TG Design Thread: Elegance in Elf Simulation

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG Design Thread: Elegance in Elf Simulation

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

IceBox posted:

I am in the early designing stages for an RPG and I would love some advice.

I am trying to come up with names for attributes/ability scores that do not provide players with an excuse to roleplay their characters in a certain way. For example, a character with a low intelligence being played as stupid. I want the names to reflect a character's power, finesse, and resilience in the categories of mental, physical, and social (9 total).

I realize that at my current point in development this is about the last things I should be concerning over, but it has been bothering me for long enough that I would love some input.

If what you're trying to is to prevent players overemphasizing their weaknesses in roleplay, set the lowest number at human norm instead of letting people conceivably dump-stat.

If you're trying to eliminate an aspect of the character sheet having an impact on roleplay...

Way I see it, make the 9 attributes set not by player-choice but by "class" or some other associated option that has its own bag of roleplaying tropes that aren't inherently about repeating the dumpstat weakness over and over and over again.

OR don't use impossibly broad tranches of ability as your major unique quality between characters. (the DTAS option)

# ¿ Aug 15, 2012 07:44

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 04:04

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

angry_keebler posted:

Mental stats are a bit more strained. You could have Intelligence, Cleverness, and Wisdom. Int, makes you smarter and you know more stuff, Clvr does ???, and Wis lets you block psychic attacks? How do you mechanically distinguish between a guy with high Int and low clever vs low Int high clever? Does the finess stat just make spells or w/e hit more often?

And why have a "knows more stuff" stat when you'll still have a group of skills to specify what that character knows (sailing, wilderness, knives), and how well she would know it (+2 +5 etc)? You're just creating a confusing element in front of what your players should actually care about.

A lot of other good stuff has been said but I needed to point out the inane "Int makes more skills, use Int for skills" double-dip.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2012 00:37

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

4) One of the KILLBOTS is secretly E-e-e-evil, and the other KILLBOTS must find out who it is before the Management finds out.
5) A gang of incompetent thugs attempts to rob a jewelry store while the KILLBOTS are out performing community service.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2013 02:24

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

6- KILLBOTS are asked by their new highschool friend Gerald to prevent his neighbor from going to the prom with that no-good ragamuffin Ron from out of town.

Has anyone attempted to house-rule DREAD? I have some ideas for it but I want to hear if it has ever been done before first.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2013 00:42

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Miss affects would be great:

Just simplify it to the result of the d6 rather than adding additional bulk to the useless busy-work math of your game system.
Creates a sense of dramatic tension to each action a player takes ('Will it be X or Y?') that, unlike multi-variable resource pool systems, don't also increase the amount of mind-space the game system weighs on each player
Reduces the amount of feel-bad results by a very big percentage. Players like 'good' results on the die and having to do all the busy-work math only to realize that you'd prefer the 6 to be a 7 is The Worst.
The added benefit of making nerds really, really mad because Miss = Waste Your Turn You Stupid Fighter.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2014 01:28

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

P.d0t posted:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume you mean "use the d6 result instead of the degree of failure"
That could work; it'd definitely be quicker and the d6 would probably be in the lower range on a miss, anyway.

I was also thinking of PCs doing this same thing if an enemy misses (any miss) them with a melee attack. It might get messy if both things trigger on the same attack, though..

Yeah that's what I meant :sweatdrop:

I'd playtest before you add anything that triggers whenever a single one of your DM rolls does something fairly common; anything that scales badly as you add monsters is going to make things that should be 'Epic' much more twiddling boredom.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2014 02:17

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 04:04

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

On a practical level, one requires pattern recognition plus an additional manual dexterity moment to solve your moment of tension versus a double-layered pattern recognition. 4d6 drop the highest is faster, I would think.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2014 04:45

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