/gdg/ Game Design General

I should make some new topic pics -edition

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.

>/gdg/ Resources (Op Stuff, Design Tools, Project List)
drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8nGH3G9Z0D8eDM5X25UZ055eTg

>#dev on Veeky Forums's discord:
discord.gg/3bRxgTr

>Last Thread:
>Thread Topic:
How do you tackle balancing bloat? Have you ever needed to tackle it the other way, i.e not enough meat on the bones?

Other urls found in this thread:

therpgsite.com/showthread.php?21479-Design-Alternatives-Analysis-Archive&s=5f77e8a6e7eeaec0da07bee717002e1b
mediafire.com/file/0ady9emfpclzsab/Missile_Threat_48.pdf
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Again, blatant hijack, but...

I am going forward with my freebie idea. For those of you who haven't heard, I'm planning on making one-sheeter freebie versions of my games (like the one in the left) before I put them up for sale.

My current problem is layout. Somehow I just can't figure out a good way to lay this thing out.

I might end up doing a whole comic-book style thing for the full game (i.e making all the separate sections into comic panels and mixing the art into those panels), but I'm unsure whether I have the luxury of doing it here, because I want this to fit into the one sheet.

Well, might as well answer to the thread topic too.

I handle bloat basically with Design by Subtraction. Every now and then, I sit down and start cutting the fat on the game. I try to do it as often as possible, but these days I kind of self-regulate it even while I'm writing.

I've personally gone too far sometimes, but then I've usually just taken a step back and thought about the mechanics again and how to add more depth to them.

Is the S.P.E.C.I.A.L abilities from fallout protected by something? Is there anything keeping me from copying it? I like having perception as an ability score in a system without skills.

I don't think you can patent concepts and game mechanics, so I think SPECIAL is free to be used.

However, using it in a commercial product might get the ire of Bethesda, so tread carefully. They are notoriously assholish with their IP.

Thanks for making this! I'm liking the formatting, too.

The specifics can be protected, but not the general concepts. S.P.E.C.I.A.L. would be protected, but you could use a similar set up of stats that spell out a word and do the same functions.

Of course, for non-comercial homebrew, it doesn't matter.

Bump.

Here's a Q 4 U

About how long does it take for you to lose interest when reading a new handbook, and what things keep you interested?

If the handbook is too disorganized and has no linearity, it's easy to begin wondering how much I will be getting out of reading it.
Good formatting and clear division of topic is helpful just as much as proper transition between these topics.

I rarely read the books cover to cover.

I usually get bored if there is simply too much stuff, like Exalted 3rd's charms. Yeah, you don't need to know them all to make a character, but you will miss on interesting stuff if you don't at least glance many of them over.

And there comes the problem. If the information I want is not easily accessible (such as basic rules being hidden within a wall of text) I usually lose interedt quite quickly.

I actually modified it a teeny bit again, because that legalese stamp is too close to the text.

I'm trying to come up with something interesting to the sides of the page, and keep this version like as a print version or something.

But hey, now that I have this version of the game, I will probably start working on my website and start posting this version when someone asks for games to run specific settings.

> and has no linearity.
What do you mean by this? That one section doesn't logically lead into the next?

What's a gm-less system you like?

my own
megadungeon
every player/gm makes a character and we switch places every room
rooms are generated by drawing from a deck (generic ones like "3 monsters inside" or "12 monsters inside + trap" or "miniboss")
upon completing a room, switch gms and draw next card
continue until bored or tired

you do need to have one "supergm" that will define the setting and such, and have final say on the rules, but the whole table can also vote on what happens
works great but can't hold any coherent story

Same here. As a simulationist I have the problem that I sometimes would like to reduce the number of modifiers a bit but then I know it leads to inaccuracies in-game that go against what I am trying to achieve.

>Somehow I just can't figure out a good way to lay this thing out.
Hire a professional, focus on your main task.

I've basically done this entire game on shoestring budget, so hiring a layout artist now would probably double the total development costs of the game.

