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Regarding presentation of character options I don't think a playbook model is a good idea to set as the standard, simply because most beginners don't actually know what it is they want to play until they've read about all the options. Of course that also needs the game to not have a bloat of them, if you have five variants of 'dude who hits things' then the idea is more viable. A big thing that helps with layout is having effects-based designs and unified mechanics. Games where the crunch is irreparably tied to background fluff like say l5r need you to be aware of the setting before you make a character, and if you don't have tons of tables and subsystems for traveling times or drama points then you don't need to send them to the GM section as well. What this boils down to is that some games need you to put the boring bits alongside the fun ones, if you want to go old school and sacrifice elegance of mechanics then you're going to have to sacrifice elegance of layout too. Indexes aren't a thing I've found difficult to make, all you really need is to be aware that you need separate indexes and glossaries for things that are rules, fluff, GM advice and the like. They're just time consuming. GimmickMan fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Jul 21, 2012 |
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Jul 21, 2012 03:41
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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". I'm also on this, I never saw either Dresden or LoA as overly large, and though they do get a bit repetitive it is for the sake of making sure the rules are clear. Sure, the books are pretty loving huge when compared to most indie games, but that's the price of having mechanical depth, the necessary fluff for people who can't come up with it, tools for the GM to customize the game to their liking, and enough art to grab your attention and keep it through the walls of text. edit: I mean you could cut down either of those down to half size by taking out art, summarizing crunch, and ditching most of the GM's premade homework (in both background fluff and prebuilt stuff) but that's quite the sacrifice. The PHB/DMG divide gets flak, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to keep the stuff that you need to play in one book and the setting/customization tools/in-depth advice information meant to help the GM in the other. GimmickMan fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Jul 21, 2012 |
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Jul 21, 2012 04:36
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As far as actual books go I don't see much of a solution to the accessibility dilemma beyond getting an editor who is a miracle worker and can trim down those 400-800 pages down to 200 without it turning out like The Secret Fire. Splitting off the books into two or three isn't a bad idea by itself, the problem is when the extra books are obligatory purchases and not actually optional (I'm looking at you, DMG and MM) because that doesn't really fix much. Dresden manages this somewhat reasonably, you don't really need the supplemental book if you're going with your own setting and don't want to use the existing one as inspiration. I think we could stand to do away with hardcovers and possibly pdfs, which would go a long way towards making things easier to distribute, more easily affordable, and hopefully tone down the noise to signal ratio. It might be a technical manual, but it should read like a game, damnit.
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Jul 21, 2012 05:07
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ForteMaster posted: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. You want font sizes to be slightly larger than the ones you usually use for the rest of the book. People need to read things at a glance here, unlike in a book where it is okay to ask them to be attentive for the sake of economizing space, and when people print it out they will likely have a handwriting bigger than say 10 pt. As far as digital stuff goes, drop down menues are your friend, and making it so the program automatically calculates modifiers inbuilt to the character is very useful too. Draw the eye towards the most important bits, these are usually stats and substats, make them bigger or stand out somehow, and place them at the top of the page either centered or to the left because that's where we look first. The top is also a good place for a short fluff description and a picture if you can spare the space. If you need to have detailed lists of items, feats, etc. Have those at the bottom and try to leave room for a short description for those times when people look at their sheets with a puzzled look on their face for the answer to their problems. If you have derived substats or other things of the sort including the calculations in fine print at the very bottom is a good idea as well. All of this is assuming you're going with a practical sheet for a traditional system with a lot of moving parts, not a top-down design showcasing style as the primary feature. In case of doubt, draw inspiration from the games yours is similar to, since those usually have paid professional graphics designers who know their poo poo, D&D 4E and Dresden's serve as a good comparison for entirely different game styles.
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Jul 23, 2012 17:13
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IceBox posted:I am in the early designing stages for an RPG and I would love some advice. That sounds counterintuitive. I could see it working if you had, say, Power, Finesse and Resilience as your three stats and left it up to people to fluff it however they want. But how is a character with low social stats supposed to represent anything other than someone with no influence or savvy?
