Homebrew/Game Deisgn General /hbg/ /gdg/

I rip everything. My homebrew is basically a frakenstein of DnD, WoD, Shadowrun, Phantom Crash, Fire Emblem, Civ 2-5, ASOIAF, Uplink, Fallout 2, Dark Souls, Blood Bowl, Evil Genius, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. That and 10,000+ hours of wikipedia research on otherwise practical subject matter, like physics, economics, history, etcetera. It's a surprisingly practical hobby.

In fact, I'm trying to find and rip "Birthright" and "Godbound" right now. Anyone have the pdf perchance? I tried the pdf share thread but my computer froze trying to load it.

Is it about writing a poem about Blood and Iron or writing a poem through blood and iron? Also, do you like your swords and armor brittle?

Beware the bloat, unless you're writting not-GURPS then you should be ok....

Taking with parsimony, a little from here a little from there...not only that, but adapting and filling the gaps..for instance my attribute/abilities system is a mix between both WoD and SR, in the meaning that I took the character creation priority system and mixed with the group discounts and free allocation.

What are some cool d6 pool mechanics? or where i can read about them

Is this thread only for RPG stuff, or also board games?

in theory for other board games too, but try your best to not be too specific or too broad on your questions or else we won't be of much help

D6-pool mechanics.
Usually you compare dice with Dif. values above are successes.
You can have mechanics dealing with the amount of dice or Dif.
You can have mechanics for specific amounts and/or numbers on dice: e.g. if most rolls are 1 it's a fumble
Your dice have to be somewhere specific on the table to count.
You can save some of your dice for later
You can reroll an certain amount of dice.
You can exclude highest/lowest amount of dice

A couple I've encountered... one is an "Ace" roll system, where if you roll a 1, you substitute an Ace value instead (for instance, treat 1's as a 10). This makes it substantially a different from a 1d6+4 mind you because you don't add anything to any value other than 1.

I'm sure you know about exploding dice- where if you roll the highest number you add it to the total and roll again. But despite getting players excited, exploding dice don't actually add much to the EV. The formula for calculating x-dice is n/n-x where n is the die face and x is the exploding range. So a d6 only gets a 6/5 improvement to its EV of 3.5, or +20%. Kinda wimpy. You can increase the exploding range so that it rerolls on a 5 or 6 (x=2), making it 6/4 of +50%, except on a 3.5EV that still rounds down to

For the record, I only use Imploding dice to represent actual explosions in my system. Rather than rolling say, 6d6 for a grenade, I roll a single d8M. It will average well above 36, but may only do as little as 8. So much like real explosions, sometimes you have no chance and are completely obliterated (I once rolled 168 damage this way) or maybe you just get a little scratch and are inexplicably fine.

Can I ask that a few people interrogate me mercilessly about my system? Trying to motivate myself to fill in the design gaps and get it to playtest standards.

It's a swords&sorcery system that I intend to use mostly for West Marches style gameplay.

Features I Gone and Did
>Order of Initiative
>Melee Resolution
>Missile Resolution
>Movement
>Damage
>Attributes & Traits (Skill system)
>Magic (barely touched but basic idea is in place)

Features I Need To Gone and Do
>Crit tables/wounds
>Character progression
>Weapon tags
>Dying and Death
>Character creation

Ask me about whatever and I'll try to explain what I've got in place or what I'm thinking of doing for it.

Here's a mock-up character sheet as well. I was fucking around with making the lines something other than plain straight lines, so please excuse the charcoal brush. Equipment section is incomplete, but everything else is usable for the system thus far.

What are you doing for damage that dying/death isn't ready yet?

Fair point. Damage runs on a flesh/grit system. I just haven't really codified what happens when you hit 0 flesh. Bleed out timer? Instantly dead? Receive a Wound in conjunction with the bleed out?

So death and dying hasn't been touched mostly because I have decision paralysis.

Wound+Bleed out timer seems nice enough
You might survive but not unscathed...

