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Sentient Data posted:Instead of buying a regen ability that the game shouldn't technically require to win since it's an optional purchase, how about having drive act like a fairy in Zelda? If you die but have a certain amount of drive, it's spent letting you heal in place - if you don't have enough, then game over. It rewards those that don't need it, and provides a risk-reward on spending then past a threshold I realized that I kind of designed this game from the inside out; I came up with the move first and built out from there. Which is fine to get me to this point, but now I need to look at what I have from the top down.
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Jan 24, 2020 16:27
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I'm trying to sketch out an idea for a sub-system for my game, and I'd appreciate some opinions on angles I might've missed. I'm trying to think of a way of mechanically supporting the idea of the game antagonist, the Chimera, being a distributed consciousness. When you're in combat with a Chimera squad, it's not a group of independent organisms, it's one thing moving its limbs. The players act and coordinate as a team; the Chimera flexes the fingers on its hand. My first thought for this was some kind of action pool - the GM rolls a pool of dice at the start of the round and spends them performing actions with NPCs. More powerful or exclusive actions require higher values of dice be spent and each NPC has an action limit, where you can only spend so many dice. This has an interesting side effect - assuming the action pool doesn't spiral down as the PCs eliminate resistance - of smoothing the curve in combat away from the enemy side going into a death spiral once they lose a couple of combatants. The GM has less pieces on the board and a more restricted action economy, but they have a better dice economy, allowing them to take more or better actions. My only concern with this is that it really doesn't feel like it gels with the XCOM-esque tactical cover shooter system I've built the engine around. It'd also increase turn time by introducing a whole planning segment that doesn't exist when you're just rolling a to-hit. My second thought was to dial it back to just having an 'escalation pool', which is a pool of dice the GM can use as the team draws more of the Chimera's attention during a mission. The GM can spend dice to sub them on rolls and activate abilities. This one is much simpler, but still ends up adding a dimension of complexity where I could just instead say 'okay, X enemy ability has the Limited tag so it's powerful but can't be used more than once' and be done with it.
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Feb 7, 2020 10:13
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Attach abilities to monsters but have the big abilities require chimera attention points to activate, and even bigger abilities require multiple points. The GM must split points as evenly as possible, but has discretion over who gets excess points or who gets mone if there's not enough to go round. If you're fighting a big crab, a giant tentacle, and a horde of tiny goobers, the GM only has two points per round. So that's two cool abilities per round from two different creatures. Players choose to take out the crab because it's the most dangerous to their armoured carrier escort, and then the little goobers to keep them out of the vents, all the while taking various basic and mid level powers per round. Tactical decisions. So you're down to the tentacle but because the GM still has the same amount of points and doesn't need to split them it can use it can keep its two point ability up for the rest of the fight and now looks like this:  e: this has less overhead than rolling since you're just deciding on each monster's turn whether they get a point or not, keeping in mind that you're limited to max one point per monster until you start a round with more points than monsters. Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Feb 7, 2020 |
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Feb 7, 2020 13:01
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I’d say take a page from D&D 4e and have discrete abilities that activate off of triggers outside of the monster’s normal action. Being reduced below 50% health (becoming “bloodied”) was probably the most common. Maybe a tentacle whips at the first guy to move or shoot at it within a short distance or a crab loses a pincer, reducing its armor/attacks, but it can then can rush forward when that happens. Stuff like that makes it so you don’t have to plot out a bunch of actions ahead of time.
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Feb 7, 2020 13:21
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I want to preface this with I have no illusions about making money in this industry as a whole and any participation I take in said industry is purely as a side thing away from my day job and budding art life. Now for the dumb questions: what is a good page size layout for someone doing the indie heartbreaker thing with a print-on-demand model? (Is print on demand even worth pursuing?) I've read some people say you're doomed if you don't do an 8.5 x 11 inch landscape layout, that you'll get passed up on the shelf if its not that big (see previous sentence about this) but AW seems to be doing well with.. what is it, 8.3 x 5.5 for their book sizes? So I was curious about that. As far as book density goes I have about ~100 pages of actual setting lore i'm editing the hell out of when I have the time to and then an unknown amount of page count on mechanics but, being someone who personally hates huge poorly layout mechanic sprawls, I can say I'm aiming for 'succinct and logically arrayed'. Does 100 pages counting core mechanics and player options (think D&D spells or 4e powers) Give or take? I have no idea what a good size is for this, only than prior experience with megalithic tome-games that were unwieldy and had god awful lay outs. This is actually why i'm so worried about actual book dimensions.. Anyone else have experiences publishing a game with D&D 4e-esque amounts of powers with similar or abridged formatting? Thanks in advance for any advice. I'm fuckin' hopeless at this poo poo and would much rather just draw interior art than edit wordcount and wrack my brain over margins.
