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Hyper Crab Tank posted:I think it would be a shame not to include the iconic skills and abilities from the Persona series, and I would be disappointed with the system if it didn't let me, eventually, just up and Megidolaon a motherfucker. That being said, Persona has always worked on the principle of including almost every permutation of element, damage, area of effect etc. as a separate skill. You have Agi, Agilao, Agidyne, Maragi, Maragion, Maragidyne... repeat for every element. Including the physical ones. On one hand, I expect a Persona game to have those skills, but on the other, it makes some of them feel kind of... mechanical and repetitive, and just having a massive matrix of like, "this is what a [target] [element] [strength] spell is called" sounds really boring. That makes sense to me, yeah. What I'm thinking of for skills is separating them out into "domains," and then having some flexibility within them. If your Persona has the Fire domain, you gain the "Agi" basic attack, which is something like four times per scene (not a true at-will--I want weapon attacks to be important even for pure "casters," because there will be effective weapons for every stat). You can expend two uses of it to make it hit a moderate area, which is "Maragi." As you gain levels, you're able to gain more uses of your Fire domain and more ways that you can use them, like dumping two uses into making the single-target version stronger ("Agilao") instead of AoE. That goes all the way up to being able to spend a certain amount of uses for Agidyne or Maragidyne, with Fire Boost/Amp as passive skills (feats). That said, I also think that might be too fiddly for my tastes. The other thing I was considering is finding some way to differentiate Agi, Agilao, Agidyne, and their Ma- versions beyond just how much damage they do. Like Agi is your basic fire attack, but Agilao isn't just a stronger Agi. Instead it's a once-per-scene (encounter) power that inflicts Burning. Or maybe Maragi is a fire AoE centered on the caster, while Maragidyne is a very powerful delayed blast fireball centered on a target. I like the idea of "building" Personas out of skill domains, but I'm not yet sure how I want to treat individual skills. I do also want to have domains that aren't available until higher tiers (domains that give you things like Power Charge or Mind Charge, attacks like Hassou Tobi or Agneyastra, the Almighty domain). Hama and Mudo might be difficult to deal with, too, but I think I might treat the lower levels of those skills more like banishment for Hama (think Color Spray) and curses for Mudo.
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Feb 10, 2015 15:19
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:Unearthed Arcana took a swing at that back in the day: http://www.systemreferencedocuments.org/resources/systems/pennpaper/dnd35/soveliorsage/unearthedSpellPoints.html
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Feb 10, 2015 15:38
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Haha, holy poo poo, look what I just found in a box under my computer desk! I remember this thing having a pretty bitching mapmaker program for its time (1996), and it also has RTFs of all the core AD&D2 books!
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Feb 10, 2015 15:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:This is a general design musing on healing and the "15-minute workday": how about just making combats self-contained? A game that does this well actually sounds kind of hard to design. Encounter powers need to be fairly situational and not just At-Wills-But-Better so that the first few rounds of every combat isn't you just going through them until they're all spent to get that early-combat advantage. Any time you just have one move that's Better than your other moves with no real downside to using it you lose all strategy until it's expended.
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Feb 10, 2015 15:41
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Chaotic Neutral posted:It's also worth considering that in an MMO, players can be regularly pushed to the edge of their capability, because it's easy to pick back up and have another go when the first one fails. In tabletop it's a lot harder to do, because overstepping that boundary means death, and that's at best a much larger time sink.. and rare is the encounter that can be done (or that players want to do) twice. I mean, it's not an absolute that failure should mean death, you could just force the party to retreat to their last base camp like mountaineers. Similarly, what if instead of a plot-foxused "tree of encounters" style design we went back to a hexcrawl-style design where the focus was on poking your nose into one of the many dank crypts in the countryside and seeing what happens? What would a storygame version of the World's Greatest Dungeon look like? What if we replaced the encounter tree that represents plot with an encounter map, where you'd map a character's want to some kind of appropriate encounter? I have a hunch PbtA-style Fronta are related to what I'm wondering, but I'm not really familiar with those.
