Game Design General /GDG/

There a good trinary resolution system that isn't pbta shit?

Hello /gdg/. Is my first time posting here. I am caught in a rather bizzare situation. I am currently creating my own RPG, with a top-bottom design. I've broadly defined the concepts, mechanics and abilities. Howerver, I can't think of a decent resolution system.
The game is d6 based.

Anyone has tips?

Im doing a small CCG which is like a simplified version of our well known magic the gathering; but I'd like to add some depth to it; by using things beyond the game itself. What are some cool props to use on a CCG? (dice rolls, coin flips, rock paper scissors matches, triggering cards only when you wear a shirt of a certain color... etc). The game itself takes inspiration from Final Fantasy Tactics, with a card for each class and that.

To give you an idea of what i want: there is a "creature" (fighter in game terms) that has a huge combat bonus if you romantically like your opponent.

Of course, nobody can get inside your head to check that, it's you who must claim this bonus before the attack if you want. This can lead to awkward situations on a tournament; or to help you declare to that person you like.

>Howerver, I can't think of a decent resolution system.
>The game is d6 based.

I take it as that you've picked d6 just because, no real reason beyond it.
We can't judge without knowing a little more of what the game is about and what kind of feeling you want to achieve.
Write a little about what you have, we can't promise anything but for zealot hate fueled commentaries from amateur, full of ourselves designers but we can try to figure out something.

Hey, Im designing some additional content for Barbarians of Lemuria. What would be a good trigger for a powerful but debilitating rage, like that of a warp-spasm for those who are familiar. I want it to trigger during combat and provide a buff, but cause damage until the subject is knocked unconcious, making small engagements as part of a larger plan dangerous because they could incapacitate the character. Im not sure what the trigger should be though. I dont want to have the player roll to save each turn, that would be a pain.

For reference, BoL is a 2D6 based system. Anybody got any ideas?

bumplestiltskin

Blades in the Dark

It's been a month and I still haven't settled on an inventory mechanic I like.

My game is more similar to FATE, conceptually; it's based around details, like aspects, and using verbs to change them. I'm aiming for something rules light and narrative focused. But I just can't figure out a good inventory/items mechanic!

I thought about making something more like D&D, where you have what you have and that makes a certain weight. But I felt that this raised a lot of questions about, "how do weapons work, how does armor work, how does weight work, what different kinds of items can you have?"

I thought about something more like FATE, with items as simply being extra details, but that raised other questions about how to govern these.

My ideal mechanic would be:

>completely explained in under one page, including all subtypes of items (like weapons or armor)
>have some way to limit how much a character can carry
>have some way to track how many uses an item has
>have some way to add various extra details to individual items (even if this is simply appending them to the item detail itself)
>allows characters to gain/lose items as easily as possible

If they're already rolling once, bake the save into that roll - i.e. on a 1 they get triggered till they roll a 6. Sorry, not very familiar with BoL.

I've picked d6 only because it's the most common dice, but I could technically balance it around d10, or d100. I just dislike the use of different dices.

Main concept is noblebright set in a postapocaliptic alternative past. Around 180, humanity discovered a strange source of energy called "metaenergy" or simply meta, whose main characteristic is that it did not obey the 2nd law of thermodynamic. This lead to numerous shenanigans, until circa 1850 a lovercraftian catastrophe struck the world, causing the sun to turn black, general eldritch tentacle madness galore and so on.
However, itbecame soon apparent that use of meta (and in particular, meta-fueled lamps) held back both the now-mutating powers of sunlight and the mutated beasts.

Fast forward 60 years, civilization is beginning to recover, and the first actual search parties are being sent to explore, research and scavenge.

The theme I'm going for is colonialism/adventure with an hint of horror. It is mainly a game about explorers exploring and killing a shoggot or two while doing it.

Jesus, I couldn't past the 5 seconds mark. What a fucking faggot.

How can I use anydice or your goodwill or google to find out the % of rolling triplets on 3d6?

Here you go: anydice.com/program/c3e3

The probability is 0.46%.

Thank you. After posting my Google-fu went the right way. The chance is too low to be used as a game mechanic (2,7%).

Now I have a new, worse problem.

I found out that the probability of rolling doubles on 3d6 is around 44% (16/36), but now I'm struggling to see the probability of rolling doubles on a 4d6 drop highest/lowest (without dropping the chances are around 72%).

Honestly I think rules should be purposefully made even more esoteric and obsfucated. This is the best way to weed out normies, casuals and critical role shitters and leave in people who actually care about games.

