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Rexides posted: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? I was thinking of going with "find enough Treasure to level up". There's a limited amount of Treasure per level, and of course the lower levels have more Treasure, so... You find Treasure by defeating baddies and looting their stuff, by bypassing (skill challenge) the baddies and stealing their stuff, or in Lost Hoards (find the clues and figure out how to get to it). It's just "Treasure" and a value. When the party has accumulated enough Treasure, they level up, and can safely go down a level  That, or XP (reduced for monsters lower than your level?) and a system of Time Points like you mentioned earlier to prevent grinding.
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Nov 26, 2012 14:08
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Rexides posted: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. zachol posted: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. So combining this with the time-points thing, every time unit spent exploring nets the GM encounter points. For 10 points he can buy "Orc Room number 7 gets some reinforcements", and now Orc Room number 7's poker game has a new player. If they'd been quicker then they'd have gotten there before the fifth guy arrived. Similarly the GM could buy "Kobolds finish building another pit trap" or "Goblin Patrol walks in on you", whatever makes the most narrative sense. Rather than go back to XP for gold to avoid the random encounter XP grind issue inherent with such a system, we can divorce XP from combat/loot etc entirely and instead reward XP for completing Adventure Goals. If your goal is "Get the Hoard", if you get the hoard you get XP. Include minor goals, like "Get past the room full of Orcs on level 1". Killing them works, but so does sneaking past all sneaky like. The only advantage to killing them is that "Getting past on the way out" is another goal, which killing them all pre-loads the success for. Well, and also you get their stuff, which could be nice stuff, and you get to do a Fight, which is fun. Include rules and guidelines for adding Adventure Goals on the fly; If a particular goblin keeps getting away from combat you can add "kill that rear end in a top hat goblin" as an additional Adventure Goal. AlphaDog posted:Good idea? Awful idea? Mediocre idea? I just want a dungeoncrawl game that's not too loving hard to set up. Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 14:21
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AlphaDog posted:Good idea? Awful idea? Mediocre idea? I just want a dungeoncrawl game that's not too loving hard to set up. It seems like Blood Bowl players: str/dex stats in the 2-5 range with ability rolls based on rolling d6 under. Six levels with one skill pick or ability bonus per level. I'd play the heck out of "blood bowl players crawl a dungeon, get
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Nov 26, 2012 14:33
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Splicer posted:Sounds fun as balls to be frank. If you haven't played Descent you should, the campaign mode is very similar to what you are describing. Not too close, but enough to crib ideas from/get a feel for it. I have played Descent. I initially didn't have much fun with it. Then I realised that it's HeroQuest not Basic D&D, and I was cool with it. Ideally, I'd like something about half way between D&D and the D&D spinoff boardgames, without D&D's baggage. D&D's baggage is so hard to get away from when you're a long term D&D player trying to design a game. I keep thinking of Big Muscly Sword Guy as "the fighter", but he's not a D&D fighter at all.
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Nov 26, 2012 14:36
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AlphaDog posted: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". Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 14:58
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AlphaDog posted:I have played Descent. I initially didn't have much fun with it. Then I realised that it's HeroQuest not Basic D&D, and I was cool with it. Ideally, I'd like something about half way between D&D and the D&D spinoff boardgames, without D&D's baggage.
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Nov 26, 2012 15:00
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AlphaDog posted:I was thinking of going with "find enough Treasure to level up". There's a limited amount of Treasure per level, and of course the lower levels have more Treasure, so... Since the dungeon also has a limited number of levels to it, tie character advancement to that! Whenever the players have "sufficiently" (however you define that) explored a dungeon level, they can go to the next and level up. If the dungeon actually proceeds upwards, you can even make it a more literal kind of level-up. And if the players find the exit before that, I dunno, have a dwarven construction crew with road signs be closing it off because it's not ready or something.
