/gdg/ - Game Design General

>What are the advantages and disadvantages of making a system tailored around a specific setting?
Testing is an advantage because if given a fixed setting the testing parameters are more similar between sessions/groups than testing the same system in fantasy as opposed to hard sci-fi or modern horror.
Disadvantage is that if you tailor it too hard to the given setting, porting it to other settings is more complicated.

>5e D&D Weapons that aren't just die numbers.
What did he mean by this?

Likely he meant die sizes.

How can I make the perfect game?

You can make a game that feels perfect to you, but you can't please every demographic. What makes a game perfect for you, only you can tell.

What if I don't know what I want?

There is no perfect game, only perfect games.

You'll have to work it out.
Try to narrow it down. Surely you have some preferences? What do you decidedly not want? For whom are you doing this? Yourself, your immediate group? A s big as possible a group of prospective buyers?

That thought is a misconception. Games are a temporary diversion that will become boring at some point, even if well-designed.

Then you're ill-equipped to design a good game.

Well, there's something good about this for skyresh though, i might be able to grab the system once it's done and easily mod it to support the setting! Not everything is lost, but I won't be working on it as a standalone anymore for a good while.

What do you fellas use to make your character sheets??

I use Adobe Illustrator myself, with some pretty good results Sometimes I just use spreadsheets to test values though! Kinda like my PF character here. Those are nice to have if you're still in the development process of your game to know what things will and will not go in the final character sheet before you start designing them, the amount of space the elements will take based on how much info you put into them, and stuff like that.

Now if this google account becomes suddenly inaccessible, we have nothing. Before, we might temporarily lose one cached item, which we could ask for in thread and receive. Now we'd have to dig up the old copypasta, hope that the files were updated in both places, and so on.

That's true. It also can help moving onto something else, and then coming back later with fresh eyes.

No one really knows what they want until they see it juxtaposed with their lack.

Bumping.

Material Culture Bump. Got these in the mail recently, pretty happy with the quality - they feel like FFG promo cards... Not quite as nice as Magic cards, but far better than the nasty Chinese cardstock.

Any more close ups of the cards?

There is no functional difference between one weapon which deals 1d6 damage and any other, except in terms people don't really care about (cost - people don't often actually buy mundane items - and weight, which people generally disregard).

I took weapon keywords from the Star Wars RPG as one idea to make d20 a little more interesting for the martials, for example:

Defensive X (if you are targeted by an attack, you may as a reaction use a weapon with the Defensive property to parry, increasing your AC reactively by its Defensive value)
Penetrating (ignores specific damage type resistance, but is still subject to magical resistance or immunity)
Cleaving/Area (a Cleaving weapon may deal half weapon damage to a second target within range and adjacent to the first target, if the original attack roll hits the second target, even multiple times per turn - Area is the same but all adjacent targets instead of one. This only counts the weapon's own damage, so stuff from e.g. Great Weapon Mastery or Sharpshooter don't affect it - only what you roll on the weapon's dice + your statistical damage bonus with it)

By adding more interesting properties in this way you add functional differences to weapons. It's design-intensive but allows mundane items to be near as interesting as magical ones, which is great for lower-than-average-fantasy games. I've also considered making Feats more minor and giving you one every attribute increase i.e. in addition to rather than instead of it - so feats which play into specific weapon properties become viable design space (Defensive Duelist allowing you to add a roll of the weapon's damage die to your AC as well when using the Defensive property, for example)

All that being said, I figure I might as well just not play D&D. So I'm writing a bit of Dragon's Dogma-inspired fantasy right now for Genesys when it comes out. I've gotten obsessive about my workflow, though.

I did this as sort of a trial in game design, both graphic and logistical. It's rewarding that the game system runs, and that a game can be carried on from start to finish without any need to patch up the game on the fly... although it's full of unbalanced combos and dead cards that I didn't see coming. A lesson for us all: no matter how well you design your system, it won't survive first contact with your players.

The lighting in my house is crappy, but here's a selection. All the art is free domain, which is a plus.

They're looking pretty good.

