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Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

EverettLO posted:

It's gonna be six weeks before I stop clicking on Private Games Server out of muscle memory.

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Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Tulip posted:

I think that last part is resolvable - it's fairly common to have a game that starts with one major touchstone as its kind of obvious media piece and a second one that is a fairly clear example of where it gets its classes from. Apocalypse World is Mad Max for sure, but the classes are much more Firefly than Mad Max. Blades in the Dark is very Thief & Dishonored as its main media, but the classes feel a lot more like Leverage than how Thief & Dishonored do it.

So Phoenix Wright, but also by way of CSI or something. Something with a good ensemble feel to it.
True. In the actual 'trial phase' you could have the individual people present their portions of the case and use their own rolls, while the attorney class's job would be to play goalie for shots at the weak spots you have (and to shout HOLD IT) at key components.

I'm imagining that your adventures would kind of rack up Evidence value but also possibly some kind of case flaw tracker, with the challenge being that you have to run up Evidence while keeping case flaw as low as it can be.

CitizenKeen
Nov 13, 2003

easygoing pedant
Now I'm thinking of a crunchy game like Invisible, Inc., where the three main game modes are social engineering, group hacking, and stealth. You can attack people, but it better be a quick-tap-hide-the-body kind of violence, because any real combat could raise the alarm.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/243970/Invisible_Inc/

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


And now I'm bouncing the idea of a "bad lawyers" game where you intimidate witnesses and bribe jurors...

CitizenKeen posted:

Now I'm thinking of a crunchy game like Invisible, Inc., where the three main game modes are social engineering, group hacking, and stealth. You can attack people, but it better be a quick-tap-hide-the-body kind of violence, because any real combat could raise the alarm.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/243970/Invisible_Inc/

I like this!

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

I had an idea for a game a few years ago about being a fantasy-setting circuit court. 1+ players, so in one-player mode you're literally just a judge doing a circuit, add more players and you can have like a baliff, maybe investigators, defense counsel, etc. Part of the game would be the players inventing the legal system that they're nominally implementing (or failing to), so each adventure or campaign could have radically different feel depending on what laws you're putting people on trial for breaking, whether you run fair or unfair trials, what sorts of punishments you can or do implement, etc.

It needn't necessarily be a high-magic or low-magic fantasy setting, either, could work in SF too; the important part is, you travel around and visit communities that have the need for, but cannot self-provide, court services, as with the original meaning of a "circuit" court.

Then I realized last year, oh, this is basically about being cops, and didn't really want to make that game any more; even with the best of intentions, it would likely attract people who just wanted to use the game to roleplay their fascist fantasies, ugh.

Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Jun 1, 2021

Glazius
Jul 22, 2007

Hail all those who are able,
any mouse can,
any mouse will,
but the Guard prevail.

Clapping Larry

CitizenKeen posted:

But coming up with mysteries is a bit exhausting, if I'm honest. Unless I'm playing it wrong, there's no "throw 4 skeletons and a wight into a room with a flame pit and call it a day" way to make an hour of fun with mysteries.

I grow tired of violence, sometimes, and then I play RPGs that don't focus on violence. But they're usually lighter. When I feel the itch to min/max a character sheet and choose from a giant list of cool abilities, all of my options seem to be about violence.

Get ready for this spicy hot take: even the games that are maximally crunched about violence are a bit poo poo at being about violence.

As soon as combat is about more than just annihilating the other side most of them just fall apart! You can't hold a line or protect someone or something, and god forbid someone tries to run away from someone who wants to catch them. Granted, 4 skeletons and a wight are all about annihilating the other side; you could well argue that's what they're for.

But the same sort of actual people you'd need to take time and care to build out as meaningful NPC participants in a mystery or a trial or an ill-starred stage production need to be built out with time and care to be meaningful NPC participants in violence too, because who gets up in the morning just to kill you? And most of the violence systems don't make that easy to prep or run.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Leperflesh posted:

I had an idea for a game a few years ago about being a fantasy-setting circuit court. 1+ players, so in one-player mode you're literally just a judge doing a circuit, add more players and you can have like a baliff, maybe investigators, defense counsel, etc. Part of the game would be the players inventing the legal system that they're nominally implementing (or failing to), so each adventure or campaign could have radically different feel depending on what laws you're putting people on trial for breaking, whether you run fair or unfair trials, what sorts of punishments you can or do implement, etc.

