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My FLGS has a manual for something called the Cypher system. It says on the back cover that it can handle a great many genres and types of games. Is anyone familiar with it? Is it any good?
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Apr 6, 2017 00:52
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Cypher is the system used in Numenera and other such Monte Cook games. It's... alright.. but it's very different from other systems (for example, you can actually SPEND points out of your stat pool for a bonus in a roll, but then you have to deal with the lower stat until you can rest).
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Apr 6, 2017 00:59
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SirFozzie posted:Cypher is the system used in Numenera and other such Monte Cook games. those are your HP, so this is very often a Bad Idea. it reminds me of mutants and masterminds that way
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Apr 6, 2017 01:08
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Mr.Misfit posted:I´m working on my homebrew system, a gritty post-not-thirty-years-war game in a world dominated by romano-hellenic seeds in the not-renaissance with a budding not-christianity about people with flaws trying to achieve differing targets, usually as pointed out by their flaw/ambition-mechanic. This is an interesting design question, and I don't have a ready answer, but I think any system with death-spiral combat is going to have players building to try and circumvent that, especially if having the default health loadout means that there's a good chance of the PC getting one- or two-shotted. Getting insta-chumped in fights is a really unattractive concept to players, and not unreasonably so; it's a lot of time spent not roleplaying, among other things. What often happens, and what you want to avoid, is this becoming a de facto tax on every build, like how Exalted 1E builds more or less required several purchases of Ox-Body Technique (an extremely boring Charm that gave you extra health boxes and nothing else) to prevent your character from being insta-incapacitated. Really, I'm not sure that "D&D-style shenanigans" and "death-spiral combat where every fight is dangerous rocket tag" are amazingly compatible, unless you want the PCs to be extremely cautious in the stereotypical Fantasy loving Vietnam mode and/or you want a lot of PC turnover. You might want to consider a different sort of health system where base PC durability is a bit higher.
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Apr 6, 2017 01:12
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paradoxGentleman posted:My FLGS has a manual for something called the Cypher system. It says on the back cover that it can handle a great many genres and types of games. It's bad, actually.
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Apr 6, 2017 01:23
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Rocket tag combat is one of the things I hate about the new Alternity Kickstarter. Any game that uses extremely limited health and damage spirals is just not something I'm interested in. It could work in like a wargame or a boardgame where you don't have any serious connection to your 'character' but it seems really counterproductive in an RPG.
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Apr 6, 2017 01:32
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Mr.Misfit posted:
Ok so, I think it's worth noting how much in this book relates to combat. It seems natural to me that players, when they see a book with a guy with a sword on the cover and a bunch of rules relating to fighting, are going to assume that they're supposed to fight or will be engaged in combat regularly and thus would be perfectly justified in taking precautions against getting instantly evaporated on the field of battle. You imply war is frequent in the introduction. Look at the sample character you outline starting on page 16; all but two of their Talents are combat-oriented, and that's not even including Combat Styles! I also don't like "be better at persuading someone" using the same character resource as "go first in combat", but that's a different discussion and I suppose pretty standard for a lot of games. Anyway, if you don't want people focusing on surviving in combat you should perhaps downplay the importance and ubiquity of combat.
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Apr 6, 2017 01:45
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paradoxGentleman posted:My FLGS has a manual for something called the Cypher system. It says on the back cover that it can handle a great many genres and types of games. the Cypher System is pretty bad and prone to character death spirals because the main way you boost rolls is by spending points out of your HP pools. It also encourages GM dickery through GM intrusions, which function like Fate Points if Fate Points were also your XP and Fate Compels weren't a mutually-consensual advantage/disadvantage lever for both PCs and the GM, but solely the domain of the GM to annoy and inconvenience players in arbitrary and unpredictable ways. You're expected to use GM Intrusions multiple times throughout a session to award XP, too, and this isn't counting the times a free GM Intrusion is triggered on a natural 1. Monte Cook also can't get past the fighter/rogue/wizard division in most of his games, so both Numenera and The Strange split their classes along those lines. The fighter classes are as dull as you'd expect and the wizard classes are just as overpowering.
