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Most RPG designers could stand to take a page from board game rules design. Not just in presentation, but also in amount of content. Some fairly complex games with an amazing amount of tactical swing to them fit on just one or two pages. One of the most complex boardgames I know, Twilight Imperium, mostly fits on a booklet that's less than 30 pages and then introduces edge case and unique rules on playing cards. That's not bad for a game with a reputation of being so complex, big and engaging that it can take an entire weekend to play a game of it. And that's an exceptional situation in boardgames, with most fitting on just a couple of pages! Simplify, Simplify, Simplify. Cut down. Reword. Use play aids. Learn to organize your rules better. Spend less time writing those 100.000 word bricks that are completely inaccessible in play and more time designing the game. We can tell when a game was written by the word (0.01 dollars per). To name an example of a horrifically badly organized ruleset, I nominate FATE and its variants. It's a fairly simple game at its heart, with rules which can be (and have been) fit into a trifold booklet. But the rules are worded in a verbose and obtuse manner, it's organized like an old school wargame most of the time and they're always full of long lists of special powers which most people just tend to ignore and which could more easily be condensed to a set of cards or hyperlinks. A ruleset which can be fit into a pamphlet should not take hundreds of pages of space. Verbosity is not a virtue.
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Jul 19, 2012 15:05
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The way I choose to interpret DTAS (aside from Mikan's bit) is a combination of "cut the useless cruft" and "try to have just one resolution mechanic". Cutting the cruft is obvious: if it's a mechanic which doesn't do anything or a number which adds to nothing, cut it. D&D 4e ability scores fall into this where they could as easily have been just the modifier. The other is a bit trickier. In a system where you have a skill system for measuring "learned skill" and an ability score system measuring "natural talent" (and there is far from a clear line between the two outside the world of RPGs), ask yourself this: Are they both required for your system to work? I say that they're not. In a system which has a "Charisma" stat representing an abstract measurement of your innate personal charm, you probably don't also need a system of subdivided skills to charm people with. Use one or the other, because using both is redundant or at best reduces one of them to a modifier of the other. Fenarisk posted:There's actually two big main stream FATE books I'll break down, one which is good for its size and one which is not. Funny thing, though. They're both available at my FLGS. Both of them absolutely intimidate customers, even if Dresden is nominally friendlier. Why? Because they're both massive bricks which are heavier than the clubs you'd use to bash a seal's skull in. That one has friendlier presentation on the inside doesn't matter because they're both falling victim to the problem of looking like serious drat business or collectibles rather than games you play. And that is a serious problem which the current RPG industry is making worse and worse as books get bigger and thicker and more capable of devastating cute animals.
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Jul 21, 2012 00:04
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Evil Mastermind posted:To go back to the idea that "larger game = bad game", I have to disagree with that; I'd honestly rather have a larger game that tells me how it's supposed to work over a smaller game that doesn't tell me anything past "here's the system, we're not going to expand on anything, good luck". Besides what Gau said, those books do not need to be that big. There is not nearly enough interesting or usable content for me in either to justify smacking down 115 bucks for them, because that's what they cost in my country. The core system is so simple that it can fit on a pamphlet. Rather than realize that and embrace it, both games instead chose to balloon to a size that's frankly ridiculous. e: In fact, here. This is a tri-fold version of Fate. Why does a game that fits in that much space need 400+ pages? It doesn't, and yet there are multiple versions of it that take up that much space and the rules in each are certainly much bigger than a pamphlet. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Jul 21, 2012 |
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Jul 21, 2012 11:17
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The point I'm making isn't about game size (well, not just), nor am I criticizing Dresden Files for having a setting. It's about condensing your design and simplifying it. Look at the Spirit of the Century SRD and compare it to trifold. Both are largely setting-free and rules-focused, but one would fill hundreds of pages in print even if you only use the rules that appear in both and leave out the rest. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about! A lot of the SotC SRD is just plain verbiage, things which could be rephrased to be simpler or clearer. The trend I'm talking about is about rules bloating up like that in unnecessary ways. But if that's a contentious point, I'll leave it off so the thread can talk about something more productive.
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Jul 21, 2012 18:38
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A hundred-card deck, the page numbers of a multiple-of-100 page book, some kind of wheel of fortune, this... zocchihedron, a stopwatch that counts from 0 to 99. And if you want style, there is only one option. 