What are some good/cool and fairly simple magic systems that are still attribute-based in some way or another?

Thanks for your input! I can probably tie it in neatly with the crit tables, and have players roll for a wound on the crit table if their Flesh is depleted to 0 by an attack.

>> fill in the design gaps and get it to playtest standards.
One solid advice I have heard before, there is no such thing as playtest standards. If your have your basic mechanic for solving conflicts you are ready to go.

Most system that are not DnD require the caster to make a "skill/attribute" roll when using magic. So go read most things that aren't "freeform" and you're set.

>there is no such thing as playtest standards
Fair enough. I guess I should go pester some friends to play.

Just make it very clear that it's WIP and not completely ready, improvise on the moment and choose later whether you are keeping those temp. rules ( don't forget that when you retcon the rules you should give them the chance to retcon their characters too)

So I'm trying to build rules for a domain style kingdom management game, based on simple models of real life (making it both verisimilar and educational!).

I'm having trouble quantifying the effects of education however. Near as I can tell its just a multiplier of labors effect on GDP. But if all education does is give you cash, why not just invest in more merchant fleets instead?

There's got to be something more here. One obvious suggestion is technology. Except 1) all the education in the world won't help you sometimes- see China failing to reach industrial revolution, and 2) you can steal technology easily, so why bother investing ever? Even rural Africa has cell phones.

So what does education do, precisely? Obviously it does stuff, I'm just having a hard time quantifying it.

Technology use and adoption is something to consider. We stole the printing press, awesome! Except it doesn't change anything because barely anyone can read. Or, we stole a way of sterilizing dairy but no-one wants it because it makes it more expensive to produce and people still think disease is caused by evil spirits or witches or whatever, not microbes in milk.

Really depends on the scope of your game. It is more Sid Meyer's Civilization or The Guild? Heroes of Might and Magic or Knights & Merchants? Warcraft or Rise of Nations?

In some education helps to stay powerful through technologic means (tank vs spearman), and sharing can give wealth or improve diplomacy.

High education levels increase Productivity, Technology and Satisfaction, and reduce Racial Tension and both the Crime and Violent Crime rates.

) all the education in the world won't help you sometimes- see China failing to reach industrial revolution.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Causes_in_Europe

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence

) you can steal technology easily, so why bother investing ever? Even rural Africa has cell phones.
this and Having access (being able to purchase tech or steal knowledge) is different from having the means of production or being able to use it properly in large scale.

Well, what about beyond just using magic? Mana points, spell mechanics, spell collecting, preparation, the math behind it, and all of those other things too. Like, the whole system.

The Great Divergence in no way contradicts my claim. Regardless of what did cause the industrial revolution, an abundance of scholarship and education was not sufficient to cause it.

Still, is something to consider. It at leaves gives a handwavy justification for why you can't use guns despite having several thousand guns. But it leaves me with the problem of trying to quantify technology so that so many widgets of education result in so many doodads of technology acquisition. Is there a good precedent for this?

Very important question. I want my game to be played out over a single generation. So not even a century would go by in the course of normal gameplay. That may be significant timescale for modern or even industrial tech acquisition, but in antiquity/medieval/renaissance you're not going to get meaningful technological advances.

For that you should read whole chapters/books. I reccomend the following books: Shadowrun 2e and 4e, WoD: Mage the Ascension (M20), Ars Magicka, Unknown Armies. and the GURPs supplements about magic.

>>The Great Divergence in no way contradicts my claim.
I know, you claim is in fact correct. The point being that technological progress does not depend ONLY on education, and just because it's not the only factor it shouldn't be disregarded.

>Satisfaction, and reduce Racial Tension and both the Crime and Violent Crime rates.
I forgot to address this previous point, which seemed pertinent and directly on topic to my original query. It also occurs to me (via the pasteurization poster) that public health might be improved.

