/gdg/ - Game Design General

Having extensively Diaspora (FATE) I agree that Consequences are the most thematic form of injury tracking.

The top design looks the tightest, but there's something to be said for the octagonal layout.

Yes, I prefer the octagon for thematic reasons. Not only does it illustrate the dichotomy of each opposing rune (i.e. fire vs water), it illustrates how the diagonal runes are "derived from" the elemental runes (i.e. man is the master of fire and earth, beasts are masters of sea and air; fire and air destroy life, earth and water nurture the harvest). Maybe something like this? Starting to get complicated again though.

lmao stolen

Do it familia, I can't stop you. What are you working on?

What's the cutoff for "rules light", "rules medium" and "rules heavy"?

My book is about 50 pages right now, but I'd estimate at least half is advice and philosophy as opposed to actual game mechanics.

I need help with building a 1v1 adventure I'm making. I might codify it into a system later. This adventure needs to be different because it is for my girl who is sick with anemia and can't do much. She wants to play Wonder Woman.

She likes to investigate and find the best decision. She doesn't like having to keep track of stats and numbers, and doesn't want to learn a system. I'm having trouble framing the adventure for investigation rather than combat, and I wondered if you guys could give me some writing examples I could model my encounters after.

She's more of a feeler than a thinker and I really just want her to start feeling good for a change.

Have you looked into Gumshoe? It's a fairly light investigative system, and at the very least you could glean a lot of insight about investigative adventures by reading it.

Hope you both get well soon.

hmmmm

i'd say rules-light is everyone is john, rules-medium is dnd 5e, rules-heavy is shadowrun 3e

Thank you. The problem is that my construction isn't very good and I am stuck. I have Wonder Woman going to the military base for help with her crashed jet. But I can't seem to frame it right. The soldiers are wary because a powerful female (a villain named The Cheetah) stole Stinger missiles from the base and they think it might be Wonder Woman. But I need her to not fight the military men, because plausibly she'll either maul them, or get knocked out somehow, and I can't think of how to make that work. Talking about it helps me think of possibilities, though...

Maybe she has someone to vouch for her, or discovers some clue that convinces the military to work with her?

Yes, but then I need my player to _not_ choose to fight them... I need to reframe the situation so that fighting them doesn't come up, but I'm having ttrouble thinking of a way.

>What is the best place to be in terms of "addative bonus relevancy" vs "luck relevancy"
System dependent. An even balance is popular and nice, but there's no reason it can't be more luck or less luck dependent. Also, Averages alone don't mean much, so consider how the dice and mods interact at the minimum and maximum values also.

I'm gonna go ahead and call that "rules medium-light".

Fifty pages, with game-running advice, seems to be minimal on actual rules but enough to produce a flavor. Which is, from my perspective, a good place to be.

I'm looking for a nice dicepool system that I can hack for my own game, any recommendations ? I want a simple enough system that doesn't make things end up in dice buckets like pic related, I also don't want something that makes you roll 4 times for a single combat action (like in the Old World of Darkness).

you could replicate WoD and make combat rules from scratch

"i'm gonna grab this thing that works and i like and fix the things i don't like" is the premise for like half the games and videogames in the market right now

It's hard to generalize what rules-weight is, especially from writing standpoint.

Hell, my own game has about as much words as RISUS but the difference in rules-complexity and similarly robustness is staggering. It's all about how you use your pages, like how you say.

25 pages of rules, if it's just rules, sounds like rules-medium to me, honestly. Because if you take something like D&D 5e and distill just the rules, it's about 25 pages long. It just has a lot of fluff and additional content in between. And my game's rules are like 6-10 pages long in A4 (Depending on font size, I use a much bigger font than RISUS), and it's somewhere in the grey area between rules-light and rules-medium.

The most important part though, is to focus on making the game feel good and feel like it has enough options to justify its weight. If you make a complex game where still basically the only thing you can do in combat is walk next to the enemy and whale on it, there might be a problem.

I can't bring myself to give you recommendations just off-the-cuff, because I would like to know what kind of game you're making first. The resolution system needs context, and that context is the game. A resolution system that works with X won't work with Y.

You can look at Legends of the Wulin to see this. The resolution system works very differently than most (you roll before choosing what to do, and can do multiple things with a single roll), but it works due to the game itself being about kung-fu, where careful consideration of your actions is very in line with how the it is perceived in the world. It wouldn't work in a fast and gritty game, because it's slow and meticulous in nature.

So, what is your game about, user? Tell me that and I can throw you a bone.

