/gdg/ Game Design General

Re:2d6
This is a big part of my problem. I'm starting to hate d20 more and more as time goes on. 5e having proficiency as a base modifier to a bunch of stuff is cool, but my favorite part of the game after a few years is early on, like between levels 3 and 6 where the games basic monsters are still dangerous but you're starting to get a handle on things, but due to d20 you still fail often because of how swingy things are.
Idk I'll keep working on this, thanks for the advice. I mostly though want a game that actually respects the idea of theee equal game design pillars (combat, exploration, social) versus what we got which is a not so great combat simulator (and I use the word loosely) with the other parts of that trifecta completely ignored.
It wouldn't look like 5e too much when I would be done with it, which is why I'm posting here and not in /5eg/. Idk. It's like 5e is a movie you watch but it's way too dumb and yet way too serious to take seriously, you know? I kind of am starting to resent my playgroup too which is making me want to just abandon tabletop altogether because I dislike the games available to me and dislike my group who might be willing to try something new.
You working on anything user?

Well, I am OP and , my system is, ironically, 2d6, with an Advantage-system, theoretically equal components for physical duking it out to social combat, and zero mathematics.

But regardless of that. I understand the distaste of the d20, I have kind of similar feelings about it, to be honest. I've heard people have made several conversions to 3d6, but another that might work in stead of 1d20 would be 2d10. It gives a similar curve as 2d6, centering on 11, so not bad, I reckon. It would make crits very rare, though, so you might want to make crits happen on 19s, too.

Trying to forge D&D into something that has equal parts in the trifecta would require you to create some interesting tricks to the social mechanics, but in the end, as long as you don't need to start converting each creature's stats away from the base of 20, you should be good.

Well, if you would want to make your own game, I usually encourage people to take first come up with some interesting mechanics that enforce the type of play that they want, and then review and take away any parts that don't fit the vision, more or less.

Like, I personally feel I have put strong design choices into Misfortune, making it into a surprisingly deep game for a ten-page long game (In A5, it would be 5 pages long in Letter). I have removed almost everything that is not in line with the vision of the game, that being easy to run, easy to learn, high stakes game.

>Does your system handle morality and ethics? How?
One of my projects is going to be moral and ethics based at the core (hopefully). The idea is that both the theme is going to be the grimdarkiest of grimdark. The world is terrible and wants to kill you. People are controlled by vices and tragic flaws without heroism. Every victory is pyrrhic.

Some examples include character creation putting you in debt. You'll buy attributes of your character (which are net negatives) with a meta currency that the GM uses to craft encounters. Likewise, you get penalties for helping other people.

The key to all of this, is that you'll still need to be around people, and you'll still be in the "gaming party" and interacting with each other. Everything you do is in spite of the circumstances, and it'll allow for both the players and GM to have meta-experiences. The important part for me is to determine exactly how to make that happen.

Don't let your dreams be memes user

>Is it worth it bros?
Probably not, but that doesn't stop us.

>Every victory is pyrrhic.
You're probably a good guy but there is no way I would want to play in that world, I'm just saying. If I was into the story side of it I'd feel cheated that I could never inject my side of the story, and if I was into the game side of it I would find it too hard.

Hey guys, I've been working on my E6 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. system and would appreciate an outside look on the weapon and armor upgrades

I forgot to mention that things that can't scale will just have their cost reduced by spell power. It's just that there needs to be enough things with scaling power for the mechanic to have some actual presence. All removal will use power to determine the size of the creature it can remove.

I want to make a card game where, first, card text is expressed in a formal language so that it can be formally analyzed, and second, the game can play equally well in person or on a computer. The goal with the formal analysis would be to let people write their own cards, and have them be algorithmically costed. Obviously, game balance would then come down to good design of the costing algorithm.

