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AlphaDog posted:All the alternatives I've seen to levels that still involve character advancement are still subject to the "wait to get cool stuff" thing though. I'm experimenting with the idea of static character creation in my game. Players create their character by spreading around stat points, picking their skills/powers & then taking some items for their Inventory & once its done the character is complete. There isn't any XP mechanic & I'm trying to design the monster math around making encounters that are of an Easy, Medium & Hard difficulty with these static characters. I was hoping that having the players start out as Cool & Not Getting any Cooler in terms of mechanical power would mean that focus on in-game narrative rewards would go up. True this style of play probably wouldn't appeal to the heavy crunch/min-max/char op kind of player but I don't think that it has to have universal appeal to be a fun game.
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Nov 22, 2012 18:38
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Lately I've been thinking about why we have a Perception skill at all. I understand the concept, that a perceptive character will get more clues than one who isn't, but it seems like totally Makes Sense design. In practice, it leads to withholding information from the PCs, and there's nothing fun about that for anyone. I had a particularly strict DM that required Perception rolls every time we tried to discern the details of anything and it slowed the game down and led to a lot of unsatisfying moments. So I'm thinking that details should just be given, and if a player is curious enough to be asking detailed questions, then the character is perceptive enough to be getting that information. Instead, the rolling should be for information that can't just be gleaned from normal interaction, stuff that's the province of experience and specialization. Perception certainly shouldn't be a Skill, not when we can have Tracking and Sense Motive and Trapfinding and stuff that covers the specific applications of it already. I want the stat to be Intuition, and to be used for like hunches and secret info like Apocalypse World-style questions, does that make sense?
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Nov 22, 2012 22:29
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Scrape posted:Lately I've been thinking about why we have a Perception skill at all. I understand the concept, that a perceptive character will get more clues than one who isn't, but it seems like totally Makes Sense design. In practice, it leads to withholding information from the PCs, and there's nothing fun about that for anyone. I had a particularly strict DM that required Perception rolls every time we tried to discern the details of anything and it slowed the game down and led to a lot of unsatisfying moments. Players are not babies that should always get something when the alternative is failure (and therefore somehow not fun, though binary failure can be disappointing). We have Perception checks because you are not your character, ideally. Characters without good Perception usually have other things to head off the consequences of that, and in many cases it takes one character with good Perception to spot for other characters that do not in a combat situation. Players who ask eighteen questions at the table, sometimes purely to overcome problems on their character sheet, also slow the game down, and generally they do so a hell of a lot more than Perception checks do. It's also unhealthy to tie success with players who want every fine detail, because then you're kicking players who don't play like that. I have a lot of fun with Perception checks, in horror games especially, which can add to in-game tension and overall amusement.
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Nov 22, 2012 22:49
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Scrape posted:Lately I've been thinking about why we have a Perception skill at all. I understand the concept, that a perceptive character will get more clues than one who isn't, but it seems like totally Makes Sense design. In practice, it leads to withholding information from the PCs, and there's nothing fun about that for anyone. I had a particularly strict DM that required Perception rolls every time we tried to discern the details of anything and it slowed the game down and led to a lot of unsatisfying moments. I could see bringing them in as an active skill that gave a character some narrative-control. Instead of the DM writing down absurdly specific details (the mortar around the brick to the left of the king is weak/the enemy has a tiny limp in his left-leg/the candelabra is in just the right spot to fall on the guards) about the environment, we could just assume that most environments have some features that a sufficiently observant/clever character could notice. Then a perception check could be used any time players wanted to find a mechanically-useful exploit. I like using this as a way to represent the cleverness that fictional, non-magical heroes had. But, I'm not sure if it would balance especially well.
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Nov 23, 2012 00:42
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I don't see it working unless there's a narrative resource of some sort - FATE would get real messy if you could declare stuff without fate points.
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Nov 23, 2012 01:26
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It's not that I think they're "babies" who can't handle failure, it's that not discovering things isn't fun, you may as well have not prepared it, y'know? My specialty is horror games and I never use perception checks, 'cause it's always more frightening and more fun to hear the bump in the night. Builds more in-game tension, as you said. I dunno, maybe it's just our style, but like where is the fun in not discovering something cool? As a player, too, I find it frustrating to listen at a door and have to roll for it, it feels so arbitrary.