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Aug 15, 2012 09:37
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There's something to be said about making a distinction between Intelligence and Wisdom, in that at the very least the archetypes they represent are different. Strength and Constitution, on the other hand, should have never been separate stats because pretty much every fantasy character who is strong is also tough, and viceversa. Ability Scores in general are pretty terrible conceptually, not just in how they are implemented. If you are going to make a hack of D&D at least change those.
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Aug 20, 2012 00:12
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Scrape posted:I, for one, have always bated the Int/Wis separation as well as Str/Con. My ideal system would measure fitness, intellect, and charm as the only three defining stats, leaving the player to interpret their Fitness as either strong/tough or fast. Like seriously, can you really imagine a super strong guy who is not also tough? Or vice versa? I feel like only superpowers make that distinction. It really is a question of how granular you want to make your game. A more cinematic approach sacrificing complexity for simplicity will see you doing away with divides for things until you get the barely necessary ones. My stuff tends to revolve around having those three (down to the names, except Charm is Empathy) with Perception or Willpower added in as the theme and mood of the game demands. Mind you there is a lot to be gained from having more stats than the essentials, but there is a lot more to be lost in doing them wrong, and most of the time systems are made without the designers being aware of what kind of game they want to be running. If you want the core of the gameplay experience to revolve around combat, as is the case for most systems out there, you may want to consider stats such as Dexterity or Reflexes to be kept separate from other physical ones simply to ensure that everyone who is a good fighter is mechanically different, and keep all the mental or social stuff to a few stats because you're not going to need them as much. But if you want the Wizard to feel different to the Druid in the same way the Rogue feels different to the Fighter (beyond having a different class), then you want to keep the Int/Wis divide. GimmickMan fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Aug 22, 2012 |
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Aug 22, 2012 23:46
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In addition, it is important to realize that there is no such thing as a truly universal system, because the rules of the game need to focus their complexity and depth on the parts that matter. Some games aim for realism and predictability, others for getting the feel of an action movie and 'failing forward', others for personal horror where nothing is certain. You can't really encapsulate a system to be like all types of fiction, much less like real life, you are going to have to pick and choose what you want it to do.
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Aug 23, 2012 04:51
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P.d0t posted:I am fine tuning a skill system for my own homebrew system, and I am thinking of switching from d4s to d6s. If I do make the change, I'll have to redo a whole bunch of maths, of course. You could go middle of the way and use d5's (a halved d10, which is more common) but that's far from being elegant at the table.
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Oct 10, 2012 12:54
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That sounds like a workable core system. In my experience doing away with regular damage mechanics in place of hurting your stats/aspects/whatever means either people will try to get hurt in places that aren't immediately relevant (ie I'm in a swordfight, I take my damage as a scar that lowers my Universal Socialite aspect) or creates a downward spiral where the first blow defines the conflict almost immediately. You might be better off not making it have an intricate damage subsystem and making conflict be just an opposed check that gives you a roleplaying negative aspect if you lose. I mean character grinders are fun and all but roleplaying the consequences of a fight gone wrong is going to be more fun than losing your PC the majority of the time.
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Oct 11, 2012 01:26
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That could work, consider taking a look at the Deadlands core system, it uses multiples of four for 'success ranks' and dice going from d4's to d20's. The rest is relatively old school but it can be useful for cannibalizing a more solid engine. You could hardcode some kind of aspect spread (say if you are a primary physical, secondary mental, tertiary social you get three of the first two of the second, one of the third) to ensure someone doesn't become invincible by getting all combat aspects or accidentally gimps themselves by having only one. This isn't necessary, though, as the Player is simply deciding where they want their agency to lie and what balance means is different for every group. GimmickMan fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 01:51
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Yeah this sounds cool, I can see myself playing this if I'm in the mood for something a little bit crunchier than PDQ but still simple, good luck there. On a different subject now though, is this the go-to thread for homebrewing or more for design in general? I thought we had a homebrew thread somewhere.