It needn't necessarily be a high-magic or low-magic fantasy setting, either, could work in SF too; the important part is, you travel around and visit communities that have the need for, but cannot self-provide, court services, as with the original meaning of a "circuit" court.

Then I realized last year, oh, this is basically about being cops, and didn't really want to make that game any more; even with the best of intentions, it would likely attract people who just wanted to use the game to roleplay their fascist fantasies, ugh.
Circuit judges and such well predate the modern system of policing that we know, although it does presuppose a certain degree of what you would probably call 'law enforcement'. On the other hand I imagine that if the game is set up as such that you 'win' by instituting justice and that adventures involve investigating or resolving crimes, with violence being maybe an occasional thing where some guy's last-ditch effort is to pull out his deLameter or lure you into a death trap... different story.


Tulip posted:

And now I'm bouncing the idea of a "bad lawyers" game where you intimidate witnesses and bribe jurors...
What I'm imagining here is that you have kind of two things you're trying to develop with your case: 'Power,' which is just "how good is your legal case," and 'flaws,' which represent weak points that the other side can use to gently caress you up. If you have sufficient 'Power' then maybe flaws don't matter - or maybe you're in a situation where it's OK if you don't have a lot of power, but you absolutely cannot have a single flaw.

Sort of like victory points in a board game. And of course some cases might require an absurd number of victory points AND to dig down into the opponents' flaws to have a chance, but that's why Phoenix Wright made it into Marvel vs. Capcom.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Asterite34 posted:

fake edit: Maybe a collaborative art form like filmmaking? Classes include Director, Screenwriter, Producer, Leading Man, that kinda thing.

Under Hollow Hills tries to do that with scripting a circus performance.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Glazius posted:

Get ready for this spicy hot take: even the games that are maximally crunched about violence are a bit poo poo at being about violence.

As soon as combat is about more than just annihilating the other side most of them just fall apart! You can't hold a line or protect someone or something, and god forbid someone tries to run away from someone who wants to catch them. Granted, 4 skeletons and a wight are all about annihilating the other side; you could well argue that's what they're for.

But the same sort of actual people you'd need to take time and care to build out as meaningful NPC participants in a mystery or a trial or an ill-starred stage production need to be built out with time and care to be meaningful NPC participants in violence too, because who gets up in the morning just to kill you? And most of the violence systems don't make that easy to prep or run.

Honestly, agreed. Remember how much chaos you got the first time you had NPCs surrender early in a combat? That shouldn't be an incredibly rare situation!

DigitalRaven
Oct 9, 2012




Tiler Kiwi posted:

Congratulations on being top level now, trad games

:woop:

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Nessus posted:

Circuit judges and such well predate the modern system of policing that we know, although it does presuppose a certain degree of what you would probably call 'law enforcement'. On the other hand I imagine that if the game is set up as such that you 'win' by instituting justice and that adventures involve investigating or resolving crimes, with violence being maybe an occasional thing where some guy's last-ditch effort is to pull out his deLameter or lure you into a death trap... different story.
What I'm imagining here is that you have kind of two things you're trying to develop with your case: 'Power,' which is just "how good is your legal case," and 'flaws,' which represent weak points that the other side can use to gently caress you up. If you have sufficient 'Power' then maybe flaws don't matter - or maybe you're in a situation where it's OK if you don't have a lot of power, but you absolutely cannot have a single flaw.

I was thinking that your characters might gain in prestige or resources or experience or whatever by concluding cases, without the game deciding that you needed to 'win' or 'lose' them, particularly given the party might be on both sides of any case, and might not have any way to know whether a given suspect was "actually" innocent or guilty. They might need to deal with repercussions and complications either way, too; a community might be hostile to the circuit court, or to a suspect(s), or deeply split; you'd answer to some sort of regional authority that might evaluate your performance based on a variety of criteria (cost, whether the nobility is satisfied, adherence to holy scripture, execution quota, etc.). Perhaps a lot of that could be determinable by the party as part of pre-adventure/campaign generation or during the adventure too, I dunno.

