A place for full-on game designers and homebrewers alike. Feel free to share your games, ideas and problems, comment to other designers' ideas and give advice to those that need it.
Try to keep discussion as civilized as possible, avoid non-constructive criticism, and try not to drop your entire PDF unless you're asking for specifics, it's near completion or you're asked to.
I'm trying to figure out if I want to make grid/map play a bigger part of my system/setting? A few questions I have
>what are the pros and cons of it being required vs. just a feature they can take advantage of if they want? Does grid required gaming stifle roleplaying?
>What are the pros and cons of a hex map vs. square map? I've heard that the hex gives you more directions if the squares only are allowed 4 directions, but I've also heard that if you give square grids all 8 directions (including diagonal) almost all non-railroaded movement then becomes diagonal? Is this true? is there a way to get around this, such as combat positioning or in-game reasons to move not-diagonally all the time, or does it not matter much and diagonal play is considered fine? Is hex just a better option in general?
>Another question, are there any nonhex/square grids you have seen that worked? Perhaps grids with multiple grid types (multiple shapes, similar to how the shapes on a soccer ball fit together).
Juan Sanchez
>How can you better streamline your game, make the action more real time, without resorting to rules lite? My solution was to do away with self contained turns.
In most games a guy does all his shit on his turn while everyone waits. When he's done the next guy does all his shit. This continues until the round ends and it all starts again.
I've broken the rounds into phases to keep players engaged. Everyone moves in the movement phase. They use abilities in the tactics phase. They attack in the attack phase. It's a rapid series of micro turns. I can even use different initiatives for each phase.
I also have a rule stating that if a player becomes frozen with indecision (they waste everyones time trying to figure out the perfect action to take) their character suffers the same problem. Give them a warning, count to three, then skip them if they don't declare an action.
Evan White
Continuing with this buddy cop RPG.
How do I get players to argue and fight with each other? Ideally I want players to bicker the whole way through, even have separate goals at first.
Dominic Harris
That's extremely hard to do out of game, and you might flare up some real world anger among friends, and lose players.
Maybe do it mechanically with fuck-over deals? Like if Cop1 does his secret thing, everyone else has -1 to their rolls or something. There's that Call of Juarez game that's pure shit, but it's a coop shooter with 3 cops, FBI, DEA and some sort of Sheriff, and all 3 have different secret things they have to do during a mission, and if they succeed, they gain points while the other two lose points, and if they get caught doing the secret corrupt thing like placing drugs at the crime scene or stealing evidence/cell phones they lose points, and the character that caught them gains points. Tie the bickering mechanically, not IRL.
You don't want IRL bickering because you'll need an extremely well-adjusted and mature player group, and we know this hobby don't got much of those.
Samuel Jenkins
The problem being that players will be too nice, and won't use their special ability so as to not hurt other teammates rolls.
Camden Hill
I'm having trouble deciding how board "skills" should be, having everything under one skill like "handicrafts" or separated into "Quilting, Shoemaking" etc, any opinions?
Ayden Bennett
It i not a decision in a vacuum. How granular have you been with your stats until now? Do skills advance? In how many steps do they advance? Do these steps give perks or a scaling numerical bonus? Do skills have prerequisites? In short, how complex is any one skill? What is the setting? What is the genre? What weight of rules are you aiming for? How much of my "player attention budget" is spent already? Is it worth it spending detail here? What is the niche of my system?
If you answer those questions eventually a synergetic choice will become apparent.
Angel Rivera
Who is my target audience? Does the skill system have to feed into other mechanics? How many connection points do these have? Is it required of each skill to be applicable in every scene? Are situational skills permissible? How situational?
Andrew King
Boxes are enough to mark where your unit is when the fireball goes off. They are less ideal for off-road travel, because you don't always move in straight lines. You can use hex to mark movement around an impassable mountain, for example.
Boxes and hexes gain an additional use in tactical situations where facing is important. That's to account for flank attacks, backstabs, area effects. If your game has those things, you may want grid for tactical situations. It's less for movement- you can fudge movement down for any reason if it won't otherwise work. "You had to move more carefully there because" whatever, and so forth.