The game is also relatively small, so if I learn how to do the layout work properly myself, I can safely start churning out games. My standards just happen to be tad bit high.

Agh, ended up spamming the thread:

How does it look now? The outline is a small thing, but it adds a certain vibe to it.

... Aaand now I added girl's stats to the white area on the left side.

That actually works pretty well, I just probably need to use a better font for it.

But otherwise I think I'm ready. I will stop spamming the thread now.

Page 11 save

Yes, that's more or less what I mean.

Some books take these interrupting detours that are just bewildering to me, or they split up one topic among multiple chapters. This makes referencing quite a chore.

Can anyone can recommend a good, professional editor? Release version is nearing.

Scribus seems like a well-loved option, if open-source doesn't turn you away.

Otherwise, iWork and InDesign come to mind

Sometimes I compulsively color pictures I like... would this look good in your PDF?

No, I meant Editor as in job title, not as in software tool.

Not him. Do you have a portfolio?

She looks cool, but I actually planned on making the game black and white from the start. To emphasize the manga style.

I appreciate the effort though, definitely wasn't expecting anything of the sort!

But I can maybe make a colored one too, I don't see harm in it.

Me and my artist both are still pretty flabbergasted at this turn of events. I need to think...

Still working on my stat(skill 1, s2, s3) set up. I wanna run this as a dice pool system, with step dice elements. Each skill will have a dice, maybe more than 1 if stat doesnt have a dice. Rolling 4+ is a check, get enough check to be succesful on a test. Generally I wanna do Roll 2 applicable skills to do a test. If the stat does have a die, then it should be involved as well. Mechanic TBD, but stat/skills is the focus ATM:

Brawn (Strength, Constitution, Size)
Grace (Agility, Dexterity, Speed)
___ (Willpower, Morale?, Faith?)
Perception (Insight, Investigation, Senses)
____ (Cunning, Wits,___)
Speak (Deception, Charm, Persuasion)
___(Relations, Presence, Reputation)
Intellect (Planning?, Logic, Knowledge)

Specialties will be an important feature to compliment the stat/skills. They will also be handled with a die. Things like training in Stealth will be handled as a specialty. That doesnt stop untrained characters from testing stealth, just limits from getting more checks. Another good example is knowledge and its specialties. They should really be given freely around. Been sad that fighters in DnD have a will power comparable to wet parchment, so they will just get a specialty called Bravery.

Hmm, just got an idea; remove Relations, use Reputation as default, with specific relationships as specialties to reputation.

Feeling a bit trapped in my 1 stat to 3 skills ratio, but it will make character creation more evened out.

That's pretty darn good user.

Funnily enough I've heard that freelance editors are many times more in demand than writers, I've seen some stuff T. R. "Freelance" Knight worked on and they seem decent and his prices are affordable.

Looking good, user. Thanks for the hint.

Writers are easy to find, but good editors are in high demand, so most get sucked up to work for publishers. It makes freelancers even harder to find.

So I'm looking at how to handle physical distance on the board for a game that's heavily abstracted. The problem is that since all measurements are made from a model's base, it can mess with measurements on a board with different elevations. For ranged combat, that's not a huge problem, since most have enough range to cover elevations when measuring. But in melee, where ranges are only an inch or two, it gets weird.

The idea I'm thinking is using the abstracted Size system models and terrain is using for Line of Sight. Basically, the idea is a model can reach up terrain equal to its Size, and reach down 1Size if they have short melee range or 2 if they have long. Either way, it cuts their melee range in half.

So if a model attacks another model that's on a higher piece of terrain with a 1" melee, it "projects" a melee range of 1/2" on the elevated piece of terrain.

I'm not sure if its a good idea or not, though.

Doesn't Warhammer 40K 8E do it similarly? Except that they have a fixed height independent of model size? Basically a a cylinder for attacking.

Page 10.

Well, if you're going to do 1 stat to 3 skills for any, then you must do it for all. It does make the intelligence stats awkward.

Unless there is an option to merge Intellect with the "clever" stat pool, that might be a really challenging. I'd need more descriptions of what each skill handles because so many of them are synonyms.

