>only made this because i had a question and i'm a prick If you're including both setting and gameplay information in one book, which should come first?
Nicholas Lewis
Alright, I struggle with this detail a lot--
I want to represent weapons with higher percussive qualities/momentum. This has been done in many systems and I'm not introducing anything very different narratively but curious to see how people seek to deal with these weapons themselves, or if they have any insight. The concept I have right now is that these would be very useful tools for disorienting or crippling foes. Additionally, I anticipate their impact would be deep; attacked shields and armor won't break but the human under them will still feel the concussion and even sustain injury. However, I've researched that bypassing shields was better done through pulling the shield away from its user with certain weapons (hooked polearms come to mind), instead of bashing it with something heavy and hoping the user's guard drops.
I think this generally covers the possible utilities of this weapon trait but if there's any other qualities worth bringing up (or correcting me on), I'd appreciate the input.
Jonathan Roberts
They're too heavy to practically carry around.
Thomas Cruz
I always go the disorienting way, like a penalty to attack and defense. I also tend to do it as a critical hit, to represent things like bashing away until their defense breaks, or a lucky hit that knocks the wind out of them.
Josiah Martinez
I'm trying to think of how to represent explosive or area weapons in my game. Standard for a lot of wargames is a specific template that is placed on the field to determine if models are hit, and it scatters if you miss. I have 2 ideas that work with that, and another that is templateless.
The first idea is to use a template and use 2 different scattering distances for whether you hit or miss. If the attack hits, the template scatters D6-2" in a random direction, but if you miss, it goes D6+1".
The second is similar, but with a distance that's the same for missing or hitting, but following the idea of the RoF system, you use the difference of the rolls to reduce distance; i.e. the template always scatters D6+3", but you reduce the distance an inch for each point you beat the defence roll by, so being 2 over would reduce the scatter by 2".
The last idea is just to remove templates and have it if you miss, you miss, but if you hit, everything within X" can also be hit.
Thoughts on which sounds better?
Hunter Bailey
I'm personally partial to your degree of success effecting the scatter, so your second option of three. It means that more accurate units represent that accuracy appropriately, and you don't have strange binary-hits for massive template weapons which would feasibly hit a portion of a given force.
Camden Russell
Yeah, that's what I'm leaning towards. The templateless version was leftover from a set of mechanics that didn't use separate hit and damage rolls.
Carson Stewart
Say you have a game like duel masters, but there is another value in addition to power called limit. This value is the ceiling on how high effects can bring the creature's power. My question is, what exactly could limit represent? What kind of creature has a high limit(relative to its power) vs a low limit? What kind of creature would have a base power higher than its own limit? What kind of effect increases limit more than power, what kind of effect increase power more than limit, what kind of effect increases both equally?
Robert Baker
I can think of a few ideas, but it comes down to fluff? I can see limit being more physical, while power be more aetheric, like prosthetics increase the possible power a creature can get, while invigorating energies bring the creature to its full potential, but can't push it past that.
I guess some examples would be something like Graft Limb would raise the limit of a creature, while Fury would increase power, and Giant Growth could do both.
Brandon Miller
Light setting in front, rules, then the rest of the setting. Lead with a teaser of what the fluff is, but don't unload all of it on the reader. It also makes finding rules easier if you don't have the extra bits to go through. Worst offenders are the ones that start each section with all the fluff related to that part of the rules. I'm looking at you, older GW rule books.
Lucas Nguyen
After this thread dies no one make a new one until Saturday. Let's all take the week to work on our projects and come back strong.
William Reyes
Hi /gdg/.
I'm having some doubts about one of my game's combat bits and in need of a second opinion.
The system is d100-based. Basically, every weapon has a "damage" rating which is a percentage, and every character has a "toughness" rating which is also a percentage. After the character is hit, an opposed test of "damage" vs "toughness" happens. If the attacker wins, the target gets a wound, which is some kind of a major injury - bullet wound, deep cut, broken bone, etc. If not, the hit's deflected, absorbed, grazes, or otherwise deals negligible damage which is not tracked at all. The maximum amount of wounds is in general the same for all characters and is defined by desired campaign lethality level.
So, what I'm stuck with is armor and bypassing it. I'm seeing two ways of handling it - as a chance to negate a hit or a wound, or as a bonus to the "tougness" rating. One adds an additional roll, which slows stuff down, and another feels too generic and adds more numbers to track. Armor piercing, respectively, would be a rating to oppose the negation chance, or negate the toughness bonus.
Any advice? I'm aiming for a rules-medium classless skill-based soft-ish sci-fi RPG about exceptional people in extraordinary circumstances, if that matters.