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Nov 26, 2012 15:12
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Since the dungeon also has a limited number of levels to it, tie character advancement to that! Whenever the players have "sufficiently" (however you define that) explored a dungeon level, they can go to the next and level up. If the dungeon actually proceeds upwards, you can even make it a more literal kind of level-up. Again this could be linked in to the Time Units thing. For every in-game minute or so the levels start getting more and more dangerous. The more time you spend on a level the more likely a stronger monster is going to roll upstairs to natter with the (now dead) goblins, and the more likely someone from the floor above is going to run across evidence of your passing and follow you down to find out what's going on. Or the longer you wait the more lava worms burrow in downstairs and so on. That could be part of dungeon creation, determining what the "advancing threat" is that makes push-push-push an option (while keeping "keep looking and hope to win the arms race" as an option too.) Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 15:29
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Splicer posted:I think part of the design goal is for "When are we leaving this level" to be a tactical decision. I agree with this, which is why I don't really like the get-to-this-number-to-get-a-character-level approach. It does not matter if it's monster XP or treasure XP (I prefer treasure XP, if I had to choose), if "advancement" means suddenly getting a full package that makes you better across the board then players are going to weight it way more favourably than any other option they have. It sure is a nice abstraction of the concept of the treasure you find making you more capable in combat, but I am not sure that we need that abstraction in this kind of game. As a player, the reason I would play this game is because I want to find ALL the treasure, so making the treasure something tangible and the main means of character advancement would add a lot to the appeal of the game.
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Nov 26, 2012 15:42
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Leveling up could be done on a Thing basis. Killing a monster group is a Thing. Entering a previously unopened room is a Thing. Every time you do a Thing, put a token on the Thing tracker. When the Thing tracker has tokens equal to something like (number of players*6) + party level, the party levels up. If your Party level is higher than the Dungeon level you no longer gain tokens for doing Things. If your party level is lower than the dungeon level then you gain double Things. (moved this to its own post) e: Changed to players*6 to stay with the theme. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 15:45
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"RPG: The Boardgame: The RPG" sounds like exactly what I was going for. Obviously I don't have the resources (or desire) to make up dungeon tiles like Castle Ravenloft, and I think I want more RPG-ish than that, but the vibe is definitely right. On treasure/advancement/etc... If I went with the treasure system, you'd have to find almost all the treasure in a level before you advanced. The way the fighting math is working right now, it looks like you'd sometimes win fights one level higher than you, but it'd be less than half the time. So if you're stumped, bored, or just want to  , you can charge down the dungeon and see how that goes. As far as resources go, I've got "hit points" that refresh after each fight, and "surges" that refresh... not sure. "Surges" let you get up again at the end of a fight where you run out of hitpoints, power a Special Move even if you don't have Special Move Power (the dice ring thing from earlier), or auto-succeed a skill check. I'm thinking you get X Surges per character level, or possibly Surges recharge after a certain time if I go with Time Points or a Thing Tracker. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 15:49
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Splicer posted:Rather than go back to XP for gold to avoid the random encounter XP grind issue inherent with such a system, we can divorce XP from combat/loot etc entirely and instead reward XP for completing Adventure Goals. I like this. I was sort of thinking of quests as well. Maybe have hidden, secret goals, with some metagame indication they're there. If players want to spend time knocking on walls for secret doors, they can, but it'll take up time, and there's always a time limit (but you still know there's definitely a secret treasure around here somewhere, or that there were only two and you found them both). Rexides posted:advancement What about a staggered approach? With levels, but many of them, each with a very small bit of advancement. All the things you'd get in a level in D&D, spread over four or five levels or "sub-levels." Sort like a point system, except you spend the points on certain things in a certain order. Or ding, a new advance, but because it's an even-numbered advance it needs to be spent this specific way. Or other stuff automatically goes up with your advances.
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Nov 26, 2012 15:51
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The way I eventually settled on rationalizing "dungeons" in my fantasy settings is to say they're tunnels into the Underworld--a nightmarish Silent Hill like environment--so there's always justification for "something big and nasty will come for you, or something awful will happen, if you stay long enough." If you incorporated this Time Units thing into some sort of mashup that involved influences from 4e and/or [OSH/Dungeon World/Mouse Guard] I would buy and play the poo poo out of it.