>youtube.com/watch?v=vuThpe-Rgxs&list=PL3eVql0CPrVim0xLlubU2vA-3JCe1cWaM
>Two lecturers trying not to talk over each other
I'm worried already

youtube.com/watch?v=0IUaGQhlPwo

I only watched the first 5 minutes but starts pretty good.

Check out Lamentations of the Flame Princesse's encumbrance system. Often regarded as a gold standard for rules light

bump

How do you feel about metacurrencies?

I'm working one into my game. There is a pool of ten tokens per player, which is divided evenly at the start of the game. They are traded to the GM to achieve various positive effects for the spender's character, and the GM uses them to add an additional dramatic effect to a player's roll before putting them back in the pile. The other players award them to each other, one at a time, for good roleplaying.

Good to see this thread it up!

I'm experimenting with ways to convert real life ranges into tabletop ranges - this is for an air combat game, specifically missile and radar ranges.

I want closer ranges to be larger on the tabletop (so 12" is a missiles range, or even up to 24"), while longer ranges are equal to less on the tabletop - so a radar with a range of 200 nautical miles is only about 48" on the tabletop.

I fooled around with this site to generate graphs from an equation - and talking to a maths major gave me the idea of using 2 equations at once - joining in the middle. But I'm not sure how practical this will be and if there is a way to do this kind of thing with one equation.

Does anyone know an equation that might work for me? or have any suggestions on things to try out? it would be nice to have a single equation I can plug ranges in nautical miles into and get a range in inches for the tabletop. Using 2 equations would give me more accuracy, but I would need to know the crossover point...

>tfw GM chapter is the size of the previous four chapters combined
fug

There's a reason why the DM guide is an entire book in D&D. There's a lot to cover.

I like them, personally.
IIRC, the OSR folks tend to dislike them more often than not.

I remember Heroes Against Darkness had something pretty light and quick and covers what you need. Might want to look into that.

heroesagainstdarkness.blogspot.com/

This sounds really creepy and like a general bad idea.

>To give you an idea of what i want: there is a "creature" (fighter in game terms) that has a huge combat bonus if you romantically like your opponent.
>Of course, nobody can get inside your head to check that, it's you who must claim this bonus before the attack if you want. This can lead to awkward situations on a tournament; or to help you declare to that person you like.
I don't mean to be harsh but I honestly can't believe you think this is a good idea. If someone told me this was an actual game mechanic my first thought would be they are trying to pull one over on me.

Yo, any horror games (board-games or books) that makes you play as the ghost or evil mastermind?

Something like house in the hill board game.

Bump with one of my first historical rulesets

I do like metacurrencies, as long as they aren't just a "break the rules" card. Doing things inside the game system like re-rolls, fudging dice rolls a little, stealing initiative, etc., where you still have to follow how the system works, its just gives you a bump.

>It is mainly a game about explorers exploring and killing a shoggot or two while doing it

sounds very cool to me.
Systems are something made for tastes; many of them work, you just have to see which one works for you best.
Have you checked simpled6? google it, is a one page thing which can be easyly hacked and I've used a lot with good results; maybe you can work up from there.

Yeah I know it's a little weird but I'm not afraid of that. Not all cards must trigger deep issues though; and as I said, nobody forces you to admit/state you like someone, you can just play with no bonus.

For relative increasing distances working with zones would be better than inches, no?

What are some games that pull off horizontal development well? Instead of gaining increasingly crazy powers in a narrow field, gaining a wider variety of abilities.

Sounds like tze 'fun' rules from AoS initial release. Certain boni were applied if ypu had the longest beard or spoke with an orc accent or shit like that. Everyone hated the and dropped them asap. Don't do this.
Also check the un-sets from mtg, they have similar stuff going on.

Overwhelmingly negative.

They are immersion poison to me.
I also hate the idea of bribing people with boni (or XP) to do good roleplaying. It won't make a bad player good. It makes the way you roleplay this incentivize scramble to secure a bonus. I don't want to feel pressured to do overt stunting constantly or feel like I'm wasting things mechanically. Likewise I don't want to rate other players persistently. You get a conflict of interest. Do I want the group to win or am I honest and don't reward a player for underwhelming or mediocre roleplaying? I much rather look at the other players exploits in character.
As a GM you will have situations where the player maneuvered themselves into a bad situation and proceed to unload their good roleplay points from a unrelated situation to suddenly be loaded with bonuses when they were crawling through a ditch moments before.

