Why was the game design thread deleted? Are we getting a separate board for game design threads?

>Are you sure it was deleted and not just falling off the board through lack of use?

archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/subject/game design/

Been having the same problem. A lot of it is avoiding the full rules rewrite I need to do.

I have that problem constantly. Delays in feedback and playtesting are the worst and can easily kill any idea.

Really helps to design something not as a solo project, and find the different bits that each person can feel motivated to get on with, plus have frequent design-focused discussions, proper meetings even, helps a ton in structuring when mechanics need to be written and what they are. Nothing helps more than a deadline of getting shit done before the next meeting so you can sort out the next stage.

Open a .doc, write down generalized chapters, such as Combat, Initiative, Dying, Stats, Wounds, Movement, Actions, Enemies, Traps, Magical Items, Consumables, etc. Separate all of them to be one-per-page via Ctrl+Enter.

Group similar things together; Combat could have Actions, Initiative, Movement and Dying; Base mechanic should have what dice you're using and what are stats, conflict resolution, and so on.

You'll write it in a few days. Testing (and especially playtesting) is a bitch tho.

May have to try this.

OP may also have deleted it due to not having the regular /gdg/ copypasta of reference links (which we should move to a thing on Notehub or a static page on someone's website, so there's only one link you need) but we'll never know because both mods and OPs are faggots

What is the fastest task resolution?

Low dice size with minimal modifiers against a fixed whole number target.

Reposting from last thread

docs.google.com/document/d/1-x7vMbcJeXps8ZaeTa2ovoXK2yoB7ICqcEmNKP1dlww/edit?usp=sharing

This is my WIP Ace Combat homebrew. I've had to put it down for awhile, but I might be able to get some more progress into it soon.

Its designed to work with as little required from the players (i.e. no minis, no special map grids, low-level math) while also offering plenty for the players to customize their experience. Its built with the format of the vidya in mind (episodic missions). Combat will follow the rules (once finished) while RP is more freeform. Players control their pilots and the GM controls allies, enemies, AWACS, etc.

Things still on the docket:
Plane Stat Blocks (big one)
Plane Modifications
Finalized combat rules
Fluff text to evoke feeling
Formatting to tie everything together

Sounds like a little too much going into everything. Are skills and stats particularly small? because there's possibility for a huge range of numbers

Deep thoughts for the thread:

What purpose does healing serve in your combat system, how is it mechanically implemented, and does a party need a healer to succeed at combat?

>Why was the game design thread deleted?
Because Virtualoptim made the thread and he's permabanned. He's removed his IRL name off his Fallen Lands game, but you can still find it in the archives.

JoJo's 1d6 Adventure. Exactly what it says on the tin. A rules-lite 1d6 system that gets around the constraint of reaching a target number by changing the way the dice are interpreted, rather than add or subtract bonuses for difficulty. It's also freeform enough to allow as much versatility in Stand Creation as you like.

is there a point in creating an innovative dice system or just tweaking what is it already there?

i am struggling creating a dice mechanic but i end with dnd or savage worlds

maybe i doing it wrong, inst selecting the principal dice mechanic the first step on game design

Yeah, so what you want to do is decide what kind of genre your system uses, then find mechanics that reflect that.

well, I am quite creative but since I am going to publish my game, I am keeping details close to my chest.

>Delays in feedback and playtesting are the worst
No, not getting NO feedback from your friends is the worst and can sour even long-standing friendships.

But I did get the game done anyway, if anything it has motivated me even more.

So why is it that using dice is a big no-no in blad games, but is somehow acceptable in rpgs? Should we start having more eurogame resolution mechanics in rpgs too? Makes you think how we accept some things as staples in gaming without ever thinking if it's even a good idea in the first place.

*board games

Resolution mechanics that aren't dice only tend to work in games with limited scope where potential changes to the boardstate can only go in so many different ways.
The only alternate system I've seen work in RPGs is a deck of traditional playing cards where the numbers and faces mean, well, numbers and special results.