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Oct 15, 2012 15:47
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Now if you come up with a specific feature of the dice you want to exploit, such as getting doubles on 2d10 (on a normal d% roll) or 2d6 enabling specific mechanics (say a critical hit), that would be a meaningful difference because doubles would be far more common on 2d6 (1/6 versus 1/10). It would also be distinct from the chance of a natural 20 on a d20. Or maybe the dice explode in which case die size is important, or you like how a bell curve roll makes smaller, more easily handled bonuses more valuable in certain situations (a +2 on a d20 is a flat +10% always, but the same bonus on 2d6 can make a huge difference). All of these can impact design. Talking "meaningful" in the sense of "what do I learn from the roll", that's a bit trickier. You can look at a roll as a question you're asking and want an answer to. By far most RPGs make this a [No/Yes] question, such as "do I hit on this attack?", and the roll gives an answer. And... that's it. That's basically all they do with it. Some rolls might have "critical" success/failure, turning the question into a [Hell No/No/Yes/Hell Yes] one, but that's still ultimately the same question. Pretty much every system pre-d20 did things this way. Then you get games like Apocalypse/Dungeon World, where the answer spectrum involves different consequences. A roll can give you a [No/ Yes, But /Yes] answer, with the "But" bit being a potential consequence, concession, cost or similar effect of having succeeded. You could expand on that and have a "No, But" in there to indicate that you did not succeed but made some kind of progress towards your goal anyway. You could have criticals on each end, giving you a crazy [Hell No / No / No, But / Yes, But /Yes / Hell Yes] range of potential information outcomes. You can even go one further and ask, "do I want more than one piece of information from this roll?" This is the bases behind the One Roll Engine, which in one roll can give you an answer of whether you hit, how well, how much damage you did and even the precise hit location you damaged your enemy in. So in short: The question shouldn't always be "what dice does my system use". It can also be "what do the dice tell me in my system".
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Oct 23, 2012 21:31
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Ulta posted:Just a general game question, with some overlap into the video games, but RPGs and video games are kissing cousins. I think it's just a "makes sense" kind of design. Bigger things mean you need to learn smaller things before it, right? Makes sense. Not to say there isn't a benefit to it. One function of the design is to limit when you can take certain abilities which would be "too powerful"; if a feat is ten feats in a tree, you can't take it until your character has more than ten feat picks. It can be a tool for balancing, limiting your choices so that you won't end up with some kind of crazy combo. It can be a straight up power carrot, as you say. But ultimately I'm pretty sure it's just something that arose because it made sense. Actually I think I'll talk about makes sense-style design later and why it's not a good thing.
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Nov 21, 2012 16:31
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Yep, you got it right there Halloween Jack. Makes Sense design is that exact process of coming up with a mechanic off the cuff and just going with whatever "makes sense" at the time without being concerned overly (or at all) with how this interacts with anything else in the system. It's a great way to write something cheap and fast, but it leaves actually being good in the dust. So let's dissect it. Is it really that bad? Let's say your system has Points. With a Point, you can buy a Skill. You get a limited number of Points. Let's say that every single skill is equally valued in terms of Points. It makes sense to have characters all cost the same amount of points, right? Then let's make some skills. "Fight with weapons" is one skill, and covers attacking things with weapons and parrying things with weapons because it makes sense that you'd learn both of those as part of the same skill, right? But then we also make climbing, swimming, lifting things and breaking poo poo be separate skills because it makes sense - you learn swimming separately from climbing ropes in gym class and they're different enough in your experience to merit two different things. Suddenly, a character who is good at being athletic is four times as expensive in points as a dude who is learning to master melee weapons. And now things have stopped making sense. Makes Sense design is essentially freewriting, a kind of stream-of-consciousness process. And as with all such processes, the end result is usually a complete mess because hey, guess what! What enters your mind at any given moment doesn't make coherent sense at all! Does it significantly hamper design or affect play? My favorite example of Makes Sense design comes from the computer game Arcanum. It is thematic. It has strong story, excellent flavor, all that stuff which draws people to the genre in the first place, the kind that gets remembered. And its system is complete rear end. To illustrate this, let's take a closer look at the mechanics it has for combat, specifically how it calculates differences between weapons. Bigger, more damaging weapons are slow but hit potentially harder - say a speed 6 axe dealind d12 damage versus a speed 2 dagger dealing d4. Makes sense, right? The speed of the weapon determines how many Action Points it costs to use per swing, and your character's dexterity determines your action points because it's a measure of physical grace and speed. On top of that, you add your character's strength bonus to damage on every swing you make. Makes sense, right? Naturally, every character who wants to damage a lot in this system will take the smallest, tiniest, fastest dagger possible and - wait, what? Well, it works like this. Faster weapons simply attack more often. If you have a static bonus from your strength to damage, you add it to every single swing of the weapon - so naturally you want to swing more often. On top of that, the strength bonus far outweighs the weapon's actual damage, often being as high as +20 damage per swing. And you can get a maximum of 20 action points in the system. Let's say you have just 12 action points. Which would you rather do; swing a d12 axe twice for d12+20 damage each time, or swing a dagger six times at d4+20 damage each time? The first option on average deals 53 damage, and the latter does 135. Did I mention that you get experience based on how often you hit enemies with weapons? Because it makes sense to learn to use weapons better from hitting things with weapons, right? So not only are you dealing more damage with the tiny dagger, you're also leveling up faster. The most powerful, almost fastest-leveling combat character in the game is an ogre with 20 strength (max in the game) who runs around hitting things with the tiniest, fastest dagger-like weapon he can get, or possibly a rapier. Does that strike you as making even a lick of sense? Makes Sense design can so completely gently caress actual gameplay over that it makes the game practically unplayable, and it will produce utter nonsense results outside of the individual rule's make-sense bubble. If you've ever lit yourself on fire in GURPS because it has less of a penalty than fighting in the dark does, you've exploited this. If your experience of combat in D&D 3.x is that you just stand rooted in one spot playing rock'em sock'em robots until you or the opponent are dead because every other possible action -including basic movement- is laden with makes sense design, you've experienced this. But what's the alternative? Not making sense? Don't design rules in a vacuum. Always consider what the actual effect of them will be. Playtest them. If the actual result of the rule is nonsense, back to the drawing board you go. Your game doesn't need to be consistent with your gut feeling of how reality works, it just needs to be internally consistent, interesting and fun enough for the audience to buy into it. If this means a slightly unintuitive rule on first read, don't worry about it. If it produces an interesting or somehow even a more real-seeming experience in actual play, it's doing its job. Don't focus on whether the individual rule makes sense, but in what kind of sense it will produce when used with other components of the rules. Remember, you're designing a game. Make actual gameplay the prime factor, not whether it "makes sense" to account for wind resistance on bullets.