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Feb 10, 2015 15:47
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Harrow posted:I like the idea of "building" Personas out of skill domains, but I'm not yet sure how I want to treat individual skills. I do also want to have domains that aren't available until higher tiers (domains that give you things like Power Charge or Mind Charge, attacks like Hassou Tobi or Agneyastra, the Almighty domain). Hama and Mudo might be difficult to deal with, too, but I think I might treat the lower levels of those skills more like banishment for Hama (think Color Spray) and curses for Mudo. Yeah, Hama and Mudo are super problematic because they embody "save or suck" to such an obscene degree. Have you ever played Persona Q? Naoto is widely considered way overpowered in that game because not only does she get both (Ma)hama(on) and (Ma)mudo(on) really early, it's nearly trivial to give her skill cards that boost her to a near-100% success rate on anything that isn't outright immune. Targeting everyone starting from about midway through the game. And you can offset the MP cost just by handing her a support Persona with a high MP buffer, so 99% of all fights just end in the first round at no cost. I think I like the basic idea of building up more "domain points" for lack of a better word and deciding on the fly whether you want to spend those on weaker but wider spells or stronger but more narrow ones. It's not the way the Persona games themselves do it, of course, but that shouldn't stop you from doing it. I wonder how well it translates to auxiliary effects though. I mean, it's easy to describe spells like Agi/Zio/Bufu/Garu this way, and maybe even Hama/Mudo, and you could make a good argument that physical skills like Sonic Punch or Brave Blade. But that leaves a significant portion of the available spells and skills. What domain is Tarukaja? Is it the same domain as Rakukaja and Sukukaja? What about Tarunda/Rakunda/Sukunda, or Dekaja/Dekunda, or even stuff like Tetrakarn/Makarukarn? I'm very curious to hear your ideas. Maybe you could make higher level domains work by letting you have the domains earlier, but the lower-level powers it grants are less flashy. Maybe Hama isn't granted until rank 5 or whatever of its domain, but at rank 1 you get Tarukaja or something. A big downside there is that it doesn't map well onto established Persona from the main games, which I think it something worth striving for... you don't want to be one of those games where it's impossible to reasonably stat up the characters from the main franchise. Also, what are your thoughts on the mechanical effects of the various arcana? They're such a big deal in the main series that I feel they should do something.
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Feb 10, 2015 15:49
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Plague of Hats posted:Haha, holy poo poo, look what I just found in a box under my computer desk! quote:I remember this thing having a pretty bitching mapmaker program for its time (1996), and it also has RTFs of all the core AD&D2 books! Man, it was a more innocent time back then, wasn't it?  Siivola posted:This is a bit of a tangent, but I find it a bit curious that the current default expectation in RPGs seems to be that the adventure hinges on each and every encounter: The stakes are such that you can only try an encounter once and if you gently caress up, welp, too bad, no backsies. If you're lucky the module writer's heard of "failing forward" so the adventure doesn't just screech into a halt because the orcs ended up catching the PCs. I've been going through a lot of the big Torg modules lately and they were loving terrible with that stuff. They were written not only with the assumption that the PCs would succeed at everything, but also with the assumption that they'd notice and understand certain clues, figure out some obscure puzzle, or that they'd come to the right conclusions that the writer needed them to for the adventure to progress.
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Feb 10, 2015 15:56
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Evil Mastermind posted:Wait, RTFs? Like, editable ones? Yyyyyyup! Got the three core books, Arms & Equipment, and some Tome or other. Their formatting is, eh, not completely awful. There're no embedded TOCs, and the text references have no page numbers. I recall you're supposed to use some exe to view them. I'd have to set up DOSbox or something to find out.
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Feb 10, 2015 16:11
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Yeah, Hama and Mudo are super problematic because they embody "save or suck" to such an obscene degree. Have you ever played Persona Q? Naoto is widely considered way overpowered in that game because not only does she get both (Ma)hama(on) and (Ma)mudo(on) really early, it's nearly trivial to give her skill cards that boost her to a near-100% success rate on anything that isn't outright immune. Targeting everyone starting from about midway through the game. And you can offset the MP cost just by handing her a support Persona with a high MP buffer, so 99% of all fights just end in the first round at no cost. Yep, I played Persona Q. I played on hard mode and Naoto still trivialized everything as soon as she got Impure Reach. It was nuts. The -kaja and -kunda spells are tricky, for sure. My original idea was to have an "Inspiration" domain for the -kaja spells and "Weakness" domain for -kunda spells but I think those domains become far too limiting as a result. What I might do with them is do what the Persona games do: spread them out. Maybe the Fists domain (that gives you things like Sonic Punch) gives you Tarukaja and Matarukaja, or the Knives domain gives you the Sukukaja spells (think Yosuke), but there's also an Inspiration domain if you want to be like Teddie and have all the buffs (plus some others that no other domain gets, like Heat Riser if you max out Inspiration). If you take Inspiration, you're a Bard, essentially. You'd probably pick two domains at character/Persona creation, and then you can gain another domain once per "tier," up to a final total of four or five domains. I'm thinking three tiers, a little like 13th Age (levels 1-4 are tier 1, 5-7 tier 2, and 8-10 tier 3), with each tier coming with a Persona "evolution" because you gain XP by growing as a person. I'm not too sure how I want to handle higher-tier domains. Almighty is easy--I