Right, so ideas and suggestions please.
I have been developing a homebrew for a while, and the thing I keep getting stuck on, is skills. So I was reading some posts the other day and people there mentioned using professions, specifically Barbarians of Lemuria. Well, I haven't looked that, but thought I would try my hand at something and over complicate it completely. This was written on the train to work this morning, so feel free to tear gaping holes in it...
This system would completely replace all skills, so no more skill lists.
The basic roll system (for this example) is that each profession has a rating (3-6) which is associated with a die; rating 3 = 1d6, rating 4 = 1d8, rating 5 = 1d10 and rating 6 = 1d12. Basic default rating is 3 or 1d6.

So, everyone picks professions. This would be done via points, so you could end up with many or few. Each profession would be chosen at a level, so truck driver 3, research scientist 4. There are three levels of profession which depend (in the real world) on the amount of training needed to be able to do that role and (in the game world) how useful that profession would be (ie, the amount of skills it would conceivable give).

Some examples
Basic professions - Shop assistant, cleaner, truck driver, factory worker, admin assistant
Trained profession - Soldier, mechanic, Air force fighter pilot, acrobat, computer tech
Speciality profession - Spy

cont...

cont...

How they would work
If the task at hand was directly relevant to the profession, then roll your profession rating. If the task at hand was indirectly relevant, or it took some blagging, then roll the die twice and take the lowest result. If you had to blag and blag for the profession to be relevant, then GMs caveat.

Questions
I was wondering how to do skills which were not a profession, but instead hobbies. So, if you had a computer hacker who liked to shoot (but not be in the army). This would be a Trained profession (computer hacker) and then hobby (shootist). Hobbies would be treated as Basic professions and be much more narrow in focus. Do you think this would work?

Thanks for any feedback and be, you don't have to be kind if you think this is rubbish!

nah, it works, of course. it's basically a mashup of savage worlds and dnd 5e. all you need to do is have normal skills and treat professions as skill packages.

Dice are simple. RPGs are already complex, so we use simple dice.
Board games are simple, so we experiment with more complex mechanics and are bored with just dice.

It works, Shadow of the Demon Lord works kinda like that, read it up; and die number getting bigger with better skill works like Knights and Knaves from that one guy a while ago.

I don't like single die systems, I like my bell curves; but it works.

Thanks guys, glad it looks like I'm on the right track, which is nice.
As for the actual die rolling mechanic, well, everything can change, this was just on the train this morning! ;-)

page 9 bump

How do you guys feel about wargaming style turns in RPGs? That is everyone acting in seperate phases of movement, casting, fighting, that kind of thing, rather than one player at a time doing all their stuff in one go.

Makes archers OP because they play first depending on system and stuff. Wargame turns are better for armies that fight, PCs are too personal to do that. Tried it out once, everyone was confused at the table too.

I dislike it personally. I use Party AVG Initiative vs. Monster AVG Initiative; wanted to roll that every round like 2e, but I always forget, so it's a simple "either the players or the monsters play first". Simple d6 lighthearted system.

>Design idea
>Theme - Zombie/Survival

>You can scavenge during the day
>low resource scavenging
>relatively safe, zombies not so dangerous
>small chance of encountering people
>very small chance of encountering dangerous raiders

>You can scavenge during the night
>better resource drop rates
>infected are much more dangerous
>very little chance of encountering people

Thoughts?

The guy uses like twelve different names, but can't figure out how to spoof an IP?

Pretty shallow and kinda expected.
Not to say it's bad or wrong, but there's very little to work with here until you make a real setting.
Where are the zombies coming from? What type of zombies/infection? How does it spread? How did it win? What age are we in? How big is the city? New York's gonna be hella different to survive in than Fucknowhere, Indiana.
Is there a coherent military/government group? Is the whole world dead or is it just your area, and the government is trying to quiet that shit up (this would be a pretty interesting deal).