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Nov 23, 2012 03:51
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The party is walking through the haunted mansion. The big nasty thing is stalking them. Players are guaranteed to get random thumps and flashes of shadow, but there's a tough Perception check to spot anything concrete. If they make it, they can start the conflict early, with the monster at a distance, and not in its preferred arena. If not, it'll stalk them until they get to its favorite location, and will get right on them and surprise them. Lots of similar instances, where the party can walk into an ambush or trap, but a Perception check will let them spot it ahead of time, and prepare or avoid it. I don't understand why you'd get rid of that, any more than you'd get rid of the roll to dodge out of the path of the swinging scythe. It's a chance to gain an advantage, or avoid getting hosed by a surprise.
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Nov 23, 2012 04:03
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One problem is that "finding hidden stuff" is so contingent on the type of game you're playing that you can never have just one good way to approach it. AD&D was very much a game about sprawling dungeon complexes, where the goal was "steal the treasure" rather than "kill the baddies". Bypassing rooms or whole dungeon levels was not only supported and cool, it was mechanically a good idea because you'd almost always got more xp for stealing the treasure than you would for beating the dragon. So searching every room carefully for the special secret way into the treasure room was important, as was finding ways to bypass the killer wolf pits and whatever else. In later D&D editions, it's not like that. The in-system benefits (namely xp) come from defeating the monsters and completing plot goals. So bypassing them, and all the systems and rules for doing so, start to seem lame. There's nothing wrong with either style of play, but if you were to play an AD&D game where you were required to fight everything in a classic dungeon (and got no xp for carrying off the loot), you wouldn't have as much fun - just like "failed perception, miss the cool thing behind this secret door" isn't that great in 3e or 4e. One good way to approach this is with narrative resources. In something like DFRPG, "your tracking spell fails" is just lame as hell. But it's made better by the fact that you have this narrative resource to compensate for that sort of failure (fate points), so if you somehow still don't have enough fate points to make your spell work, chances are another character has enough to approach the problem differently. It's not "gee, you all failed your perception checks, I guess the baddies got clean away" - if you really want to find them, you trade future narrative control for the ability to do so. Another good way to deal with the whole perception thing is "failing forward". When a character fails to notice something, the game/plot advances anyway, just differently than it would have had they noticed that thing. They don't miss out on a cool extra that can only be found if you pass a certain test in a certain area. Like zachol said, failing your perception check might mean fighting the BBEG in his arena of doom rather than a random room he hasn't really prepared as a trick-laden ground for his showdown. That's pretty cool, but "not finding the secret door and missing the bonus objective because of a single die roll" is lame as hell (unless, of course, it's an AD&D-like dungeon crawler where there are many special extra areas and discovering some while missing others is part of the general feel of the game - and even then it's lame if the only way to find it is "check perception here").
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Nov 23, 2012 04:39
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Different topic... P.d0t posted:I read through the doc you posted and I wanted to comment on your skill idea. Collaborating? I have a feeling that I'd be incredibly frustrating to work with. I'm very disorganised and am "working" on this so irregularly that it's progressing at a snail's pace. That said, I like your skill list better than mine. I'd been thinking of some sort of "check to see if you know this" skill that encompasses all knowledge skills, probably tied to the primary/secondary tree that you chose. I'd also been thinking of a system more like the AD&D secondary skills, where you pick from a list of backgrounds and then if you explain in-character how you're solving the problem at hand with your skills, you roll to see if you succeed (and maybe tie that into "bonus if it's also covered by your primary/secondary ability", but we're starting to get into FATE aspects by that stage). I kind of want to go with this because it keeps skills vague and separate (and "like Basic D&D"... well, that didn't even have a skill system).
