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As for Godbound, it has an exceptionally good factions system, and it generally pretty solid, but it does have the problem that combat is utterly boring autoattacks for the most part. That’s kind of the price of the simplicity.
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Jun 10, 2018 15:04
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Yeah that's my point. None of the subsystems in 3e are bad except craft, but the fact there's about five of them and they've all got depth most games reserve for combat alone, and on top of that there's literally hundreds of charms means that to get the entire thing running is actually a very complex process that results in it being an awkward mess. I'm sure you can have fun with it but people also play GURPS so there's evidently a market for having mechanics requiring a decent calculator to use as well so I'm not sure that realistically means it's the best game it could've been.
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Jun 10, 2018 15:36
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How fun is a hero system superhero game? The crunch and numbers stuff looks pretty neat but a pain to get over the hurdle
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Jun 10, 2018 22:53
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That feeling when your players had told you weeks ago they weren't going to make it over beers and you forgot and wasted everyone's time waiting on them. Cause that just happened.
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Jun 10, 2018 23:16
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Banana Man posted:How fun is a hero system superhero game? The crunch and numbers stuff looks pretty neat but a pain to get over the hurdle Hero System is the second most complicated RPG I've ever seen, behind only whatever the most bookkeeping-obsessed version of Ars Magica is. It also explicitly says "yeah balance is not the point of any of this and will not happen, use a gentleman's agreement." So unless you're the kind of person who looks at GURPS and goes "you know, this is nice, but a little light for my tastes" I wouldn't recommend it. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Jun 11, 2018 |
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Jun 10, 2018 23:20
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Hero system is vastly more complex than even the most complex options in Ars Magica. Literally just try to make a Hero system character without the program the book comes packaged with.
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Jun 10, 2018 23:24
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Is there a thread for Origins? Planning a day trip there Saturday and I was wondering if there were any goons going
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Jun 11, 2018 00:46
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The main complexity in Hero System is character creation. Usually it's just addition and subtraction, but powers with modifiers or different power frameworks quickly get complicated. Beyond that, combat just has a lot to track - it uses a 12-phase system for each turn where characters have a variable number of phases they act on, attacks can do 10d6+ dice easily that need to be counted, and characters generally have both attack and defense rolls, and there are multiple polls for balance and the amount of energy it takes to use your powers. There are also drawbacks like phobias or sidekicks that you need to remember to roll. It's one of those systems where a lot of it isn't complicated by itself, but it really just starts to add up unless you've internalized it all, and combat can drag just because of the weird staggered turn system in addition to tracking modifiers, counting big rolls, setting up a map, etc.
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Jun 11, 2018 00:58
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Len posted:Is there a thread for Origins? Planning a day trip there Saturday and I was wondering if there were any goons going No thread that I'm aware of, but I know I'll be there for much of it.
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Jun 11, 2018 01:02
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Alien Rope Burn posted:No thread that I'm aware of, but I know I'll be there for much of it. We aren't sure what exactly we'll be doing. Visit the vendor hall for sure. I haven't been to Origins since 2010 so I'm not sure what it's like nowadays. I'd like to try some RPGs but it looks like all preregistration is done until things kick off so I won't know what's sold out and what isn't until then.
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Jun 11, 2018 01:08
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I'm going to be there the whole Con and will probably be up for meeting up for games most evenings. From the GenCon thread, Nesbit37 is going to be there demoing his Bee Lives game as well. The only event ribbon I'd strongly suggest considering if you are going to be there multiple days is the Board Room ribbon that gives you unlimited access to the CABS board game library and roped off table space to play at.
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Jun 11, 2018 04:31
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Weird question I randomly thought of : So, there's lots of games that have resource management front and center, poo poo like D&D being the progenitor of this whole concept in RPGs. One of the big ones very commonly used, most specifically and artfully by D&D 4e, is HP. (Or whatever health/vitality/staying-alivey-ness is used in the system.) In the majority of the systems I'm thinking of off hand, damage against such a resource is randomized, either because of the question of whether the attack hits or, more specifically, for the amount of damage done, i.e. there are a lot of systems where you roll to attack and then you roll for damage. Does this pop up in any other kind of thing other than tracking nebulous health? Note, I'm specifically not talking about a D&D 3e save vs damage kind of thing. I mean something where another resource's loss is randomized on the granular level of how much is lost, if that makes sense. And that it's a large part of the system and not just, like, how much ability drain a wight has or whatever. (Sorry I'm using all these D&D examples ; I'm trying to go with examples that just about everyone would be familiar with for clarity.) So, say, what I'm asking is if there was a magic system where mana-spent was randomized and you lose 2d8+3 mana for a spell or something. The only one I can kind of think of is Call of Cthulhu sometimes did that with Sanity I guess?????