I want to make a combat system based entirerly on narration and freedom of action by the players. If you try to finish a fight early by going for a weak spot, you can, but you'll have a really hard time doing it. You can weaken and injure foes first to make finishing them off easier.

Preferably, this all be done with one basic mechanic.

Thanks! I was a bit iffy about colour-coding and embedding the keywords, but I think they look good on the card, and it works well for streamlining the system.

Grids? Hexes? TotM? Why?

TotM

because I can break out into game with just paper, pencil and dice right the fuck away

What's TotM?

Grid though. Hex is great in theory, but in practice it can be wonky.

Theatre of mind, just eyeballing it.

So, for reasons I'm not going to go into, I've been thinking a lot about focus, specifically the focus of my game. I got into thinking about the existential or meta aspects of my design and I went looking for resources. I found a particularly interesting and actually useful checklist that, while mainly for RPGs, could be used for most of our projects with proper tweaking.

genesisoflegend.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Game-Design-Sheet-Fillable.pdf

It provides a nice snapshot of what your game is "supposed to be", so it can be compared to your own work to see whether or not you've kept your focus (or will need to change). Also, it can be compared to other works as sort of a quick, elevator-pitch style intro.

I think I'm finally happy with the combat system of my arena skirmish game.

Each attack lets you roll with specific d6 dice. There are 4 different dice. Worst to best they are yellow, orange, red, purple.

>yellow
0-1-1-1-2-2
>orange
1-1-1-2-2-2
>red
1-1-2-2-2-3
>purple
1-2-2-2-3-3

Let's say a mighty fireball attack lets you roll with 2 red, 3 orange and 4 yellow dice. You roll and get part 1 of pic related. You split the dice into groups with a value of 3+ to determine damage. As you see in part 2, one of the red dice alone does 1 damage because it already has a value of 3. The others need to be paired up to get 3 with one of the dice being the remainder. In the end the attack deals 4 damage because there are 4 groups of 3+. It doesn't have to be exactly 3 so if you pair up two 2s it's still 3+ and thus 1 damage.
But 3 is just the baseline. You can equip armor or simply have tougher units that will have an armor value. Let's say the unit has an armor value of 1. That means that in order to deal damage to that unit, you'll have to pair up your dice to reach a value of 4 instead of 3. Using the same dice, it would look like part 3 of the pic. As you see now the attack only deals 3 damage.

So far I'm pretty happy. The system is very simple but I like that it's not too swingy. The dice are fairly consistent and the pairing-up mechanic makes it so damage is usually within a pretty narrow window meaning results won't be too random.

Oh what I forgot to mention is that you can upgrade units/attacks over the course of the game. For example that you add an extra purple die to each attack of a unit.

I like it. Dice curves seem on point as well. Generic system, or are you catering it to a specific game?

Thanks! It's for a specific board game idea I have.

I notice the sheet doesn't allow for a GM-less game, not that I want one. But it is biased in that the numbers of points to allocate don't permit all design decisions. Or it isn't biased and just fails at math.

The person who made it filled in a sample for dnd 4e and didn't follow those guidelines themselves so I doubt it's all encompassing.

But, those numbers ranges do help you think more critically about your game. There are plenty of people who might think "well, all of these are important so I'll fill them all in" without realizing the purpose isn't to make a 27pt RPG, but rather know where to focus your deepest and most interesting mechanics.

And, if you're making a GMless game, you probably already have an idea on how to allocate responsibility. If not, you're already designing outside your scope

What are the best d100 game systems?

I'm looking for inspiration and/or stuff from which to steal.

I really like your system. It involves a lot of dice without being lolrandumb. Though maybe try to limit it to three different dice instead of four and just make the power difference between them a bit bigger. Also not sure about 0 on yellow. But honestly cool idea with the pairing mechanic.

I'm still trying to hack at this combat system. I think it could work really well, but when I think about larger encounters where the DM wants to bring in lots of enemies my confidence is a little shaken. Does it seem like a lot more work for a DM to keep track of? Is it time to stop going for simultaneous turns and just stick with turn-based?

On another note for people who are sick of seeing me pop in with my problems, would you guys prefer 8.5x11 or 6x9 for TTRPG books?