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Apr 6, 2017 01:52
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Kwyndig posted:Rocket tag combat is one of the things I hate about the new Alternity Kickstarter. Any game that uses extremely limited health and damage spirals is just not something I'm interested in. It could work in like a wargame or a boardgame where you don't have any serious connection to your 'character' but it seems really counterproductive in an RPG.
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Apr 6, 2017 01:53
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I always wanted to build a wound system that basically goes You'll be good in a few minutes You'll be good in an hour You'll be good after you sleep You'll be good in a week You'll be good in a few months You will probably not ever be okay again But I couldn't figure out a way to actually build mechanics around it that wouldn't come around to "the GM will just tell you, don't worry too hard about it".
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Apr 6, 2017 02:08
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Yes but rocket tag systems tend to not get less rocket tag after character progression. D&D isn't really rocket tag even at level one even with rolled HP unless you're using zero is dead or really unbalanced encounters or both. Systems with actual rocket tag make it easy to one shot characters, for example early Shadowrun was really rocket tag in the sense that initiative boosters were completely loving broken, everybody only had ten health boxes, and most people packed weapons that either did six a shot or three a shot but that armor was mostly useless against. So because of these if you got init by enough you could fire so many rounds before your opponent got to act that they were dead several times over. Later editions fixed this by not letting characters take multiple turns in a row and later by adjusting damage and health values. 4e removed any vestiges of rocket tag with enhanced HP at level one and balanced encounter design in D&D. I just wish more game systems would realize that rocket tag is lovely design.
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Apr 6, 2017 02:42
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Pope Guilty posted:I always wanted to build a wound system that basically goes Burning Wheel works exactly like this. eta: Well, it's very close. There are rolls involved to recover from the more severe wounds, and there's the possibility of a bad wound turning worse. Falstaff fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Apr 6, 2017 |
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Apr 6, 2017 02:55
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IIRC Babylon Project had an interesting approach where combat itself was resolved pretty quickly and you mostly just found out whether people fell down. Then post-combat you went through and determined whether the wounds were fatal, requiring immediate surgery, or trivial. Seems like moving the consequences to post-combat can avoid death spirals during combat but still make combat itself terrifying.
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Apr 6, 2017 03:11
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Pope Guilty posted:I always wanted to build a wound system that basically goes Fate kinda does this. Minor consequences clear at the end of a scene, moderate ones clear at the end of the next session, and severe ones clear at the end of the adventure.
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Apr 6, 2017 03:26
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Latest blogpost for The Next Project is now up! Talking about certain bounds on character and party customization.
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Apr 6, 2017 03:51
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Falstaff posted:Burning Wheel works exactly like this. The Burning Wheel and Dungeon World folks are pretty tight, aren't they? I should check out BW sometime.
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Apr 6, 2017 04:58
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Pope Guilty posted:I always wanted to build a wound system that basically goes well the problem with this is tracking the time. nobody wants to have their character out of play for a week and the best outcome of that is that the gm speeds up time so that the week's wait is pointless anyway.
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Apr 6, 2017 05:46
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It could work in a game where character gen is fast enough that you just play as PC2 for a bit while PC1 is resting up, and where the passage of time has its own meaningful mechanics.
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Apr 6, 2017 06:00
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I will say that when I ran Burning Wheel the wound system lead to a character being out of the game for 6 months as a best case scenario after catching a heavy crossbow bolt to the chest. They ended up making a replacement PC after even divine intervention didn't quite have the power to heal them (players failed the Faith roll). I'm not particularly a fan - I feel like if your wound mechanics need you to take some downtime you should a) keep the actual time needed flexible and b) try to make it unlikely that only one player wants the downtime and so has to drop out.
