Mechanics vs Setting

When you're creating a system, especially a system that is an adaption of an existing thing, is it more important to try and create mechanics that are unique and reflect the thing you're copying or is it better to just go for a simple system and handle most of the unique aspects descriptively?

For example, if I were to adapt bloodborne into a table top game, would it be better to create some sort of mechanic around trick weapons and transforming them mid combat, incorporate healing via attacking, and have something to simulate stamina usage? Or should I go for a generic combat system and simply try to emulate the feeling of the game via how I describe actions and areas?

I would say I always go for mechanics that emulate the source material but it can be difficult when such things don't translate well into turn based, slower actions. For instance, the "Dodge" mechanic that is so vital in soulsborne games is very difficult to pull off similarly to the games. This is why I'm wondering if it might just be better to eschew attempts to emulate gameplay that you'll never quite replicate.

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Okay, I actually have a specific set of experience with this topic, so I'll give you my take on it.

I think its more satisfying to create a system that is uniquely tailored for the setting you want to portray. This may not always means keeping the numbers the same, so much as the impact those numbers had.

I worked on a game for an Evangelion roleplaying system, and one of the big features of the setting is the fact that the titular robots are plugged in, and if that cord gets cut they default to a 5 minute battery life before they power down. In the show, this provided tension.

With the way combat played out in the game, 5 rounds did not provide tension. That was pretty much the whole fight anyway. And even then, 1 round = 1 minute narrative time never really made sense. In order to keep the cords relevant, we had to shorten the battery time to 3 rounds. It wasn't number accurate, but it made losing your external power actually matter, and force the player to gauge whether this was a fight they could win immediately or they had to fall back and plug in again.

So take that as an example where you might have to go against the provided material in order to best simulate it. I mention this because, as a videogame with a timing based real time combat system, you will never be able to actually replicate Bloodborne style combat. What you will have to do instead is identify what the video game mechanics behind Bloodborne made you FEEL as a player, and see what tabletop mechanics allow you to create a similar illusion. Just recognize what problem it is you are trying to solve, because the 'obvious' problem (make Bloodborne itself into a tabletop game) is in fact the wrong way to approach things.

Likewise, if you want what you make to be a *good* RPG, you will have to do something that may come as a surprise and feel weird: you are going to have to include stuff that isn't actually in the source material.

Why? Well, do you want your system to be able to tell more than one story, or is it literally just the exact plot of Bloodborne but with friends this time?

You are already going to have to make allowances in the mechanics for the transition to tabletop from a mechanical standpoint, but you also need to make allowances for campaigns.

For a game like Bloodborne, this means building out the lore enough that the world is someplace that the players can actually live in and interact with. Whats Yarnham like when its not a night of the hunt gone all screwy? What does the healing church look like if its not fucking deserted, and actually have vicars to do Blood Healing for you? What if the players go left when the games plot went right? What other locals around Yanham, both close are far, exist?

Like, if you go one direction out of town and into the forbidden woods, you find Brygenwerth by the lake. Fine. Got that. That if you go North instead? Or the opposite direction entirely? Play in the setting long enough, and you are going to have to answer those questions.

As the game designer, you don't have to get too nitty gritty with the map, and its probably for the best that you don't because GMs will want to tailor their game to their needs anyway. But new areas mean new people, new factions, new abilities and new items. This allows you to include things that you feel fit the overall tone of the game without being canonically part of it, and in doing so provide material for GMs to look at and go "That looks neat, Im'a use that" or even better "this faction looks cool, I'm not actually going to use them but they give me an IDEA for..."

Making the mechanics emulate the SETTING isn't nearly as important as making the mechanics emulate the TONE. Changing the setting of a system isn't particularly work intensive, but changing the TONE that the mechanics of a system informs is so hard that it'd be easier to just build a new system from the ground up. You have to ask yourself questions like
>To what degree should the PC's feel like the protagonists of their story, or just participants in a living world?
>How much comparative time should be spent on combat relative to everything else?
>To what degree should player-to-player AND player-to-threat power discrepancies be permitted in the name of realism?
>To what degree should realism take a back seat to genre?

