also had healing, but it was even less desirable than 5e's. Characters are assumed to be in charge of their own health, but there were ways to provide supplemental party healing. The amount of healing compared to amount of damage was designed so that it couldn't keep up with constant pressure or a coordinated spike, and was more about removing the "ambient damage" that was flying around.

Overwatch also has some healing and non-healing support. I mention overwatch, because even the full healers have many other options in combat than just healing. They have abilities that, if you took away their healing, would still provided useful utility to their team. There's also the non-healing healers that provide survivability in the forms of temp-hp, or by augmenting health packs, allowing characters to heal themselves.

You can take all those ideas into account when designing how healers or healing might fit. One character might augment both healing and non-healing potions so that they're more effective. Another might provide a small aura of small, continuous healing so that you surivability is slightly higher when you're near them. A third might be dedicated to cleansing conditions, which might remove lasting damage effects. A fourth could grant allies a vampiric effect, increasing both damage output and survivability. Healing should be just a small portion of what the overall abilities of a character are, and gaining access to that healing depends on performing other, useful combat functions.

>>54282691
>>54282950
I'm not trying to make healers that can't do anything but heal. Not only that's boring but probably impractical. I'm trying to: 1) give some classes healing options; and 2) making a few of those classes better than the others. But if healing is too good, then combat isn't a problem, but if it's too bad, why bother?

>>54283295
I'm looking at HP not as Health Points but as a measure of how much you can play the game before you're forced to stop. Mechanically, that's what HP and some status effects already do anyways. So there's basically two kinds of HP, one that prevents you from playing temporarily (you're unconscious, restrained, etc.) and one that prevents you from playing until you make a new character(you're dead, kidnapped, etc.). You still lose HP mostly to physical damage, but attacks get stronger because they (usually) gain additional effects rather than gaining bigger numbers.

>>54283104
I'm gonna take a better look at your post later, but managing specializations is an obstacle I'm trying to overcome. I do want to give classes a focus and a few options to make characters from the same class different from each other and perhaps fill different niches, but I worry everyone accidentally or intentionally going for the same thing could break the game.

>>54286961
Same as the previous paragraph. Also, since I mentioned the Cook class, I was also thinking about giving them the ability to passively gain money in their time off and maybe some social skills as well. I'm trying to not spread the class too thin.

>>54283198
I was talking specifically about the mechanic of moves. You can vastly simplify it changing the amount of dice you use, for example.

>>54288146
> I'm not trying to make healers that can't do anything but heal. Not only that's boring but probably impractical. I'm trying to: 1) give some classes healing options; and 2) making a few of those classes better than the others. But if healing is too good, then combat isn't a problem, but if it's too bad, why bother?

You might be able to achieve by limiting what healing can accomplish, and how easily it does it. If you don't want it over-used, you can place limitations or drawbacks so that players keep it for when it's really needed, rather than topping themselves up after every battle. Make them actually have to make an educated decision about their healing options - especially if the right decision is sometimes to forego healing and save it for later - and you'll probably avoid the problem of it making combat too easy.

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>Not quite enough space to fit in all the stats I need for aircraft
>Don't want to go landscape format
>Decide to try iconography
>Add abbreviations under the icons for more clarity.

Do you think the iconography is clear and/or intuitive? any suggestions for icons for the other stats?

Should I include the abbreviation text in the heading, or just stick to the icons?

The "Hard Points" icon uses icons shown earlier in the rules - the missile and bomb rack icons.
There will be an introduction to the aircraft data lists explaining what things mean, but ideally players glancing at the aircraft lists should still be able to understand what's going on hopefully without referring to the introduction section.

>>54293895
Hard Points isn't all that clear. I recommend a horizontal wing, head on, with a missile or bomb under it

Also is Range the amount of time it can stay in flight? Or the distance it can travel? The icon suggests distance traveled.

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>>54294477
Range is the distance an aircraft can travel -
in game its the number of turns the aircraft can stay on the table before having to return to base.

Pic related is the example of hardpoints featured previously in the rules. The idea that they can be used for missiles or bomb racks is the main premise behind the icon - "missile / bomb" as its one or the other.
I will experiment with a wing / missile though, could be more clear.

>>54294547
If that's how each plane looks then hard points is probably fine. Not everyone is going to be familiar with the terminology, so make sure that's stated plainly somewhere.

But, if that's how your bomb racks are going to look then your missile icon should be something more than just a crosshair.

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>>54296246
Its a pretty common image for a missile - trying to go for a pic related style of loadout image. The image I posted is the only one of its type in the rules - an example image of how to load an aircraft. There isn't going to be an individual image for each aircraft as that would take up far too much space (Although it would be pretty cool - but a lot of extra work. The way you can load out aircraft is spelled out so people will know they can either have bombs or a missile in a hardpoint, but not both. Everything you need to know about the aircraft should hopefully be covered in the data list shown >>54293895

>>54258322
This failing forward meme is cancer.

>>54283104
What did you use to create this?

How do I make a spell system that isn't complete shit?

>>54297491
Pretty broad question. Depends what you consider 'shit' to be in magic systems.

>>54294547
Didn't realize the crosshair icon was used elsewhere. To my unfamiliar eye it looked like 'crosshair slash 3 circles clumped together', but if the player reading it is introduced to those two symbols right away then that is probably enough.

>>54277157
This. But what's even easier is sleeving playing cards, and then writing what a card does on a bit of paper and slipping it into the sleeve.

>>54298261
That crosshair just looks like a crosshair, but if you rotate it 45 degrees, then it looks like a proper missile icon like in >>54296430.

The "X crosshair" is used pretty often to represent missiles, and the bomb icon is just about as good as you'll get for representing bombs, so yeah, the sooner they associate "this is a missile icon" and "this is a bomb icon" the easier it'll be.

>>54296576
>buzzwords
Remember to show your work.

