TG Design Thread: Elegance in Elf Simulation

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG Design Thread: Elegance in Elf Simulation

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

IceBox posted:

I am trying to come up with names for attributes/ability scores that do not provide players with an excuse to roleplay their characters in a certain way. For example, a character with a low intelligence being played as stupid. I want the names to reflect a character's power, finesse, and resilience in the categories of mental, physical, and social (9 total).

What do these stats do?

# ¿ Aug 15, 2012 09:01

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:33

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

TK-31 posted:

There's something to be said about making a distinction between Intelligence and Wisdom, in that at the very least the archetypes they represent are different. Strength and Constitution, on the other hand, should have never been separate stats because pretty much every fantasy character who is strong is also tough, and viceversa.

I agree with Strength implies toughness, but not the vice-versa. Nigh-indestructable characters of average or above average strength aren't too uncommon.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2012 17:06

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

homullus posted:

The problem with "all Strong characters are also Tough, but not all Tough characters are also Strong" is that it privileges one attribute over another -- why put points into Tough if you can put them into Strong and get both?

I was saying that I saw an issue with using fantasy tropes to justify merging them, not that they should be half merged mechanically or something.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Aug 22, 2012

# ¿ Aug 22, 2012 21:57

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Scrape posted:

My biggest design question right now is how to implement Skills. I hate d20-style static bonuses with a large randomizer. I used to really love L5R's roll&keep system (dice pool, add your Stat plus your Skill, but only keep dice equal to your Stat, try to hit a target number), but nowadays I like simpler mechanics. L5R has too many Stats for me, I think.

I've been playing a lot of Dungeon World and Apocalypse World, which work amazingly without skills at all, but to be honest I miss the satisfaction of Improving My Sword Skill every couple sessions.

What are some good skill systems that are elegant, rather than realistic?

I quite liked the basics of the Deadlands system (though the actual implementation was terrible). You had Ability Scores and you had Skills. Ability Scores were the die-type used, so if you had d12 agility you rolled a d12 when making an Agility based test (dice exploded). Skills were how many dice you rolled, so if you had 2 in Guns you'd roll two dice. So with the above example you'd roll 2d12 (exploding) and pick the best one. After that it's your standard "did I roll high enough".

It was my first introduction to the idea of skills and ability scores offering different mechanical benefits, as opposed to just being different ways to get the same thing (stacking +1s in D&D/Unisystem, Storyteller's dicepools, most percentile systems etc). The actual implementation is terrible though (Something like 12 ability scores, weird point costs etc).

I've since run across other systems that do ability score/skill differentiation differently (WFRP3 skill training gives you a different kind of die with a unique symbol, and... actually I can't remember any others offhand but I know they exist), and I've always liked the idea of Ability Scores and Skills, if in the same system, functioning in fundamentally different manners. Makes them seem actually interesting int heir own right instead of just an extra layer of obfuscation.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2012 12:29

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Bob Quixote posted:

The magical abilities require spending MP, which we've chosen to think of as "Mental Points" instead of magic points & recently the idea came up to tie your MP score into a sort of CoC Sanity type deal, where if you cast too many spells too fast and drain your MP down to a very low score it snaps your brain (at least temporarily). We're not sure if this would be too penalizing to magic using characters though, and I'd really like to know if there are other games that use a similar system or if anyone has some advice that could help out with this.

Treat the Risky bit as an option rather than a requirement, and see if the game is still fun for anyone not taking advantage of it. WFRP3 has a similar thing, where if you roll a chaos star when casting a spell you draw a Bad Thing Happening. However you can only roll chaos stars on purple dice, and you never have to roll a purple die when casting a spell. You can quite easily have a fun time playing a magic user and never have to roll a purple die ever. The incentives for doing the things that mean more purple dice are pretty tempting though...

So if the average mage has, say, 12 magic points, and dropping below 4 means Bad Things Might Happen, first design around the average Mage having 9 or 10 and just flat out not being able to cast spells when they hit 0. If you see what I mean.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Aug 26, 2012

# ¿ Aug 26, 2012 19:00

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Bob Quixote posted:

Sounds like a very good idea to me, I'll try that out first and we'll see which works better; if it turns out to not be workable it's no great loss.