Not really game design, but I don't see a worldbuilding thread up.

What do you do when it's time to go back to the drawing board? Looking back on the setting I haven't worked on in a few years, it just feels too much like an MMO, with all the countries being divided up by racial, cultural, and neatly geographic lines.

My races also ended up being just humans with a different skintone or weird feature (ears, tail, horns). Their cultures are also all the same for each race, and tend to just be a real world cultural mishmash with the serial numbers barely filed off (Urkai are [red] skinned with [horns] and based on [Persians]. Dwyrin are [short] and have [doggish] ears and a culture based on [China], etcetera)

I like the general shape of the world, but the geography as a whole needs to be fixed. I need to break up my countries into not just giant continents.

I'm never sure how to handle the fact that the setting has magical technology and magic that gives it a scifi feel, but is mostly still fantasy, albeit fantasy with machina and airships and laser rifles.

Somewhere along the way I didn't want active deities, so they became an ancient precursor race type bunch.

Not to mention that I've grown attached to what were ostensibly "placeholder" names, so talking about the setting is kind of like talking about a jRPG, with all the random mythological reference names.

I'm not a worldbuilder; I did the same thing you did but with Strogg Brasspunk race and other wonky shit. I'm afraid to look at my old setting because it's a cringy piece of shit, but I still kinda use its locations without using the rest of the setting's lore, deities or other info.

If your players are WoW gamers or something, it's a fine setting, honestly. Your crowd determines how well you should make something. If it's shit but passable, it's good. If it's amazing yet no one plays/understands it, it's shit. Know your audience.

Retouch it. Make one-sentence lines about every nation/region, and stay true to them.
Maybe make something smaller sized than a whole world with continents and multiple states that the players would likely never see or even if they did they wouldn't memorize them. Downscale it, and extract all the cool things you really like in a single continent the size of Australia, or smaller.

I'm designing my first card game and I have a question - when and why do you decide a game is finished (either in a good or in a bad way)?

Ok crits - currently critical successes for actions outside of a hardsuit are achieved on a roll of 1 on the 1d10 (roll under with 10 as the maximum value of both pilot and hardsuit stats)

Given that all rolls involving hardsuits are taken on a 1d20 (a pilot stat + a hardsuit stat) a roll of 1 would make crits being achieved on it a whole factor harder so...

Would having the Hardsuit critical success achieved on a 1 AND a 2 work out better?

Would having a critical failure of a 10 for the 1d10 pilot tests and 19 and 20 on the hardsuits 1d20 tests?

I need to stop forgetting about this boardgame I keep forgetting about.

It was inspired by Metal Gear Solid (Portable Ops, Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes, Phantom Pain) and was going to be about building and managing a base. I sort of changed the fluff to be more of a fantasy thing, focused on running a guild. I'm not really sure what I want to do with it, though, or which features work and which don't.

I kind of want to do something similar to Dead of Winter, but I'm not sure if I'd rather have players working together or working against each other. Or working together in one way but against each other in another (i.e. each player is a different guild, but they need to work together to solve the problems of the city, Ravnica style)

Honestly, it's not even for a game. It was originally to flesh out a world for a novel. I basically started worldbuilding to procrastinate but pretend I was still doing something.

why do the zombies always have to be night creatures? I understand why it is like that, but wouldn't be more interesting if zombies were active in the day (making most of the day dangerous) and you could better scavenge during the night - but facing the lack of sleep etc?

>tl;dr
why day=not dangerous and night= dangerous?

Because seeing zombies is safer than not being able to see zombies

Its assumed zombies can navigate in the dark via super senses or other senses, putting them at an advantage in the night. Also possibly being attracted to light sources needed by humans in the dark.

One way to deal with that would be to have your zombies have senses as limited and vulnerable as humans. e.g its senses are as good as whoever they used to be but once they rot (eyes are first to go) they'd have to rely on their remaining senses.