like the idea of making that something you can't even add to your Persona until tier 2 or so. I also like the idea of putting the various Boost and Amp passives and skills like Power Charge and Mind Charge in higher-tier domains, so that even if you want to be the best fire mage ever you still need to level more than one domain to get there. I'm not sure about skills like God Hand, Hassou Tobi, Black Spot, Riot Gun, etc. I don't know if those should go into the normal physical domains as capstone skills, or if they should go into high-tier domains. If I decide to go with that "domain points" idea instead of an at-will/encounter/daily structure, that's another thing to consider--should a skill like God Hand draw from a different "domain points" pool than your Sonic Punch attacks? Should "domain points" just be consolidated into Soul Points and all of your skills draw from an SP pool that regains a certain amount of SP after each encounter/scene? As for the Arcana, I'm inclined to use them as how you gain XP and Soul Points (which I kind of want to treat like Fate Points or Bennies from Savage Worlds if they're not just used to pay for skills). You pick one at character creation and then use it to determine your character's Drives (what motivates them and keeps them going) and Weaknesses (the things their Shadow would embody if they ran into it). You gain a Soul Point for fulfilling one of your Drives, and you gain XP for confronting one of your Weaknesses.
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Feb 10, 2015 16:19
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Siivola posted:This is a bit of a tangent, but I find it a bit curious that the current default expectation in RPGs seems to be that the adventure hinges on each and every encounter: The stakes are such that you can only try an encounter once and if you gently caress up, welp, too bad, no backsies.
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Feb 10, 2015 16:34
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Lightning Lord posted:I swear I read somewhere that Lovecraft considered her to be "one of the good ones" There's an anecdote where HP and Sonia were at a party and HP was busy insulting Jews as he liked to do. When Sonia pointed out she was a Jew, he retorted that no, she was not a Jew, she was a Lovecraft.  i wonder why their marriage only lasted two years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrHgZRGLgo0
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Feb 10, 2015 16:48
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One thing I'd be careful about is putting too much "good stuff" in a few high-level domains. For instance, Power Charge is going to be useful for anyone who wants to use physical skills, which gives everyone a very strong reason to go for whatever domain that is in as fast as possible. It's important that other domains remain competitive, or you fall into that situation where yes, technically you can customize your characters, but in reality there's only one "right way" and everything else is just a trap because they don't give you these powerful vital spells.Harrow posted:I'm not sure about skills like God Hand, Hassou Tobi, Black Spot, Riot Gun, etc. Add to that Ragnarok, Niflheim, Thunder Reign, Panta Rhei, Samsara, Die For Me, Heat Riser, Debilitate, Black Viper and so on. Pretty much every school has some kind of super-powerful version at the very top. By the way, it would be nice to escape the trap of just scaling basic damage spells upwards ad infinitum. Throw in status ailments or utility spells. Come up with new ones, even. One thing I always thought a bit odd is how few upgrades there are for ailment-causing spells. Like, in Persona 4, Skull Cracker only has one upgraded version (Mind Slice), which is AoE and slightly more powerful... but when you're at the point when you're throwing around God Hands at people, you won't be using either version anymore. Okay, wild idea. Hear me out. I hope I'm not stepping on your toes too much: Skillcrafting. When you level up or whenever, you get to improve your skills either by making them more powerful, or adding descriptors to them appropriate to your domain, or some other effect. You'd get to start with a couple of them and get more as you level up. Heck, that could even be what Soul Points are if that phrase doesn't already have too much competition for it. For example, say your persona has, I dunno, Fire and Recovery domains. Get a "basic single target damage" template (available from the Fire/Ice/Wind/Elec domains), add your Fire descriptor to it and pool as much excess SP as you have into damage dice, and you've basically got Agi. Do the same with a healing template and you've got Dia. Next time you level up, you take away some of those SP and add the newly-unlocked "multi-target" effect and you've got Maragi. When you level up enough to also pick up the Elec domain, change it to that descriptor and you've got Zionga. Maybe throw in the poison ailment on top of it and you have a spell that doesn't exist in the Persona canon, but totally could. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 16:58
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Siivola posted:This is a bit of a tangent, but I find it a bit curious that the current default expectation in RPGs seems to be that the adventure hinges on each and every encounter: The stakes are such that you can only try an encounter once and if you gently caress up, welp, too bad, no backsies. If you're lucky the module writer's heard of "failing forward" so the adventure doesn't just screech into a halt because the orcs ended up catching the PCs. E: Also, re: Personachat, I'll be honest - all the things that make Persona.. well, Persona, aren't really wrapped up in its fine combat mechanics. If it were an SMT game, then absolutely, but if you're looking to emulate Persona you're probably better off going for something way more narrative/cinematic. Unless you're looking to simulate Tartarus, anyway. Chaotic Neutral fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 17:07
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Emong posted:Today I have been overcome with the strangest urge to acquire a copy of the DBZ RPG. Then I found out that it's 50 bucks on Amazon and that urge went away. I reviewed it for the FATAL & Friends thread. Short version, it's terrible and someone will actually cause the game to lock up on accident. It's also the only tabletop RPG I've seen where it's possible to freeze the game.