I think metacurrency is such a step backwards when you want your game to have narrative freedom, because they impose binding rules in an area where they were non before. It is baffling and only undermines a story.

No traditional games really come to mind, but a game that focuses on equipment based skills would be ideal. A vidya that does this is the first Guild Wars. You learn, hunt, or otherwise gain access to some 300+ skills for your two professions, but you can only bring 8 at a time. The more options you have access to, the better you can prepare for upcoming challenges.

One of my own games is probably going to go this route. Character progression is pretty free form, but your niche depends on what abilities you decide to bring.

I want to be able to measure distances in inches though. There are no squares or hexes on the table for this game.

Traveller. Skills cap at 4 and take months to train up.
The more skills you have the longer it takes to train new ones.

It shouldn't be terribly hard to keep the zone idea and replace those squares with inches

Just use one formula with a smarter scale.
A logarithmic scale sounds just like what you want.
Something of the form
>y = a log10(x) + b

>nobody forces you to ... you can just play with no bonus
If this game is inspired by MTG and FFT, then people are probably going to want and need that competitive advantage.
You're implicitly pushing people towards those things by otherwise forcing them to play a suboptimal game.

Runefag from last thread here. Been thinking on a magic system. I want something free form, with as few lists as possible.

Since there will naturally be four runes PCs are ostensibly pretty good at and four they won't be, I think a good starting foundation is only casting spells of runes with which you are aligned (have 60%+ in that rune). You can use expendable ruins earned on your quest or cooperate with your fellows to cast other runic spells, though.

I also plan to use metacurrency to judge the power of a spell, the more you spend (from 0 to 3), the more powerful your spell. You earn metacurrency by pleasing the gods, much like in King of Dragon Pass.

But what's a good, flexible scale of power for magic? This has baffled me for awhile.

This. If the right way isn't also the fun way, people will play the unfun way instead of the wrong way.

>flexible scale of power
What exactly do you mean by this?
I think the concept of power to levels (counted in metacurrency cost) is pretty straightforward.
But what does flexible refer to?
Does it mean easy to scale up or down?
Does it mean generically applying to utility and combat spells (or anything else you throw at it) alike?

so, im working on a play-by-post diceless systems for lols

so far the idea i got is that every player bullshits to add up to two stats that are relevant to a given DC, and try to beat the DC. If they cant beat it they can either spend some form of token to grow their "roll" or take some form of damage.

Sound good?

I mean, how do you quantify the difference between investing 1 Favor and investing 2 Favor in a way that isn't highly restrictive or implicative (?) of the kinds of spells you can cast?

For example, we'll say Air with 0 Favor, that might be like running pretty quick or a great leap. And then 3 Favor might be summoning a small cyclone around yourself or flying. So what are 1 and 2? And what does that say about Fire, or Death?

I'm thinking right now about this:
>describe what you want to do
>GM tells you what rune that's gonna be and how much Favor it's gonna cost
>you still have to roll

Pretty simple! But it feels a little mother may I and doesn't give the GM a lot of pricing guidance besides.

Maybe scale it by natural human abilities?
Like
>0 - Great realistic feats
>1 - Slight superhuman feats
>2 - Minor external forces
>3 - Major external forces
E.g. for Air
>Run quite fast
>Confidently leap between highrise rooftops
>Wind giving you a boost, allowing you to glide, or cushioning a fall.
>Flying

How do you guys feel about PbtA-style GM moves? I was initially kind of repulsed but it has been growing on me. I see it as kind of like bad GM insurance.

Ideally, it won't limit the GM because the moves should be flexible enough to conceptually cover most conceivable problems the PCs could suffer, and well-designed moves will not only inject genre flavor into the game but also keep the game moving forward.

One of my biggest pet peeves as a player, and one thing I always try to avoid as GM is the simple "No," or "You fail." It grinds the game to a halt and doesn't give the players a lot to go off of. Instead of saying "The wall is too high to climb," I try to add something like, "The guards hear your grappling hook clang to the ground - you hear them coming to check what the noise was." This tells the players they have to do something to avoid escalating the situation (or embrace it and escalate).

Why have zones at all when all you need to measure are inches?
What I'm trying to do is rather to convert zones into inches.

yeah a log curve will probably work better. I'll fool around with a few, cheers.

Bump!

