/gdg/ - Game Design General

"Cash Rules Everything Around Me" edition

A place for full-on game designers and homebrewers alike, as well as general mechanics discussion for published games. Feel free to share your projects, ideas and problems, comment to other designers' ideas and give advice to those that need it.

Try to keep discussion as civilized as possible, and avoid non-constructive criticism. A new thread is posted every friday (or monday, apparently), as long as there isn’t one still up.

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>Last Thread:
>Thread Topic:
How best to handle money in game design? As a normal single currency resource? How to deal with bookkeeping? Are multiple currencies viable? Or can they at least be made viable through clever design?
On the other hand, do you prefer handling money as an abstract number? What are the pros and cons?
Help us brainstorm the issue.

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I've always preferred the one single Currency and a secondary abstract currency at the same time.

If things are so much Gold in my campaigns, it's easy to understand for new players without any additional thought of conversions and 'How much is that in Electrum?' comes up very rarely when everything is a single currency. Decision Fatigue is a pretty big factor especially if you play late in the evening.

but I also incorporate abstract concepts such as Gems. IE "you find 250 Gold, and three Rubies"
while I don't use gems anywhere near as often, it adds a second layer without the need to complicate the Half Copper -> Copper -> Silver -> Gold -> Electrum -> Platinum

another way to go about it, is have the other currencies as "ancient currencies" some having more value than others; while some shop keepers generally accept them, most don't and they're used exclusively as another way to achieve the one currency you do use, via trading them to specialized individuals which might help give out side quests even
Ultimately having them as "ancient/unused" currencies is the same as only using gems and Gold

>inb4 no one uses Electrum
I did once, and it prompted me to not use any of them again and change everything to Gil and Gemstones instead.

I use different currencies to work for stuff that's affordable to people such as food, lodging, supplies and common weapons.
I also use an abstract form of wealth called Estate, which is used to acquire very expensive and rare items. Estate goes down if you don't do something to maintain it if you use it. It's more about prestige, favours and privileges than actual currency, though that plays a part as well.
Once an Estate is big enough, a PC uses it as an investment in something. A shop, sponsoring a craftsman, buying a hall, or homestead, etc. These tend to be self sufficient barring some misfortune.
Eventually players abandon currency and work only with Estate.

I find that players usually have little reason keeping more than 10 - 30 or so of each lower-end currency on them. Usually, a mountain of copper gets exchanged for gold pieces (Or iron pieces depending on the setting!). Functionally, your players will deviate toward whatever makes bookkeeping the easiest for both you and them.

In those cases, currency tend to start becoming a background, a descriptor in a payment; if a pouch contains a lot of coppers and some silvers, it tells a story of its previous owner. If a bunch of mercenaries have exactly 50 gold pieces in a pouch, that tells a story.

I am a bit into various facets about currencies, from things like the old knife dollars to things like shaving coins. What stops people in your setting from shaving the coins? Something I wrote before:

With one reason or another, some coins can be worth less than their normal value: The kingdoms in which the coins were minted in might be in war with the market in which one’s trying to spend them, for example, or the coins themselves were minted at a time of shortage. and alloys with less worth are mixed in. Coins tampered with by coin shavers and wizards also fall under this categorization.

When mixed in a pile, weak coinage is hard to detect without paying special attention, and can ruin a merchant’s reputation if a sufficient quality is mixed in their payment. Using weak coinage to pay for services of Outsiders can anger them if they notice, occasionally causing them to return seeking compensation even if they did not notice immediately. A dragon’s horde with weak coinage is a sign of great shame and ridicule, and a dragon’s social standing amongst its kind would be forever ruined if even a single coin in them are materially weak coinage.

On the topic thread: I generally play OSR games with the silver standard. Treasure in our games tends to be non-monetary or coins are old as fuck and not recognizable so there's a lot of barter and conversion rates between different areas involved. There's some bookkeeping, but most of it is on DM and we don't sweat it much, just a fun way to spice up dealing with the treasure. In modern settings Iprefer something like CoC Credit Rating.

On the general topic: my friend makes up a little set of rules for himself to run vaguely fantasy-ish or modern setting traditional games with the emphasis on quick adjucation. The obviously correct decision would be convincing him to just choose something, anything, but I'd like to articulate what exactly doesn't feel right.

>d100 system
It's virtually Call of Cthulhu, but let's not dive into it right now. Instead there's this concept...

>4 aspects: Power, Mind, Charisma & Gift
These are not classic stats. They're expressed in a number from 1 to 4, almost each one starts at 1 cause this is the baseline.
Gift is the exception, it starts at 0 and it's your ability to do magic, so you need to unlock it.
At the chargen you get 4 points for them and the highest you can raise an aspect is 3.

