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I'm sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding this: you want stats that do not correspond to the character's fictional attributes?
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Aug 15, 2012 07:13
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 16:44 |
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Doc Hawkins posted:I'm sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding this: you want stats that do not correspond to the character's fictional attributes? Okay, I've gotten over my shock. Here are two possible methods I've seen in various games. 1) Decide on what fields of conflict the game will include. "Big Superhero Fights," "Courts of Law," "Alchemic Laboratories," whatever. Tell players to assign a number to each. Tell them that when they succeed, things went their character's way, and if not, not, and that's the only restriction on narration. If they have a low Courts of Law stat, maybe they're an amazing lawyer, but they have powerful enemies, or the system is just broken (cf. To Kill a Mockingbird). If they have high Alchemic Laboratories, maybe they're an untutored kid whose random admixtures of common household items create incredible effects (cf. Georgie's Marvellous Medicine). 2) Make success dependent on the expenditure of points, rather than a weighted randomizer. Call the points "Effort" or "Energy" or "Money" or something value-neutral. For added effect, give everyone the same amount, and/or refresh everyone's pool at the same rate. But also I have to say, yeah, if you want people to be able to make characters without being given direction on wether they should make someone 'weak' or 'smart,' then DTAS, play Solar System.
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Aug 15, 2012 16:56
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homullus posted:The problem with "all Strong characters are also Tough, but not all Tough characters are also Strong" is that it privileges one attribute over another -- why put points into Tough if you can put them into Strong and get both? Some games solve this by having derived attributes or ones that get their starting points from other stats, but it's An Issue. Or you could decide that in your game characters solve problems physically by being Tough, so an attribute for strength would be a distraction, or vice-versa.
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Aug 22, 2012 21:20
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Scrape posted:I, for one, have always bated the Int/Wis separation as well as Str/Con. My ideal system would measure fitness, intellect, and charm as the only three defining stats, leaving the player to interpret their Fitness as either strong/tough or fast. Like seriously, can you really imagine a super strong guy who is not also tough? Or vice versa? I feel like only superpowers make that distinction. A survey of All Fiction Ever will reveal a million super-tough guys who are not unusually strong. There's countless cases where the distinction would matter, but the only case you need to consider is your particular game: the people, struggles and situations that you want it to be about.
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Aug 22, 2012 23:06
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It's way more elegant to have two stats called Intelligence and Wisdom if the difference between being intelligent and being wise is significant in your game. Analyses of real life are almost 100% beside the point.Scrape posted:If you think of toughness as just survival, maybe so. I think of it as "solves problems and achieves goals by expressing toughness." quote:As far as my experience with fiction goes I'm just saying it varies from fiction to fiction, which means you can have your game do whatever you want, except everything. If you try to make it "you know, like in stories," or "you know, like in real life," you will fail. Decide on exactly what you want to have happen in the fiction your game produces, and give the players choices and tools which reflect those aesthetic goals.
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Aug 23, 2012 03:53
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Speaking as someone who did not even enjoy playing Diaspora, it is absolutely worth reading, playing and stealing from. It's a "big game," which is to say it includes many ideas, and most of them are quite good. E: VVV That is absolutely one of them, yeah. Abstracted zones, ranges and barriers are something that was missing from FATE "non-combat combats." Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Aug 26, 2012 |
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Aug 26, 2012 17:03
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There have been a thousand thousand systems which do something like that, but I usually hear the more overtly currency-ish ones being called "fan mail" after the mechanic in Prime Time Adventures. It may not have been the first, but it was close, and worthy of study. But you don't need a complete economy or custom-built system: just give everyone X bonus points/dice every session which they can only spend helping each other. If by "metagaming" you mean "but what if the players realize its always in their interest to give each other bonuses  ", then you avoid that when the players realize that would only be in their character's interests, and it's actually in their interest to reward fun and interesting play, by signalling clearly to eachother what they find fun and interesting. The "meta" level, of the humans hanging out having fun, is your friend. Give them a small enough number of points that they can't give everything a bonus, and they'll make choices, and things will work out.There's also what Capes does, which is impossible to accurately and briefly summarize, but in effect, you get awesome tokens when you do something which makes another player try very hard to stop you and they succeed at it. So if you play a villain for some scenes (you can essentially create and switch between any number of characters) and do something that excites the people playing heroes, and put up a good struggle, but loose in the end, you have perfectly filled the dramatic needs of the game (superhero comic genre), and are payed in these tokens. So there's no need for a designated GM, because the system rewards people who provide interesting opposition, without anyone needing to explicitly say "I like what you did there, here's my daily bonus point." It's crazy-elegant.
