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Well that's thematically very cool. I didn't realize you also want to keep track of "hits" so I didn't create a variable for that, but it'd be pretty easy to add in. I think it also makes the system much more interesting, as it gives you choices about hitting harder vs. lasting longer, etc. On its face, dice pools are commonly used in several different RPGs, and are a useful baseline mechanic to build off of. You can add in things like: one-offs that recover dice or let you roll an extra, having just one or two "special" dice in your pool that you choose when to roll and have higher value faces, but if you lose anyway that die is lost rather than going back into your pool, three and four way matches, etc. I kind of enjoyed figuring this out because I've been thinking of learning some python for a while anyway. At first glance your eyes might glaze over but "roll some dice" is like absolutely a babby's first program in most any language, so it's a great starting point.
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Feb 9, 2024 02:09
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I can't help with the statistics bit, but rolling tons of dice is always fun as hell. It does sound like the only actual choice in your game is the character choice, everything else is just random. To me, that's not the best game design, maybe you can do something with the hits where you choose if you want to block or attack or something?
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Feb 13, 2024 19:58
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I went to Protospiel St. Louis this past weeakend and got a bunch of work done on my weird satirical anti-cryptocurrency thematic sequel to Heckin Hounds. The bad dogs have gotten into cyptocurrency. But they're dumb bad dogs, so they want bones in exchange for their coins, which are worthless. The player with the most bones at the end of the game wins.   Frozen Peach fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Feb 20, 2024 |
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Feb 20, 2024 04:01
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You can now buy print and PDF copies of my new adventures for Mothership, the 40-page living ship module The Stone-Flesh Gift and the one-shot pamphlet So You've Been Chump-Dumped, on my itch.io page. They'll also be available in some RPG stores, like Exalted Funeral, in the near future.  
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Mar 27, 2024 21:56
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JMBosch posted:You can now buy print and PDF copies of my new adventures for Mothership, the 40-page living ship module The Stone-Flesh Gift and the one-shot pamphlet So You've Been Chump-Dumped, on my itch.io page. They'll also be available in some RPG stores, like Exalted Funeral, in the near future. So You've Been Chump-Dumped looks great and I regret reading it, or at least telling my Mothership GM that I read it.
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Mar 31, 2024 08:18
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bbcisdabomb posted:So You've Been Chump-Dumped looks great and I regret reading it, or at least telling my Mothership GM that I read it. Hah, thanks! Gotta work on that character knowledge–player knowledge divide. The randomized elements should still keep it interesting, but you could maybe ask your Warden to consider swapping the positions of some key items if they want.
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Mar 31, 2024 20:17
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DriveThruRPG just sponsored their third PocketQuest gamejam. This year's theme was Heists. Indie developers worked through February and March to create 90 new heist-based RPGs, and there's a lot of neat looking titles that have been released. There's also my game. Not as neat looking. But I'm shilling it anyway!  Ins & Outs is a quickplay, GM-less game for 3-6 players, inspired by lighter heist films like Ocean's Eleven or Logan Lucky. Characters can be rolled up in about a minute once you're used to it. You roll up an Origin Story and then three pairs of linked attributes (Smash & Grab, Hide & Seek, Safes & Sounds) with each pair equaling 10. Mechanically the game is very simple. To resolve a task, roll 2d6 and add your attribute; you succeed on a 13 or more, otherwise you fail forward. The game is much more interested in narrative and roleplay than crunch, and it's not really built for campaign play, so it won't be for everyone. It'll be disappointing if you want something robust, but it works well one-shots or a breather between your regular sessions. It's less "four hours of planning a shadowrun" and more "bullshitting with my buddies over pretzels and beers about how we'd rob a train." The game contains two heists (Moneytrain, about robbing a train is also a bank, or perhaps a bank that is also a train?; and Who Deleted Loni Leopard?, about breaking into a film studio to steal a copy of a film that they plan to delete as a tax write-off), and a guide on how to create your own. I'll also be publishing packs of heists down the line.
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Apr 4, 2024 02:51
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Oh my gods, I cannot believe it, I actually released a new game! In german only for now but gosh golly, I'm so happy to have finished it for now. I've written a historical rpg about playing mercenaries and controlling a company during the anglo-french "Hundred Years War", so if you can read german and that's for you, go take a look at https://mrmisfit.itch.io/soudard =) I'm also planning an english translation but that's for the far future. It's called SOUDARD, as you can see below, and it was my first project actually using Affinity Publisher 2. And gently caress me did I learn a lot. 
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Apr 30, 2024 18:50
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Mr.Misfit posted:Oh my gods, I cannot believe it, I actually released a new game! In german only for now but gosh golly, I'm so happy to have finished it for now. That's right, buddy; make it happen!
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Apr 30, 2024 19:09
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Are there any TTRPGs that avoid combat entirely by taking the approach of "you are victorious... but at a cost"? I have a part-formed idea of how to do this (I find combat in the trad D&D style of to-hit rolls and everyone waiting for their turn veeeeery tedious), but if someone's already devised a good system I want to know about it!