Kevin Jones
Is there such a thing as a set of rules to play roleplaying games in imageboards?
By "playable in imageboards", I mean a game where random people can play anonymously without having to be online at the same time, where it also doesn't demand a lot of organization.
What changes to the design of imageboards would facilitate such a game?
Caleb Foster
So a creature with base power higher than its base limit would be like an expert fighter that you have summoned without any equipment.
Elijah Green
Nothing wrong with generic if it works. I'd personally go with the addition to toughness and AP reducing that bonus. Its simple and yeah, numbers to track, but not difficult ones if done right.
Levi Sanders
>done right That's the thing, that's why I'm here. If I go with that, all armors would either feel samey or would be a nightmare to stat and track.
Since this is a sci-fi game, let's say handheld laser weapons exist. There may be a piece of armor that protects well against lasers but not against bullets, so it would have two bonus values, or a special statement that it doesn't protect against bullets. And other stuff like that.
Kayden Harris
That can be handled with keywords. In your example, you could say the armor is energy resistence, so it only works on energy attacks. While something like flakk armor could be physical resistence, so bullets would be physical and it'd work on it, but laser ignore it. And you could put on multiple keywords.
Depending on how many damage types, you could go with the multiple types. If its only 2 or 3, that's not hard to manage. Keep the armor universal, don't worry about hit location unless its a special effect, like a helmet that gives protection from stun effects. That way you only track the sum of those numbers, cutting down on bookkeeping.
Michael Butler
Well, that's what I'm talking about. A character would effectively have multiple "toughness" values, each against its own damage type, even if it's not explicit. I'd prefer not to have that.
Jaxon Jenkins
Why not though? Toughness would be your base "armor" that applies to every kind of damage. Then, each armor would have different defenses for each of the different attack types, but the calculation is still just Tough+Specific Defense which is as simple as you can get.
Austin Gonzalez
I'll consider that. Maybe I'll even just stop differentiating damage types and say that since they are all equally common, most armor protects against equally well from all of them. Armored vests are almost always reflective by themselves, or are so tough that a railgun bullet and a laser blast would do about the same amount of damage, or something like that, and only rare specific cases differ from that. And those rare specific cases just don't work as armor against certain attacks.
Cooper Bennett
Ey, Ive posted it a billion times but mining cant hurt: Im making a polynsian RPG and I need ideas for 2-slot items, meaning they must be carried either in two hands or over one shoulder.
Caleb Hernandez
It depends on how you want the game to play. Personally, I think it would be thematic for armor to have its own toughness rating and health/number of wounds. Each time it fails it takes a hit, and you roll again, taking damage each time it fails until it either stops the hit or runs out. This rewards tough charters, but still makes armor useful for them (though less so than more fragile characters).
That fits with my personal philosophy on ttrpg combat: it should always either serve a narrative purpose or provide tension via resource attrition. Having armor function in the way described above makes it effectively a resource which can contribute to that attrition.
Lucas Davis
Yes. We have that on Veeky Forums. Its called /qst/
Brayden Wood
It depends on how lethal the game is, and therefore how important having fair consequences is. I use a simplified system for the games I run which use any kind of AoE, and that is to assume that a missed shot either goes short or long, which has the potential of damaging the shooter or at the very least screwing with their position. Basically, instead of scattering you roll to hit, and if you fail you move the template either closer or farther away by a increment related to the degree to which the shot failed to connect. Whether the shot goes over or under the aim distance can be determined either by a die roll or by whether the shot is inside or outside of half the weapon's maximum range. The second option has the added benefit of making using AoE weapons at close range even more dangerous, which can help to balance melee or CQB combat.
Charles Ortiz
Creatures that are unnaturally empowered (demons, creatures in mechs or something) would have power beyond their own limit, while heroic or somehow destined characters would have power far lower than their limit.
Dominic Fisher
The way I use these in games I design is that they stagger the target when they hit, regardless of damage, but stagger the user when they miss. Its a very clean system.
Andrew Jenkins
>(demons, creatures in mechs or something) Something POSSESSED by a demon maybe, but I don't see how demons themselves, or mechs make sense.
In addition to power and limit, there would also be something called charges. Each creature has a number of charges that it's summoned with. All creatures have the ability to spend charges to increase their power by that much for one turn. But it's more obvious what having few or lots of charges would represent.