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Apr 6, 2017 07:54
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EDIT: on a completely unrelated note, can someone hook me up with printable grid sheets, both for squares and hexes? Or link me to a DTRPG page that has these?Mr.Misfit posted:However I´ve found that in practice, this leads to players focusing Constitution and HP instead and building their characters to last and still engage in near-deadly combat instead. I´m unsure if this is a logical player behaviour that circumvents the idea of it or something of emergent behaviour from a single playtest group. The thing about hit points is that they provide predictability. If you have 10 HP, and you just got hit for 4 damage, and you saw (or were told) that the DM rolls a d4 for damage, then you know that you can take 2 more hits before going down. So you fight until you're one hit away from damage, then you bring out the panic button, or you flee, or something. When this model gets violated, (some) people will balk. If it's OD&D and you roll a 1d6 for level 1 HP, and everything deals 1d6 damage, it kinda sucks. If it's high-level 3e D&D and you can deal so much damage in one turn to reduce a target to 0 HP such that initiative is more important than anything (i.e. rocket tag), it also kinda sucks. There's no predictability, there's no sense that you can gauge and estimate how the fight is going. And as much as there's this niche design bullet-point for "deadly combat" where it can be decided in a single stroke, it's perfectly rational for players to want to increase their health to the point where that won't happen, because it sucks when you die with zero warning and zero chance to react. paradoxGentleman posted:My FLGS has a manual for something called the Cypher system. It says on the back cover that it can handle a great many genres and types of games. The Cypher System is the engine that powers Numenera and The Strange. This generic rulebook is supposed to let you adapt it to different themes/settings. It is Not Good. Tendales posted:It could work in a game where character gen is fast enough that you just play as PC2 for a bit while PC1 is resting up, and where the passage of time has its own meaningful mechanics. YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Apr 6, 2017 |
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Apr 6, 2017 08:46
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Countblanc posted:Ok so, I think it's worth noting how much in this book relates to combat. It seems natural to me that players, when they see a book with a guy with a sword on the cover and a bunch of rules relating to fighting, are going to assume that they're supposed to fight or will be engaged in combat regularly and thus would be perfectly justified in taking precautions against getting instantly evaporated on the field of battle. You imply war is frequent in the introduction. The carrot is the big section of their character sheet devoted to combat
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Apr 6, 2017 09:37
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Since the Star Trek Attack Wing thread is now in the archives (RIP), I'll post it here instead. Wizkids has confirmed that they are retaining the Star Trek license so if you were hoping for an actual competent company to publish Star Trek games, well, tough poo poo. For Star Trek Attack Wing, they are bringing exciting new content! Card packs will just be expansions that they can churn out with even less play-testing, and while not even bothering to design a new ship/re-purpose an existing ship. The other exciting development is Faction Packs, which package 4 ships of a single faction. Obviously they are intended to get people into the game cheaply, but they will also include extra cards only available in those Faction Packs, so thus forcing Lifers to re-buy ships they already own! Guess Wizkids really ARE learning from FFG's example! Also newly available are ultra-detailed, primed but not pre-painted ships for STAW. You know how the ship for X-Wing are both pre-painted and have really nice details? Well, Wizkids can only do one at the time. Never buy poo poo from Wizkids.
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Apr 6, 2017 10:06
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Flavivirus posted:I'm not particularly a fan - I feel like if your wound mechanics need you to take some downtime you should a) keep the actual time needed flexible and b) try to make it unlikely that only one player wants the downtime and so has to drop out. In fairness, BW does have rules for skill practice during downtime, so it's not as if the rest of the group wouldn't have things to do during the time skip, but I can easily imagine scenarios where just taking six months off from playing "the real game" is not practical.
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Apr 6, 2017 11:15
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Parkreiner posted:In fairness, BW does have rules for skill practice during downtime, so it's not as if the rest of the group wouldn't have things to do during the time skip, but I can easily imagine scenarios where just taking six months off from playing "the real game" is not practical. Yeah, it may have been more a lesson that burning wheel is not good for setups with a strong time pressure.