Questions like these are MUCH more important than
>How can I stat that one guy from that one episode/chapter?

Agreed. In reference to

>How much comparative time should be spent on combat relative to everything else?

specifically, I think a Soulsborne style game might even need two different forms of combat. Bossfights should be big, involved battles where going into the fight with the wrong tools or not enough strength is a massive mistake. But, by and large, fighting normal enemies in a Soulsborne RPG should be quick and dirty. You don't want to roll initiative and go through the whole rigamoroll every time you walk down a hallway and, surprise, there are even more crazy dudes to kill. Just like the last three rooms.

You are going to want fighting normal enemies to be over in relatively few rolls. Kill or be killed, but with enough safety nets on the player side that fighting normal enemies is probably 'win, but at what cost' unless they pick the wrong fight or something goes similarly wrong. This will make the boss fights, where 'kill them before they get a chance to kill you' doesn't work be even more of an oh shit moment. You now have to plan for the fact that the boss is going to survive long enough to attack you a bunch, so you have to not just rush in like a retard.

Changing mechanics (they can use the same stats are normal combat, just use them in different ways) might seem gamist but it also does the job of letting the players know they are in a bossfight without relying on the GM to spell it out for them. The last thing you want is for a player to think they are fighting mooks only to realize that this wolf looking this has a hat on it, and thus has 50 time the health of a normal enemy and can eat souls.

Both KDM and the Dark Souls board game decided that the way to handle big boss monsters was AI cards. I wonder if there is a similar solution for more RPG combat, which is generally more flexible and complex than board game rules.

honestly for the most part I'd assume Dark Souls/Bloodborne style dodging would automatically occur as part of basic combat, if an attack misses one can assume it was either dodged or blocked

otherwise I feel most Soulsborne mechanics aren't actually all that hard to emulate in an RPG context

I like how everyone has been waxing philosophic at what everyone already knows: "translating video game mechanics to tabletop doesn't work."

This is a simple concept that no one but the newest of fags struggles with on Veeky Forums

I'm just going to leave this right here.

Yeah, but what's it like?

Mechanics should reinforce the tone and feel of the setting. Universal systems are garbage.

In general, I think it's a good idea to have unique mechanics that support the tone and premise of the setting. This doesn't mean they can't be simple and light, that's just harder to design.

However, it's a misstep to try and translate exact mechanics directly. Different mediums do different things in different ways, and an attempt to directly replicate a mechanic will often have a result that feels completely different to the original.

Instead of trying to replicate, try to adapt. Look at what the elements of the original you like do in context- Trick weapons provide versatility and change up potential, healing by combat encourages aggression, and stamina usage forces you to conserve resources and punishes you for overcommitting.

Once you've figured out those, you can try and build a system of mechanics to properly create those results in tabletop form.

You could do a decent 'Souls dodge with ORE mechanics. A high enough sense means you see enemy attacks coming before they happen, and then you just declare that you're dodging and/or using multiple actions to dodge while doing other stuff. Multiple actions means that you have to get multiple sets and hope the set you designate for dodge is better than your attacker's best set.

Light attacks would be "fast attack" maneuvers, heavy attacks would be the special maneuver that does more damage, and so on.

Stamina could be a mechanic where you could temporarily avoid the penalty for multiple actions, but take an even bigger penalty if you run out. Say you get base stamina equal to Body (or make a new stat for it), lose one every turn you dodge, run, or try special maneuvers, gain one back every turn you don't do anything fancy, and take an extra -1 if you run out. Though in my opinion stamina isn't strictly necessary for a souls TRPG.

Willpower would be the representation for losing/gaining sanity and going hollow. Dying forces a trauma check, picking up your bloodstain gets any lost willpower and base will from that particular death, and hitting 0 base will means you go hollow. Maybe call it "humanity" instead of willpower.

>honestly for the most part I'd assume Dark Souls/Bloodborne style dodging would automatically occur as part of basic combat, if an attack misses one can assume it was either dodged or blocked

If you wanted to check "player skill" for it, you could have it be either double blind or dice pool based mechanics, without it being too obtrusive.