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Oct 11, 2012 02:18
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Yeah that is what I thought, but it is a good point anyway since this is a good place as any for either thing. One thing I've been thinking a bit about lately is the practicality of character sheets and facilitating their use. Many games have sheets that are visually busy, and you need to shuffle between two or more pages just to look for whatever skills/items/powers/whatever you have, but without any of the sheets actually telling you what they do because there is no room for a proper entry (okay, with enough pages, there could be, but that's a lot of busywork). Beyond that, there's the necessity to update and replace old numbers in a sheet with new ones which can make for an illegible mess after a few sessions of erasing and rewriting. There's more issues of course, but those are the most common I think. Now electronic tools or online gaming can solve these rather easily, but if you're actually going to bother making a printable sheet, one should at least try for it to make gameplay fast, right? Storyteller did something cool with dots as stats and checkboxes as health. Not only do they stand out from the rest of the sheet, but you don't need to rewrite your stat or your HP too much, just add another dot or tick another box. As a bonus, it is a lot easier for people less nerdy to pick up and learn if they have something simpler than tons of number in their sheets. The only problem is that it does not work very well with a game that has variables going much higher than ten or so. Another neat trick are Power cards, which make sure you have what you need the most right in front of you at all times. But at the same time if you resort to making cards out of everything somewhat crunchy, you won't be much better in the end than spreading it through multiple sheets. What can be done to aid character sheets in their practical use? What cool aids do the games that you play implement, if any? You know, more on the playing side, with the system already set in stone. edit: clarity GimmickMan fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 10:29
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You can have them as completely independent skills everyone can learn as previously said, but you could also have them as attributes inherent to a class (either as fixed numbers, or as bonuses if you also want to make them independent skills) and you could also make them all increase depending on what cool stuff PCs pick up, so if you grab a bunch of sword-fighting powers/feats/whatever your attack bonus increases for instance.
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Oct 15, 2012 12:27
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Halloween Jack posted:Is there any sort of general opinion on percentile systems? The concept was a big deal when it came out. I don't have anything against them, but I found that I have never felt really intrigued or excited by a percentile-based system. They're like a old Volvo; they do their job and don't give you problems, but they're a little clunky and certainly not sleek or elegant. I remember the last time Chaosium released a new version of their BRP corebook and some posters on RPGnet were excited; my reply was "How do you get excited about BRP?" Percentile makes it easy to model things in, because the way things are designed and read in it is fairly elegant. That's the theory. In practice they are super fiddly and really hard to balance because of how swingy the core resolution mechanic is.
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Oct 18, 2012 12:07
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Zandar posted:It pretty much is, actually, unless you have roll-under-half mechanics or something. "Roll under x on d20" is the same as "roll d20 and add x to beat DC21". The only difference is that skills are usually assumed to be bounded in a roll-under system. I know this is from the last page already but let me expand a bit on it, what I mean when I say that percentile is really hard to balance due to swinginess is from the perspective of a guy who has to come up with skills/talents/whatever and has to take every single 1% into consideration. In d20 the minimum bonus/penalty that powers/skills/whatever can give you is of +1, which is five times as much as the minimum that percentile works with. This means coming up with an internally tight subsystem for grading what the odds of 1% to 4% are worth when compared to everything else a character could be getting with their XP or character growth equivalent of choice. Then it gets weirder, because those odds are so pitiful you have to make abilities based on them come in bulk, so they actually can ever count for something. Unless you really know what you're doing and streamline the poo poo out of your options, this is going to lead to a glut of abilities. Then you need to work in the stuff that comes in the 10% and higher range into the rules, the abilities or options that make for tactical choices in gameplay, without making all the others obsolete. This stops being an issue if you don't give a crap about tight, balanced designs and just handwave 3%'s and 9%'s however you wish all over the place, but I trust I don't need to explain why that's not a very good idea. I'm simplifying the issue a lot and I hope my words make sense. I want to love percentile as a resolution system but it has so many underlying issues and it needs a very careful approach to make a game with it that doesn't waste its elegant framework.
