/gdg/ - Game Design General

I think having baselines would be nice but having the option to also build their own story would be nice and after reading I think separate books might be better. Maybe you could have a book with already generated campaigns for those who want to explore the world through your vision and then have guidelines to help build their own while keeping it in the same realm of the original

I understand the concept, but without context of the rest of the game, I'm not sure how it'd work out.

There are no life points. You win by either by using a big creature to defeat the enemy avatar, or by causing the enemy to run out of cards in their deck. Decks can be attacked by minions, and a successful attack seals the top card of that deck by a degree equal to the minion's strength(effectively milling 1 + minion strength). This isn't a very quick way to win by itself against a deck with 40 cards, but combining a big hit with a card that does something like "Return the root of target seal to its owner's hand, then double seal each of its links." can really do work.

Ah, okay. Interesting idea.

Also, most cards that interact with seals, with the exception of "defusers", will be modal in the sense that you can reasonably use them on either your own seals or enemy seals.

How can I achieve statistical, number based balance in my game?
I want things to curve properly as levels/stats increase.

Learn about dice curves.

This is good advice. I'd suggest playing around in anydice to see how dice rolls curve and what results you get from different combinations. This should help with understanding how things should scale and what impact each addition or change has on the rolls.

I'm coming back to my RPG after half a year of focusing on a different project. I'm really enjoying the process of shuffling around the parts to make the whole thing better.

I had a hard time figuring out how to distinguish skills and what I ended up calling "generic abilities" like acrobatics, investigation, sprint, etc. I don't have a class system and I hate how DnD does it.

Generic abilities use the lowest of their required stats to determine dice rolled. Many skills have multiple required stats, meaning you can't perform well when you're hurt or impaired. That's the important thing to me. A nice juicy death spiral that players have to respect

Bump

Let's have us a bump!

I think you're probably right, in the main book (The L.E.M.S. Codex) I'm pretty sure I'll put the overarching details about the town and the people, then have a separate book with "adventure modules" for different groups to get into the setting and make their own plots from there.

I'm thinking of calling adventure modules "Episodes." It just sorta feels right.

How did you end up distinguishing them from each other? Do you have any material you could post?

That sounds like a great idea and calling them episodes fits perfect. This just keeps sounding better the further it comes along

How many rounds should combat take? Note that the amount of time a combat takes is this number, times the number of players, times how long a player turn takes, and that includes the time they take to realize it's their turn.

Say a combat should take 5 rounds. That means that the average damage a character does per round should be about one fifth of max HP. If attacks are 80% accurate, that's one fourth of HP per hit. If attacks are 80% accurate and the average encounter has a way to prevent an attack entirely (say using forced movement), that means you need one third of HP per hit. Also notice that preventing attacks ends up being the same as giving extra HP.

As characters level, does the number of rounds to fight a same-level opponent stay the same? Accuracy? The HP/Damage ratio? Number of attack-preventing abilities?

How many level one characters does it take to challenge a level two character? A level three character? Etc. Is there a breakpoint where a level ten character could fight an unlimited number of level one opponents without harm?

Once you've answered these questions (rounds, typical distribution of hit/miss/bullshit in combat, how these change, how different level characters are supposed to balance), you can math everything out.

Combat concept I'm working on:

The entire combat is a series of fixed stages: ambush, ranged, melee, and close. The party with initiative goes first in each stage, and within a party characters can go in any order. Once a stage is over, combat moves to the next one, though there are a handful of abilities out there that force stages to repeat. Only characters that passed an opposed skill roll can act in the ambush stage. The close stage repeats until the combat is over (which should rarely be many times because close is extremely deadly).

I have a bunch of cool things I can do with this, like the wizard taking two stages to cast a spell and needing someone to hold the line so the combat doesn't get to close range before then.

There's a couple things I want to do that end up splitting the party. I'm looking for a way to unify the rules for these.
- The Ranger shoots an arrow that pins someone to a tree. Their party can repeat the ranged stage, or leave them behind for a round (they won't participate in melee, and will catch up if melee repeats).
- The Rogue uses the ambush stage to immediately appear in close range during the party's ranged stage. They make an attack, then use more Rogue bullshit to slip back out into melee range instead of being dogpiled. Whoever isn't presently being shanked by the Rogue should be able to participate in the ranged round.
- Centaurs can repeat ranged stages by running away while firing. If they're in a party with a minotaur who is okay with standing there holding the line, what happens?

