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Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.
Hey, this looks like a useful new thread! I know that I've learned a ton about game design from reading TGD in the past, and I want to thank all of you for helping me. I think TGD is the only place on the Internet that is both interested in discussing games on a design level rather than nebulous 'feelings', and is knowledgeable about said design.

I'll separate this out to make it easier to read. Sorry about the :words:, but I have a lot to say! Also, I'll be referencing my current game project, but I won't be specific about it. You can see it if you want, but pulling my dick out and sticking it in random forums (including TGD, once!) isn't such a good idea when I'm still working on it. (The 'current' public version sucks, but I've learned a lot from TGD and experience, and I've got a semi-public which is a lot better and even more in the works.)

Just for the record, I'll admit that I'm an inexperienced designer and have no formal business experience or training. I've made a lot of mistakes in both. So if I say anything out of sorts, I apologize in advance.

-

In terms of books, I don't think the one-book design is inherently bad, but books need to be both better designed and better written. Oh, and loving indexed. There also need to be more introductory products on the market. Very few RPGs go out of their way to give you a proper Red Box style experience, and I think new players would have a much easier time if such things existed.

How I want to do it, and am doing it, is to have a package freely available digitally and cheaply available printed, maybe in a nice box - rulebook, intro adventure, pregens. Enough rules to get you started and pique your interest in the full product. Again, just the typical Red Box stuff, but I think where that fails is that your Red Box adventures never have personal investment, and neither do pregen characters. Get people used not just to the idea of adventuring or whatever, but to telling a story and playing a character - give a coherent world to the players and GM, give the pregen characters histories and personalities, and have an adventure which is both fun and exciting!

I know Gau will probably hate me for this, but I think that a one-book system with slow, stable expansions is the way to go. Not a billion splatbooks for every occasion, mind you - instead, focus on a high quality core system and fluff, and each expansion advances the fluff and adds new options. Mind you, that doesn't work with every system, since 'new options' can often lead to ridiculous things, but I think it can work with my setup. Compartmentalization sounds great in theory, but I don't think it'd work with a market used to having big, meaty hunks of content.

-

Other revenue streams: Subscriptions are great, but that requires a constant stream of new content, which isn't ideal for every game...and that can lead to heavy power creep, as we saw with D&D Insider. I think it's worth trying accessories - WotC hasn't had luck with them, but game aids, visual aids, miniatures and toys

Modern technology can help here, too. 3D printing is an exciting technology, and though it's not cheap for your average mass production mini, imagine this - going to the company and ordering your own custom versions, which come out exactly as you want it! It's something I'm working on, with a 3D modeller of my own.

It depends on the game - something like this works better for games with relatively uniform-looking characters/units. Say, you could order a bunch of Space Marines equipped with whatever custom accessories you want, or your own customized BattleMech! Put new technologies to use, people.

It goes without saying that mobile apps and aids help, too. Unfortunately, that's outside my area of expertise and my budget. But if possible, I'd love to have a multiplatform game aid app.

-

As for indexes: Ideally, you have several indexes - say, an index for rules concepts, an index for character creation info, an index for fluff...as long as there's no overlap, that makes things a lot more convenient. Glossaries help, too - fluff glossaries should also be there. Rules aids - quick sheets with a summary of the rules and conditions. Power Cards from 4e were awesome, those should be available. Explain the rules to your players, explain character creation, help them make good decisions. No traps. Be open with your players. Tell them everything they need to know to play the game!

GM and Player info separation is necessary to an extent. I know that you guys see the roles as not that different, but the GM does have concerns that the players don't, and generally more responsibility. Not as much as D&D can have it, where the GM has a huge amount of work compared to the players, but some. Narrative systems can help take this weight off, and you work to have a design where the weight of storytelling is not totally on the GM's shoulders.

But for the most part, information should be open. There should be no 'GMs only!' section, only a 'this is more useful for GMs' section. Again, everyone should be able to know whatever they need to play.

-

Again, sorry about the :words:. I hope I didn't embarass myself too much, and I look forward to learning more lessons from TGD and this thread in the future!