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Nov 23, 2012 04:46
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Scrape posted:Lately I've been thinking about why we have a Perception skill at all. I understand the concept, that a perceptive character will get more clues than one who isn't, but it seems like totally Makes Sense design. In practice, it leads to withholding information from the PCs, and there's nothing fun about that for anyone. I had a particularly strict DM that required Perception rolls every time we tried to discern the details of anything and it slowed the game down and led to a lot of unsatisfying moments. Of course, dealing with the design sense you're talking about requires one to see the PCs as moving through a story arc, rather than around an imagined physical map. There are a lot of people who can only see a gaming scenario (like the archetypal dungeoncrawl) that way, and see it as a failure when you have to nudge the PCs because they're been going around in circles due to failing a skill check. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Nov 23, 2012 |
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Nov 23, 2012 06:01
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Halloween Jack posted:Of course, dealing with the design sense you're talking about requires one to see the PCs as moving through a story arc, rather than around an imagined physical map. There are a lot of people who can only see a gaming scenario (like the archetypal dungeoncrawl) that way, and see it as a failure when you have to nudge the PCs because they're been going around in circles due to failing a skill check. I'm not sure it does. In a map-based dungeoncrawl, noticing something that gives you an advantage but doesn't chop off part of the game is doable and can be cool So there's this secret passage that leads to the room where the princess's friend is imprisoned (rescue the princess being the main goal). You can find it by... *A perception-type check in the hall where the door is. *Discovering the previous adventurers' map of the place (the room is hinted at but not explicitly mapped). *Following the guards that bring the food there. *Finding the prisoner manifest, which has one room with a letter instead of number code. It comes with a partial map that has other hidden rooms marked with letter codes. *When they finally rescue the princess, she tells them she heard her friend being dragged off in X direction, and then the noise of sliding stone. Of course, if they get to the friend before they do other stuff, she's got info that will help them out elsewhere, or give them the location of other secret stuff, or whatever. "Dungeoncrawl" doesn't have to mean "pixelbitching hellscape".
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Nov 23, 2012 07:02
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What's a good single-word name for setting elements? Like, you've probably seen somewhere in this very subforum, someone say "Oh my god, I am totally stealing rat pope/fist wizards/the crimson brotherhood/etc. for my game." What would you call those more-or-less-self-contained collections of ideas? Examples taken more directly from what I need to do: I already have "Cultures" which collect crunch available to everyone from a particular place or ethnos, but then I have crunch for, say, mass warfare, alchemy, sailing, dream magics, word magics, being an elf, three-corner wizardry (that is, 'academic' magic of a kind), and the like. What are those exactly? (I don't think a game needs a consistent name for these sorts of things, but I'm writing software which models that "oh man I'm totally stealing that X" behavior, so naming it is important.)
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Nov 23, 2012 15:40
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Re: perception skill, those are some real valid points about the function of the skill being different depending on the game. I guess my group just doesn't play games where it's anything but a total cockblock skill, so that's where I'm coming from. I'll keep mulling it over. @DocHawkins, I'd call it a meme, except we've blown out the term. Something to do with an interchangeable unit of information. Packet? You want a noun for the piece of info, right? Not a verb for borrowing the piece? Is the word just used internally for coding or is it also presented as parlance to the user?
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Nov 23, 2012 16:50
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Doc Hawkins posted:What's a good single-word name for setting elements? "Worldelement"? It's ugly and mashed-together, but it combines the basic ideas at least.
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Nov 23, 2012 16:56
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How about 'storyatom'? Mashed together but a little more concise than 'worldelement'.
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Nov 23, 2012 17:07
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But these are mechanics you're swapping around, right? Not setting elements? Or is it both? Why not just call it a Mechanic? Now I'm thinking of technical terms like Assembly, but that's not it...
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Nov 23, 2012 18:08
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If you want to steal from Sumerian/Akkadian mythology/Neil Stephenson, you could call them "mes". What they actually were is up for debate, but if you look at examples of them (list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_%28mythology%29) you can sort of see how the concepts you want to name could be made to fit in. Plus the word is short. some FUCKING LIAR fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Nov 23, 2012 |
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Nov 23, 2012 20:58
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How about Setting Element?
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Nov 24, 2012 01:45
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How would you feel about Stephen?