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Apr 6, 2017 12:45
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gradenko_2000 posted:EDIT: on a completely unrelated note, can someone hook me up with printable grid sheets, both for squares and hexes? Or link me to a DTRPG page that has these? http://gridzzly.com/ http://www.printfreegraphpaper.com/ https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/hexagonal/ https://www.printablepaper.net/category/hexagon_graph
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Apr 6, 2017 12:46
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Mr.Misfit posted:I´m working on my homebrew system, a gritty post-not-thirty-years-war game in a world dominated by romano-hellenic seeds in the not-renaissance with a budding not-christianity about people with flaws trying to achieve differing targets, usually as pointed out by their flaw/ambition-mechanic. I think the Paranoia system is a great way to handle things, and could easily be adapted into a more serious one. For those who haven't played it: Your health track goes Okay-Snafued(as in, the attack doesn't hurt you, but it distracts you or forces a reaction)-Wounded-Maimed-Down-Killed-Vaporised, but damage is non-cumulative. If you take three points of damage you'll be Maimed, but a further three points doesn't take you to Vaporised, it just Maims you again. Depending on how you worked the penalties for wounds and stuff you should be able to avoid a too punishing death spiral - a dude who's just had his arms chopped off is obviously going to be less effective in combat,and should think twice about trying to stab some orcs, but doesn't need to be any more worried about a crossbow bolt to the chest than he would have been at full health. By giving everybody the same health track you avoid the problems of them just pumping con - give healers a way to mitigate injuries, and tanks/fighters/barbs ways to ignore them and everyone else can focus on whatever they're class is meant to be about.
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Apr 6, 2017 14:36
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30YW is a cool as hell scenario I always wanted to see transported to TRPG, good luck on that.
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Apr 6, 2017 14:42
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xiw posted:IIRC Babylon Project had an interesting approach where combat itself was resolved pretty quickly and you mostly just found out whether people fell down. Then post-combat you went through and determined whether the wounds were fatal, requiring immediate surgery, or trivial. Strike! also does something similar.
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Apr 6, 2017 14:54
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Pope Guilty posted:I always wanted to build a wound system that basically goes Abstract HP and healing surges can work for modeling this. If you having healing surges, you are in the first 2 categories. If you are out of healing surges, you are in the 3rd category. If you go to 0HP you are in one of the last 3 categories depending on if the player wants to keep playing this character. Long term recovery rules aren't really relavent to NPCs.
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Apr 6, 2017 15:40
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Flavivirus posted:I will say that when I ran Burning Wheel the wound system lead to a character being out of the game for 6 months as a best case scenario after catching a heavy crossbow bolt to the chest. They ended up making a replacement PC after even divine intervention didn't quite have the power to heal them (players failed the Faith roll). No offense, but that's not a very good way to handle it within the system. I always get excited when my character takes a bad wound in Burning Wheel because: 1. If your character is literally out of commission from the wound, then giving the rest of the party a break is a reward since they can then break out the downtime advancement rules. (as Parkreiner mentioned above) 2. This may seem like it leaves the wounded character at a disadvantage. Not so, however, as long as you pick things back up once the character's recovered enough to start doing things again. This is because if your character recovers enough that s/he is ambulatory again, then adventuring in that state means you're going to start advancing VERY quickly thanks to your temporarily low dice pools. Wounds play into the game's reward systems. I know a lot of players feel like they need to play their characters at 100% health all the time (I used to be one of these, so I understand the mentality), but that just means they're robbing themselves of opportunities. eta: Pope Guilty posted:The Burning Wheel and Dungeon World folks are pretty tight, aren't they? I should check out BW sometime. Not to my knowledge? But then I don't really follow the creators of either game particularly closely. If you're looking for a similar experience to Dungeon World, though, you'll be very disappointed with BW. I think the only things the two systems have in common is that they both fall under the umbrella of "fantasy games," and in both systems a single roll can encompass a lot of story. Falstaff fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Apr 6, 2017 |
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Apr 6, 2017 15:42
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Plutonis posted:30YW is a cool as hell scenario I always wanted to see transported to TRPG, good luck on that. Sounds like a setting for a Battle Brothers-like game where even though the individual mercs have personality and can grow, combat is so brutal that you regularly have to hire your replacement characters using party funds. If you cheap out, you get a crappy character but save money for other stuff. Kind of meta, where you're playing as the company as much as the individual characters. After all, corporations are characters too.  Or is that just "Play Chainmail"?