There's problems. You can't assume anyone playing the game is familiar with lawyering or judging or historical examples of either, which is an authoring problem (how much of a game's pages can you devote to teaching people skills and history?). As a game, people might find themselves really uncomfortable with passing judgement on someone when they're not really sure of their guilt but have in-game pressure to reach a verdict, even if you're not officially "cops" you're still part of a law enforcement structure, etc. etc.

I dunno. I'll probably mull it for another several years while doing nothing with it, as is my wont.

Jimbozig
Sep 30, 2003

I like sharing and ice cream and animals.
One reason why it's easier to make games about combat than about arguing is because people don't know poo poo about combat, but we've all been in a bajillion arguments.

If I tell you, here are the exactly 8 arguments you can make, and their mechanical effects, you'll be like... but what about this? How does this fit? It's not one of the 8. And this mechanical effect for this argument assumes you're making it in a certain way and... Etc.

If I tell you, here are the exactly 8 ways to hit someone with a big sword, you'll be like, cool I've got 8 moves. Unless you're a real deep medieval combat nerd you're not going to be like "but what about half-swording??"

Leraika
Jun 14, 2015

Luckily, I *did* save your old avatar. Fucked around and found out indeed.
Oh speaking of games with more space devoted to non-combat than combat: Leverage (though one of the 'classes' is the guy who cleans up messes so)

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran

Tulip posted:

Honestly, agreed. Remember how much chaos you got the first time you had NPCs surrender early in a combat? That shouldn't be an incredibly rare situation!

Depends on the game. In something like D&D it should be rare because "now we must deal with our prisoners" slows gameplay down immensely and becomes the same kind of logistical slog that people hate in games where you're asked to track your supplies. In, say, Unknown Armies, someone throwing up their hands and pleading for mercy makes things more interesting because it's already a game (largely) of horror, hard choices, and moral complexity. D&D being none of those things, dealing with every third or fourth kobold surrendering is not furthering what the game wants to do.

Now, AD&D is a different beast. Morale rules were more important in earlier editions, because they were trying to impose a base level of "you are real people living in a world where carrying capacity matters," and the system had support for that sort of play. It wasn't very good support, but it did exist. But the fact that people almost universally houseruled away morale rules, leading to the dynamic that has existed since 3E, says something about how fun it was.

bewilderment
Nov 22, 2007
man what



Glazius posted:

Get ready for this spicy hot take: even the games that are maximally crunched about violence are a bit poo poo at being about violence.

As soon as combat is about more than just annihilating the other side most of them just fall apart! You can't hold a line or protect someone or something, and god forbid someone tries to run away from someone who wants to catch them. Granted, 4 skeletons and a wight are all about annihilating the other side; you could well argue that's what they're for.

This is why Lancer is good as it provides 'sitreps' with guidelines on how to make combats that aren't just wiping out the other side. The general sense is that each one is expected to last 6 rounds (dial up or down as required) and after that switches to narrating the success or failure based on the sitrep's rules.
e.g. the 'Gauntlet' sitrep requires you to outnumber the enemies in the capture zone. The 'recon' sitrep requires you to hold one out of several points by the end, but you don't know which one it is at the start and have to investigate them. The 'Control' sitrep gives one side points for how many control zones they control at the end of each round, and then the scores are compared at the end.

Asterite34 posted:

Well that brings up the hypothetical: What situations and kinds of stories lend themselves to the traditional RPG mold (a party of differently classed specialists overcoming challenges with discrete moves and skills and attributes) but which would usually involve no physical combat of any sort?

The sample game Hammerheads for Cortex Prime (which is kinda free on the website in terms of explanation) is this. The premise is that you're crisis/disaster responders, kinda like the old Thunderbirds show. Avalanche rescue, airdropping to shut down a runaway train, fighting a wildfire, and so on.

PerniciousKnid
Sep 13, 2006
Thinking about it more, I think what's interesting about combat in DnD, Lancer etc. is the team aspect. Combining your characters and abilities to overcome the enemy team is interesting. One fighter pounding on a single enemy isn't really any more interesting mechanically than rolling a persuasion check.