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Nov 24, 2012 02:13
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AlphaDog posted:Collaborating? I have a feeling that I'd be incredibly frustrating to work with. I'm very disorganised and am "working" on this so irregularly that it's progressing at a snail's pace. One quick question for you: Which class(es) are you most interested in designing? I ask this because I have been procrastinatin on doing up summoning/spellcasting in my designs, but the martial side of things is pretty thoroughly fleshed out.
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Nov 24, 2012 05:15
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P.d0t posted:One quick question for you: Since I'm not really designing with "classes", that's hard to answer  The most trouble I'm having is how to integrate non-combat spellcasting into the game, so that's what I've been completely failing to work on. I'll post my vague ideas about casting though. Combat spellcasting is easy: "Dice roll = <damage>+<effect> via <mundane/divine/magic>". Because Basic D&D and AD&D had no actual skill system, I think folding noncombat casting into the skill system works. Problem is, I don't want to have a mechanical difference between "I climb walls" and "I magic myself up walls". Non-combat spellcasting that's just "Skill roll = <degree of success> via <magic>" seems a little... flavorless. Then again, with the idea being to build an almost-flavorless dungeoncrawl game where the players add all the flavor via character skinning*, maybe that's a good idea. *I have some ideas in the vein of collaborative world building too, but I'm not even sure how necessary world building is in a game about going down holes and killing bad guys. I just don't want players to be locked into "Elves are like this and orcs are like that" with no input.
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Nov 24, 2012 07:46
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AlphaDog posted:Because Basic D&D and AD&D had no actual skill system, I think folding noncombat casting into the skill system works. Problem is, I don't want to have a mechanical difference between "I climb walls" and "I magic myself up walls". I think you just answered your own question on this one. If a character climbs up walls because of swole, let the player narrate that. If they magic themselves up walls, let them narrate it that way instead. There's nothing to say why they have that skill, and if you divorce skills from ability scores, there's even less pigeon-holing. "I hide and move silently because ROGUE" and "I am loving invisible because WIZARD" can both be Deception skill checks; the best part of this is you don't have to balance "non-combat spellcasting" against skills if you make them run off the same engine. It also gives either playstyle the same chance of failure, instead of "I roll low on my skill and fail" vs. "I cast a spell on myself which I don't resist so I auto-succeed" caster supremacy bullshit.
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Nov 24, 2012 15:45
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Scrape: you have to be careful with making the "move the plot" ability, any such ability based on the player's actual skill. Some people just aren't sharp or your MC's logic is different and that can slow a game down something fierce. A good way of presenting a stat like that would be to feed the player a hint, or allow them a little peek behind the curtain. You have to keep the other players in mind for investigative minigames, and realize that horror works on the basis of not knowing things, so what works there won't necessarily work in other system types. A thought: has any elfgame system appropriated FF7's Materia system? Freely customizable and shared ability pools seem like an interesting dynamic for a loosely classed game.
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Nov 25, 2012 09:02
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MadRhetoric posted:A thought: has any elfgame system appropriated FF7's Materia system? Freely customizable and shared ability pools seem like an interesting dynamic for a loosely classed game. Can you give us a rundown of what you mean? Ability pools are customisable and shared between the whole party? Like, everyone can do anything on the ability list as long as you've unlocked it, or there are some abilities that are party abilities and other abilities that are not? I have never played a Final Fantasy game, partly because that sort of thing didn't appeal to me at the time, and partly because now people who will not loving shut up about how it's the best game ever have completely turned me off ever trying it.
