Help with homebrewing a diceless noncombat system?

I am trying to homebrew a suitable noncombat system for my campaigns, since I port over the tactical combat from a certain other RPG I like. I have had a look at everything from Powered by the Apocalypse games to Fantasy Flight wacky dice games to Cortex+ to Fate, and none of them quite suit what I prefer.

I am looking for something that minimizes luck and chance out of combat, lets the PCs succeed at everything that matters to them, encourages players to roleplay out their PCs' flaws and character-specific misfortunes, and encourages players to have their PCs share heart-to-heart moments with one another over relaxing activities. I want to avoid resource-based mechanics dependent on scenes and sessions, because in my years of GMing online campaigns, the duration of scenes and sessions is wildly unpredictable from week to week even within the same campaign.

I have thought up ideas for the baseline foundation for a diceless noncombat system, and I would like opinions on how to improve the ideas. Would anyone happen to have any insights on such diceless mechanics? Would anyone know of any similar RPGs?

~

Each task that would significantly and meaningfully challenge a hero of the campaign's power level has a burden rating, starting at 1. Whenever you attempt a burdensome task, you lower the skill rating by your skill rating, to a minimum of 0. Up to three other characters can step in to share the burden, reducing the burden by their skill ratings as well. Either way, you can negotiate with the GM to raise the burden of the task for extra effects like exceptional results, doing it discreetly, doing it in a way that impresses observers, doing it very quickly, and so on, which helps you avoid "wasting" your skill rating.

(Continued.)

Any leftover burden rating becomes stress. Whoever participated in solving the task distributes the stress amongst themselves. The person who receive the in-universe credit for solving the task is not the one who contributed the highest skill rating, but whoever took the most stress. If multiple people took the stress, they share the credit proportionally.

Stress is a mix of literal stress, and bad kismet. You gradually have to offload bad stress by deliberately making poor decisions or having unfortunate events befall you, ideally directly related to your character's personality flaws and character-specific misfortunes. I still have to come up with examples, but removing 1 stress is usually minor things like "You offend the princess enough that the party has to spend a few lines in conversation placating the royal," whereas the 6 to 8 point range is things like "and now the princess orders you thrown into the dream-prison."

You can share a heart-to-heart with another character, lowering both of your stress by 1. (If more characters join in, they lower their stress too.) If you share a heart-to-heart over a relaxing activity like food, that is worth -2 stress. If the relaxing activity is one you really went out of your way to facilitate, like a hot spring, -3 stress.

There are other, campaign-specific ways to lower stress. For example, in games that encourage playing dress-up, getting the exact right outfit for heading somewhere is worth -1 stress, and devoting a small conversation to it is worth -2 stress.

There is probably going to be an "Okay, that is all the stress reduction you are getting from this scene" limitation, to prevent dilly-dallying too much.

(Continued.)

Of course, you can also refuse a task in the first place. Perhaps the burden cost is too high, even with multiple PCs joining in to share the burden. When this happens, it is as though you never attempted the task in the first place. "I do not we will be able to sneak through there," or "There is no way I can make that jump," for example. On the other hand, you can lower stress by making a "soft move" or a "hard move" against yourself as part of turning down a task. Maybe you try to sneak, make a noise, and prompt a guard to investigate, as a "soft move." Or maybe you get spotted outright, as a "hard move." I have to work out stress reductions for these.

The biggest problem here is coming up with a solid list of examples for stress reduction, because this is something that can spark major disagreements. Any RPG that relies heavily on resources gained from activating your characters' flaws and character-specific misfortunes is going to run into "Was that really worth a point?" or "Maybe that should be worth 2 points," but those are usually somewhat optional, not the crux of the conflict resolution system that everyone has to pay attention to at all times.

What can I do to improve this set of ideas into a proper foundation that minimizes arguments and negotiations? What other RPGs exist that are similar to this?

I suppose it would be a good idea to actually implement a reason to avoid stress from accumulating too high, like penalties for certain stress levels, or *forcing* you to offload all of your stress at the next possible opportunity once you have hit a certain threshold.