>Aspects are associated with the various checks in a game.
They're not a baseline for a skill or something. When you make an action, depending on what 'aspect' is associated with that action, you get this:

>2 points
Gives you an ability to push your rolls for a check associated with an aspect, as in CoC 7th edition.

>3 points
Gives you additional 1d6 to roll when you roll for advancing your skills associated with an aspect.

>4 points
The human limit of 99 doesn't apply to the skills associated with an aspect.

Skills are bought as in CoC, but since there's no stats, there's no universal way to deal with the checks that don't cover the obvious skill. Besides that CoC table wit the starting values of untrained skills.

Please help.

Continued from last thread
>I think a big problem game design hits at times is the idea that the only failure state is dying.
Yes, absolutely. Risk management is the issue. If death is at risk, there's only so many times you can put the PCs into that position before they start dying. If that's what you want, no problem. But if not, then you need other stakes for other scenes.
Some stakes can be tied directly to the main goal: defeating the scenario. But that poses another question: how often can you let the party fail to solve the scenario before they balk? Especially if it's combat and therefore survival-related?

Another example: why do PCs so rarely flee from combat outside of hard mode OSR? Because they know they are meant to survive - they have nothing to lose. With Fortune and the Trial of the Gods, if they fail to flee when they should have, you can bail them out BUT at the price of Fortune and then they might not get the magic sword at the end (or whatever you put at stake).

>58503406
Personally, I would rather something like what Robin Laws does, where you have multiple "means"/resources to attempt to get closer to solving, whether it's "calling in a favor" from your contact at the news agency, or otherwise. Perhaps rather than it being a "fortune point," have a cooldown/drawback for calling on such resources (such as the cultists becoming alerted, etc).
Heh, Robin D. Laws and Kenneth Hite are of course behind Trail of Cthulhu/GUMSHOE.

The advantage of Fortune Points versus a drawback is that you have to invent a drawback everytime you need one. Sometimes it can be jarring to squeeze one into the current scene. With Fortune Points and Twists of Fate you created scenario-wide stakes in a central spot that you can apply throughout - if you want to. And these stakes can be tailored to your group's playstyle. (You can of course combine it with scenes in which there are direct drawbacks at stake, instead of Fortune Points.)

Refers to
And should be properly quoted as:
>Personally, I would rather something like what Robin Laws does, where you have multiple "means"/resources to attempt to get closer to solving, whether it's "calling in a favor" from your contact at the news agency, or otherwise. Perhaps rather than it being a "fortune point," have a cooldown/drawback for calling on such resources (such as the cultists becoming alerted, etc).

For my simulationistic P&P system I do a unified value notation split for various articles.
23 [spices]
1 [gold coin shavings]
13 [Doubloon]
500 [promissory note]
__________________
537

Accounts for all objects physically there, has room for fluff and allows for economic hooks without dealing with the minutia of conversions.

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ooh, I might steal that and incorporate that into my system

bump

I've been trying to come up with a system to simulate the 'only psychopaths shoot to kill' meme that isn't clunky or boring. The idea being players can be stone cold psychopaths, normal functional people or something in the middle. The idea is that psychopathy isn't a OP attribute.

A current idea is having a health score as normal, a shock score - which increases when you are shot at (lessened by psychopathy) but decreases quickly outside of frequent combat, and a stress score, that begins to fill up when the shock score has been maxed out, when you personally kill someone or someone is killed in your proximity and so on. If you accumulate maximum stress you get 1 trauma or something.

I'm still not sure how to handle the actual mechanics of shooting at someone though.

Once I've nailed it down I can port the mechanics to different periods.

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What is your base task resolution like (if you have one yet)?
You could use that and just have stress as a resource cost to the action.

So when 2 scales are filled up, you start accumulating points on a 3rd scale? That seems a bit too complicated. Maybe reduce the numbers of scales?

What meme is that? Are all professional shooters psychopaths?

You've raised good points, but realistically there are people who weigh money in scales/balances whenever there's a market right? And the value of your currency is only worth what it weighs.

Personally I set my world up to allow for some unrealistic solutions to fraud. The fiat currency of the world is not a natural material, but a custom creation of the empire with some properties that suggest they may have been created with alchemy

You should reduce the number of gauges there from 4 to 3, at the least.

Give two numbers, a lethal and a grazing +#. Resolve trying to hit however you want (success, d20, d100, whatever) but it's harder to get a lethal hit than a grazing hit, which do half damage or whatever if you're within grazing # of the lethal hit range.