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Nov 25, 2012 09:59
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Skill talk... I've come up with the following skill list/system for my game. Remember, it's a dungeoncrawler with optional hexcrawl rules coming later. Pick 2 from this list: Vigor: Jump, climb, swim, balance, tumble, endure etc Discovery: Track, spot, notice, listen, find trap etc. Subtlety: Hide, sneak, open lock/door, find/remove trap etc Charisma: Bluff, diplomacy, intimidate, etc Knowledge: Know something about something. You are Good at the ones you picked, and Mediocre At Best at the other. For each skill (even the untrained ones) choose whether you do it through Mundane, Spiritual, or Arcane means - so basically whether you trained hard, your god helps, or you know a magic spell for just this situation. The skill system look like this at first level: Roll 2d6 for a trained skill and 1d6 for an untrained skill. Subtract the Difficulty. <2 Failure with a condition (because you tried and it didn't work). 3-6 Failure: you know you can't succeed and so don't try. 7-11 Success, you did what you wanted. >12 Resounding success (you can do it and also help someone else do it, or it gets you an extra benefit). An average-difficulty at first level is 5, so a trained newbie character succeeds a little under 60% of the time if he has no help. Low Difficulty is 3, High is 8, giving the trained newbie around 27% to succeed at High. Trained characters don't have to roll for Low difficulty checks of their level or below. (There is a box on the character sheet for the difficulty number at which it's easy enough for you to do without checking - so the GM says "test Subtlety 9" and you get to say "Haha, nope, I got this"). Now, it looks like an untrained person can't succeed. That's right, at first level at average difficulty. They will succeed 50% of the time at Low difficulty checks. At second level (and then every second level after that), you get another d6 (to all skills) - so your skill at everything goes up, and you can start doing stuff you formerly couldn't achieve, so long as the difficulty is low enough. Now, those numbers stay pretty constant throughout the progression (the Difficulty number changes with the character's level, but there's always roughly the same chance of success/failure). To summarise: A short list of dungeony skills. You choose whether you cast spells, ask god/spirits, or trained hard to achieve the effect. There is a number on your character sheet that tells you the difficulty you don't even have to roll for if you are trained in a skill. The better you get at being an adventurer, the less likely it is that you'll have to check to see if you can do something minor, and the better you get at everything related to adventuring. Edit: The game has 10 character levels. So you end up rolling 7d6 for skills (and attacks) by the end. Is that too many dice in anyone's opinion? The whole system is just d6s, and I like rolling a handful of dice, but it seems like that might be too much addition. I can scale the system back to max at maybe 4 or 5 d6, but that loses some of the "you are progressing" feeling with the numbers going up... Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Nov 25, 2012 |
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Nov 25, 2012 10:57
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AlphaDog posted:Can you give us a rundown of what you mean? Ability pools are customisable and shared between the whole party? Like, everyone can do anything on the ability list as long as you've unlocked it, or there are some abilities that are party abilities and other abilities that are not? Materias are items that you can slot into your equipment, and in doing so they give you spells, new commands (as in Steal, Transform, Throw) or passive bonuses. Use a Materia long enough, and you learn the ability for good. Of course, party members could share Materia as needed. I think it is a cool idea, and while it would need a bit of readapting to the tabletop, it is worth exploring. It could be a great way for building up certain party dynamics if you know what you're doing.
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Nov 25, 2012 12:00
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P.d0t posted:I think you just answered your own question on this one.
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Nov 25, 2012 12:03
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TK-31 posted:Materias are items that you can slot into your equipment, and in doing so they give you spells, new commands (as in Steal, Transform, Throw) or passive bonuses. Use a Materia long enough, and you learn the ability for good. So for a tabletop game, it's a magic item that bestows an inherent bonus on you if you use it enough, I guess. You might for instance take the orc cheiftain's Bloodrage Amulet, and when you use it X times to hulk out, you learn how to hulk out without it. Then pass it on to someone who hasn't learned to hulk out yet. I can see it being a cool sandbox game - figure out what powers you want, find the baddies that use that stuff, and then gradually absorb the power from whatever item you take from them that gave them that power in the first place.
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Nov 25, 2012 15:38
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TK-31 posted:Materias are items that you can slot into your equipment, and in doing so they give you spells, new commands (as in Steal, Transform, Throw) or passive bonuses. Use a Materia long enough, and you learn the ability for good.  I believe the court will find that if you use a Materia long enough it spawns a new one of its type with 0 experience*. Characters in FF7 were almost entirely interchangeable except for their limit breaks and special effects of their weapons, assuming similar level. You may have been thinking of Final Fantasy 9, which had you gain abilities from equipped gear. Most active abilities were character-specific, though. You should probably not do this in your elfgame! *Many also gain new and/or more powerful abilities on the way, and at least one just accumulated whatever they called materia XP endlessly, but this is mostly how it works.