>>54223786
Hey /gdg/ would you be more interested in a card game that focuses on a single dog fighter, 2v2, squadron, or a whole air campaign?

>>54296576
The only people who actually think this never run games.

>>54302533
That or they've confused falling forward with a lack of actual risk of failure.

You can have both in a game.

>>54302417
It's hard for me to imagine a dog fighter card game without models moving in a physical space, but probably squadron for the options.

>>54251215
>As a GM you will have situations where the player maneuvered themselves into a bad situation and proceed to unload their good roleplay points from a unrelated situation to suddenly be loaded with bonuses when they were crawling through a ditch moments before.

This is the point of metacurrencies that aren't mulligans for the dice fucking a player, desu. In exchange for the MC ceding narrative control to the player in exchange for metacurrency, the player is incentivized to willingly have bad things happen to their characters for that metacurrency. It's to simulate the ebb and flow of dramatic narrative.

Now, you're clearly talking FATE here, because you're describing a fuckup of the Fate Point Economy. The hacks are to allow the Fate Points one person generates go to the table, disallow banking compel Fate Points for more than a scene, disallow multiple compels a scene, or have Fate Points gained by doing story related things instead of slapstick.

>>54302588
I'm designing around various engagement zones on a playmat, as well as an advantage system dependent on if the enemy is at your tail or not.

I'll focus on designing around a squad of fighters. Thanks!

>>54302533
Degrees of success are a good idea, but usually when someone says "fail forward is cancer" they mean "the failure forward/success at cost is worse than a success or a failure".

One of the examples that sticks with me is in the Apocalypse World book, where someone gets a weak hit on a stealth run and gets spotted by a kid. They have to kill the kid or blow the stealth run. So technically they've already failed the stealth run (the kid has the MGS ! Icon over their head), so the ugly choice becomes kill a child or alert the entire compound. And that's on the most common success band.


Another issue with fail forward/success at cost is that the costs are never mechanically codified, which means the MC is making an ad hoc ruling all the time, which means the actual cost is all over the map.

>>54302901
Making sure the game doesn't grind to a screeching halt because of failure - except for death, of course - is a good thing, but I personally don't think it needs to be incorporated into the game's rules.

It seems more of a thing that separates mediocre GMs from good ones, and should be taught in any GM guide/handbook that is part of a game's core rulebooks.

Also there needs to be a distinction between 'Players messed up' and 'Dice rolls failed'. If the players were going about things the right way but the dice betrayed them, then detouring the plot to keep the game moving is warranted. If the players were going about it entirely the wrong way - and not because you suck as a GM and didn't provide enough for them to work with - then consequences should be harsher or even final.

>>54304007
I think more advanced meta about running a good game may be actively encouraged or encoded in game rules.
This particularly concept might not be you cup of tea, but I think it's a neat innovation worth existing.

>>54304007
>It seems more of a thing that separates mediocre GMs from good ones, and should be taught in any GM guide/handbook that is part of a game's core rulebooks.
The problem is that many fail forward games are a total departure from the classical "the GM writes a fantasy novel and the players squirm around that framework" philosophy. Instead it's about improv and surprising everyone at the table, GM included.

>>54302901
>One of the examples that sticks with me is in the Apocalypse World book, where someone gets a weak hit on a stealth run and gets spotted by a kid. They have to kill the kid or blow the stealth run. So technically they've already failed the stealth run (the kid has the MGS ! Icon over their head), so the ugly choice becomes kill a child or alert the entire compound. And that's on the most common success band.
AW is a game about shitty chocies made by desperate people in life-or-death situations. That's not the way I would have run the scenario, but I don't see the problem with it in context.

>>54298261
I think the wing with the single missile underneath is a great idea though - maximum clarity.

>>54300218
Definitely going to rotate all them missiles 45 degrees, maybe remove the 'X' from inside the circle and maybe make the circle a bit smaller so it looks more like a missile from front view.

>>54306781
>the problem
So when people complain it's more about their preference in the difference between collaborative storytelling and co-operative overcoming challenges?
Am I getting that right?

In context of this memery it's important to note that there are just very many kinds of tabletop games.
A lot of people disagree about what makes particular things in certain games good.

So what, generally, makes a game bad?

>>54296593
Indesign. It's not cheap, but it's damn good.

But it requires a lot of mastery and fiddling with settings to do stuff with it. Even though I don't want to gloat, I do take pride in it, as it's probably the best sheet I've made to date.

>>54225421
>>54224074
It was my first time making the oc.
I found some old /gdg/s in the archive and some had pasta but some didn't.

Has anyone tried outbreak: undead? The crafting, loot, and stronghold system look like they might be fun to steal for my game, but a lot of things in that system looked okay but turned out to be abysmal.

>>54316127
>So when people complain it's more about their preference
>Am I getting that right?
In general, yes.

>>54283104

I found that healing in general is pretty worthless in combat, but mitigation is better. So, for 5E I gave the cleric a "bubble" spell, that she can cast as a reaction, giving a player 1d6/spell level temporary hitpoints, that exist for 1 turn

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>>54256567
>>54256440
>>54242904
>>54242821

>B-but, I don't wanna say to my opponent that I love him while I'm drinking its salty tears and metaphorically fucking him in the ass like the powerhungry tourneyfaggot that I am ! It is not fun !
>N-no homo, btw

>>54316127
I don't know if its so much that as people are afraid of failure. Failure of an action/story thread/whatever shouldn't bring the game to a grinding halt, and it won't in a well designed storyline. Many GMs only create one rail or one path to connect their major plot points, so if there's a failure at any of those segues it derails everything. Some aspiring designers see that and think that they should just bake a failsafe into their game, but that's not at all necessary. It isn't a failure of the game however much it may feel like it.

