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victrix posted:4e even uses this in a slightly awkward manner - there are moves that do something on a failure, so you're rolling to see which of two different resolution methods you use, gated on an initial success/not-as-good-a-success roll. Hah! 4e uses it in a slightly awkward fashion twice over. Skill challenges are turning a collection of binary success/fail task based resolutions into a granular challenge based resolution system. Which (given the standard of D&D next we've seen so far) is more than we can expect going forwards.
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Jun 14, 2013 02:31
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victrix posted:On a somewhat unrelated tangent, I just realized the Lone Wolf gamebooks handled skills in a pretty cool way in general. Having a given skill would open up alternate actions or provide bonuses in various situations, but the skills were all much, much cooler than 'Bluff' or 'Sneak'. Though I suppose in that case they were more class powers than what we'd think of a typical rpg systems skills that are trying to provide some sort of mechanical framework for interacting with a huge variety of situations in a relatively 'normal' or 'logical' manner. I love the Lone Wolf game books but I can see it being somewhat harder as a GM to keep track of every players list of available skills and then suggesting courses of action appropriate to their skill-sets for given situations rather than having the players use their available skills in a narrative fashion to overcome challenges. On the other hand I'm very much in favor of class/role type powers to take the place of super-generic skills... I prefer things like "Thief", "Warrior", "Alchemist" or "Woodsman" to be ranked skills that the player can choose to apply as they see fit to the current situation. If a player has "Thief" as a general skill then I think it should be up to them to use that skill in an appropriate manner in the game, i.e. "I use my years of training as a thief to sneak up silently behind the guard to strike him down before he can raise an alarm" (which is also something that someone who has "Woodsman/Hunter" could probably do as well, but a woodsman would probably be a lousy lockpicker and a thief might not last long trying to survive off of potentially poisonous plants in the forest so each skill has its own niche to fill as well). EDIT This post came out pretty rambling but I guess what I'm saying is that I like the cut of your gib and that Lone Wolf/RPG Game-Books are one of my preferred sources for idea mining for games too. Bob Quixote fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Jun 14, 2013 |
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Jun 14, 2013 02:38
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Yeah that's why I was asking about rpgs that have skills that say 'take this skill, then you can do these things' (which are, broadly, class powers, just framed differently conceptually). There's nothing wrong with skills that require gm/party consensus to use (they'd slot right into Dungeon World fine... that might be interesting to pursue if I feel like being creative in the DW thread  ), but a set of skills that have rules attached is an interesting concept to me.Which sounds so obvious it's bugging me that I can't think of any obvious rpgs that use them. edit: Also I like your idea of professions as skills, because it implies broad competence in a set of logically related skills, and it makes perfect sense in terms of both character backstory and development. It's the sort of thing I'd like to see in a 'build your class' rpg that you start out very simple and gradually fill in your concept as you play, granting you an ever growing list of capabilities without overwhelming you with analysis paralysis or really lengthy character creation. Even something as zany as instead of 'going up a level', you 'reveal more of your backstory' and it literally slots in a new set of skills, training, ability, or whatever to your character. Why didn't you know that during the previous session? Shush! It's neat. victrix fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Jun 14, 2013 |
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Jun 14, 2013 02:45
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victrix posted:edit: Also I like your idea of professions as skills, because it implies broad competence in a set of logically related skills, and it makes perfect sense in terms of both character backstory and development. Professions as skills just always made more sense to me than the super-granular way that D&D handles things. Most people don't train to work on "Balance" and "Search/Spot", but heighten these skills as facets of training for a particular profession (which is what Class skills are for, but the way slots are assigned and their numbers is a total clusterfuck imo). Classes are "easier" since they put you in a specific role right off the bat that you don't have to think too much about, but I prefer the idea of skill/profession based character creation since you can still emulate the structures of a class based game (Ranger = primarily Warrior/Woodsman/Nature-Magic skill spread) but allows you to be more nuanced in how you want your particular character to play. Do you want to be sort of Thiefy but mostly Fighty? Pretty Magical but also kind of Charismatic? A decent Sailor and expert Marksman? If you have a broad enough list of professions/skills/competencies then you can ensure that players can take different groups of skills and all still remain useful since each profession would have multiple broad uses instead of extremely specific ones.