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Feb 15, 2020 09:07
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Pvt.Scott posted:Id say take a page from D&D 4e and have discrete abilities that activate off of triggers outside of the monsters normal action. [...] This was my starting point, actually. It's nice and functional, but I'd like to do something a little more distinct, assuming I can get it to a similar level of ease-of-use. Splicer posted:Attach abilities to monsters but have the big abilities require chimera attention points to activate, and even bigger abilities require multiple points. The GM must split points as evenly as possible, but has discretion over who gets excess points or who gets mone if there's not enough to go round. [...] I've yet to have the time to try to draft an implementation, but this feels like an extremely good balance of what I'm trying to achieve vs. introducing too much planning time to a turn. The process is largely automatic until the GM's side gets small enough that surplus points become a factor, and then time cost is managed by the fact you've got less pieces in the fight.
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Feb 15, 2020 13:02
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Hey, I posted this in the main chat thread but it understandably got buried under the news. In case there's any other interest, this is a vaguely Firebrands-based hack for running a godawful 12-player-maximum collaborative writing battle royale, specifically in the style of Fate/Stay Night and the Fate/ franchise in general. A friend not on this forum and I put it together, and we're also running a sprawling Discord-and-google-docs based iteration of it to playtest. It's meant to be extremely flexible with regard to canon, and instead focuses on setting up players to support each other, collaborate, and generate a tournament bracket and series of plot beats. The mechanical framework is fully abstracted out of any kind of setting simulation, and instead tries to help create the genre through the selection of minigames, plot twists, and special actions available. I'm vaguely considering reworking it to make a generic brand urban fantasy battle royale ruleset out of it, if the first game goes well. Fate/Ignite Array: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sDID5q9wmJL8EB5VAZsQNrqcIicDrXQEJ6y7AHefqeI/edit?usp=sharing
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Feb 15, 2020 19:27
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Zeerust posted:I've yet to have the time to try to draft an implementation, but this feels like an extremely good balance of what I'm trying to achieve vs. introducing too much planning time to a turn. The process is largely automatic until the GM's side gets small enough that surplus points become a factor, and then time cost is managed by the fact you've got less pieces in the fight. There's an obvious edge case problem where you have 3 monsters and 2 points, you choose not to boost the first monster in a turn, and the second or third gets murdered before they get a chance to use a point. So now you have a spare point and not enough monsters left to split them "evenly" over before the end of the turn. You could cover that eventuality with a couple of generic specials, like "Last gasp: Spend a point to have a monster that was just killed perform a standard attack before they die."
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Feb 16, 2020 01:26
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Hodgepocalypse - Australia https://www.hodgepocalypse.com/2020/03/hodgepocalypse-australia-part-1.html I had a request to flesh out my post-post apocalyptic world with magic for Australia - so here's part 1. I'm not completely happy with it, so open to suggestions on this one.
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Mar 3, 2020 03:00
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Light at the end of the tunnel! e: 
Sentient Data fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Mar 23, 2020 |
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Mar 19, 2020 17:26
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decided to share my old notes on Central/South America while I try to drum up support. here's a start https://www.hodgepocalypse.com/2020/03/hodgepocalypse-south-and-central.html https://www.hodgepocalypse.com/2020/03/hodgepocalypse-south-and-central_30.html Hodgepocalypse and Dinosaurs.  #drevrpg #dnd5e #dungeonsanddragons #apocalypse.
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Mar 31, 2020 01:19
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I have potentially a dumb statistics question to ask: If I'm using a dice pool system where one match is the threshold for success, should I be looking at the odds of rolling at least one match, or the average number of matches when estimating the odds of success on a given number of dice?
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Apr 8, 2020 16:14
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If the only way to fail is to roll no matches, and all successes are equivalent (so the results are only ever binary success or failure), then you want the odds of rolling at least one match (which is 1 minus the odds of rolling no matches, which will be easier to calculate).
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Apr 8, 2020 17:58
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Thanks for the clarification! It is possible to get a critical result by rolling two or more 6's, but based on what you've said, presumably the critical chance is just the chance of rolling at least 2 matches?
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Apr 8, 2020 20:18
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I'd get the chance of no matches, the chance of a crit (via calculating non-crits), and then do 1-(no hit)-(no crit) for standard successes E: just make sure when you're balancing for a success at all you add crits back into the standard success odds
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Apr 8, 2020 20:46
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 Here's a plot of the results for pools from 2d6 to 10d6 (10000 trials).