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May 1, 2024 22:58
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Small Strange Bird posted:Are there any TTRPGs that avoid combat entirely by taking the approach of "you are victorious... but at a cost"? I have a part-formed idea of how to do this (I find combat in the trad D&D style of to-hit rolls and everyone waiting for their turn veeeeery tedious), but if someone's already devised a good system I want to know about it! Just think of combat as a skill check. Big bad guy is a negative modifier, big sword is a positive and so forth. On success, you win, on a failure, it's up to your discretion as a GM if the players are wounded, pushed off or killed.
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May 2, 2024 06:32
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Is it just me or is DriveThruRPGs way of creating a printable book for PrintOnDemand terrible? I've been struggling for hours now to get their file, into the right size and it still says the pages are the wrong size. This is exhausting, not to mention that they also use imperial measurements for which someone should be quartered at this state of the world... And my first local print test from the print company that did my last book hosed up my print all around, with big white spaces and the entire layout not reaching the edges of the pages. gently caress me. *sigh* Any tips from those with more experience?
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May 9, 2024 08:24
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Leperflesh posted:On its face, dice pools are commonly used in several different RPGs, and are a useful baseline mechanic to build off of. It's interesting to see this, because I thought the conventional wisdom was that dice pools are bad because they complicate basic task resolution and obscure probabilities of success (sometimes even from the game designers). Are there inherent problems with dice pools, or did all the 90s games that used them just use them badly and give them an unfairly bad reputation?
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May 12, 2024 20:16
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Silver2195 posted:It's interesting to see this, because I thought the conventional wisdom was that dice pools are bad because they complicate basic task resolution and obscure probabilities of success (sometimes even from the game designers). Are there inherent problems with dice pools, or did all the 90s games that used them just use them badly and give them an unfairly bad reputation? Dice pools are entirely usable and coherent as a concept, and have certain advantages such as expanding the possible axes of success-measuring as in ORE. It is correct that they are harder for people to figure out mathematically even in their simplest forms, and stuff like WotG would be completely opaque to a lot of people if they hadn't put the probability table right there in the book. But a simple dice pool system can have very straightforward probabilities that your average player can keep in mind without having to take a minute to work out the math or look it up somewhere. It can get really interesting if you make bespoke dice. I love Legend of the Five Rings 5th Edition's take. FFG Star Wars, its predecessor, has some good ideas but really overcomplicates the premise. WoD and to a lesser extent Shadowrun gave the concept a bad rap. WoD's math was garbage from the start and too many of the authors actively didn't care about the math of whatever they wrote. It was a whole bunch of tummy feels. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 21:42 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 21:12
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Yeah a game that gives players various resources to spend can make one or more of those resources (mechanically) dice, which really just means the resource has some probability curve to its utility. There's nothing wrong with that foundationally, but it can easily be a problem if you don't think about (and math out and understand) what those probability curves actually are and mean, or pay attention to other critical game elements like pacing. I always say that what makes a game a game is that player(s) have interesting choices to make: you have to make sure that your dice pool mechanic is giving the players something interesting to do, rather than just killing time with pointless randomness or forcing players to make random choices because they cannot straightforwardly analyze their probabilities (this is making uninteresting choices). For example, the 2d20 system from Modiphius gives players the ability to roll 2d20, plus additional d20s (up to a maximum of 5) if they draw from a shared resource pool to get extra dice. They don't add the d20's results together, but rather compare the result on each die to target numbers to determine successes. So the "dice pool" in this case doesn't particularly complicate odds: it's very straightforward to understand what your chances are for each die to succeed (five percent per integer value on the die), and not especially hard to calculate (and fairly easy to "get" through the experience of some play) how your odds change when you add additional dice. This system adds risk in that each die has a 1/20th chance of an unavoidable negative consequence, so there's an interesting tradeoff to be made: buy a higher chance of success, but you are also buying a higher chance of drawbacks along with it. The various 2d20 games Modiphius has published have varying receptions in terms of game balance and quality, but I haven't really seen anyone criticize the underlying mechanic, it's very solid. I think the strengths come from limiting the maximum size of the dice pool and using just one die type, using success mechanics to avoid having to intuit a probability curve's changes from adding or removing lots of dice in an additive system, and only using one dice pool rather than several interacting ones. It doesn't feel especially necessary for the game designers to print success charts to clarify an obscure set of outcome results for those who aren't interested in writing Python programs to work it out. There's other ways to go. IMO dice pools are a useful tool, but shouldn't be treated as a default tool or just thrown into any game because they seem cool. You want to have a diverse toolkit in your game design box, and reach for the right tool for each job you're trying to accomplish, and then not abuse that tool by trying to force it to extremes where it's going to break or produce undesirable effects.
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May 12, 2024 21:34
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Leperflesh posted:The various 2d20 games Modiphius has published have varying receptions in terms of game balance and quality, but I haven't really seen anyone criticize the underlying mechanic, it's very solid. I think the strengths come from limiting the maximum size of the dice pool and using just one die type, using success mechanics to avoid having to intuit a probability curve's changes from adding or removing lots of dice in an additive system, and only using one dice pool rather than several interacting ones. It doesn't feel especially necessary for the game designers to print success charts to clarify an obscure set of outcome results for those who aren't interested in writing Python programs to work it out. I think there are a lot of people who dislike 2d20 as a whole and not just individual games, but I think the focus of their ire is usually the metacurrencies rather than the actual 2d20 roll.
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May 13, 2024 21:02
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