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Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

Fenarisk posted:

Alright, I've been working on "finalizing" a rough draft of sorts that I've had planned for my players this school year. My original goal was to make a fantasy fate game but a lot more concise, to the point, and specific to my needs of A) taking the things Dresden did for FATE, and B) adding some of my own ideas that the players wanted like 4e style powers, less aspects and fate points, etc.

Anyway here is the rough draft, coming in at 39 pages. It's 5 chapters, and is the bulk of the player info. The only thing I would add is chapter 6, which goes into details on combat and a few more specific rules I didn't cover, which I think should be doable with examples in only another 10 pages. That leaves 50 more pages for GM info/advice/monsters/little bit of setting fluff.

Let me know what you think about the general layout and design. Yes I know all the images are copyright (I'm not selling the thing so please keep it SA only) and it's rough as gently caress since I have no publishing/typography experience, but maybe this can be the thread's guinea pig.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/27081430/Aeria_1.0.pdf

I haven't read it all, and I can't promise I will in a timely fashion, but the main thing that strikes me right now is that you plow straight into the setting for a few pages without really explaining any aspect of the game or how it's played first thing. You want at least a bit of intro text to ease people in, even if your target audience is existing players of a game. You might do well at having a very small setting intro first - say, one or two pages of salient info and mood-setting - and then taking some time in explaining a bit about the broad game structures.

I remember I had this problem with the small game Remnants, but on a far larger scale - Remnants gives you a ton of setting info all at once in the beginning, and very little about the game or how it's played. (Remnants has quite a few other problems, mostly in presentation terms and some awkward writing - the rules and setting and GM advice are all okay, but it's nothing too special and the production values are very low.) White Wolf also has this problem, at least what I've read of them. And I've made the same mistake myself, in a very big way, so don't feel too bad about it - it seems to happen to most game designers who get really excited about their fluff!

I'm also not entirely sure why the text has such huge margins on one side. Generally, you want to keep stuff in the middle. The layout's kind of blah right now; I'd justify the text in your columns at the bare minimum.

As an aside, I really think games need a better 'what is an RPG' section in general, and definitely better examples of play. I haven't seen a decent example of either in my memory. Does anyone know of games which have really good explanations of either?

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

Fenarisk posted:

Thanks for the tips. I actually got a lot more done this weekend than I thought, including 3 more chapters. I added a foreward in 3 pages that explains basically what an RPG is with a play example.

As well, I've changed the big blank spaces on all the pages, as it was some tip I got for doing publications for print, which is a moot point given this is for pdf/ipad. I should have all of these changes plus the added content by the end of this week.

No problem! Glad I could help a fellow wannabe designer. I did a class on InDesign and have been messing with it for a little while, so I've picked up a few things.

If you're going for digital only, you want every page element to stay in the same place rather than alternating sides like a print publication. You can also have pages which are different sizes from one another for what would normally be a spread. And take advantage of the digital format. You want PDF bookmarks minimum, page links in at least the ToC if not elsewhere, and possibly interactive forms or other elements.

Speaking of which, I'd really like tips on character sheet design. Simply put, I have no idea how to make an effective format, especially not in InDesign with fillable forms and poo poo. I also want to make fillable 'weapon cards', or at least printable cards for each weapon available, including some customizations that can be made. Since special attacks in my game are mostly weapon-based, this is basically your Power Card equivalent. Cards are awesome, even if they're just cards-on-page, because it's all concise and in one place.

(Oh yeah, while I'm at it: gently caress D&D Next's spell-list-in-book format. But that's for another thread.)

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

IceBox posted:

I am in the early designing stages for an RPG and I would love some advice.

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).

I realize that at my current point in development this is about the last things I should be concerning over, but it has been bothering me for long enough that I would love some input.

This just strikes me as a terrible idea, and the other replies to this post don't convince me otherwise. If you don't want a character's overall roleplay style in intelligence and physical power to be defined by ability scores based on their capabilities, then don't use ability scores at all! Even this method of trying to find these categories which somehow don't connect with the properties of the character seems like a doomed approach, because as people here have pointed out, you're eventually going to run out of things that players can't use to define their characters...especially with nine categories.