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Apr 8, 2020 20:57
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Well, holy poo poo. It only took a worldwide plague putting everyone into lockdown, but I finally managed to finish - at least, to a condition I'm happy with - my long-ongoing RPG You All Meet In A Tavern! The last time I did any major work on it was two years ago. As a reminder, since I doubt many people will remember a thing about it, YAMIAT is a B/X retroclone, designed for one-shot play rather than campaigns and with drastically simplified and sped-up combat and character creation. There are no to-hit rolls; every attack causes some damage, even if only 1 HP. No poring over tables of weapons and armour; damage and AC are determined by class. Combat was always my least favourite part of playing RPGs, so I wanted to make it move as quickly as possible while still giving players interesting things to do rather than just rolling damage dice. I've also written a sample adventure, Path of One Thousand Prayers, that should give all the different classes something to do. Here's the link to the PDFs of the rules and adventure. It'd be great if you could have a look and let me know what you think, or if you spot any mistakes or things that could be improved.
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Apr 12, 2020 11:59
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Question for those who have made their own games using cards, is there a decent machine for rapidly-slicing a paper into cards? Specifically 41x63mm. Looking online I can find machines that either slice into only business-card size, or cost several thousand dollars. I own one of those cutting boards, but those aren't exactly great when you want to do hundreds of cards at a time.
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Apr 17, 2020 01:37
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Find a local print shop that has a cutting press, they'll probably only charge a pittance. Aside from that, you're probably needing a laser cutter or something for a huge volume, or if you're prototyping go for 8.5x11 perforated business card stock
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Apr 17, 2020 02:00
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I could swap to business-card size for now, it just so happens that I have nearly a thousand extra card sleeves of the size I mentioned, which makes shuffling so much easier (and adds some rigidity to the cards, while still allowing my junk printer to not get jammed up by cardstock).
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Apr 17, 2020 02:10
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Joe Slowboat posted:Hey, I posted this in the main chat thread but it understandably got buried under the news. In case there's any other interest, this is a vaguely Firebrands-based hack for running a godawful 12-player-maximum collaborative writing battle royale, specifically in the style of Fate/Stay Night and the Fate/ franchise in general. A friend not on this forum and I put it together, and we're also running a sprawling Discord-and-google-docs based iteration of it to playtest. I don't have much to add except yes, do this, it rules I'm trying not to outright steal anything, but you have made my gears turn hard regarding semi-competitive online roleplaying (specifically e-feds and things similar to e-feds)
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Apr 18, 2020 04:14
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That post was from February, I don't even care
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Apr 18, 2020 04:16
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Lunatic Sledge posted:That post was from February, I don't even care Absolutely loving steal things from me, are you kidding? Go ahead and steal! I wouldn't say no to, like, a 'special thanks' credit if you publish a book or something, but like... steal away! It's already a mutant Firebrands hack anyways. E: The playtest game is still going. Slowly, but it's going! It's pretty darn hard to corral everyone into making their scenes, but, the game is now solidly into Day 2.
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Apr 18, 2020 06:20
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P.d0t posted:[crosspost] Jumping back in this thread for the first time in a while. tl;dr I took a hiatus over the course of 2019, but have started writing again, last month. Newest blog post is now up! I'm looking to expand the character customization options in the near future, so today lays out how those features (Archetypes and Domains) are going to be doled out I made sure to include lots of 4e nostalgia (beyond what the game already includes.) Also, jump in the TNP Discord and help stimulate the discussion there.
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Apr 24, 2020 18:50
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Hey all, I spent the weekend smashing out a system cause I had a weird dice idea that seemed fun, and I've been meaning to nail Spire's stress/fallout system and the Siholette damage system to something. Idea is for a fun universal system that I can use with my friends, because there's a lot of genre gaming they like but most of those systems I don't enjoy. Anyhows, I was hoping for help with the maths, making sure it works. The core system is success counting. Summary: * Every skill always has five dots. * Dots start as untrained (D6's). * Untrained dots can be upgraded to trained (D8) * Trained dots can be upgraded to focused (D12) * When making a skill check, roll the five dice as approprate for your dots, TN 6. * If you possess a positive characteristic, you get to reroll that many failed dice. * If you possess a negative characteristic, you get to reroll that many successful dice. I've tried just rolling dice to see how it feels, and it seems okay. I'm just not sure the best way to math it out to make sure it holds up at different skill levels. Document so far attached for system clarity. https://docs.google.com/document/d/12bTaljLu4MxONhlcFL0cGCms5hie32NAfxCqEpmNK4Y/edit?usp=sharing
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Apr 28, 2020 04:02
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Just clarifying from the document, every skill roll is five dice, right? You just roll different sizes of dice depending on how trained you are? So if I've got three trained dots in a Skill and made a check at +2, I'd roll 3d8, 2d6 and reroll two dice that rolled <6?
