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Covok posted:Yeah, that. It would be nice to have more control on the process since handing it off to a layout guy, while is fine and has worked in the past, requires a lot of correspondence and leads to more than a few communication errors. Then again, I don't have experience with aesthetics in general, not just the program so it would also be a theory problem. I figure it has to do with the communal nature of /tg/ projects, as they both quickly figure out what does and doesn't work, and will be absolutely vicious in mocking a bad layout in ways that even SA pales at doing
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Aug 26, 2015 06:35
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Wasn't there a PBP game of Dungeon World or 13th Age or something not long ago that was set in Morrowind? Did that ever become a thing? I vaguely remember reading the recruitment post but it was for a system I don't know at all and 
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Aug 26, 2015 07:00
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Drone posted:Wasn't there a PBP game of Dungeon World or 13th Age or something not long ago that was set in Morrowind? Did that ever become a thing? I vaguely remember reading the recruitment post but it was for a system I don't know at all and It was 13th Age, and it died.
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Aug 26, 2015 07:14
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Ken Rolson actually edited Runequest for a few years before leading design on Morrowind and Oblivion.
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Aug 26, 2015 10:31
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Serf posted:Now that I think about it, I wish more games had an MP model where you spent points from a pool to cast your spells. I've always liked that more than Vancian casting. At least in an old school Vancian system, your wizard probably chose a broad range of spells to cover a lot of situations. Or even if they decide to play a pure fire mage, the system still forces them to mix it up between fireballs in level 3 slots and burning hands in level 1. So from a game design perspective, Vancian casting is actually a pretty brilliant way to inject meaningful choice into the game for those that like that kind of thing.
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Aug 26, 2015 15:10
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What is the best way to start learning inDesign, anyway?
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Aug 26, 2015 18:37
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Rand Brittain posted:What is the best way to start learning inDesign, anyway? And also the theory side of things?
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Aug 26, 2015 18:42
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In my case it was coming into work and hearing "hey we need an info poster for our department made in InDesign, you're good with Photoshop and stuff, can you do this?" - "I dunno but how hard can it be!" I made super sure no pro would ever see the actual .indd file, but all they ever asked for was for it to look good in print and it did  so I dunno, I'm tempted to say "get access to a copy and start layouting some poo poo" but there probably is such a thing as best practice and with this method you're likely to learn the opposite.
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Aug 26, 2015 18:46
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OSR impresario Kevin Crawford did The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu as an example of how to replicate early D&D modules in inDesign, then Exemplars and Eidolons for replicating the "three brown books"
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Aug 26, 2015 18:48
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The Non-Designer's Design Book is probably one of the best introductory texts to graphic design. The principles within can do tons to help with the theory side of things. Also, while InDesign is absolutely the best tool on the market, it's also crazy expensive. Scribus, meanwhile, is less reliable and powerful, but it is free, and it has worked out fairly well for me.
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Aug 26, 2015 18:52
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I've also had a lot of luck using Inkscape for layout, with some pretty good results: http://www.mediafire.com/view/ju34lp0wsgai5xp/Harbinger+Preview+Playbook.pdf And Inkscape is free! I don't know that I'd ever want to do a full book in Inkscape though. Each individual page is its own file when working in that program. It'd be do-able but a 300 page book would need 300 files that you'd need to merge together using outside programs. You could very easily save a couple template pages and then just change the text but it's still a lot to put together at the end of the process.