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Jun 14, 2013 05:58
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victrix posted:WH by mechanics (literal cards that say 'if you succeed EXTRA WELL do this, if you gently caress up EXTRA BAD do this'). Check the OP of the WFRP3E thread for more info!
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Jun 14, 2013 19:03
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Chopping a dudes head off while stabbing yourself in the face is good game design 
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Jun 14, 2013 19:17
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victrix posted:Chopping a dudes head off while stabbing yourself in the face is good game design
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Jun 14, 2013 19:23
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The problem with using professions as skills is that when you're standing watch, you might be able to justify that your profession required good observation skills... but often that will be a stretch and then the DM has to adjudicate and it's a bit weird all around for the DM to be deciding a fact about your character, or even for you to be deciding this fact about your character at this point in time when you have a vested interest. Burning Wheel does it best by having lifepaths and skill points. That system is amazing. I wish I could steal it for my game, but it doesn't really work there. Also I want to bitch here because I (finally) thought of a better name for my game than Sacred BBQ. I wanted to call it Beyond the Walls, only to find that there's some loving retroclone with almost exactly that name already. And some kind of setting fluff book with that name too. Man, why am I so loving bad at names? I guess I could just do "Over the walls" or "Outside the Walls" but that's not the same.
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Jun 14, 2013 20:00
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"Ad Murum"
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Jun 14, 2013 20:25
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"Beyond the X": Beyond the Gate Beyond the Dome Beyond the Citadel Beyond the Barricade ... can you hear the people sing? Beyond the Prison Beyond the Confines Beyond Containment Beyond the Cell Beyond the Formula "X the Walls": Past the Walls Breaching the Walls Departing the Walls Penetrating the Walls Scaling the Walls
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Jun 14, 2013 20:37
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Penetrating the Gate 
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Jun 14, 2013 20:58
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Jimbozig posted:I (finally) thought of a better name for my game than Sacred BBQ. I always liked the idea [that someone else came up with] to just call it SBBQ and pretend it was some really obscure and deep, meaningful Latin acronym, like INRI or something.
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Jun 14, 2013 21:59
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On one hand, TORG and GURPS are terribly names. But FATE worked out pretty well. Speaking of FATE, I feel like their version skills works well for dealing with the problems currently being discussed. You get a broad competency, suggestions for what it does and does not affect, and you can generally customize it. They're less reliant on fiat compared to Aspects, but they don't seem to cripple anybody with over-specialization. Am I off base here?
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Jun 15, 2013 16:32
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Going off of some previous discussion of making chargen non-front loaded, I wrote this: I AM KILLBOT It could use more moves.
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Jun 18, 2013 06:50
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PublicOpinion posted:Going off of some previous discussion of making chargen non-front loaded, I wrote this: Yeah, that's a pretty fantastic hack right there. Although: * when adding to a stat, you should add to a stat related to the action (this doesn't specify). Also, they should probably get a max (so people don't end up with +4 to one stat). * "token" should have a better, more killbot-y name. * Focus Fire is kind of weird - "bust a hole in it" doesn't make a huge amount of sense if your target isn't a wall or door. * How can you harm yourself or your fellow killbots if you're all goddamn indestructible? Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Jun 18, 2013 |
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Jun 18, 2013 20:22
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Thanks! I've updated it to try and address your points: here. -dropped the "harm yourself/other killbots" and replaced with "expend vital resources" and "bring down the wrath of Management". What's Management? Not sure yet, but that sounds like a golden opportunity for GM moves -stat bonuses are now to the stat used for the triggering roll, with a +2 cap (+3 for the last advance) -tokens are now given specific names, and are unique to the token-granting move. Since a character gets two advanced moves ever, I don't think it'll be too fiddly. -Focus Fire replaced with Demo Man. Not entirely sold on the options I give with the move, but I think it better gets across my original intent of "if you want to break something, it's gonna break" Additonally, added a third advanced move for each stat Next things to do: GM page. Agenda, principles, moves. I specifically want this to just be a page. Scenario 1, "Laboratory Twelve": the core scenario. Killbots wake up in the abandoned ruins of their birthplace, and are driven by their creator's last orders and their developing independence. Laboratory is full of other killbots, rogue crazy-killbots, scavengers, and the creator's other project: some kind of horrifying flesh-beasts. Also want this to fit on one page. Scenario 2, "Happy Birthday Doctor": the killbots must organize a surprise party.