I found a thing for people who want to put together PDFs but don't want to get into inDesign

homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/

That's... pretty awesome.

I'm working on the material now, nothing is ready to share yet.

I basically created categories of skills you can learn, and ones that don't need to be learned. So combat would be a category of learned skill, but generic abilities aren't learned so you only improve them by having better stats and/or having some extra bonus trait.

This is ridiculously cool. I'll definitely try this once I have my shit together

Had another card game idea. This time, for the combat effectiveness of permanents.

Each permanent has three printed values: [Base Charges] Strength/Limit. Strength determines the outcome of a battle, limit determines how high something's strength is allowed to go, and base charges is how many charges the permanent starts with. At any time, any permanent has the ability to expend one of its charges to increase its strength by 1 for the turn. Cards can also have other abilities that cost charges.

Effects can raise or lower a permanent's strength and limit, can give or take charges from permanents(also resetting their strength in the case of taking), and can reset a permanent's charge amount to its base charges. If a temporary effect tries to raise a permanent's strength above its limit, it will stop at the limit and raising the limit later on in the turn will not cause the strength to go up. For example, a 5/6 permanent can expend two charges for bonus strength, but it will not go above 6, even when you play a card later in the turn that raises the permanent's limit above 6. You have to raise the limit before applying temporary strength boost. Continuous strength boosts do, however, update whenever the permanent's limit is increased. You could even have something like a 5/3 permanent that benefits from pure limit boosts.

Bampin

the way you write makes no fucking sense, what kind of game are you even describing

>Have idea for system that fulfills a niche, would probably be a relatively popular system if it gets polished enough
>Not another fantasy heartbreaker
>Not yet another generic system
>Know what I want to do with it
>Don't have motivation to write anything down so others can give opinions
>Just browse Veeky Forums all day instead
Why does this happen

Something like MtG but only using a single value to determine the outcome of combat between creatures instead of two values(power/toughness).

Back to ask for more item ideas for my polynesian RPG. Im looking for large item ideas. Things that would have to be carried in two hands or over one shoulder.

You lack the egotism necessary to fuel your ambitions. My own game design has been in the making for 7 years or so, and my belief in its greatness is only growing with each iteration and prototype.

I will Solve The Problems
I will Be The Greatest

Do you already have a giant oar, like for a boat? I imagine so, that would be the first thing that comes to my mind.

Is it fantasy or are you trying to go realistic?

That's happened to me so much, I can't even tell you. After designing ~10 games, this is the secret: Write the cool shit first, it's always easier and requires less motivation to get your (potentially) bad ass ideas on paper first, and fill in the gaps later.

Try this: Give us your resolution system. Just explain it in plain English, not like you're writing rules, but just tell us how it goes down.

youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8

Go do some game jams. Maybe crank out a stupid game for a cliche genre you have no respect for and do the whole thing in an hour. Get back to the idea you're stuck on later.

I'm trying to decide if I should just use a standard initiative system or something of my own design for the game I'm working on.
I want to get an extremely gritty and simultaneous feeling combat system, where having just that one initiative higher can mean the difference between doming an enemy and having to roll a new character. My idea is that players declare and "lock in" their actions after rolling initiative, with all actions being resolved in initiative order (it uses an action/reaction system for attack rolls). Characters would be able to take a hit to their initiative prior to their turn in order to change their actions. Combatants who are downed prior to their initiative turn still get to go, albeit with hefty penalties.
Too convoluted?

It's not too convoluted, but locked in actions quickly become fuzzy after a few actions have been resolved (especially movement), and you'll need to be careful with your rules for handling that, because they may quickly become convoluted.

Additionally, your system sometimes changes the initiative order, which is very slow. I've timed turns (with a stopwatch) and even with D&D-style fixed initiative, turn order concerns take up almost half the time of each player's turn.

Still could use thoughts on this.