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Nov 26, 2012 15:56
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Halloween Jack posted:The way I eventually settled on rationalizing "dungeons" in my fantasy settings is to say they're tunnels into the Underworld--a nightmarish Silent Hill like environment--so there's always justification for "something big and nasty will come for you, or something awful will happen, if you stay long enough." This actually sounds a lot like the way OD&D did things. Dungeons weren't the ruins of a long gone civilization, they were a scary underground bizarro dimension of death where all the doors had to be forced open by PCs but opened automatically for monsters and the doors also closed behind you automatically unless you secured them with iron spikes, because the Dungeon itself was trying to kill you.
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Nov 26, 2012 16:02
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Halloween Jack posted:The way I eventually settled on rationalizing "dungeons" in my fantasy settings is to say they're tunnels into the Underworld--a nightmarish Silent Hill like environment--so there's always justification for "something big and nasty will come for you, or something awful will happen, if you stay long enough." Raiding dude's planar fortresses in Planescape. At X time the BBEG realises you're there and releases the hounds. At Y time he releases the killer bees. At Z time he closes the gates and starts hunting you, so if you're not advanced enough, you're probably hosed. Way more boardgamey than what I had in mind, but pretty cool.
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Nov 26, 2012 16:03
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Ratpick posted:This actually sounds a lot like the way OD&D did things. Dungeons weren't the ruins of a long gone civilization, they were a scary underground bizarro dimension of death where all the doors had to be forced open by PCs but opened automatically for monsters and the doors also closed behind you automatically unless you secured them with iron spikes, because the Dungeon itself was trying to kill you. Philotomy Jurament posted:
This guy Philotomy used to have a site for all his "OD&D Musings," but unfortunately it's gone now. The thing is, sometimes you'd want to have challenges that aren't in a hellish underground dungeon, so you'd need other things to do with Time Units. They wouldn't necessarily have to be a feature of every dungeon raid.
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Nov 26, 2012 16:20
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AlphaDog posted:As far as resources go, I've got "hit points" that refresh after each fight, and "surges" that refresh... not sure. "Surges" let you get up again at the end of a fight where you run out of hitpoints, power a Special Move even if you don't have Special Move Power (the dice ring thing from earlier), or auto-succeed a skill check. I'm thinking you get X Surges per character level, or possibly Surges recharge after a certain time if I go with Time Points or a Thing Tracker.
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Nov 26, 2012 16:34
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The concept of the sentient megadungeon that tries to kill you sounds a lot like Fantasy loving System Shock, and I just love that game to bits.Fantasy Shodan posted:Look at you, adventurer: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal megadungeon?
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Nov 26, 2012 16:39
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Splicer posted:Surges could recharge every time you go down a level. There's no in-game rhyme or reason for it but it might work gameplaywise. It's easy to remember (We went down a level, everyone fill their surges) and a per-floor resource would buff a "Just bull through and run" gameplay style. I'm going with Luck as the "surge" name. As in "drat, it's lucky that dagger missed my heart" and "lucky I remembered to bring a Macgyver Macguffin" and "wow, it's lucky your arrow hit him right in the loving eye". Since luck is so unpredictable, it kind of fits as a metagame resource. Also, it lets me write "when your luck runs out" and "if you are out of luck" a lot.
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Nov 26, 2012 16:42
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Although OD&D does proceed from the notion that the dungeon is inherently evil and hostile, remember that the whole move from Chainmail to D&D grew out of a scenario that involved trying to break a siege by getting into a castle through its dungeon--the concept of Time Units can easily be fit into something like this without making it too "gamey" and seeming like it's forcing everything into a mold.Rexides posted:The concept of the sentient megadungeon that tries to kill you sounds a lot like Fantasy loving System Shock, and I just love that game to bits.
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Nov 26, 2012 16:43
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Halloween Jack posted:Although OD&D does proceed from the notion that the dungeon is inherently evil and hostile, remember that the whole move from Chainmail to D&D grew out of a scenario that involved trying to break a siege by getting into a castle through its dungeon--the concept of Time Units can easily be fit into something like this without making it too "gamey" and seeming like it's forcing everything into a mold. That could be a neat use of skills actually. If you have the lockpicking skill and try to pick a lock then you automatically succeed, what you're rolling for is to see if you rolled well enough to do it for free or if it's going to take a time unit (during which time the other players can look around for Stuff or something).