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Nov 25, 2012 15:50
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The FF7 system has its own wrinkles, too. Some items allow you to "link" materia together, so for instance if you have "Fire" for blasting things with fire, you can link it with the "All" materia to hit every enemy on the field at once but this making things a little more expensive. You could instead make it an "Added Effect" and do fire damage on all regular attacks, "Counter Attack" to do it whenever you are attacked and even "Steal" to attempt to steal something from the enemy under the cover of the fire blast. You can get pretty effective combos, such as by using "Cover" to take an attack intended for an ally, thus triggering an attack linkes to "Counter Attack". In a more strict class-based system, these meta-materia or sub-materia might be more restricted as class abilities, or just something some characters start with and not others. Or just severely limit the amount of abilities you can equip, whichever! The original system has two limits on it. First, you have to actually get the materia items. Second, not all equipment is made equal for them. Not all weapons have more than two "linked" slots to allow for comboing, at least early on. In the original game, you basically don't have to worry about it at all and it's so easy you can finish it without ever really delving into the system of it, which is a bit of a shame because for the time it was pretty unique. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Nov 25, 2012 |
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Nov 25, 2012 16:06
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MadRhetoric posted:... An associate of mine once homebrewed an elfgame mashup of every Final Fantasy game that was out at the time (this was before FFX), Materia was a fairly large part of character progression. I remember enjoying it at the time, but I'd have to dig it up to see if the design holds up or if we didn't play long enough to find the glaring flaws.
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Nov 25, 2012 17:43
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Oh God, I just finished reading through this thread, now I can finally post some poo poo.AlphaDog posted:I'm not sure it does. In a map-based dungeoncrawl, noticing something that gives you an advantage but doesn't chop off part of the game is doable and can be cool This is a great way of handling things, but in the end it depends on the DM being awesome, not the rules themselves facilitating this kind of experience. I don't have experience with many RPGs, but I haven't seen any dungeon crawler that deals with dungeon crawling with the same amount of crunch that it does for combat. Sure, they provide rules for Dealing With Things, but there is no mechanical connection between Failing/Succeeding At Things and the overall adventure. Take a look at the combat system (any combat system), for contrast. You hit a guy, you chip away some hit points. There are rules that govern this exchange. Once all the guys from one team run out of hit points, the battle is over. This is how each individual mechanic that happens inside a battle connects with each other. But there is no such unifying system for exploration, which is why everything is Boring Binary Bullshit. Exploration needs it's own self-contained game, just like combat does. If you add the concept of "Time Points", say that certain exploration actions use these "Time Points", and have a threshold (or several) of "Time Points" that the party does not want to reach because they will lose/not win spectacularly/miss some sweet reward, then you have moved the stakes from the individual exploration action (searching a room, for example) to the adventure itself, giving you more leeway with how you can design the individual exploration mechanics. Searching a room, for example, is an Exploration Action that takes 1 Time Point and reveals all hastily hidden items (ie a trunk hidden under a bed, a trap door under a rug). Scrutinous Search, on the other hand, takes 2 Time Points but reveals ALL secrets in the room. Now the players have the choice whether they want to spend their Time Points searching a room by comparing it with searching other rooms that might have better chances of hiding something due to their importance, or taking other kind of exploration actions, like clearing a passageway of the fallen rocks that blocked it. Perception (and other skills) can tie into this by making it cheaper to take the appropriate actions if you have invested in the skill. This can be implemented as either straight reduction of Time Point costs for the actions, having to beat a DC in a binary pass/fail system, where you can try again after a failure but you would have wasted a time point, a more granular resolution system, or even have a point system for each challenge that your skill rolls chip away at. The problem with this approach is that it always requires that something time-based is at stake, otherwise the system falls apart. The "save the princess" scenario is a good candidate obviously, but "explore the ancient tomb" might need some gimmick, maybe even a metagame one, in order to urge the party to think of the cost of their exploration actions. Oh, and of course you have to be man enough to let players regain ALL their resources after each combat, or have it cost some Time Points, because anything based around the concept of daily rest is going to mess up the exploration mini-game.