A problem would be that it'd depower them significantly given that you'd probably only have to hold up for about a week until their faculties had decayed (eyes rotting, scent cells dying off, the thin eardrum falling apart etc)

my two cents is why designing one of the thousands zombie games if it isn't different from the others

I'm not the designer, I was just pointing out what elaborated on.
>Its assumed zombies can navigate in the dark via super senses or other senses, putting them at an advantage in the night. Also possibly being attracted to light sources needed by humans in the dark.

Unfortunately, the part about "just wait a week and the zompocalypse will be over" doesn't make for a thrilling setting.

Frankly neither do zombies in general. Of the myriad of things they could be, zombies have been covered in nearly every form and then done to death. Intelligent vampire zombies in I am Legend, Fast rage zombies in 28 days later, magic zombies in the Evil Dead series.

Even meme zombies in Pontypool

Question as to if zombies are needed at all. It'd be the same design idea if you replaced zombies with nocturnal werebats

I'm on final testing for my game. I've got to make a decision pretty soon to either take it to kickstarter or go and present it to a publisher.

There's a publisher close by who I have contacts with, but the game is fairly simple so having it manufactured personally wouldn't be too outlandish.

Because things get more dangerous at night applies not only to successful works of art (literature, games, etc) but also applies to real life.

When designing anything, you need to play to preconceived notions or else its not relatable. You could design a zombie game, but if your zombies are short people with hairy feet that want to throw a ring into a volcano instead of eat brains, people aren't going to understand why its a zombie game.

There are only so many ways you can change a chocolate chip cookie recipe before its not a chocolate chip cookie, or a cookie at all, and just a pile of ingredients.

I hate myself and want to design a game with Riddle of Steel-like wounds.

Why.

This is my card-generated Gauntlet for my D&D like simpled6 homebrew; any thoughts on what else I could add? Wouldn't want to make it too complex.
Draw a card per room entered, 10 rooms and you can descend down a level. I used multi-GMs here, with every GM/played describing a room. Was great.

I like it, and I think you should do something with the fact that one die is smaller, give it some unique function.
Have the d6 determine secondary effects of attacks that don't apply to every hit.
Make up a mechanic for rolling 2d6 and keeping the higher one under some conditions. It's approximately just a +1 on average, but it's tactile so it feels better to do.

Thanks i have been randomly making "systems" like this one:

FIS 3
AGI 2
Melee 1d6+Agi
Evade 1d4 +Fis
Sword 1d6+Fis
Leather Armor 1d4

Skills go from 1d4 to 1d12, you roll your melee vs opponent evade or parry, if you got an higher result you hit, roll damage, also you can roll your armor to reduce damage, rolling 1 in armor make it deteriorate

I like it

But i think it is slow to use different type of dice , so i dicided to only use d6, then to use multiple d6 and ended with something like D6 adventure lol

Eh?

>install Gentoo
I've looked at several generic systems. They don't do what I want, and I enjoy creating mechanics I never intend to play.

when you test it and players are happy, willing to play it again

docs.google.com/document/d/1pbolzNZbt8NAPIuf2MctFEmIfmnvhZ0WGBySfwE6M-U/edit?usp=sharing

is this any good? I feel that the artillery and some shotguns may be a bit dinkey, but that may be the result of it not being playtested enough.

But SoB&H isn't that good.

Working on drawing up a Tacticool + Eldritch + X-Com machination. Working on mechanics and classes, so then we can playtest. I think I have a solid grounding for combat, so far:

Strength determines output for Melee and Perception is main stat for Ranged/Firearms. Stats range from 1 to 6.
Weapons have Bonus Dice/Damage associated with them.
Attacks are made with Pools of dice, d6's (though I might consider d12's because they're easily divided)
Generate Pool: 1d6/Main Stat + Weapon's Bonus Dice
>Perception of 5 plus a Rifle that gave +3D Bonus would result in a total Pool of 8d6.
Check Target's Armor: Units can be Unarmored, Light, Medium, or Heavy Armored. (Flak vest, kevlar vest, trauma plate kit, Bulldozer armor, etc)
Target numbers for hitting targets are: 2+ for Unarmored, 3+ for Light, 4+ for Medium, 5+ for Heavy. (Heavy armor is generally rare as it cuts into movement speed considerably.
Armor also provides an "overshield" for damage. So damage is applied to Armor first. When all Armor is gone, it Breaks. You are then Unarmored, and in deep shit.
Crits (natural 6's) ignore Armor and deal damage directly to HP.