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Oct 22, 2012 18:03
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Rulebook Heavily posted: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". While we're at it might as well add my two cents about what you can ask yourself about your own system. The first one would be "what do I want to leave up to chance?", a d100 can be great for say random chargen/encounters/critical damage tables to give an old-school example, but on the more modern side of things you can make investigations a thing that never fails because leaving those up to chance would be missing the point of the game. The other question you should ask yourself is "do I want tight and simple or visceral and exciting resolution?" the former usually involves flat odds and elegant unified mechanics that are quick to memorize, the latter tends to focus on dicepools because rolling a bunch of dice together at once (which often explode) is awesome and then lets you do things with said dice like make sets of them or gamble them or something. It may not sound like one, but it is an important decision because one focuses on fast play and transparent math, but the other (while it can still have that) is going to be a little less predictable and often transports some of the game's tactical depth to the dice rolling level slowing things down a little. I personally find the differences between core resolution systems, and the styles of games that they enable, to be one of the more interesting aspects of game design.
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Oct 23, 2012 22:39
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You could stick with d12's and lower for most things, and make the d20 a special mechanic for when you spend resources to reroll a failed check, or something to that effect. Don't make the d20 standard, make it special.
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Oct 24, 2012 17:01
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This is pretty cool. Grand Wizard's Debate tactic is hilarious, in particular.
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Nov 3, 2012 15:56
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Makes Sense The thing that baffles me about this style of design is that it does not actually make sense, and it would take thirty seconds of thinking about what these mechanics represent either in the game world or in the metagame to realize it. It is like this entire hobby is built on the foundations that rules don't matter as much as the books being a semi-interesting fun read, so we don't need to do any actual playtesting because GMs will fix stuff up anyway.  As for the hierarchical talent-trees feature that is common in many games, I think it is entirely unnecessary. The point of such trees is to let people pick a niche they can specialize in to be different from the rest of the group, they should be free to define their agency in that niche once they have secured it, without having to wait for twenty sessions to get their actual cool stuff. But then again I despise Level-based games in general, so take that with a grain of salt. GimmickMan fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 22, 2012 00:16
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Unless you're playing a shitfarmer simulator, growth is not supposed to make you cool, but it is supposed to make you cooler. Starting with a superpower that lets you fly and that you enhance with a +X to flight rolls over time is different from starting out jumping really high then gradually turning that into flight. In a good point-buy system you can grab anything, but not everything. You get what you really want now, then save the secondary stuff for later. The "more cool stuff" method works, but arbitrary restrictions on what kind of it you can start with don't really accomplish much for players, they're mostly there just to obscure bad balance.
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Nov 22, 2012 11:40
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How about Setting Element?
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Nov 24, 2012 01:45
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AlphaDog posted:Can you give us a rundown of what you mean? Ability pools are customisable and shared between the whole party? Like, everyone can do anything on the ability list as long as you've unlocked it, or there are some abilities that are party abilities and other abilities that are not? Materias are items that you can slot into your equipment, and in doing so they give you spells, new commands (as in Steal, Transform, Throw) or passive bonuses. Use a Materia long enough, and you learn the ability for good. Of course, party members could share Materia as needed. I think it is a cool idea, and while it would need a bit of readapting to the tabletop, it is worth exploring. It could be a great way for building up certain party dynamics if you know what you're doing.
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Nov 25, 2012 12:00
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Classes actually make balance easier to achieve by making sure that anybody who wants to fill a particular niche can not only do it well, but that they will do it better than others. The problem is when there's classes that focus in things the game doesn't revolve about, and when, in trying to make generalists keep up with specialists, the former excel at everything instead of being okay. You can still have an effects-based game while using classes, they just don't have to be the traditional ones. Rather than specific things such as Fighter or Wizard have your classes be general roles such as Defender or Striker.
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Nov 27, 2012 13:01
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Doc Hawkins posted:What the gently caress. I guess it is true in the sense that it made a number of poorly-done executions of said archetypes popular. It did not come up with elves or orcs but it sure came up with the boring versions of them that are everywhere in nerd fiction. Nerd fiction still isn't television and literature as a whole though. AlphaDog posted:I don't think it's intellectually lazy to say that many gamers are likely to judge and fantasy game classes against those of D&D. Do you really need the grognard seal of approval though? Or more importantly, do you actually want grognards in your userbase?