Even if you do somehow find categories that are totally unconnected with the character's properties, remember that players aren't used to this. They can, and will, misinterpret their ability scores as defining their character physically or mentally. In fact, the mere presence of ability scores will have players who insist this be the case, for reasons of 'versimilitude'.

The best solution, of course, is to scrap this entirely and have stats which are directly connected to attack capability and skill. That way, it just says Sword 7 or whatever, and your player can decide whether he's a stupid brawler with big muscles or a quick stabby dude or an intelligent fighter using special techniques...without any preconceptions whatsoever! It avoids the 'versimilitude' argument too, even if only because often people who make that argument don't play games like that. (And frankly, they're better for it.)

Death to ability scores!

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

sighnoceros posted:

Whoa what, a Mistborn RPG? Details!

I'm supposed to be playing it Monday, I'll try and report in. My friend picked it up and said, with amazement, 'They did the math.' So I have high hopes for it.

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

angry_keebler posted:

The problem is that ability scores are, at best, redundant in a class and level based system. Usually, and for DnD specifically, there's only one right build for each class. A fighter needs Con, Wis, ane Str || Dex. Why not just make each fighter start with the approprate stats, to prevent new players from screwing themselves. And if each fighter starts out with the same stats, why not just get rid of the stats?

If you want a class that plays radically different when it has a different stat build, consider splitting it into two (or more I guess) different classes. If high Dex fighter plays way different than high Str fighter, call one the mercenary (he skulks around with a bow and has knife fighting tricks) and the other the soldier (sword and board or spear with and shield fighty man with movent denial tricks) and then you can bake unique playstyles right into the system.

Coincidentally, a non-ability score based system avoids two problems! The first is randomly rolled ability scores, which grant unfair advantages or disadvantages to characters by default, even in the best case.

The second is a bit more complicated, but there are people out there who absolutely hate the idea that they have to optimize to be effective. And classes which explicitly require a specific array or a selection of two or three really bug these people. (Why it doesn't bug them when it's randomly rolled, I have no idea.) Even in less extreme cases, you find people raising non-optimal stats with no practical use, often for 'roleplaying reasons'. This might be because they don't want to be dumb/weak/ugly, because they don't know what the optimal array is, or because of experience with other systems that confuses them.

Ability scores heavily obfuscate and confuse how the game is played versus how roleplaying works, conflating the two heavily. This is the very definition of a bad thing, especially for new players, and though it works out better in systems where ability scores are better designed or less vital to every bit of task resolution, I prefer to leave that can of worms where it belongs...in the trash.

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.
Figures that the moment I'm mentioned here and a shameless plug is given, I have to stop lurking and come to you guys for help. Oh well, I'll try to keep things reasonably quick and informative to the thread.

Most of this thread has been based around theory - very good theory, of course, which has helped me a great deal, but still theory. Since I started coming to TGD, I've simplified the design, built in respecs, eliminated damage rolls, and gotten rid of a wide variety of 'makes sense' rules that, in large part, were holding me back. I've also been graciously allowed use of the skill elements from Jimbozig's Sacred BBQ for my skill system - that game's been described/decried on TGD as 'a ten-page storygame with a grid', but a ten-page storygame is all I really wanted anyway. (The current public version and even the semi-public one from my last con demo don't quite do it justice, though the general themes and details are still there.) Right now, rather than theory or new mechanics, what I need is math - to do what so many designers don't and actually figure out what is actually happening during the game, and what effects each change in the variables has on the proceedings.

Average values are important - I need a base value for how long it takes things to die - but so are miss values (because missing sucks), the probability of a one-hit kill, and many other factors that can show desired or undesired results in the process, and where my revisions need to go to have a game that's balanced rather than...well, insert your own joke about Paizo here. :V Playing a Gunslinger in 01011001's Pathfinder game has taught me eminently necessary a fully scientific balancing act is.