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Feb 10, 2015 17:12
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Yawgmoth posted:Well yes, this is the expectation because that's how reality works. If Strike Force Alpha fucks up and fails to assassinate their target (the encounter), they can't just call do-overs and get the same enemies in the same spot with the same protections; there's going to be more/less/different protections, including a heightened awareness from guards at the very least. I agree that not every encounter needs to be life-or-death (literally or figuratively), but expecting an encounter to be identical on your second attempt is rather silly to me.
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Feb 10, 2015 17:34
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Yeah, those are some good points regarding putting too much emphasis on high-level domains. To be honest, the only reason I was considering including high-tier domains at all was because it was the only way I could think of to include Almighty skills. It'd feel kind of odd wrapping them into any of skill lines that give you elemental attacks, because that's not what Almighty is. The same goes for the Charge abilities. I'd like them to be powerful enough to be desirable but not so powerful that they should just be baseline because everyone's going to take them. My current idea is something like the Wizard's Evocation talent in 13th Age, which is notably less flashy than the Sorcerer's Gather Energy ability: once per battle you can declare you're Evoking before you roll the attack and spend a quick action to do so, and then if you hit, you maximize your damage roll. It's powerful and cool, but not so powerful and cool that you absolutely have to have it to be a Wizard. That's probably not exactly the right balance, but it's better than "every other turn you charge up so your next attack deals double damage," which would really screw the flow of combat. As for status effects, yeah, those need to be there, and they need to be more exciting. That's something else I'm going to take as a design challenge here. Chaotic Neutral posted:E: Also, re: Personachat, I'll be honest - all the things that make Persona.. well, Persona, aren't really wrapped up in its fine combat mechanics. If it were an SMT game, then absolutely, but if you're looking to emulate Persona you're probably better off going for something way more narrative/cinematic. Unless you're looking to simulate Tartarus, anyway. Yeah, what I really want is something in between. I want it to have a more cinematic feeling to it, but I also want to include all of those aesthetic touches that scream Persona--the elemental spells, the cool physical attacks, Hama and Mudo, all of that. It's going to be a really tricky balance to hit, I think.
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Feb 10, 2015 17:38
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Chaotic Neutral posted:Also, re: Personachat, I'll be honest - all the things that make Persona.. well, Persona, aren't really wrapped up in its fine combat mechanics. If it were an SMT game, then absolutely, but if you're looking to emulate Persona you're probably better off going for something way more narrative/cinematic. Unless you're looking to simulate Tartarus, anyway. Yeah, like I personally would just reskin Bliss Stage a bit, since its central Trust&Intimacy = rear end-Kicking mechanic is basically already Social Links (I have also given thought to using it for Wraith the Oblivion: Doomslayers), but then it's rare for me to run anything crunchier than Monsterhearts, these days...