This is great but I want to give you some edits to consider and help convey concepts more left-to-right.

standby, going to draw up something

Allright, go ahead. I'm open to ideas, I'm still quite new to doing text layout.

I haven't paid attention to 8th, but I thought 40k was still stuck with true line of sight.

It is but melee has 1'' range in the plane now, iirc.

>How do you tackle balancing bloat? Have you ever needed to tackle it the other way, i.e not enough meat on the bones?

This is a trade secret but I'll let you guys in on it. I design multiple games simultaneously. Each one serves a different extreme purposes, so I end up with

One game is about absolute minimalism
One game is about complete maximum bloat
One game is about maximum flavor
One game is about being totally generic
...and so on

None of these games are meant to be good, just extreme. But what you find is that trying to push a design philosophy to the limits forces you to go outside your comfort zone and find out how far is too far in any given direction. Then you can take the lessons learned and apply them to the "core" real game.

Went in for some grammatical elements but I'm also trying to inject some better verbs and break up sentence length.
Some more consistency with titling of your game system elements would also be helpful, as to not confuse them with a non-mechanical description of something else.

Now that I have what is most of the system in front of me—really looking over these concepts for details—it seems pretty fun.

Errata:
I mean for Rolling and Modifier Dice together to precede Game Mastering.

Thanks - in more ways than one!

I'll look it over. It's kind of funny that in the complete version of the game, I already took some of those things (such as Twist Points being TP) into accord, I just mostly kept them out to simplify the freebie. Grammatical errors are grammatical though, so I gotta look them over.

Problem with the section switching is that Misfortune is a thing that obviously belongs after rolling, but if Modifier Dice and Rolling should be directly before Game Mastering, fitting Misfortune there is kind of tricky.

In regards the game itself, I'm wondering whether I should just get rid of Weakness ratings, and go for success-based system (6s are successes, 1s are failures, positive and negative Traits allow 5s and 2s to be successes and failures and so forth)...

But I've had the ratings on Weaknesses for a long time now, so removing them now, over a year after development, would be kind of weird. Probably won't, will leave that kind of trickery to possible later editions, if anywhere.

You're perfectly welcome, editing is something I'm very used to.
I felt bad making the reorganization suggestion because I'm like, for fuck's sake, it's a single page.
...but I also hate reading something and feeling like I missed something from previous material. I can generally tolerate a "read on, this will come up later" element from the author to let me I'm not unobservant, but too much future-reference can be obnoxious, I think.

I understand why you feel like that, and that's kind of the reason why I organized the game in it's current way. It's not as "clean" as having all the rolling stuff in a single column, but unless I put Challenges as a different thing from Game Mastering (which is not a bad idea in on itself), I need to work around Misfortune and Inspire there.

Might actually need to move the picture to a different column or otherwise reorganize it.

Actually, would this work as a compromise or as an apt addition? The Tabula Rasa chapter is kind of redundant, so I could use the space for something useful, such as an overview of the game which includes the Tabula Rasa aspect.

Already I ask you to forgive me for my spelling mistakes, it's 4 in the morning and I need to sleep.

What kinds of games are all of you working on and who is the audience you're designing for?

This is very efficient, to say the least.

>that change the rolls in and out of favor
I would append "your" before favor. It's more personal speech but gives better indication of whose favor.

>You may gain Misfortune to gain rerolls...
Careful with the redundant verbs. I would stick to something like, "gain Misfortune to reroll,..."
Also, instead of Misfortune having "ill effects", I'd say more explicitly that it increases your chances of being out of the story.

Melee range isn't that new. A lot of wargames are moving away from b2b for melee. I'm using a system that Malifaux uses, but trying to avoid the problem it has. The problem Malifaux has is just like mine; all measurements are from the base. It can cause weird things like if a model is standing on something lije barrel, depending on the terrain piece height and the attacking model's range, it could technically be unattackable even if the models could physically touch each other.

Warmahordes does a similar thing with having each model project a volume from the base, but its a system that relies on everything following the same rules based on base size. I'm trying to make it to include instances of things like tall thin models or squat wide ones.

