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.
Levi Mitchell
Change the special ability.
Ryder Martin
? Elaborate
Jordan Parker
bump
Cooper Morgan
...
Ayden Perez
>How can you better streamline your game, make the action more real time, without resorting to rules lite? In other words: >How to become rules-medium? Well, you devise a rules-heavy game and look at each part to see where accuracy is least required. Or where the rules slow down the game particularly. Or where the rules are particularly difficult to pitch to customers.
For example, I had a Harnmaster-style 2D matrix for combat resolution. Since the diagonals were mostly the same, I could ultimately convert it into a simple table. Much more palatable to the gaming audience.
But that required first identifying it as a problematic part and then thinking about a solution until I had an epiphany.
Joshua Sanders
Hey guys, is this thread for wargames too? Also is this thread helpful for world and aesthetic building or just for crunch? Thanks!
Isaiah Kelly
>is this thread for wargames too? Yea.
>Also is this thread helpful for world and aesthetic building or just for crunch? Worldbuilding for worldbuildings sake is more /wbg/'s territory but we've previously discussed how to integrate worldbuilding and mechanical crunch quite a bit.
Robert Hernandez
>How can you better streamline your game, make the action more real time, without resorting to rules lite? Continuous Tick initiative is just about as real time as you can get while maintaining structure. I completely forgot it existed until after I had written some rules for an Ace Combat inspired med-lite skirmish game. I'll need to rewrite my whole combat rules to include it whenever I get back to that game.
Parker Turner
Man, I'm facing the same problem right now. Been going a similar route to what you are saying in terms of making a simple table that cross references stats. This breakdown is really helpful at my stage in development.
My question ITT is: what do you folks think of having different stat-lines for NPCs to breakdown interaction into a more manageable format? Has saved page space so far but am uncertain if it's worth it to lose the ease of reference, if that makes sense.
Owen White
How do you create a turn based combat system that doesn't just become spamming your strongest and most accurate attack?
Chase Thomas
We started to do a fantasy dungeon crawler just for ourselves to enjoy, using miniatures from other companies. I can agree to this, we are planning to do similar but - like in kemet for example. Everyone has X action points. player a takes 1 action, then passes to player b monster a takes 1 action, then passes to player b, player b takes 1 action, then passes, etc. The round is finished, when every player and monster has used up all their action points.
Mason Garcia
Put limits on how powerful or how often you can do that attack?
Charles Brooks
This might sound like a bad idea at first, but give it some thought;
A super meter.
Or something that fulfills the same purpose as a super meter. A growing pool of resources that starts empty and is spent on special abilities.
Perhaps a barbarian builds rage points as he takes damage. Maybe the monk builds focus with each successful strike. A mage might further weaken the fabric of reality with each spell cast, eventually allowing even greater spells to be used.
In any case, the combatants are starting the fight with only their basic abilities available. As the battle goes on they build their pool of points and gain access to more powerful abilities until they eventually use what amounts to a finisher.
Yes. I'm working on one myself, and I've seen a few float through before.
Oliver Perry
I need games with the most cumbersome and insane amount of stats/attributes.
Anthony Moore
>11- Harnmaster (Str, Sta, Dex, Agility, Eyesight, Hearing, Smell, Voice, Int, Aura, Will (13 if you want to count Frame and Morality). Still works. Attributes aren't cumbersome because they sit their on your sheet and wait until you use them. The only way they could be cumbersome if you needed to distribute points across them to raise them. You don't do that in Harnmaster and so it's fine.
Brandon Cook
>Harnmaster I just took a look at the character sheet and this looks exactly what I was looking for, just really specific stats like an upper-arm hit area
Jayden Cruz
also look at rolemaster, it has 10 attributes
Juan Roberts
By having their other "attacks" be utility abilitys instead
Xavier Bennett
First off: limit what you can do in a turn. If you enable too many actions in a turn, you create "highlights" of the turn. This creates a perception that attacks are the exclusive option if you enable too many actions in one turn.
Second: Resources management. Doesn't have to be extreme, just make sure there's a feeling that something to do takes something to spend.
Third: Variable situations are your friend. Make sure situations matter. He'll, lock powerful abilities behind certain situations then give ways for players to seek out those situations.