So really its a story writing problem, and it should be outside the hands of the developer. Failing Forward allows you to continue on that same narrative rail when instead a failure at any part means there should be a divergence, or a fork in the road. If you don't convince the king to give you his magical scepter to save the world, that should no longer be an option. You've wasted time and you'll need to come up with another plan. If instead you fail forward through picking a lock, then your options are "you successfully pick the lock" and "you pick the lock but Something Happens". At no point do you not pick the lock because that is an impossibility in that story. That's why failing forward isn't that great. It only allows for one true outcome. Imagine combat with a failing forward philosophy. You can either hit for damage, or hit for less damage, but you can't ever miss or lose because there isn't anywhere for the story to go if that happens.

cont.

>>54318617
One other related aspect is the singular, binary win/lose that is often used in encounter building. Of course its not going to feel great when you have one singular shot at something at its determined by chance. That's why encounter failure needs multiple rolls so you can develop an average result. Its a complaint people have of many d20 systems, but its really an encounter design issue rather than a game design one. Again, look at combat. Combat is resolved after multiple rolls that will eventually favor the participants with the better stats. Critical hits will happen here and there, but you aren't at the mercy of a singular "resolve combat" roll. Other encounters need to approach similar amounts of rolling to get appropriate results, and no amount of bell curve is going to save you. Encounters are "lost" after multiple and majority failures and "won" after multiple and majority successes. If not, its either part of an encounter or not an encounter at all.

Again, this is an encounter design problem of the GM, not so much of the game. You could always design these shortcomings into your system, but I haven't really seen that from anyone.

>>54316148
Games, and more specifically their rules, only have a few jobs. One of them is clarity in expressing necessary information like Rules. If a game doesn't do that well, I'd say its a bad game.

>>54318617
doesn't failing forward mean "no, but" as much as "yes, but"?

>>54318713
>encounter failure needs multiple rolls so you can develop an average result
>no amount of bell curve is going to save you
So do you care about "statistically nice" rolls or not?
Or is it about being engaged longer (here at least multiple rolls) with a challenge?

Sidenote: I've played boardgames in which a single/double "resolve combat" roll felt just fine, might not be a good idea for all (especially otherwise crunchy) systems, but it can work.

Also, how much work to offload on the GM or the players is in fact a system feature.
When things don't go well this doesn't have to necessarily be a failure of purely either the GM or the system.

>>54318617
>>54318713
Ideally you could break down every important event into a full 'encounter' of rolls, but that's a) a lot of extra work for the DM, and b) not really fun to play most of the time. Take the example of getting past the locked door, which has several possible outcomes (not an exhaustive list):

- the party AFKs while waiting on the rogue to make a dozen rolls (a 'full encounter') to solo the door
- the rogue makes a single roll, fails, the party resorts to brute force and gets detected
- the rogue fails and the party looks for an alternate entrance, resulting in a whole lot of extra rolls to remain undetected and statistically they're going to fail unless the entire party was optimized for stealth
- the rogue fails and the party attempts to improvise a solution, resulting in lots of rolling at penalty or without bonuses and low odds of success

Fail forward is meant to be a mechanic to speed through obstacles that don't deserve that much attention. Maybe the door isn't the important plot element, maybe it's whether or not you were noticed, so have a a guard show up, everyone bags him without contest, and you use the key on him to keep going. Saves time without detracting from the story.

An ideal game would have every possible result and reaction mapped out but no DM can foresee every player action and sometimes you back yourself into a corner with how a scenario is laid out. Instead of forcing the DM to announce a retcon, here's a guideline to buy into success even if it's costly. Some DM's do lean on it too much, but that's better than a full table of people getting frustrated with bad rolls.

>>54318906
What I meant by bell curves was that going to a 3d6 over 1d20 doesn't change the need for multiple results. It's common for people to complain about the swinginess of the d20 and think they'll fix it by getting a bell curve. That's still not sufficient to hinge the entire encounters results on, so you break it up into multiple rolls to get proper results. It ties back into my spiel about failing forward. In order to truly support failure in an encounter, you need multiple small failures to support the narrative changing. If you fail once, you'll want to try again. But if you fail 10 times, it's much easier to see that maybe you're outclassed by the situation and a more appropriate route is needed.

>>54319146
Your examples, we'd probably both agree, are bad encounter design, but the door isn't the encounter. Rather, the door is a puzzle, and good puzzle design is having multiple solutions. Picking the lock, finding the key, bashing the door down, bribing the guard (with or without disguise) are all good options for getting through the door.

But what if you cannot get through the door? That's moreso the crux of my argument. You cannot grind the story to a halt because of that door. Failing forward ensures you get through that door, but better design allows the game to continue without passing through that checkpoint. Just like the door needing multiple solutions, the story needs multiple paths.

If you notice, neither encounter building nor story crafting are part of the game rules. They're entirely created by the GM, which means you can port those skills to systems beyond the theoretical one you're playing at the moment. Now, of course, you can always intrinsically support failing forward in your system just like you can choose whether to support grid+minis or theatre combat. But, failing forward is a single rail concept. It sacrifices true failure and the stories that could be created for the sake of the predestined narrative.

>>54226830
Having 3+ dice causes the roll to roughly mimic a bell curve, making the middle/average result more likely.

>>54227774
Dice pool vs dice pool honestly sounds FAR less clunky. Maybe even have things like cover give automatic "hits" for the defender?

>>54227801
I've used 4dF with 0 being the in-between "yeah, but" range, and it worked fairly well.
But it was still very derivative of pbta, so it's probably not the system you're looking for.

>>54320580
Where d20 is swingy, 3d6 is normal.
The math is pretty clear on this.
>not sufficient
>proper results
Could you be more explicit?

It sounds like the experience of spending multiple rolls on an encounter matters most to you here.

>>54321788
Not that poster, but this sounds hella neat.

>>54321060
(different anon here)
What is your definition of an encounter then?
It is not clear to me what the encounter would be in this example, since you say getting past the door is instead a puzzle.