I'm currently flopping between two different wargames. One is a skirmish level sci-fantasy game set on a near-future earth after the gates to Hell were accidentally opened. The other is a larger scale fantasy game in a setting flavored after the Classical era.

How do you all feel about systems that have one attribute tied to all things mental and social?

Little bit odd, since we have so many instances of people with insufferable emotional/social IQ but their intelligence is quite fine.
I think the minimum categories of traits would look something like:
Physicality
Mentality
Personality

I pretty much exclusively design and play wargames with no gm, so there's too many favorites. Its quite rare to have a gm in wargames - the only ones I can think of right now are Harpoon, Kriegspiel and the Fletcher Pratt Naval wargame. 3 games in 200 years aint very many...

Referees are generally used for double blind games (a mechanic woefully under-used in modern tabletop gaming) or for resolution of hits or damage or combat results as in the Fletcher Pratt naval game and in Kriegspiel (an 1800s-era military training 'game' designed for Prussian and German officers)

Working on pic related - Modern air combat game covering all the major air conflicts of the mid-late 20th century (but not Korea because not enough missiles...)

My audience is anyone interested in modern air combat - both the beginner and the hardened grognard. I'm trying to present things in a very clear and concise fashion, and the rules are kept as simple as possible, with almost no note-keeping or tables to reference.

Then on top of this very simple premise I have added the ability to customize aircraft loadouts (the kinds of missiles and bombs taken) as well as including rules for ground assets (SAM sites, Early Warning radars, AAA), helicopters and Naval Vessels.

I've also tried to include the stats for pretty much every aircraft used in all these conflicts - the final tally will likely be over 200 aircraft...

So with some fairly simple base rules I can facilitate players creating a quite realistic 'air environment' - multiple different aircraft working together to attack or defend ground targets, or attack / defend air targets, or both.
There are also many options for building your forces - you can choose the pilot quality for your aircraft, choose what kind of ground assets to take (if any) and what kind of missiles / bombs / air-to-ground missiles / etc. to equip your aircraft with.

I've written the rules out and we've done 10+ playtests. Currently researching Gulf War aircraft (1991), having completed all the research up until that point chronologically (Vietnam, Arab-Israeli, Indo-Pakistani, Falklands).

After the Gulf war research is done and the aircraft / weapons statted out / points costs done I can move on to Bosnia and I will pretty much be finished.

What do you think of this concept for a wargame/rpg setting. Basically stolen from starman jones.

You're a crew-member in a medium-large cruise ship which makes a faulty transition. The result of this is that you end up stranded in some unknown space, and there's no way out.

Being a non-naval ship, and having no way to leave, you essentially end up with a group of minimally armed and underprepared colonists.

The planet is hostile, but not at first glance.

It would play out as a combination citybuilding/wargame system. There are card draws for events, and aspects of city management, and (depending on the flavour of game you're after) there are rpg sized or wargame sized encounters which occur at random intervals.

It's basically an excuse for city management, as well as minimally armed settlers fighting fantasy and sci-fi beasts.

The goal of the game would be to build a sustainable society and to either subjugate or exterminate the local fauna.

Also neat would be a lord of light RPG.

I would look at Kingdom Death: Monster, mechanically, very similar idea.

Is it weird to want to make a homebrewed stat and character creation system despite that fact that you've never actually played a tabletop game in your life

Maybe it means you want to be in control of the rules; jumping into another game means adapting instead of controlling how your characters manifest.
Or, maybe, you enjoy categorizing things and rating them...

Yeah, writing while tired at 4 a.m doesn't do me favors. Fixed them, and I'll start applying the fixes you gave me later today.

By the way, here's a paneling demo I will probably be doing for the majority of the layout of my game.

I think it looks pretty damn neat, honestly.

I'm thinking of even making sub-panels that would work as infoboxes.

Damn, I'm liking this design choice. It might be pretty badass in the end.

Let's not forget Braunstein. It's kinda important.

Do you have any rules to look at yet?

No, because
creating > consuming.