I have been dreaming of an initiative system for a while, I'll explain below and feel free to use and abuse it. If I was designing a big boy system right now, I'd totally employ this.

So, instead of an initiative score, initiative is a resource.

There are no turns, but combat happens by each character and monster on the board "bidding" their initiative resource to take an action. Something like this --

>Assume, for purposes of example, everyone has 10 initiative
>Player 1 sorta wants to go right now, but isn't super worried about it.
>Monster 1 also wants to go
>Player 1 bids 2 initiative
>Monster 1 responds by raising, bidding 3 initiative
>Player 1 doesn't want to raise to 4
>No one else bids, so Monster 1 gets to take its turn
>Monster 1 moves and attacks Player 1*
>Player 1 tries to defends, fails, takes damage**
>Action has been resolved, so another bid takes place
>Monster 1 has 7 initiative left, Player 1 has 8 left
>Now that Monster 1 has attacked, it is vulnerable, so Player 1 really wants to go
>Player 1 bids 4, Monster 1 doesn't raise because it doesn't want to spend more than half current initiative
>Player 1 wins bid, attacks Monster 1, deals damage***
>Monster 1 has 7 initiative, Player 1 has 3 initiative

This goes on until no one has enough initiative to take an action, or no one wants to. Then, the "round" flips and everyone's initiative fills up back to max. Repeat until there's no more combat to do.

* You can build little mechanics in. For example, you can say that you have to bid minimum of 1 initiative in order to "move," and something like 1 more (for a total of 2) to additionally "attack."

** Here, Player 1 has a chance to defend the attack because he bid (even though he lost), so there's benefits for trying to win the bid and having to lose some of your initiative points

*** Here, Monster 1 didn't bid, so it doesn't get a chance to defend, it just takes the damage

>To be continued... character limit

It definitely needs to be fleshed out, but there is SO much room for building little mechanics in.

Going a little further, one thing I thought could be cool with this system is class abilities or special abilities based on the type of combat the character is doing.

For example, let's say there is some special sword flourish that does an extra 4 damage - one of the prerequisites could be that you have to minimum bid X initiative to accomplish it.

Same with "defense." Say every initiative point that you LOSE on a bid equals a bonus to your defense against any attacks that come your way from the bid winner.

I dunno, I have just always thought this could be an elegant "semi-continuous initiative" if done well.

Bump before bed

oWoD vampire had a similar initiative system where people would announce their actions in lowest-to-highest initiative order, and then actions would resolve from highest-to-lowest.

A lot of people didn't actually use it; the rules describing it were too verbose, and it significantly complicates something people already hate to do (creating and tracking initiative lists.)

Sounds like Warhammer. I've thought about doing this too, but the prospect of balancing and specifying the abilities of everything in terms of phases turned me off.

Now I'm moving ever closer to the OSR philosophy of loose rules and negotiated action

Thoughts?

I think I'm cursed. I'm basically incapable of thinking of good ideas that aren't horribly depressing, depressing to the point where rather than losing interest, I slowly stop designing the game makes me sad.

Notably I've tried to make a weird-noir-spy-mercenary or street level vigilante game with really brutal combat to the point where your opponents are frightened of you. It had a primarily trait based character generation system where it was assured that your character would turn out being a horribly broken, edgy, semi-insane freak. I had 3 d100 traits, good/advantages, bad/disadvantages and 'weird' tables.

The other more recent one was about mercenaries and adventurers in 1950s Africa but it could be used more or less whenever guns were available so I stated arquebuses and assault rifles along with some 40's and 50's weapons. I also included a scenario supposed to be set after operation unthinkable where the Soviet Union had collapsed into feuding warlord states. It would primarily take place in the Far East because all of the large European cities are radioactive ruins. The gimmick of the system was the characters had for all intents and purposes a psychopathy stat which had to be your highest roll at character generation unless your gym agreed otherwise. I almost had it working smoothly before I stopped, I just wanted to make a more realistic shooting rpg where fear and suppression and taking a human life were important to gameplay instead I made a psychopathy simulator. And I can't say that isn't entirely what I wanted.

This isn't a cry for help or anything! I was just wondering if anyone had any advice or tips?