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Apr 28, 2020 06:58
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Zeerust posted:Just clarifying from the document, every skill roll is five dice, right? You just roll different sizes of dice depending on how trained you are? Correct. You always roll 5 dice, it's just the type of dice that change.
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Apr 28, 2020 07:34
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I am happy to report that we finally got the 5e book of danger (aka the monster manual for the hodgepocalypse - a post-post apocalyptic setting with magic) ready for feedback and game testing. If you are interested, please contact us at drevrpg@gmail.com #drevrpg #5e #apocalypse #dnd5e #dungeonsanddragons https://www.hodgepocalypse.com
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Apr 28, 2020 18:33
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P.d0t posted:Jumping back in this thread for the first time in a while. tl;dr I took a hiatus over the course of 2019, but have started writing again, last month. Blogging continues! In this latest post, we're outlining which classes have access to each power source, and how that impacts the broader designs, going forward. I also talk a bit about the timeframe I'm thinking of for getting a new draft of the rules cranked out. Check the Discord link (in the quote at the top) or reply here, if you have comments/questions/etc.
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May 6, 2020 16:11
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 I've just published a devlog for Twilight Song that explores how I used computer simulations to refine a key part of the game—the flow of time, the mechanics that control how the story spans many years. It's kinda like what I did earlier in this thread for things like Cthulhu Dark, but formatted a little differently.
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May 14, 2020 20:27
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Cross-posting from the publisher thread:UnCO3 posted:This might be of interest to people here, both experienced and new: the Wretched & Alone Game Jam (nothing to do with me). It's a game jam for games using the 'Wretched & Alone' SRD (free here), a 1-player Jenga tower/dice/card system for stories of inevitable, yet seemingly-avoidable decline and demise. The two games written before the jam are:
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May 16, 2020 18:30
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I'm working on a game called Five Year Mission where you play as the captain of an exploration ship on a long-term mission to seek out new worlds etc, etc. You manage the crew and their stats/skills to overcome obstacles and accomplish missions. Each mission gives you points and certain point thresholds lead to certain levels of victory at the end of your five years. The game occupies a strange place between "two-player RPG" and "resource-management board game" and I'm trying to fix it so I end up more in the vein of the former and less the latter. I have couple of conundrums I would like feedback on: 1. I would like to encourage bonds between the players and characters without notably increasing the mechanical complexity of the system. Basically, I would like each character to have a personality and for that to matter in-game, but I don't have a clear path to implementing that. Right now each character is just a name, four stats, and up to six skills. Maybe a Personality Type that interacts with various obstacles? I just need it to be essentially simple, as the player controls dozens of crew. 2. How odious is it to require a whiteboard or similar erasable surface as an essential component? I have like, four whiteboards in my house but I don't really know how common they are for gamers who don't prototype processes as their day job.
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May 29, 2020 23:32
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Zurui posted:I'm working on a game called Five Year Mission where you play as the captain of an exploration ship on a long-term mission to seek out new worlds etc, etc. You manage the crew and their stats/skills to overcome obstacles and accomplish missions. Each mission gives you points and certain point thresholds lead to certain levels of victory at the end of your five years. The game occupies a strange place between "two-player RPG" and "resource-management board game" and I'm trying to fix it so I end up more in the vein of the former and less the latter. I have couple of conundrums I would like feedback on: 1) Whichever way you go, I feel like it'll be more endearing if it involves the characters changing because of player decisions, maybe in pretty unpredictable ways. People can fill in the blanks with their imagination, and building up a character's history gives them way more character than a fixed attribute. 2) Physical whiteboards are probably pretty rare. Digital ones are less so—there's stuff like google drawings or miro or whatever and probably dozens of other not-quite as good websites where you can make persistent whiteboards where you can draw, create, and upload things, then select, move, erase them etc. Then your game only works with internet access, though. Is this for keeping track of characters or a map of the cosmos or something else?