If your game text is short, that is a great design choice. Otherwise it's a layouter's nightmare.

The game is ~7000 words, so it's a breeze.

This will also lenghten the game a bit, probably to around 30-40 pages A5, and it took me 10 minutes to do that test page. So it's still one day's work to layout.

I'm currently working on a side project of porting Torchbearer to BRP/RuneQuest so I can play !Greyhawk modules with rpg hipsters who reduce to touch a d20.

Would there be interest in composing a google doc tossed into the OP within which, dice mechanics and mathematics are explored?

I'd rather somebody wrote a FYI summarizing the decent pessimistic posts in previous threads, remember, no optimism allowed.

Are there any good Unicode symbols that convey "minus" without being a hyphen?
I've already used O to show "null" (surprise), for the sake of "neither malus nor bonus".

I was considering:
¬ for logical "not"
or an to show "nope"

oh whoops, I tried to put these symbols into our Taiwanese basket-weaving site

After playing pic related, I had some inspiration for making a Sonic homebrew RPG. It uses a D6 pooling system.

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to post and share. It's playable, but has had zero playtesting insofar (I plan on playing it in its current state with some friends who were interested).

...

> So it's still one day's work to layout.
The problem is later revisions. But at that length it should be manageable

.>rpg hipsters who reduce to touch a d20.
>implying it's not hipsters who play d20

Dark Fantasy RPG aimed fantasy genre simulation enthusiast. Yes, I am completely going against recent trends which are gamist or narrativist only. Makes me a bit apprehensive but I am unrelenting about the boons of moderate simulationism.

There is this thread which should be linked in every OP:
>therpgsite.com/showthread.php?21479-Design-Alternatives-Analysis-Archive&s=5f77e8a6e7eeaec0da07bee717002e1b

People generally just post it here when they feel they have something to share. And hope someone reads and gives feedback.

Resizing the pages and such is actually quite easy, so I think I'll manage. I'd like to continue doing it right now, but I'm too tired.

>Yes, I am completely going against recent trends which are gamist or narrativist only
You've been consuming Crane's propaganda again haven't you user?

a shitty 2d6/3d6 D&D knockoff with make-your-own-spells
audience is retards, drunks and children (and coincidentally, all my playtesters/friends)

a modern postapoalypse fantasy version of shadow of the colossus, the only problems I still have are how the fuck the social systems will work, and how the heck am I supposed to add a consistent currency for PCs?

How does this resolution mechanic look? Know pretty much fuck all about maths, so I could be missing something really basic.

>Characters are made up of 2 kinds of values, X and Y
>Value X is rated from 1-9, and equals the target number needed on a d10 to get a 'success'
>Value Y is rated from 1-10 and is the amount of dice that player rolls when trying to accomplish an action

So I see a basic action like thing
>Player wants to kick down a door
>GM decides the most applicable X and Y value, and decides that they will need 3 successes to succeed.
>Player rolls their Y amount of d10 counting all results of X or lower as a success.
>Count the number of successes against target number, win or lose depending.

Its similar to some other systems, I know, but what do you guys think?

>Do you have any rules to look at yet?
Sure, the file size is up to 9MB so I can't post it here, but here's the mediafire link:

mediafire.com/file/0ady9emfpclzsab/Missile_Threat_48.pdf

I haven't added any nice photos yet (there are some spaces for them - although I will leave it until last so the formatting can change easily), and some of the example images need updating (the cannon attack image for example - can't attack from the front)
I also haven't spell checked in a while so likely be some errors.

Pic from one of our playtests - a Vietnam-era Strike mission

This is fairly common, and would be a dice pool with variable target number system. Generally speaking, the pool is decided by the character while the TN is decided by the task; a typical TN leaves a 30% chance of a success on a die in d10-pool systems from what I've seen (most commonly being roll over 7).

The major twist of using a secondary character value for the TN is good, as is using roll-under so higher values are better (easier to understand the progression, psychologically speaking). If the pool is your attribute/stat, the core part of the character, while the TN is your applicable skill, and the RS - required successes - is the task, I could see it working okay. For conciseness on your character sheet, you could set a base TN and list skills as modifiers, so you only need to actually write anything for the skills you actually have.