Also, again, "failing forward" includes possibly being forced into an alternate path (with complications), not just succeeding anyways (with complications).

>>54236971
Rolling doubles,
counting triples as doubles,
on a 4d6,
dropping the lowest roll,
has a probability of 696 / 1296 assuming I didn't fuck up my code

>>54270692
I usually use markers and
> amazon . com/Blank-Playing-Cards/dp/1572814993

>>54321981
>>54322581
Getting through the door is a portion of an encounter, just like an attack is part of a combat. Combat is an encounter. In that example, the whole stealth portion of getting the macguffin is the encounter. Whether you roll 1d20 or 3d6 to get your results is irrelevant. You'll still need multiple successes or multiple failures to determine the full outcome of the encounter.

DND 4e, for all the flak it gets, did this very well with its skill challenges. Multiple challenges will make any die/die system less swingy over the course of the encounter. If major events are hinging on singular rolls, obviously you'll be having problems with game feel/perception.

>>54227801
Mutants and Masterminds has scaled effects for saving throws. Fail by 1-5, minor shit happens, fail by 6-10 shit happens, fail by 11-15 major shit happens, fail by 16+ you lose. It's not trinary, but you could probably adapt it.

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>>54318617
>designed storyline
>story writing
We're not talking about these kinds of games though. We're discussing games that are expressly about NOT pre-planning some kind of narrative or storyline. In that context this:

>Failing Forward allows you to continue on that same narrative rail when instead a failure at any part means there should be a divergence, or a fork in the road.

Is nonsense, but this:

If instead you fail forward through picking a lock, then your options are "you successfully pick the lock" and "you pick the lock but Something Happens".
>Imagine combat with a failing forward philosophy. You can either hit for damage, or hit for less damage, but you can't ever miss or lose because there isn't anywhere for the story to go if that happens.

Reveals you don't even understand the idea behind "fail forward" regardless, so why did you make this shitpost?

>>54323943
I think I see where the confusion came from now.
It was never about variance, it's about simulation resolution.
(resolution as in timstep/pixels, not the other definition)

For high lethality, or depending on where you want to put the detail/focus, single rolls may suffice in certain cases, and may actually be more appropriate.

But I'll agree that this obviously plays a big factor in the feel of a system.

>>54321788
The system was designed around smaller things grouping up against bigger targets, so attacking is always a pure dice pool, but defense is a mixture of defense dice and automatic successes through armor. It also used exploding dice, so it wasn't impossible for no win situations to arise.

The biggest problems I was having was how to take the power of attacks into account and combating dice pool bloat. I was working with a D12, since I like the spread, but the system was looking at rolls of up to 5 or 6 dice, which starts to get awkward on anything not a D6. And how I was doing the power added to that problem, since the attack pool was based off of it.

>>54267380
I could see the cognitive load of having to remember how long your marks have been around for becoming quite considerable. To a certain extent, it depends on the timeframe of the game, but I expect skill checks and therefore marks will be quite common.
This is especially true if you can have multiple marks with different starting times in the same skill, which is how I woyld interpret the rules as written. This should probably be specified.
I see a lot of potential in this system, but it needs refinement.

>>54270692
Index cards are a fucking godsend. 100 for $5.

>>54325124
You could do power-of-attack as a bonus that only applies if the attack lands (i.e. weapon damage in Chronicles of Darkness)
D12's are nice (dat divisibility) but I would try to stick to d6's unless you have some specific reason not to (e.g. hit location die)
Just my 2 cents

>>54325767
That's a really good observation, anon; i'll be sure to keep it in account. Marks go away once you level the skill, but I didn't clarify. Do you have any suggestions?

Idea: starting from a character sheet of a very powerful character and adding mechanics from there? Do about 5 archtypes and you got yourself a system.

Make a "level 20 fighter, wizard, cleric, thief, ranger/ street samurai, mage, adept, shaman, decker, rigger" and fully equip them and think up their abilites and shit. From there, make mechanics that make that gear/abilities possible.

Personal opinion: balance isn't that much important in homebrew pnprpgs because the pool of players that play it is very small and usually not metagame-y enough (most people can't do charops but read up on guides how to) to warrant a higher level of balance barring horrible shit mistakes you might make.

>>54326108
I'm not familiar with how Chronicles of Darkness does their system.

I'm not completely married to D12's but I do want to avoid D6's. I've found that they are to granular for my liking. I may switch to D10's, or put a cap on how many dice per pool.

>>54326764
I don't do exactly the same thing, but I do look at the most powerful characters can become when I do balance. I'm sure you could make your features based on max ability and then figure out a way for characters to grow into it.

How would you feel about a game where you roll 1d100 to determine your class, but it's just a label that you give meaning in the world (instead of a collection of features/powers)?

Say you roll "Abyss Wanderer" - what does that mean in your world? What powers does an Abyss Wanderer have? How do others perceive/treat them?

>>54329824
I would be amused for about five minutes after I finished reading the book and being perplexed for half an hour trying to figure out just what this random char-gen variable actually did.