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Nov 26, 2012 16:54
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Splicer posted:That could be a neat use of skills actually. If you have the lockpicking skill and try to pick a lock then you automatically succeed, what you're rolling for is to see if you rolled well enough to do it for free or if it's going to take a time unit (during which time the other players can look around for Stuff or something). Yeah, I was thinking about the same thing. In that case, a "time unit" can be roughly five minutes, and each party member can decide what to do during that time. The rogue can try picking the lock, the wizard can identify an item, the fighter can... do some warm-ups for the next fight (I really think that we need separated class lists for combat and exploration for this to work)
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Nov 26, 2012 16:58
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Rexides posted:Yeah, I was thinking about the same thing. In that case, a "time unit" can be roughly five minutes, and each party member can decide what to do during that time. The rogue can try picking the lock, the wizard can identify an item, the fighter can... do some warm-ups for the next fight (I really think that we need separated class lists for combat and exploration for this to work) e: Success being guaranteed also means you can keep roll success quite low. Having a 2 out of 3 chance to fail to open the door is very different from a 1 in 3 chance to have a free action. Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 17:08
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I think the thing I like most about Time Units, much moreso than having a model for "if you linger too long the monsters get tougher" is the prospect of having simple rules for the things that involved wheedling the DM in Basic. Instead of PCs who display "player skill" by tediously annoucning that they're searching the door, ceiling, floor, walls, and every feature of the room, and the DM who screws them over by saying "Haha you get attacked and it automatically hits you and bites your face off" you have something everyone can understand--upon entering a room, a hidden monster may attack or a trap may spring in X Time Units, so you can only do so many things before whatever was going to happen, happens. Detection skills could be passive things that tell you which actions are worth taking, rather than a roll to determine if you do notice the stunjelly once you've decided to search for it.
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Nov 26, 2012 17:11
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Thank you so much everyone who tried to help me out. Sorry I wasn't able to reply earlier.  Scrape posted:@DocHawkins, I'd call it a meme, except we've blown out the term. Something to do with an interchangeable unit of information. Packet? This is a great suggestion, because you're absolutely right about what the thing is: a transferrable, self-contained unit of information. I do need a noun first (the verbs tend to follow), and since it would be a thing that players could make, I'd need a 'user-facing' name anyway, so I was looking for a word that would fit both needs. Also, it's important, when writing software that models the processes of an existing 'domain' of knowledge or activity, to use, as much as possible, the existing language of that domain, or to make language that would be immediately recognizable by people familiar with that domain. Effectronica posted:"Worldelement"? It's ugly and mashed-together, but it combines the basic ideas at least. UnCO3 posted:How about 'storyatom'? Mashed together but a little more concise than 'worldelement'. These are great suggestions, because they made me realize my 'single word' restriction was arbitrary and unnecessary. I could make a thing that in code was called 'WorldElement' and in author-facing displays was called 'World Element' very easily. Scrape posted: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... This is a great suggestion because it underlines the difficulty of what I'm talking about. Typically, rpgs come packaged in 'books', which present lots of bits of fictional information and mechanical information, usually with explicit or implicit instructions that any one piece of it implies all the others. What I'm looking for is the name of the lower-level collection of fiction and/or mechanics, which can also be applied to the rpg stuff that comes from little pdfs and posts in threads and blogs. The question can be restated as 'what are books composed of?' some loving LIAR posted: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. This is a great suggestion because it's evocative as gently caress. I always assumed Stephenson was making stuff up to make a fun story, but no, it turns out Sumerians really thought differently than we do. It's also great because it makes me think that the role of the thing I am talking about is a classification or tag, and that there can be different kinds of those, with different names. Like, when you search your music collection, it will give you songs with titles, artists, albums or genres that match your search query, because all of those attributes are really just one kind of thing ('Metadata') with different names. So I do hope to have Mes be one of the possible names. TK-31 posted:How about Setting Element? This is a great suggestion because it underlines that the name I wasn't satisfied with is still perfectly understandable. Splicer posted:How would you feel about Stephen? These is similarly a good suggestion because it reminded me that it's possible to over-think the issue, and that now I have tons of good ideas. And as it turned out, re-reading all of them yesterday made me realize that I really like the word 'Idea'. So again, thanks to everyone.