Leperflesh posted:

I had an idea for a game a few years ago about being a fantasy-setting circuit court. 1+ players, so in one-player mode you're literally just a judge doing a circuit, add more players and you can have like a baliff, maybe investigators, defense counsel, etc. Part of the game would be the players inventing the legal system that they're nominally implementing (or failing to), so each adventure or campaign could have radically different feel depending on what laws you're putting people on trial for breaking, whether you run fair or unfair trials, what sorts of punishments you can or do implement, etc.

It needn't necessarily be a high-magic or low-magic fantasy setting, either, could work in SF too; the important part is, you travel around and visit communities that have the need for, but cannot self-provide, court services, as with the original meaning of a "circuit" court.

Then I realized last year, oh, this is basically about being cops, and didn't really want to make that game any more; even with the best of intentions, it would likely attract people who just wanted to use the game to roleplay their fascist fantasies, ugh.

That's a much more interesting idea. I was thinking about something like a social web, where players are trying to navigate the abstract terrain of a social network. I guess what's really missing on many games is that you might have certain classes with abilities to leverage contacts in interesting ways, but not interesting complimentary social powers and resource trade-offs on the level of a typical minis combat game.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Leperflesh posted:

I was thinking that your characters might gain in prestige or resources or experience or whatever by concluding cases, without the game deciding that you needed to 'win' or 'lose' them, particularly given the party might be on both sides of any case, and might not have any way to know whether a given suspect was "actually" innocent or guilty. They might need to deal with repercussions and complications either way, too; a community might be hostile to the circuit court, or to a suspect(s), or deeply split; you'd answer to some sort of regional authority that might evaluate your performance based on a variety of criteria (cost, whether the nobility is satisfied, adherence to holy scripture, execution quota, etc.). Perhaps a lot of that could be determinable by the party as part of pre-adventure/campaign generation or during the adventure too, I dunno.

There's problems. You can't assume anyone playing the game is familiar with lawyering or judging or historical examples of either, which is an authoring problem (how much of a game's pages can you devote to teaching people skills and history?). As a game, people might find themselves really uncomfortable with passing judgement on someone when they're not really sure of their guilt but have in-game pressure to reach a verdict, even if you're not officially "cops" you're still part of a law enforcement structure, etc. etc.

I dunno. I'll probably mull it for another several years while doing nothing with it, as is my wont.
I think there's a few different possibilities in this space here.

One would be, at the risk of using a Less Than Friendly Analogy, something like that you're the assistants to an Inquisitorial figure or one of the PCs has the power to make the final judgment call and you are, more or less, the law; you find the facts with the team but you will ultimately be called upon to make a judgment, and carry out the relevant sentence (which, to be fair, will far more often be 'give him 3 cows' or 'the house belongs to X, not Y' than 'DEATH'). This probably works best in something resembling a classical fantasy milieu.

In something more closely resembling your modern day court system, you would have either a prosecutor or a defense attorney. Defense attorneys seem like they would be more easily cast in a heroic mold, a la Phoenix Wright, and it could well be an ironclad rule that when the campaign begins, the GM has to make a fundamental statement - no subversions - of, "Everyone you defend is innocent," "everyone you defend is innocent of the crime of which they are accused," or "everyone deserves a strong legal defense, even if they loving well did it."

Those all have different moods, but so do different styles of D&D campaigns. Legendary heroes vs. murderhoboes vs. some hypothetical-but-rarely-done 'military campaign play' or something. The issues seem comparable, with the benefit that you could very well have a campaign with a dozen cases and make strong impacts without killing a single person, even in a medieval environment.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

PerniciousKnid posted:

Thinking about it more, I think what's interesting about combat in DnD, Lancer etc. is the team aspect. Combining your characters and abilities to overcome the enemy team is interesting. One fighter pounding on a single enemy isn't really any more interesting mechanically than rolling a persuasion check.
I'm watching a regular stream of it and by far Lancer's greatest combat mechanic is that it's "whichever side has the numbers disadvantage goes first and then the advantage goes" so it's more often than not players go then GM goes until it becomes GM goes and then players go and because there's no initiative players nominate who they think should go next and this allows for great synergy between player units and just setting up combos and then finishing them between them. It keeps everyone paying attention to the tactical map so they serve up the ball to each other so the others can spike and it makes the players feel so good and satisfied to come up with plans organically based on situations and then execute them.

