Pitch your new take on RPG systems

I'm imagining big dudes shooting big guns and rolling around from the recoil, and some little dudes sniping with little guns.

Sounds like a video game.

There was some RPG someone was telling me about where you play yourself in the town you're in as the apocalypse is happening. You choose your own stats, but you have to convince everyone at the table they're accurate.
>Yeah man, I'm totally 10 across the board

Is the idea to guess the kind of character that player would want to be, is is the personality test for the fictional character?

I'm kinda going from an opposite end it seems. I'm a fan of that vaguely sim exploration focused sandbox kinda play. My design has been inspired largely by how poorly I think a lot of systems handle this sort of play.

I've only put the playtested rules in my document so far but I have a lot of rules I think support this better. Things like having business ownership have an actual gameplay mechanic. Then the reason to adventure as a business owner is that trade routes affect pricing, so getting rid of bandits in one route or impeding trade in another route can be a way to boost your profits. Or finding rare herbs is designed around encouraging the player to travel to various locations, using reagents and scrolls as reasons to explore for mages, etc.
Another goal is that a lot of games if they have domain support, will just have domain support. My goal is to provide rules support for that transition period more firmly and have more things to do than just "gather army, take over kingdom" for high level players to have an impact on the setting.

The world is mainly made up by the GM butI'm planning on playtesting soon an idea of "creating a village" session where it's sorta inspired by micropose, the first year and over the wall. The home base concept is something that isn't stressed in importance enough in ye old sandbox and is one of the setting elements that's absolutely appropriate for players to create. The idea is that the GM has a map to give the players and introduces events periodically but it's up to the players to roleplay how the village forms and decide what characteristics it has.

The thing that's helped me the most in rules designing though is "keep it simple stupid". Only autists give a fuck if water weighs 0.6 a gallon or 0.8 or i this actually matters. That and once your mechanics get too complex, it starts getting hard to improv.

Personality test is for the character. High/low scores in each category make you better at certain things and shit at others.

>the choice. Is. Yours.

This sounds good. For me, "role playing" = taking the fiction seriously. If you have some profession or a high status you should have the mechanics provided to explore that properly.

Yeah. Anytime I run a campaign, even if the dungeon crawl and adventuring rules are solid; unless I run a high fantasy game with magic marts, the players are going to start churches, buy land, try to become nobility, try to do magic research. I've seen some rules that try to simulate that sorta thing but I want those sort o things to be more integrated into the gameplay and simpler to run. That way they're a serious part of the campaign rather than just a money sink and something you roll a bunch of dice for(12 new villagers arrived at your village! Now to work out 5 calculations to see how this affects tax income!) every couple of months.
The basic gameplay is challenge and exploration oriented so those are the things I'm trying to hit on.

How do you feel about the whole "GNS means you need to go hard on one aspect of gameplay" thing? I've never quite believed in that though I do think coherence is important. I have the whole sim and gamist thing down but I've been playing around with a sort of system that adds mechanical weight to character motivations. The idea isn't so much a roleplay reward thing as much as a way to reward the party for directing their own goals and having party goals match character goals since I tend to go hard on "The GM creates the situation and then the players decide the goals of play"

>opposite end. sim exploration focused sandbox
Maybe, maybe not. I like that too, but what I'm most interested in is exploring what the players are interested in, which is nine times out of ten the PCs. Of course a merchant character is best explored through wealth and trade mechanics, a fighter through fighting, etc. All characters benefit from social mechanics, since even if we're playing a game about aliens its still humans playing them, and humans are inherently social creatures.

>business ownership, reagents, domains
>KISS
Yeah, mechanics for things that you want to matter, otherwise minimal. If you have too many rules, and rules of varying importance, people will skim or ignore them and do their own thing.
It's a general design principle that you should use as little (words, mechanics, etc.) as possible to illustrate the concept.

Some interesting reading on RPG design:
indie-rpgs.com/articles/6/

>Session 0 worldbuilding
Yes. Doing a Microscope session to springboard off a campaign is something I've done and it was amazing.

The idea is to lighten the load of the DM and give him tools to streamline things and even be surprised himself.

Videogames have awful AI systems 100% of the time unless you're talking about Dwarf Fortress. This would lay down some rules for how an enemy behaves in different circumstances so that the DM doesn't have to do as much work.

I believe the best thing about tabletop games is the ability to do more advanced things than videogames without having to program or open up 3D Studio.

>So you're fine. Post it
certainly not.

I believe the best thing about tabletop games is utilising the creative resources of the people sitting at the table. That's where the surprise and joy is. If the GM is overworked have some of the other players help. Having players whose PCs aren't in a scene be NPC for tactics and roleplay is ace. Collab worldbuilding has already been discussed.

Computers are able to simulate so quickly they can be surprising and engaging, nothing a GM could do by hand mechanically can compare. The 'storytelling to justify mechanical results' such as that you get in DortFort's community is only enhanced by multiple storytellers. It certainly can have a place in tabletop, but the emphasis should be on the players creatively interacting rather than mechanics.

I'm this idiot. I'll post the PDF and the Character sheet.

It's not going to get much better just collecting dust without some testing, and, yes, the flavor text is worse than a Twilight book, but fuck it. It's ugly, needs art, and heavy revision in a couple of spots, but meh, might as well see what happens.