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Feb 10, 2015 17:44
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Chaotic Neutral posted:Well, like, in my view 'fail forward' is in stark opposition to the idea of being able to retry encounters, generally. It means that the failure state isn't necessarily the end of the game, and that losing still moves the story forward, but that also implicitly means it won't be the same story that it would have been had you succeeded. Personally, I think that's a good thing - it just also means that most enemies are anything but static, unless they're intended to be absolute gatekeepers.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:01
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Yeah, sorry if my suggestions are too crunchy. I get carried away like that. I do think, though, that if someone wants to play their campaign as Persona 3.5: Tartarus Boogaloo, then that's totally valid and something the game should support. There needs to be enough crunch for that at least.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:01
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Sion posted:I have gone with Shadowrun. I'd be interested in hearing how this goes. I started playing Dragonfall a couple nights ago. It's my first exposure to the Shadowrun setting, but drat if it doesn't sell it. It makes me interested in trying the tabletop game, but I've heard as a system it is rather rough.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:This is a general design musing on healing and the "15-minute workday": how about just making combats self-contained? I won't, but I really want to bronze that post and find the other side's equivalent of grognards.txt - it hits every point of grog paranoia except the use of the words "narrative" and *World. I don't actually disagree with you that such a set of mechanics wouldn't work and wouldn't produce a good game. But as someone who likes rogue likes with perma-death and the entire resource management mini-game, it sounds likes a very boring generic action rpg. While I know that verisimilitude is a dirty word hereabouts, but some of us do actually enjoy tracking the number of arrows we have left, gambling on when to use a daily power, pushing our luck and so on. Also, if you make combat encounters self contained, then doesn't every single encounter have to threaten to kill party members? I'm not being facetious - if you get all your resources back at the end of an encounter, then the only failure condition is a character getting eliminated from the game. I'm actually fine with that and can appreciate a system that only bothers with combat when its life or death, but I'm not sure its what you were going for. And if you decide to include expendable resources ala potions, etc, then the bitching about rest periods you're trying to head off is going to be replaced by bitching about how many potions can be carried, how effective they are and what they cost. Siivola posted:I mean, it's not an absolute that failure should mean death, you could just force the party to retreat to their last base camp like mountaineers. Similarly, what if instead of a plot-foxused "tree of encounters" style design we went back to a hexcrawl-style design where the focus was on poking your nose into one of the many dank crypts in the countryside and seeing what happens? If you can stand his pompous writing style there are some interesting stuff in some of this guy's Blog and the ENWorld thread it links to. Non-linear adventure design with multiple points of entry/exit and encounter areas that take multiple attempts are something the grogs think about quite a bit, if you're willing to read up on it and can chew through the idiotic bits. It was reading OSR blogs that actually got me to run my first sandbox style games which, after a few false starts, have developed into my favorite play style. Yawgmoth posted:Well yes, this is the expectation because that's how reality works. If Strike Force Alpha fucks up and fails to assassinate their target (the encounter), they can't just call do-overs and get the same enemies in the same spot with the same protections; there's going to be more/less/different protections, including a heightened awareness from guards at the very least. I agree that not every encounter needs to be life-or-death (literally or figuratively), but expecting an encounter to be identical on your second attempt is rather silly to me. I don't think that's really what is being proposed, outside of a few specific in-game situations like non-intelligent spectral undead reforming or something. More that it should be a viable option for the party to retreat and come back to try again later. Of course, this relies on your players not having the attention spans of ferrets and being willing to revisit a location in game, which is generally something you can clear up by talking about it and making sure they know its a viable option. It also does load a little work on to the GM's plate, in terms of figuring out how the enemy has reinforced their position, but you can plan for that.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:03
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Plague of Hats posted:Yyyyyyup! Got the three core books, Arms & Equipment, and some Tome or other. Their formatting is, eh, not completely awful. There're no embedded TOCs, and the text references have no page numbers. I recall you're supposed to use some exe to view them. I'd have to set up DOSbox or something to find out. I remember the old 2e character maker program had the entire AD&D library as, for some insane reason, Microsoft help files.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:16
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Lynx Winters posted:I reviewed it for the FATAL & Friends thread. Short version, it's terrible and someone will actually cause the game to lock up on accident. It's also the only tabletop RPG I've seen where it's possible to freeze the game. Yeah, I'm not expecting it to be good. I still want the sourcebooks because I am a compulsive RPG hoarder apparently. Not enough to pay 50 bucks a piece, but enough to keep an eye out.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:18