This just might work! I think I'm going to adjust the scale so that a 0 Favor use of your runes is just using them normally (for example, Air represents direct imposition or violence, so Air 0 is just a normal intimidate/attack roll; the Man rune represents civilized things humans do, so 0 Man might be writing a poem but 3 Man might actually a magical law). Then you have to spend something for actual magic. If it costs 0 I'm afraid players will use it too often for the tone of this game.

I want the metacurrency to come from doing behaviors that please the gods, just like KoDP, but that has two problems I'm confident can be solved. This kind of gives the GM a little too much power over this mechanic, and because so much of my game is based around collaborative worldbuilding, it might be difficult for players to create gods who feature balanced ways to please.

Bump for the night.

I'm trying to create a rules-light game where players can create new powers.
I'm having a bit of trouble with phrasing one of the rules.
I you extend a previous power it must be one-step-removed from it, that's simple.
But completely new powers must be inspired by the world around them, e.g. there must be a lit matchstick/candle/campfire/etc. nearby to create the power to make a small flame at your fingertips.
How can I write this clear and brief?

Imagine a battle in 2 zones, field and sea. Aircraft dogfighting in one zone treats the inches as X. But if one in the field/sea wants to shoot one in the sea/field, on top of his zone inches distance, each inch in the other zone counts as Y (greater than X).

This can streamline the math.

>one-step-removed from it
I only understood this in reference to your next paragraph, for what it's worth.

I would just write that players need an in-world, fictional circumstance to inspire new powers and give some examples.

Hmmm

Magic requires a physical, pre-existing source. Spells can modify one, small aspect of a physical source or of another spell.

And now that I've just thought of it, you can bake in limits to how often you can piggy back off an existing spell. Perhaps rolling a spell failure check off a day or d10 or something. 1 is failure, each additional modification raises the failure TN by 1 (4 modifications fail on a roll of 1-4, succeed on 5&6, etc)

While I appreciate the ideas, I am actually actively avoiding such concrete solutions.
Trying to keep things abstract and unconstrained.
>Powers are either original or derivative.
>An original power is inspired by something in the world around a character
>A derivative power is different by one thing compared to the power it is based on.
Actually might be good to add combinations of powers too.
>A combination power is a simple combination of the two powers it is based on.

You're right, I should probably just use some more words explaining this stuff explicitly.

I really like the mark and exp stuff, but a lot of confounding phrasing in here.

Make "natural marks" the general rule and say:
>For certain skills that can be practiced you can spend 1 EXP to obtain a mark
Also what's this about needing previous ranks?

Either fix your terminology or explicitly split it out into stats and ranks/specializations/abilities per skill.
Because stats, skills, and skill specializations (all with ranks), and abilities (which apparently depend on a single skill each) is confusing.

Yeah it doesn't roll out the tongue very well, thanks for pointing that out, i'll try to word it better once I make some changes to it

Bump.

Its a miniatures game though, generally aircraft are moving all over the place. Measuring distances in inches is the simplest way to work out distance.

Its ok the "convert real life distance to inches via equation" is working very well - just need to find the right equation. The math is only done during the game design phase - players never have to worry about it.

Any tool for quick prototyping card games? I'd hack something togather in html/css but I'm burned out from work.

I heard of some tool that lets you export spreadsheet data as a series of cards - keep the thread alive till I get home and I'll look it up.

Back. Try data merge, with InDesign.

What do you guys think about games that are divided into phases, like Burning Wheel or Ryuutama?

Use a standard playing deck and just write a table of what the regular cards actually represent in your game.

How many rolls per action is too many? Does your game have to-hit rolls, critical confirmations, hit location rolls, item expenditure rolls, armor rolls or other things? Or is everything wrapped up in a single go?

>want to design TCG
>decide there's no way in hell for an indie TCG to survive
Should I just convert my ideas to an LCG? Is there any better way of making a self-contained card game than just a draft cube?

As few as possible that still allow for the most flavor and tactical options.

My philosophy is to make the main focus of the game more in-depth, and glaze over the less important factors.

So a game about tactical gun fighting should have decently complex gun rules, while diplomacy and wounds could be handled more simply.

A game about air combat where the players control aircraft should have in-depth pilot and aircraft modeling, while AA fire and attacking ground targets can be simpler.

In your case if you want attacks to be the main focus of a game, I would have a single hit roll with the armor factored in, followed by a damage roll which could potentially have the hit location written in as flavor text.

You can always use modifiers to help lower the amount of dice rolled. Armor for example could be a modifier on a damage table.