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Jun 11, 2018 04:49
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Well, there's several cases of spells that cost HP, and those are sometimes random...either they cost a random amount or they're resistible (like drain in shadowrun) so not every spell costs a consistent amount. Closest 'pure' example I can think of off the top of my head is Questers of the Middle Realms which has an interesting mechanic for divine magic where you have a Favor score for gods (and can have different favor ratings for different gods). when you cast a divine spell you make a check to see if your Favor is decreased. So any given spell could cost between 0-1 favor from the god.
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Jun 11, 2018 05:19
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I can think of a handful of systems which don't have HP as such and where you take damage directly to your primary stats instead, but I can't really think of many granular randomized costs that aren't conceptualized as harm in one form or another, if that's what you're looking for. I could imagine a game with a heavy emphasis on logistics having certain actions cost you randomized amounts of money or some similar resource, but I don't know of any specific game that's actually done that off the top of my head.
Thuryl fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Jun 11, 2018 |
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Jun 11, 2018 05:32
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Xiahou Dun posted:Does this pop up in any other kind of thing other than tracking nebulous health? Sanity checks
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Jun 11, 2018 06:07
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I did ponder a three-pronged system for Health, Stamina and Morale.
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Jun 11, 2018 06:23
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alg posted:Noble Knight Games is probably the biggest out of print retailer, check their price However, US prices are different from UK prices. Searching Sold items on Ebay can be good, and there's the Boardgames and RPGs for Sale and Trade (and its sister discussion group), on Facebook. (Golden dice type header, admin is a chap called Pat Eadie)
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Jun 11, 2018 06:57
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There's a good case to made that, whenever you can't think of any stakes to throw at your players for any given, make failure deal them some kind of damage, rolled or otherwise.
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Jun 11, 2018 07:01
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Xiahou Dun posted:So, say, what I'm asking is if there was a magic system where mana-spent was randomized and you lose 2d8+3 mana for a spell or something. My buddy's infamous homebrew has three tiers of ressources: life, stamina and reserves. Damage usually goes to stamina, once you run out it goes to life. Your own special attacks go to reserves and to stamina once you run out. And it does have a system where the worse you roll for your spellcasting skill, the more reserves damage you take.
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Jun 11, 2018 07:10
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Spire: The City Must Fall has five 'resistances' that you build up stress in - while you're accumulating a negative, it works very similarly to having a bunch of resources you can spend to do things. Spire uses Blood (physical), Mind (mental), Silver (monetary), Reputation (social) and Shadow (the coolest one, in my opinion: Your cover identities and secrecy as a member of a revolutionary cell). These build up Stress, which is abstract, and when you get enough of it it turns into fallout, which is concrete. So you might pick up a bunch of Blood stress and get the fallout 'broken limb' or 'bleeding' while comparable Shadow fallout would be 'cover identity in danger' or 'under suspicion.' And then the most serious Blood fallout would be 'dying' and Shadow might have 'the revolutionary organization you're part of cuts you off and burns your cover, deciding you're worth more dead than alive.' It's an interesting system but I haven't played it yet, so, I can't speak to its effectiveness.
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Jun 11, 2018 07:16
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I just got an email with the 1.0 pdf for the Unity RPG which is apparently headed to printers soon. It doesn't seem to be up for general purchase on DTRPG though, which is a little strange, but at least it should be a step closer I guess?
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Jun 11, 2018 08:53
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My Lovely Horse posted:I'm not sure this would work very well because you already decide whether you cast a spell, and you base it partly on how much mana you have left. If a spell costs 14 mana fixed you check whether you have 14 mana left, if it costs 2d8+3 you check whether you have 19 left, cause most of the time you want to definitely get that spell through. If it ends up costing less that's a nice bonus but you can probably model that effect differently. It would work perfectly well if you can still cast a spell that you don't have enough mana for, at a consequence. You then have to pick between casting the spell you need, potentially with it backfiring, or playing safe and not casting it.