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Nov 21, 2012 19:08
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The FF7 system has its own wrinkles, too. Some items allow you to "link" materia together, so for instance if you have "Fire" for blasting things with fire, you can link it with the "All" materia to hit every enemy on the field at once but this making things a little more expensive. You could instead make it an "Added Effect" and do fire damage on all regular attacks, "Counter Attack" to do it whenever you are attacked and even "Steal" to attempt to steal something from the enemy under the cover of the fire blast. You can get pretty effective combos, such as by using "Cover" to take an attack intended for an ally, thus triggering an attack linkes to "Counter Attack". In a more strict class-based system, these meta-materia or sub-materia might be more restricted as class abilities, or just something some characters start with and not others. Or just severely limit the amount of abilities you can equip, whichever! The original system has two limits on it. First, you have to actually get the materia items. Second, not all equipment is made equal for them. Not all weapons have more than two "linked" slots to allow for comboing, at least early on. In the original game, you basically don't have to worry about it at all and it's so easy you can finish it without ever really delving into the system of it, which is a bit of a shame because for the time it was pretty unique. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Nov 25, 2012 |
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Nov 25, 2012 16:06
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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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I really like that approach. It opens up the possibility of things like class features that let you skip steps (like, say, a Ranger-alike who gets +6 Trap-laying without having to go through all the intermediary steps of Mechanics/Traps/Disarm Trap or Trap-laying), and at no point does the initial +2 become totally useless. Specializing in a skill becomes more about specializing in a category of interrelated things. You could even have specialties be a little more granular. Rather than "Hide" or "Move Silently" you could have "Urban Stealth", "Natural Stealth" and "Shadowing".
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Nov 29, 2012 17:55
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There's no reason why a specialty couldn't be arrived at from multiple starting locations in the tree, honestly.
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Nov 29, 2012 20:41
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The Buffy/Elric problem is an artifact of most of the rules focus being placed in the chargen aspects of the game as opposed to the actual gameplay, I think. It's a problem that needs to be addressed in the actual gameplay to make both sides of the character viable in play at the table, rather than a series of chargen options notionally balanced around a system of attributes and so on and forth which just serve to restrict choice of options when it becomes time to actually play the game. So, if in gameplay the buffy/elric options are equally effective choices no matter the ratio is between them, things are quite good in actual play. If they are balanced in points cost in chargen but are completely different in actual play (in a way that makes both of them suck), then it's time to abandon that chargen model if making them work equally well is a goal. I'm actually thinking that chargen itself needs to be toned down considerably or rolled into play. Consider success stories in this field: Planescape: Torment has AD&D's system but your character changes with decisions made once you begin playing, with just a choice of attribute points (themselves mutable in play) guiding you at the beginning. It's still not the most mechanically rigorous system, but the idea of making chargen an aspect of actual play is very appealing and forces the design to consider play first.