I recently had a breakthrough retooling my attributes after a... game direction change? (Basically I changed the focus of the game and had to decide what to cut and what to keep)

Here are my current attributes and their purpose so far. The names are still holdovers, so they won't be particularly accurate.
>Power = Number of actions and Weapon complexity
Weapon complexity determines things like damage in my "build your own weapon" system
>Defense = Actions known and Armor.
Actions are things like attacking, moving, casting a spell, tripping, blocking, etc. So Defense determines how many you can learn, and Power determines how many you can perform during a turn
>Accuracy = Crit chance and Extra damage
>Evasion = Miss chance and ?
Accuracy and Evasion work in tandem. They're contested rolls that, depending on who wins and by how much, can either result in a crit (150-200%), hit (100%), glancing hit (50%), or miss (0%). I moved the extra, stat-based damage away from power and magic to accuracy for math and balance related reasons, but I'm not sure what secondary effect Evasion should get. Damage Reduction is handled by armor(Defense)
>Magic = Total MP and ?
You can use all of your MP per round to cast spells, so essentially it determines the complexity of the spell (I have spell creation rules too). Now that I've taken extra damage away from the stat, I don't know what secondary effect it could have
>MDef = spells known and ?
Similar to Defense, Magic Defense determines how many spells you can have in your "spellbook". Because there's a lot of freedom in creating weapons, spells, action combos, and probably armor, being limited in what you can bring at any given moment is how you create your niche. Some ideas for the secondary effect include Healing, Magical DR, and even HP.
>Speed = movement and ?
Speed is important both in getting to places and getting out of lingering area effects. Speed's secondary could affect Attacks of Opportunity or initiative.

Is there are an example of low initiative characters choose first goes last done right?

>>54326537
>Do you have any suggestions?
Write to me like I'm an idiot. Playtest more.
Run a blind playtest if you can; give them the rulebook and just see what happens. No talking.
More specifically, I would have unused marks go away every time you could use them but don't, and also specify that you can only have one mark in a skill at a time.

>>54329824
How much creative storytelling would the rest of the game have?

>>54331546
I like the power and accuracy systems, particularly in how they make you chose between actions per turn and versatility, but it is unthematic. There is no easy to point to real-world equivalent to power like there is to Strength or Intelligence.
I also like the idea of a build-your-own weapon system. To me this implies a Kaladesh kind of world with bizzare inventions of all kinds running around everywhere.

One immediate possible balance issue that appears to me is that there isn't a whole lot of reason to not put all of your points in to power if you're just going for combat efficiency. Multiple attacks with a stronger weapon is quadratic growth, whereas the others grow fairly linearly.

>>54332455
Depends on what you mean. It's a JRPG themed game intended for short campaigns, with a single resolution mechanic and less than 20 pages of rules.

Characters have four very broad stats and everything else about them is free text tags like FATE, including items. The difference is, everyone at the table has a pretty good idea of what "Goal: Save my village" or "Trouble: Flashbacks to the war" or whatever else means, but they have to establish some meaning behind "Job: Abyss Walker" or "Job: Alienist".

>>54334732
Seems to fit with the rest of the game then.
As I currently understand it:
>you randomly (1d100) generate a class name, e.g. "Job: Abyss Wanderer"
>this class has no mechanical implications per se
>you have to interpret what it means and build/roleplay your character around it
>the other players and GM have to rolepay around it too
Is this correct?
If so, it seems like a fun idea, though I'm not clear on who decides how much about your character and the world.

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>>54335605
Yeah, basically just roll on this thing.

>I'm not clear on who decides how much about your character and the world
The group creates the world together before rolling for any classes, so there is already a pre-established "way of things" for them to fit into.

I realize it may not be a popular answer here but I think just trusting the group to trust each other is a fine way to handle this sort of thing. I'm tired of games that try to mechanize everything imaginable as some kind of bad GM failsafe that the player can exploit dumb loopholes in words or combinations. That kind of 3.PF philosophy disgusts me.

>>54331855
oWoD Storyteller does it, and I was certain there were some more but I can't find where they'd be listed.
I like the idea of declarations starting at slowest and resolving at fastest as it handles reactions well, allowing combat to be slightly more tactical.

>>54329824
I'd ignore it. Between random rolling and purpose building a character it seems like the worst of both worlds.

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>>54332683
I ran out of space and then fell asleep, so I left off some notable parts.

I barely mentioned that along with the redesign, I'll need to give those attributes more thematic names as the current ones aren't entirely correct anymore, and they were placeholders even when they were more accurate. Defense, for example, is most likely going to be called something relating to Tactics to reflect your physical action variety and armor. I do want to avoid common names like Strength or Intelligence as the original design was that Power, for example, was the original "do more damage" stat for physical attacks. Whether you used Strength or Dexterity for your attacks is irrelevant. Or Dexterity improving both agility and fine-motor skills. I wanted names to more closely reflect what they control in combat rather than have general stats that control multiple derivative aspects of the game.

Its also important to know that each stat has a cap like dnd 5e. 20 is the max that you can have in any stat, which is attainable by about mid-level. Depending on how you allocate your stats, you can have anywhere from 2-3 stats maxed. Pic related is my starting stat arrays and stat growth table. All your attributes grow according to your level and table. At each level, you can add one free point to any stat (20 points at level 20). The system is designed to guarantee characters are fairly balanced whether or not they want to min-max or generalize. So many of the stats have synergy with each other, so nigh every stat will be useful to any character. And same with the stats, the archetype names in pic related are no longer accurate thematically, so those will change. They're just placeholders for convenience.

In case you were wondering, right now both attacks and spells are balanced around dealing 10d6 or equivalent (5d12, 15d4)per turn

>>54336267
Honestly sounds like it could pair well with my own system >>54331546>>54338736.
Roll on the table, then try to mechanically create it with my rules.

I think a lot of people don't want to bother much with things that don't have mechanical meaning. Like, imagine swapping Class with Eye Color.
>DM: Roll on this table to determine your Eye Color. Its a defining feature of every character
>Player: I got blue. What does that mean?
>DM: You'll have to figure out on your own what it means to have blue eyes.
>Player: I think I want gray eyes instead.
>DM: Fine, whatever. How do gray eyes change your character?
>Player: I dunno

I think you'll need at least some form of mechanical representation to help players get started on their ideas and give meaning. You could create rules for all the classes on that triangle, or you could make creation rules similar to my game. Maybe you just have 3 simple stats like Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence that correspond to how close to each of the triangle points they are. For example, #28 Raider is 5 lines away from Fighter, 6 lines away from Rogue, and 8 lines away from Mage, so your stats could be 5 Str, 4 Dex, 2 Int. Simple and easy, but gives some meaning to each option.