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Jun 11, 2018 09:53
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Oooh, that's a good one. Spell costs 2d8+3 mana, if you have at least 19 mana left it's fine, if you have 5 or below you can't cast that spell, but in the range between interesting things happen when you decide to cast the spell and can't pay the mana cost. You could make certain spells more reliable than others inherently, give them different probability curves of interesting stuff happening, all just using different dice expressions. That'd be one hell of an interesting system.
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Jun 11, 2018 10:27
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Kai Tave posted:I just got an email with the 1.0 pdf for the Unity RPG which is apparently headed to printers soon. It doesn't seem to be up for general purchase on DTRPG though, which is a little strange, but at least it should be a step closer I guess? Mechanics look to be clean 4e-ish in presentation with some 13A influences, which is fantastic. Character classes all have a resource to manage, with fun-looking and interesting ways to use and balance them. I still have some of the same math concerns I did earlier - specifically regarding attribute boosts - but these are based in theory rather than in practice, and they should be easy enough to tweak if they end up being problematic. You get like 4 '+1 to an attribute' bonuses over your 10 levels. There's 4, and your class has a Core Attribute that almost everything is based on. So obviously, you will boost your Core Attribute, because there are no limits on it, and the system is center-weighted 2d10. So you could end up at the end with +7/+1/+0/+0 or whatever. This may be what the game intends you to do - in which case, no worries. If it doesn't work quite right, it's easy enough to either say "your core attribute can't be more than 3 better than your second attribute" or "your top attribute can be no more than 4 points above your lowest attribute" or - in the other direction - "you increase your core attribute and one other." At this point, I'd recommend checking it out. I'm excited by the whole thing.
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Jun 11, 2018 15:44
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Its nice that as a cleric, I was the only thing standing between our party and TPK because we got into a fight with a way too loving powerful sorcerer. Oh, and that Wizard who nearly murdered us was basically an apprentice to the army of dudes besieging the city we're in Oh, and everyone kept rolling 1 on their attack rolls  Atleast no one tried to bribe an undead abomination this time around The Glumslinger fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jun 11, 2018 |
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Jun 11, 2018 18:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:In the majority of the systems I'm thinking of off hand, damage against such a resource is randomized, either because of the question of whether the attack hits or, more specifically, for the amount of damage done, i.e. there are a lot of systems where you roll to attack and then you roll for damage. Delta Green RPG has you lose 1d3 or 1d4-1 points in various non-Sanity, non-Health ratings from time to time. Stat-damage is often randomized like regular damage in a bunch of systems, especially older ones.
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Jun 11, 2018 23:20
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The Glumslinger posted:Atleast no one tried to bribe an undead abomination this time around
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Jun 11, 2018 23:41
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Xiahou Dun posted:Weird question I randomly thought of : Runequest's spirit combat heavily revolves around dealing randomized damage to one another's magic points, which are otherwise used for casting spells.
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Jun 12, 2018 03:10
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are game systems / mechanics under copyright or can I read a pdf and say "that's a pretty neat idea" and name it something else in my own? i'm going to guess "probably not unless you copied all of gurps and named it not-gurps" because of every rpg metaphorically standing on the shoulders of other rpgs but i'd really like to know!
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Jun 12, 2018 04:53
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:are game systems / mechanics under copyright or can I read a pdf and say "that's a pretty neat idea" and name it something else in my own? Mechanics, though not the terminology associated with it, has around a twenty year copyright date.
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Jun 12, 2018 05:29
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fool_of_sound posted:Nevertheless, it’s mostly functional and the combat successfully emulates wuxia flow. People who say the system sucks usually are just the kind of people who are too lazy for any real crunch. It’s why some posters sing the praises of Dungeon World when in fact it’s only slightly better than 5e. Dungeon World legit has good exploration mechanics and mechanics for teaching or helping GM's with having narratives that react to PCs. Exalted 3rd edition is very good, but anyone can see it's energy intensive and more important bogged down by fat. But I love my curvy wife
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Jun 12, 2018 05:41
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NutritiousSnack posted:Mechanics, though not the terminology associated with it, has around a twenty year copyright date.