However, are we certain violent crime is actually improved? I can think of plenty of violent academics- primarily anarchists and socialists in the early 20th century. But there are also sophisticated terrorist groups with substantial education- for instance the chemical weapon attacks on the Tokyo subway system, and ISIS and Al-Quada leadership at least are very tech savvy. And then there's all those school shootings which have become rather routine.

I think we could assert the educated are more likely to be politically active. But that also might make them more effective at insurgency.

I'm also not convinced it improves racial tensions. Scientific Racism and Eugenics programs are typically the product of educated elites.

It's easy to imagine violent dumb people, but are they really more commonplace?

Crime in general I totally buy though. Educated workers can transition more easily to new employment, thus avoiding extended layoffs and resorting to crime to survive. Poverty being the foremost predictor of crime in any society.

TLDR: Questions of combat pacing/tempo

I've been playing some MtG, Hearthstone and Streetfighter lately. Despite not all being from the same genre, they all have a mechanic of "building tempo", whether that's playing land cards, building your special meter, or just the passage of turns.

The longer the game goes on, you can play bigger threats. The match starts slow, and builds up to big cards/special moves.

I really like this mechanic. One of the things I find frustrating about D&D is that players often just unleash their biggest spells, especially if they don't think there will be any battles after the present battle.

How would you implement a "tempo" mechanic for a table top rpg? Hearthstone's mechanic of each turn passing seems to be the easiest.

For my custom rpg, I'm considering doing something like "Character Role", where the player would chose between things like Offensive, Deffensive, Support, maybe some others.

Offensive would build tempo from attacking. Defensive would build tempo from being attacked. Support would build tempo by aiding another player.

As you build tempo, you could expend it on Big Moves. Or maybe it would limit what level of attack you can make, but the meter would never deplete.

Anyone have any ideas to flesh this out? any systems that already do something like this?

Sanitation (and preventive medicine) in general becomes a greater necessity once the general population receives education...

>>However, are we certain violent crime is actually improved?
Those are incidents, even if they are happening quite often, they are insignificant compared to the homicide rates in third world countries.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

A decrease in racial tension is what you should get with proper education (or so do I believe). To avoid stuff like fanaticism and eugenics is the reason I believe that civics, philosophy and sociology should be included in general education.

A few thoughts/criticisms. First, this sorta has that trope where people meet their demise because their first attack wasn't decisive. Why *wouldn't* you start out with your most powerful attack? To justify it you'd need weird metaphysics where everyone is magic and magic can only be accomplished with tempo. Don't forget that the "this isn't even my final form" scenario has an unavoidable association with weeabo cringe.

Second, in some minor sense there already is a momentum in as much as buffing is a thing. Early fight you lay down all your buffs. Late fight you apply your finishers when they're at full power. There is no middle fight.

If you made it to where everyone was magic, but some were magic martials and others were magic support or DPS glass cannons, I could see it working. However this means silent ambushes become the most devastating and preferred form of attack if you can build up momentum without engagement. If magic requires engagement feedback to build momentum, then the same rules apply to defensive mages and the easiest way to deal with opponents is to get a rogue to shank them them to death really fast, possibly with poison, then run away.

I'm inclined to assert that momentum fighting defies the very fundamental principles behind all strategy and tactics going back to "The Art of War". Its hard to imagine a scenario where this sort of combat would be the dominant strategy. And non-dominant strategies vanish quickly by nature of the war.

Might work for some other form of non-traditional conflict resolution though. I could see a politics game running off of momentum for instance.

I'd be interested to see a comparison of national homicide rates in ratio to GDP. Of course third world countries have more violent crime. They also have more plague, famine, and Malthusian warfare. Assuming poverty is the number one contribution to criminal behavior, anything that reduces poverty (like education) reduces crime. But would it do so even if you controlled for poverty?

Funny, I've always been of the opinion that psychology (particularly psychology concerning ethics) and economics should be added to the secondary school curriculum. Sociology seems more comfortable at a college level but should at least be available. But this is neither here nor there...