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Siivola posted:Realy I'm trying to question the whole idea of playing Strike Force Alpha here. People have been playing Strike Force Alpha since, I dunno, Ravenloft or Dragons of Despair or whatever the gently caress. We could just as well play the Hillary expedition with some murderous goblins or mountain spirits srinkled between the party and th peak. The whole "can we please stop playing black ops murdersquads" issue aside, it's a loving elfgame, it's trivially easy to justify a dungeon resetting itself between tries. Just sprinkle ~magic~ on it and you're done. Your coice whether you want to use golem magic or time magic or clockwork deathtrap magic or Japanese demon housemaid magic or... To be honest I'm not even sure what your complain or argument really is anymore. If all you're doing is dungeoncrawling then sure, let poo poo behave just like a video game. If you're not, then the world is going to behave like a world, with creatures that have thoughts and memories and desires.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:32
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Alien Rope Burn posted:i wonder why their marriage only lasted two years  
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Feb 10, 2015 18:37
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Yeah, sorry if my suggestions are too crunchy. I get carried away like that. I do think, though, that if someone wants to play their campaign as Persona 3.5: Tartarus Boogaloo, then that's totally valid and something the game should support. There needs to be enough crunch for that at least. I've been trying to reign in my own urge to get crunchy as hell, so don't worry about it. I'm still trying to figure out if I want to include Persona fusion at all, even as an option. (If I do, it'd be a campaign-level thing--either everyone's a Wild Card like in P1/2 or nobody is.) I'm also trying to avoid going full PbtA with it, even though I tend to love PbtA games and I think a Persona *World hack could actually work extremely well. I want just a tad more combat crunch than I think I'd be comfortable shoehorning into that system, and I also want, for lack of a better term, numbers to get bigger as player characters level up. Not out of control growth, but, y'know, I'd want a tanky character to be able to have a couple hundred HP by max level, that sort of thing.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:46
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I suppose I was coming at it from the perspective of: in order to prevent the party from being able to come into every fight with everything prepared, I either A. have to keep coming up with in-universe justifications as to why they can't or B. strictly declare by DM fiat that they can't because the underlying mechanics of the game say they can't yet. And it's usually somewhere between the two where it's A is really just B-but-with-versimilitude. And from there, if B is acceptable for the sake of gameplay, then perhaps the reverse is also possible? I make no claims as to how easy or feasible this would be to actually design, though. Glorified Scrivener posted:Also, if you make combat encounters self contained, then doesn't every single encounter have to threaten to kill party members? Mostly yes. I'm also thinking about what makes "trash mobs" meaningful and it usually comes down to efficient clearing: besides the fact that they can and will kill the party, people want to get to the boss and grab the loot before too long, where "too long" is either in the form of a literal respawn timer, or an achievement/bonus for getting to the end quickly, or simply so that the raid finishes before it eats up too many IRL hours. I suppose the time element could be represented in the form of how many rounds it takes to finish a combat. I don't know if such an approach would make combat feel too "punishing", as in something to be avoided.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:52
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Harrow posted:I'm still trying to figure out if I want to include Persona fusion at all, even as an option. (If I do, it'd be a campaign-level thing--either everyone's a Wild Card like in P1/2 or nobody is.) I think in my mind the "domain" system replaces fusion, and I think I prefer it, too. I think it's better to encourage players to focus on their one persona and how it evolves as they evolve emotionally. I mean your persona is literally a mythical representation of what you are on the inside, and in this system, it's half your character. It feels weird to have it be something you can just throw away because cool I can get Megidolaon if I fuse with this other thing. Plus, you know there's some segment of players who will just crazy enjoy kitting out their own Original the Persona. I also agree that PbtA is not what comes to mind when I think Persona Tabletop RPG. Or, perhaps more accurately, I think you can make a good argument for its rules being suitable for handling the social link half of the game, but I'm not* liking it for the persona/shadow combat half. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 18:58
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Yawgmoth posted:Sure, there's plenty of ways to explain why a dungeon resets and ~magic~ is one of them, but that then begs the question of why the gently caress are we even here? If all you're doing is playing WoW-but-with-paper then gently caress it, no one ought to care why the monsters in the dungeon respawn or how the chests keep refilling or anything else that no one even pretends to care about in WoW. Does it actually hurt you that people might play games for different reasons or something?
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Feb 10, 2015 19:00
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Glorified Scrivener posted:Also, if you make combat encounters self contained, then doesn't every single encounter have to threaten to kill party members? I'm not being facetious - if you get all your resources back at the end of an encounter, then the only failure condition is a character getting eliminated from the game. I'm actually fine with that and can appreciate a system that only bothers with combat when its life or death, but I'm not sure its what you were going for. And if you decide to include expendable resources ala potions, etc, then the bitching about rest periods you're trying to head off is going to be replaced by bitching about how many potions can be carried, how effective they are and what they cost. - that the only way to be eliminated from a fight is to die - that losing a fight = a TPK - that combat resources are the only kind of resources - that the only penalties possible are ones you can track Please check out Strike! It challenges all of those assumptions. The fights are self-contained in that you always start with full HP and all your powers, but depending on how you do, you might owe a narrative concession and you might have some Conditions that will be ongoing penalties that affect you outside of combat and could penalize you in the next encounter as well.