Two things:
Remember that more options = more powerful, so an 8 point mage is less powerful than an 12 point mage with only 8 "safe" points. If you have a perfectly balanced "10 safe points" mage then the equivalently powerful risky mage will be something like "12 points total 9 safe" or whatever. (I'm really just elaborating on part of what I said above but I'm always worried that I've phrased something too vaguely).

Secondly, make sure you don't fall into the trap of having the risky option be an all-or-worse-than-nothing. Have the chance of getting consequences be relatively unrelated to whether the actual spell succeeded or not. "Well I tried to fireball all the badguys but instead I developed a fear of rats" is considerably less fun than "Hooray I fireballed all the badguys AND developed a fear of rats". I'd honestly go one step further and set it such that a player can't miss and suffer consequences at the same time, so the only possible results of a risky cast are:

Spell fizzles, nothing happens at all.
Spell succeeds.
Spell succeeds but with consequences.

If that makes sense.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Aug 27, 2012

# ¿ Aug 27, 2012 01:15

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Bob Quixote posted:

I see what you are getting at, and I'm definitely on board with it. I was thinking that MP would only get used up during the successful use of a magical ability/talent, so in that case the only times you'd be at risk of suffering any kind of effects from MP drain would be if you had already successfully performed the act as it was.

I like the way you think!
An alternate way of presenting it might be to allow casters to cast into "negative points". This might make it easier to remember (I have 10 points, but if I want to live dangerously I can keep casting until I hit -5). So first you'd design spellcasting around having about 12 points (or whatever), but you can't cast points you don't have. Then to finalise the spellcasting you reduce the average to about 10 points but allow casting down to about negative 5, and then see how that went.

Bob Quixote posted:

The way the game is set up is classless (but does have levels) and I'm trying to get a setup going that encourages building rounded characters who have a little of everything rather than ones who go all one way or all another (though thats still an option if the player prefers it).

How are you doing this so far? I have Advice of Dubious Usefulness but you may be following some or all of it already.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2012 15:23

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

A game where, mechanically speaking, everything remains static would be hard to pull off. RPGs are at their core storytelling games, and Growth and Change are some of the biggest aspects of a good story. If you're taking out mechanical "numbers and swords" growth you'll want to implement some other kind of structured evolution system. That said, it doesn't have to be your characters' physical abilities that change.

All changes could be personality based. FATE has aspects, which I'm not going to fully explain here but one thing they can describe are a character's personality. "Idealistic Newcomer" can be changed to "Jaded Veteran" by events (at your decision). Reign has Passions, things your character really cares about that you get bonuses to rolls relating to, which you can change as they are completed/satisfied/overcome. They're like Aspects but they're free to activate as it's assumed you're going to try to use them as much as possible. I'm not even going to get into 3:16. Compared to the intricacies of combat systems however, character personality simulation and advancement is a fairly untapped field. You could build a robust "inner character growth" system of some manner as a Thing.

Or the characters can stay the same but the "party" advances. Reign's Company system is a crunchy example of a non-character-based growth mechanic (Go here and select "Companies" from the dropdown menu to see what one looks like) Mechanically it's basically an NPC character who's stats go up and down based on your players' actions (or they can just spend XP). So you could WFRP3 has something kind of similar with the Party Sheets, which you can attach talents to and trade out for better ones with more talent slots and better bonusses.

Then there's the world-shaping approach, mechanically representing the party's effect on the world as a whole. FATE's aspects can be attached to cities or countries, like adding a rousing speech adding "Civil Uprising" to the evil kingdom, or "Patriotism!" to the good one. In Reign you can stat up cities and countries as NPC companies, with a hunt for mithril boosting your village's defences or economy(or granting you access to better equipment), or a surgical strike reducing an enemy kingdom's. The (free) Grab Bag supplement on this page even has rules for company vs giant monster combat.

Finally there's the much maligned "christmas tree" approach, where your character remains the same but his equipment and sundries change. This doesn't just have to be equipment though. 4E has Boons (introduced around the time of Dark Sun), basically favors people (monsters, gods) owe you, memberships in societies etc. A lot of games (WFRP3, FATE, GURPS, UA) have wound/madness type things, negative longterm effects that can be removed by further adventuring (or spending XPs). Or you can go the equipment route, but make it more interesting see the mithril example above).