Yeah, I'd assumed that was something you'd done or just forgot to mention. Only niggling thing is how to make the system work without all challenges playing out like negotiations

>What can I do to improve this set of ideas into a proper foundation that minimizes arguments and negotiations? What other RPGs exist that are similar to this?
This is tricky because it lies outside the normal realm of RPGs, so most people will have little if any experience with a system like this. My inclination would be to go more improvisational and freeform for a system with little or no rules, but you're going for a strictly delineated resource system of trade-offs (you can take on stress to do shit, and instigate bad things to relieve yourself of stress). This might be easier with a combat-focused game, with concrete actions, effects, damages and such, but I think quantifying actions in a more narrative, noncombat game is relatively difficult. Or at least I've never been happy with, for instance, rules for social combat. These things are difficult to put in boxes. And assigning exact stress values to amorphous actions doesn't work so well.

How crunchy do you want this system to be?

One thing you could do is if your stress reaches a certain level, you get -1 to all your skill ratings. Or, with a lesser version, -1 to whatever skill put you over the top. Also, as long as the stress is below a certain level, you could rule that it's entirely in the player's hands, but once it gets above X, the GM can freely spend the excess points for actions taken against his character.

Combat is not a problem for me. I usually port over the tactical combat of a certain system I enjoy anyway.

The real problem is hashing out how to handle noncombat sequences.

I am fine with virtually any level of crunchiness, although it should keep to the original criteria:
>I am looking for something that minimizes luck and chance out of combat, lets the PCs succeed at everything that matters to them, encourages players to roleplay out their PCs' flaws and character-specific misfortunes, and encourages players to have their PCs share heart-to-heart moments with one another over relaxing activities. I want to avoid resource-based mechanics dependent on scenes and sessions, because in my years of GMing online campaigns, the duration of scenes and sessions is wildly unpredictable from week to week even within the same campaign.

>I am looking for something that minimizes luck and chance out of combat, lets the PCs succeed at everything that matters to them, encourages players to roleplay out their PCs' flaws and character-specific misfortunes, and encourages players to have their PCs share heart-to-heart moments with one another over relaxing activities. I want to avoid resource-based mechanics dependent on scenes and sessions, because in my years of GMing online campaigns, the duration of scenes and sessions is wildly unpredictable from week to week even within the same campaign.
You should look at the Adventures in Oz RPG. It seems to be exactly what you're looking for.

>I suppose it would be a good idea to actually implement a reason to avoid stress from accumulating too high, like penalties for certain stress levels, or *forcing* you to offload all of your stress at the next possible opportunity once you have hit a certain threshold.
Maybe the burden cost of actions increases with stress level?

I'd make accumulating stress reduce the number of "doing things" scenes, and players have to spend "relaxing" scenes to get rid of stress. Or do relaxing or silly things *instead* of accomplishing goals during regular scenes.

You want diceless but then you say you don't want resource management but then get in to a complicated stress management subsystem.

Simple would be to give points every session that can be used to improve the outcome. No dice and no stress either real or mechanical.

Just steal the system from Golden Sky Stories or roleplay it like everyone else.

Christ, 2hu.

Through the breach uses cards instead of dice so it's diceless. And players have hands of cards they can use to replace the flips to improve outcomes a limited number of times.

aw fuck did I just get tricked into posting in a touhoufag thread

I don't into anime so all these moeblobs look the same to me

If someone's including anime with every post, and it isn't smug or an example of what they're talking about, it's even odds it's Colette. That, and he talks like an autist.

I do not want resource-based mechanics *dependent on scenes and sessions*, because in my years of GMing online campaigns, the duration of scenes and sessions is wildly unpredictable from week to week even within the same campaign.

I have actually played half a dozen sessions of Golden Sky Stories, for example, and that was an absolute mess because the resource-based mechanics were scene-dependent. The GM struggled to actually adjudicate what counted as a scene and what did not count as a scene, and even for all their effort, we still wound up with an impressive glut of Wonder and Feelings as the scenes went by.