When the psycho shoots, they extend the lethal range by grazing # and do grazing at grazing # x 2.

Ex:
Lethal 5 Graze+5
Normal people are getting a lethal hit at 5 and below, grazing from 6 to 10.
Psychos are getting a lethal from 10 down, and a grazing from 11 to 15.

How would you perfect a fencing board game? Simultaneous turns? Deckbuilding? Dicerolling?
I'm intrigued about fencing but I honestly don't know anything about the sport.

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Nidhogg on Steam might be a good start for you.

>but I honestly don't know anything about the sport.
The first thing to do then is probably to hand the project over to a fencer, so it won't be The Big Fuck Game written by A. Virgin.

>but I honestly don't know anything about the sport.
Then its time to research it. read books, watch films, play games, everything you can to get a handle on how it works and the "feel" of fencing. Then you can start thinking about mechanics that will represent the reality of it, and decide on the kind of complexity level you want to go for.

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So, one thing I am wondering:

Is Warstack actually a good name for a game?

I may want to change it, but it does explain the game's draw: A wargame with stack-based resolution.

Also, the game is currently "bring your own minis" as I have no idea how to actually get into that part of the industry...of course 3d printers will render that part moot anyway.

>the game is currently "bring your own minis" as I have no idea how to actually get into that part of the industry
That's generally the norm for wargame publishers. It's rare for people to make their own minis for a game they publish, generally only very large companies do that - GW and Battlefront for example.

Anyone got a game they want someone to try out? Cards only in a printable format x

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I'm going to say 'no', but I fucking suck at naming things, so I'm not the best judge.

With the idea of 3D printers, if you did a digital release you could include CAD files for the minis.

eh warstack sounds kinda dumb, especially since "The Stack" (like mtg?) isn't that much of a draw, desu it sounds like a Jenga clone

Don't like it, sounds a tinge meta, like talking about a video game in community terms (good old doomstacks). Or a company trying to impose their brand on a normal concept (we are going to copyright stacking cards guys!). It mixes the meta layer with the fluff layer in an awkward way and the "war" part seems superfluous with how vague it is, lots of warring in games.
In a vacuum it also sounds a bit like a bland looking retro independent game some YouTuber plays for all but 15 minutes. The "my stickfigures make very snappy action sounds and thats about it" kind.

PS
Have a drawing of the imaginary Warstack, as token representing that I don't mean to shit on your work.

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So you have those 4 'aspects'/stats (Power, Mind, Charisma, Gift), and a large skill list, in a d100 system?

And you're asking for a quick way to do checks that don't easily fit into any of the skills on your skill list?

How high are the trained skills? EG, what's a basic soldier look like for shooting? What's the success rate on an average task for an average person?

We have 3 vague problems here:
>your skill list doesn't cover most everything in an acceptable way
>you need a way to adjudicate actions that require rolls that don't fit into a skill and
>>because you have to dip into pure 'gm adjudication'-area for these unknown skills and no stats you have no basis to go off of

#1 would suggest maybe re-do your skill list to be more broad
#2 and 3, you actually do have a basis: those 4 stats. Power/Mind/Charisma can easily be classical 3-stat setup of body/wits/soul-spirit-thing, then Gift is uh...who knows.
At that point, you can do something like

>Set a base skill level of, oh, say, 20. Or 15. Or something suitably low. It depends on what you want your tone to be, and how good your heroes are.
>Select the most appropriate stat (is it a physical thing? a smartsy thing? a 'spirit'/talky thing?)
>Add +5 to the base skill for every aspect-point you have.
No utilizing those actual bonuses of the aspect bonus - pushing rolls, etc.

Basically, an alt activation system where attacks and counter-attacks can be preempted, a strat point mechanic unifies it together, and redirection exists if interrupts prevent attacking the original target.

Another thing if you really don't want to officially be associated with MTG's Stack. Its fine for discussion like this, but its a good idea to avoid advertising yourself by associating with another person's game.

The name isn't as important as the cover image and interior illustrations. And the quality of the minis in the case of a wargame.

Not the guy you were responding to, but just wanted to say this is important advice for a lot of new designers. You'll realize that general "catch all" rules as best to make first, and then get more specific as you want to emphasize specialization

bump

page 10

How do I write to podcasters about my game? Does anybody here have experience in promotion, writing press releases, etc.?

The discord really killed these threads.

I really enjoy this idea, though I'm interested to know how it's quantified.
Managing an estate sounds like a lot of spreadsheet work to me but maybe there's a simple way of handling this.

Bumpinh