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May 15, 2013 20:03
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"Ad Murum"
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Jun 14, 2013 20:25
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Bit of an old-school style design thought: I'm deep in the process of writing a D&D-style adventure game for the Icelandic market (yes, I aim for the stars don't I) and I'm busily rethinking the role of the thief-type character. Mostly, I'm eliminating him from the game. I'm taking a bit of a cue here from every story I've heard about older-school gaming: If you describe evading or disarming a trap in a clever way, no one rolls. Not only that, but anyone can do it. But this also extends to detecting traps. What if I just cut out this weird middle-man and make traps a group activity, like combat? The core of my game is the Conversation. It comes first: if something is described well in the conversation, it takes precedence over rolling. It's something that's a feature of a lot of reports from games in the seventies, I've just codified it into a rule. Also part of this rule is that I've stated this: All traps, secret doors and hidden dangers must have a verbal hint as to their presence. For example, in a dungeon you've described as dusty, a corridor you describe as "meticulously clean" can mean a bunch of things. Does something wash over it regularly? Does it move? Is someone living there? Does a gelatinous cube traverse it occasionally (unlikely in my game but you get what I mean)? This is the conversational trigger. If someone investigates the floor more closely based on this, they'll find a tiny crack hidden in the uneven tiles on the floor which seems to suck a little bit of air into it. Congratulations, you've found a pit trap which may lead somewhere far different. Dust doesn't accrue because it sees regular use and maintenance. If the player then describes in the conversation how they're using iron spikes to wedge it shut, it's disarmed. If they do something particularly stupid in the conversation, it might be time for a roll to avoid triggering it. And if they don't investigate it at all, they will probably trigger the trap and fall straight into it. So in this case, the trap is "statted" as follows: quote:Hint: The floor is meticulously clean in this corridor. You could do the same for an ambush: quote:Hint: There is no birdsong in the air. And even for unusual social situations: quote:Hint: Lady Aelfrid's voice seems different and her eyes do not meet yours at all, despite your previous acquaintance. The distinction here is that it's still possible to roll to search/disarm/listen for noise/whatever. It's just not one character's option to do so. That leaves me without the other side of the thief-style character, which is the lightly armored light-weapon harrier. I think I'll do a Robber or Bandit style thing for him instead, where he's still a thief but he's also a survivor at the edge of civilization.
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Jul 8, 2013 00:31
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Paolomania posted:Some Heartbreaker similarly calls it "The Expected Thing". Your "conversation", as well as these other examples, essentially set up a frame of "fiction first" where what makes fictional sense comes before mechanics. I'm familiar with that, but I'm not familiar with any game which makes it a mechanical requirement to include pieces of description in order to make things fair. Basically, I'm not just putting conversation first: I am making a solid ruleset of what can and cannot be part of the conversation.
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Jul 8, 2013 06:19
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Yes, I am familiar with Dungeon World and fiction-first thinking. I'm writing a sixty-page supplement for it, and I am stealing quite a bit from it. I think maybe I didn't explain what I'm going for very well, because people are fixating on the conversation bit and not what I'm doing with it. I'm doing something these other examples of fiction-first games do not do: I am outright making the fiction rules-based. If Dungeon World separates it into moves that are "triggered" by the fiction, I am making the descriptions in the fiction themselves a solid, immovable rules object. It places constraints on the fiction directly. The "hints" I presented as part of traps earlier are not optional or moddable. You have to include them when that trap or situation presents itself, and the same goes for every other trap you design. When you describe a situation, you have to weave those phrases into your description. The answer to those fictional hints, on the other hand, are not codified. DW would codify actions you could do as triggers and results as moves, but I am leaving the resolution up to creativity first. To name an example, if I describe a clearing, I can say "It is an idyllic scene. Flowers grow in abundance, and a tiny stream trickles its way past your feet. There is no birdsong in the air." One of these descriptive elements is a rules object: The lack of birdsong is the required hint for the upcoming danger of an ambush, as I described in the earlier post. The players can interact with all of them, such as by taking a drink from the stream or picking a flower, but now I've codified one type of descriptive element as a hard rule. I can even chain these for when people take a closer look. In the following example, Hint is the initial impression of an element, and Hint 2 is what I say when someone looks more closely. A Tag is essentially an adjective with rules attached. "This is an idyllic forest clearing. Flowers are blooming all around and the air is filled with birdsong. There is a bubbling brook here, but it looks a little filthy." quote:Hint: There is a bubbling brook here, but it looks a little filthy. The distinction between this and a DW move is admittedly thin, but it's a matter of emphasis. DW would invoke rolls and expect rolls to inform interpretation of fiction pretty much constantly, with fictional triggers for any number of things provoking rolling for moves. Rolls in my variation are a measure of last resort, when safety has been thrown to the wind or when people's descriptions are unclear enough to leave room for doubt. They're more like saving throws in that way a lot of the time. Tags are another element of the hard-coded description. If you have a tag, you should describe your character in terms of those tags. The character who takes a drink from this brook may become Sick, and this places a constraint on how the player can describe actions taken by their character without invoking a roll. Trying to do stuff like acrobatics or physical stuff while sick might be described well, but if you don't incorporate how the illness is affecting your action you might be made to roll. Other tags have benefits if you include them and are more optional, like an Honorable tag which rewards you for acting with honor (but you have to describe how you're doing it). Basically, the fiction doesn't just come first. The rules affect the fictional conversation more directly, stating what adjectives and phrases you can or should weave into it.