Ayden King
I thought of that, and that's a whole another can of worms. I do like the destructible armor idea, but that's not a mechanic I'd use. It adds more rolls AND more numbers, to both of which I'm opposed. Something simpler would better. Like, the toughness bonus decreases with successful hits. Or, even simpler, armor counts as extra wound "slots", which are taken first and are described as armor being damaged. Maybe even take a page from SW d20 and make crits ignore that.
Oliver Cook
Well, there's got to be a pyrrhic element to being a demon where you can only draw power from evil. And I was talking about a dude IN a mech.
So, while I understand being turned off to the idea, allow me to argue against those other options. One reason to not have armor with a declining value is that you need to track the value and systematize the decline in usability. Second, just allowing extra wounds doesnt give you quite as much room for variety and it doesnt do a good job of inherently representing armor penetration the way the system I described does.
Also, its literally a scientifically observable fact that the more dice people roll the more fun they have.
Christian Nguyen
Lots of dice in one roll are all good. Several rolls with just two are an exact opposite of that, as experience shows. It slows things down a lot in the long run.
Anthony Thompson
I wouldnt anticipate it being that bad, say that you have a stab-vest that has 3-wounds and an armor rating of 30. You get shot with a burst of gunfire and they roll high, you roll 3 quick times, fail all but one and just barely survive. Done. I suppose rolling D100 takes longer than serially rolling single dice, but I wouldnt think that would be a huge problem.
Honestly, having armor be a flat wounds boost is a bad idea on its face because it means tough characters get much more out of armor than weak ones, which is the opposite of the point of armor.
Grayson Diaz
So what you propose is this: we'll need a to-hit roll, then an armor piercing roll, then an armor damage roll, and only then a damage roll. That's four opposed rolls for just one attack. Every attack. A firefight would be a nightmare.
Ayden Hall
My understanding was you compared a hit roll with a defense roll. Is that not the case?
What I was suggesting is having a hit roll, then rolling the armor with is own defense statistic, and each time it fails you roll again until either it stops the hit or it breaks and you get to roll your own toughness. If thats incorrect can you better explain the exact sequence of events in a single combat hit?
Xavier Morris
The idea was that all rolls are opposed. So first would be a to-hit roll opposed by "dodge" roll, and if the attacker wins, second would be a "damage"roll opposed by "toughness" roll. If the defender wins, nothing happens, if the attacker wins, defender is wounded.
The question is how to factor armor into that.
Leo Cooper
Ok, so, character gets hit, we move on to damage.
Roll damage, and just have that as a set number. Now roll your armor using its own unique toughness value. if it fails, it loses one point and you roll again until you either stop the shot or you go on to rolling your own toughness. I like that system because it incorporates armor penetraton simply by virtue of the armor's inherent "toughness" and allows you to come up with different types of armor for max balance. You could have crappy metal plates that had one wound and high toughness, or an EOD suit with 10 wounds and medium toughness. Im not sure how lethal your game is though. I would agree that if the average character has more than 8 wounds then a system like that would drag things out horribly.
An alternative would be to have armor act as a toughness buff with its own wound pool that drops by 1 each time a wound goes through. I just really dont like armor being a flat bonus and nothing else. It needs to be a resource, and the natural way to deplete it would be to have it fail. If you wanted to add another layer of BS you could have armor piercing weapons which would damage armor any time they scored a hit, whether they wounded or not.
Cooper Jones
That adds a lot of rolls to a single attack, possibly going to double-digits. I don't want ten rolls to resolve each gunshot.
>An alternative would be to have armor act as a toughness buff with its own wound pool that drops by 1 each time a wound goes through.
I said tgat already, see : >the toughness bonus decreases with successful hits.
Zachary Anderson
Decreasing the bonus with successive hits is too complicated in my book because you'd need to systematize it and its far easier to remember "-1" rather than some carefully balanced modulus.
Also, using the former scheme would only cause double-digit rolls if you had armor with nearly double digit wounds.
How many wounds can an average character take?
Evan Price
Three to five for a regular human. Up to seven for cyborgs, droids, aliens, and other extra tough things. More is vehicle, building and special cases territory.
Anthony Martin
Yeah. Im not sure where you're getting "double digit rolls" from then. If you give crap armor a single wound, medium two, and great armor 3 then adjust their unique toughness values based on material then you're at 5 rolls max for one hit, and that, mind you, is a hit which blows through all armor meaning you wont get to roll it again. You can modulate the toughness values as well to make sure you get armor thats as effective as you want it to be.
Robert Foster
Just got an idea for the skeleton of an outcome determining system.
Every task has a difficulty and a base success roll. When an actor attempts a task, they add the roll from at least one of their aspects to the base success roll of the task. They can add rolls from more of their aspects(if applicable to the task) to increase the chance of success, but the WAY in which they succeed or fail depends on which aspect roll is the highest. The base success roll of a task acts to control how much impact throwing more aspects into the attempt has.