>Example
>You have 5 Perception and are armed with an Assault Rifle that grants +3D Bonus Pool.
>Your target is wearing Medium Armor and has 10 Armor Points and 10 HP.
>You roll 8d6 for the Attack, trying for 4+
>You roll 2,2,3,4,4,5,6,6
>This result scores 5 Hits, 2 of which are Crits.
>Your target loses 3 Armor Points and 2 HP.

Interesting, it does seem like it'd be easier to keep track of things with pieces, but I dont think that's what you meant with Minis. It comes across as simplistic but the speed thing is a little convoluted, at least in my mind. I do keep thinking back to the X-Wing Game, I don't personally indulge in it often but it is pretty easy to get a grasp on what's going on.

Only thing I could suggest is the somewhat wonky Missile mechanics and tracking how long it takes to get somewhere. Gothic just has you slap a Torp token on the table and move it every turn, might be a good idea to just have missile tokens moving every phase to make tracking easier.

A link to the rest of the shit I've written up thus far. It's long. I work on it every day, but it's fun and fulfilling. I'll actually organize it better later.

docs.google.com/document/d/109UfQ2bmwQWLVceX6CPbiD9fWG3I6j58YlMkwFaYhw8/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah, by minis I mean anything casted, with altitude stands, or the like. If all you have are scraps of paper and dice to represent the planes and movement, it should be able to work.

As far as Speed goes, I wanted to represent how you can turn more by going faster, but eventually you're going too fast to turn tightly. This should make a diamond shape of movement possibilities which I could make into a picture in a finalized pdf. I hope that clears your confusion.

I could also write some small rules regarding missile "tokens" so that missile tracking can be easier. Missiles will also have their own stat blocks to determine how easily they can turn.

Sounds like its simple enough, just need to make things a little clearer. Thanks again.

It needs gygax to not get deleted

R8 my stat block, races, racial abilities, and whatever other feedback you have, I'll be working on rewritting my main combat system soonish, though I'll probably just give up when I hit currency again, because damn is that a boring grind, need to figure out a simple wealth based system

the base system is meant to be universial since all combat is based and balanced on the human stat block, but fantasy will be the first main focus, hence all the fantasy races

I hate most of your choices. That's because I'm sick of D&D derivatives and typical high fantasy stuff. You also spelled "quite" wrong while describing "Sapient Dim", which I find ironic.

I feel like you're trying to make a joke with "Sapient Average" only saying that you can count to 10, while "Sapient High" is a big ridiculous calculus equation.

The rules regarding "diving" seem a bit too simplistic. Everybody can just dive and it always increases their defense?

In general, I find your style of game design to be a mixture of unoriginal, uninspiring, and poorly thought through

Can't argue with your concept, but I don't like how much math is involved, or the weird correlations with D&D style stats.

Serious healing doesn't really happen during combat in my system. To the extent that it does happen, it's a way of pacing aggression and risk-taking versus defense and strategy. You recover some stats while not engaged in combat. There's a lot more going on in the fight besides just HP going up and down in my system though, so it's not a fair comparison.

This is very mediocre advice imo. For me, the key was all about formatting, but not just grouping things together. You need to figure out the purpose of what you're trying to write in the first place. I'm actually using a unique format I've never seen before in a Handbook or manual before, and I'm proud enough of it that I'm not going to share it.

bump

>I'm actually using a unique format I've never seen before in a Handbook or manual before, and I'm proud enough of it that I'm not going to share it.
>inb4 decoration font for body text

I think you should distance yourself from D&D more. D&D has more writers doing this kinda shit writing down rules for flying or underwater basket weaving, you should be better off trimming the fat rules away. I don't like or understand the HP system, and what's your Damage/Combat system?