You may have noticed that a lot of these are just mechanical representations of things that are already in most games, but tend to be just handwaved by the GM or dealt with narratively. Basically, people like Stuff. Especially in a Crunchy game, Getting Stuff is good. If you're taking away one of the Crunchy Game Genre's biggest Stuff Getters (mechanical power growth) you're probably* going to need to introduce or buff up another Stuff Getter.

*or maybe not! I am not the god of game knowing.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2012 14:58

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Bob Quixote posted:

I guess I hadn't realized that Getting Stuff was such a big deal, I'd just been wondering how many games worked on the principle of Not Getting Stuff or if many had been able to pull such a thing off successfully. I suppose there aren't many, and from the sound of it for good reason.

It's probably doable, it's not so much "Getting Stuff" I was trying to say was important. It's about achieving a real sense of progression and continuity, and the easiest way to do that is having the Stuff you Got last session impacting what's going on today.

Progression and Continuity (Getting Stuff and Using It) can be entirely narrative based, like the guy you saved last session helping you out today, or the wizard you met a few sessions ago calling you up to help him with a problem, or the city you saved from zombies becoming a sprawling utopic metropolis. Or it can be your character overcoming his fear of spiders, or developing a fear of spiders, or discovering he's from the dimension of spiders, or all three (not necessarily in that order). This kind of thing happens in most games anyway, it's kind of the point. By removing the default "You are buffer than before" progression you're right in that you do greatly increase the focus on the narrative sides of things, but that's a double-edged sword. Without the safety net of "Swords and XPs for all!" you have to make very sure that the narrative rewards are extremely compelling, either by being an amazing GM... or making the narrative rewards more mechanical.

Bob Quixote posted:

I'd been thinking that in this sort of game the main drives of the characters would have to be more focused on accomplishing things within the narrative rather than in the metagame sense of getting more power/abilities but I hadn't done much consideration on how to get that idea across

(snip)

I like the idea of players giving their characters an Ambition of some sort that they are trying to fulfill and let them try and attain it within the game, like 'Gain Immortality' or 'Overthrow the King' but I don't have any strong desire to find a way to tie in some sort of mechanic for it. Maybe some sort of bonus when making a roll toward achieving that goal? What would one do about really generic goals like 'Kill Dudes' or 'Get Money' (aside from simply not allow them)?

This is a good start. You could go the Everyone Is John route of rewarding more... rewards? for hard to achieve things. Or you could have tiers of ambitions, so they have to choose a long term and a mid term and a short term goal. If there's a place to put "Kill lots of dudes" and a place to put "Become Immortal" then they don't have to choose between them. Or go the FATE route, where there are out-of-game resources that dictate how many times you can invoke your goal's benefits.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Sep 6, 2012

# ¿ Sep 6, 2012 17:25

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

There's a link to the ORE character generator in my previous post, you can see what a company looks like (though some of it won't make sense out of context).

Bob Quixote posted:

Resource advancement sounds like one of the traditional dungeon-crawl mechanics (get money/power/fame) and seems like it would be the best fit for this sort of situation out of the options.

Don't take my above list as exhaustive! It's a number of examples, not the definitive list of acceptable RPG advancement options or something. It's there to show you that there already exist a wide variety of ways you can keep the individual characters at a static level of competence while still having their actions result in tangible, system-supported changes to the gamestate. The last thing I want to do is to stifle your creativity by making you think you have to choose an option from the above.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 02:55

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Paolomania posted:

Combat Skill, Exploration Skill, Movement Skill, Social Skill and Creative Skill.

This seems a little off. If someone is primarily Combat with very little Social, then it seems that there's little they could do in a Social situation. Unless these are just approaches and someone would be easily able to use their Combat skill in a Social situation, and vice versa?

# ¿ Sep 19, 2012 15:06

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

If it's encounter by encounter then you just end up with a series of "Social Guy does nothing for 30 minutes" "Combat guy does nothing for 30 minutes" "Exploration guy does nothing for 30 minutes". You're not playing a game as a group, you're justa bunch of people playing seperate games who happen to be at the same table.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2012 19:53

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Paolomania posted:

Did you not read the sentence "(the answer is to use *World style GMing to make more interesting encounters that are not so straightforward and have overlapping events that give each character a chance to shine)"?

That doesn't really mesh with your proposed skill system though.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2012 21:28

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

/\This is kind of how my will-never-get-finished fantasy heartbreaker thing is going/\

Bob Quixote posted:

but having only one character who could pick a lock or set a broken leg could give each player a feeling that they are contributing when their time to shine comes up.