Throwing your Brutality aspect roll in with your Diplomacy aspect roll to convince somebody of something may make you nearly certain to succeed, but the result will not be pretty if Brutality rolls higher than Diplomacy, and it will be uglier still if Brutality overtakes Diplomacy AND you fail the attempt anyway.
There could also be perks or whatever about increasing or decreasing a roll purely for the purpose of determining the dominant aspect in an action's outcome.
Dominic Rivera
That would get very irritating very fast. Sensible people solve problems with discrete approaches, not by throwing different aspects at a wall. If you design a system to require bonuses from at least two aspects, its going to turn the game into manic kabuki theater. I like the idea, but its not an abstraction of real life.
Jackson Martinez
You can still solve things sensibly, you just have the option of resorting to unsensible means. Even then, there is still a chance that the end result will be something reasonable. Being willing to resort to violence may be what allows a non-violent resolution.
You could also imagine this system representing something else all together. The main point being the ability to sacrifice predictability of the outcome, for more chance to succeed.
Landon Martinez
I like the idea of augmenting a roll's success in exchange for unpredictability, but I think you would need to bring it around into a better filled out system. Perhaps you could incorporate the sort of "yes, and" mechanics that Edge of the Empire has (which I can describe if you're not familiar) and use the secondary attributes as color for those effects?
Levi Anderson
So I kinda ripped off FF's "limit" mechanics for my RPG system. Anyway I got to test the system for the first time yesterday and it actually went pretty well (I'll post the Gdoc link when it looks more like an RPG system and less like a series of indecipherable ramblings scratched into the cell wall of a mental asylum). The limit mechanic gave combat a very interesting tempo, and it created the situation where characters could pretty much operate at peak efficiency as long as they maintained said tempo, no matter how badly crippled their characters were. Obviously I'm not going for any sort of realism here, but the whole group did find it fun.
Anyway now that I'm moving on to actually writing this bitch up I'm looking for a more suitable name than "limit" which was always just a placeholder for a mechanic that I wasn't even sure I wanted to keep originally. I want something that will make my game a little more distinct and not just make people think that the whole thing is some sort of FF rip off when really only that one part is inspired by it. Especially since the MAIN focus of the system is on the opposed dice roll mechanic I came up with which is completely unique as far as I know.
Given what I said about how the "limit" functioned I'm thinking of calling it something along the lines of "Tempo" or "Momentum". The only problems with these is that I am considering allowing "limit" to be used out of combat also (yesterday's session was mostly focused around combat so I didn't get a good look at how non combat skills intersected with "limit", except that the players seemed reluctant to use their precious "limit" points out of combat) And so "tempo" may not be a particularly suitable name if this mechanic will be used in out of combat situations also. On the other hand as I said I'm not going for realism and a name is just a name at the end of the day.
Well anyway if you've got any ideas for what to call this mechanic and resource I'd be glad for the advice.
Hunter Carter
Tempo and Momentum are both fine. Drive, Pressure, Overload, or Surge might work.
What's the opposed roll mechanic?
Connor James
Those are some good ones to consider.
Basically the idea behind the dice rolling mechanic is that every roll is opposed by another roll, even against inanimate objects, so no fixed DCs. And that there is some possibility of being beaten every time your character does anything, so you don't get to walk around in combat on you turn hitting things with impunity.
Each skill is represented by a primary attribute (x) and secondary attribute (y) "x/y" meaning you roll x dice and add y to each roll, then compare each dice to your opponent's dice in order. Since I'm shit at explaining, here's an example.
Me and you are fighting, my Fighting skill is 3/2, your fighting skill is 2/3
I attack, rolling an 8, 4 and 1, which become 10, 6 and 3 once I've added my secondary attribute
you roll your fighting skill to defend getting 6 and 4 which become 9 and 7 after adding your secondary attribute.
First we compare our highest dice 10 v 9 - I get a strike
Second highest 6 v 7 - you get a strike
Now since I still have one die and you don't, you get a "dummy die" which means you act as though you rolled ones for all the remaining dice. After adding your secondary attribute it becomes a 4. 3 v 4 - you beat me, but since it's a dummy die, you don't score a strike, merely stop me from scoring a strike.
So we each got one strike, dealing one damage to each other.
CONT...
Jackson Myers
...INUED
Out of combat, the rolling method still applies. Take lockpicking as a typical example. You only need a certain amount of strikes to unlock the door, but each strike scored AGAINST you by the door makes it take five minutes longer.