I don't like the "at half HP people are bloodied and might think about fleeing". Just say that they play smart and have morale, and they run at GM discretion or have a morale system.

Fatigue seems interesting, maybe have it happen when really heavy melee attacks happen, make deals with the players.

Good luck.

This all works well. Maybe not have armor be destroyed to lessen bookkeeping. Or maybe have it work once because the plate cracks.

It's my theory that D&D handbooks in particular are designed to be badly organized so that people can't easily copy pages for future reference. I decided to go the other way.

Hex or square?

>>inb4 decoration font for body text
Some decoration fonts aren't that bad. A lot of 3.5 books are written in Historical, for instance. At full size it looks ancient and weathered, but at 12px it just gives the hint of fantasy.

That reminds me, I need to get some fonts back on this computer.

When you guys read other PDF's, hanbooks, or game design manuals, what do you mostly pay attention to?

I read the starter's PDF for Burning Wheel and noticed how clever it was to have little imp characters that expressed the author's advice. Dividing the "tips" from the official rules really inspired me to format things by purpose more than logic.

Black Chancery is nice but is it overused?

I have alot of friends who don't got alot of time but still want that Dnd experience. I decided to make a homebrew variant, here's the skinny.

You play as a group of summoners that take control of a random monster from a pool. You fight as far as you can go before dying, then you get gold to spend on the RP of side (summoners in town) and experience towards your summoner. When you level, you get more monsters to summon, and you can add bonuses to all monsters you get (+25% health, +1 AC etc.)

docs.google.com/document/d/1cvAflNZA5Hyif0dqzp0teDAW0HZKArjmrDWb5p2XKXA/edit?usp=sharing

I'm having a blast coming up with monsters, and I don't have to worry too much about balancing since getting a slightly worse monster is just something you have to deal with.

Any recs for monsters or criticisms about what I got so far?

When I'm done, I'll put up an ad for some players and co-gms

I can't even read this.

>I hate most of your choices.
I'm a fan of D&D, so ya It's going to borrow from that and typical fantasy stuff, although I think my gnomes are unique

The intelligence stuff is in there as a joke ya, I might scrap the whole humanoid intelligence sections, they really aren't very useful, was going to make it a requirement for things like engineering or maybe alchemy, but getting rid of it is probably worth it and just having one general thing for all humanoids/self aware creatures

Diving requires you to be standing, makes you go prone, costs 2 actions, and gives you a higher defense bonus than some other bonus defense actions, I probably need to rewrite it

>I think you should distance yourself from D&D more
I've trimmed a ton since version 1, the idea is to create, then simplify until it feels right

what's confusing about HP? 50% in "Injured" -25% is dead dead.

the injury thing is more of a suggestion rather than a rule
there's the current combat engine

Basically there's D100 for attacks against a defense rating of 50, so 50% base chance to hit. And there's base damage, which is 10 for a medium creature, with weapons dealing a multiple of it, so a long sword is say 1.5x for 15 on a hit.

The main focus is on combat

Also doing the injured thing lets me set the humanoid abilities as they are

basically one MISC ability, and usually one ability that happens when a creature is injured or dying

Action System's a bit convoluted. 4AP.
1. True Action (costs 3AP or 2AP)
2. Move Action (costs 2AP or 1AP)
3. Reaction (costs 2 AP);
Maybe just quick-it down to "if you don't move you have a reaction/interruption, or if you spend your True Action readying a reaction but move"-deal. I'd personally have trouble remembering how many actions I'd play with, and if I was GMing, that would fuck most monsters up.
So, basically, it's "Either Move+Shoot, Shoot+React or Move+React".
That's how I understood it, might be mistaken.