I'd go with rules-medium. Rules light for me feels like anything that's around a dozen pages, rules medium is less than a 100, and rules heavy is anything more. But it also comes down to how the actual rules work. Rules light always feel more free-form to me, while the heavier the rules, the more rigid and precise they are.

While I generally agree with , there are a few dice pool systems that are simple enough you can inject them into likewise simple games.

MouseGuard has a nice core mechanic: roll a number of d6 equal to the relevant skill and count the number of fours, fives or sixes rolled. If you got more successes than the Ob (obstacle rating) set by the GM, you succeed; otherwise, something bad happens. You're often rolling for the outcome of entire scenes, or at least big enough chunks that stuff happens as opposed to rolling for every six seconds of action (ie D&D). Short, simple, easy.

So I understood it to be Rune is kinda like a 'regular' stat (or, the one that's being tested) and Heroism is this ever-present sort of 'luck' stat (although actually tied to narrative, which imo is a pretty great idea).

"No, but" and "Yes, and" are both results of the test which are coming with a positive twist of fate, while the other two are the opposite. What you could do is have the Rune be the roll-to-beat. If it's roll-under then anything below the number is a Yes, and anything above is a No. Then, anything within [Heroism] from the Rune number gives you one of the positive twists, and anything more than than gives you a negative twist. Or if you want to preserve the neutral results, more than double away from it gives you the negative twist. The idea here is that if you're heroic enough, then some of that chance for bad things just gets cut off.

I have no idea how well that will run, though. Just throwing out an idea.

I've been leaning toward making the stats 1-9 and using two differently-colored d10, one being success/failure and one being positive/negative twist.

However, I would like to keep the percentile flavor if possible. Normally I wouldn't care but this is kind of intentionally "retro" (RuneQuest).

I've talked about my game one time in Veeky Forums here's the thread

Then here's an idea: d% where the individual numbers and doubles matter.

doubles = good twist
1s over 10s = nothing (ex. 67, 24, 29, 19, 58)
10s over 1s = bad twist (ex. 42, 51, 32, 63)

>Success with good twist: [Under % TN, doubles]
>Success: [Under % TN, 1s is bigger than 10s]
>Success with bad twist: [Under % TN, 10s is bigger than 1s]
>Failure with a good twist: [Over % TN, doubles]
>Failure: [Over % TN,1s is bigger than 10s]
>Failure with bad twist: [Over % TN, 10s is bigger than 1s]

Swapping (10s over 1s) and (1s over 10s) places as nothing and bad twist is also legit, making the bad outcomes more likely. I can try charting this out in anydice, though it might be hard to make legit.

Forgot the link :

Welp, that's not too much to go by. It might sound backwards, but think about the systems around the dice before settling on what dice to use. In the end, the dice almost exclusively choose ONLY the number range you use for the game. Sometimes they can mold the rest of the game, but that is a thing that comes from the other systems and ideas, not the dice themselves.

You need to flesh out the idea first. The game is based on colonization, so is its emphasis on exploration, settlement building or trading? These three premises have different needs, and you gotta get those in line before arbitrarily deciding the dice you use.

Do you want stats to be target numbers or give modifiers?
Will there be skills? How do you want them to affect the dice?
Do you want to have binary or non-binary success tracking (meaning either "yes" or "no" vs. "yes, but" and "no, and" and the like)?

And in your case, do you want to make an entire game, or do you want to fit an entire system to the mold, maybe filing off the numbers and customizing some of the skills? These are very different things to start from, and in the original thread you were just looking for a game to run a setting. Has that changed?

>captcha: FARM STOCK

I do like integrating doubles (maybe triumph if they're under your rating and despair if they're over) but I specifically want to avoid results without twists. Not only does this play into some other mechanics in the system, but I feel it really helps lend some momentum to the play.

Speaking of which, I added a few new rune pairs, but I'm not sure I'll keep them. Eight should be plenty and most of these can be rolled into the other runes anyway. Still, it's strangely fun to make these. Is the formatting obvious enough at least?

I just have a few other things to lay out in my main game, then I can fork it for Bronze Age. Gonna be fun.

In that case, you can make it like you said:

doubles --> "Crits"
1s over 10s --> Positive
10s over 1s --> Negative

About the runes though, I never read your original post, so let me see...

Is each point to a direction supposed to be +10? I don't know shit about runequest (guessing it was used as inspiration for it), so this is very new to me. What kind of bothers me is that even though aesthetically it looks pleasing, the different sizes would seem to imply that the middle one of each direction is more important than the other ones. Is this intentional?