Navigating through a forest. Each strike you scored is one kilometre of progress, every strike the forest scores is an extra half an hour.
Social combat. Scoring a strike lets you convince your target, but each strike he gets lets him impose some condition on you or his cooperation.
Rolling a knowledge check. The GM assigns some score based on the obscurity of the knowledge. Each strike you get gets you a bit more information, each strike against you may give you a piece of false information.
I should note though that I've limited these dice pools to 5 dice, any more than that translate into rerolls instead, since comparing huge handfuls of dice would bog everything down, while in my playtesting with my group I found that comparing 4 dice is easy and 5 is just pushing the boundary of bogging the game down. Not to say that rolling five dice is going to be a common occurrence. Starting characters will mostly be rolling two to four dice for their best skills. With 4 only being possible by applying the "limit" boosts and such that I mentioned in my previous post until characters advance enough that their stats allow them to roll four dice naturally.
I did actually post in another thread a while ago about this rolling mechanic, although my system has developed a long way since then. (It was literally just a method of rolling back then)
Tyler Perry
Late night bump.
Joseph Sanchez
Alright lads, i must decide what sort of encumbrance system to use for my systems, so i figured i'd ask what systems you guys like.
Do you prefer to track the weight of every item separately or do you like that thing when you track weight abstractly by carrying x items based on your STR?
Colton Richardson
Be a fucking maverick and do neither.
Different sized packs have different "encumbrance penalties". Then print out different sized grids for each pack, print out tokens for each item, and players have to physically for everything in their packs.
I would be impressed if you actually ran a game like that.
Noah Roberts
...
Grayson Russell
This kind of RE4 stuff would be actually pretty sick but requires a lot of prep beforehand in order to print out tokens and stuff. I like this idea, but it's not very practical in an RPG where you can make up a nigh infinite number of objects. I can see it being fun for a board game though, just not an RPG.
I like the way LOTFP handles it and am considering lifting and adapting it. The thing is, I'm designing a post-apoc RPG where the focus is on having to manage scarce resources; while i think the LOTFP approach is easier, I'm wondering if it shouldn't be best to let the players manage their stuff organically. Then again, the latter might just be a giant hassle, so maybe abstracting the whole process is indeed the way to go.
Jacob Rogers
Neither. I use a slotted inventory system. It is a simple solution which promotes inventory hygiene and boils items down to the essentials.
Gavin Hall
Momentum is identical to the concept of initiative in combat lingo.
Isaac Carter
>slotted inventory system could you elaborate? I'm curious
Grayson Howard
Its for a polynesian themed game. You have five slots. Two hands, two shoulders/back, one belt. Everyone also has a pouch that they can use to hold small, incidental items should they wish. The result is what I like to call Inventory Hygiene. Anything they have is there because they need it, and an open slot is a gambit that you may find something you want to bring home.
I use the same system for my Ork ttrpg: meanest an da greenest.
For more tactical games I usually expand the system to allow three belt slots.
The system operates on a grid so that you can only hold so many two-slot items. I usually allow backpacks which trade both back slots for three individual slots, allowing characters to carry more but sacrifice their ability to carry large items.
Aaron Barnes
That's quite interesting. It seems to me this system forces the players to weight their options carefully and think about what they want to carry, so they'll probably end up outfitting specifically for the task, correct?
What happens if your player have a horse/mule/wagon?
Jayden Wright
A beast of burden or a helper can only hold two slots worth of items, as they need to carry their own supplies. A wagon can hold three, or be upgraded to hold more. That said, I rarely use this system in games with those sorts of options. The key is to have a clear division between travelling space and operating space. In travelling space you can allow a few extra inventory slots for extra equipment and loot. This would be open countryside (or ocean in the case of my current project), but you wouldnt bring a donkey into a cave, or a dungeon, or even into a haunted wood, either because it would be impractical or simply because he would not follow you. Obviously you have to abstract these distinctions from your players, but keeping those lines in mind is important if you give them other ways of carrying things.
Gavin White
I'll keep this system in mind, it sounds nice.
Jason Jackson
It works very well. It doesnt hold up to certain playstyles, but it functions well given my DMing philosophy. Equipment should only be a direct means to an end, or the subject of attrition. There is no narrative value in meaningless stockpiling. However, you can make abstractions within the system. For example, I once had a player who made a sword-master character and I allowed him to fill his entire inventory with a harness of several dozen swords so that he could never be disarmed for very long. If you remember to treat inventory slots as a resource, you can always allow players to trade that resource for blanket benefits like that.