Now, I'm sure most of you are going to refer me to the excellent utility AnyDice for this purpose. Indeed, AnyDice is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to figure out how their favorite games really work (or don't work). Well, here's the problem with that idea: I did. Despite not having done any programming for several years, I struggled through AnyDice's little limitations and painfully bad documentation, not to mention my own ineptitude, and came out with a relatively functional damage calculator for the game. (As noted, damage rolls were abolished, so that table's a lot cleaner than it would've been a year ago.) This gives me exact probabilities of every damage value a given attack with a given weapon can produce, as well as an average damage value.

Boring Mechanics Talk Here, Spoilered to skip more easily posted:

To explain: The specific mechanic involved is an opposed 3d6 plus bonus roll, which is fairly basic. Resolution is based on the weapon - when Attack is equal to Evasion, you deal a certain value, and you have a 'Damage Step' which adds and removes from this value based on the difference between attack and defense. A weapon with a narrow range won't have to roll as high to get full damage, but stands a greater chance of missing. All fairly simple so far.

The dice tricks are where it gets interesting. A triple is a failure state, and a straight - a sequence like 4,5,6 - is a critical state. This applies to both attack and evasion - there's a 1/9 chance for a straight, so there's always a 1/9 chance to hit and a 1/9 chance to miss given opposed rolls. However, there are two kinds of crits - if your attack is a straight but would otherwise miss if it were a normal roll, you deal full damage. If you would have hit with the attack for any amount of damage, you deal double full damage.

There's a hard-coded chaos to this which ensures that even relatively weaker foes are always a threat in numbers. It also favors the side which is able to break free from a reliance on statistics - that being the PCs, who have a wide variety of abilities to manipulate dice and stats, prevent automatic failures, break the action economy and stated rules of the game, and generally gently caress things up in what is otherwise a somewhat predictable system.

The problem, as anyone who checks the code will figure out, is that the functions are bloated and I'm using a lot of kludges. Quite simply, AnyDice wasn't designed to handle what I'm trying to do with it, at least not efficiently. I have to manually set input parameters each time I want to use them. And this is just basic calculations - I want to do more complicated things which will involve much worse abuse of the code. AnyDice can't set global variables within a function, can't return more than one value from a function, doesn't have a proper for or while loop, and worst of all, has no support for arrays or objects.

There's a few things I want to do that will become needlessly complicated here. Dual wielding will have its issues, and trying to calculate condition chances will be hell. My functions would end up with dozens of inputs, increasing the possibility for user error. The details aren't particularly important, though - what I'm getting at is, what I really need is a proper programming language to work in, particularly an object oriented one where I can define a 'weapon' class...and eventually a 'mech' class, with subclasses for certain units, etcetera, which I can more easily pass to a function and streamline my code. (Since I want to actually get a proper digital tool available for the game, that would help me get the numbers I need. (Theoretically, I could simulate an entire battle with sufficiently good tools.)

I know I can learn how to program this, since I've done some good stuff in AnyDice, not all of it seen here. What I want to know is what kind of libraries are available to help me, what languages would be particularly appropriate, and what techniques i would use to produce output similar to what AnyDice provides - especially its 'Export' function, which uses standard CSV values you can punch into Excel. Graphing functions, dice rolling libraries, anything I can use to get the data I need without having to manually figure out every step in the way...which would end in ruin and would take a lot of work I don't really have the time to do.

I know this is a bit off the discussion the thread's been having, but I hope some of it is of interest nonetheless, and I also hope I can get some help!

Queen Fiona fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Jan 2, 2013

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

Rexides posted:

You don't have to do both the addition and the crit calculation in the same function. Have two functions that receive the same arguments but return either the total (does that need to even be a separate function?) or the crit status. This will not have any speed improvements, but it will clear the code a bit. But even if you don't want to do this, you can at least check whether you got <0 or >100 at the start of your main function and separate the roll value from the critical status.

Edit: As for finding out if the rolled numbers were consecutive, try the following: |(A-B)(A-C)(B-C)| = 2 (this is not in the AnyDice format, I don't think that it even has a function for absolute values). The idea is that if you subtract three consecutive integer numbers from each other, you will always get the following set: (+/-)1, (+/-)1, (+/-)2, which, if multiplied, will always result in (+/-)2. If at least two of the numbers are the same the result will be 0, and will always be bigger than 2 for other cases. I am no algebra wiz though, so I could be overlooking some (pretty obvious) cases.