Parkreiner
Oct 29, 2011

Tulip posted:

So Phoenix Wright, but also by way of CSI or something. Something with a good ensemble feel to it.
My mind is increasingly going towards a stealth focused game as a good option. The hacking idea CK mentioned before would feel better to me if I knew a drat thing about hacking, but having it be a system where you aren't hacking to kill people but to extort or expose or indict people might be good.

CitizenKeen posted:

Now I'm thinking of a crunchy game like Invisible, Inc., where the three main game modes are social engineering, group hacking, and stealth. You can attack people, but it better be a quick-tap-hide-the-body kind of violence, because any real combat could raise the alarm.


So this reminds me of Black Seven, a crunchy stealth game I messed around with a bit. Out of the box it does have some compulsory (if not necessarily lethal) violence, as you need to disable X number of guards to reach a bare minimum level of non-surveillance to start monkeywrenching things, but combat is non-tactical “roll this to take out 1-2 sentries” and most of the game’s attention revolves around maneuvering into position, managing suspicion, and deciding when to abandon safety/secrecy. It’s not quite what we’re looking for, I think, but it’s a step in the right direction? There’s about an hour of actual play to listen to as well.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Nessus posted:

I think there's a few different possibilities in this space here.

One would be, at the risk of using a Less Than Friendly Analogy, something like that you're the assistants to an Inquisitorial figure or one of the PCs has the power to make the final judgment call and you are, more or less, the law; you find the facts with the team but you will ultimately be called upon to make a judgment, and carry out the relevant sentence (which, to be fair, will far more often be 'give him 3 cows' or 'the house belongs to X, not Y' than 'DEATH'). This probably works best in something resembling a classical fantasy milieu.

I've played some of the warhammer 40k inquisitor's minions game, Dark Heresy, which is more or less what you're describing in terms of "what the PCs are supposed to be doing" - and the rules are, perhaps unsurprisingly, like 50% about combat capabilities; plus skills useful for investigation, intimidation, getting resources, etc. So a typical adventure still winds up being fairly violent, although it's not strictly required. And of course the game is set in the bleak dystopia of the 40k setting, so there's zero expectation that you'll be fair. These are not knocks on the game necessarily, it does what it sets out to do, but it has that vibe of "you're powerful compared to the regular joes around you, but you're also really just weak tools of a much more powerful Inquisitor who you must please but who will do little for you; good luck" and that part could certainly be borrowed for some kinds of Circuit Court game modes.

quote:

In something more closely resembling your modern day court system, you would have either a prosecutor or a defense attorney. Defense attorneys seem like they would be more easily cast in a heroic mold, a la Phoenix Wright, and it could well be an ironclad rule that when the campaign begins, the GM has to make a fundamental statement - no subversions - of, "Everyone you defend is innocent," "everyone you defend is innocent of the crime of which they are accused," or "everyone deserves a strong legal defense, even if they loving well did it."

I think some kind of unequivocal, out-of-character safety factors and session 0 discussions for this kind of game would be very necessary, for sure. On top of innocence questions, tables need to set expectations and limits about things like: the use by PCs and/or NPCs of harsh interrogation/torture; harsh punishments (mutilation, torture, death); the influence of prejudices and how we'll address them (ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.); sexual crime; etc. It'd be really easy to stray across lines that harm players if you didn't. Perhaps "are we expected to defend a guilty person" or "is it possible we unknowingly get a very guilty person off" aren't as obvious as problems but I agree they totally could be and are just as deserving of care.

Throw on the whole "so we're basically cops/cop adjacent" part and you start to see why I kind of lost my enthusiasm for what seemed initially like a cool idea on its surface.

quote:

Those all have different moods, but so do different styles of D&D campaigns. Legendary heroes vs. murderhoboes vs. some hypothetical-but-rarely-done 'military campaign play' or something. The issues seem comparable, with the benefit that you could very well have a campaign with a dozen cases and make strong impacts without killing a single person, even in a medieval environment.