I think being playable in person and on computer is actually the trickier problem. Magic has two problems that make it tedious to play on a computer: players get priority too often, and there are race conditions everywhere. For example, graveyard order (traditionally) matters in Magic, so if you're forced to discard your hand, a correct implementation makes you choose the discard order. More generally, any "simultaneous" activity has to be explicitly ordered by players, because order of trigger resolution can matter. Hearthstone (e.g.) is unplayable in person, for lots and lots and lots of reasons, but persistent monster health is the most fundamental.

I'm not sure how to get the second issue off the ground, but I'm hoping I'll get a burst of inspiration at some point.

Well, sure, as long as the rest of the game is designed keeping that in mind, I see no problem there.

Only problem you might run into is card drought, because there are only so many effects you can come up with that use that, and after the first card with spell power that can do that, having two exactly similar cards is kind of unintuitive, unless you have something like the color wheel and go wild with that.

Like, once you make the first (Remove creature with Power X), there is little reason to make a similar card, unless you start stacking the effects, like: (Remove creature with Power X; Lose X life), where the spell power would be smaller (If I now understood the mechanic right).

In that kind of situation, the card creation possibilities are practically endless. So if you ever hit a drought while designing, you should just write up all the possible effects you can come up with and combine them to make new cards.

I like a dark setting to play about in, but I don't really buy into Pyrrhic-only victories.
I'm and I'm posting this as a proof of concept to make sure I'm accountable to at least someone as I begin the grind to completeness.
I'd like to hear about any outstanding flaws you guys see right away.

I guess all removal being strictly power-based is more problematic than I thought. My original line of thought behind the idea was that "any removal that isn't limited by the power will have to only hit minions and not gods, and I'd like to preserve that flexibility in most removal". But the thing is, removal would be the easiest way to get high power for low cost, and boosting that enough to kill the opposing god wouldn't be too hard.

So what I think I'll do is make +spell power a very common ability, and make it so a lot of spells get an additional effect if they have a certain amount of spell power. And it still reduces cost.

Magic being too powerful in a class system requires that you redistribute it to the classes that don't have it. Things are swingy because the martials have very few abilities that work every time to substantially shore up their position.

Disallow any classes you think are shit, make the player reimagine the character as the proper class, and keep the players who don't leave in disgust because they are the good ones. If you need to, create a bucket "magic-user" class for people to customize from.

I suspect "hard" removal is an artifact of Magic, where Garfield was motivated by the aesthetics of the colors rather than game balance in itself. Which is to say, you could always not have hard removal, you could just have direct damage. You can also split the difference and have "kill a creature with power at most 3." That's different from "deal 3 damage to a creature" because "deal 3 damage" plus "deal 2 damage" kills a creature with power 5 (assuming damage has some persistence), while "kill a creature with power at most 3" and "kill a creature with power at most 2," in most systems, can't be combined to make "kill a creature with power at most 5."

In Magic-land, then, this is a different design direction because, while Magic has both Fireball ("deal X damage" plus some confusing shit about target-splitting) and Lightning Bolt ("deal 3 damage"), the fixed-value damage effects are more cost-efficient and nobody plays Fireball. You can likewise do different things with fixed values, like having cards that scale differently so that different cards are more useful in different situations.

is this more for advice on making campaigns or can we share stuff like recordings of campaigns we spent a lot of time designing?

While campaign design is welcome (I guess?), /gdg/ is mostly focused on homebrewing rules, much less about running the actual games.

I'll take a look at your system. I keep going back and forth between "eh it'll still be d&d (or at least something OSR) at the end" and "fuck this project will be so huge and not at all like where I started at". Thanks for the advice though. I'll post eventually if I get anywhere with it.
Thanks man.
Yeah. Ok shit, to the grindstone I guess.
This is one of my fears, but I'm a fan of e6 style games that never stray too far into "pcs as arbiters of cosmic change" or what have you, so I think there is a way to balance giving some characters super specific keys to problems, or at least gating certain possible solutions to problems behind magic, provided it's both as you say available to all somehow AND not something that's the only thing a particular class can do.
I LIKE the existence of magic, and honestly in 5e it's power level is pretty good, just the breadth of what it can accomplish versus nonmagical characters is an issue for me. And thanks for the advice.