Actually, I do have to do the crit calculation in the same function for one very simple reason - because their argument is a die roll (or series thereof), doing them separately makes their values independent of one another. It would be like rolling two sets of dice - one for your roll's value, one for the crit status. There's no relationship at all between the two sets of dice (why would there be?), and since the value of the roll actually does matter to the crit logic, you could get impossible results like 'rolled 18, but also a straight'.

I can't say it doesn't look and feel kind of silly though. Ordinarily I would just have the function return two values, one for the dice roll and one for the crit status, but I can't do that in AnyDice. Thus the kludge. When even my rarefied coder instincts know there's better solutions, you start to get the feeling you need a better tool to work these problems out.

You're spot on for the absolute value poo poo. That said, none of this is really answering my ultimate question of what other good programming tools are out there for being able to produce this vital data, preferably without reinventing the wheel. Is there really only one good tool out there? I know we joke about game designers not doing the math, but it seems unlikely.

MadRhetoric posted:

And I'm not entirely sure AnyDice's weak documentation and programming power is the sole problem with the mecha system. It's a lot to keep track of without a couple of functions doing the work.

It's one of those things which looks a lot more complicated when dragged out into a full-implementation logical syntax, since you have to very carefully specify things humans can get a grasp of very easily - though my sloppy code doesn't help. There's not that many factors to keep track of in play, and any one given player is only keeping track of a few of them...and all of them are very clearly laid out for you.

I could never say it's the most rules-light system ever made, but it's certainly lighter (and more transparent) than a lot of crunchy-combat systems I've seen, and it's definitely lighter than some of the genre's older mainstays or some of the bad genre supplements I've seen. It's a preference - a superlight storygsme attached to a somewhat heavier combat system is actually what I want out of my RPGs.

Queen Fiona fucked around with this message at 11:08 on Jan 3, 2013

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

MadRhetoric posted:

FM: If they're clear for human consumption, explain them. Lay them out better than in the boring mechanics spoiler, since ai was cross-referring that to try and help you with your code and still found it fiddly. It seems to be a Super Robot Wars sort of attack calculation with a scaling damage step and a superfluous dice trick for criticals?

I have no idea how you got Super Robot Wars out of my calculations at all. I'm not exactly familiar with SRW's nitty-gritty, but the mechanics here weren't inspired by that series. (There are some SRW-inspired bits, but none of them are related to the dice.)

Attack Rules posted:

1) Make an opposed 3d6 roll. If your Attack and their Evasion are equal, you deal your Base Damage, which varies by weapon.
2) If they aren't equal, take the difference between Attack and Evasion. This tells you how many Damage Steps to add or subtract, until you reach Max Damage or zero.

Let's say you have roll a 16 versus their 18. This puts you at -2. For a machine gun with a Base Damage 7 and a Damage Step of 1, you're dealing 5 damage.
A weapon like an assault rifle, with Base Damage of 8 and Damage Step of 2, would only deal 4.
And a weapon like a railgun would have a Base Damage of 12 and a Damage Step of 6, dealing no damage at all.
You can see these calcs in the program, but with equal Attack and Evasion bonuses, the average damage is actually pretty much equal.

It's not too difficult after your first couple of tries. Some weapons deal some amount of damage on fairly low rolls, others don't need a high roll to deal max. Every group I've played this with has picked this up very quickly.

Crit Rules posted:

If you have triples, you fail. Attackers get a free attack on them, as well. (This is a 1/36 shot and the attack can still be avoided; it's a chaos-creating mechanic.)
2) If you have straights (a 1 in 9 chance) on evasion, you avoid all damage.
3) If you have straights on attack, you deal your maximum damage if you would have missed, and twice max if you would have hit for any amount of damage.
4) The rare 1/81 double-triples situation is resolved like a normal roll.