Most definitely, the flexibility is part of the attraction I think.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
I think for ideas of non-combat mechanics and themes, you need to look at other media. I'm still working on a light-hearted anime-inspired system with robots and AIs where they have all kinds of potential issues that count as a challenge- throwing a party on short notice complete with catering, entertainment and guest management; tracking down a lost child in a city or wilderness; performing a heist on a shady animal experimentation facility to rescue some pigeons that aren't exactly normal pigeons (and the rest while they're at it)...

Also going for Battle Network levels of Internet of poo poo, one encounter I have in mind is a smartfridge that's been left ignored for long enough that both its contents and its OS have gone dangerously rotten to the point of being weaponised. Also, it's mobile.

bewilderment
Nov 22, 2007
man what



Hostile V posted:

I'm watching a regular stream of it and by far Lancer's greatest combat mechanic is that it's "whichever side has the numbers disadvantage goes first and then the advantage goes" so it's more often than not players go then GM goes until it becomes GM goes and then players go and because there's no initiative players nominate who they think should go next and this allows for great synergy between player units and just setting up combos and then finishing them between them. It keeps everyone paying attention to the tactical map so they serve up the ball to each other so the others can spike and it makes the players feel so good and satisfied to come up with plans organically based on situations and then execute them.

That's not actually how Lancer works.

It's just plain "player takes a turn, then an enemy takes a turn" and both PCs and enemy can go in any order they want, until one side has all gone and then you finish up resolving the other side.

I mean you're still 90% correct, it's just that players always go first in a round. The only exception to this rule is a Veteran-template enemy that's been given the Viper's Speed trait.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
The all-purpose answer to this question is that the best thing for games to model with high-crunch systems is games.

No, seriously.

D&D is a series of wargame scenarios wrapped in a narrative that is designed to promote emotional investment in the outcome of the encounter (especially for people who aren't as big on serious competition / the intrinsic goal of winning) and to tie one encounter to the next. Literally just do that but with whatever game you like instead. Approaching it from the angle of "but what should we model and how should we model it" is falling into the exact same trap as people who try to calculate dexterity by swinging a computer mouse around by its cord, just slightly less obviously.

Dread is a good object lesson here. There should be some resonance between the game mechanics and the narrative situation it stands in for but the important thing is that translating it back into narrative is a matter of interpretation, not simulation. You want social "combat"? Play a hand of poker and then the winner gets to explain what happened in the story.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
the trouble with this approach, of course, is that either you steal an existing game and your results fall somewhere on a scale of "that Jenga RPG" to "d20 shovelware" depending on how appealing people find the concept -- or worse, you have to actually do game design and not just write a series of RNG-modulated creative writing prompts :v:

Zarick
Dec 28, 2004

Glazius posted:

Get ready for this spicy hot take: even the games that are maximally crunched about violence are a bit poo poo at being about violence.

As soon as combat is about more than just annihilating the other side most of them just fall apart! You can't hold a line or protect someone or something, and god forbid someone tries to run away from someone who wants to catch them. Granted, 4 skeletons and a wight are all about annihilating the other side; you could well argue that's what they're for.

But the same sort of actual people you'd need to take time and care to build out as meaningful NPC participants in a mystery or a trial or an ill-starred stage production need to be built out with time and care to be meaningful NPC participants in violence too, because who gets up in the morning just to kill you? And most of the violence systems don't make that easy to prep or run.

I like how Torchbearer interacts with this: whenever you get into a conflict the players decide the stakes: you can choose Kill if you want, but then you getting killed is also on the table. Choosing Drive Off will often get you the thing you want without putting as much at stake. This has the (probably intentional) side effect of making the players think about whether they *really* need to kill their opponents rather than just making them stop guarding the gates or occupying the town or whatever.

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

CitizenKeen posted:

You're not wrong.

We currently have a paradigm where the group is trying to get into a room, but two guards stand in the way.
  1. "I'll attack the guards." --> Break out the mini-game.
  2. "I'll try and convince them to let me pass." --> Engage core mechanic, roll a die, you're done, moving on.