Ah okay, I'll keep my stuff to myself then, carry on.

Now that that came up, it seems I've forgot that original part from the OP post. I'll actually add it to reduce confusion in the future.

Okay, right. Not every aspect of a given victory is going to be pyrrhic. Part of the genius of the game well be that you create bonds and support each other in spite of the rules and in spite of the world you're in because being alone is death. The encounter-creating meta currency just keeps growing until it eventually overwhelms, and the only way to reduce that growth permanently is to share your burdens with others. The game will punish you (or say it punishes you) for being a good person, but you'll have to do it anyway to survive. Those who succumb to their vices or animalistic instincts will be swallowed up and lost.

That's the kind of feeling I want players to experience.

Well, you'll need to identify any possible mechanics that don't play well with computers and either circumvent those concepts or avoid them altogether. That'll probably mean you design a very different game from MtG or Hearthstone. You'll need to be much more open to possible design directions.

Reposting from last thread:
I'm having trouble figuring out how best to add advancement to my game. Each character has four stats and four powers (which work like moves in PbtA games).

Because I want to keep characters at about the same power level, but give players control over growth, I'm thinking of having two different growth systems:

>advancements, given out by the GM after narrative accomplishments, increase a stat by 1
>XP, earned through good roleplay, used to heal wounds, buy items and modify your powers

Is this enough, though? A lot of games focus on adding wholly new powers or abilities to the character. I wouldn't be opposed to such a thing, but I can't think of a good way to fit it in.

If you're still around to see it, /world building general/ is all about settings. If it's a major system, you could also try that system's respective general.

I think that, with proper pricing, the modifying abilities portion can give enough change to grow abilities unto having new functionality.

You could also periodically give players the same abilities again so that once they've grown the original in one direction, they can grow again and get more utility from a different path.

I'm not familiar with PtbA, do take what you can.

Do the PC:s have weaknesses or disadvantages coming from anywhere? Because I figured out that a good way to give out experience AND to enforce roleplaying was to have players have problems and disadvantages, and give experience every time they gain a new one, or lose an old one. Gaining disadvantages should most often be a player choice, with only the direst of situations giving them without the player's consent.

I'm avoiding persistent damage because the objective is to destroy a big creature rather than reduce a life total to zero. Persistent damage also causes the whole "emrakul killed by fifteen squirrels" conundrum.

Basically the abilities all follow a similar template:

Spider Climb
When you [climb the walls like a spider], roll a risk.

On a success, pick two:
>No one notices
>You reach your destination quickly
>You do not suffer madness

On a failure ignore one:
>Someone notices
>You reach your destination slowly
>You suffer six madness

I realize that isn't a super interesting move - it's just an example. It's important to note that characters suffer three madness every time they use a supernatural power.

Madness is gained by doing, well, mad things. Using your powers, seeing eldritch things, killing people, etc. Once it crosses a certain threshold, you are tested - if you fail, you suffer some consequence, haven't decided what. However, you also spend madness to heal wounds, buy things, etc. It's all mind over matter.

Meanwhile good roleplay is rewarded with Sanity, which can be spent to decrease your madness. which can be used to reduce your madness, keeping you under your cap but reducing your XP pool. NPCs also react differently to slavering madmen stalking the streets, so you have to manage your madness and sanity carefully.

Getting hurt/stressed gives you disadvantages, and acting within them gives sanity (ignoring gives madness).

So my thinking is, the GM gives everyone advancements to increase stats, thus keeping them all at roughly the same level, and players can spend madness to add new factors to their powers - more possibilities on success or things to avoid on failure.