I stole the doubles idea from Eclipse phase though, I just added the comparison between the numbers myself.

Oh wait, now I think I get it.

You're supposed to write the number on the middle one, and then color the direction it leans towards?

That's cool, but also kind of weird. It took me seriously a second, because it "feels" like a place where you color instead of writing. If there were numbers I would've caught it.

I think I'll just go with what said , I'll just take WoD system and change everything I don't like (The combat, replace the attributes with D&D type attributes, change the skills,Change the health system) and roll with it.

Pretty much yeah the goal has changed, instead of fitting the universe into a system I'll just build a new one by hacking rules.

That works. If you need help with the hacking itself, come back to the thread by all means.

You have a rating in each rune from 10 to 90. These ratings almost never change. This is written in that Rune's diamond space.

Each "opposed" pair must add up to 100 - thus, if you have 80 in Fire you will have 20 in Water.

You also have a "Heroism" rating that begins at 10 and increases whenever you achieve some significant milestone in play.

If you roll less than or equal to your rune's rating, you succeed with a negative twist; if you roll more than your rune's rating, you fail with a negative twist.

However, if you roll between [rune - Heroism] and [rune], you succeed with a positive twist; if you roll between [rune] and [rune + Heroism], you fail with a positive twist. Write [rune - Heroism] in the left triangle and [rune + Heroism] in the right triangle.

The external directional arrows on the bottom five rows show which two runes "influence" the rune they point to; for example, Man is influenced by Fire and Earth, because his mastery of Fire, agriculture, pottery and mining differentiate him from Beast. Right now, I think this is only for flavor but it might have some mechanic later (i.e. these runes being equal to the average of their parents).

How do you guys feel about TCGs were the damage dealt to a player is done in the form of putting their deck into a discard pile? I think the Harry Potter TCG did this ages ago but I can't think of another TCG where "mill" is the primary win condition.

Off the top of my head I see some pros and cons:

>Pro
No need for lifecounters/dice/scrap paper
Allows for cards that trigger when milled as part of damage
Makes it easier for the discard pile to be an alternate resource
Prevents games from going on too long, as long as there's not a not of effects that put cards back into your deck
Some players in other games really like mill mechanics

>Cons
Counting the cards in your deck could be inconvenient of a way to check a life total
Some players do not getting milled

Thoughts? Pic somewhat related.

Also, I suppose this could apply to LCGs too, but I haven't played as many LCGs as I have TCGs.

That heroism thing makes the system quite a bit more complicated than it should be, I think. The numbers are munched in advance, so it isn't that bad, but... Well, not my style, honestly.

I gotta admit the idea of the stats connecting to each other is, well... Good on paper, but it might get messy in the meanwhile. How about if the connecting attributes give like +5 modifiers to the "heroism" score of that attribute if the connected attribute is higher than the base one.

(say, having 25 in truth, 55 in fire and 10 in heroism: normally, Truth would be 15-25-35, but because the fire is higher than truth, it would be 10-25-40)

That is, unless you take in the doubles idea and run with that. I still don't catch how heroism is actually supposed to work. Is it a stat you can raise?

I swear fucking around with the character sheet is like half the fun
Also, I continue to backwards-engineer shit based on the character sheet and what it can fit because i'm an asshole
More at 11

To answer this, I suppose what bothers me is how the format handles it. Like there's never any choice one way or another from most games.

Either make mill a viable option, or don't include those cards in the game. This wishy washy sometimes you can mill, but its not reasonable to make a deck based on it shit is stupid and creates these conversations instead of it just being another mechanic you have to watch out for.

Well, I think the problem with mill in most of the TCGs I've played is how mill tends to be a mechanic that requires you to go all-in to that particular strategy.

For instance, let's make a hypothetical MTG deck that consists of 20 Volcanic Island, 20 Lava Spike, and 20 Tome Scour. Now, if you manage to win a game with that deck, it most likely means you burnt or milled out your opponent, and if you won via burn, every Tome Scour you played was irrelevant, and vice versa if you won via mill. This problem doesn't exist in a deck of 20 Taiga, 20 Lava Spike, and 20 Grizzly Bears.

What I'm curious about if there's any game that does away with the traditional life total, and all damage whether through a creature-esque card or a spell-esque card is done in the form of mill. Additionally, I'm curious what would be the ramifications of such a mechanic.

Hey guys, sorry if this has been asked before, but how do you make your character sheets? Is there a program where I can make one easily?

Thanks.