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Jul 8, 2013 16:05
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Paolomania posted:That sounds to be very much in the vein of old adventure/puzzle games (Zmachine/SCUMM). Is that the feel that you are going for? That, and how I've heard people describe OD&D. For instance: Blog of Holding, series on Mike Mornard posted:Mike told us the story of one of Gary's lesser players who decided to go adventuring alone. He encountered a room filled with gems. Apparently, he didn't suspect that Gary was trying anything devious: he ran into the room and started reveling in his treasure. "It's great!" said Gary (from behind his file cabinet, presumably). "You're in gems up to your ankles!" The descriptive hints here is the fact that your character is sinking! Then there's this: quote:Earlier in our adventure, before we were trapped in a burning room, we encountered a glowing dagger, floating in the air, blade pointed downwards. I'm new to OD&D. My instinct was that this was similar to all the "trips and tracks" listed in the first edition Dungeon Master's Guide, like altars that might increase your Strength by 1d4 points or make you save vs. poison or die, with no way to determine between them. If it was either a treasure or a "gotcha" trap, I decided that I would take a risk and grab the dagger, fully aware that I might be arbitrarily zapped for my trouble. A lot of the game of OD&D was carried out in conversation like this, except it was never actually codified into the rules. It's traditionally been left up in the air as "DM skills" and then left as "advice". I'm taking those neat descriptive elements and hard-coding them into the rules rather than leaving it up to a DM to just maybe figure out by rubbing the book hard enough or something. The full series: http://blogofholding.com/?series=mornard
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Jul 8, 2013 16:39
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The rule in the game is that if nothing in particular happens when you look at an object - the description doesn't change in a meaningful way - then it's a "safe" object. You can continue chew on the scenery and use it in your descriptions, but picking up a flower and being told "it's pretty, I guess it also smells nice" is the fictional signal that you find nothing and it's a dead end. The option exists to just go with what the players are doing, but I am considering a Time Out rule where you just straight up call a time out for the game and go "hey, this is dumb and you're not going anywhere, just telling you straight up". Talking about the game in and of itself becomes a rule to avoid the pixelbitching problem, but only again as a measure of last resort when the fiction alone doesn't convey it - call it a saving throw for the fiction.
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Jul 8, 2013 17:19
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HitTheTargets posted:Would there be a Big List of Trap Hints, then? Probably not, no. It would just be a matter of placing some kind of description which sounds suspicious or out of place, not a list of "here is what an Ambush is described like". Traps I'd write for general use might have multiple possible hints.
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Jul 8, 2013 20:44
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The problem with System Mastery as expressed in D&D has everything to do with frontloading, yes. If we apply the concept of a difficulty curve to D&D, we immediately notice that most of the absolutely most important decisions that affect gameplay are made before play even begins, thus putting the game's curve somewhere beyond the difficulty of Dwarf Fortress (where it's possible and even easy to succeed so long as you learn the procedures of play well rather than frontloading your expedition - although that's also important). Gameplay by contrast is almost simplistically stupid when the player learns how every option beyond "attack for maximum amount of damage" is depreciated. If you want to achieve success in later versions of D&D, most of the rules you need to know and understand must be known or understood before play begins. It's a bit like if you could autowin at Hockey by buying the right equipment and knowing the rules beforehand. And that's crap. Human beings enjoy challenges, but they enjoy them by the process of learning. Anyone should be capable of beginning play, and then be able to get better at play over time until they master play. Winning the game in chargen doesn't engage any of this process: either you know and you're in the clear, or you don't and you're hosed until you can start over from scratch. It utterly fails to actually engage the process of enjoyment unless you happen to really like creating challenges for yourself (like "optimising a fighter") and then post a lot on CharOp forums about fighter builds until you have something workable. The only thing in a lot of versions of D&D which engages that all-important process of learning and enjoyment is the character creation minigame right at the beginning, and so that's what people play. Switching over to a mastery-through-play model will require radical shifts of tabletop RPG design thought. Character creation will have to be streamlined or turned into a process of play in and of itself (preferably without making it a minigame like old-school Lifepath systems do), and the core resolution systems must become vastly more robust, flexible and option-filled while also being gated in such a way that a new player isn't overwhelmed and gets a few simple things to engage with at a time. RPGs are decades behind most of the game industry in this regard. I don't see that changing a lot in the near future either, but it's something we've already gotten glimmers of in the more tactically robust games like D&D 4e, WFRP3e and certain games like Apocalypse World and its derivatives, and even then it's primitive and shambling and has lots of problems for players to wrap their heads around.