The dice tricks aren't superfluous, they're an intended part of the design. You're always guaranteed an 11% hit rate and an 11% chance to avoid attacks, and PCs can get a variety of reroll tricks to help them pick up the vaunted straights. Because of this hard-coded chaos element, enemies always have a certain threat level, even when the PCs are clearly superior. Health counts are low enough that a lucky hit can take large amounts of health off, even if most attacks are avoided.

Admittedly it's a bit fiddly to roll for large numbers of weak enemies, each of them opposed by an individual evasion roll, but I'm going to be making minion rules for that very situation - which is related to the other bit in the thread about progression. After a certain point, weaker enemies turn from full statblocks to one-hit kills. I actually have an idea where, instead of doing individual attacks for each enemy, you roll a pool of dice for a group of minions and deal damage for every 6 that pops up.

Either way, I think you're overestimating the complexity level here. And really, I don't need help with the code - it does work, after all, even if it's amateurish - I just want to have a better tool to use than AnyDice so I can be less limited, and maybe be able to reuse the game logic somewhere down the line. I can do the coding job myself, even if it's sloppy; what I need is some direction on what to do it in.

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

AlphaDog posted:

I have no idea what I might have ended up calling the three things and how you advance in them if I'd ended up going further with it, which I won't until I read "Warrior, Rogue & Mage".

Fair warning - I played a hack/refluffing of WRM called WYRED which was awful on pretty much every level and is fairly broken, in the 'nonfunctional' sense. The given difficulty numbers appear to not actually work, let alone anything else.

Also I met the creator of WRM and wasn't impressed - self-absorbed smarmy Nice Guy grog through and through. (I went on about it in one of the early nest threads.) Never read the system directly, but I imagine given these two facts that it's probably not something you'd want to emulate? Just a fair warning.

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

Spiderfist Island posted:

I'm not too familiar with the math behind dice pool systems so I can't comment on Exalted's fundamental mechanical issues.

To be fair, neither is White Wolf. :v:

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.
I'm not entirely convinced this is a useful argument, at least on Sid's part, and the problem comes largely from inherent assumptions that characters are disposable from the earliest games - despite the fact that this has proven anything but true from the early days, and is pretty much a flat-out lie for any modern gamer. We get rather attached, and not many people want to play Fantasy loving Vietnam anymore...which means character creation should be convenient.

The issue is in choice paralysis - that being, how much you offer up-front. Now, a lot of games work just fine having you take a sheet and go, but I don't feel it's too much to ask to choose between three fighter-y types if you have a good amount of variety and differences between them...but it's when you're putting everything else on top and giving numerous ways to fail where you get problems. Ability scores, racial bonuses, feats, powers...it's all a little much. And it gets worse elsewhere - it took my group four hours to make Shadowrun characters, and several of them (including mine) ended up gimped because the game doesn't document how good you should be at your specialty and allows you to make so many terrible decisions with no protection.

Anyway, all I can do here is offer stuff I have done myself, plan to do, or can otherwise think of off the top of my head. Note that your mileage may vary on what you want to do in terms of complexity, but some of these apply no matter how you're ultimately setting things up. (This isn't an exceedingly well-informed or well-researched list, so feel free to correct me.)