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Apr 6, 2017 16:05
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I like Legends of the Wulin's damage system, where hitting opponents places a certain numbers of Ripples on an opponent depending on how well you rolled. Ripples don't do anything at all... until a Rippling roll is called for. This happens either if you hit someone super, super well - the crit-equivalent is that you do a bunch of Ripples and also make them roll them out right now - but normally happens at the end of combat. More Ripples = more and more bad stuff happens to you on the Rippling roll. Like actual wound effects, maiming injuries, emotional damage, called shots to the self esteem and so on. The main effect of this is that two kung fu masters can wale on each other for a few rounds, realise that nobody is going to roll well enough to actually force a mid-combat rippling roll, wale on each other some more until one or both opponents start looking nervously at the amount of ripples that are stacking up, bow to each other and turn to leave. At this point, one of them examines his wounds, realises that he is bleeding to death, both his arms are shattered and he can't see out of one eye and the other kung fu master realises that his leg is broken, his opponent's style was superior to his, that he is a bad Buddhist and then he keels over into unconsciousness. One of the special abilities Buddhist monks get is the ability to, when an opponent makes a rippling roll, offer them the choice to become obsessed with becoming a better Buddhist in exchange for not having to make that ripple roll. A Shaolin monk kicks the gently caress out of you to the point where you're certain that when you stop fighting you're just going to drop dead and then offers to help you get back to the righteous path. You look at your fifteen ripples that you have stacked up and take his generous offer. Obsessions, maiming wounds, mental trauma, reputation damage and emotional and psychological effects are all handled the same mechanically and are all equal fodder for results on a bad ripple roll. You can choose to get stabbed the gently caress up and crippled, or sub some of that out for your mentor thinking you're a waste of loving space and having a lingering phobia of loud noises. Meanwhile in combat, there's no death spiral because ripples have no effect until you're forced to roll them out and it takes some serious stats before you can just dunk an in-combat rippling roll on somebody. Meanwhile it's actually really hard to perma-kill someone because that requires a whole hell of a lot of ripples and they're almost certainly going to duck out before then. This way, it sets the stage for long-term continuing relationships between rival kung-fu masters and a lot of pissed off people in bandages questioning their life choices as they learn valuable lessons in self-reflection from the village healer. And some games just have you subtract hit points until you hit zero and die 
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Apr 6, 2017 16:08
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Stupid question, but is an 80% chance to hit a target number the same regardless of what dice expression you use?
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Apr 6, 2017 17:00
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gradenko_2000 posted:Stupid question, but is an 80% chance to hit a target number the same regardless of what dice expression you use? That makes no sense...I think? If you get an 80% chance to hit a target number regardless of dice expression, the dice used are of less import? Or did I misunderstand you? Can you...elaborate?
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Apr 6, 2017 17:35
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Mr.Misfit posted:That makes no sense...I think? If you get an 80% chance to hit a target number regardless of dice expression, the dice used are of less import? What I mean is that a 3d6 has an 83% chance of getting at least an 8, whereas a d20 has an 80% chance of getting at least a 5, and a d100 has an 80% chance of getting at least a 21. Setting aside the other 3% on the 3d6, that's all the same, right?
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Apr 6, 2017 17:42
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The effect of bonuses on a dice expression could affect how easy/difficult it is to get the 80% chance to hit. But if any given roll has an 80% chance to hit, it has an 80% chance to hit.
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Apr 6, 2017 17:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:What I mean is that a 3d6 has an 83% chance of getting at least an 8, whereas a d20 has an 80% chance of getting at least a 5, and a d100 has an 80% chance of getting at least a 21. Like in my above post, the 80% chance should hold true. However, depending on how bonuses can be generated can determine how easy it is to get to that 80% chance. For example, using D&D 5e Advantage mechanic on the d20 to get at least a 5 should give you different percentages than if you used the same mechanic on the 3d6 roll to get at least an 8.
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Apr 6, 2017 17:45
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Yep. An 80% chance is an 80% chance no matter how you slice it. However, modifiers to the roll (and other mechanical considerations when setting target numbers) need to be considered during game design.
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Apr 6, 2017 18:02
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Falstaff posted:No offense, but that's not a very good way to handle it within the system. I always get excited when my character takes a bad wound in Burning Wheel because: As I said later, the game's setup was a bad fit for the system. It was a 'we have a few weeks to save the city' sort of thing. In a game with less time pressure, I can see the practice rules - not to mention easy access to difficult tests for the wounded character - making it pretty fun.
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Apr 6, 2017 18:38
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So The Boss Baby is basically the exact same as Demon: The Descent when you think about it
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Apr 6, 2017 19:25
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