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Aug 26, 2015 18:58
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ImpactVector posted:MP based systems are actually kind of a tough design problem. The most likely scenario is that you end up with a "4e psionics" problem, where people choose a widely applicable spell and spam it all the time, leading to stagnant gameplay. Another problem that is by no means exclusive to MP based systems but sort of exasperated by them is that it front-loads characters with lots of resources at the beginning of an encounter/day/whatever, and without a proper pacing mechanism in place can encourage alpha-striking, i.e. unloading your biggest and baddest spell on turn 1 in order to blast all the enemies. Not only is it not very dramatic (most examples of that sort of stuff in media have the main character dishing out one big attack at the end of a long drawn-out fight instead of right at the beginning) but it also turns combat into a grind where you plink at your enemies with crossbow bolts or at-will spells after you've unloaded your big attack spell. I once toyed around with the idea for an RPG where you'd start each encounter at 0 and by using your basic attacks you'd also gain MP or Refresh or whatever it's called, so that you'd only be able to unlock your biggest and baddest attacks after a couple of rounds of combat. Flavor it however you like, maybe in order to perform greater magics you first need to open yourself up as a conduit between the magical realm and this one by using basic spells or something, I don't know.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:15
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CRPGs have tackled that nova problem by hiding the most powerful hits behind combos, cycles and rotations. Frost Bolts until the target is Frozen, then Ice Lance until the freeze runs out. Frostfire Bolt when you get a trigger that makes its casting time reasonable and buffs its damage. And so on and so forth.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:22
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While I'm not a big fan of 4e and find the game just ok, I do think its AEDU system is probably one of the better resource management systems in TRPGs. When proper balanced around a set number of encounters, this system can really keep resources properly attributed.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:25
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Covok posted:While I'm not a big fan of 4e and find the game just ok, I do think its AEDU system is probably one of the better resource management systems in TRPGs. When proper balanced around a set number of encounters, this system can really keep resources properly attributed. I like 4e and the AEDU system is great, but I could do without the D. Wait, I phrased that badly.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:27
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What I mean is that phrasing daily powers as dailies is, in my opinion, the weakest part of 4e. I know there's an explicit assumption in the game that a single adventuring day is 4 encounters (I think, it's been a while since I read my 4e books) with short rests in between, but for games which are paced differently than the four-room dungeon (say, a long trip through the woods) daily powers tend to become super-Encounter powers. Of course the 15-minute working day isn't quite as big a problem in 4e as it was in previous editions, but I still feel the game could do well either entirely without Daily powers or with Daily powers but expressed in some other way (say, Milestone powers, usable once per Milestone). Incidentally, this is why I think Strike! is such a great game, because in addition to being a really nice and stream-lined application of 4e's design philosophy it also got rid of my biggest problem with the system.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:CRPGs have tackled that nova problem by hiding the most powerful hits behind combos, cycles and rotations. Frost Bolts until the target is Frozen, then Ice Lance until the freeze runs out. Frostfire Bolt when you get a trigger that makes its casting time reasonable and buffs its damage. And so on and so forth. About the only TT thing I've seen that models this similarly is aspect placement in Fate.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:32
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Ratpick posted:I like 4e and the AEDU system is great, but I could do without the D. You remind me of my last boyfriend. Wait, that came out wrong. No, wait, that was right. To be serious, why do you not like the Daily aspect?
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Aug 26, 2015 19:33
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Ratpick posted:Of course the 15-minute working day isn't quite as big a problem in 4e as it was in previous editions, but I still feel the game could do well either entirely without Daily powers or with Daily powers but expressed in some other way (say, Milestone powers, usable once per Milestone). Incidentally, this is why I think Strike! is such a great game, because in addition to being a really nice and stream-lined application of 4e's design philosophy it also got rid of my biggest problem with the system. I've always liked how 13th Age handled "daily" powers; you could only use them once per day, but after a battle you made a d20 roll and on an 16+ or something you got the power back. And you got to roll after every battle, not just the one you used the power in.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:36
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gnome7 posted:I've also had a lot of luck using Inkscape for layout, with some pretty good results: http://www.mediafire.com/view/ju34lp0wsgai5xp/Harbinger+Preview+Playbook.pdf There's also Scribus, which is explicitly setting out to replicate inDesign's features/functionality. That might be a place to start playing around if you can't get ahold of a copy of inDesign.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:37
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Evil Mastermind posted:I've always liked how 13th Age handled "daily" powers; you could only use them once per day, but after a battle you made a d20 roll and on an 16+ or something you got the power back. And you got to roll after every battle, not just the one you used the power in. That was just for Recharge powers. There were straight Daily ones that you could only use once per four battles.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:37
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Evil Mastermind posted:I've always liked how 13th Age handled "daily" powers; you could only use them once per day, but after a battle you made a d20 roll and on an 16+ or something you got the power back. And you got to roll after every battle, not just the one you used the power in. Those are just recharge powers, there are true dailies as well. Edit: beaten on this part. Ratpick posted:What I mean is that phrasing daily powers as dailies is, in my opinion, the weakest part of 4e. I know there's an explicit assumption in the game that a single adventuring day is 4 encounters (I think, it's been a while since I read my 4e books) with short rests in between, but for games which are paced differently than the four-room dungeon (say, a long trip through the woods) daily powers tend to become super-Encounter powers.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:39
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Oh yeah, I also like 13th Age's approach to it, basically making the adventuring day a narrative concept entirely. An adventuring day in 13th Age could be a four-room dungeon, or it could be a trip in the wilderness between two cities, with the journey from point A to point B being the "adventure" and only lasting a single adventuring day in game terms while probably taking days and weeks in real time. 4e is still basically one of my favorite editions of D&D (it's close, but I still rank B/X a bit higher simply due to its simplicity), but in retrospect I wish it had gone even further in slaying some sacred cows.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:51
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Covok posted:To be serious, why do you not like the Daily aspect?