It didn't make sense until you posted But now its simple. Roll under Rune for the large pass/fail, but roll within the difference of Rune and Heroism for good twist, roll outside difference for bad twist.

I don't know what your questions are beyond "Does this make sense?" which it does once you explained it better. That's really all that needs to happen.

How do you guys like my wargame system? Its a 15mm system made to be strategic in nature. It's module based, so each game is basically an expansion with armies and additional rules.

docs.google.com/document/d/1iJVaPD0VXYfQ_xhv__J6Ne01CtgXp-ONOGeTEbbLPeU/edit?usp=sharing

There's quite a few simple card games that are all about keeping cards in your hands with you considered "out" when you don't have any more cards. Egyptian Rat Screw does pretty much exactly what you're thinking with playing cards. I'd expect it would be simple enough to make some TCG style cards with only mill mechanics and test it out.

While I agree with what you're saying 100% and never thought of it that way I would like to point out poison counters in MTG. You can still damage an opponent and deal with monsters without shying away from using infect, it's just not the most straightforward strategy.

Cards that could mill for damage, or mill when tapped but are still creatures would start to solve the problem of being a mill only idea. It would create multiple win conditions in one deck that neither mtg or yugioh really has right now.

Try Adobe InDesign and/or Illustrator. For free alternatives, you can use Scribus and InkScape. I recommend using a simple spreadsheet for your first attempts though; the design is going to evolve a lot over time, so it's best not to sink too much into the first attempts.

Heroism is basically your level, it's just expressed as a percentage. Instead of "leveling up" by accumulating XP, you record your narrative milestones on your character sheet - each one is a "level" that increases your Heroism.

By using Heroism to increase the probability of positive twists (by widening the range around your rune rating), things are just more likely to "go your way" as you grow into a more legendary, mythological hero.

Thank you. I'll focus my official write-up more toward the latter style of explanation than the original.

I'm working on a few CCG projects, but i want to be able to easily and quickly spit out cards. I _REALLY_ don't want to use MSE, as some of my playtesters are pretty anti-mtg, and the frames sour them to the game.

Are there any other tools I should be looking at for creating card frames and cards?

If you aren't that far into the game yet, making the experience system where you write the deeds the character has done would be pretty neat. Each deed regardless of nature gives a certain amount of heroism, and may change the character's runes to accommodate to the deed. Outwitting an ancient monster is something a smart guy does, so the character's runes start leaning that-a-way.

Similarly, when a new character would join the frey, they should have the same around of "myths" around them, and they can be used as plot points later.

>inb4 you already did this and this post is redundant

The dice pool mechanic is good at the base, can't comment much more than that without examples. Reactions are a nice touch, the range limit and limit to the number each turn prevents it from turning into a dominoes issue that can occur in some systems, like Infinity.

The movement can be fleshed out. I find that its something that a lot of rules writers tend to skim over, since it seems straight forward to someone experienced with wargames, but there's plenty of "well, duh" kind of rules that still need to be written out, such as how to measure movement, or placing models when they overlap bases, or sometimes base to base interactions when they can't make it into base to base. I haven't kept track of it, but I know when AoS first came out, you could stack models onto each other's bases to get more guys into combat.

I was just watching an 8th edition 40k battle report that had exactly this problem, where how the rules were written meant that while a unit could climb up a set of ruins to charge a unit, they couldn't actually charge, because the unit was situated in a way that no enemy models could ever get to it, allowing the unit free reign in shooting, since it was high enough that nothing was blocking LoS. Yeah, freak occurrences like that can happen in any ruleset, but there are still ways to safeguard against or to clarify in situations like that.

Quick nitpicks, there's a misspelling in the Attacks section:
>remoge one from the damage pool
Also the Attacks section could be broken up a bit. Its a little hard to read.

Otherwise, its a good start, and I'll continue to keep an eye out for updates.

page 11 bump?

That's about what I imagined; great minds think alike?

I also intend for new characters to join at the same Heroism level. I have a chapter in the book about creating your own world as a group, including the tribe to which the PCs belong.

One thing I'm waffling on is how closely the game should hew to King of Dragon Pass. I really like the idea of characters being part of their clan's Ring, taking on quests every season to help their clan and maybe having to wait out some seasons to heal up or just bide their time managing their settlement.

Sounds interesting, I'll keep an eye out. I've really wanted to make something bronze age -related for a long time, due to it being such an underutilized setting, and having a lot of potential.

What parts of the bronze age are you going with? I guess it's more akin to mid-european tribalism, where honestly I am kind of looking at Greek age of heroes stuff. But bronze age is a big period, a lot of different themes and ideas are part of what we think of as bronze age.

