A thread dedicated to discussion and feedback of games and homebrews made by Veeky Forums regarding anything from minor elements to entire systems, as well as inviting people to playtest your games online. While the thread's main focus is mechanics, you're always welcome to share tidbits about your setting.
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.
I'm interested in Veeky Forums's thoughts on the relationship between attributes, physical limits, and rolling. I'll use the horizontal jump as an example.
Many games state that a character can jump a given distance determined by the relevant attribute. Sometimes you can roll dice to increase the distance you jump.
An alternative approach would be to give a gap the character is trying to jump a set DC, with no reference to specific distances.
Although the second approach seems more elegant due to reduced math it's also going to result in fewer automatic successes, characters may be required to roll on actions that wouldn't require a roll under system 1.
I'm sure there are alternative approaches I'm not considering at the moment.
Colton Miller
Are there any problems with having a card game where everything is instant(in the MtG sense), including the combat actions of creatures?
It should make the game more interactive, right?
Leo Rodriguez
Distance per successes.
Kayden Howard
The sorcery speed thing in MtG is in place to act as a check, so you can't do a turn's worth during your opponent's turn, and then do another during yours. Its because of how mana and lands refresh in MtG. There are ways around it, like a combined turn might nip it.
Sebastian Phillips
>like a combined turn I thought that was a given.
Having a mixture of instant and sorcery speed actions causes a game to waste a ton of its complexity budget, but most games go the "everything is sorcery" route as opposed to the "everything is instant" route to avoid this. Why is that?
Robert Young
Most card games go for IGOUGO, so combined is unusual.
Its mostly for easier tracking. In MtG, instants are heavily reliant on timing order and the stack. Most people don't want to use the stack in theirs, out of fear of scaring off players. Honestly, I've found a lot of games that go that route get kinda simple, since removal of the stack or timing rules limits how you can play things.
So, I technically could make everything roll under which would reduce some math, but that might change gun damage math. Missiles are binary hit or miss depending on Targeting Roll vs Evasion Roll. Guns use the same, but for every 1 you beat the Evasion roll, you deal 10/100 damage. The damage roughly follows the Ace Combat games, where 1-4 missiles or a few bullets will drop a plane.
Future Plans: - I'm probably going to add in a method to resupply to go along with limited loadouts. You won't carry as many missiles as the games (sometimes 80+), but you also aren't going to carry so few as in real life (maybe 6 total armaments). Something in the 20s sounds about right, and in the event you do need to resupply, you can probably fly out of the combat area (map) and sacrifice maybe a few turns to return fully equipped. - Money is used for everything. You use it to purchase upgrades, new/replacement planes, and repair costs. I'll need to codify some rules for how all of that will be handled. - Speaking of Replacement Planes, I'll need to make rules for being shot down too. - Stat Blocks are always on my mind. I'll need to make some for Planes, Weapons, and Upgrades and price accordingly. Fortunately since I've decided all stats will fall between 1-10, I can easily convert some of the vidya stats over and fine-tune from there.
Any comments welcome. Let me know what you think about the current or future rules, or even what's missing.
Jeremiah Sanders
Maybe a small section with pilot slang, to help with roleplaying?
Ian Brooks
I mean how else am i gonna shout "Alpha charlie bravo i got a bogey on my six" like a massive retard while fighting old Chink MIG-s?
Austin Rogers
Yeah, that's not unreasonable. I'm intentionally leaving few rules for roleplay as that's something that should happen organically. However, terminology will definitely help set the mood. Some of that will also be done when I get around to polishing and adding a voice to the rules.
Wyatt Miller
Oh yeah, I forgot put this one rolling...
Missing those new things in the OP, but not that serious, to be honest. The OP isn't that much of a factor in the thread as the advice of other designers.
Well, that depends what kind of feel your game is going for, ultimately. Like, I know my game is a gross example, but the dependency in my game is overcoming the character's abilities. This means, while the difficulty adds disadvantage dice, the difficulty will always stay the same, being the character's stat.
Chase Sanchez
Brainstorming a D&D heartbreaker. The idea is returning to the core classes of Fighter/Rogue/Wizard/Cleric. But at every 5 levels you can choose a path, like Fighter (Paladin, Barbarian, Ranger). Wonder if restrict to classes like 5e or requisites like 3.pf, so a Rogue can choose a divine subclass without the need to make one specifically for rogue.