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Jun 19, 2013 07:14
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PublicOpinion posted:Scenario 2, "Happy Birthday Doctor": the killbots must organize a surprise party. I... um... What... Okay. I AM KILLBOT is officially the best game ever.
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Jun 19, 2013 07:29
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Ratpick posted:I... um... Despite the fact that the game is now about robots built for murdering, the initial seed of I AM KILLBOT was my scrapped submission for the diceless non-combat-focused RPG contest. That one was about wizards trying to funnel their massive cosmic powers into completing mundane tasks, and my plan for the sample adventure would be to have the mage-lords try and throw a birthday party for a little girl. I'll probably want to leave the little girls out of this one because of the massive potential for collateral damage if someone has a bad run with the dice, but the initial idea of providing the players with a wide variety of overkill and watching the trainwreck of problems still appeals to me, and the AW '7-9: succeed with cost' really works well for that. A bunch of the advanced moves turn a 6- into 'succeed with even greater cost', so there's even more opportunity for players to blow up the bridge they're trying to cross or release a stampede of goats or flood the vents with nerve gas. It's funny, but as soon as I wrote down 'HP: irrelevant' it completely changed the way I was thinking about the game. Combat was no longer this special thing (which is already half taken care of by the core system), but being opposed by a group of armed bug-men was a challenge in the same style as navigating a rickety bridge or getting a good price on scrap copper. For this to work, I'm going to need to make sure that the players have lots of things that aren't health to take away. I recall a grogs.txt post talking about how now "everyone gets a pony" and ever since I've wanted to run a game where literally every character is entrusted with a pony, and then the ponies will be threatened at every turn.
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Jun 19, 2013 07:55
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PublicOpinion posted:I recall a grogs.txt post talking about how now "everyone gets a pony" and ever since I've wanted to run a game where literally every character is entrusted with a pony, and then the ponies will be threatened at every turn.
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Jun 19, 2013 13:01
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4) One of the KILLBOTS is secretly E-e-e-evil, and the other KILLBOTS must find out who it is before the Management finds out. 5) A gang of incompetent thugs attempts to rob a jewelry store while the KILLBOTS are out performing community service.
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Jun 20, 2013 02:24
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Wow. Killbot is like some bizzaro-world Paranoia. It's a game where 'Murder the entire U.S. army' is a cake-walk mission, whereas an actual cake-walk is a high-stakes no-holds-barred nigh-impossible death march that might leave the entire continent depopulated.
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Jun 20, 2013 10:36
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I'm probably going to have to run a one-shot of I AM KILLBOT at my local con next month. I really like the idea of having the killbots arrange a surprise birthday party, but I also kind of want to have the killbots run a pizza delivery service.
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Jun 21, 2013 00:39
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6- KILLBOTS are asked by their new highschool friend Gerald to prevent his neighbor from going to the prom with that no-good ragamuffin Ron from out of town. Has anyone attempted to house-rule DREAD? I have some ideas for it but I want to hear if it has ever been done before first.
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Jun 21, 2013 00:42
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I'm not sure I've included enough stuff in the scenarios for GMs who aren't used to *World stuff and willing to improv like crazy, but I'm not sure what additional guidance to offer there. Updated 'I am killbot'
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Jun 21, 2013 03:16
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Are there any rpgs with a reasonable level of mechanical crunch that have no 'GM' role as such? Only 'players'.
