/gdg/ Game Design General

How complex are your abilities?

Each card has one to two abilities roughly on the level of
"Ignore water borders when marching with this card"
or
"Recruit 1 Skeleton for every kill you get in a combat where this card was part of the move or support order"

Problem is there are player number+1 cards of each so in a 4 player game you're reading 10 new cards a round.

Should I just make the cards simpler?

You could make it simpler, or perhaps allow some previewing of the next turn's cards. I'm thinking that if players A and B are busy resolving some combat, maybe players C and D can spend some time examining the next turn's cards if they have been drawn and placed off to the side. Obviously depends on how important the secrecy of upcoming cards is.

>if players A and B are busy resolving some combat
I kept combat simple explicitly to keep the complexity in the cards. It's just
>resolve "pre combat" effects (+strength, an automatic kill, nothing that actually takes long) from cards allocated earlier
>count up strength on each side
>higher strength wins
>get one kill per two models who were actually in combat and not just supporting
>resolve "after combat" effects from cards allocated earlier
so that obviously doesn't take long.

>Obviously depends on how important the secrecy of upcoming cards is.
Not very, this is mainly a practical problem because right now my cards are roughly 20% taller than a MtG card to account for the artwork I plan to put on them. So having upcoming turns laid out would require a monstrous table.

Okay, so I'm miraculously wrapping up production of my ttrpg books. What do I do now?

I've heard it's good to put things up on DriveThruRPG, but honestly I know just about nothing about the marketing and sale of games.

>Do you have side projects?
Can't afford to. My main project demands all my thought, attention and energy. Can't get side-tracked at this point. I am eyeing future settings though.

>Sadly, I didn't get to release Misfortune for christmas, doubtfully will release it before the turn of the year.
I didn't even try to go live before xmas. But my website will go be online in early January.

I suggest changing the thread topic to:
>How do I shill my game best?
Because January onwards this will be the main task beyond putting the finishing touches ont he Quickstart PDF.

No one can give you a meaningful answer to that without knowing the intent behind the game: is it gamist, simulationist, narrativist or a mix?

But in a narrativist game this might not be an issue at all.

Ha, welcome to the club! Thread topic officially changed!

>What do I do now?
I tell you part of my marketing strategy:
I have set up a newsletter campaign via mailchimp. Anyone can register to that nesletter campaign on my game's website. I plan to deliver various content ranging from major news over design decisions taken to regular blogposts via the newsletter., depending on subscription level. Feel free to watch this space and subscribe to my newsletter to see how I do and to improve on my mistakes.

But, yeah, a substantial part of marketing is creating a semi-regular drip of semi-interesting news and disseminating it.

>But in a narrativist game this might not be an issue at all.
Sure. I think neither complexity nor simplicity are inherently bad or god, it depends entirely on the game.

The map for MAS works on 2 levels:

Topology is the less important part. Like, if there's a large rock coming up, or a narrower section of the road, it's marked to the map. Otherwise it's basically just a flat plane.

The real map is the vehicle positions. You can imagine each vehicle having an about 10-meter area around them, which is the zone of combat.

So a map could be a triangle of 3 cars (2 cars chasing the last one). The area between the cars is irrelevant unless someone is standing there, so it's treated simply as a measure of distance for ranged combat and catching up. Characters on the vehicles can move freely atop their own vehicles, and maybe even jump onto adjacent vehicles with good rolls.

I still need to refine and test these things, because I want to avoid ambiguities. But I think this kind of workaround is passable.

So how would you shill your game here on Veeky Forums? I can see two problems with it:
1. Keeping it from dropping from the catalogue quickly due to lack of responses (sure, you can samefag like crazy or ask a few friends but that kinda sucks too).
2. How do you prevent endless debates with people calling you out for being a shill?

Song Of Swords did it pretty successfully by engaging the community in the development process. You could do the same by creating a general thread with your PDF in the OP and a ‘hey can someone look this over and tell me what you like/dislike or how I should improve it.’ If it’s interesting enough, people will get on board and start talking about it.

I occasionally shill over in /awg/, but I lack enough solid material to do it effectively. I mostly just end up using it as a focus group for ideas and such.

Well, the development of the Quickstart process is unwinding, so that part is no longer possible; I'll think of something else.

Perhaps the other /gdg/ irregulars can help each other a bit out here, seeing as multiple of us are moving towards marketing. This is a good idea in particular, so that we don't steal each other's attention if we have suddenly 3 threads with different /gdg/-related games up.

Hey boys and girls! What do you think... about CATastrophe?

Isn't that the one that's basically about catgirls in Waterworld?

So, first time ever really in this general, but I'm wondering what /gdg/ thinks of the following, especially those with experience in wargames.

For context, I've had an urge to homebrew up a space fleet wargame in the same vein of Battlefleet Gothic, Dropfleet Commander, etc etc; somewhat sizable fleets with a mixture of small and large ships, "space as an ocean", and so on and so forth.

I've thought up a rather interesting core/base attack mechanic, but I'm interested in getting some feedback on it.
At its core, there are only four important stats when it comes to resolving attacks, ignoring range/arcs and so forth; Evasion and Armor on ships, Attacks and Damage on weapon systems.
Evasion and Armor are rated anywhere from 2+ to 6+, with higher being better.
Attacks and Damage are any positive number one or greater.

When a weapon is fired upon an enemy ship, the attacker rolls 1d6; if its greater than or equal to the ship's evasion, it's a success. If it's less than the ship's evasion, it's a failure.
If the roll is a failure, one attack is negated; this roll is then repeated until either a success occurs, or all attacks are negated.
If the roll is a success, all attacks successfully hit.
Example: A weapon with 4 attacks is fired against a ship with 4+ evasion; the first roll is a 3, so one attack is negated. The second roll is a 6, so the remaining three attacks hit.