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Feb 10, 2015 19:13
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:I think in my mind the "domain" system replaces fusion, and I think I prefer it, too. I think it's better to encourage players to focus on their one persona and how it evolves as they evolve emotionally. I mean your persona is literally a mythical representation of what you are on the inside, and in this system, it's half your character. It feels weird to have it be something you can just throw away because cool I can get Megidolaon if I fuse with this other thing. Plus, you know there's some segment of players who will just crazy enjoy kitting out their own Original the Persona. Yeah, I like the idea of building your own original Persona better than Persona fusion for this, definitely. Ability-wise, I'm starting to like the idea of treating SP almost like psionic Power Points from 4e. Most domains give you at-will abilities (or very nearly at-will). Fire's basic attack is Agi, for example. The Recovery domain might give you a twice-per-scene Dia spell (like how 13th Age Clerics have a twice-per-battle Heal spell). The "Hit Things" domain (can't think of a good name right now) gives you Bash. Then you can use SP to power those up in specific ways. Like, spend two SP on your Agi spell to make it AoE so it's Maragi, or spend three to make it more powerful so it's Agilao. You can spend as much SP on a skill as you have ranks in that skill's domain. So, Rank 2 Fire would let you do Maragi; Rank 3 Fire would let you spend enough SP to do either Maragi or Agilao, but not Maragilao. The exact numbers will obviously need a ton of tweaking, but doing it that way can help avoid forcing players to manage lists of specific skills, at the cost of asking them to manage an SP pool. Maybe you'd get a certain number of SP per "episode" (think "day" in D&D/13th Age terms), and maybe you recover a small amount of SP after each scene/encounter so that it's not full-on attrition. Skills like Power Charge could get treated like feats (which are mostly "passive skills" for this system, but these are obviously active). Like, you'd take the Power Charge "passive" on level-up that lets you, once or twice per scene, declare you're charging up at the cost of a minor action, then your next physical skill that hits deals max damage. That way they don't need to belong to a domain, necessarily, but instead just hang out in the list of passive skill feats. Maybe you need to have a least rank 3 or 4 in any physical domain as a prerequisite for it. I'm also thinking about what you said about attacks that have status effect riders, like Skull Cracker and Mind Slice. I don't think I'd want to treat those as straight SP-spending upgrades on attacks like Bash or Cleave--otherwise, physical attacks have more versatility wrapped into them than magic attacks do. Like, I wouldn't want Bash to be able to be come Skull Cracker (status effect rider), Rampage (AoE), or Brain Shake (hits twice) by spending SP, while Agi can only advance in two ways (AoE or hits harder), y'know? Maybe it could be a difference that allows for more physical domains than just Cut, Pierce, and Blunt. Like, the Bludgeons domain gets you blunt attacks that have more opportunities to have status effect riders, while the Martial Arts domain gets you blunt attacks that have more opportunities to be AoE. EDIT: Still not sure how to work in Almighty, though. The Megido line of spells is always so cool (and a little impractical), and I'd kind of like to keep it that way. I was about to edit in the idea I just had--make an "Almighty" passive skill that lets you spend extra SP to make one of your elemental spells non-elemental--but saying "okay, this Maragidyne is non-elemental" entirely lacks the cool factor of "Megidolaon, motherfucker!" But as it stands, making Almighty its own domain is awkward. There's not much need for other higher-tier domains if all of the domains are built to scale up to max level (which they should), so having just Almighty there seems odd, but what the hell would one do for low-level skills in an Almighty domain? I could maybe make it something like a "Magic" or "Void" domain that starts with skills like the elemental Wall spells that increase elemental resistance and builds up to include Megido spells, but I'm not too sure about that either. Harrow fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 19:46
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TheSpookyDanger posted:Does it actually hurt you that people might play games for different reasons or something?
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Feb 10, 2015 19:49
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Jimbozig posted:So you've got a slew of assumptions here that you probably aren't even aware that you're making. For instance: First; I admire that you've created something, appreciate your zeal for your own creation and your kind condescension in pointing out my wrong thinking, but I've read through your thread and kickstarter page and playing your game is way, way down on my gaming bucket list, right after running Fatal and then getting myself killed during a LARP in a steam tunnel. But, thanks - though you might want to soften the sell a little if you don't want people to think you're a self promoting heel, as I do! As for the individual assumptions - I was discussing gradenko_2000 posted:This is a general design musing on healing and the "15-minute workday": how about just making combats self-contained? and to me a game that makes combats self contained does presuppose that you've mechanically partitioned them off from the rest of the system and have an almost negative continuity regarding what happens inside them vs the rest of the game. I wanted to clarify gradenko_2000's point before proceeding down that line of thought, as it does appear I misunderstood it. I don't think combat is really being proposed to be self-contained, just a separate sub-system like in most games, where you switch between two rule sets for combat and non-combat and the results of each influence the other. Anyway; if combats are not really self-contained and have effects that persist between combats on things like non-combat resources, then all that you've said is correct. I'd happily concede the point about TPK's and non-lethal elimination from combat anyway. One last thing though; Jimbozig posted:- that the only penalties possible are ones you can track What does that even mean? Something the GM tracks instead of the players? Someone is still tracking it. Please elaborate on how you've created a penalty that exists in a quantum state that is un-trackable by the participants in a game but is still relevant. Glorified Scrivener fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 20:09
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You randomly shuffle loaded dice into their dice pool. Uh, which is stored in an opaque bag in the middle of the table. Maybe it's a communal dice pool.