It seems education would only have that effect if you designed it to have that effect. If I'm not mistaken the first public schools in France were designed specifically to standardize Parisian French and instill a sense of nationalism based on a shared narrative of history. So education is exactly as useful to a nationalist as it is to a globalist.

I'm not specifically arguing with you per se. I'm just thinking critically.

Stealing technology is always going to leave you behind the times, by the time you're able to properly reverse engineer it, or buy it from neighbors, either way you're going to have to invest some time and money into assimilating the knowledge, and will need SOME education to use it effectively. And I'm not sure how your game would work (I'm not familiar with Domain), but I'd say maybe there should be a check for technological breakthrough, and the chances of success are tied to your education level.

Additionally, I'd say merchant fleets would have some sort of practical limit to income generation, eventually you're not going to have enough surplus to sell overseas, and buying extra merchant ships won't do you any good. I'd say merchant ships shouldn't really be a primary income generator on their own, but a way of turning surplus production into money, and buying resources that aren't available locally.

I often post here about the CCG I'm working on. Got some great feedback from the thread, too.

Interesting, yeah I can see why you'd want to start with the most decisive move first, from a sense of realism, but from a sense of narrative perspective this is often incredibly boring. I've played enough D&D to realize most battles are won on round 1 or 2, but continue another seven rounds anyway. I really like the sense of "tempo" inherent in games like Street Fighter or Hearthstone because it keeps the match interesting. Every turn is an escalation, not a slow grind where each turn is increasingly less interesting.

The system I'm designing is actually based off Street Fighter the Storytelling System, an early World of Darkness spin off franchise. Everyone is "magic" in the sense of a fighting game, where every attack is just another "special move". Some characters might fight with Machine Guns, others magic spells, what will distinguish them is the tactical applications of different maneuver types.

Buffs will also be fairly limited. I'm thinking about going with a 5e style of buffs, where a player can only maintain a single buff at a time. I've played enough 3.5 to realize buffing is a bad thing. "Who buffed most" is not a compelling way to play a game and leads to excessive bookkeeping, generally through spreadsheets. In my last campaign, the druid regularly had 20+ buffs going, and even if I wanted to dispel them, that takes another 10 minutes of checking caster levels, which isn't fun either.

Haven't been following this too closely, but I want to make a general argument against high level simulationism for Civ type game.

Instead of trying to accurately simulate every aspect of a civilization, I think you need to work from the perspective of a game.

First, there is no objective historical method of measuring civilizations anyway. Historians debate the cause and effect of this and that, without ever really finding final answers. To work from a place of realism isn't an effective way to make a Civ type game.

Instead, look at things like Education, Sanitation, Technology and find game mechanics that interact with each other. Think about the tone and mood of the game you want to make. Does something super banal like Inflation Economics have a place? Does something super dark like infant mortality have a place? Does something super light hearted like a "happiness index" have a place? Do you want to simulate all time periods, or just a specific one? You don't need to create a system of insurrection and counter-terrorism if you're trying to simulate Ancient China.

Not trying to say your conversation is without merit, but it just looks like you're all lost in the weeds a bit.

Lost? In a sense. One always is when mapping uncharted territory.

But for my purposes, I'm not analyzing history so much as modern policy. Right now I have a Department of Defense, Department of State and Foreign Affairs, Department of Justice, Department of the Interior (figuring out what that did was quite the adventure!), Department of the Treasury and Economics, Department of Health and Welfare, and now I'm working on a Department of Education. I figured it would be somewhat obvious what it did, but quickly discovered otherwise.

A map is only as useful as the details it leaves out. A map with perfect detail is identical to the territory. I'm trying to map government in general. Games happen to be extremely useful sorts of maps. And if its interesting enough for people to make passionate careers and TV dramas about, I'm confident the game mechanics will flow naturally once I've got a proper understanding of it all.

Sure, like I said, I haven't followed this whole convo, maybe it's useful stuff.