>What parts of the bronze age are you going with?
I plan to leave that up to the group, taking influences from wherever as they create their tribe/clan/city culture. The rules will assume a specific subset of technologies and societies from throughout the Bronze Age, and it will be up to the group to decide where they sit.

As a template, it will be something like Glorantha insofar as runes will be more or less universal across cultures (due to their self-evident power), but there will be a variety of distinct cultures. Unlike Glorantha, however, I want it to be a little more down to earth with no non-human races (or at least no rules for them).

Bump.

What are some of the best settlement/community management games? I've never really heard of any.

What stats do you think are a must-have in RPGs? I had 7, now I have 6, and I'm almost going to 5, and they are practically the same of the system I'm cannibalizing.

It's similar to the one I'm working with. The mechanics of the health system are: Health Points, that measure small amounts of damage; Afflictions, that translate negative effects such as poisoning and curses; and Wounds, which are grievous injuries (physical, mental, emotional, or whatever).

So far, Health Points work as you'd expect. You don't die when you reach 0. Currently I'm thinking you only die when you reach -5, and you can avoid getting to that point by willingly taking Wounds, and even then you can roll to avoid death.

Afflictions have numbers attached to them, reflecting how strong of an effect they are. For example, "Fear of Heights 1" means you probably need to roll to convince a NPC to stay up in a mountain with your party. "Fear of Heights 3" means any attempts to keep him there cordially fail and he'll do something crazy like fight you if you stand in his way. They can also be something like "Curse of Snakes 2 - Whenever you roll an 1 in a die, a snake bursts out of your body. Choose one: reduce the rolled value by 1 or take 1 damage (ignore armor)."

Wounds are things like losing an arm or being betrayed by a loved one, and will usually take a few sessions to cicatrize. After they do so, you gain 1 XP and a minor ability, to represent how it changed your character.

I still haven't decided if I want ressurection to be a thing or not, and how much of a thing I want it to be. If character growth is going to be important, losing a character at a point a new character won't get to do much sounds unfun. But if it's easy to come back from the dead, shouldn't that impact the setting?

It's probably not what you want to hear, but if you spend an hour or two in GIMP making a solid frame, then set it up as a template, you can can crank out the cards fast. I once produced 68 cards in six hours using this method. Once you get set-up, it's quick.

As far as 'plug-and-play' template programs go? I've yet to find a great one. StrangeEons3 is freeware, and you might be able to use that, with someone else's design, to make cards.

Sate my curiosity as a fellow cardfag: What elements do your cards require? Post a mockup in paint?

>What stats do you think are a must-have in RPGs?
I just have four: Force, Guile, Passion and Logic. I didn't feel tracking the individual characteristics of a character made much sense, because the actual characteristics don't matter - what matters is how you apply them to solve problems. These four stats are the four broad methods of solving a problem, I think - and if you're good at those, it doesn't matter how or why, mechanically speaking. You just have free text to explain that.

>losing a character at a point a new character won't get to do much sounds unfun
Just introduce new characters of the same power level as the rest of the party, don't make players start from scratch.

Look into data merge for InDesign, you'll thank me later.

My current stats are Might, Fortitude, Wits, Charm, Dexterity and Agility. I'm considering rolling Dexterity and Agility into one, because the actions I'm thinking about using Agility for also require some amount of dexterity (flavorfully), and mechanically I only use one modifier at a time.

Who else /research/ ?

I've been putting in the hours getting the data for a modern air combat game, starting with Vietnam era aircraft and going to about 2000 tech.
Holy shit the US had a lot of different aircraft in Vietnam...

Finding the range of each aircraft's radar proved to be the hardest part - still a few gaps.

In my case, it depends on how the stats are framed. But a perfect mix, for me, is to have the big three attributes, each divided to two:
>Physical: Fortitude and Agility
>Mental: Intelligence and Willpower
>Social: Presence and Cunning

This doesn't sell any of the big 3 short, and it flows pretty well.

Of course, my own flagship game does things differently, because each stat is a mirrored version of their respective stat: (Agility -> Clumsiness and so forth). But at least two aspects of each of the big 3 should be present, nonetheless.

Well, kind of. I /research/ mostly for recreational purposes though, because learning things is fun.

I watch everything from nature documentaries to gun disassembly videos (god bless Forgotten Weapons) on a semi-regular basis, usually my interest jumping between making systems and researching stuff to learn stuff, and occasionally put something I've learned to the game.