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Jun 21, 2013 04:41
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victrix posted:Are there any rpgs with a reasonable level of mechanical crunch that have no 'GM' role as such? Only 'players'. Depends on what you mean by 'reasonable crunch'. Polaris is a fun game that sort of rotates PC/GM responsibilities every fifteen minutes or less, and while it certainly has stats you roll (2 of them, to be exact), and other stuff like possessions and relationships, it's not particularly fiddly. Or you might consider it super-crunchy, given that conflicts are highly formalised, and the entire game is almost ritualised.
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Jun 23, 2013 12:04
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victrix posted:Are there any rpgs with a reasonable level of mechanical crunch that have no 'GM' role as such? Only 'players'.
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Jun 23, 2013 13:02
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victrix posted:Are there any rpgs with a reasonable level of mechanical crunch that have no 'GM' role as such? Only 'players'. I can think of no RPG that matches that description straight out of the box, but I do recall reading about GMless zero-sum FATE a number of years ago. FATE is, depending on the exact version, light-to-heavy crunch, and with FATE Core in the works it should be easy to pull off. Basically, every player starts with a certain number of Fate points and players can use said points to narrate new things about the scene OR invoke their aspects. There are basically two approaches you could do: either all spent Fate points go to a shared pot or players trade with Fate points by giving the points to whoever's character they narrate something against. If using the shared pot of Fate points, players could take points out of the pot by compelling their own aspects, and if using the idea of players trading from their own pools of Fate points compelling aspects would be something that players could do to each other. Obviously it'd need work, but I could see it being done provided you agreed on the exact rules with your group. Basically, any game that already allows for player-driven narration with meta-game resources could be hacked into a GMless game. I could see it being done in Old School Hack, with awesome points being the currency that players use to add trouble into the game.
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Jun 23, 2013 18:11
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I am fond of mechanics that force the GM to leverage certain finite resources in order to accomplish traditional "adversarial DM" goals. Mostly you tend to see this in GMless games, like Fiasco, where a sort of good end/bad end resource is used as narrative currency. D&D has been trying to do something a little like this with Challenge Ratings and such, but I think it would work better in a less crunchy system. I was experimenting a while ago with a project I may pick back up once I have a working computer at home (lol) that used a kind of Karma engine. Player characters had a shared resource pool called "Hope," which they could expend to give themselves exceptional boosts in power or convenience. However, each expenditure of Hope would give the GM a resource called "Despair", which he could use to induce generally negative changes in the world. There would be something of an economy of exchange in place, whereby players get back some Hope, along with some XP, by overcoming the influence of the GM's Despair. The area it breaks down in design-wise is balance. It's pretty easy to plonk down rules like, "You can spend 1 Hope to give yourself an extra die of effect to your attack. You can spend 3 Hope to have a single non-supernatural adversary undergo a sudden change of heart." It's less easy to answer the question, "How many Despair does the GM need to spend to create a plague of zombies in a particular town?", or, "What is the extent of power the DM can exert to challenge player characters at the cost of 0 Despair?"
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Jun 24, 2013 15:01
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I have never played it but I have seen Burning Empires described as working like that. The GM isn't just playing as the impartial arbiter of reality, he's playing the aliens and he should be playing to win.
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Jun 24, 2013 16:32
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deadly_pudding posted:The area it breaks down in design-wise is balance. It's pretty easy to plonk down rules like, "You can spend 1 Hope to give yourself an extra die of effect to your attack. You can spend 3 Hope to have a single non-supernatural adversary undergo a sudden change of heart." Yeah, I can't think of a game offhand that pulls back the field of engagement this far; the two GM budget games I'm most familiar with, Agon (http://www.agon-rpg.com/) and Rune (http://www.atlas-games.com/rune/) are both riffs on the D&D mold of picaresque self-contained setpiece quests. They do, however, have a certain amount of give and take built in; Rune specifies a certain amount of loot and friendly shrines per unit of bad stuff, and Agon partially refreshes the GM's stock of discretionary points (used to buff monsters on the fly) when the party decides to rest. So maybe balancing on the narrative level is the way to go-- for every sudden necroplague, there should be a divine intervention somewhere else?