I just wonder, wouldn't it be nice to have a paradigm:
  1. "I'll attack the guards." --> Engage core mechanic, roll a die, you're done, moving on.
  2. "I'll try and convince them to let me pass." --> Break out the mini-game.

Or at least one game where that was the way it worked. Then, the fun way to play the game is to parley, negotiate, and threaten, as opposed to stabbing people in the neck.

I think part of the challenge is that it's hard to conceptualize noncombat things as simple minigames you can conduct as part of a wider pen and paper RPG. Or well, hard to gamify in general. You can look at video games and see how often combat of some kind is a feature there versus noncombat task resolution and see the same problem. Like Disco Elysium and some other isometrics have been praised for non-combat task resolution, and those are ultimately resolved with dialog trees and TTRPG-style skill checks and nothing fancier. Board games certainly have a wide variety of non-combat "what are you doing" systems, but a lot of that is facilitated with cards and tokens and other components that help manually juggle whatever abstracted system you're simulating as you play, and it all ends up being weightier than is practical for a lot of RPGs.

e- and as far as hacking games, wasn't there a whole elaborate cyber security system in that fantasy cyberpunk game the one doofy twitter guy made before SIGMATA and his aborted eco-terrorist game?

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Nuns with Guns posted:

e- and as far as hacking games, wasn't there a whole elaborate cyber security system in that fantasy cyberpunk game the one doofy twitter guy made before SIGMATA and his aborted eco-terrorist game?

It’s elaborate but not mechanically deep. You need to constantly remember best practices of cryptography and information security, or bad stuff happens, but it’s all in the form of cryptography parallels and GM enforcement.

Which makes 100% sense for a game about teaching software engineers to always remember best practices of cryptographic security, but it doesn’t make for a very engaging hacking/cryptography system.

It’s a bit like if a sword fighting RPG had skill resolution based on memorizing which moves counter which, and wounds were something the GM decided.

SkyeAuroline
Nov 12, 2020

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

the trouble with this approach, of course, is that either you steal an existing game and your results fall somewhere on a scale of "that Jenga RPG" to "d20 shovelware" depending on how appealing people find the concept -- or worse, you have to actually do game design and not just write a series of RNG-modulated creative writing prompts :v:

My "barely able to rewrite solo game oracles, let alone do game design" self is attacked. :v:

Hypnobeard
Sep 15, 2004

Obey the Beard



CitizenKeen posted:

What are some role playing games with good, board gamey mini games that aren't combat? Shardix's mentality is similar to my own, but also, for most games, combat is the part that's the crunchy, interactive, gamey part. Which is the part I want.

Ars Magicka is a little too solitaire. Red Markets is a little too depressing. Even optimistic, relationship-centered, narrative games like Flying Circus put the game in the combat.

What's a good, crunchy game where the meatiest chapter is for something other than fighting?

Does Burning Wheel qualify for this? Social conflict and martial conflicts play out on pretty much the same system (though the "life counter" is a bit different), and combat explicitly has a "eh, we're not going to bother playing this out" mechanic.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Nuns with Guns posted:

Like Disco Elysium and some other isometrics have been praised for non-combat task resolution, and those are ultimately resolved with dialog trees and TTRPG-style skill checks and nothing fancier.

Honestly I think this is a case of lack of imagination on the part of reviewers, or perhaps just a sign that in a desert any water is sweet. As much as video games have piled into increasingly sophisticated ways to shoot shotguns, there are some parts of video games that have incredibly expressive nonviolent mechanics, with the first that comes to mind being "city builders, as a genre."

And while the sort of 'gods eye view' may not make sense for group play, I did finally watch 1952's Ikiru, which is about a lot of things but for our purposes we can take "how does a park get built by a dysfunctional bureaucracy," told from a pretty low level where it comes down to brow-beating and arguments and manipulation and of course good old fashioned horse-trading. I can think of RPGs that have a start point for this (e.g. Blades in the Dark's factions and standings) but to make that a core mechanic would require elaboration.

e: starting to feel bad that there's a wealth of ideas here but not a lot of completed games

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



Almost no games are actually about violence - they're about violence as depicted in entertainment.