Likewise, as a GM, I have always had trouble with session-based fate/luck point mechanics ala Fate Core and Strike!. Session length and what actually happens from session to session varies depending on the week. I have always had to resort to "That session does not actually count as a session for mechanical purposes," which has always come across as extremely awkward.

Changing "sessions" to "episodes" has been clunky as well, because nobody at the table, even me, is quite sure what should constitute the end of an "episode."

>The biggest problem here is coming up with a solid list of examples for stress reduction, because this is something that can spark major disagreements.
That's shit the GM can arbitrate. Any written point equivalences can just remain guidelines. You can let the player propose reduction and then you assign it a point value, giving them an ability to increase or decrease whatever it is to reach a new point value. Even if you ultimately want a more rigid list, I think that you're only going to get good values through play experience and feeling things out via improvisation.

>Likewise, as a GM, I have always had trouble with session-based fate/luck point mechanics ala Fate Core and Strike!.
I haven't run those, but I get around the basic problem you're talking about with fate/luck points by simply having them periodically regenerate within the game. I just do it when it feels right and for the amount that feels right, but you could nail things down a bit more and do it per scene or something like that (possibly with a variable amount of points based on how long / rigorous the scene was).

The problem you describe, by the way is one of the main issues I have with vancian magic in D&D. Casters can become crazy powerful in scenarios where there's only one encounter/scheme in a day.

Unrelated with the thread, but how do you even walk in those things on your feet?

This may be a sad reality.

>but you could nail things down a bit more and do it per scene or something like that

At that point, you are running into just as much wishy-washy GM adjudication as the "stress reduction" system above, if not more.

I do not think basing resource management on scenes or sessions will ever please me, hence why I am trying to avoid it.

You could do it like torchbearer, where doing things will stress you over time, but they only way to earn "destressing scenes" is by allowing bad things to happen to your character. The way it works in TB is that you can call on a flaw to reduce your ability to succeed, or even force a failure and you get a "mark" that you can use in a later scene to recover

That is already what I have down:
>You gradually have to offload bad stress by deliberately making poor decisions or having unfortunate events befall you, ideally directly related to your character's personality flaws and character-specific misfortunes. I still have to come up with examples, but removing 1 stress is usually minor things like "You offend the princess enough that the party has to spend a few lines in conversation placating the royal," whereas the 6 to 8 point range is things like "and now the princess orders you thrown into the dream-prison."

It is just that I want to enable other options for stress reduction, like so:

>You can share a heart-to-heart with another character, lowering both of your stress by 1. (If more characters join in, they lower their stress too.) If you share a heart-to-heart over a relaxing activity like food, that is worth -2 stress. If the relaxing activity is one you really went out of your way to facilitate, like a hot spring, -3 stress.

>There are other, campaign-specific ways to lower stress. For example, in games that encourage playing dress-up, getting the exact right outfit for heading somewhere is worth -1 stress, and devoting a small conversation to it is worth -2 stress.

>There is probably going to be an "Okay, that is all the stress reduction you are getting from this scene" limitation, to prevent dilly-dallying too much.

I suppose this is Chuubo's-like, now that I consider it, but that still is not quite what I am looking for.

I think the point of is that relieving stress only works if you have stress-relief tokens at all.

If your character doesn't "break" in some small way before stress can be relieved, it'll never really affect gameplay, because characters will just keep on managing it before it becomes an issue. From a narrative perspective, imagine it as... have you seen Inside Out? One of the major themes of the movie was that repressing the negative emotions (in the movie's case, sadness) stops you from starting the healing process, and also stops others from helping you/realizing you need help.

Stress could still reset between adventures, if the characters have a longer period of downtime, but for the shorter period (during the adventure), the "get stressed -> invoke flaw -> ease stress" cycle seems pretty good to me.

Amber Diceless.