Most of the time, there aren't guaranteed results/rolls in combat, no "taking 10"/30, but it's okay to have and I personally use it when there's hopeless mooks involved that the players grossly outclass, but not for serious fights.

10 hits to drop someone is an amazing amount of time, in your combat example; assuming that the enemy is unarmored, that's 5 hits to die. That's 50 seconds of successful strikes. You might want to cut back on HP bloat. My shitty d6 usually has 1-4 hits to die on most things.

Base damage being static puts me off.
Your Twohand/Onehand bit isn't well written, and dual-wielding penalties are pretty nasty. Like fuck, why would anyone even attempt dual-wielding in your system; maybe that's what you want and it's okay then, but I like my shitty D&D fantasy with some wuxia going around.

Parry or Dodge are ok, Dark Souls like. You could also add Reckless Counter where both you (the defender) and your attacker's attacks go through, but either of you has no defense. Think of it as a duel between two pistols, they both shoot at the same time and they don't dodge. A pretty desperate move that could catch people off-guard.

I strongly recommend reading 1e, 2e and OSR clones; they will be extremely easier to build your homebrew upon, copy some of their mechanics and add your own spin to those.

I'm working on a card based game, where the players all help take control of a singular protagonist. This is my first draft. The only commentary I've gotten so far, other than some grammar fixes, is that I need to try and focus on a single genre, or theme to build around. If I can get some ideas put out there, I would really appreciate it. Also, just a general review of the ideas and mechanics as they are right now would be great, too.

docs.google.com/document/d/1GmVDIyho4f87F1LVyU5aS0UpvILvYez_WGjBJbqcokY/edit?usp=sharing

Hex.

Triangle.

Bump

A couple weeks ago I posted about making a Final Fantasy/Fire Emblem/older JRPG-inspired game. One suggestion was a wider variety of jobs after I posted the initial roster.

Here's what I've come up with since, but I'm really struggling to come up with more jobs for White Mage and Black Mage.

Any ideas?

I should also note how jobs work in this game. Jobs have a command (a set of five special abilities), skills (broad packages of "I'm good at/know about this"), and five traits (passive bonuses). Every level you buy into a job adds one ability to its command set and unlock one trait.

At character creation, each character selects their major job; only one character in the party can have a particular major job and it can never change. Characters always have their major job's command and skill.

Once a character unlocks all five levels of their major job, they can change freely between minor jobs. Minor jobs give you skills and let you unlock traits, but you can't use their commands.

Once they master a minor job, they unlock its advanced job, which is like an additional major job.

Man, I ran tests with a group using triangle configuration boards and they never got movement down and had a lot of spatial awareness problems.

It was really fun seeing them try to keep track of things.

I'm trying to figure out how to do health of models with my new system. Current idea is you can take as much damage as your Size.

For context, the base numbers I'm looking at are attackers roll 3 D12's, rolling a success on a 5+; defenders roll 3 D12's, scoring a success on a 6+. A roll of '12' counts as two successes. You subtract the defender's successes from the attacker's to determine hits. Every 2 hits cause a point of damage. Most models will have Size 2, so that means 2 points of damage to remove them.

The idea is, the bigger they are, the harder to remove them, but since there's already an "armor" system, there'd be no reason to over-inflate the number of hitpoints a model has to represent the chunkiness of the model.

Seems like it should work, though how big do you expect things to get?

If you have something that can hit specific defense types (i.e. one penetrates armor, and one hits HP easily) then keep the two defense attributes. If not, then its probably more simple to have just the one.

Size 4 at most, armor 3 for the really heavily armored stuff, 4 for things that are like trying to smash a wall.

I forgot to mention that weapons have multipliers for the number of successes. Standard small arms is Power 1, heavy weapons are Power 2, while things like artillery are Power 3.

there are great ways to use dice in board games. Roll-to-move and certain kinds of combat resolution (Risk) are shit, but many board games manage to make interesting mechanics out of dice