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Nov 26, 2012 19:59
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Splicer posted:That's better actually. The rogue says "I'm using my time unit to pick the lock". If he rolls well, he gets his time-unit refunded and can spend it on searching or peering through the keyhole or something. I don't know if I agree with the idea of regaining time units on a success. If it's just one person trying something, then it works fine, but if everyone is doing his thing then you have to find something else to do on a success otherwise your success does not mean anything. And what happens if you are also successful on the other action you picked? What if the other players picked something to do just because a time unit was spent even if they didn't need to, and your success invalidated their choices because it's tactically better at that point to not spent a time unit if possible. The way I am imagining it, when you attempt an exploration action, you spend a time unit and roll your skill. Let's assume a dice pool system like WoD, and let's say that the lock needs 8 successes to open, and your skill is 10. If you manage to roll 8 successes, you open the lock on your first try with just one time unit spent. If you don't get enough successes, you can spent another time unit to try again, with any previous successes carrying over to the next try. One problem I can see is the game slowing down when everyone tries to find something to do whenever a time unit needs to be spent. One solution I can think of is that members of the party who don't do anything in particular during a time unit contribute points to a metagame pool, which in turn can be used as some kind of bonus. Maybe the in-game explanation can be that they are discussing general tactics, refining their exploration plans, or studying the nature of the dungeon in more depth.
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Nov 26, 2012 20:18
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Fuego Fish posted:Make them Ability Sephirot. I realize this was from a long time ago, but this idea is really attractive to me for a lot of reasons, and I've been thinking about it a lot since you mentioned it (and wanted you to get some feedback on the suggestion). There's design room here not just for character advancement, but something like a party sheet (akin to the WFRP3 ones) and even for moves within combat or social encounters. For the party sheet, players put pegs in the slots their characters occupy in that group archetype, and get bonuses to behaving according to their roles. Each party type would have its own board and synergies or combos or whatever, and there could be movement as the party develops or changes its approach. In a Band of Thugs you'd have a lot of places to get bonuses on intimidation and interrogation, but fewer on reassurance and persuasion and generally oppressing people (for example), where Glory Hounds would get bonuses to making impressions and fighting tough opponents. Within a contest (combat or otherwise) it may be possible to use a position on the board with some other information (cards played, dice rolled) to generate outcomes, with far less left to pure chance. Anyway, I know this isn't the topic right now, but I wanted to type out my thoughts before too much time passed.
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Nov 26, 2012 21:20
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Halloween Jack posted:This guy Philotomy used to have a site for all his "OD&D Musings," but unfortunately it's gone now. Yeah, I was paraphrasing Philotomy, because I couldn't find the original article anywhere. I didn't know that Philotomy's musings were gone. This makes me sad, because his stuff had a lot of steal-worthy material for just about any fantasy dungeon game. The next time I run any kind of a dungeon crawler, I'm throwing in the dungeon as a sentient evil entity as one of the things. Which reminds me, Old School Hack already kind of has a mechanic for what's being talked about : while the game isn't exactly aimed at dungeon exploration in the traditional sense, the game does feature Awesome Points as a resource that the DM can use to pace the adventure. So, if your players are dawdling in the dungeon, throw in a few more Awesome Points into the pool to call up a wandering monster or some other complication. The benefit of such an approach is that you don't have to have separate metagame resources for the players and the DM, but it might not be as well-defined as what you're setting out to do.
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Nov 26, 2012 22:41
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AlphaDog posted: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? A full 20-level nothing-but-dungeon-crawl game. . . I am not sure how that wouldn't become tedious in this day and age where 4E was openly designed as a dungeon crawl game and yet tried to work in everything else even then. quote: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. This is good but does it include mechanics for Appropriate Level Traps?