Seriously. Look at it.

Oh, shit, it's 2Hu. Never mind, your feeble brain couldn't cope. Fuck off back to your personal hell.

What I'm getting at is that:

1 Stress should be a bad thing, either via approaching a breaking point or slowly debilitating a character as it grows.

2. The ONLY way to remove this stress should be to "do bad thing, based off character traits etc"

This ensured you don't have to fiddle around with when to regenerate things etc because the only way to drop stress is to do these actions of failure, weakness etc. This makes a very easy to use feedback loop that let's the players balance themselves out rather than you having to worry of when you get to restock.

tl:dr your tea party shouldn't be able to destressing you unless you have a "destress token" or whatever from acting too brashly earlier

In other words, what you are proposing is that two things are necessary to remove stress:

1. Having bad things happen to your character, or deliberately having your character make awful decisions.

2. Relaxation and heart-to-heart moments.

It is an interesting idea, though my worry is that there is no reason to actually have relaxation and heart-to-heart moments *before* the bad things happen.

If someone puts effort into a heart-to-heart moment just after a major triumph, but before the backlash, should they not be rewarded for that?

>If someone's including anime with every post, and it isn't smug or an example of what they're talking about, it's even odds it's Colette.
But that's like 80% of the threads on Veeky Forums these days...

>That, and he talks like an autist.
Fuck man, now we're in the high-90s!

Maybe heart-to-hearts without tokens could work as a stress-shield sort of thing?

Like, temp HP for stress. It won't heal your mental wounds (you either need a tipping point or a longer period of rest for that), but it'll let you continue for a while longer without problem.

Although, one might also argue that having a h2h before stress visibly starts taking effect (bad decisions, indulging in vices) is kinda meta. You could argue that a character with good empathy may take notice before things start getting serious, but that may be exceptional enough to require special rules of some sort (maybe having bond levels lets you use those instead of tokens depending on the level of the bond or something?)

Celebrating the major truimph should heal the stress they got while getting to that truimph.

You do bring a good point if you want to reward heart to heart even when it's not necessary. Maybe make something that a heart to heart or destress or whatever gives you a one use buff/ action you can draw upon whenever you do it at zero stress and cap it some how to discourage people abusing it

An additional solution to this problem is to make it so stress is very hard to get rid of entirely. I'm not sure how'd you want to implement this, but torchbearer, the source for this system, has it so stress inflicts status conditions, these conditions are hard to get rid of and require a significant amount of loot to treat (buying a nice room, nice food, getting a doctor). Another possibility is to make stress harder to get rid of as you have less of it, or do a stress shield

The way I see it, it is perfectly normal for characters to celebrate a major triumph.

Perhaps it could be such that there are three pools to keep track of:

1. Stress points.
2. Backlash points.
3. Comfort points.

To remove stress points, you need to spend an equal amount of *both* backlash points and comfort points.

Could this perhaps work out, given some math to ensure that an adequate amount of backlash points and comfort points are handed out for the appropriate events?

Bonds remind me of Monsters and Other Childish things

Your main "boost" there is from bonds. You can invoke a bond at any time basically to help you push on, assuming you can justify it ("X told me she trusts me and expects me to win this morning!" or something). However, if you fail at something even after invoking the bond, your bond takes damage, and you have to spend time repairing it later, or risk it taking irreparable damage. H2H would be healing the bonds that got strained by invoking them, in this case, or creating new ones/opportunities to use existing ones.

Bonds can be people or even items (people are harder to invoke and more limited, but items are harder to repair from what I remember).

It's a cool system, I recommend giving a read.

I'd love to see 80% of non smug anime posts, can I see them?

I don't know man it all runs together for me

It's just broken spines and wonky anatomy that would put Liefeld to shame

There is Through the Breach which uses nothing but playing cards for randomization. The mechanics are neat in that you have a hand of cards which you can use to replace the results of some flips, adding a degree of reliability to your actions.