Say if you have a hit roll and a damage roll, players could specify a hit location they're trying to aim for and that could modify both the hit roll and the damage roll.
So aiming for the head would make it harder to hit but do more damage. Aiming for the chest would be easier to hit and do less damage, especially if armor is being worn, etc.

Well I enjoy their discussions on game design greatly, and it got me to buy The Characteristics Of Games, which was both the best purchase and one of the most interesting reads of my life. I dislike their approach in their panels on playing games, though i can't exactly say why.

Works great for a board game like Eldritch Horror, so I imagine it works fine with roleplaying games if you're okay with the gamey feel it gives.

Give Fate a look and draw ideas from there. Notice how it describes everything as broadly as possible.

You could still design a TCG for your own fun and practice.
But yeah, for market viability an LCG would work better.

I've tried to do a one roll resolution system (technically 2? Its a roll off), but can't get it to work in a way I'm happy with. Right now I'm using a roll-off followed by damage rolls system.

LCG is a better business model.

That's an interesting source, thanks.
Not personally a big fan of the examples and the amount of words used to describe things, but it's definitely a clear way to write things.

How do you make healers useful without making the game brutal or making the healers obligatory (that is, without a healer, you die)?

I think it'd add more to my homebrew than it'd subtract, but I'm not quite sure what kind of health/magic system would make it work.

Of course, healers would have use besides healing (for example, one of the "healer" classes would be The Cook), but again I'm not sure how to make them work.

Take a look at Dungeon World's moves. I'm sorry, but I don't have any of the links or PDF with me ATM. Maybe in a few hours if the thread is still up.

By the way, how are you ruling the creation of powers? Point-buy?

>How do you make healers useful without making the game brutal or making the healers obligatory (that is, without a healer, you die)?
I don't think this is possible unless you move away from "healer" and into "support". I can't think of a single game that does dedicated healers well. In fact, I'd say your question boils down to "How do I make healers necessary but not necessary?"

A lot of video games have tried this and as far as I know they've all turned into pretty miserable clusterfucks.

Make healing more general

Or if you want specialized healer, make it do big heals and nothing else

I made this sheet to my friend's game, it's pretty heavy OSR, but I liked trying my hand at more complex character sheets. Mostly asking opinions about the composition. The first page is super busy compared to the rest, but I tried to make it in a way that it works.

Make healers into a convenience. Make healing otherwise slow and very dependent on rolls, slowing the pace of the game if you don't have one with you.

Also, avoid Specialization superiority. Don't make a healer that only knows how to heal (A cook who is useless except for making gourmet) better than one that can also contribute while fighting. Make the healing options shallow, but make them useful at all stages of the game.

Like, make healing skills something that level up naturally as the characters do. For the cook, for example, make food restore a % of health, or have the amount healed be affected by the one who is healed. Hard numbers on healing things make them kind of inefficient on higher levels, or require continuous specialization toward that thing.

One thing you can do, is that characters' hit point pool never gets larger, or that you use alternative HP methods, such as rising wounds against rolls or something. One of my favorite methods for this is possible in step-dice games. You roll your toughness die against the amount of wounds you have, and need to roll over the number.

The kicker is that different healers could do different things with this. Some could remove wounds, but a cook, for example, can give a boost to the roll itself (A full belly bonus, if I may say). A bad roll will still make you kick the bucket (or at least, make you fall unconscious), but your chances of survival are much better.

Already have the PDF, thanks anyways.
Dungeon World's rules seem to be way crunchier than the basic rules I'm trying to go for.

I'm ruling power creation as once per (party) level, with an initial power for each player at the start of the game, except you don't keep track of levels explicitly.

All this half-assed explaining reminds me that I should really just finish up a prototype ruleset soon, so I can share specifics.

So, one way to keep healers from being necessary but to keep combat brutal is to assume 0 HP is out of the fight and fucked, but not yet dead.

Lasting wounds for falling to 0, but much more generous rules for dying. I won't say steal from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but keep in mind that it was one of the first RPGs to use a meta-currency simply so it could be as brutal as possible on characters but still have them survive their hardships.

Is there a good example for non-combative systems in games? This point came up earlier in a conversation with a friend and we're both struggling for ideas. A lot of it is just 'social combat' or targeted rolls.

People are going to find the most optimal ways to play whatever options you offer, so you'll need to know yourself how healing interacts with the rest of the game.