I'm debating cutting Conversational tactics; on one hand, I shouldn't have to spell out how human beings work and try to gamify it.

On the other hand, I want to help new DMs not fall into the trap of letting 'diplomacy' be the instant win condition of a game.

The PDF should have some basic monster ideas for the game, about 30~ on my last count, so it should be simple enough to run a basic enough game with friends, or something.

And the basic Character Sheet. . .

I just realized I posted a slightly older version of the character sheet; simply replace the words 'Happiness' with 'Health,' and everything should align.

Sure, I agree in theory, except that the "creative resources of people sitting around the table" usually turns out to be...

1. Wasting people's time who probably don't have much to spare if you're working adults. 5 people sitting around a table for two hours is 10 very precious man-hours. I'd say 50% of spitballing ideas is wasted at least, and higher if you have a group of people who aren't already neck deep in these types of social settings or creative exercises.

2. Awkward and likely to backfire unless you have that rare group chemistry everyone dreams of. There is such a thing as bad creativity, especially when one person has fun at the expense of 3 others because they're the loudest.

3. Picking the lowest hanging fruit. It's a proven fact that the IQ of everybody in a group setting trends to go down dramatically compared to when they're working solo. Groupthink is trash most of the time. People go for the most obvious, familiar, and harmless ideas for a variety of reasons.

Having a system suggest ideas fixes these problems, while still allowing the DM to pick and choose, tailor, and contradict.

The time consuming and dull parts of these tools (especially map generation) would be done beforehand by the DM, not during play. It creates a foundation for him to work on, or a half-finished painting for him to complete.

I'd love some sort of flow chart-esqe AI for enemies, could be used to differentiate the enemies aside from stats and remove that niggling feeling that the DM is fucking you over.

These are big priorities for me. I hate that behavior - which should be the heart of interaction - is usually either so simplified and predictable that it feels lifeless, or the complete burden of a DM.

Creating interesting behavior for dozens of different creatures only to have them killed by a spell the next round makes me pity good DM's. I want to give them a helping hand.

I'm on my phone or I'd download and read it now. Hopefully somebody can give you feedback and maybe even test it.

Obviously depends on the players, and some sorts of games aren't for everyone. You can mitigate 2 and 3 with good rules, 1 is a problem for any game no matter what. "Get better players" is snide, but its the right answer. If you're invested enough in the hobby to be talking about it on the internet in your free time and making your own rulesets you can probably work towards forging that perfect group.

>2, 3
Just because you want to engage players' creativity doesn't mean you're doing everything by committee. The use of metagame currency gives a natural ebb and flow to control, what you say goes only if you outbid the other guy, and if you've been bidding hard so far you've got nothing left. Or by passing control around in turns (Microscope and Gieger Counter do this, you can take suggestions but ultimately the choice is the current player's).

>Having a system suggest ideas fixes these problems
Only if you replace the perfect group with the perfect GM. They're different solutions, I don't think either of them are strictly better. I do think relying on human creativity and social interaction is richer and more powerful than mechanics, however. But also more fragile, as you point out.

>behavior is usually either so simplified and predictable

If you're talking about combat it can often be attributed to the fact there's usually only a small subset of 'good' moves to make. That's totally natural because that's a good reflection of reality. There's no real way to get around that in any tactical wargame, in the end the statespace is restricted and optimal moves are fairly obvious.

The best way to make combat more interesting imo is to set up goal for the combatants that aren't "kill the other guys". Setting unusual objectives leads to more interesting things occurring. Instead of a slugfest you have a race, maybe negotiation, whatever - importantly all those possible moves which are 'bad' when you just want to kill the other guy become viable and interesting for this new goal.

To answer your question about GNS, I think it's important to consider the argument that a system should only focus on one mode. The question becomes how to juggle the needs of different players of you're not going to prioritize one at the expense of the others.

I never read about GNS before like that, but it makes me appreciate the balance I've struck with my own system.

Fortune/misfortune determinism with precognitive players

You preroll your results and then get to choose when to use witch rolls for what actions.

Does need the house rule that you can't intentionally try to fail.
Otherwise they'll start using a natural one on an attempt to annoy someone who they actually want to woo.

The game Annalise has a mechanic vaguely similar to this, when a conflict arises you determine the number of consequences the conflict may have (they all have to be mutually exclusive though), for instance say you were fighting an orc, your consequences might be:
>whether or not you get wounded
>whether or not the orc escapes
>whether or not your equipment gets damaged

Then you roll a number of dice equal to the number of consequences and assign the results to each one, dice are 6 sided with higher being better.

Players should GM and GMs should play

>Patreon
Really the best thing to happen to creative people and creativity writ large in a while.

I heard somebody say they'd never want to let Veeky Forums know about their Patreon because it will end up with them doxed and terrorized. I don't get that vibe from Veeky Forums. People here all seem just thirsty for new interesting stuff

Let's say I want to do an RPG blog, maybe with a patreon attached. It would mostly be interesting ideas for setting fluff, monsters and locations, quest hook ideas, things like that. How often would you want content? Small stuff multiple times a week, something larger once a week, or larger, more in depth things every two or three weeks?

Will Veeky Forums ever be supplanted as the internet bogeyman?

All that stuff you can get for free. The RPG blogs I'm most interested in are the ones that talk about RPG design and meta stuff, like the social dynamics of players, and new ways of going about prep.