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Nov 27, 2012 05:36
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:A full 20-level nothing-but-dungeon-crawl game. . . I am not sure how that wouldn't become tedious in this day and age where 4E was openly designed as a dungeon crawl game and yet tried to work in everything else even then. Exactly my point. Very few people would even try, and they'd usually give up before they got anywhere near level 20. I was envisioning 1-2 sessions per dungeon level, so a full 6 level dungeon would take about 12 sessions at most. OneThousandMonkeys posted:This is good but does it include mechanics for Appropriate Level Traps? Of course. On the second level, there are second level traps, which inflict appropriate second level effects on second level characters. A trap approached by an appropriate level PC will be detectable most of the time, if the PC is trained and looking. Its effects should hinder exploration and burn resources. A trap approached by a one-level-lower PC who is trained and looking will be detectable some of the time. Its effects should drastically hinder exploration and burn lots of resources. A trap approached by a two-levels-lower PC who is trained and looking should be barely detectable and block further exploration and/or burn lethal amounts of resources. If the former, then the block can be overcome once PCs are closer to level-appropriate. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 06:07
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AlphaDog posted:Of course. On the second level, there are second level traps, which inflict appropriate second level effects on second level characters. OK, well in that case I am not sure why we are even talking about PCs getting ahead of themselves, though. Because it's certainly not entertaining for PCs to get in over their heads to a degree where Death Is Certain if they went the wrong way through the complex. These are sort of practical problems that may only be solved by good GMing though.
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Nov 27, 2012 06:13
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I'd imagine that in this theoretical system, the stairway down to the more difficult section of the dungeon would be clearly signposted (possibly with a literal signpost depending on the tongue-in-cheekness of the game); the players would only end up in over their heads due to their own consuming greed. In my clone for the contest, I had two tracks: Depth and Time. Failure at skill challenges and taking healing breaks would increase Time, but only player choice would increase Depth. Time could also be reduced through spending resources or luck at skill challenges, and maybe some other things? I've been trying to redesign it in a dozen different directions since the contest; I've forgotten exactly what it looked like at the end. The higher of Depth or Time determined encounter difficulty, but only Depth determined treasure rewards.
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Nov 27, 2012 06:25
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:A full 20-level nothing-but-dungeon-crawl game. . . I am not sure how that wouldn't become tedious in this day and age where 4E was openly designed as a dungeon crawl game and yet tried to work in everything else even then. Hey man I am totally currently running the World's Largest Dungeon right now!
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Nov 27, 2012 07:19
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:OK, well in that case I am not sure why we are even talking about PCs getting ahead of themselves, though. Because it's certainly not entertaining for PCs to get in over their heads to a degree where Death Is Certain if they went the wrong way through the complex. These are sort of practical problems that may only be solved by good GMing though. Point is that one level ahead of yourself is OK if you're lucky, skillful, or don't care. Two levels ahead of yourself is at the point where yeah, the traps kill you, the monsters kill you, and the 10x10 stone passages look really foreboding. Remember, 6 levels in the game. "Two levels ahead of yourself" is like 10 levels ahead of yourself in 4e terms. I'd like the Minimum Dungeon to be 2 levels (3 or 4 sessions max, maybe even 2 if Level 2 consists solely of the BBEG room). Good GMing? The intent was to be explicit as gently caress that poo poo like "a chute drops you directly to level 5 lol good luck with that" is utter bullshit. Hell, the generic design back in the Basic days was "if there's stairs going down, poo poo gets more dangerous if you go that way". Retaining that isn't a bad idea, and neither is having some other obvious in-game way of saying "Level 2 is thataway".