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Nov 18, 2013 18:52
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Another option is to have character options not cost resources and only be earned in-game, where you then have the ability to use or reject those options at your leisure. Oddly enough, the easiest example is the Vancian-based D&D Wizard. A Wizard learns spells. This doesn't really cost any money, or the money (or scrolls) are earned during regular adventuring gameplay and thus are part of that gameplay. Some spells are more useful than others, but although this isn't immediately apparent when looking at the spells, the Wizard can learn those spells and then choose which ones to use at any given time. Thus, spells aren't made equal, but they also don't have to be made equal. The player will learn naturally which spells are great or work well enough by playing with them. This doesn't cost the character any permanent character resources, ability points, proficiencies or anything like that, and in fact you cannot gain these things during character creation at all for the most part except for a very basic selection. Imagine a non-character resource based mechanic like that for a swordy person. Call her Invincible Sword Princess, because that's the best swordy RPG character example ever. In this hypothetical model, Invincible Sword Princess might learn Styles. Styles might be gated based on what weapon the character is wielding - there could be a separate style for Sabers and Longswords, while other styles could use "any sword". These styles are learned from fighting manuals and trainers (for gold) during play. They will cost no permanent character resource, and the player is allowed to pick and choose from among them by the simple expedient of switching weapons (assuming the game doesn't pigeonhole your choice of weapons further, of course). If Invincible Sword Princess knows Saber Style, Rapier Style and Longschwert Style, but doesn't like how Rapier Style meshes with her choice of armor (it prefers light armor and she prefers the type of armor that puts a lot of metal between her and her multitude of non-invincible enemies), she can just use Sabers and Langschwerts and not use Rapier Style at all. It's not like it cost her anything. Both of these engage in a type of system mastery exercise in a way that the rest of D&D doesn't. It emerges in play. It's easy to control what is in the game (assuming it's understood that some spells won't be appearing in this game world if the group wants them out). Players get to customize their charactes but do so in-game in a way that meshes naturally with what has happened in play. Contrast the 3.x D&D "Prestige Classes" system which were meant to do this but in practice required extensive planning to get into at all, cost important character resources (and thus massive opportunity costs), and which didn't let you play with them anywhere near as freely. I mean, who says D&D doesn't have decent ideas sometimes? D&D wizards are noted for their power, fun, customizability and tactical and strategic choices during gameplay. Let's give that to everyone else.
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Nov 18, 2013 20:39
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eth0.n posted:But it costs her gold. Gold (and scrolls, and fight-books) is a thing earned in play, is the thing. That's why it's a better resource to work with than feat slots or proficiency points spent in chargen, and it's easier to fix "wasted gold" in play than it is to fix "wasted permanent character option" if it becomes a problem. And I imagine that the best way to balance gold in this instance would be to insure that you never make something absolutely essential to the game's function (like +Whatever weapons that are figured directly into the game's expected math curve) dependent on gold, like avoiding giving Styles or Spells boring math-skewing functions like basic "+1 to hit with X weapon". Obviously you'd need to strike a balance, but I can't come up with one offhand for a single design-think post. That's a matter of treasure parcelling over time, expected treasure amount, gold sinks, costs of books etc versus cost of equipment, whether there's a whole variety of buyable consumables and so on. But that's part of what I meant when I said you have to gate these things.
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Nov 18, 2013 23:51
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eth0.n posted:If your point is just that changing things from being choices at character creation, to choices at advancement, then sure, that could be an improvement. You still have to be careful here, and system mastery can still be problematic. Even Dungeon World has some bullshit here: if you're not a Cleric or Wizard, you're a fool if you don't take a spellcasting multiclass in one of those at level 2. Unless of course there's a separate XP system entirely, in which case this criticism falls apart a bit. You're making a bunch of assumptions I didn't actually put forward, and are assuming things about the gold parcelling system that I did not (namely that there's a single set defined limit to how much gold a character earns, that the parcelling is inherently inflexible over time/that there IS a set parcelling amount, that there isn't a second gated system to Styles/Spells that helps balance it out, and so on). If you immediately assume the system works in a way that would make it fall apart, it falls apart! That's not much of an insight, and it's not a productive way to see how an idea could be made to work. To name an example of what else could come up against it, there could be training time (practicing your newfound thing), items that just drop and thus don't cost gold (and thus impose no opportunity cost) with an optional outlay of gold for others, a requirement for having gained a certain amount of mechanically tracked reputation or status before you can explore some styles and more. Also, having played Dungeon World, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about with that multiclass comment. Are you taking multiple multiclass moves to get the basic Spellbook and Cast a Spell moves ASAP and thus not using moves more immediately useful to you just to get to spells, which are honestly not much greater than most moves to begin with? For that much of an outlay, I probably wouldn't do it. I'm not even sure a lot of playbooks can do it.