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Nov 25, 2012 18:11
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Rexides posted:Time points. D&D has always had this in the form of rounds/turns. Early editions had "turns" as the measure of exploration activities (takes X turns to thoroughly search Y area) and certain races or classes had the ability to (sometimes, unreliably) find hidden stuff without spending that time. There was no explicit advice about putting in time constraints, but ad&d RAW has it all built in with torches, lanterns, protective spells, and wandering monsters being based on Turns. The system could do with a shitload of refining (time points sound awesome) but it was there from the start.
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Nov 26, 2012 02:22
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The problem with it is, there always has to be a reason why you only have so much time to do stuff. Otherwise it's *~*too gamey*~* and poo poo. I mean, that's a lovely reason, but still. Like, if you're heading into a place with the idea being "kill bad things/take their stuff" but the DM has the idea that while you're there, you find out that The Princess is being held captive in this very dungeon and is going to be executed within the hour/at the next full moon as a sacrifice to evil gods/whatever, then it's going to ramp up the timetable on your actions. So, does the clock start ticking once you find this out (not realistic/*~*ruins immersion*~*/MY VERISIMILTUDE!) or as soon as you enter the dungeon (meaning time can expire on that "quest" without your PCs even knowing it's A Thing, thus kinda ruining the whole hook)? In any case, I'm not sure how you build mechanical support for this stuff (beyond just guidelines); it seems like it'll always boil down to DM fiat.
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Nov 26, 2012 06:31
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Have it be about "the raid." Dungeons are assumed to be populated, with overwhelming numbers of enemies. The point of the raid is to bypass them to get the treasure and then get the gently caress out. The majority of the game is focused on avoiding combat, or on finishing it quickly and decisively when it's unavoidable. Delays mean you'll get swarmed and inevitably die. No matter what, they're going to find out about you sooner or later, so you have both a medium term deadline, and a short term deadline if you gently caress up and trip the alarms early. You're never in a situation where you can just rest (while on a raid), you're always racing the clock, and there are no spells or abilities that outright bypass this (except for a few that get you out of the situation, but then you can't go back). Treasure quality and difficulty ramp up significantly as you go deeper in, and repeated "shallow" raids where you're sloppy or quit early don't get you much reward. Monsters don't give XP. XP comes from training, which costs money. There isn't a direct "1 GP = 1 XP" conversion, it's more about how much you want to speed it up, and you also need to equip yourselves (training consumes the money). There should also be some sort of longer term deadline, some hard limit of an event that you're preparing for. Researching and preparing for a raid takes time and money. If you do things inefficiently, you'll always be wasting time setting up raids that don't give enough rewards, and you won't be able to properly train and gear yourselves up for that deadline. There would be checkpoints/minibosses beforehand so you can tell how you're doing. Something like that. Feels really videogamey but whatever.
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Nov 26, 2012 08:22
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AlphaDog posted:D&D has always had this in the form of rounds/turns. Early editions had "turns" as the measure of exploration activities (takes X turns to thoroughly search Y area) and certain races or classes had the ability to (sometimes, unreliably) find hidden stuff without spending that time. You mean 1E? I started with 2, but even if it was still there, at that age I was too engrossed reading about magical dudes to pay attention to anything else. But even so, having a power recharge system based around the adventuring day does not mesh well with exploration actions that take up minutes.
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Nov 26, 2012 08:38
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One way of making a crawl work under the gun would be to appropriate the Grim Portents idea from D-World and speeding them up. Everything you do either mitigates, advances, or triggers some objective or major action. You can go as fast or as slow as you like, as long as there's a web of function calls going on that map to what the players are doing.