Honestly, I think a souls style game needs the doding to be nonrandom. You have a limited pool of resources to dodge with, and when you spend a point to dodge that dodge just works, end of story. Rolling for dodge slows down gameplay in the best of times, in something as fast paced as bloodborne it just turns tge game into rollsrollsrolls.

Instead of 'will the dice let me dodge?', instead it becomes 'can I afford to dodge? Should I dodge now, or is this a hit I can afford to take? I can earn back some of that lost health if I survive...'

That's what I mean by double-blind, either as a simple stamina bidding or a more complicated "chose action" mechanic.

What would choose action look like?

Any of this helping you, OP?

Yep. Sorry for lack of replies, I've been kind of busy.

Yeah, but that would just fall under "Ignore mechanics, worry more about setting and tone".

You can handle anything via standard combat systems, from dark souls to bullet hells. It just won't FEEL much like the original.

>is it more important to try and create mechanics that are unique and reflect the thing you're copying or is it better to just go for a simple system and handle most of the unique aspects descriptively?
Which half of a car is better? The left half, or the right half?
Either half is useless without the other

I like to make mechanics flavored to fit the world we are emulating, makes it a bit less distant.

There are games like RuneQuest and GURPS that have okay ideas for dodging, look them up they might spark an idea. There is allso an option to have one dodge attempt every turn, also if I remember Song of Swords has sorta dodge, you keep dice for deffence. But you can explain to the DM that you roll to avoid, not that it matters.

But if you want to go really deep into shit pick up MERP or Rolemaster.

If you're trying to make a new system to adapt something to tabletop, I'd argue it's pretty much mandatory to make mechanics that help emulate the setting, source material, and/or tone of the source. Otherwise you run full force into "why should I use this system when I could just run the game in [generic system of choice], which I already know how to play and know how it works?" This is assuming you're capable of making a functional system with unique, if gimmicky, mechanics. If you can't build it without it either being a broken piece of shit where an olympic athlete will fail to pick up a 50-pound weight half the time, or just a generic system with fluff centered around whatever you based it on, then it's probably just better to pick up an established generic system than reinventing the wheel.

Yes - GM removes kiddy gloves and plays the monsters to the best or almost the best of their abilities.

Nightmare mode - GM makes a monster with premonition and also uses meta-knowledge as part of monster planning its actions.

The only problem I have with that is that it screws with the pattern learning part of souls fights. GMs are too inconsistent for you to really be expected to figure out the monsters logic without handholding.

Is there even much point in trying to make a Bloodborne game, as opposed to a game that intentionally apes Bloodborne? Bloodborne basically doesn't have a plot, and its setting doesn't have much meat to it either because everything is *~a mystery~*.

Even Dark Souls has a more developed story. I can at least tell you what I wanted in Dark Souls, or what happened. The ending of Bloodborne is just completely out of left field and everything after the healing Church was just me playing the game because it wasn't over yet with no goal in mind or logic to my actions.

>I didn't understand it so the story was bad/non-existent

I think your first mistake is the whole premise, of "bloodborn as table top game".
Bloodborne is a really good video game, because it has lots of really good video game mechanics and it plays well as video game.
Trying to emulate that in another medium is stupid.

But talking more generally about adopting settings or ideas from other medium, then yes, crafting systems and mechanics that enhance the things that are important in the source material is better than just adding flavor text on top of some random generic bullshit.

Its not that I don't understand it, its that I wasn't given anything to understand.

I paid attention to the dialog and reading the item descriptions and whatnot, and I kept waiting for all of these *cool things* they kept introducing to add up to something. I recognized that I had heard about Rom before once the fight started, but I don't know why I went out of my way to kill her. I know that there is a whole thing about the elder gods periodically magicking baby gods into people as a way of entering out world, but that doesn't explain how or why I turned into a squid at the end, or indeed even if this was something I wanted.