  • Pregens, pregens, pregens. Have them. Lots of them. More than you would need for one group, maybe twice as many. Tell players they can change anything they don't like, but include everything a player might need - background, motivation, appearance, build and kit. People who 'just want to play' can have one, people who want to change will change, builders will build. Simple as that.
  • Put all the character creation together, and at the front. Don't split character creation up - put it all at the front with as few rules as possible. Not forcing the whole rulebook down their throat when they start will help with picking characters without worrying about choice paralysis or effectiveness - in combination with other tips.
  • This is the important one - start character creation with as few choices as possible. I knew a guy who tried to teach new players RPGs, and gave them a choice of several systems, each of them with their own choices and context they have no way of understanding...and he wondered why none of his players stayed interested or were able to make those choices. Make a couple of varieties of each archetype/class you want, add a couple of small choices if you want, leave more complex stuff for after they've played a bit. Picking from 'sword guy', 'magic guy', and 'other guy' is enough to begin with, and you can refluff and use future advancement to inform the details.
  • Don't bloat choices later. You can offer a few 'quick picks' and a more complex option for people who like the complexity (but not much more complex, because people will overextend), but don't put extra steps or too much choice bloat in future books or expansions.
  • Respecs. Frankly, this is something I feel should be in every game, 'realism' be damned. We take mechanics from MMOs because MMOs have good mechanics. Ignoring the advances of your more successful offspring on general principle is kinda naff. (You don't need me to tell you that, I'm sure!) Players will feel much more comfortable if they're told up-front and very clearly that they aren't forced to stick with what they've got.
  • Foster a cooperative environment during character creation. It's our table, and the people who are having trouble deserve to be told they aren't stupid for having trouble and should ask their friends. As often as not, D&D parties won't bother to consider what to make in context of the rest of the party, and more importantly, new players feel ostracized by people who already know the mechanics and don't share. This isn't a silver bullet, but doing this will stave off well-meaning but awkward groups from shutting people out; the rest of this will ensure they stay interested.
  • Document your loving builds. Put all your game info as upfront as possible - don't hide your mechanics. 'This guy is good at X because of Y', rather than the D&D approach of going 'this guy is best at X' and leaving the player to figure out why themselves.
  • Don't have build traps. More importantly, don't tell people to raise stats that have nothing to do with their base effectiveness. (Ideally, all stats should have some sort of base effectiveness, but that's a more tricky question and is outside the purview of this list.
  • Don't let characters die. This is going to be controversial, and I know why - death is a powerful narrative force. But if you're going to have any complexity in character creation - and especially as characters become more and more complex over time, increasing the choices required - don't make death an expected state. I remember someone saying how much he disliked Call of Cthulhu's lethal nature when character creation wasn't easy and emotional investment was high, and it made me think of what bad design it is to have your players subject to constant sheet revisions when the sheets take so long. Make death player-initiated, rarer, or whatever, but at least consider the issue and don't act like death isn't an inconvenience for the players far more than it is a powerful storytelling device.

As for your actual content posted, um...well, that's a few levels more complex than I'm willing to deal with at 3 AM, and I suspect it's a lot more complicated than it needs to be - but that's outside my department. I'll let other people handle that.

Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

AlphaDog posted:

That's a really cool post. Can you name a few systems that you feel really nailed aspects of it? (Obviously not right now it's it's 3am where you are).

Sadly, this is mostly my extensive experience with systems that didn't get it right, my personal successes and failures, and a bunch of second-hand knowledge. All too often in this hobby, you end up learning more from what doesn't work because of peoples' tolerance for sloppy design.

I will say that my experience with convention games, which I've delved into quite a bit in the last couple years, has drilled into me the value of a good pregen - with so little time to set up and play, a pregen becomes necessary, but there's no real reason the time benefits can't be back-ported to an ongoing campaign, with a few tweaks to system assumptions to allow player choice in the future.

From my mostly second-hand memory, I've known the various *World playbooks to be a good implementation of these concepts from what I've heard around these forums. Old School Hack is another. But the latter especially isn't appropriate for all games - people do want a context to play in, but they generally want some freedom of choice for a few things, and if you're doing a tactical game, that's expected on some level due to the expectations video games set.

When it comes to more complex creation processes, the Mistborn game is the one I felt pulled it all off best on average...although I'm more than willing to concede it was partially the GM's doing. The intro pregens were some of the best I've seen, offering not only mechanics but also good backstory and motivation - one of the players adapted her pregen into a new character, who has become an enduring legacy among the various groups my group's players are involved in. Character creation was explicitly cooperative, asked important questions about motivations and character traits, and generally was not too difficult in the general sense. (In the specific sense, you have to spend stat points and that can be a bit fiddly, and the value of certain abilities can be vastly unbalanced, as well as a bit unfamiliar to those who haven't read the source material.) This is the best I've personally come across, even if there's still a lot of flaws.