Parker Sanders
I'm just gonna go ahead and put this out there, this is a playtest packet that's about 2/3 complete as far as rules go. The fluff is mostly finished however.
If anyone wants to look over the rules they can, I'll warn them they are incomplete and possibly contradictory at certain points. The core mechanic is well established however.
At this stage I'm more interested in any thoughts concerning the setting and atmosphere. I guess my goal was kind of a anti-post-cyberpunk; I wanted to make a setting that was dystopian, but with the corporations on the verge of collapse and new beginning on the horizon. The realism level is somewhat soft but without faster than light travel: you have tech wizards controlling fantastic nanoswarms but you aren't getting through space any faster than 0.1g constant acceleration.
Grayson White
One idea is to take inspiration from Path of Exile. There's one skill tree that every class uses. Each class has a different starting point, but theoretically any class can get any skill.
One of the main problems with PoE is that its Skill Circle is massive (pic related isn't even its final form), but there's plenty of ways you can make a smaller version that would fit with your goals.
Jack Walker
Nice. Thank you.
Nolan Mitchell
>Behold, my true power!
Michael Russell
So, how about a fairly general question. I've been thinking about a way to combine both the initiative as well as the action itself into a single roll. The idea there would be to simulate situations like chaotic high-intensity firefights, where knowing the precise order of initiative beforehand would drain much of the tension out of it and make things too deterministic.
Now, the core would be a straightforward dice-pool system, probably using d10s, though 12s or even 20s might be a good alternative depending on how much granularity turns out to be necessary. The idea is that in a time-sensitive test (e.g. in combat), your roll would have two TNs, the lower one for initiative and the higher one the action itself. So you roll your test, and as the first step remove all dice that haven't met your lower TN. The number of remaining dice then tells you your initiative (more dice = goes first). Next you check how many of those dice meet the higher TN, which determines if and to what degree your action succeeds or fails, like in many other such systems.
The twist there would be that characters would have the option of voluntarily adjusting those TNs in tandem, to represent taking extra time or hurrying things along. So for example, you start out with an init TN of 3 and an action TN of 7. If you wanted to hurry things along, you could opt to lower your init TN in exchange for an equal increase in your action TN, e.g. to 1 and 9. That would give you more dice for the init test, making it more likely you'd go first, but at the cost of making the actual action less likely to succeed. The reverse would also be possible, to represent taking extra time with an action. You'd raise your init TN in exchange for lowering the action TN, e.g. to 5 and 5. You'd be more likely to succeed with the action (and succeed well), but will probably act later than you would otherwise.
(1/2, because I'm bad at explaining things concisely)
Julian Kelly
(cont'd)
The overall goal of this would be to give the players a tangible way to weigh between the speed and quality of their actions, while still retaining a certain element of risk and chance. It does feel rather on the complicated side, but I'm hoping the tangibility of dice pools would make it fairly smooth in regular play. Just physically taking away the dice that didn't meet the init TN and looking at the size of the remaining pile of dice seems like a fairly intuitive way of tracking initiative.
The main potential hurdle I can think of is that this would make any effect that increases or lowers your dice pool relatively very powerful. Characters with a fairly low pool would be both very slow and shit at what they're trying to do, which might turn out to be a bit too much. The common "stat+skill = pool size" might be a bit too volatile for this system. Also, unless the pools are fairly large to begin with, there'd likely be many ties in init tests, which could pose another problem.
So, what do you say? Could this show promise, or is it stupid overcomplicated shit for idiots? Are there any big mathematical issues I'm missing, such as obvious sweet spots that make the TN shifting obsolete?
Oliver Miller
Maybe fairly fixed dice pools with d12s or d20s and adjusting TN rather than dice count. Changing the TN won't be as dramatic as alternating pool size if you use more granular dice.
Josiah Campbell
It's stupidly complicated, and worst of all the measures you are taking don't seem to correspond very tightly (if at all) to your stated goals. You honestly seem pretty hung up on system concepts you may have seen before, which do not necessarily support the kind of experience you are trying to create.
Back to the drawing board, and think hard specifically about what kind of play you are trying to encourage, and how your chosen mechanics will achieve that.