When I beat Mergo's Wetnurse and that path of exploration was over, I was wondering where I should head to next now that this long winding waste of my time was over with when, to my shock, my fucking house was on fire and the game was ending now. Really? This is it? This is all of the explanation I get, nothing is going to thematically tie all of this together?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there was a good story in there. But if you have to pull info out of a game guide or a wiki to do it, stuff that wasn't IN THE GAME to inform the story, its crap.

Here's the basic rundown
youtube.com/watch?v=wjWOy6ioVHI

All the info is given in the game, it's just spread out like puzzle pieces that you have to fit together. Despite that, it isn't as esoteric as something like Evangelion, and is relatively more straightforward with its story.

Okay, I'm 2 minutes in and this already explains a lot. Which is to say, I had never fucking heard of Ebreitus and that boss design was totally new to me, and a quick google search informs me that there is a whole path of boss fights and exploration at the Healing Church that I somehow never encountered. That certainly explains why it felt like I wasn't getting half the details, its because I was in fact not getting half the details.

Its not enough to make me go back and replay the game, but I'll concede the point as my criticism is founded in an incomplete experience of the game.

It really depends on what you're trying to do, OP.

It could be cool for you to have a game that recreates the feeling of playing Bloodborne in a tabletop game, if you did it right. Obviously you'll never be able to quite recreate a twitchy action game in a roleplaying format, but you can get a decent approximation. Even if the dodge mechanic doesn't work (it almost certainly won't), transforming weapons, healing from attacking, and a stamina system sounds like it could be fun.

The real question is whether that's something you're honestly interested in doing. There's more to Bloodborne than the combat system, isn't there? Or to put it this way- if there was a game about the non-combatants in Bloodborne, how would it be different than a game about non-combatants in Dune or Middle Earth? What rules would you use to reinforce the game's setting?

If you're stumped, try reading other roleplaying games and seeing how they do it. Read up on all sorts of games- simulation heavy number crunchers and almost freeform storygames. It sounds like you're stuck- if that's the case, it can really help to get some perspective!

Considering the similarities between them, I almost wonder if it would doable to make a game that is intentionally Soulsborne, as in designed to play both Dark Souls AND Bloodborne mechanically, just as different options in character creation.

So like, you can play as a Human or a Hollow, but the Human's get the Hunter perks to keep up with the fact that Hollow's never fucking die, they just take a nap. Hunters don't have to worry about hollowing, but only because they are trading away their humanity to dark gods and have to worry about turning into beasts instead.

Make Attunement be a limited mental space that can be taken up by uses-per-rest Spells OR passive buff Runes, and you should be good to go. Guns in Bloodborne as more of a tactical tool than pure ranged DPS advantage, so a good Bow is honestly still relevant mechanically.

Hollows with Trick weapons. Hunters with magic spears. Butcher powerful monsters for their souls and their blood respectively.

GMs are pretty consistent when they play like this. Think about the thing that will screw you over most of all in a fight - something even worse will happen.

Pattern learning is more or less worthless in RPG games. You could learn abilities of monsters but unless they dumb automatons GMs will or at least should play them with variety modelling how they react to changing environment.

You could better spend your time by learning patterns of your GM.

Bump for OP.

Some basic ideas on the subject.

>Trick weapons
As a free action switch between modes. One might do more damage but has shorter range, the other does less damage but has longer range.
Faster attacks vs. attacks that inflict status effects.
And so on.

>Regain System
Use double-sided tokens. Everytime you lose health, put down as many tokens with the empty/bad side up. For every successful attack, flip the first empty token from the left over to the good side and regain one point of health.
After so and so many turns, start removing tokens from the right, one by one until either all tokens have been turned over or removed.
Every time you take damage while in the process of regaining health, remove These token before setting down new ones.

You both put down a card with your action on it face down, and then flip it over.

That doesnt sound all that fun.

Just use GURPS

It's fun. Can generate very tense moments. It's probably better for dedicated competitive games, because it is very tiring.

Yeah. Now imagine doing that multiple times a round, every combat.

Gurps is legitimately horrible. Its functional but it tries to be so universal that it is little more than a slog.