If you want to know what a Department of Education does, I suggest looking beyond the USA for sure. Federalism prevents the Dept of Ed. from doing very much in America. Most things are left up to local school boards, or sometimes State Boards of Education

Good idea, but do you know any direct useful resources for investigating that? For starters, I'd be limited to English speaking countries (linguistics is not my strong suit). Britain, Canada, Australia, maybe South Africa, maaaaybe India. Second, I doubt those have an easy summary of what they do as explained to a foreigner...

You might try to hit up the /int/ board for that kind of info. Otherwise, see if you can find some youtube videos of education conferences. Governments are often keen to use conferences as an opportunity to lay out their agenda.

bump

Right so I have been designing a rules light horror system that involves the use of only d6 dice.

I have been working on it on and off while I do my studies and uni and shit, but through my local gaming group, game shop and online gaming group I have had about 20 different people playtest it and say they enjoy it. With their help I have been able to streamline/ improve various aspects.

Of course having people you know critique you inst always good because of obvious bias, so I figure anonymous people on the internet ripping me apart would offer a fresh perspective.

docs.google.com/document/d/1T9-Jd5nQ85NoHy1neITy26jWHpqPZs8MGR63O4kyJDg/edit#

In this link comments are enabled so you can rip apart my grammer, rules and so on and hopefuly from this I can further improve this system.

I will also be able to answer questions on mechanics, design decisions etc.

Is it a good or bad idea for the first game I'm planning to DM to be purely homebrewed? It's a lot of work, but other than that, what are other issues I might face?

If with published games sometimes the GM must improvise, with a homebrewed one the chances are higher.

>A decrease in racial tension is what you should get with proper education (or so do I believe).

Universities are hotbeds of racial tensions.

Aite /gdg/, asking y'all since I trust Veeky Forums more that I do /v/ (and I still have no idea what Veeky Forums is since I'm an old man).

I'm starting work on a vidja along the lines of KD:M or Monster Hunter, and am looking for a tabletop system of some sort that can provide a framework for making a balanced system. I know GURPS is an option, albeit a clunky one, but I'm looking for other systems that could be a little less work to design with balance between the hunters and monsters.

Well, almost anything is better than DnD. Hopefully you've at least PLAYED before right? And read other systems books on GMing?

I can't seem to recall the central mechanics of Monster Hunter. Wasn't the core element training and feeding captured monsters? Mostly I remember a one eyed monster and the Playstation insisting the game disc was a magical artifact.

Tbh, Tabletop tends to shy away from summoner types because they're too intensive to work with most of the time. It can be done if the player is motivated to keep all their cards up to date, but its a pain in the ass and can slow things down when there's too many peons on the table.

You are thinking Monster Farmer.
Monster hunter is the one with oversized weapons made out of monster parts.

1-4 player boss rush against raptors, wyverns, giant crabs, and even bigger crap, grinding them to make new armor and weapons to fight even bigger things.

Ah that's right. Monster Rancher. My mistake.

Ok, so basically you're just looking to make a raid boss then?

As a homebrew designer, I've dissected a lot of systems and many of them don't make even a cursory effort at balance. Wizards, Paizo, and White Wolf at least are all guilty of this. I've never gotten into miniatures, so GW will have to speak for itself.

As far as I'm concerned, there's no substitute for EVs. Average damage mitigated by probability of hit. A single player making multiple attacks per round can make that a bit tedious to analyze given all the possible weapons and buffs they could have. An entire party even more tedious. But if you want genuine balance, that's the work you have to put in. It isn't easy. How many years did it take Blizzard to get D3 balanced? It was shit for at least 2 years, and a hack and slash should be nothing BUT balanced combat.

For anything sophisticated you're going to need to program, but for a vidja designer that shouldn't be an issue. Basically the balance will be as good as your test cases.