Brody Parker
artesia rpg. also google eoris char sheet but that is just insane.
John Harris
for
Jose Allen
Are there any resources to design something similar in tactical level to a wargame?
Jacob Gray
It is a situation cost problem. If there is no cost to using the "most powerful" attack then of course it will be used every time, as the others are obsolete.
In your example where one attack is "most powerful" and there is no cost, no reason not to use it, there is no strategy.
If all attacks operate solely on the same variable of "hit points", then strategy is low-level. The limits determine when you should use various attacks. Like WoW, where the more powerful attacks have a "cooldown" timer before you can use them again.
If some defenses make it impossible for some attacks to touch hit points, such as lycanthrope instahealing ability in 1/2e, and attacks exist that operate not on hit points but on some other variable, then strategy becomes incrementally more important and difficult.
You can increase the difficulty further with additional limits.
Ryan Morgan
I was thinking about putting together a Mafia-like card game based on slasher movies where a group of teens go out to an isolated location to engage in debauchery and one of them is secretly a psycho killer - anyone know any games in that vein they think have particularly good and fun mechanics? I've got some basic ideas so far but nothing concrete, and I'm trying to put together the simplest possible version of such a game before I start adding things, but I think I could add a lot of complex stuff while keeping it very intuitive because everyone is so familiar with how the formula works in those movies
I also want it to either play out really quickly once the killing starts or have some way for 'dead' characters to continue to be involved in the game just so the first person to die doesn't have to sit there for an hour watching everyone else at the table have fun
Angel Powell
This wouldn't have anything to do with Friday the 13th would it?
Dead characters can be part of a response team or the news. The more players are part of the News/FR the sooner the game ends with teen victory, similar to research in Pandemic: Contagion.
Hudson Miller
I feel like I could do a mix betweeen Eoris and Harnmaster, and o boi, what I've read of artesia so fat sounds perfect desu
Camden King
I'm considering whether to add stances that augment actions in combat. Basically, you have different stances like defend stance, damage stance, accurate stance or whatever and they'll add modifiers or something to a basic attack. If it was dnd, defend stance would add +2AC, damage stance adds +2 damage, accurate stance adds +2 attack or something like that. I don't know really what I want from it, but I really like the idea of changing stances to change how you do combat so maybe it needs to be stronger than just small bonuses.
Austin Perez
Only make grid essential if you have something really creative as a selling point. Most people do grids very lazily, that's the problem.
I like the idea of the indecision rule. As long as you don't have counter-intuitive and confusing mechanics like D&D
i assume you mean "broad", and the answer is that you make it as complex as people can handle without bogging down the game and creating redundancy. Also, playtest them yourselves and find out. I've found that more skills are better
Make strong attacks risky, lesser attacks safer.
Isaac Price
Hi, Veeky Forums Me and a friend were trying to create a RPG system with a poker feeling. Something in which you or your character would benefit from trying to predict your opponents moves using visual cues, their own knowledge of the kind of people/creatures it's facing and what kind of strategy it have adopted along the encounter. So far we've managed to create a prototype character sheet in notepad along with 3 different encounter types (one for combat, one for stealth/chase situations and another of social interactions) and had a small adventure to test it. We are, however, far from calling the system balanced (mainly in the math field) or even half-way through testing and I'd like you people to give an honest opinion on how it looks so far or even testing it if you think it's worth a shot.
Fair Warning: most of the character creation is still open to discussion, so what you read about Perks, Flaws, the Reality Level system, the SpellTech system and even the point distribution for Attributes is totally open to discussion. We just want to keep it simple and filled with mind games.
Cameron Jones
my idea is too specific and creative to share here, cuz you know, donut steel
Ryan Wood
You can't trust players with broad skills, the same players who rant about player agency and the superiority of rules lite are also the same players that will see a universal crafting skill and complain that it doesn't make sense a crafter can make weaponry and chairs using the same skill.
Hudson Barnes
ideas are almost worthless, execution matters
Nicholas Adams
Isn't the problem with similar stance systems is that It's always objectively better to take the most offensive option possible?
Sebastian White
Only if they allow the math to work that way, but there's nothing inherent in the idea that would make it so.