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Nov 27, 2012 07:44
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AlphaDog posted:I was thinking of going with "find enough Treasure to level up". There's a limited amount of Treasure per level, and of course the lower levels have more Treasure, so... If the primary objective is exploration, I would have gold, monsters, and Time Points contribute to XP but also have "objective points" and map size also play a major part. Like, if you find a major setpiece in the dungeon or clear an entire annex of the dungeon, you get XP. If you want to keep XP values from inflating (like say just 10 XP to level from 1 to 2) but want to use all three ways of doing XP, then I'd budget the max XP per floor to be equal to the (number of players) • (XP to next level) plus (a bit). Maybe you could even include a bonus amount of XP for exploring 100% of a floor and give it to the MVPs in combat/exploration/trap finding/puzzle solving/whatever. That way there's an incentive to explore the whole floor while keeping a bit of a competitive edge to the whole thing, if you want that sort of thing. When it comes to monsters and XP in your system, I would only give XP for fighting specific target monsters on a given floor and only put treasure for the "boss monsters" on that floor. Random encounters should be endlessly coming as a resource drain, and if you want an old school feel but still want a bit of combat you shouldn't let random encounters give XP, especially since it'll mess up your character advancement budget if you do it the way I described above. AlphaDog posted:D&D's baggage is so hard to get away from when you're a long term D&D player trying to design a game. I keep thinking of Big Muscly Sword Guy as "the fighter", but he's not a D&D fighter at all. What I did with that problem in one of my games is that I don't have an actual "spellcaster" class, per se. It's liberating not having to design combat mechanics around wizard bullshit.
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Nov 27, 2012 08:15
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Spiderfist Island posted:
All that means is you've internalized D&D's lovely design practices so hard that you've given up on changing them even when you have the freedom to do so and don't have to design a game under D&D paradigms. That ain't a good look for anything but a heartbreaker. The main thing holding back class parity in fantasy game design is the designer's inner grog. Kill that, and it's quite liberating.
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Nov 27, 2012 09:14
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MadRhetoric posted:The main thing holding back class parity in fantasy game design is the designer's inner grog. Kill that, and it's quite liberating. I disagree somewhat. That's part of it, but the main thing holding back class parity is classes. Why spend time balancing Fighter and Rogue when you could spend time developing a pool of universal balanced abilities and let people pick the ones they like and say ... by magic or ... with my trusty sword?
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Nov 27, 2012 09:45
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AlphaDog posted:I disagree somewhat. That's part of it, but the main thing holding back class parity is classes. Because both approaches are legitimate. Mutants and Masterminds does the latter thing, where you have Effects and in describing them they become Powers. There is nothing inherently wrong with classes, however, as it creates a system where it is much easier to have niche protection without the GM stepping in to say 'OK, Tom, lightning powers are a no-go. Lily has those already.'. Classes are pretty much like a less graphical version of fighting game characters - obviously, working with characters who are straight up different in how their options work presents a challenge, but this doesn't make the games bad at all - and in fact some fighting games manage to be so balanced that literally any character can beat any other (example: Street Fighter 2 Super Turbo, Guilty Gear). The same thing is possible in PnP.
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Nov 27, 2012 10:07
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I'm not saying Classes are bad design - not by a long shot. Just that by their nature they tend toward imbalance. I'm not even saying that they're inherently imbalanced, just that a fantasy game that ditches D&D while retaining classes is difficult because by the very nature of "classes" you end up mentally comparing them to D&D's fighter, paladin, rogue, etc. I can even see that working to the game's detriment, as people mentally categorise your game's Assassin as a D&D Rogue when he's more like a modern spy-thriller-action type who moves in high society, gets invited to jousting tournaments (and is a good knight-in-armour fighter), and then slips through the shadows in the evening doing his real job, and arranges things so that it looks like the Duke's men assassinated the Baron's brother when really it was the King's plan all along.
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Nov 27, 2012 11:13
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AlphaDog posted:Why spend time balancing Fighter and Rogue when you could spend time developing a pool of universal balanced abilities and let people pick the ones they like and say ... by magic or ... with my trusty sword? You have to actively work to make the abilities balanced in such a system, the same way you will have to work to balance your classes in a class-based system. In fact, and I am talking in a very abstract sense here that may not apply to all situations, balancing classes it's easier because you can have both weak and strong abilities within a class as long as the overall power remains the same, while in a system where you freely choose your abilities you have to make sure that each and every one of them is balanced against every other (or at least within their own tier).
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Nov 27, 2012 11:24
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