That's different though. One guy can only pick the lock, but another guy is the best at jumping chasms and the third can see in the dark. These are all useful while exploring a dungeon, so during the exploration of a dungeon everyone gets to do something. Similarly if there's a fight going on if one guy is the best at hurting people and the next is best at taking hits and the third is best at bamboozling combatants then everyone will get to contribute. And if there's a social gathering going on and one person is good at picking pockets and another is good at bullying people and the third is good at fast-talking people then again, everyone can contribute.

It's not that a game can't work without each character having something to do in most situations, it just makes it considerably easier to run. If you know everyone has at least one thing they can do in the most common game situations then it makes it much easier to create these encounters, as otherwise you have to find a way to enable Puncher McPunch to meaningfully contribute to the Duchess's Tea Party, and Chatty McLoudmouth has something to do when fighting against evil fungi.

That said, I just reread Paolomania's second post and it appears I did, indeed, somehow manage to miss a chunk of it, specifically how under each skill he tried to include at least one thing that's useful outside that skill's obvious area of expertise. Which is the basic thing I was worried about, so, uh, nevermind I suppose.

Paolomania posted:

Do you object to games that use numerical bonuses to differentiate characters? Do you object to calling numerical bonuses 'skills'? Do you object to the rolling of 20-sided dice?

My issue was that three of your five skills listed were named after the different phases that most games are divided into when theorycrafting, which implied that, for example, someone attempting to do anything Social would need to roll their Social skill, someone attempting to do anything Explorey would need to use their Explorey skill. In a 1d20 + flat number rollover system this is generally a bad thing, especially if it's binary pass-fail (which I have to admit you didn't explicitly state).

If I'm reading your other post correctly this time though the skills being described are more general than that, so "Combat" doesn't mean "Combat Encounters", it means "Stuff related to Fightin'", allowing a high Combat character to use her Combat score during a Social Encounter to yell at people/comment on the obvious military influences amongst the local architecture* (while still being a bit out of luck at the Duchess's luncheon, but that kind of fish-out-of-water situation is fine on occasion). Similarly "Social" doesn't mean "Social Encounters", it means "Stuff related to Talkin'", allowing someone with a high Social skill to spend Combat encounters distracting the opponents with witty banter or deceptive body language** (while still being a bit out of luck when fighting a bunch of deaf oozes, but again, see above).

*Or just punch someone if she wants
**Or try to talk them out of it, if they have ears.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:06 on Sep 20, 2012

# ¿ Sep 20, 2012 14:04

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

I'm trying to do the opposite of the sacred barbeque, I'm trying to grab as many things from as many editions of D&D as possible and make them work, dammit. Stats AND skills AND classes AND levels, baby! I'm stuck on a bit of the skill system though, I know what I'm going to be doing on he basic level but having some trouble with the specifics.

Thing I Wanted to Keep: Untrained skills having the 3.x/4E thing of (stat-10)/2.
Issue 1): The Cleric/Religion Problem.
Issue 2): Low incentive to use appropriate skills with low bonuses.
Solution 1): Trained skills have a set value that increases over time. So a level 5 guy with Int 12 and Religion trained has the same bonus as a level 5 guy with Int 20 and Religion trained.
New Problem 3): Training something you already have a high stat in gives less of a return than training something you have a low stat in.
Solution 2 + 3): Training a skill nets you "Skill Points" :v:

You can spend these when making untrained checks to boost the results (and with trained ones to lesser effect maybe). This means that training an already high skill doesn't feel like a waste, and encourages you to use untrained skills when appropriate since you can boost them with skill points if you roll low.

My problem is, I'm not sure how Skill Points should boost your rolls. Rerolls? +2 per point spent? What's a balanced X and Y for "Always +1 to this skill" vs "Do X to any skill once every Y"? Bookkeeping is also a bit of a worry, per-session refresh would seem to be an answer but a lot of people here seem not to like per-session mechanics.

e: Basic rolling mechanic is 2d20 system, if one roll succeeds it's a success, both rolls are a superior success. 4E-style power system.

e2: I've put more thought than I've written about into what could be the actual bonuses that SP give, but I have problems with each of them and I'd like to get some unbiased ideas. Also feel free to rip it apart completely, I'm more than due some payback by this stage.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Sep 20, 2012

# ¿ Sep 20, 2012 16:08

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

They're also easier to pick up in a literal sense.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 10:33

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Or you can use (d8/2)s, (d12/3)s and (d20/5)s in addition to d4s. That's four "d4s" per set.

e: Wait, we're forgetting the important question.