Weapons and Armor are pretty good. I'll need to save this for inspiration later

Haven you posted in /wbg/ recently? because that premise is familiar. I can dig what's written so far. I was going to comment on using different imagery with the weapons, but then it started looking very reminiscent of Kingdom Hearts (where you choose a Sword, Wand, or Shield as both a mechanical and internal symbol of playstyle). You could easily run an adultier Kingdom Hearts game with the ideas you have so far. Maybe even a Dark Souls + Kingdom Hearts aesthetic. Not that you have to design with that in mind, I'm just thinking of campaigns that could be run.

You could also consider a shield mechanic where you stay immune to low-quality attacks, but damage that exceeds the threshold fully punches through. You get that persistent damage in smaller and more easily internalized chunks. i.e., with 15 Health and 4 Shield, I'm impervious to the lowest mooks, and can only die in 1-3 damaging hits.

Depending on the stat ranges, a good idea might be to, instead of the players gaining new abilities, have them be able to switch them. Like, every two or three game sessions they can either raise a stat by one or switch one of their abilities to a new one. Or both.

You could even track "levels" or somesuch, to lock some more advanced abilities behind a level wall so there is a real sense of getting better, slowly but surely.

How about that?

>That'll probably mean you design a very different game from MtG or Hearthstone. You'll need to be much more open to possible design directions.
Yeah, that's why it's something where I'm hoping for inspiration. The rules set would probably need to be a lot more... feedforward. In Magic and Hearthstone, race conditions crop up because of the focus on events ("when," "as"). But it's tricky, because interactions are what make the games interesting. So while I'm open to basically any good design, that's not really the same as coming up with novel designs.

Persistent damage is mainly troublesome because of the bookkeeping. I think the real issue with squirrels and elder gods is that the damage is linearly scaled, so there's an unstated model assumption that Emrakul is fifteen times stronger than a squirrel. That's a very different issue, and one that probably deserves more thought than this. It's also a much deeper issue, because the more you try to realize the model assumptions of a game, the more you'll realize how shit the modeling is.

>giving some characters super specific keys to problems, or at least gating certain possible solutions to problems behind magic

I don't think it's good to set up magic as key-and-lock, because that brings boredom. Magic users of lore (and by extension, superheroes) thrill us by using their magic in odd ways to solve problems. Very rarely does Superman solve the problem by punching the enemy to death.

I was thinking more of "all classes can use most magic via items, some can do certain magic without items and are better at it." (4e did this backwards by turning every spell into a weapon and making it follow weapon rules, that's the opposite of what I mean.)

>Haven you posted in /wbg/ recently? because that premise is familiar. I can dig what's written so far.
I haven't, but I should. It's actually based on a homebrew setting I already run games in, based on a 'what if' scenario where the main villains won.

>I was going to comment on using different imagery with the weapons, but then it started looking very reminiscent of Kingdom Hearts (where you choose a Sword, Wand, or Shield as both a mechanical and internal symbol of playstyle).
The imagery I'm intending with the Talents is 'suit of fantasy cards', with each Talent representing a suit a la Ravenloft's tarokka. The idea is to make distinct categories that all generally contribute equally in different ways, which is sort of a tall order for such a simple game.

I had considered have weapons be associated with a particular Talent based on their name, but I've decided that weapons would be associated with a Talent based on their use instead (magical blasts belong to Tomes, martial arts belong to Staves because of muh monks).

Most of the names line up nicely, but an acrobat's quarterstaff weapon could be Bows because it's based on using the weapon as a tool to aid dexterity, while heavy bows would be Shields because heavy bows require a lot of power to draw. Things like greatswords would definitely be Shields, for example. It's probably going to end up being that a particular weapon can benefit from multiple Talents, but when a particular Talent uses it it has different benefits: Bows would deal more damage when the Talent is Shields and be more accurate when the Talent is Bows, and get a split bonus when Staves (like the typical ranger) use it.