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Aug 26, 2015 19:53
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Flame112 posted:13th Age "solved" this by just mandating that extended rests happen every 4 battles. If you sleep in an inn before 4 battles happen then you have nightmares or something and it isn't very restful. If your 4th battle happens in the middle of a dungeon then maybe you found a healing fountain or you're just digging deep into yourself and finding reserves of strength.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:53
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Yawgmoth posted:I know that I personally dislike the 1/day thing in any system because it makes monster design a pain in the rear end. Either you assume the players will use their orbital bombardment on the thing and make it leagues harder without it, or you assume they don't have that power and it becomes a cakewalk if they do. Much easier to just balance everything on a per-fight basis and not have to worry about planning for X number of daily powers to be used to win. This too. Designing things fight-by-fight is so much easier without having to account for the possibility of one of the PCs using a daily power.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:57
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Ratpick posted:I once toyed around with the idea for an RPG where you'd start each encounter at 0 and by using your basic attacks you'd also gain MP or Refresh or whatever it's called, so that you'd only be able to unlock your biggest and baddest attacks after a couple of rounds of combat. Flavor it however you like, maybe in order to perform greater magics you first need to open yourself up as a conduit between the magical realm and this one by using basic spells or something, I don't know. I love this idea. You could do something similar for non-magical folks as well, building adrenaline or focus or something like that. Or just separate the fluff from the mechanics and let the player flavor things however they like. Overall I like the 4E way of doing things as well. AEDU is pretty awesome, and the simplification of resource management was a good thing for my group. After looking over the Strike! rules I'm thinking of showing it to them and see if they would like to give it a shot. Still holding out for a good MP model, though. Really anything but Vancian casting.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:59
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There are tons of brief, basic tutorials for InDesign all over the place; Adobe hosts some of the better ones themselves. Short of taking an actual class, I think the best thing to do is to start dicking around and find out what seems hard or impossible, then ask how to do those things or how to do them better. Scribus is pretty impressive for a free product, but they lag in a lot of important ways, and the last two rounds of InDesign CC have been packed with quality-of-life upgrades compared to CS6 or whatever the gently caress life was like before ~the cloud~, and I'd still take CS6 over Scribus. Although, the last time I seriously looked at Scribus was probably almost a year ago, and was already habituated to InDesign well before then.
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Aug 26, 2015 20:00
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Ratpick posted:I once toyed around with the idea for an RPG where you'd start each encounter at 0 and by using your basic attacks you'd also gain MP or Refresh or whatever it's called, so that you'd only be able to unlock your biggest and baddest attacks after a couple of rounds of combat. Flavor it however you like, maybe in order to perform greater magics you first need to open yourself up as a conduit between the magical realm and this one by using basic spells or something, I don't know. That reminds me a lot on how Anima Prime's combat works. Building up momentum/mana to power your killer moves is definitely design space I want to toy around with for a game.
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Aug 26, 2015 20:05
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Ratpick posted:Oh yeah, I also like 13th Age's approach to it, basically making the adventuring day a narrative concept entirely. Yawgmoth posted:Much easier to just balance everything on a per-fight basis and not have to worry about planning for X number of daily powers to be used to win. Either of these seem to be more reasonable alternatives to D&D's "adventuring day": 1. The "long rest" is whenever the GM says so and/or when the table comes to an agreement as to when it'd be cool to do so, so that you can't skip the intended "attritional warfare" by engineering some series of actions that'll give you 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep 2. The more MMO-like model of every encounter is potentially deadly in and of itself, rather than a slow-and-steady build-up towards "this last encounter is potentially deadly if you didn't handle the other ones efficiently enough because now you're so beat up and low on resources". Easy encounters would then be rewarding insofar as clearing them quickly takes up less real-time (and maybe some other benny or plot-based reward). Serf posted:Still holding out for a good MP model, though. Really anything but Vancian casting. I find myself thinking more and more about fighter/warrior-only set-ups, or non-magic set-ups, because it's so much easier to work within the boundaries of just skill checks and physical combat systems without throwing magic into the mix. VVVV A 3.x psionics-only game is also something that's on my TG "bucket list", so to speak gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Aug 26, 2015 |
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Aug 26, 2015 20:06
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Serf posted:Still holding out for a good MP model, though. Really anything but Vancian casting. What's your opinion on the 3.5/Pathfinder Psionic system?