Any system with more than a few pages of actual mechanics is bloated and needs to be streamlined.

Well "a round" would be everyone putting down 1 or 2 cards at most, that's the point. But the decision would have more weight than rolling the dice (there may not even be a dice roll involved at all; in fact, that would strengthen its likeness to the game). It'd be extra tiring for the GM unless there was some sort of AI for the monsters... which is actually how the bardgame and Kingdom Death work, so it's not out of the question.

> OP's never coming back to see all of this insightful discussion on his topic

I'm right here

I'm just quietly reading through it and replying occasionally without drawing attention to who I am. There's some interesting ideas here, though people seems to have focused more on bloodborne than I figured they would, since I was just using that as an example.

Not to hijack this thread but;

I currently have this setting concept I've been working on for a few years now. It's a noir style lost city, outside of space and time, where technology is all weird and fucked up. For example; people fight with scrap metal guns but there are robots and people use hovercars to get around.

What sort of mechanics can emulate the 'feel' of this setting?

>Or should I go for a generic combat system and simply try to emulate the feeling of the game via how I describe actions and areas?
Do this and then include SOME elements of the former, thus avoiding overcomplication.

>Rolling for dodge slows down gameplay in the best of times,
This is the biggest bullshit ever, usually pushed by D&D morons. Dodging (or parrying) gives players something to do outside of their turn; it also provides a tension point for them: the dragon hit - can i successfully dodge or do I take massive amounts of damage?

When you dodge or parry regularly in a game system, this literally takes no time: the player picks up his dice and rolls, comparing the result to his dodging skill which he memorized well enough after the 3rd time dodging. How the fuck does this slow down the game signifticantly? It does turn a 30 min fight into 33 min fight - terrible!

Someone hasn't played DH where everyone has active defenses and its a fucking slog.

Doubling the number of rolls to determine a hit isn't an insignificant increase, user.

Increasing the frequency of rolling by a third does indeed slow down gameplay by a considerable margin.

Alternatively you could just assume that an enemy hits as long as you can't dodge/defend/parry.

The attacker would only carry modifiers to the roll and you roll your "not get nibbeled by zombies" dice.

Like: A Strong enemy would make it harder to block
An unarmed enemy would be easy to parry.

it would't change much in the roll & time economy but might be the thing to bring over the tone better.

I haven't only played DH and RT, I have run DW and dodging is nothing like that. Dodging is usually straight up Agility and becomes only marginally more complicated when trying to dodge automatic weapons because DoS are involved. It's a simple, straight-forward process that consumes little time.

>Doubling the number of rolls to determine a hit isn't an insignificant increase, user.
Diec-rolling isn't what makes combat long, user.
There are 3 things that make combats long:
A. Rules questions, usually related to talents/traits or how they interact with one another.
B. Lack of clarity about a given situation, occasionally resulting in having to walk back an action.
C. Player indecision or player strategizing.

I can assure you, compared to that
>Roll versus Agility. 67, okay, I fail.
is nothing. Especially when you have memorized your Dodging value well from previous dodging attempts.
It's a meme pushed by D&D fans who haven't actually studied combat time consumption.

t. hasnt studied a range of youtube actual plays

>translating video game mechanics to tabletop doesn't work
Only if you're trying to translate real time mechanics, turn based RPGs don't really have an issue.

Probably have something like "tech level" associated with all of your gear, if you really want to... but it feels like this is a "style over substance" style setting, so it's probably best to just not worry about it too much.

Every time your system has opposed rolling you could have just doubled the number of dice and subtracted the average from the roll of the attacker (or added as a bonus to the defender.

i.e. if you have a character rolling a d6 to attack and another a d6 to defend, you could have just had the attacking character roll 2d6 vs 7 (apply modifiers the same way).

If you have some sort of other mechanics tying into it, or maaaaybe if you have different die sizes for rolls (like savage worlds, except SW just uses "half die size" for defenses), I guess you could have opposed rolling.

If you do opposed rolling with a d%, you deserve to be humanely put down.