We're just accustomed to the non-action parts being handled off-screen because that's how it's been done as long as stories have been told. We don't conventionally wonder what to do with all these captured goblins because they're no longer relevant to the story after they've stopped being interesting.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

moths posted:

Almost no games are actually about violence - they're about violence as depicted in entertainment.

We're just accustomed to the non-action parts being handled off-screen because that's how it's been done as long as stories have been told. We don't conventionally wonder what to do with all these captured goblins because they're no longer relevant to the story after they've stopped being interesting.

Always going to use an excuse to post this (somewhat spoilery for Season 4 of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I guess)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P89X-j-TWVE

As for non-combat mechanics in video games, don't the Frogwares Sherlock games where you get to combine the clues you pick up in a kind of 2d mind-palace to see how they fit together? Return of the Obra Dinn has something similar with the journal you fill up.

potatocubed
Jul 26, 2012

*rathian noises*

SkyeAuroline posted:

My "barely able to rewrite solo game oracles, let alone do game design" self is attacked. :v:

Creative writing prompts are game design. They're just design for games that TC there doesn't like.

SkyeAuroline
Nov 12, 2020

potatocubed posted:

Creative writing prompts are game design. They're just design for games that TC there doesn't like.

I should have said "mechanics design" in my reply - with an ongoing Thousand Year Old Vampire playthrough (alongside Starforged where I need to finish my tables...), I know it's still game design. I struggle more with mechanics but have enough trouble just stocking tables.

Bumper Stickup
Jan 7, 2012

Mmm... Offshore Toast!


Grimey Drawer
Hey does anyone have any experience with mongooses Paranoia series? Trying to get a more in depth answer to what differentiates regular Paranoia and Acute Paranoia. Like I know that you can blay as bots but are there any mechanical/rules/etc differences or is it just an expansion?

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Bumper Stickup posted:

Hey does anyone have any experience with mongooses Paranoia series? Trying to get a more in depth answer to what differentiates regular Paranoia and Acute Paranoia. Like I know that you can blay as bots but are there any mechanical/rules/etc differences or is it just an expansion?
When you say Mongoose's Paranoia do you mean the most recent White Box or do you mean XP/25th Anniversary.

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011

Bumper Stickup posted:

Hey does anyone have any experience with mongooses Paranoia series? Trying to get a more in depth answer to what differentiates regular Paranoia and Acute Paranoia. Like I know that you can blay as bots but are there any mechanical/rules/etc differences or is it just an expansion?

PARANOIA reached its peak with the mid-2000s revamp and the various new editions from Mongoose since then have been worse and worse. Just buy this PDF https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/1937/Paranoia-Service-Pack-1?filters=0_0_10122_0_0 (also called PARANOIA XP) and print off whatever pages you want, it's all in black and white.

Rules don't matter in PARANOIA. Rules really don't matter in PARANOIA.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Discussions about Paranoia tend to turn into impromptu games of it for a reason, I think one of the books itself specifically says Alpha Complex is more of a frame of mind than a setting.

That said, come to think of it, it'd probably work well in PbtA. Just have 'failure', 'success' and 'catastrophic success'.

Maxwell Lord
Dec 12, 2008

I am drowning.
There is no sign of land.
You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.

And I hope you die.

I hope we both die.


:smith:

Grimey Drawer
I've always liked mechanics focused on organizational management- like, running a noble house or a crime organization. BitD is an obvious example though that also has heists and combat and such, the first Dune RPG had some stuff for looking at the health of your minor house, the ASoIaF RPG has some stuff for that too. There are plenty of board and video games based on running something and I think a collaborative RPG is also a good setting for that.

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Arivia
Mar 17, 2011

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Discussions about Paranoia tend to turn into impromptu games of it for a reason, I think one of the books itself specifically says Alpha Complex is more of a frame of mind than a setting.

That said, come to think of it, it'd probably work well in PbtA. Just have 'failure', 'success' and 'catastrophic success'.

The problem with PbtA for PARANOIA is that it requires clear playbooks and moves, so the GM couldn't gently caress with the players nearly as much.

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