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Nov 19, 2013 05:50
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eth0.n posted:I honestly thought you were saying that the styles would be the sole form of advancement, at least in terms of combat abilities. I thought the notion was to take the dynamics of spells in D&D and build it out into the basis for the entire system. Which I think would be a good idea overall. And that's not particularly helpful, because your assumptions involve things no one has actually mentioned and more or less don't include solutions to themselves - you just state an assumption based on D&D and then say why that assumption wouldn't work in a system so theoretical it hasn't been written yet! They are potential design pitfalls, maybe, but they're not useful criticisms of the actual idea itself. quote:Now, to make your idea work, perhaps have a limit of one learned style per level, which they can replace on learning a new one if they want, and make the gold cost option more for flavor than an actual meaningful limitation. Unless its a game significantly more about economics than D&D conventionally is, I think its better to let gold be relatively fluffy, primarily used for skills-related or roleplaying-oriented uses, and don't bother to try to pin it down with wealth-by-level or parcel systems. I would not limit acquisition "by level" because that would defeat the purpose of making it as freely learned as scrolls to begin with. Level might cap the power of specific techniques you could use as a kind of secondary gateway, though, similarly to how higher level spells are gated by level in D&D. If gold gatewaying by itself is problematic, then certain styles could be learned by completely ancillary methods, such as by mechanically-tracked reputation with specific organizations (maybe you can only learn Cloak and Dagger style if you're high up with an assassin, and Holy Avenger style needs a blessing from a church, and similar) or maybe learned for free "by level" occasionally to make sure no one falls behind and there's some level of control over the acquisition. quote:If the items are random treasure, parceled out wishlist items, or the result of some other mechanized system, then they have an opportunity cost of whatever else could drop. If they're a DM fiat gift, that raises problems of DMs having to hand-balance their PCs, and causes problems with encounter building guidelines. There's no opportunity cost when it's random because there was no control over it to begin with, unless you want to get seriously pedantic about how every single roll has the potential to be a natural 20 or something. If you learn them "by level" but can also get them with simple money, the opportunity cost (of money AND levels) is severely lessened. In each instance, the opportunity cost is far less than it would be if they were something like D&D feats or AD&D proficiencies. The point is, design can mitigate these things, and in fact that was why I proposed this at all. quote:Check the rules for multiclass moves. The character sheets are misleading. You get all related spellcasting moves with a single multiclass move, and you get that spellcasting ability as if you were level 1, no matter your current level, and it increases as you level from there. Which means if you take it at any level other than 2 you're forever simply weaker than you could be had you built your character correctly. I actually just solve this problem by excising the separate spellcasting-list classes from the game, but I did it for entirely unrelated reasons. Good to know I have an even better reason to do it now. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Nov 19, 2013 |
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Nov 19, 2013 07:23
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Splicer posted:So yeah, messing with the distribution curve won't fix any of these problems. Tiered success will. As Cirno said, 3.X has dabbled with a few different tiered success options in the past, but they're all been individual subsystems, exceptions to the rule. D&D will always have these problems until some kind of robust, system-wide tiered success system is implemented, either a simple partial success style one, or a complete overhaul of the DC system into something more FATE-like, or something entirely new. Assuming this is in response to me: The distribution curve I suggested several times actually does address the problems, though! But you correctly spot the core of the math issue involved in making any distribution curve work: the disparity between highest and lowest is never as wide as the random number generator used in the game. It simply can't be without completely unbalancing the core math of the game. A d20 game where the difference between the highest and lowest is 20 readily demonstrates why. There can be no actual competition between the two. No matter what one person rolls, the other will always autosucceed. The only measure the game has to prevent a complete failure of its own curve is autohit on d20, and automiss on 1 - and those are 5% chances which no one wants to be stuck with, ever. And one of the most pertinent criticisms of a multiple-dice system is simply that the distribution is for all intents and purposes smaller. A natural 20 on a d20 is far more likely than on a 2d10, and the linear distribution's ability to handle more numbers on its own curve without getting awful and boring means you have a wider range of numbers to play with in the core system before two characters grow too far apart from one another. But neither system wants to be in a situation where a player only has a 1 in 20 (or lower) chance of success because that's a bit daft, not to mention frustrating. To use design speak I normally wouldn't, it allows more "granularity" in character numbers. The curve by contrast provides a feeling of consistency that the linear distribution doesn't - all results gather towards the middle of the curve. (This doesn't always make you more likely to succeed, but as much as we can deride it, "feel" in the user interface is important.) The big thing that the curve variety has is also less granularity. Simply put, with smaller numbers to play with, and with multiple dice influencing the end result of a single roll, it's just less math overhead required to control the outcome. It can still be pretty crunchy and complicated (see: Iron Kingdoms), but there's far less overhead during actual play to worry about purely because there's less "swing" between character ability and bonuses. (This is of course assuming the system is designed according to its own math, and not just poo poo-flung at a wall.) Bonuses can have really dramatic effects on gameplay in a way they don't in a linear system either, which is also a "feel" thing: When was the last time you were genuinely excited about a +2 bonus in a d20 system? Ultimately both of these are just options which present their own challenges. They have quirks the other doesn't. And it's also correct to identify that the actual big core problem is with the boring, samey binary yes-no resolution beneath the dice, on a systemic level. What I object to is the presentation of this argument that since 2d10 doesn't solve all of a d20's problems, it can or should be dismissed as an option in design. That's the kind of thinking that produced Next's many design problems in the first place. And no, this is not some agenda I'm pushing because I'm entirely aware that Next will never abandon the d20. But what it has largely abandoned is the linear curve, from adding skill dice to rolls to gaining Advantage on them, and the stated reason for doing it is for the potential benefits this provides - less math overhead required to influence the results of a roll. Advantage is simply a variety of multiple dice, "roll two take highest", a simple and intuitive way to control dice results that doesn't involve adding bonuses together. That's the design problem it's supposed to address, and that's how they addressed it. They just did it in a way that didn't actually remove any of the old math overhead, because they openly state that they didn't do the math. And it's still the same old yes/no, too. The takeaway is: -Don't get married to one way of resolving things against which all others must "prove" themselves in gladiatorial combat. -Do something other than yes/no in the underlying system. -Do the math.