Mapping in hex for tactical small-scale combat is kinda wonky, but not as difficult as I thought. Huh.

Dark Heresy is like the benchmark d100 RRG. It has a lot of bloat, but the bones are good.

tentative cover rule concepts, or the illustration of a rave?
you decide!

Took a few seconds to see what this was for
I'm not enthralled about the greater perimeter on the left cover instance...

We ended up scrapping it in favor of "if you can draw a straight line between attacker and target and there's something in the way, they're covered" and decided to limit the use of the grid to areas of effect, movement, distances, range, etc

This is a good way of doing it. Only thing I'd make note of is what happens if the line runs along of edge of a hex, like which one it counts as crossing over.

We consider the hex to be an abstraction of character positioning, so for this further abstraction we consider the line to be drawn towards where the character would be in the area of the hex, rather than on the center of a grid unit

What I meant to say is - these lines arent tied to grid restrictions.

>all the art is free domain

Holy fuck, where did you find these? I'm looking for some art for my cards myself.

Mostly from: pixabay.com/

Good luck though, I spent hours scouring this site just to find ninety or so decent images.

Also post up those cards when you develop them! I try and give feedback to the RPG guys as user when I can, but I'm more of a card/boardgame player, and I'd like to see a few more projects like that going in these threads.

What about penalyzing clones?

I mean, when talking about D&D4 or Strike! the concept of alpha striking is usually to use clones to end the battle quickly by unleashing the most damage in the first round.

What about a rule to only allow one of an Encounter Power per battle? So if Andrew used "BTFO" Encounter Power, Bob can't.

This assumes that the only way for Andrew and Bob to have this power is to have the same class, and choosing it from a pool of 4 available.
Maybe not banning, but imposing a dire penalty, since the enemy already saw this once yadda yadda. This opens up for the same PC using the same power twice instead of hard limiting it to once per battle.

Options I can think of...

- Don't allow same class
- Don't balance powers based on frequency of use
- Larger powers require "charge-up" via using smaller ones/just surviving a few rounds so that they tend to end, not start battles

Quick background, the PCs are modern drug dealers trying to get a foothold in the city. I want to make the other factions feel "alive" by rolling random interactions between them. Using a few stats;
> finance, reputation, loyalty and combat ability
To represent the faction. I would roll with a few stats added and subtracted vs the average of the roll to see which side gains more territory or members.

>combat of one -combat of the other to see who takes over a few blocks in a shootout
>loyalty to see if the loser has members leave
>reputation to see if the winner gains members

Anyone ever try a random faction interaction system? Any ideas for potential "stats"?

simple dicepool homebrew, D&D3.5-like-ish, though I've long left D&D for inspiration.

made for kids and drunkards, beer'n'pretzels game

critique welcome and appreciated, steal/copy anything you'd like

Have reputation and presence.
Reputation is always toward some other faction. Presence is about owning territory and power.

I'll use d20 as example
Presence is rolled as a bonus.
Reputation adds to the roll against that faction. High roll is always better.
Add situation modifiers. Maybe the Red Scorpions like violence (+ to roll), but the Virgin Nuns not (- to roll), so even with the same reputation, the total modifier can be different.

On phone so excuse anything.

bump

The charge up idea could be interesting for other systems. It's just adrenaline from any given vidya, but it would have an interesting effect of implemented for both magic and martial classes.

Thank you, kind user.

Was the d100 WHFB RPG any good? From what I understand they were rather close in design.

Thoughts on casual deception games like Werewolf (and One Night variation), Mafia, Secret Hitler, etc.?

I'm working on a similar style game where everyone is a crew member of a space station, with different areas of expertise and there are X number of saboteurs. I'm trying to get around the player elimination, without having the game only last 1 "round". Right now, the idea is having "tiles" that represent sections of the ship. Once a tile gets compromised, it's removed and after a certain number get compromised, the rest of the ship goes down.

Only problem is I can't seem to find a way for saboteurs to go about doing this each "round" without it being super obvious (deducible?) who they are. Anyone with suggestions or experience with those types of games?

Things I should consider? Things I need to keep in mind?