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Jun 12, 2018 06:33
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NutritiousSnack posted:Mechanics, though not the terminology associated with it, has around a twenty year copyright date. This is not true in any territory I know of. Certainly in the EU and US, mechanics and game mechanics are exempt from copyright law as they fall under the same category as lists of ingredients, formulas and so on. The descriptions of these, and any additional creative work, will be the copyright of the creator/assignee however. So, to take a well-known example: I could not replicate the text of the rulebook of Settlers of Catan, but I could happily reuse their trading mechanics without breaching copyright, as long as I did not reuse and of their descriptions of those mechanics. It's also worth knowing that the title "Settlers of Catan" is also not protected by copyright - it would fall under trademark law. This is also the case for specific terminology, acronyms and so on (such as Magic:the Gathering's "tap").
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Jun 12, 2018 06:46
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You can, however, patent game mechanics in some circumstances. Several specific aspects of collectible card games, including turning cards sideways for certain purposes, were held in patent by WotC from 1994 to 2014, and Nintendo holds a patent for certain sanity systems causing audio changes and changes to scripted situations in video games until 2022.
LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 09:08
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And they've been making such great use of that patent.
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Jun 12, 2018 10:20
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I'm really torn on this because on the one hand I think, from an artistic standpoint, game mechanics are more like cinematography, or stage direction in a script, than technical instructions. On the other hand, US copyright law is an absurd, stifling farce and I don't particularly want it extended to new domains.
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Jun 12, 2018 14:08
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fool_of_sound posted:Nevertheless, it’s mostly functional and the combat successfully emulates wuxia flow. People who say the system sucks usually are just the kind of people who are too lazy for any real crunch. It’s why some posters sing the praises of Dungeon World when in fact it’s only slightly better than 5e. I mean, they're not really comparable. They're not trying to be the same thing. If someone specifically wanted the kinds of things 5e provides, I'd probably suggest 4e or Shadow of the Demon Lord instead of Dungeon World. I think--or I hope, at least--we've moved past the initial fad of PbtA games being treated as the platonic ideal of tabletop roleplaying. They are good and I like them, but they're not appropriate for every style of game.
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Jun 12, 2018 14:21
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LatwPIAT posted:You can, however, patent game mechanics in some circumstances. Several specific aspects of collectible card games, including turning cards sideways for certain purposes, were held in patent by WotC from 1994 to 2014, and Nintendo holds a patent for certain sanity systems causing audio changes and changes to scripted situations in video games until 2022. The examples you give are expressions of game mechanics. The underlying mechanics are “spend card for one turn” and “track player sanity”, roughly, and neither are subject to legal protection.
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Jun 12, 2018 14:41
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Harrow posted:They are good and I like them, but they're not appropriate for every style of game. What styles of games are we talking about, out of curiosity?
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Jun 12, 2018 15:58
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Pollyanna posted:What styles of games are we talking about, out of curiosity? I guess that depends on how I'm using the word "style," huh PbtA systems are best suited to games that are all about constructing a narrative cooperatively, often in a novelistic or cinematic way. Their game mechanics aren't there to test the players' tactical thinking or create any sort of "challenge," but rather to facilitate cooperative storytelling. If that's not what you want--for example, if you want tactical combat, or something that has detailed systems for survival or attrition or things like that--PbtA and other similar systems probably aren't what you're looking for. Fragged Empire, for example, has a detailed turn-based combat system for XCOM-style gunfights, along with an entirely separate combat system for spaceship battles that asks players to think ahead about their moves to account for relative velocity and the gravity of nearby objects. That's not what PbtA would be about. PbtA would be about zooming out and abstracting everything except pivotal, cinematic moments in the fight, rather than simulating the blow-by-blow. There's a lot to recommend both approaches, but they're just for different styles of play. I have a lot of players who really like when combat feels explicitly like a "game" rather than a cinematic scene, for example. I don't mean to suggest that PbtA (and PbtA-inspired games) are all touchy-feely or never dangerous or lethal, of course. Blades in the Dark is all about pushing player characters to take huge risks with huge consequences if they fail, for example. But it also takes a cinematic approach rather than a detailed, play-by-play of how each move in a fight goes, or each aspect of breaking into a room, and I could imagine a system that takes a more detailed, slowed-down approach that's still worth playing for a different experience. Harrow fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 16:53
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