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Nov 28, 2012 21:27
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Yeah my first thought when I read the cash incentive was that it would probably get frustrating in a group where everyone's style doesn't revolve around the same things. Missing out on a fate chip is no big deal, missing out on XP can be annoying, missing out on cash (even if they had already spent it) feels terrible. My groups tend to be very diverse, which keeps the game swinging in different directions. Something like this would not just work against that, it'd be upsetting to anyone who wants to have fun but is implicitly being told their ideas aren't the ones worth money.
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Dec 9, 2012 21:43
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Blasphemeral posted:I'm not sure how to feel about this concern. I've been in and run games for groups where everybody wanted different things from the game. In those situations, the group was strained on a normal basis as-is by its very nature. I've learned to recognize this situation, and when it happens, either diffuse it by bringing everyone onto the same page, or discontinue it to play with alternative group configurations to allow everyone to have more fun. Certainly my mechanic wouldn't work in those scenarios, but I propose that those scenarios are already more prone to failure, and therefore my mechanic failing there is more of a symptom or a catalyst than a cause. Depends on the kind of game. I agree that if you want to try a game with a specific focus then it is better talked out (If everyone wants to play Dread but Bob hates horror/jenga for instance) but if I just want to sit down with my friends and have dirty casualgaming fun then kicking one or more of them out is counterproductive. At the same time, I wouldn't try this kind of mechanic in a more serious game with people other than my close group of friends either, because as Rexides said it encourages doing more of the same in the long term instead of trying out different things. The feedback loop may be positive, but it is still a loop. I get the impression that this does great at getting people to reach out of the passenger's seat and be more proactive and interested in the game, which is awesome and always has my support, but doesn't do much for groups that already do that outside of giving them a way to game the system. If I were to implement something like this, I'd do intangible rewards as you suggest but also have a rotating per-session judge instead of voting. It is a different dynamic, but also encourages everyone to get a better grasp of the things each other likes, and keeps things dynamic. e: I'm mostly talking from the perspective of campaign play, because oneshots are a different matter. GimmickMan fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Dec 11, 2012 |
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Dec 11, 2012 02:13
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amount was chosen as a token value. The reason I'm fronting it rather than asking people to chip in was to make it entirely voluntary and remove most possibilities of antagonism. I (the GM) don't even vote on it, to prevent cries of favoritism.
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Dread is one of, if not the, most visceral and better designed RPGs I know of. I always die early because I suck, but it is still great fun.Doc Hawkins posted:Yeah, but that's just it: what we call 'the one shot' should be the default assumption of modern, inclusive design. Most people's schedules can only accomodate group games which are playable start-to-finish in less than two. Only a few time-rich folks will feel the urge to play Twilight Imperium or Mega-Risk or the default 'yeah just do stuff until things happen i guess' roleplaying campaign. It is true that unless you're playing online, which is its own can of worms scheduling-wise, arranging for frequent meetups is obviously difficult and making it the default does not encourage newer blood. But we can combine the best of both worlds with Episodic storytelling, which has most of the benefits of traditional campaigns (stable cast, overarching plot, etc.) and makes it that much easier to incorporate or sideline new/missing players as needed. Lots of modern games enable this pretty well, it is mostly the old school stuff that doesn't. It is also very easy to sell people on that idea. Yeah, you can play the leads of a movie, but you could also have your very own running series. It is still not as easy to work with as oneshots, for obvious reasons, but it sure as hell isn't intended to be a 20-30 level journey either.
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Dec 11, 2012 06:18
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Note that by 'episodic' I mean less 'oneshot' and more 'serial', but yeah we're pretty much in agreement otherwise. I personally really like the idea of taking a self-contained session as a seed and going from there a lot, and FATE's background stories are my favorite character creation idea ever.