>>54338254
Mind explaining why?

>>54339414
I don't actually get a character that has random traits because I still have to build a character myself to the given profession title myself and I don't get the freedom of choosing my theme. Of course you can creatively move around the title but that isn't the point and would feel cheap and blemished. For example get wizard and build a muscle mage who casts fist. It feels like a mechanic that replaces the GM telling the player "you have to be x this game". It is in an unpleasant in between where I don't get the full surprise of discovering what fortuna holds for me and not being able to chose my theme. Especially when the job title can get as polarizing as Abyss Wanderer. Here I either have to accept the connotation of something related to deep sea, underground trenches or hell/demons or stretch the title unpleasantly.
And if you get something you are unenthusiastic about it adds insult to injury by having you work out yourself to what you confine yourself.

>>54339641
If they each came with a short description and one unique skill, would that be more satisfying?

>>54339793
No, the problem is that it feels meddling.
The description would be very confining for little gain (Now you set in stone what Abyss walker has to be) or you try to be ambiguous and have it be obsolete while like defining random small things by accident. A description is a very final feeling building block, like it is the writeup.
A skill likewise runs counter to this make up your own interpretation creative stage you want. And it doesn't salvage much of anything as you add another bullet point you have to connect to.

It kind of feels like building a character for another person to me. Now another criteria is that he wants to be able to do [x].

Generally when I'm random rolling I want to have a sense of the character unfolding before me piece by piece.
When I'm free building I want to work out my own thing.
This feels a bit like an assignment and I'd be much less willing to take it from a gamebook than from a person.

You can maybe rewrite the rules to make it more like one aspect of the character being rolled, like you only roll background traits, but that would feel very unsupported and arbitrary when no other aspects of a character are rolled.

>>54340203
The thing is you define something with a roll that has a large impact in theme an feel, more than a factoid of the character who's thematic implications feel more open.
It feels like you have to fill out something rather than expanding on something.

Something like abyss can feel like the following:
You can be any class, but your character has to be edgy. Maybe he can be not actually edgy but he has to dress in all black and wear skulls and drink blood.

>>54340320
That all being said I'm not a narrative game type, if that is what you want to do, since I don't like how narrative games impose rules on the stories I want to tell.

>>54340378
>I don't like how narrative games impose rules on the stories I want to tell
Got any examples of games that do this?

>>54339793
It could work if each player controls a squad of 3-4 characters. If each squad mate has 1 skill, and 3 small stats like >>54339280 mentioned, their combined effect could be alright. Like the other Anon alluded to, the random rolling and purpose driven character building doesn't feel good with a single, emotion invested character. If you have multiple characters quickly going through a meat grinder, then a bad roll will hurt less and you won't have to invest much into the character, letting things stay free.

>>54340788
Metacurrency mostly.
But also baked in plots/arcs like the Grief, Greed and Hatred stats from Burning Wheel (which I know is not the usual rules light).
The predetermined death when the tower falls in Dread.

>>54340378
>>54340930
It was really more of a side note.

You shouldn't cater to people who are not in your target group. And in a vacuum that method of character rolling seemed closer to modern rules light trends. A character generation with a creative exercise character might work well for people who want freedom from heavy hard rules more than freedom from narrative interference.

>>54341075
>freedom from heavy hard rules more than freedom from narrative interference
This is not a real dichotomy.

>>54288146
Look at D&D 4E Leader classes. Each of those is a healer that has it's own gimmick. In 4e healers are needed as a design choice, you could bend that a bit by granting everyone some sort of generic self healing but making your healers be the most effective way of healing. To use 4e as an example again; during downtime (4e calls this short or long rests) everyone can use a healing surge (a limited resource that replenishes each day) to heal 1d8 hp, or you can get your cleric friend to help heal your wounds and just heal the max amount. The cleric also has other defensive and offensive tools that help him not become a Wand of Cure Light Wounds.

>>54344142
>Look at D&D 4E Leader classes. Each of those is a healer that has it's own gimmick. In 4e healers are needed as a design choice, you could bend that a bit by granting everyone some sort of generic self healing but making your healers be the most effective way of healing.
4e was designed to be playable without any healers, that's the whole point of Second Wind and spending surges during rests. You just need to reliably burst down enemies and preferably stay standing long enough to use your Second Wind.

Leaders usually had bonus HP on their powers, but they were more important as being another way to spend surges during combat and a way to heal with only Minor actions so you can keep attacking with your Standard. Action economy, healing now is worth more than healing later if you are going to lose actions due to being unconscious.

>To use 4e as an example again; during downtime (4e calls this short or long rests) everyone can use a healing surge (a limited resource that replenishes each day) to heal 1d8 hp, or you can get your cleric friend to help heal your wounds and just heal the max amount. The cleric also has other defensive and offensive tools that help him not become a Wand of Cure Light Wounds.
4e doesn't roll dice for healing surges, you get the flat value every time so four surges should top you off every time barring rounding error when healing from near zero. The extra 1d6 on the Cleric's Healing Word might be tempting enough that you spend extra short rests but it's usually negligible.

5e has the rolling for healing during rests using hit dice, and it's pretty much garbage since on average you're healing less than your full HP value. In 4e you should have enough surges to heal around two to three times your max HP depending on your class.

Hmm, I one dude read my game in entirety, and his comments gave me an idea:

Currently, I have 3 separate mechanics for different things: injury rolls, pushing and twists.

Injury rolls are a really vague thing, I kind of dislike them, but they felt necessary. You basically roll against your toughness stat whether you get a lasting injury of some sort whenever that is possible.

Pushing is like infinite fate points, it just accumulates damage that is really difficult to get rid of. It doesn't quarantee that you succeed, but it adds a lot of extra fiddling to the system (you need a different color of dice entirely for it).