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Aug 26, 2015 20:07
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TurninTrix posted:That reminds me a lot on how Anima Prime's combat works. Building momentum/mana through play to power your killer moves is definitely design space I want to toy around with for a game. Huh, I have actually read Anima Prime but had actually completely forgotten about it. And you're right, it basically does exactly what I'm talking about the way the game's resource management works, so you start each combat just doing maneuvers and gathering power and then hitting them with a big attack.
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Aug 26, 2015 20:08
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's been a bit of a problem with the organized play adventures; you get a full rest after every session regardless, but there are only two fights per session. Are they double-strength fights or whatever?
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Aug 26, 2015 20:23
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Andrast posted:What's your opinion on the 3.5/Pathfinder Psionic system? I never played with it, but I did own the D&D Psionics book. The system seemed way more interesting than vanilla D&D magic. I remember there being a lot of different disciplines that were as arbitrary as the magic schools, so that was a bit lame. I'll have to glance over the book again sometime, but if I had ever run 3.x I would've used psionics instead of the normal magic classes just because they seemed much more fun. I also happened across a spell points variant rule in one of those old D&D books (Unearthed Arcana?) that looked like a good compromise between Vancian casting and an MP pool.
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Aug 26, 2015 20:30
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Flame112 posted:Are they double-strength fights or whatever?
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Aug 26, 2015 20:46
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The 3.5 psionics rules always felt to me like the designers saying "this is what we would do if we weren't stuck with vancian magic".
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Aug 26, 2015 20:47
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Plague of Hats posted:Scribus is pretty impressive for a free product, but they lag in a lot of important ways, and the last two rounds of InDesign CC have been packed with quality-of-life upgrades compared to CS6 or whatever the gently caress life was like before ~the cloud~, and I'd still take CS6 over Scribus. Although, the last time I seriously looked at Scribus was probably almost a year ago, and was already habituated to InDesign well before then. InDesign is vastly superior to Scribus and also vastly more expensive. 'Free' can be a drat compelling argument. I learned how to use InDesign (and Scribus) based on trial and error -- you can get a pretty sweet-looking pdf out of an indd file that would make a pro (or a seasoned amateur such as myself) gibber with horror, although as someone mentioned upthread there is such a thing as best practice and you won't be learning it. On the other hand, if no-one's going to see the source files but you... who cares? True story: the first thing I ever had to do in InDesign was edit a flyer my company was putting out, and I couldn't for the life of me work out how to turn off underlined text (which is what the previous designer had done). So I copied the backdrop entity, which was a solid colour, and squished it so that it covered the underline I wanted to remove. Looked just fine when it was printed. I waffled some about my experiences and know-how here in the Game Writing Workshop thread if people want to know some basics.
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Aug 26, 2015 21:14
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ImpactVector posted:CRPGs also tend to have way more "rounds" than TTRPGs, so they have a little more room to play with this kind of design space. Most TTRPG fights are designed to be over in 3-6 rounds. Compared to, for instance, even most trash pulls in most MMOs Will take upwards of 10+ GCDs. It's important to note also that that video games have rounds that go by significantly faster. Having a fight by 6 rounds in most ttrpgs ends up taking an agonizing amount of time, especially given that few ttrpgs bother giving it's enemies interesting abilities. gradenko_2000 posted:Either of these seem to be more reasonable alternatives to D&D's "adventuring day": To be frank the only reason most ttrpgs DON'T do this is because of TRADITIOOOOOOOOON! TRADITION! D&D started as a resource management game, and even though most of that playstyle has been left far behind, it still tries to keep the same method of keeping track of resources. And as with most things traditional in the hobby, good fuckin' luck trying to see it get changed.
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Aug 26, 2015 22:07
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Well, I do remember Legends by Rule of Cool doing that. All their resources were meant to come back on a per encounter basis and every battle was supposed to be a big engagement. The problem with it, though, is that it takes some bad 3e-isms like monsters being built like PCs and their bestiary will never be finished (though the PHB is). Strangest thing, for a 3e inspired game, fighters are better than casters.
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Aug 26, 2015 22:11
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drrockso20 posted:I figure it has to do with the communal nature of /tg/ projects, as they both quickly figure out what does and doesn't work, and will be absolutely vicious in mocking a bad layout in ways that even SA pales at doing It's a bit misleading, as those projects might start communally, but in most cases you can bet that if one of them got finished it was less a function of the community and more a function of the 1-5 people who gave enough of a drat about whatever silly poo poo everyone thought up to actually stick with it.
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