Nice. Forgotten weapons is based.
I guess considering I write exclusively historical wargames, research is such a large part of the process. The more I research the more accurate the game will be and the more "flavor" it will have which is incredibly important for me (and for the players!) I'm always interested in representing real life weapons and tactics as accurately as possible in a simple and fun way. It can be quite challenging sometimes.

Kingdom Death is the main one i've played, unless you were looking for one where there was no combat.

I am more of a pure systems guy myself. Kind of like munchkinning, except optimizing a system instead of a character. Writing fluff is a total nightmare for me.

Like, my current system, before long, became a challenge of "How little mathematics can I have to make a rules-medium/light system work?"

That's also kind of the reason I'm more prone to making generic systems rather than specific ones. Less fluff, more rules to make.

I don't research nearly that much. All my games have some sort of vidya attachment unless they're just that lite they they don't need one. I do try to get my approximations as close as reasonable, but I'm willing to lose nuance for simpler math and balance.

However, a modern air combat game piques my interest. I'm making an Ace Combat system myself, so I'll be interested in seeing how you handle your rules.

There's no hard answer for must haves. Each RPG is different, so the requirements will be unique. Games have had anywhere from 2 to 17 attributes, so the amount is also pretty open. You just have to determine what exactly you want to represent, and the best way to do that.

>because each stat is a mirrored version of their respective stat
I'm sorry, what?

True, true. I'm asking around to see if anything sticks to me.

My original idea for a system was a generic one, but creating some fluff has helped me develop it. Now I'm actually thinking I should come up with a little more fluff so I can have a clearer idea of how I want some of my classes to work and make up my mind on some mechanics (e.g. ressurection). What I'm going for is very little fluff that can be built around as needed.

Ugh, I'm getting tired, can't even explain things properly. Well, you need to look at it in a skewed light to see why it is like it is.

You see, it is a roll-over system, where stats are weaknesses. The higher the stat is - say, Clumsiness - the worse that weakness is, and harder it is to beat a roll against it.

I've turned the game into more customizable form these days, but the original seven weaknesses I had were:

>Frailty -> Fortitude
>Clumsiness -> Agility
>Dullness -> Intelligence
>Meekness -> Willpower
>Naivete -> Cunning
>Awkwardness -> Charisma
>Ordinariness -> [Magic stat]

The system works on its own level, where the bigger almost any number on your sheet is, the worse off you are. Each roll you make is compared against multiple things on the character sheet, and the more things you try to accomplish, the riskier each move becomes. It's kind of a downward spiral, and that's the heart of the system. But the thing is, I'm trying to not make this edgy, instead aiming for kind of cheesy with dark humor.

It's called Misfortune, after all.

>I'm making an Ace Combat system myself, so I'll be interested in seeing how you handle your rules.
Nice, I'll keep you guy informed of my progress.
My tentative title is "Missile Threat" and I have a draft of the mechanics written up and playtested, and it should prove to be pretty fun. I have already written WW1 and WW2 air combat games so have some experience in the genre.

I'm aiming for maximum fun and simplicity with the mechanics, but still having many many aircraft variants available. The goal will be to provide an air 'environment' where SAM sites, ground targets, AWACS and aircraft all interact and all have a part to play.

Currently typing up the deployment and radar detection rules - Players will need to write a flight plan showing when a flight of aircraft will arrive and when it will leave (as an aircraft's range dictates the maximum number of turns it can spend on the table).
Aircraft are initially placed as radar contacts (either small, medium or large) and depending on their initial tactics (like flying on the deck or very high) could potentially be placed very close to enemy aircraft. Of course AEW and AWACs aricraft will prevent radar contacts being placed within a certain distance, giving those types of aircraft a reason to exist.

I ideally want aircraft to be able to avoid detection by flying extremely low or by ambushing from high altitude, as was quite common in Vietnam. That way real life tactics can be used.

Having a flight plan will also mean you can send in SEAD aircraft to suppress air defenses, and fighters to draw out enemy fighters before sending in your more vulnerable ground attack and bomber aircraft.

A flight plan will also make things a bit more rigid in-game - you will have to wait for aircraft to show up on their specified turn instead of being in complete control all the time. Aircraft will also have to RTB once they're bingo fuel...

Missiles will also be incredibly fun to try to out turn and evade...

How many premade monsters or NPCs does your game include?

bump

0. Everything from monsters to masterminds work with the same framework: they have one stat depending on their story relevance, and advantages and disadvantages depending on other things. It's to maximize the effectiveness of the GM and allow the GM to just make up stuff as needed without looking up anything.