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Nov 27, 2013 20:43
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Paolomania posted:People keep arguing with you because you continue to conflate two different issues (which other people have split apart) around outcome as indicated by this sentence right here. No, the distribution of dice rolls do not cause all results to gather towards the middle. If you are in a pass/fail system rolling for a specific target there are only ever two results: meeting the target and under the target. Pass and fail do not cluster around anything but "pass" and "fail". Except I have never said any of this. When I say the "result" of a dice roll I mean the literal numbers on the dice resulting from the roll, not the method by which a system interprets them into pass/fail. The result of a dice roll is an entirely separate thing from how a game system interprets a dice roll. When I address these two things, I address them as the separate things that they are. It is not me who is conflating them, it's all you. Also to clarify, apparently people think I'm stating that the dice roll system solves the pass/fail issue. Not only have I not once stated this, but literally no one else has either.
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Nov 27, 2013 22:15
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You beg to differ about a thing I said. Okay. Let's look at this from the top. Here's what the proposed thing does, according to the proposal: quote:So how long until someone finally bites the bullet and makes a game designed around 2d10 instead of 1d20? Having a game balanced around someone actually rolling around average the majority of the time rather than just "eventually, given enough rolls" would flatten the math a lot I would imagine. Here's the challenge: quote:Can you clarify what problem switching to 2d10 is solving? Because if you have a 50% chance of success with 2d10 and a 50% chance of success with 1d20 you're going to be equally prone to streaks of successes and failures in either system. What people are still failing to grasp is that these are two entirely separate things unrelated to one another. The original proposal states "Having a game balanced around someone actually rolling around average the majority of the time rather than just "eventually, given enough rolls" would flatten the math a lot I would imagine." But the challenge doesn't address this. It doesn't even touch on it. It instead launches into a criticism of a binary pass/fail resolution mechanic. The proposal is stating that it would be easier to flatten the game's math - reduce math overhead - by using a multiple dice resolution system. Next is already doing this on one level by using Advantage, and even for the stated goal of reducing math complexity during play. Note how it doesn't actually touch on the binary pass/fail? That's because binary pass/fail is an entirely separate thing, a method to interpret dice rolls, and according to binary pass/fail the two methods are perfectly equal. And here's the important thing: This is both true and not true. If we look at it purely from the lens of binary pass/fail, they are equal and no different from one another. But if you look at how the actual dice function, they are not. A +2 bonus in one system is not the same as a +2 bonus in the other, and this has ramifications on gameplay and rules procedure even if the game has nothing but a binary resolution system. Even if there are only two possible results of an action, that's a difference in actual design procedure that can and should be accounted for. Basically, the criticism of the idea is dismissing some rather important in-game math as being irrelevant purely because it doesn't change the nature of how pass/fail works. That's a dismissive view to take because it ignores how different the two methods actually are on a design level, and it's flawed because we shouldn't interpret roll mechanics purely by pass/fail chances - in fact, as Splicer has pointed out, pass/fail is the core of the problem. If we use solely pass/fail as a means of criticism, then clearly dice aren't actually different from doing jumping jacks, using cards, hosting an archery competition or standing on your head - each one, after all, has only two possible interpretations in a pass/fail system. And that's a really stupid way to interpret how dice, jumping jacks and archery competitions work. e: Death to pass/fail
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Nov 27, 2013 22:55
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 21:56 |
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Are you still on this? See this poo poo right here, which you posted? quote:But what were you arguing about in advocating use of 2dX rolling? It couldn't have been both. An argument assuming one doesn't work with the other. quote:What exactly did you mean by "underdog", and it being "heroic" for them to get bigger bonuses? Was it: This is something I already answered in the Next thread. I think both interpretations have their merits. They could both be underdog mechanics, and be valid for different reasons. I am not pushing for one or the other in particular. The first is clearly the Next-style Advantage mechanic, and the second is a curve mechanic. They could each have their own fictional or game design justification (bringing characters up to speed regardless of how low their investment is VS not rewarding investing nothing at all into an ability over investing something or a lot). I am not pushing for one or the other. They both accomplish a form of underdog-rewarding, but do so in different ways and with a different emphasis (how MUCH of an underdog you can be before the big boost applies, in this instance). Hell, they're both using multiple dice to do it. Now are you done asking me the same question in multiple threads and getting the same answer? Or are you simply incapable of understanding the concept of someone finding merits in multiple things at the same time, despite them being different? I am not pushing an agenda here, for one interpretation being more correct than the other. This isn't a jigsaw puzzle where you quote scattered things I said out of context and "solve" my argument.
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Nov 28, 2013 08:23
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