Ryuutama

I'm currently doing stuff to spice up combat system. Something like adding secondary actions, adding more tactics, making monsters slightly more interesting...

It's not really a game about fighting, but it can serve as a core to pretty Etrian Odyssey-ish combat.

>Etrian Odyssey-ish combat
That actually sounds great, care to share some of your work?

Ryuutama's main problem is that it has very little granularity, but i already did several combat hacks.

The main one is using an item to gain secondary action. So if you use attack or magic, you can also use one item to do defense, feint, skill, initiative recalculation, etc.

Feint with item use gives target -2 to initiative (both this and previous are effort to steer players towards more tactical approach)

Playing with "effort" system for combat-type characters. By using MP they can improve their attacks - for example strike an additional target, or attack enemy in back row, or make attack deal specific type of damage (though the last is mostly GM's discretion - there are rudimentary traces of elemental damage in a system, so it's probably wise to expand them). Ability to inflict status effects with hits is also there. This set of modifiers gives combat types reason to improve MP and allows them to use fancy attacks without much GM fiat.

Disrupt - [accuracy check -2], deactivates monster's special ability (one that needs to be applied; if it's applied automatically at the start (like demons' auras) it doesn't "turn off". It DOES turn off things like double strike or MP damage. Lore justifications may vary.

Riposte - like defend, defensive stance only instead of getting defense points, you counterattack at -1 die size every time opponent's attack misses until your turn. Together with defend it can give one character seriously amazing protective capabilities.

Of course, every one of these could be used by opponents. My favorite trick is one beatstick monsters with several small monsters constantly using Feint. And all these enhancements go with monsters who have multiple attacks, and even multiple bodyparts (statted like normal monster group, only much less separable), so for example Giant Enemy Crab might have two claws (need to be disrupted once in a while), body (armored and beefy) and weak point (attack for massive damage, in the back row)

For something more fluffy and flavory, i used ideas from Miitopia, namely character relationships affecting combat. This is a bit harder to pull off, but with good roleplayers, very possible. Characters may show off to impress one another, warn others about incoming attack, or even start dealing more damage if friend has been knocked out. These effects are bit harder to codify, though and they are not of much use to monsters (unless you're fighting nekogoblins and other sapients). I honestly like it a lot, but it's more fiat-y.

Then again, Ryuutama depends heavily on fiat, so it's a good way to spice up both combat and character relationships.

Note that these ideas are only for combat - to make it more interesting, even if it's not the focus of the system. Journey across interesting, different and dangerous locales will always trump facepunch-filled journey.

oh, right, last addition - nonlethal strikes don't have penalty to hit. Like hell i will penalize players for trying to end combat nonletally (defeated enemy is much more interesting than dead one).

I've been thinking about running Ryuutama again myself, these are pretty interesting hacks.

Any other changes? Combat's sort of always been the thing that's worried me, although things like the way durability is handled also could do with smoothing out. I'm tempted to build my own sea travel system on too, but that's more for flavor and mechanical interestingness rather than necessity.

How do the different GM dragon types play out in practice? This is the only game I have ever seen to have "classes" for game masters, with specific abilities, and find it fascinating. Are there any other games that do that?

This is the worst part of the game. I dig the resource management, but the other stuff is complete garbage.

Also the travel rolls were really really dumb.

The classes were lame as hell too.

By design, GMs don't need classes. Fundamentally it's a role to be an arbitrator so that the game is fun and interesting things happen.

The only way I've seen giving GMs special powers is in Savage Worlds and what I've heard of the Infinity Game. In them they have in-built mechanics to naturally set up a flow of "if the players are doing really awesome, then they can expect some big bullshit to go down." And even then those only exist for faggots who get super pissy at GM fiats.

sounds like you ONLY dig resource management.

GMs do not need classes (or whatever character building mechanics the game uses), but strictly speaking neither do players - you can run everything as a Game of Pretend and things can go fine if the people participating are creative and reasonable. On the other hands, the GM role is a major point of failure for campaigns, because GMs have to work much more than the other people involved, and they are not even called a "player". I feel like giving GMs some small measure of build options could, if properly designed, make the experience more fun for them.

I thought of at least one more game in which the GM is treated as an actual character in the game world with stats/abilities - Fellowship, in which the GM is the Overlord that the party seeks to defeat. You actually get to go through a special character creation process that defines your powers, weaknesses, and backstory, which is really neat.

This sounds rad. You guys looking for players?

I probably will be, once I figure out how I want to set things up a bit more. It'll take a few days at least though, it's been a while since I've done RPG things.

Got a discord?

No server yet, I'm Liq#2450 though.