Why do you want to switch to d4s?

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 14:56

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

What's the stat progression?

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 16:36

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

I'm assuming it's an equal-to-or-under system (as otherwise the low stat is impossible to succeed with) but with those numbers I get:

code:

2d4	81.25%	6	37.5%	4	6.25%	2
2d4	93.75%	7	37.5%	4	6.25%	2
2d4	100%	8	37.5%	4	6.25%	2
3d4	84.38%	9	31.25%	6	1.56%	3
3d4	93.75%	10	31.25%	6	1.56%	3
3d4	98.44%	11	31.25%	6	1.56%	3
4d4	86.33%	12	25.78%	8	0.39%	4
4d4	94.14%	13	25.78%	8	0.39%	4
4d4	98.05%	14	25.78%	8	0.39%	4
5d4	88.18%	15	21.68%	10	0.1%	5

for untrained skill checks. Is this right? Or am I missing something? Because that progression seems a little funny.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 17:01

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

I think this thread was supposed to be about the underlying theories behind designing games while the other thread was supposed to be about posting games you are in the process of designing. So you might post about how siloing vs freeform in this thread but concrete queries about your specific siloing implementation would go in the other.

e: Theory vs practical implentations.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2012 10:09

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Two questions first:

1) Do weapon users have to invest resources to aquire their weapons, and do they need to continue to invest resources to keep pace? If weapon users have had to either find or buy their weapon then unless the magic-user has also had to buy "weapons" (the D&D4E approach) the magic-user will have more free cash to spend onother forms of damage booster.

2) Are weapon-users more restricted in their power choice than magic users? If (for example) a two-handed weapon user has no way to attack flying enemies, but a magic user can take close blast and ranged attack spells without penalty then you're can end up with a weapon user who looks equal to or better on paper than a magic user but who ends up fighting sub-optimally more often.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2012 15:49

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Bob Quixote posted:

1) Players start the game with several items of their choice which can include weapons. There are not any "Magic" weapons in the game and the only way to boost physical damage is through the use of secondary items which may incur penalties with overuse (steroid potions of somesuch thing).

Are there ways to boost magical damage?

Bob Quixote posted:

2) There are no classes in the game, any player may select magic powers or use whatever weapons they choose.

I didn't mean construction limitations, I meant gameplay. As in, if I have a bow power and a two hander power am I more restricted in swapping between them than if I had a two hander power and a magic missile power, or a magic missile power and a close blast power.

(None of these are criticisms, they're just things that need to be taken into account before determining if the magic damage is balanced. Sorry if I'm coming off as criticising specific things at all, I'm really not doing that)

Splicer fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Oct 14, 2012

# ¿ Oct 14, 2012 16:31

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

TK-31 posted:

you could also have them as attributes inherent to a class

This is one of the biggest advantages of having a class-based system (which is part of why the D&D DTAS movement exists). Your "Odds to be hit" numbers are the least interesting thing on your sheet, so if you're making a class-based system you can just assign each class "Good, Average, Poor" defences and be done with it. If you want people to have a bit more customisation available then have certain character choices come with free upgrades. Like training in Endurance gives you +1 to Fort or whatever.

Bob Quixote posted:

I was wondering if giving magic a low max damage cap but having it bypass damage reduction might be a fair way to use these effects since they can't get boosted? Weapon damage can get boosted by taking different "Power" slots, but I wanted each magic "Power" to stand on its own. I've already got lots of non-combat magic powers (Telepathy, Animal Speech, Illusions, etc.), but wasn't sure how exactly to design combat-only damage based powers that stood alone.

Having them do lower base damage but ignore armour reduction is a decent way to keep them roughly balanced while having their own flavour. Be careful of scaling though, if dragons have a DR of 12 or something then you're not going to get a lot of stabbing in there.

Bob Quixote posted:

There is a slight restriction difference in swapping between them since you need to have a weapon in your hand to use it, but to use magic you simply must have your hands free. About one round of delay I guess.

By one round's delay do you mean they skip a turn, drop down initiative, give up a move action? Do you need both hands free to cast magic or will one free do? (as in, does moving from a sword to magic missile require you to swap out "sword" for "empty hands"?)