And then there's Twists. Twists work like character progression, where new aspects of characters are revealed / gained during play. Every time you use it, you can shift your stats or add new benefits, but you must also do an equal and opposite effect; shift stats opposite ways or add new detriments.

What I got a revelation about is that I can combine all these three mechanics into one, and basically turn pushing into Twists, and depending on context, Twist can be positive, neutral or negative.

>Neutral twists either allow an automatic success or a rerolling a contested roll. You always gain a temporary problem from it, and if you make that problem permanent, you gain an experience point. The idea is that the neutral twists should be story opportunities, to kind of allow the players to fail forward, but without making it too linear.

>Positive twists require you to use experience points. This just straight-up gives you something good. Basically powering up. Automatic success or complete reroll without disadvantages (and possibly with a new benefit that didn't exist before).

>Negative twists happen when you roll under your Despair. A negative twist will give you a temporary problem, and if you either rolled a crit fail or will it yourself, the problem is permanent and you gain a point of experience.

How does that sound like?

>>54348471
Hard to say without knowing the rest of the system, but it reminds me a lot of Aspects from FATE which you can invoke for effect, tag for bonus, or compel to force.

>>54348590
There are some similarities, I like how Fate handles aspects, but my game has kind of divided aspects into the numeral (Weakness) and the descriptive (Problems/Saving Graces) parts. Both are important.

Twists, on the other hand, are basically just a glorified experience system. Kind of like in PbtA, but here the player also needs to contribute to the experience. You don't "just" fail, you also lose something in process.

Like, it helps if you remove most of the ideas you have about how a game should work, and imagine it is theatre with dice. And no, this is not some pretentious "my game is aboot da narrativ" kind of thing, but more like a shorthand explanation.

I want every aspect of a character to be a relevant one. A character doesn't become a drug addict in the middle of a play without reason unless it is either the payoff of something or foreshadowing / buildup for something else. That's why I think this new system for twists would work better. It has this kind of feel for natural progression that a movie or a play would have.

Failure -> Setback -> Wait -> Triumph -> Payoff

>>54349316
This sounds nuanced enough that it's impossible to really judge without seeing the rules in full.

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>>54349533
I can understand that.

Well, here's the thing if you want to take a look. The rules are in a weird order, but you can just check back to the table of contents or bookmarks if something seems weird.

The reviewer said that I explain some things in a bad order, giving the wrong impressions of how things work until the other part is read.

>>54349593
That's the old version, mind you. I'm still updating it to fit the more complex twist system.

>>54349593
>>54349601
You're in the middle of reworking a lot of it so I don't want to really critique the mechanics, but I do agree with your other reviewer that you could use some more editing and formatting improvements. Examples of how mechanics are used next to the description of the mechanic, a picture of the stress track when you get to the stress explanations, a flowchart for the entire stress/danger/injury section because it's got a lot of steps, etc.

Overall though it does feel a lot like FATE with skills renamed to weaknesses and a much more random stress system (if I'm understanding the number of steps involved). My main concern would be that players are in the odd position of building a character's flaws rather than their strengths, so players in the spirit of things deliberately fuck up all the time very easily while players playing to their strengths aren't going to see as much happen.

For example, a highly specialized character might stack their weakness and then look for any reason to roll it or any reason not to roll it depending on how well they align the embarrassment meta-theme. I might make a max Dullness character that auto-fails Dullness checks, but there's the question of whether I try to make Dullness checks or avoid it knowing I'm not very bright (which could be entirely in-character behavior).

>>54350130
Hmm...

>Overall though it does feel a lot like FATE with skills renamed to weaknesses and a much more random stress system (if I'm understanding the number of steps involved).

I only know about FATE's systems through hearsay, I haven't actually read the rules almost at all myself. Stress isn't really all that random in my game, it happens when an opponent attacks you and you fail to defend yourself. Again, providing proof that some more clarification on it is required.

>My main concern would be that players are in the odd position of building a character's flaws rather than their strengths, so players in the spirit of things deliberately fuck up all the time very easily while players playing to their strengths aren't going to see as much happen.

I admit, the game incentivizes failing quite a lot, but it also tries to limit it by dropping those Dangers on you, and Grave danger killing off your character if you take it too far. Hell, as little as 2 points of despair can kill your character if you seriously fuck yourself up and don't try to resolve the things in a sensible manner.

There's the two kinds of incentives going on: The incentive of getting development points from reaching milestones, and then development points gained from fucking yourself up. The difference here is that the points you get from fucking yourself up are worth less due to giving more problems or shifting your weaknesses upward.

>Last bit

If the character has a problem, say: "I'm always right", it changes the things and begets a roll. In actual play, powergaming is actually quite hard due to the system, while giving incentives to succeed, it also punishes for failing. Hell, the other reviewer said that in the older version, the punishment for failure seemed TOO harsh.

The whole game revolves around the idea of failure. That's one of the important things I need to preface in the document. You don't roll to see whether you succeed, you roll to see whether you fail.

>>54350535
Obstacles have little meaning without personal stakes.

When there's personal stakes, characters push harder than ever to succeed.

When characters push harder, they gain more despair.

When they gain more despair, they're more and more likely to die.

If they don't die and succeed, they become stronger, if they don't die OR succeed, they get a massive setback and their failure makes them grow even stronger.

That's the jist of my entire system.

Whatever it is, it is to push the CHARACTERS forward.

How do you feel about a system where the average addative value is roughly equal to the average die result?

IE: 2d6+6 is the average roll for average circumastance and stats.

It feel awkward to me for some reason but I cant think of a logical reason why.

>>54350983
If it's always going to be there you might as well bake it into the target number math and save the players a step.

>>54351145
Just lower everything in the game by 6 so the average stat is 0? Yeah that was one of my first thoughts, but the addatove number is derived from a characters base attributes so centering on 0 means either

The average human has 0 strength, which feels wierd, and people weaker than thay have negative values which just looks depressing. This logic is entirely founded on appearance and feel, but I think its valid.