Things get more difficult to balance when you start comparing apples to melons. Comparing DPS (and the reverse- defensive) options is relatively simple compared to analyzing the value of control options. Things that target action economy for instance are not so easily fungible. Stun locking for instance can quickly become god tier. The broken thing about wizards in DnD is that they specialize in ending encounters with a single spell- but not usually by directly killing the enemy so much as rendering it pointless.

I'm not sure there's a better way to evaluate these other than playtesting. Literally, beta testing is how most major designers seem to attempt this- but at the very least it would be worth alpha testing. If you wanted to try and make a concrete analysis, you'd need to calculate opportunity cost, which can be done. For instance veteran grognards know that DPS weakly dominates healing.

Thanks, that actually gives me something to start with instead of staring a blank screen thinking my comp sci degree was a poor decision for game dev.

Happy to help. Sorry I couldn't give you an easier answer.

I'm btw, if you've got any ideas for my dilemma.

I'm starting to wonder if there's a lack of depth in my design. The idea being that you want to find good candidates for each Cabinet position, but largely that's just finding square pegs to fit square holes and round pegs for round holes. Because the end result contributes a single variable (which out of 7 departments is quite enough variables) there's no dynamic tradeoffs for any given candidate. They're either qualified or they're not.

I do something like this in my game. Every class has a focus and a move. The focus is an archetypal behavior of that class while the move is a signature ability. Your focus gives you, well, focus that power your move.

For example, the thief's focus is Rob Blind. When you come out ahead after a trick, hoodwink, deception, or otherwise gain an underhanded upper hand, you gain a focus token.

The thief's move is Swindle. The thief can spend his focus tokens to pull off sleights of hand without rolling. Spending 1 FT might allow you to pickpocket someone without a chance of them noticing, while 5 FT might allow you to slip them a potent poison.

This way you create a loop of archetypal behavior -> performing to role -> creating more opportunities for archetypal behavior.

Does this sound a little too condescending to include in my GM chapter? The game basically has GM moves similar to PbtA.

>OVERWHELM THEM
>This is your hammer when the players begin to look like nails. When you absolutely positively need to move the conversation forward for whatever reason, create an overwhelming situation that forces the group to move on. Perhaps the building they are in has caught fire, or the crowd has turned on the protagonists after the magistrate defamed them.
>Players can sometimes become fixated on unimportant details or paralyzed by indecision - this is your way of forcing their hand, making them take action. Overwhelm Them is a great tool to use in conjunction with Create An Opportunity; you can let them spin their wheels a bit, panicking, then provide a way out.

I do find it off putting, but that is more from being caged in a set of dorky formalized pokémon moves.

Have you ever played a PbtA game before?

What's your favorite way of summarizing a character's personality? Older games simply used their alignment, FATE and Risus ask you to describe them in a few aspects/cliches, and Burning Wheel has specific types of facts to give about each character. Which do you prefer?

Right now my game asks players to provide:

>Identity: A short title that describes how they see the character
>Purpose: What the character sees as their greatest goal in life, their raison d'etre
>Trouble: The character's biggest flaw that keeps them from achieving their purpose
>Three flags, additional statements that describe anything else about a character, such as their philosophy, beliefs or fears

What's more intuitive:

>you have three attributes
>three of them are set to 3, one is set to 4
>roll 1d6, try to get equal to or less than your attribute

>you have three attributes
>three of them are set to 0, one is set to +1
>roll 1d6, try to get 4 or higher
>if using your +1 stat, add +1 to the die

anydice.com/program/aef3

These options are mathematically identical as far as I can tell. The former is pretty straightforward, but it might be weird to start at 3, whereas the latter asks you to do math every time you roll.

Roleplay,
Just talking to players and GM.
Nothing more honestly.

bumping this query.

What if candidates have agendas, which translates to new action options but also effects other departments? You have to find synergies for a given course. You form the government like a "build".

A +1 isn't really math. That said, I'd go with the first one.

Look d20 Iron Heroes. Most work on this token pattern.