The basic thing I'm trying to feel out is that while people don't have to specialise, at some point you're going to have someone who wants to go all-out Magic and someone who wants to go all-out Greataxe. Will they be able to have the same average level of functionality?

If the Greataxe guy can take a power that allows him to affect people at range without going off theme, then setting the average magic damage to:
(average weapon damage - average armour damage reduction) - (some arbitrary value for any other special effects)
will work fine for balance. If they have to take a bow to affect people at range then magic will need average out to something like:
((average weapon damage - average armour damage reduction) - (some arbitrary value for any other special effects) - (average damage lost per combat to weapon switching/average number of attacks per combat))

Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Oct 15, 2012

# ¿ Oct 15, 2012 14:44

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Nope, but I can do you 0 to 99 or 1 to 100 if you want?

# ¿ Oct 15, 2012 15:25

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

AlphaDog posted:

Comedy option:

No lie, I would play an RPG where the die rolls were handled like that.
(I laughed)

# ¿ Oct 15, 2012 15:37

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Rulebook Heavily posted:

A hundred-card deck

Or a standard deck, keep drawing until you have one red and one black number cards, black is 10s.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2012 16:36

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

P.d0t posted:

I always get confused by the fact that people here seem to agree that Combat Class Should Not Equal Noncombat Role, yet they often want both minigames to run off the same mechanical engine

Because unified mechanics are a good thing.

If combat and out of combat are two completely different systems it removes the "eh, just roll a d20 get high" approach to winging it.

If combat is (resolution mechanic)->(determine result) and out of combat is "(same resolution mechanic)->(determine different kind of result), if you want to slug someone in the middle of a conversation or talk during combat it's much easier to slot them in and make a balanced and reasonable call than if the two resolution mechanics are difficulty to compare.

Finally, it's much easier to teach someone a game if they only have to learn one core mechanic.

They don't have to be identical, 4e doesn't need social interaction to be grid based, but having the basic "Roll a 20 add a number get higher than X" core mechanic be the same across all situations was one of the best changes between AD&D and 3.x.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Oct 17, 2012

# ¿ Oct 17, 2012 23:22

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

TK-31 posted:

Percentile makes it easy to model things in, because the way things are designed and read in it is fairly elegant. That's the theory. In practice they are super fiddly and really hard to balance because of how swingy the core resolution mechanic is.

You can get around the swingyness by only dealing in multiples of 5 or 10 or whatever, but at that point you have to ask why you're not just using a d12 or a d20.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2012 12:53

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

If you're saying that all debuffs will have the keyword "Debuff" and no other indication that they are Standard actions that can be used once per Encounter then that might cause issues with readability, since now you have to remember that Debuffs are always X and Y, and if the only guy who really uses them at the table remembers wrong it will be a while before anyone notices.

Having it as a standardised power creation guideline would be grand though.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2012 13:07

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Zandar posted:

Oh sure, that makes sense. I've just generally understood swinginess to be related to the shape of the dice's probability distribution, whereas the problems with d100 are more to do with how fine its results are and how little a 2% difference means. I know that a fair few d100 systems work almost entirely in 5% increments to avoid just what you've said, which makes it odd that they used that system in the first place.

Swingyness has been used to mean a couple of different things by a couple of different people on this page, TK-31 was using the same (and on reflection, incorrect) definition I was. I can't think of an accurate pithy term for this issue though.

As I said, you can avoid much of this by dishing out your percentages in multiples of 5 but at that point you're basically using a d20.

P.d0t posted:

Would this help avoid, or would it further exacerbate the "only one guy at the table knows how this attack type works" scenario you describe?

Personally I think it'd be the latter. The idea of having certain power types always* having certain characteristics are a good one, but in my opinion the more blatantly spelled out important, in-combat rules like "Takes a standard action" are in the statblock the better.

*Except where you have a particular one who's entire shtick is that it's got a different refresh/action type than the others.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Oct 23, 2012

# ¿ Oct 23, 2012 10:48

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

HitTheTargets posted:

Granularity? You're talking about something being broken down into parts so small that no individual part tells you anything about the whole, right?

Granularity in gaming terms generally just means how divisible the results are. It doesn't really work as a description of this specific problem.

Is fiddlyness the word I'm looking for?