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Feb 10, 2015 20:27
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Harrow posted:Ability-wise, I'm starting to like the idea of treating SP almost like psionic Power Points from 4e. I don't know how those work in 4E, but I like what you're describing a lot, actually. The only reservation I have is what happens at high levels when a simple Agi spell is no longer useful: spending psionic points then becomes mandatory in order to use skills at a competitive level, so it's real important that the math ends up working out here. Conversely it would also be good to have something to spend SP on even at level 1, if for no other reason than to get people used to the system. Harrow posted:Skills like Power Charge could get treated like feats (which are mostly "passive skills" for this system, but these are obviously active). Sounds pretty good too. I like unobtrusive/"fast" buffing mechanics, both in video games and in paper games. Even when I know that the math checks out and that spending an entire round buffing is optimal, it just feels really bad doing it. Am I alone in that? Anyway, if you want to connect it even closer to the SP system, you could have it be an option when casting the spell (i.e. while you're deciding whether to cast Agilao or Maragi, you also decide if maybe you'd rather be casting Mind Charged Agi). Maybe it's functionally the same, I dunno. Try it, see what feels best. Harrow posted:I'm also thinking about what you said about attacks that have status effect riders, like Skull Cracker and Mind Slice. Here's a thought: why shouldn't you be able to have a fire spell that also inflicts poison? I realize there is virtually no precedent for this in the source material, but I also think like, a Garu spell that also silences or confuses, or even Poison Agi, sounds pretty cool. You touched upon something else, which is differentiating the physical domains to be more than just Cut/Stab/Bash. I think that's something that should apply to all domains in one form or another. Even if you don't go the route of splitting Bash into two separate domains for instance, give all them something special they do other than just be a particular element. Experiment a little outside of the established box. Harrow posted:Still not sure how to work in Almighty, though. Yeah, it's a little tough. I'm not a fan of the "make a spell non-elemental" idea. It's not going to feel like Megidolaon, it's just going to feel like Non-Elemental Maragidyne. I think it would be better off as a spell line of its own, and tap into something else to make it feel special. In the video games, the Megido line is distinctive in that it's 1) High damage for when you get the spells, 2) SP-inefficient, and 3) Is never resisted, but also never hits weaknesses. In some games there are also some variants that have a chance to inflict instant death, I think? Anyway, point is, try to figure out what's analogous to those three points in your system and see if you can work out a way for Megido to feel unique within those constraints.
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Feb 10, 2015 20:28
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Glorified Scrivener posted:First; I admire that you've created something, appreciate your zeal for your own creation and your kind condescension in pointing out my wrong thinking, but I've read through your thread and kickstarter page and playing your game is way, way down on my gaming bucket list, right after running Fatal and then getting myself killed during a LARP in a steam tunnel. But, thanks - though you might want to soften the sell a little if you don't want people to think you're a self promoting heel, as I do! jesus gently caress dude calm down
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Feb 10, 2015 20:30
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Glorified Scrivener posted:First; I admire that you've created something, appreciate your zeal for your own creation and your kind condescension in pointing out my wrong thinking, but I've read through your thread and kickstarter page and playing your game is way, way down on my gaming bucket list, right after running Fatal and then getting myself killed during a LARP in a steam tunnel. But, thanks - though you might want to soften the sell a little if you don't want people to think you're a self promoting heel, as I do! Well sir you've certainly convinced me. 
Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 20:33
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Yay! It looks like Steamtunnels And Stabbings has its first play tester.
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Feb 10, 2015 20:36
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The dude was posting his thing because it is extremely similar to the thought experiment being discussed, you loving goon.
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Feb 10, 2015 20:39
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I dunno if offering that you'd rather kill yourself than interact with a game is really making you look like you're above someone heavily promoting said game.
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Feb 10, 2015 20:41
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