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Dec 12, 2012 02:14
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Cracking combination attacks (much like adapting nearly every thing from one medium or genre to another) boils down to finding what makes them tick: That being 1) They are stronger than multiple characters acting individually, and 2) They stand out as these really flashy moves different from the rest. What this means is that you don't want them to be buyable abilities because you're taking away from their uniqueness and making them a thing that will be repeated a lot due to their superiority. The way I do it is let everyone spend a Genre/Fate/Action Point, pick two Weapons/Powers/Spells and have everyone spend a turn to mix them up in a way that won't make the system have an aneurysm. Having one of the combined powers play the 'lead' keeping its special properties while the others mostly provide bonuses is a way to do it without making most rules systems explode. This makes sure that whenever they happen they're always special, and are perfectly justified in being more powerful. Plus you can improvise them on the spot, which is cinematic as gently caress. This sounds kind of abstract but I've put it to use here and its been working fine so far.
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Dec 21, 2012 01:55
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The Deleter posted:Robots! I'll second reading up on Chris Perrin's MECHA and Bliss Stage, they are reviewed over at the Fatal & Friends thread, too. There's links to the individual posts to help browsing it. The other one game which does aim for more mechanical depth to go along with your drama, and is generic enough to be useful inspiration, is Giant Guardian Generation. It is designed to be cinematic yet tactical as gently caress, and could very likely pull off CTech without the suck as written. Given you want an Apocalypse powered-like thing, I recommend you don't look at the mechanics themselves but more at the distilled genre conventions and how they're applied to a game environment.
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Jan 2, 2013 16:26
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I think Bliss Stage is terribly designed for a multitude of reasons (most of which are mechanical in nature) but I am still seconding the suggestion because its rules are entirely about making the stuff out of combat matter, while still having combat as a really important thing, and it is one of the few games that at least tries to do that.
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Jan 3, 2013 07:25
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Using HP as MP is actually a great idea. It does not punish players for doing cool things, because HP is irrelevant until you lose the last point (or until you become bloodied, or your wounds go from superficial to critical, or the equivalent for the system at hand). The most important thing is that it adds a risk factor. You can't rely on your powers to solve everything for you because damage adds up fast, so you can afford to make powers extra good and worth the use. The final result is that powers are special, because just using them adds tension and makes things more exciting. That said this an issue of tone rather than mechanics. If your system is about superheroes then you do not want to make spiderman accidentally bleed himself to death while webslinging on the way to work because that would be ridiculous. If you want a game where powers supplement mundane skills rather than a game where they're the bread and butter, then HP as MP works well enough. edit: In the context of the AEUD System, then yes, it encourages boring 15 minute 1-battle days. But that's a problem with AEUD and D&D rest systems rather than with using health as a resource. GimmickMan fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Mar 1, 2013 |
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Mar 1, 2013 21:21
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WhitemageofDOOM posted:Making something "risky" is by definition punishing someone for using it. Your definition of making something "punishing" is very broad then. By your logic the simple act of making someone roll the dice instead of saying yes is punishing them, because you are adding an element of risk, when it really is an opportunity to reward someone for using their resources properly or to create an interesting scenario from failure. Giving characters a limited skillset instead of omnipotence is not about punishing the ones who don't autosucceed at the thing they want to be good at, it is about giving them the choice of where they want their agency to lie and and how much they're willing to pay for it. Your HP/Surges/Action Points/Whatever are a resource to manage at a micro level in the same way your skill/stat modifiers (and anything you can grab with XP or the equivalent) are resources at a macro level. quote:Let's ask ourselves a question, if using this ability going to on average conserve more hitpoints than if i spammed auto attack? In a vacuum? Yes. But vacuums are boring. In play things don't go as planned. You take more damage than you thought you would because dice are still random, or your character really cares about success so you go ahead and put yourself at risk when from a pure tactical point of view you really shouldn't anyway. Solid math is crucial to good game design, but it is not why games are fun. Giving players an incentive to make things more intense is, usually, going to lead to more fun than not doing so. quote:All daily resources encourage 15 minute workdays, to be more pedantic about it all strategic resources in non-strategic situations encourage 15 minute workdays. Agreed. Which is why more games need to distinguish strategic resources from non-strategic ones. Daily resources in games that don't have any real mechanical limitation on abusing daily rests are a bad idea.