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Nov 26, 2012 08:45
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Rexides posted:You mean 1E? I started with 2, but even if it was still there, at that age I was too engrossed reading about magical dudes to pay attention to anything else. Yes, 1e. Basic had it to a lesser extent and then 2e had it as an optional rule or some obscure page in the DMG that nobody read. The point is, Basic and AD&D weren't about telling stories, they were about raiding dungeons and exploring wilderness. Time was an issue because you were going to run out of light sources and protection spells, not because "rescue the princess before midnight". "Exiting the dungeon" wasn't always (or even commonly) a possibility, and every turn you wasted checking the next 10x10 stone passage for secret doors was tense because the DM was rolling to see if wandering monsters showed up and ate you. I'm not saying "blah blah storygames blah blah things were better back then". Things were different though, and there were different expectations. I maintain that one of the problems with D&D is designers removing elements without understanding why they're present and what they connect with (or worse, not removing elements that were connected to something that got removed). 2e still tracked "rounds" and "turns", even though the exploration element was largely divorced from the time system by then. Rexides posted:But even so, having a power recharge system based around the adventuring day does not mesh well with exploration actions that take up minutes. Yep, it's dumb as poo poo. Magic should only be daily X if there's some sort of actually cool in-game reason. Like Dresden Files and "lasts until next sunup/sundown", those times being "reset" times for lots of magic spells and supernatural critters. Even then, you don't get "2 fireballs per day", it's more like "the tracking spell the faeries gave you won't persist past dawn". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 10:16
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I need people's opinions. I'm working on the math for my game, and I came up with something (this is not a math post). My goal is "Basic-D&D dungeoncrawler", and I was reading over the Basic D&D books. Levels. Levels everywhere. "My 3rd level Character casts a 1st level Spell on the 2nd level of the dungeon". This lead me to thinking about dungeon crawling and what those early D&D games were like. The DM would build a dungeon (segregating the dangerous monsters into "deeper" levels), and the PCs would go off and murder their way through it, trying to find all the cool stuff and being careful not to go too "deep" before they were ready. Second level characters would try to confine themselves to the first or second level of the dungeon - they'd usually be careful not to venture to the fourth or (gasp) fifth level because they'd be hosed right up almost instantly). So, I was thinking of a game with only 6 levels. 6 character levels, 6 attack progression levels, 6 ability progression levels, 6 difficulty progressions, and 6 dungeon levels per game. The only dice you roll are d6s, but I assure you that's coincidental. Who really runs giant 20-character-level long-term dungeoncrawl campaigns these days? I'm guessing almost nobody. But a short multisession not-too-serious dungeon crawl is fun, right? So, set the final level for your game from 1-6. Build your dungeon in sections (levels 1-whatever). Every challenge on Level 2 is a Second Level Challenge. Every bad guy has Second Level Armour Class (for his monster category). The Big Bad Evil Guy is on the last dungeon level, and he's a BBEG:2 if your dungeon ends at 2. PCs, of course, are free to roam wherever they like in the dungeon. They just need to be careful not to delve too deep, or too greedily. Good idea? Awful idea? Mediocre idea? I just want a dungeoncrawl game that's not too loving hard to set up.
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Nov 26, 2012 13:19
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How is character advancement handled? The usual rip-the-xp-out-of-monsters route? This seems like a prime candidate for auto-advancement once you reach the next level, but then again you mention the possibility of them being too greedy with their delving. So, if "greedy delving" is associated with going down a level before they level up (insert Order of the Stick joke here), then what does that mean for the metagame? They will just keep killing monsters on their current level until a number on their character sheets reaches another number. This is something I can deal with in a long campaign because it's abstract enough to represent a personal growth of ability during that period, but I don't think it works well when you have to go through 6 levels of a single dungeon. What if levels are not things you "get", but indicators you match up too once you get enough magical items to boost your numbers. So, if you start out at level 1 with +1 to your to-hit, +1 to damage, and 1 to your defence, then in order to "become level 2", you need to find enough items to bring all those numbers to 2. Basically your character advancement is scattered throughout the dungeon, and you have to find it and pick it up. In this case "delving greedily" means forgoing the +2 defence item you are missing from this level and hoping to find a +3 on the next, with all the risks that it would involve.
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Nov 26, 2012 13:52
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