I don't understand the interaction between this and the 1d20 system vs. AC. Can you explain?

Depends on what kind of game I'm running / playing.

I've enjoyed D&D in different ways using both Grid and Theater of the Mind. I prefer DMing via Theater though, just because it makes describing things / narrating action a lot easier and more flowy, without being restricted to a grid.

have you played The Resistance?
sounds a lot like what you're describing
hidden "evil faction" that tries to sabotage without getting caught

there's no player elimination, only "you're no longer trusted so nobody will give you the opportunity to sabotage"

I have not, I'll check it out.

If you've played the Battlestar Galactica board game, there's a mechanic there you could borrow. Every player has a number of skill cards, you need to pass a test to repair a system or whatever, every player puts in a skill card secretly, then they're shuffled and revealed. Theoretically, the saboteur throws off the test by secretly putting the wrong skill card in, causing the test to fail. Players then need to decide who amongst them can not be trusted.

I actually really like that. Instead of a skill, I can do something akin to "effort", or even a "tool" that everyone pitches in.

And if your players have 'different areas of expertise' you get this interesting game where the saboteur needs to pick his moment carefully, or be discovered. If there's a test that only Engineers can contribute to, and there are only three Engineers, then the saboteur throwing that test off will narrow the pool down to three people. Rather than give himself away, he might choose to actually help that test, so that later he can throw off a test which calls for the entire crew to contribute, or which requires engineering+security, making him harder to detect. If failing the tests with smaller pools of potential contributors have consequences beyond just advancing the saboteurs agenda (like: if you fail this test by 5 or more then...) the disadvantage to everyone might make it worth the risk of revealing yourself, balancing the game.

Whatever direction you go in, it sounds like it's going to be a fun project!

Thoughts on games that limit each class to only one player? I've been waffling on this for awhile now.

On the one hand, this encourages a more dynamic party wherein each PC has their own chances to shine (and thus each player gets the spotlight at some point). On the other, players might be disappointed they don't get to play the class they want. That said, I think that's not too big a deal, if you're coming to an RPG deadset on a specific character I think you're doing it wrong.

I think meddling isn't needed in this case. Many groups will implement this naturally by themselves. And it's one of those rules that I would anticipate to be discarded frequently if it strikes the players fancy. Also consider that it inhibits themed campaigns like thieves guild or witch coven and so on.

How many weapons is too many?

Making a sci-fi system, and what started out as a basic armory has turned into a massive list of variants and upgrades. It's gotten to the point that I'm considering cutting the armory down to barebones again and making an Armory PDF of optional rules for people who want it.

I've already done the same thing for the Ship Design rules, since the core book shouldnt have an entire chapter devoted to an aspect of the game that will only come up in certain games

I can only say that it should be weighted according to game priorities, proportionate to other areas of equal importance and adjusted for standardization versus unique rules ratio between individual items.

Fair enough. Sounds like I should cut it down then.

Since there is precedent you can just stick the cut material beside the ship design rules.

I ended up making rules to build your own weapons, so while I can list a few of the basics, the creation rules take care of the rest of the possible combinations and variations. Depending on how unique you need various things to be, that might be another option to reduce space.

For sure. I honestly need to finalise the effects/costs and add images and I'm sorted.

Nandeck makes it such a fucking breeze.

You can't draw grids?

Why break the grid? Those better logically occupy 4 cells, instead of just aesthetically.

Careful about that. A sword & board fighter shouldn't deny other player to play an archer fighter.

>at point in development of a game where all thats left to do is actually arrange everything in a coherent manner so people can play the game.
>this is somehow the most difficult part.

Well fuck.

I have a question. Is using base d4 a bad idea? Long story short started with base d20 but the numbers got to big to manage so i divided everything by 5 to make the numbers smaller.

Have you tried d10 first? Best to work your way down in smaller increments first.

Well all the threasholds were by 5. So i thought it best to just get rid of that and have it so each number actually matters.

A totally asinine observation here, but d4's just aren't that much fun to roll.

Agreed. Even then, I want a Zelda RPG that uses d4 painted like the triforce

Yeah. I think im going to just find a way to work with d6s without changing to much of the system.