I too don't give a shit about the maths. Tune it until it feels right. Knowing the statistical distribution of your mechanic is good guidance, but intuition can fill that gap just fine.

>Or, maybe, you enjoy categorizing things and rating them.
T-that's not weird, right?

I'm assuming all the ones with white tails are missiles? Reminds me a bit of another homebrew I saw a long time ago, where it was mechs in space, so you tracked momentum and predicted placement next turn with token for planning out moves and missile attacks. I remember it also used a heat signature tracking system for targeting and such.

Sadly, I don't have a copy of it.

That can't really be considered weird since we devote a lot of our math and science—hell, any human endeavor—into "what type of x is y".

What are some games with a good ebb and flow of metacurrency between players and GM? I had something like this in my game, but after improving some other mechanics it broke. Now I'm kind of out of ideas.

FFG SW and Don't Rest Your Head come first to mind.

>What are some games with a good ebb and flow of metacurrency between players and GM?
Mine. I hope.

Page 10 bump

Most FATE derivations have a good economy with the titular fate points. You spend a fate point to do something, as you run low your GM offers you fate points to let something bad happen.

I need help with game concepts, like naming certain mechanics or shit, or item power tiers, or enemy types idk.

How do you guys usually do it?
Where can I get some inspo or something??

I just steal from other games.

another page 10

I like looking up historical elements; people, military units, states, whatever: a naming convention where things gain labels from exemplary things from the past.
However, it should be noted I'm trying to hark back to history because Cycle is my favorite literary theme.

Otherwise, explore Thesaurus.com
Honestly, it can produce huge lists of synonyms.

Yeah, the thesaurus is your friend.

>thread question
When it comes to removing bloat, I look for what rules are unneccessary or redundant. My current project uses a system of Talents as sort of "activateable abilities", and I've taken great care to make sure none basically do the same thing. I think I will have to trim down my weapons list, though, way too many at the current stage.

Actually, thinking on this, I may have a way to trim the fat:
Each gun category has base stats, modified by its nation of origin (the setting is alt-1967 after a stalemate and ceasefire in 1942 for WWII), and each nation has access to certain categories. Rather than making stats for every fucking gun, I can just say "These would represent these kinds of weapons"

I'd like to see an example, since I have a weapon "family" system instead of adhering to the nuance between models.

Currently, these are all the SMGs. As it stands, there will be more.
If I were to implement the nation-of-origin/weapon-type system, it'd be more of an SMG has a set value for each, and say... a German SMG gets better accuracy and maybe clip size or fire rate, but lower Penetration. Something of that sort.

For clarification, all the weapon classes are: Pistols, SMGs, Assault Rifles, Battle Rifles, Machine Guns, DMRs, and Shotguns. All are almost as bloated as the SMG list, except Shotguns. But SMGs are definitely the most bloated.

Why? Who's gonna need all those?
Why not just caliber?

hey!
so, ive been running a tabletop thingy for friends at lunch every day. we have 30 minutes a day, so i had to hack together a system with a meat cleaver instead of using a proper one.
the result is K.U.N.S.O.R.P, because it sounds funny.
it stands for Kludged Up Number Stew Of Recreational Purposes.
its been working just fine so far, but my big issue currently is player progression.
stat wise, all entitites have stats on fallouts S.P.E.C.I.A.L system. a stat roll consists of a roll on a 20 sider plus half of the appropriate stat.
works great so far, but i limited the players to 40 points, with 10 as the max for a stat. as the campaign goes, monsters are definitely going to exceed those numbers. but since i havent figured out any kind of progression or levelling, i dont know how to balance those fights.
ive also been asked directly how theyre going to level up, and ive had to shrug my shoulders and say i dont know. i hate micromanaging exp values, and figuring out what benefits a "level" would bring is frustrating since everybody made such a wide variety of characters.
i was considering having stat increases be tied to better gear they find.
please help.