Dice pools or percentile system ? What's the easier roll mechanic to design around for a total newbie like me ?

My first RPG project would be a game that's very similar to Arcanum : Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura

2D6 is pretty based for RPGs. 8 is a success, add bonuses like +1 through +4 for skill level or stat modifiers.

2D6 ? I've never heard of such system ? Can you tell some games that use this roll system ?

I'm probably starting to sound like a senile old elitist, but I gotta remind everyone aspiring to make a system that turning their thinking upside down is usually a better approach than starting the climb straight out.

Unless you've come up with a contemporary rolling system (like digital root of 3d10), you should never start thinking about the game with the fiddly bits, that meaning the dice and resolution system. And even with contemporary resolution systems, it's better to bend the resolution system than bend the rest of the game.

Think about everything around the resolution system first, and then ponder or ask what resolution system would work best.

Stuff like:

>Do you want to invoke something specific in the players and GM while they play?
>Are stats arbitrary (give modifiers) or direct (dictate TN or amount of dice)?
>How do skills work? Do you roll against them or do they give modifiers to stat rolls?
>Are rolls binary or complex (including "and"s and "but"s)?
>Do you roll against only one thing at a time or multiple simultaneously?
>How many rolls should be rolled before a single action is completed?
>Is combat made with opposing rolls or against TN?
>How are TN's defined?

After answering all those you should not only have a grasp of how you want to make the game, but also what kind of resolution system would work for it.

Traveller is the one I think of. 2D6 is nice because it has a bell curve. You know you'll mostly be rolling between 6 and 8, with 7 the most common result.

That way small modifiers like +1 or +2 can have a substantial effect on the result.

If an 8 is a success, with a -4 you're very unlikely to succeed although you could still get lucky, while with a +4 your more than likely to succeed, although you could still roll a double 1 and fail...

You can get the core rulebook here - its at the bottom of the list
mega.nz/#F!lM0SDILI!ji20XD0i5GTIUzke3iv07Q!hINylSwa

Bump

Based entirely on the actual action of rolling the dice, looking at the results, and calculating if you succeed or not, which RPG does it the best?

The question is too broad in my opinion. Doing something best as in most accurate, quickest, most clearly, or least confusingly? Overall best is a hard sell due to many different definitions of good. Instead, what you should be looking at is "How the dice answer the question the game asks" and define the question the game asks, and then we're talking.

Legends of the Wulin is a personal favorite, due to the flexibility of each roll, showing opportunities and possible failings in myriads in the same roll. But the actions you make are decided only after the roll is, making it invalid in the question you pose.

There are several extremely streamlined rolling systems like d% roll-under against a number, where the difficulty is counted beforehand. In pure dice-rolling action, Eclipse Phase has an elegant system in place. The higher you roll, the better, but going over the % is a failure. Crits, both positive and negative, happen with doubles. That's all there is to it. All the calculations are done beforehand, so the game can resolve solely on the dice.

I would like to say the same about my own game, Misfortune, although it misses some of the elegant marks due to a single roll needing to be compared to several numbers on the character sheet. The system itself is simply a roll-over system where every action you make becomes more difficult as some of the numbers rise during scenes. Easy way to keep this in check mentally is to just look at the largest one of them and aim to roll over it, only checking all that goes wrong when it goes under that. The thing in Misfortune, though, is that the numbers don't fluctuate within a single scene. They just go upwards. It's a different kind of elegance, I guess.

When I said "best," I meant it as an opinion, because I was actually thinking of the question as ignoring most of a game's mechanics.

Like, Legends of the Wulin's dice works great with its theme/system, but on its own, it's a bit of a hassle. Another example is Time Wizards, which uses a lot of d4s (and d4s are cancer)

I'm just asking this because I want to make a system, and I want to make sure that the actual act of rolling the dice is fun in the system. I can then make the math of the actual mechanics I've already thought about work with the dice system.

But yeah. What do you like? Are you a fan of big fistfulls of D6s, or do you like just 3d6, or a d20, or maybe something like Roll and Keep?

I like to keep things simple. Personal favorites in style are advantage-based systems (Best thing to happen to D&D in ages in my opinion) and direct comparison systems that are fast to resolve.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise when my own game is... Direct comparison advantage-using dice pooling, kind of, except not as complex as it sounds.

Basis is 2d6, and you add dice when it's more advantageous or disadvantageous. Unlike D&D 5e, the advantages stack, one disadvantage undermines all advantages and vice versa. So in a rare case you might have a double advantage or in a less rare case a double disadvantage, and you roll 4d6 and take the two lowest / highest. Pretty slick.