The issue with really large numbers is that you need a ton to make a difference, like d%+skill needs atleast 35 to be a noticeable improvement.

The issue with small numbers is that a +1 on d4 is a crazy improvement.

Unless its a dice pool system, then it may work but like this guy said;
D4 just ain't fun to roll.

The main disadvantage would be "portability", or trying to make a system that is truly multi-purpose. X-Wing is entertaining as a game of spacefighter duels but it would take a fair bit of hacking up if you wanted to use it for, say; a Fury Road game.

The inverse is true, and overly generic rules can make for a system where powers may be "bland" or falsely equivalent to one another.

So, I'm getting overwhelmed by the math portion of trying to figure out something for my secret role / social deduction game. Each player is a member of a fictional space parliament. In the game, every player is given a character card that has different things like what planet they're from, and what their affiliation is with. Each player also has ties with certain lobbies / factions.

There's a stack of cards that has fictional Bills that affect certain planets, and are sponsored by different lobbies. The players vote on each bill, and at the end of the game, each player gets a token based on how many bills pass that are sponsored by their group. Whoever has the most tokens at the end wins.

During the game, you can out someone (each player gets one accusation, and only one accusation can be made between bills) for being affiliated with a group, and if you get outed you get nothing.

For this many variables, how do I even get started tackling balance, making sure everyone has an equal chance of winning, not making it obvious on how to deduce someone's intentions, etc.

I've been working on-and-off on a general combat system, with Warstack as a working title since it uses an Interrupt Mechanic loosely based off MTGs stack. I originally wrote this as "Alternating Activation 40k," but am looking for it to be more general-purpose. This is the current draft: Points, scenarios, etc are not in, and I'm still focusing on the "turn structure" aspect for now.

docs.google.com/document/d/1N0bbT2a0y_THicAgRS1SxKZA9ZKtDmJpDsiDSyKAkAQ/edit?usp=drivesdk

Let me know if there are any weird RAW issues you see with the current implementation. I'm looking to add more "examples of play" text too.

As a relatively new user to /gdg/, I'd like to announce a project my friends and I have been working on for the last three-odd years: Rules of Creation. It's a 3d6-based system that seems to fit a high-fantasy setting well and trades some realism in its mechanics in order to make combat more straightforward and easy to remember, and it's somewhat inspired by tactical grid-based video games like Tactics Ogre, Dofus/Wakfu, and Final Fantasy Tactics.

The main draw of the game is in its character creation mechanics; most of the pages of the rulebook itself are a toolkit for building a character's race, class, and techniques (spells/weeaboo fightan magic moves/etc.) from the ground-up. Our goal was to make chargen as customizable as possible without slogging down the players/GM with too many confounding options, and let a regular old human with a sword and shield be just as viable and interesting to play as a sapient floating book that casts runic magic through its own pages. The game itself is still in its testing phases and there are a few unwritten portions (mostly in the Skill Tricks chapter, because there are 192 separate skill tricks to think up and balance), but it's currently ready to play and we've already completed two shorter campaigns and one year-long one to test it. We're looking for feedback and testers, or more specifically we need to know exactly what parts of it are terrible so we can start rewriting it.

I'll drop a link to a google doc with the entirety of the rules here, but I'll also be giving a short summation of the various chapters/mechanics in this thread because I honestly don't expect you to read all this shit: docs.google.com/document/d/1Oy0SYFegTmTTrXqmXFwh6vqmLiQ4jTNaharHakebepg/edit#heading=h.k4ahb7u57ywl
Please feel free to leave critiques and questions in the google doc itself if you do end up reading it.

The first thing would be to make sure the planets all have an equal number of cards affecting them and similar things.

Keep track of what sub elements are on cards and make sure there is a balance between the totals per sub element.

How do I approach that if the number of players vary widely, like from 6-20

A| You can balance the maximum amount of cards and hope that shuffling will distribute them evenly enough when using a part of them.
B| Always use all cards, what does it matter if you don't get to the bottom of the draft stack?
C| Make little marked subsets, 1 per player, balance them.
D| Write the cards to be contextual/targetable/universal.