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Jun 24, 2013 22:00
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Parkreiner posted:Yeah, I can't think of a game offhand that pulls back the field of engagement this far; the two GM budget games I'm most familiar with, Agon (http://www.agon-rpg.com/) and Rune (http://www.atlas-games.com/rune/) are both riffs on the D&D mold of picaresque self-contained setpiece quests. Yeah, I have it doing something like that in reverse. There's an initial baseline amount of Despair already inflicted on the world from the get-go, and the GM has a small discretionary pool besides that. The idea is that, in terms of a narrative arc, every time the PCs solve a problem, a new one pops up somewhere, provided they had to hand some Hope over to the GM Despair pool. This goes on in a back and forth fashion with, eventually, the Despair pool dwindling compared to PC advancement. That is the point at which the world could reliably be saved. Basically, Despair needs to get a lot more bang for its buck than Hope does, or one token of Hope needs to be exchanged for like 10 despair, just because of necessary granularity. In either case, the idea is that, aside from the basic worldbuilding of the setting, the GM pretty exlusively introduces bad things to the world. PCs can either use their regular available abilities to deal with it, or chip in their Hope to make their jobs easier by introducing good things to the world. The saving grace is that the system is not at all crunchy. Everybody has 4 stats that govern everything, plus "HP" in the form of Willpower, and a handful of pretty abstract skills and powers. A lot of threats can be represented by the same stat block with a different set of powers, so I won't need to populate some huge bestiary with individual creatures and their Despair costs.
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Jun 25, 2013 00:57
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deadly_pudding posted:It's less easy to answer the question, "How many Despair does the GM need to spend to create a plague of zombies in a particular town?", or, "What is the extent of power the DM can exert to challenge player characters at the cost of 0 Despair?" deadly_pudding posted:Basically, Despair needs to get a lot more bang for its buck than Hope does, or one token of Hope needs to be exchanged for like 10 despair, just because of necessary granularity.
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Jun 25, 2013 16:33
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Splicer posted:I think this could be solved by making Despair less granular. About how much Hope would Players be throwing about per session/character arc? It's not super far into design  Probably a normal campaign starts the PCs off with a collective pool of 3 Hope per player, and a reminder that they should avoid spending it all on one adventure, it goes straight into the GM's Despair pool when they spend it, and he generally gets a lot of mileage out of it. As for how much they're expected to spend, a lot of Hope's uses are in cleaning up messes. I'm thinking the most expensive individual expenditure of Hope is 3 all at once. That's for things like forcing a sudden change of heart in a non-supernatural adversary, striking a Serious Damage effect off of one character (You accumulate major status effects, basically, as a result of being defeated in combat. They come in Slight and Serious flavors, and the Serious ones are pretty awful), or otherwise contriving a major narrative door-opener into existence if the characters have gotten themselves in too deep. Smaller costs are Finishing Move types of deals, where you can chip 1 Hope to bump one of somebody's Powers up a notch. This can be important if PCs are being KO'd and you need to end a Scene really fast. Players can expect to get back a pretty significant amount of Hope by solving a problem in the world, proportionate to the amount of Despair it took to create that problem. They may also reap one or two Hope here and there by just helping people out, if you're lucky enough to have the sort of gamers who care about that sort of thing, but the main payout of Hope, and the only payout of XP, comes from solving the root problem brought about by Despair. Basically, the GM is encouraged to give out Hope when appropriate, and is kind of backhandedly rewarded for doing so because he's providing himself with potential future ammo. On the GM end, I'm thinking that the effects of Despair on the world are mostly preemptive. Spend Despair to create a bad situation in this area, spend Despair to worsen the situation in this other area. The GM has the option of spending probably way less efficient Despair to create immediate changes like Hope does. I haven't gone past the "vague idea cloud" stage on the GM side because it's kind of a rabbit hole. I'm thinking that, in general, some baseline amount of Despair is sufficient to create either: a relatively large number of mundane adversaries, or one really unhelpful local organization, such as