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May 30, 2020 02:27
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1. I have a little player-chosen evolution in the game (characters gain experience, skills, and stat bumps between missions) but that's a great area to explore. Thank you! 2. The current concept involves using the whiteboard to list the current mission objectives and keep a persistent list of the available missions. The more traditional way to do this would be to use a custom-printed deck/print & play but I realized that you would, at most, be utilizing ten or so cards at one time out of several hundred and that just seems like a huge waste. I designed it to use standard playing cards as randomizers instead; it runs pretty slick with the playing cards and whiteboard. I suppose a pencil and paper would work in a pinch.
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May 30, 2020 02:53
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The thing about components, is that requiring them reduces the number of people who are able to play your game. Most people can scrounge up six-sided dice or a pack of normal playing cards. But even something as innocuous as a custom deck of cards means you're now restricted to playing in person (or you have to spend the time to set it up in Tabletop Simulator, or attempt to implement a custom deck in Roll20). A whiteboard feels like a real stretch -- although that might be a US/UK thing. I know having whiteboards around your house is a way more common thing in the US than here. The other thing to bear in mind is that custom cards can get really expensive to print. I was going to use a few hundred custom cards for Unnamed Farming Game, so I costed it out and realised that it would be so expensive to produce I couldn't possibly sell it at a high enough price to make a profit.
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May 30, 2020 09:51
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2) sounds like something a digital notes tool could handle, or two sets of index cards (or cards torn in half, A4/letter paper torn into 8ths, or something like that).
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May 30, 2020 10:47
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Oh yeah, I have no interest in producing custom cards or anything. I think it'll be worthwhile to devote some words explaining the different ways to track missions. Thank you very much for your feedback!
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May 30, 2020 22:46
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I've got one currently in the pipeline. It started out of disappointment with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e being essentially two steps forward and two steps back and doing nothing about how outright clunky WFRP is in the 21st Century - so I decided I might not like D&D 5e but could at least steal its engine and rip everything from the magic system to the class system to the combat system out and put something else in. Raven's Beak (a pun on Bec de Corbin being a type of warhammer) has morphed into very much its own thing although it does steal a lot of good ideas from a lot of good and bad games - including Pathfinder 2's 3 Action Economy, DCC's multiple character meatgrinder session 0, MHRP's Popcorn Initiative, and more. Instead of Chaos Gods we get seven Lords of Despair and every character has a personal relationship with one of them. (The fifth Lord of Despair is the Lord of Order, a beacon to his followers, and sitting on a golden throne...). And the setting itself takes inspiration from France about six months before the revolution although mostly with statements for the elements of "You know that the elves of of the East Megorinvia Company offer some of the most exotic magic items around", "You know that dark elves are slavers who are known as dark elves because of the colour of their sails and armour", "You've heard that every ship of the East Megorinvia Company stores a set of black sails below deck" and "You've heard that halflings are mostly just less than a meter tall because their meter was set to the height of their king just over a hundred years ago". It's its own thing and very much WIP. I would love feedback (and advice on whether I'd need to obfuscate the Lords of Despair a touch further).
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Jun 3, 2020 03:56
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5e is an interesting choice for a WFRP heartbreaker, considering how flattened 5e's progression system is, although honestly I don't know how 4e does it compared to 2e. My first instinct would be concern that a 'job' system won't translate over particularly well because the Proficiency system means any trained skill scales to your level, whereas increasing your skills in WFRP requires job changes to allow more advances to be bought. I like the Lords of Despair as a setting conceit and chargen feature, especially since it can replace racial bonuses, of which I've never been a fan.
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Jun 3, 2020 07:05
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Zeerust posted:5e is an interesting choice for a WFRP heartbreaker, considering how flattened 5e's progression system is, although honestly I don't know how 4e does it compared to 2e. My first instinct would be concern that a 'job' system won't translate over particularly well because the Proficiency system means any trained skill scales to your level, whereas increasing your skills in WFRP requires job changes to allow more advances to be bought. My idea for using 5e as a base and still having skills to level is that untrained skills start at a -2 modifier, rank 0 is no modifier, rank 1 is +2, rank 2 is +4 and rank 3 is +6. Cost for rank 0 is 1 skill point, rank 1 is 2 skill points, and so on. This setup works pretty well with 3 skill points per character level past 1st. The ranks would have names like neophyte, apprentice, journeyman, master. If you use the stat modifiers evocative of more old school games, like say ranging from -2 to +2, you can add more skill ranks or change the modifiers to +3 per step, etc. I was planning on using some sort of background/occupation chargen to give a character a smattering if rank 0 and rank 1 skills. The bounded range can be adjusted to taste, or tweaked to account for lack of magic item bonuses and the like. Skill advancement could also be made more granular by making each rank only +1, but still capping at +6 or whatever.
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Jun 3, 2020 12:24
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