I think it could work, not sure how I like the idea of relaxing treating stress before it happens. I'm leaning more towards the relaxing only does mechanical things when you have strife tokens to turn in from earlier.

Otherwise I like it

There is a very real concern that if I take the suggestion to have stress eliminated only by *both* backlash (deliberate bad decisions and unfortunate twists of fate) and heart-to-heart moments, players will have to keep track of three separate pools, rather than simply managing a single "stress" meter.

Is the trouble of managing three pools worth enforcing *both* backlash and heart-to-hearts?

Most interesting thread on the board right now.

Ah, I think you confuse the outline I'm putting out. In the version I propose Backlash are the only tokens beyond stress. You keep backlash tokens and can use them to trigger a loss of stress when a heart to heart happens. While I'll admit that your system does stick to your original intention correctly, it is one more thing to keep track of.

Then again systems like Numenera and Cypher have way more pools than 3, but I've never struggled keeping track of them. I suppose the devil with three pools will be balancing their interactions (i.e how much stress is a minor heart to heart worth when paired with a major setback token, or should the tokens "value" scale at all, I'm partial to worse things giving more setback, heart to heart)

Most TG thing right now

>In the version I propose Backlash are the only tokens beyond stress. You keep backlash tokens and can use them to trigger a loss of stress when a heart to heart happens.

I am still worried that there is a "correct" order in which to do things, and that deviating from this order screws over the players for no reason.

Suppose two PCs each have 5 stress and 0 backlash each. On a whim, they have a heart-to-heart moment with one another, all nice and cozy. This earns them absolutely nothing, under your proposal.

Yes, that's the point. The players basically are encouraged to call upon their negative traits, curses, etc to gain a chance to recover.

I've run torchbearer, which uses this system and what you says does happen to first time players. They make camp for the first time and realize they can't heal or restore themselves since they didn't trigger any backlash. The next while until they get a chance to restore is tough, but they will realize how important it is to trigger backlash and take risks. It works in TB since the players can usually recover the worst stuff with the checks they've earned, but can never completely clear it until they return to town (the end of a quest basically). The players shouldn't be without stress that often is what I'm getting at.

>problems adjudicating scenes

You shouldn't play with literal retards.

Why not have stress turn into comfort points on heart-to-hearts and when stress = comfort points you get a bonus to doing something?

But then, where would the backlash points fit into this? You would still have three resource pools to manage.

If anything. He posts decent art. If only he posted more Alice and Reisen

As I've stated before I think a simple stress, backlash cycle is the best feedback loop for this type of thing

Why is a feedback loop a good thing?

It's good when it leads to the gameplay you want to encourage with your game.

I.e. go in dungeon->get treasure/stronger->go deeper into dungeon->get more treasure/stronger->etc. is the classic D&D feedback loop.

In this case it'd be do stuff and get stressed->drama happens->heart to heart, important lesson, aesop->go back to doing stuff

This is perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of instating a "correct" order to events: it is more thematic for a heart-to-heart to be the catalyst for removing stress, than for a heart-to-heart to precede an unfortunate twist of fate that somehow relieves stress, no?

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. You usually have an important scene with people being all emotional AFTER the bad stuff happens (or possibly, during), not before.

Emotional care preventing/helping to prevent stress buildup on some level could still work, if players' want their characters to be chatty/caring towards others without a trigger happening first.

I'd probably have this run on a system similar to what Darkest Dungeon is using (which itself got its system from Torchbearer, from what I heard) where you have a number of "respite" points when you camp (or, for a more generic setting, have a lull of strenuous activity) that can be spent by the entire group together to do stuff. So chatting would say, give X resistance to stress damage, and if you spend "misery tokens" you earned, also heal some of it; it's more effective to use it to heal stress than prevent it, but if you have nothing better to do while camping, it still does something.

bump

Is there anything else to the system OP was wanting to make?

At the moment, I am mostly looking to assemble a baseline of how the basic mechanics should work.

Haven't really tried this, but it seems to make sense and quite close to what op is making.