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Mar 1, 2013 22:40
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Making your limited resources be autosuccesses is a great start. It basically cuts out the usual middlemen in RPGs and asks the question if you want this to be done right, no questions asked, but isn't anything you wouldn't be able to do if you run out of fuel anyway. A way to get around daily resource abuse without too much effort is to make things work on a per dungeon crawl basis rather than AEUD. So it does not matter how well you slept in the Wizard's pocket dimension - you are still inside a dungeon and cannot rest properly until you go back to town. But every time you leave the dungeon and come back (probably stronger and better equipped) you find the remaining enemies have gotten tougher too, this can mean anything from a few extra disposable minions to bonus action points to the boss going up a level. If you use traps, the traps have extra countermeasures set, and so on. Mikan posted:Shin Megami Tensei uses HP to fuel special abilities just fine. You have to be careful to get the math right and you should probably have some way of getting it back, but it is a cool risk and a perfectly valid design tool. Collateral in Last Stand basically uses HP to fuel special abilities, or at least carries that risk, and it owns. Being one of the few JRPG franchises with a system that doesn't make random battles a boring grind, I know I've stolen a lot of ideas from Megaten for my games and recommend doing the same.
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Mar 1, 2013 23:20
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Nearly every game that inflicts conditions on enemies (like the aforementioned 4E) has ways to set up someone else for a super attack with one of your own, though it is not so much a specific rule as just a thing that happens. If you mean combining multiple moves together into one then my game has Synchro Attacks which do exactly that.
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Jul 9, 2013 16:02
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The simple answer is that damage helps you win, while healing helps you not lose. As long as both use relatively similar values (ie dealing/healing 1d6 x Level or whatever) the former will always be better than the latter. Thus what you want to do is optimize the damage you do in battle and leave the healing to the aftermath of the encounter. The long answer is that you could plan a game so that healing strategies are better than DPS strategies, but you don't want to because healing is the most boring thing ever. When you heal someone you're not making exciting things happen, you're undoing exciting things that happened. There's probably a way to make a game where healing in battle is the optimum use of your turns and not have it be a super boring game to play but I haven't figured out how yet.
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Sep 25, 2013 05:11
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I dislike binary pass/fail as much as the next guy but the alternatives also have their own problems. I honestly have found binary pass/fail with admissions for failing forwards and exceptional successes here and there much more practical to run with. Binary pass/fail rewards a more methodical and careful style of play, while Failing Forwards rewards you for rushing full speed ahead and taking on as few consequences on the way to your goal as possible. Outright codifying a die result as always Success with Consequences has effects on the narrative that work well for some styles of fiction and bad for others. When the Players are aware that nothing is impossible they will act differently than when the rules say some things are terrible ideas no matter what you try. By the same logic where someone will always attempt Flex Diplomacy on the King, a codified failing forwards means the PCs outright choose to Stab the King and Rule the Kingdom Ourselves because they'll pull through somehow. I admit this example is a bit of a strawman, but the underlying logic is clear, I hope. If you make things like Flex Diplomacy and Failing Forwards strictly the realm of GM fiat (but you encourage their use for the purposes of funhaving) you get the best of both worlds. Players with no better options will try desperate gambles and think creatively, but won't try crazy things as the default.
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Nov 27, 2013 23:28
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Splicer posted:Having to choose between short term benefits and long term character advancement is one of the biggest criticisms people hold against the Deadlands system. And basically every system like it. Every time you write a game where some PCs earn XP and the others don't, a panda dies.
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Feb 1, 2014 16:57
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PublicOpinion posted:I haven't run or played it yet, but Tenra Bansho Zero uses the same pool of consumables for character advancement, 'luck' point mechanics, and maybe more things I'm forgetting but is also based around one-shots over campaigns to minimize character advancement as an issue. It helps that in TBZ if you earn too much XP, you die.  It is a bit more complicated than that but that is the gist of it. TBZ is the closest I've ever seen the idea of sacrificing XP for temporary benefits not being just plain bad.
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Feb 2, 2014 00:22
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