corrupt officials, or gangsters, or whatever; a sustaining ambient population of "lesser monsters", ie anything within a kind of low-grade range like zombies or a cult; a fixed number of "regular monsters", something a little more challenging to the players, like a pack of werewolves; one single "big monster", basically a boss like a demon or a powerful psychic; one "level" of dangerous environment, which is basically carte blanche for the GM to include certain hazards that aren't necessarily geographically or dimensionally normal. Stacking more than one of these things onto the same scenario just increases the Despair cost, and the GM is meant to keep things pretty open-ended. It's largely a narrative game, rather than a simulationist one. My concern about Despair is that it probably needs another level of granularity to account for the GM throwing in monkey wrenches along the lines of sudden unrelated problems for the PCs, situation turning out to be way worse than initially thought, or stuff like "THIS ISN'T EVEN MY FINAL FORM". I don't wanna derail this thread too much 
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Jun 25, 2013 19:01
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I was wondering, is it possible to make an adventure game capable of campaign play using only 1d6? Seems like a fun experiment, does anyone know of any games that could provide some ideas?
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Jun 30, 2013 15:39
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Pillow Fort Squire posted:I was wondering, is it possible to make an adventure game capable of campaign play using only 1d6? Seems like a fun experiment, does anyone know of any games that could provide some ideas? Risus uses only six-sided dice and it's free. Also, the base system of the *World games is 2d6+stat. Dungeon World mixes in other polyhedrons, but that need not be the case in your game, but it might be problematic if you go with D&D style hit points, because everyone rolling d6 for damage may not give enough variety.
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Jun 30, 2013 16:17
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Pillow Fort Squire posted:I was wondering, is it possible to make an adventure game capable of campaign play using only 1d6? Seems like a fun experiment, does anyone know of any games that could provide some ideas? Check out Sacred BBQ. I wrote it. It's based on 4e and only uses 1d6 (except if you have advantage or disadvantage. Then it's 2d6 keep highest or lowest.) If you really wanted to use just 1d6, you could just make advantage a +1 and disadvantage a -1 instead. It changes the curve a bit but not so much that it breaks anything. The idea of Sacred BBQ is to take D&D4e and simplify all the pointless obfuscating math, speed up combat, and replace the garbage skill system with something better. Edit: the 1d6 thing was easy. There's nothing in D&D that absolutely needs to be measured in 5% increments and you get the feeling of much more granularity from having multiple levels of success than you do from having bigger dice. On any given roll in SBBQ there are between 4 and 6 possible results, while in D&D there are just 2 (or 3 if you can crit). Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jun 30, 2013 |
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Jun 30, 2013 16:40
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Pillow Fort Squire posted:I was wondering, is it possible to make an adventure game capable of campaign play using only 1d6? Seems like a fun experiment, does anyone know of any games that could provide some ideas? If I recall correctly, Gumshoe games and their relatives (Dying Earth, Trail of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, Ashen Stars, Mutant City Blues, etc) all use 1d6 only. However, actual rolling of the die is kinda downplayed, as most of the actual rules are about resource management (spending skill points for special effects or to reroll the die).
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Jun 30, 2013 17:20
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I believe My Name Is Kaz and medibot are actually working on a game with the premise of no numbers greater than six. They mention it sporadically on their M:TG podcast.
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Jun 30, 2013 20:06
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Good looking out dudes. What about diceless? What's going on in that department that isn't nobilis?Jimbozig posted:Check out Sacred BBQ. I wrote it. It's based on 4e and only uses 1d6 (except if you have advantage or disadvantage. Then it's 2d6 keep highest or lowest.) If you really wanted to use just 1d6, you could just make advantage a +1 and disadvantage a -1 instead. It changes the curve a bit but not so much that it breaks anything. This is amazing, good job man. I don't think I even need to attempt it, you already got it.
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Jul 1, 2013 10:59
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