Alternatively, I could go the dnd route of "your strength is 10 which means your modifier is 0" which looks better but adds another step and just feels like coping dnds style.

How much player/GM advice is too much? My game is kind of like AW insofar as it relies on the group having a certain set of behavioral expectations that deviate from the 3.PF norm, but I wonder if I'm overthinking it.

I really don't like 3.PF's laissez faire attitude on this because I've seen it create a lot of awful, game-destroying behavior.

>>54351670
There's nothing wrong with basing the average on 0. Particularly if you make it clear, it makes it easy to understand that a weaker than average character will have a negative modifier, while a stronger than average character had a positive.

It's all about presentation which is a personal choice. But, there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea and I'd actually prefer seeing that myself.

>>54353515
Your rules should reflect your intended playstyle, so you shouldn't need to add much in the way of additional encouragement.

>>54354301
Do you have any examples of this?

>>54353515
In a way >>54354301 is right, the RULES should be the GMing section in on itself. The GMing section should not include stuff that is there to create a certain mood, that should be in the rules themselves.

And if the players are not supposed to know those rules, they're just GM rules. Guidelines are kind of difficult in on themselves, because they can be interpreted. Rules, on the other hand, have a penchant of being exact but flexible.

The rules are the foundation, the mood is the combination of the rules and the group's understanding of them. So, if you want a game to have a certain mood, write your rules to accommodate that mood, and write them IN A WAY that the mood is accommodated.

A very good example is in my game "Misfortune", which I'm trying to make from the ground up as a character drama -type of game.

Failing a roll means you SUCCUMB TO WEAKNESS, not that you fail. Failure thus has a different meaning, like it was predetermined that this was the place you would fail. When you succeed, you OVERCOME WEAKNESS, in contrast.

This shows a certain approach to the game, where the internal aspects of the character are more important than external. You don't OVERCOME OBSTACLES, you OVERCOME YOUR WEAKNESSES.

That is the whole idea of my game, and I'm sad that I'm really bad at making that point with the rules. But I'm trying.

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Bumping with the early vietnam war US list.

Pretty much filled out just need to do most of the points values.

Altered a few of the icons for more clarity - namely the Hardpoint icon

How much overlap should stats/skills have, if any?

>>54360196
stats should affect how effective your skills are.

You could have great explosives skill, but really bad dex so end up being pretty average.

It would represent a person who has studied explosives in-depth but is clumsy as fuck.

>>54360228
I guess my phrasing was pretty unclear. I meant, how much overlap should there be between any number of stats (or skills if your system uses them); i.e. agility and speed or penmanship and transcription, etc. Similar yet different concepts - worth splitting out or rolling into one?

>>54360302
That's a design choice you will have to make. Depends how specific you want to get. A game could have no skills at all and have everything based on stat checks, or vice versa.

What's the ideal length of PDF to share with you guys? I think I might be ready to post something, even if it's small.

>>54363295
The less context given, the smaller the pdf should be

>>54226431

It doesn't seem that difficult. Just roll the to hit, then everything after is the damage, right?

>>54360302
It's really just up to you and what you determine is necessary or desirable. The more focus and granularity you give to something, the more important it is. Dnd doesn't have a problem with Dexterity meaning a bunch of different, not completely related things. Other people do, as evidenced by plenty of posts on the topic in dnd generals and /gdg/, and they designed their stats in a way that makes those differences meaningful.

My own game went through the same process. I decided I didn't want my stats to be attributes in the way that dnd has them, Strength, Intelligence, etc. I didn't want to copy how Intelligence was tied with being a good wizard, or that that same Intelligence didn't help you become a better fighter, so I went with more abstract meanings. I have things like "fighting stat" and "magic stat" which just say how good you are at performing those actions. Your high fighting stat could mean you're strong and powerful, or maybe you're agile and accurate, or maybe you're effective because you understand anatomy and psyche. Likewise, you don't have to be intelligent, wise, or charismatic to cast spells. It was the way I wanted to organize my stats and I came up with something appropriate for my needs.

>>54365171
More or less. The math is both players roll their dice and add-subtract modifiers like range, cover, and crits, subtract the defense roll total from the attacker roll, and divide the difference by the RoF. Damage is just die roll against armor on the target.

For example, let's say that after modifiers for range and cover, the attacker gets -1 and the defense get +1, using a weapon with RoF of '4' and a Power of '+1' (all stats that act as modifiers will be expressed in +/- for ease):
>Attacker rolls his dice and gets '11', '4', and '4'
>Rolling doubles gives +1, which cancels the -1, giving him a 11
>The defense rolls '6', '3', and '1'
>+1 gives the defense a 7
>11 - 7 = 4, since its 1 or more, it is a hit
>The attacker would also get one extra hit because the difference is '4' and the RoF is '4', if the attacker had rolled a '10', he wouldn't get the extra hit
>Damage is just rolling 2D12, each die gets +1 from the Power, and each die that rolls over the armor stat does a point of damage

Most of the math on average scenarios works out to rarely need the RoF for more than one an extra hit.

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>>54349593
Allright, I made a diagram for how the health system works in my game.

In all honestly, I don't think it is really even difficult, especially if you use all the easier factors.

So, I would appreciate if someone who has not read Misfortune would throw their own interpretation of what this diagram looks like to them.

>>54365181
A system I saw recently with intriguing stats was d6 Dungeons. Basically your class gives you four "stats" (more like skills in D&D) and that's what you get. You're just average at everything else. I realize that doesn't allow for "muh build" autism but that isn't a bad thing in my opinion.

Have you thought about meme-based games? I've been thinking of a game where players try to bribe the GM to give them their way by offering dank memes. Dankest meme is the winner.

Page 10 bump!