Damage is resolved in exactly the same way against armor, with each successful hit doing its own "stack" of damage independent of the others, equal to the weapon's Damage value.
Example: A weapon with 3 attacks and 2 damage is fired against a ship with 4+ evasion and 5+ armor; one attack hits, but the remaining two hit.
Each attack that hits does two damage; the first rolls are respectively a 3 and a 6, so one damage is negated, and two damage is inflicted. A 6 is rolled for the remaining point of damage, so a total of 3 damage is inflicted.

(cont)

Now, despite how complicated this sounds (and it is, at least for a little bit while getting used to it), it has some excellent properties:
High attack, low damage weapons are more powerful against high evasion, low armor ships than the equivalent low attack, high damage weapon would be.
Low attack, high damage weapons are more powerful against low evasion, high armor ships than the equivalent high attack, low damage weapon would be.
Balanced weapons are best against ships with balanced evasion and armor, and are otherwise often the second or third best equivalent weapon against any ship.
These strengths/weaknesses are intrinsic to the attack/damage of weapons in relation to the defenses of ships, without needing secondary stats like "armor penetration" or "tracking/accuracy" and so forth.
Larger weapons are not proportional to smaller weapons; a 4 attack 1 damage weapon is always more than twice as good as a 2 attack 1 damage weapon.

Thoughts on this? Given a sufficiently streamlined method for resolving attacks, would this work out as a core attack mechanic?

What's very nice about it so far is it naturally creates a size/counter system for ships:
Ships with high evasion and low armor would likely be things like corvettes, frigates, destroyers
Ships with balanced evasion and armor would be things like varying sizes of cruisers
Ships with low evasion and high armor would be things like battlecruisers, battleships, and so forth
The loadout of a ship intrinsically determines what its effective against; a cruiser with many batteries of light guns might be good for chewing through frigates, but would be near useless against a battleship.
Likewise, a squadron of destroyers armed with few, big guns would be excellent at hunting down capital ships, but would be nearly unable to engage corvettes or the like.

Yes.

I'm adapting it to nWoD.

That's not a bad idea in general. So we should make our own threads from time to time, and others (Who have discussed it here) can continue discussing there?

Well, I can't benefit too much from it at this moment because Misfortune is basically ready already, and there is not really much to discuss about it.

MAS, on the other hand... Perhaps I'll try making a thread once I get some art for it.

>Misfortune is basically ready already, and there is not really much to discuss about it.
Time to be creative on how it can be (mis)used then.

Also, I have decided to release my Quickstart rules piecemeal for marketing purposes.

So, I've been waffling about my core dice mechanic for a while, and figured since /gdg/ was up, I'd get some feedback.

I can go into more detail if necessary, but the gist of the core mechanic is that attributes each have a die type instead of a numeric value (ranging from D4 to D12). For any situation where success wouldn't be guaranteed, can roll +1D for the related attribute, +1D for a related skill, +1D if related to occupation.
Only looking at the highest number rolled. Target numbers and degrees of success on the same chart, ranging from 4 being a success but with complications, and a 10+ being a success and some benefits, with 1-3 obviously being failures.

My concern is that it might be better to have actual target difficulties, as opposed to a static set, and to worry less about degrees of success - or to instead count number of successes.

The type of game is a mix of investigation, and a splash of horror/the unnatural.

Thanks in advance, and a happy holidays to all!

KISS

More dice types, more complicated. Players are dumb and the more complication the more time wasted throwing dice.

Roll and keep systems work, but can vary wildly based on the number of dice being tossed.

So why would anyone play your game and not Savage Worlds?

Well, I'm of doing the same thing with my "A Taste of" -series.

Instead of being quickstart of the game though, it's an abridged version of the game, complete in on itself. I also do them as a challenge to make a functioning game out of the least possible space I can.

I haven't played Savage Worlds, so wasn't really aware of the system. Had a quick look through the test drive rules right now, and it looks like the biggest differences are that it's a single die roll in Savage Worlds with a target that can have modifiers, vs a potential small dice pool rolled against a static difficulty without modifiers, along with a few other things.

That aside, I probably do need to sit down and re-think things. While I would argue enough systems use a similar system (Cortex, Savage Worlds, etc.), maybe it's not distinct enough to be its own thing, and could be simplified.

Having played against Dark Eldar for years, the need to roll each die at a time is terrible.

And you're right, which is why I've worked out a significantly faster way to resolve the mechanic. Albeit requiring more trust than usual from both players.
Take the example of a 4 attack, 4 damage weapon against a 4+ evasion and 4+ armor ship: to resolve the attacks, roll 4 dice.
From the position of the attacker, reading from left to right and top to bottom, determines the order of the dice.
The results are a 3, 4, 1 and 2, read left to right and top to bottom. The first roll is a failure, so one attack is negated, but the second is a success, meaning that the three remaining attacks are a hit.
To resolve damage, roll four dice, three times; likewise read left to right, top to bottom.
Reading in order, the following are rolled:
5, 3, 4, 4
2, 1, 6, 5
3, 3, 1, 4
Thus, the first hit inflicts 4 damage, the second inflicts 2, and the third inflicts 1, for a total of 7.
Alternately, simply roll all 12 dice at once and partition them after every fourth die read.

The main issue that I can see with this, obviously, is that there can be significant disagreement on how a particular group of dice can be read, but I can't think of anything else to significantly speed up the mechanic.