Part of me thinks that I should swap out the Talent names for colors (Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Purple) as a reference to the colors light produces in a prism, but I'd have to include the entire rainbow and that seems like it might overcomplicate things.
(Cont)

>You could easily run an adultier Kingdom Hearts game with the ideas you have so far. Maybe even a Dark Souls + Kingdom Hearts aesthetic. Not that you have to design with that in mind, I'm just thinking of campaigns that could be run.
The general 'color' of the setting is basically the sort of feeling you get if you've ever played Epic Mickey- that the world the character's running about with is devoid of a color that was obviously there and just needs to be brought out of it. That it's glum and dark, but it can be fixed. That while some people are selfish and cruel, not everyone's out to get you, and when it comes down to it, you're not alone in the dark.

One of the characters I've planned to introduce in the main book is the Lost God, the child of two of the members of the pantheon who disappeared after the cataclysm.
He's not powerful enough to face the Nightmare alone, but he provides a sanctuary where the darkness can't encroach. However, he's deliberately difficult to find so that the Nightmare can't catch up to him- the players aren't supposed to rely on him, but he's willing to help them.
His appearance is basically a good version of the Beast from Over the Garden Wall: He carries a lantern that can't be put out and walks the world terrifying evildoers and searching for people to help.

>main book
Wait, shit, I guess I mean the main pamphlet? I don't think it's going to end up being long enough to count as a book. I think it's gonna end up being something like thirty if I ever end up publishing it.
Whatever, I'll just get back to making it- I'll see about posting in /wbg/.

I would just say that every +1 in mtg is suppose to be a double in effectiveness but they can't mechanically do this because of complexity. So a wolf is twice as strong as a snake, an elephant is twice as strong as a wolf, a baloth is twice as strong as an elephant, a dragon is twice as strong as a baloth, and a titan is twice as strong as a dragon.

So Emrakul is the power of 16384 squirrels.

>16384 squirrels
My God, imagine the potential.

Is an elephant twice as strong as a wolf? In other words, do you think two wolves versus one elephant is an even match-up? For that matter, do you think four snakes versus one elephant would be even odds? Or, for that matter, that a wolf and a bear is a fair fight?

I don't ask this to be pedantic or to rain on anyone's parade. My point is really the opposite, that you probably shouldn't try and make a game realistic, and just deal with the fact that fifteen cards (or card-like things) titled "Squirrel" annihilates with one card titled "Emrakul, the Aeons Torn."

If a squirrel was 1/1, and the power and toughness of magic cards was appropriately linearly scaled, Emrakul would probably be unreadable because they would need so many zeroes after his power and toughness. Because I don't know how many squirrels exactly it would take to kill Emy but it would be a lot.

Well, /gdg/? How would you design this?

>Tall Tales and Blatant Lies: The Game
>Gumption
Obviously the combat stat.
>Chutzpah
Used for intimidating with.
>Moxy
Resilience/Stat that determines hit points. Used to resist intimidation.
>Childlike wonder
Used for imagining strange solutions to problems and communicating with children.
>The cut of my jib
The persuasion stat, the stat that lets you talk down the police officers and explain you really do have everything under control.
>A certain je ne sais qoui
If it doesn't fit the other stats, roll this one.
2d6 roll under, all stats start at 7 and adjust to flavor or after enough time has passed.

For some reason this reminds me of a resolution mechanic I really liked, but never had a chance to use. You have a pool of d6 determined by a stat. You'd combine your pool with the opposing pool, and add one more d6 (A+B+1 total). After filling the entire pool, Player A removes A amount of the lowest dice while Player B removes B amount of the highest. The result of the single remaining die determined the result.

I wanted to use it for a weird, abstract stat where other players had control over your stats. They would choose which stats became higher or lower (and you would do the same to them), but you would gain the inverse of their changes to place elsewhere. Power wasn't ever lost or gained, just reallocated.

It might still be worth fleshing out and bringing to a boardgame night.

deadtime bump

Deadbump time

I just remembered that part of the reason I wanted spell power is to use up that space on the templating for every type of card. Oops.

I could go back to my one older idea that spell cards all have the "free action" ability that allows them to be played without spending action points but at a higher energy cost. The space Used for power would be used for the free action cost on spells.