I also like step dice systems, particularly Ryuutama due to it's awesome simplicity. You just choose two stats that fit the task and roll their respective dice. Can't get easier than that. Shame that the rest of the game is a bit of a hassle. In pure dicetacular joy, I guess the step dice would actually be my personal favorite, and the less you need to work with static numbers (extra dice instead of +2s for example) the better. The best is none.

d%, as I said before is good in the way that it informs immediately whether a player has succeeded, and that's also one of the things I like. It keeps the dice roll exciting, and the focal point of the act of rolling dice. In modifier-heavy games like 3.PF, the better you become, the more arbitrary the dice become, and the excitement of the dice roll itself kind of disappears when you start counting all the modifiers for the roll.

So in short, I think the amount of dice varying from 2-5 is pretty much my game, keeping the granularity high enough for a game without it dice resolution becoming too slow. Having different kind of kinesthetic feeling in the hand (not always just plain d6s) is a bonus, albeit a minor one.

Immediate reaction is the best.

I like your system idea, and I might steal it. Do your dice explode, by any chance?

They don't. Honestly though, my system is a pretty unconventional one, the basic resolution system is just a really small but influential part of how it works.

PDF related if you want to see the other factors that come into each roll.

Thinking about making a homebrew based around standard rpg elements but with mechanics revolving around collecting and playing with cards.

My go to is yu-gi-oh for this since I have plenty of cards; the plan is to start everyone off with a standard-ish deck with their 'class' being an archetype, rush, toolbox etc. Through trading and battles they would slowly fine tune and improve their decks as opposed to gaining exp.

This way the GM gets to control what cards enter the game world to stop stuff from becoming just a boring reflection of the metagame + allows for possible introduction of egyptian gods or homebrew cards with special rules.

Currency probably wouldn't exist, instead players would just trade surplus cards for either new cards or whatever quest items they need.

Also not quite sure how to deal with losing a battle- I guess the player would just lose a card(s) since permanent life point damage would have major balance implications.

For setting, I'm thinking of deviating from the standard anime since that's more or less an advert with questionable worldbuilding. Not sure what to go for though, maybe a tournament arc sort of thing in a more western setting? Something like a western chess championship?

Also considering having the monsters that are summoned be actually physically manifested into the game world to make damage and attacking seem more dramatic.

Not really looking to fine tune the existing yu-gi-oh rules, as strange as they are, but rather build a game around them with a world that makes sense to the game.

Is this any good? I just came up with the whole thing not long ago so it's probably very rough around the edges. Criticism appreciated.

What games have interesting but simple inventory/equipment mechanics? I feel like this is the final piece of the puzzle for my game's base mechanics. I've been through so many iterations that never really feel satisfying.

It's a rules-medium, narrative-focus science fantasy system with little character advancement.

Decided to make a little visual guide to roll results since it's kind of hard to explain with words.

I've seen a few games with Diablo-style grid-based inventories. Each item is a certain shape made of squares. Usually things are rectangles, but they could be tetrominoes or something even weirder. For degrees of encumbrance you could have sections of the grid that impose penalties if they're used.

For some reason, Children of Mana jumped into my head when you mentioned this. It used a grid-base inventory for ability gems, for instance a 1x2 gem that gave arrows a piercing property. It was an fun mechanic until late in the game when you acquire gems that essentially let you slot all abilities.

(Copied from thread)
What does /gdg/ think of this rolling system?

d6 success system where every weapon has a Speed and Impact rating which negates Dodge and Armor.

Attacking is resolved like this:
Attack roll - [(enemy Dodge roll - Weapon Speed) + (enemy Armour - Pierce)]

You roll your attack, enemy rolls Dodge.
Your Speed negates enemy Dodge successes, your Impact negates enemy Armour (static number). Each success in Dodge and each Armour remaining now reduces your total damage.

It works in practice but is a bit clunky and slow, but is nearly impossible for me to streamline without sacrificing the weapon depth by removing either Speed or Impact.

What has plagued my development is trying to find the balance between drama, simulation, and fairness.

This has led to a good deal of hours spent on near future tech (for believable progress in an alt-history) and very importantly, the practicality of exo-skeletons and how to protect them.
I ask my more knowledgeable friends for shit like, "can a guy in a big metal frame get hit by a sabot round if he's wearing reactive armor".

I'm a little confused as to why you didn't have "yes and" and "no and" on opposite ends of the spectrum.