If I can bring back terrible memories of once-proud franchises and go into non-tabletop examples, Mass Effect is actually a markedly good example. You pick one class, you pick a background, and you pick a major event that happened to them. Boom, bam, do the face if you want, done. Enough choice to make a character feel your own, but not enough to make it difficult on starting players. (Mind you, then you have advancement problems, but that's outside this discussion's scope for now.

The absolute worst for it I've ever played was Shadowrun, far beyond even the modern D&Ds. I'm not fond of the lifepath approach, and though it does have its merits in a lot of ways, it combines both complexity and a lack of player agency. Random generation elements are also a no-no for me - Basic D&D may be 'roll stats, pick class', but rolling stats is an unnecessary and confusing step that offers variety without choice or reason. (Then again, I hate ability scores to begin with...)

Other exceptionally terrible examples I've come across include BESM and anything derived from it (especially the d20 versions), d20 Modern (ability score-based classes? really? really?), SilCORE/Heavy Gear 3rd/Jovian Chronicles/etc, Mekton Zeta, GURPS...a long list of so-called classics, really. Character creation is the most important part of the game, which is why it's so frustrating that people keep loving it up. My own design efforts came from frustration at the fact that, in the amount of time it would take me to prepare characters for and materials in many of these games, I could just write my own game. (And I did.)

I'll consult some of my other RPG-playing friends and get back to you on this.

NotInventedHere posted:

It's interesting that quite a few games tend to have character creation done up front, removed from the rest of the gameplay. I think for a lot of people, it would be easier to make decisions about the character after playing the game a bit. To facilitate that, I try to look for ways to either intersperse gameplay and character creation, or to have no upfront character creation at all.

Note that when I said 'upfront', I meant 'at the front of the book', before delving heavily into rulesets and other information (especially further crunch). That's actually a fairly good option, and one I wish would be used more extensively. (Sadly, some of the gamers I know would throw a hissyfit at the lack of choice, as though the stuff they picked on their initial sheet were all that mattered...)

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Queen Fiona
Jan 8, 2008

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.
That's actually perfectly doable today with MapTool, which has an extensive macro programming interface which can, indeed, automate nearly all aspects of the game for a player, including condition tracking, hit point counts, and everything else one would need to run a 4e game at the very least (and likely whatever you could throw at it).

The problem is, MapTool is fiddly and breaks all the time and hasn't been well-maintained recently, and it runs on Java. Plus, all the automated functionality is coded by the community - you'd have to code it yourself if you wanted to use original functionality. We actually had to stop using it because players would be an hour or more behind as the 4e framework we were using was abominably slow to update. (That might've been partially the poo poo upstream we had at my old house, though.)

The other problem, of course, is that RPG players appear to consider this idea to be a personal affront to their belief in God or whatever, and actively refuse to automate any of their computer processes in any way. One of the major selling points of Roll20 is its large lack of automation - with the insistence that manually tracking HP counts for everything and conditions and all the poo poo that, as a GM, gets in the way of what I enjoy about the job, is 'real roleplaying' and anyone who wants automation just wants a video game and is not a True ScotsmanRoleplayer. Even in the API forums, you see them actively refusing to add functionality, using vague excuses like 'not wanting to be tied to a system' for system-agnostic coding functions.

Apparently no one's clicked to the idea that the numbers are not what makes RPGs fun, and that making their mechanics more automated improves roleplaying, and does not hobble it. The dice were never what was needed, and seeking to be regressive throwbacks is not helping RPGs. It's like trying to make cars more carriage-like by steering them with reins.

Ugh, sorry if this post sounds bitter, this just annoys me slightly. I switched to Roll20 because it's immacculately coded and runs without a hitch in Chrome, making game logistics easier, but games have run much more slowly with the more limited automation tools despite the fact that we're using a much simpler system than 4e and we're much lower level. (We don't all know the game yet, but even then...)

Point is, If you want to make a tabletop game with official automation tools - though I'd frankly still aim to make them optional out of pure practicality, as not everyone has the requisite electronic devices at hand - I am all for it, and think it's a long overdue idea that people need to embrace and not turn away from. It's something I've been hoping to do as well, despite not having any coding skill to speak of.

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