Dnd 5e has healing, and it isn't necessary, but it also isn't exactly the most desired role to have filled. Healing is better used to stay out of the unconscious state rather than continually getting topped off in combat.

The early days of Guild Wars 2 also had healing, but it was even less desirable than 5e's. Characters are assumed to be in charge of their own health, but there were ways to provide supplemental party healing. The amount of healing compared to amount of damage was designed so that it couldn't keep up with constant pressure or a coordinated spike, and was more about removing the "ambient damage" that was flying around.

Overwatch also has some healing and non-healing support. I mention overwatch, because even the full healers have many other options in combat than just healing. They have abilities that, if you took away their healing, would still provided useful utility to their team. There's also the non-healing healers that provide survivability in the forms of temp-hp, or by augmenting health packs, allowing characters to heal themselves.

You can take all those ideas into account when designing how healers or healing might fit. One character might augment both healing and non-healing potions so that they're more effective. Another might provide a small aura of small, continuous healing so that you surivability is slightly higher when you're near them. A third might be dedicated to cleansing conditions, which might remove lasting damage effects. A fourth could grant allies a vampiric effect, increasing both damage output and survivability. Healing should be just a small portion of what the overall abilities of a character are, and gaining access to that healing depends on performing other, useful combat functions.

I'm not trying to make healers that can't do anything but heal. Not only that's boring but probably impractical. I'm trying to: 1) give some classes healing options; and 2) making a few of those classes better than the others. But if healing is too good, then combat isn't a problem, but if it's too bad, why bother?

I'm looking at HP not as Health Points but as a measure of how much you can play the game before you're forced to stop. Mechanically, that's what HP and some status effects already do anyways. So there's basically two kinds of HP, one that prevents you from playing temporarily (you're unconscious, restrained, etc.) and one that prevents you from playing until you make a new character(you're dead, kidnapped, etc.). You still lose HP mostly to physical damage, but attacks get stronger because they (usually) gain additional effects rather than gaining bigger numbers.

I'm gonna take a better look at your post later, but managing specializations is an obstacle I'm trying to overcome. I do want to give classes a focus and a few options to make characters from the same class different from each other and perhaps fill different niches, but I worry everyone accidentally or intentionally going for the same thing could break the game.

Same as the previous paragraph. Also, since I mentioned the Cook class, I was also thinking about giving them the ability to passively gain money in their time off and maybe some social skills as well. I'm trying to not spread the class too thin.

I was talking specifically about the mechanic of moves. You can vastly simplify it changing the amount of dice you use, for example.

Bumping.

> I'm not trying to make healers that can't do anything but heal. Not only that's boring but probably impractical. I'm trying to: 1) give some classes healing options; and 2) making a few of those classes better than the others. But if healing is too good, then combat isn't a problem, but if it's too bad, why bother?

You might be able to achieve by limiting what healing can accomplish, and how easily it does it. If you don't want it over-used, you can place limitations or drawbacks so that players keep it for when it's really needed, rather than topping themselves up after every battle. Make them actually have to make an educated decision about their healing options - especially if the right decision is sometimes to forego healing and save it for later - and you'll probably avoid the problem of it making combat too easy.

>Not quite enough space to fit in all the stats I need for aircraft
>Don't want to go landscape format
>Decide to try iconography
>Add abbreviations under the icons for more clarity.

Do you think the iconography is clear and/or intuitive? any suggestions for icons for the other stats?

Should I include the abbreviation text in the heading, or just stick to the icons?

The "Hard Points" icon uses icons shown earlier in the rules - the missile and bomb rack icons.
There will be an introduction to the aircraft data lists explaining what things mean, but ideally players glancing at the aircraft lists should still be able to understand what's going on hopefully without referring to the introduction section.

Hard Points isn't all that clear. I recommend a horizontal wing, head on, with a missile or bomb under it

Also is Range the amount of time it can stay in flight? Or the distance it can travel? The icon suggests distance traveled.

Range is the distance an aircraft can travel -
in game its the number of turns the aircraft can stay on the table before having to return to base.

Pic related is the example of hardpoints featured previously in the rules. The idea that they can be used for missiles or bomb racks is the main premise behind the icon - "missile / bomb" as its one or the other.
I will experiment with a wing / missile though, could be more clear.

If that's how each plane looks then hard points is probably fine. Not everyone is going to be familiar with the terminology, so make sure that's stated plainly somewhere.

But, if that's how your bomb racks are going to look then your missile icon should be something more than just a crosshair.