# ¿ Oct 23, 2012 19:20

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Doc Hawkins posted:

If all of those are, say, to-hit rolls, then it's a trick question: they're equally granular, because they each have the same number of possible results.

You have helped me articulate what I have been trying to say ever so slightly better! In a (binary resolution) percentile system, 99 times out of 100 it will not matter where you put a point. Assigning your skills and such is an incredibly important part of character creation and progression, but in a percentile system it is made up of a series of almost irrelevent steps (e: like assigning skill points in 3.X, but more so). And the thing is, with a rollunder binary resolution percentile system, you know it. With a rollover system your extra +1 means your final success number was higher. This may not matter, but at the least you get to say a bigger number than you would have otherwise. That +1 is always at least being mentioned. With a rollunder percentile system then either a) all you're saying is "I succeeded" or "I failed", or b) performing double-digit subtraction during combat.

So you spend all this time trying to decide where your +1%s are going, but during actual play 99 times out of 100 your final decision was ultimately irrelevent.

So what I'm saying is if you're doing a percentile system include some manner of tiered success rates or flip dice or something.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Oct 24, 2012

# ¿ Oct 24, 2012 00:04

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Who wins ties?

# ¿ Oct 24, 2012 09:35

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

PublicOpinion posted:

I think Deadlands might have allowed progression up to d20, but I'm not familiar with it.

Deadlands also did the d12+1, not sure if it turned into a d20 at any point.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2012 11:45

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Error 404 posted:

I've been thinking of having doubled d8s being used as a d16 as a better middleground between the d12 and d20.

Purely due to the kinds of dice that commonly exist you're probably not going to find a neat middle ground. For example, with a 2d8 solution you've increased the minimum possible roll to 2, and strongly weighted the results towards the middle. This means that among other things, a 1d4 is four times more likely to succeed vs 1d20 than vs 2d8.

As an aside, have a slightly updated code that gives a "2" result if you have a tie:

code:

function: A:n vs B:n
{if A > B {result: 1}
else {if A < B {result: 0}
else {result: 2}}}
output [d4 vs d12]

_{(Thank you PublicOpinion for posting your code block, I'd never really gotten the hang of AnyDice but for some reason your example made something click)}

There's a surprisingly relevent discussion going on in the Fatal and Friends thread here. You're probably best off with what TK-31 said though; have a d20 be Special, only coming out when you blow a chip or each character gets a single d20 to put into their most iconic skill or something. Basically the old "it's not a bug it's a feature!" (while putting in the work required to actually make it a feature).

Or pull a kludge fix and have everything above 12 be "Roll a d20, reroll everything that's too high".

# ¿ Oct 27, 2012 00:46

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Halloween Jack posted:

By the way: What is "elegance" in game design? To me it basically means "the exact opposite of everything AD&D/Palladium ever did."

Elegance with regard to the process or with regard to the results? If you mean with regard to the results, I'd say coherence. Every component has a clear and obvious purpose and does not conflict with or tread on the toes of any of the other components. Also no "kludge" fixes, corner-case rulings designed to work around inherent flaws in the system.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2012 16:09

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Lemon Curdistan posted:

Find a way of doing it without having to create a special rule, basically, otherwise your system is inelegant by definition.

This is what I was trying to refer to with my kludge comment above.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2012 16:30

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

How would you feel about Stephen?

# ¿ Nov 24, 2012 02:13

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

P.d0t posted:

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.

What you could do, and this is completely off the top of my head spitballing here, is have failure be source-specific. So a succesful climb is just a succesful climb, but a failed magic climb (an explosion of magic happens) is different from a failed physical climb (you fall and hurt yourself) is different from a failed Divine climb (Kord yells "Not feelin' it today Bro, go climb your own wall.").

# ¿ Nov 25, 2012 12:03

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:33

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

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.

This is how pre-3.X worked. Every X amount of time spent dicking around there was a chance an (almost XP-less since XP was gold based not fight based) random encounter would roll on by. This is where random encounter tables come from. It's not only a good mechanic in this scenario, it's also a, sigh, "versimilitudinous" one, since monsters actually do stuff on their own time and the longer you spend dicking around the more likely it is that one will stumble on you.

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.

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.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Nov 26, 2012

# ¿ Nov 26, 2012 14:21

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG Design Thread: Elegance in Elf Simulation

«‹›4 »