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Aug 31, 2012 09:08
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Fenn the Fool! posted:Actually I was more worried about something along the lines of "Oh man, Fabulous Dan swinging across the chandler and stabbing the Hobgoblin Shogun while reciting an impromptu haiku was Just displace the utility of the reward from its circumstance: the other players choose when you get Cool Tokens, but you choose when you spend them. E: missing a crucial loving word, goddamn Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Sep 1, 2012 |
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Aug 31, 2012 23:58
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but it's mechanically more advantageous to give my 
to Jimbob for that generic whirlwind attack he does all the time because...". Always spending your resources is a no brainer; I have no problem with that, you just need to be sure that how fast and how much you can accumulate them doesn't pressure players to use them or lose them. The real issue is making sure the benefits are mechanically flat in all situations so that players don't have that conflict of interest.
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Consider "sideways" advancement: every character has the same array of bonuses, but the circumstances they connect to can change. Luke goes from being Gifted Farmboy +3 to Last of the Jedi +3. Most fate games do this, though they werent the first or only. The most free and bare example might be WUSHU. Although, that reminds me of another Evil Hat game, Don't Rest Your Head, which demonstrates "equilibristic" advancement: your character's defining traits are unchangeable, but their "stats" are all resources which shift based on the results of rolls. The assumption is never that these resources will increase indefinitely, but that they change in strategic/dramatic cycles. Capes is also like that: everyone's stats are balanced, but characters might have more or less "debt" which changes their behavior, and players might have more or fewer story tokens, which changes their options.
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Sep 5, 2012 18:25
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Bob Quixote posted:I can see what you are saying, but I'm not sure how I'd be able to apply it to this particular situation exactly. The game is intended to work like a semi-traditional dungeon-hack type game with crunchy combat and special powers/abilities that are mainly focused on manipulating situations within the story rather than manipulating the narrative itself (if I'm getting myself across alright). Neither system depends on narrative focus or untactical mechanics. I'll restate them without examples: Sideways advancement: there are N balanced moves, you only have O at one time but can switch them out. Resourceful advancement: you get resources which are used to do things. Reign companies are a great idea too. Give the campaign world a character sheet, make the players advance that.
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Sep 6, 2012 20:00
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Imagine if a town (or a kingdom or whatever) was a character. What would distinguish it from another town? What could it interact with? What actions could it take? What would it need and want? What could it gain or lose? These are what would go on the character sheet, always keeping in mind that the point is to make interesting situations for the non-town characters to deal with. Again, the (i think) freely available reign company rules are a very good example. Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Sep 7, 2012 |
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Sep 7, 2012 01:53
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^^^^^ co-signed Of late, Rob Donoghue (Spirit of the Century, Dresden Files) has been posting some nice stuff on his game blog about the design space of "skills". quote:This is a rant. I'm circling an idea, and if you read this, you get to watch. That's just the start.
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Sep 7, 2012 03:06
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Bob Quixote posted:I had been thinking of Skills in terms of providing particular abilities/specialties to the characters who have them. It definitely is, because many games use it. Solar System. The Mountain Witch. Every FATE variant. The first step to writing a book is to read as many as you can. The first step to writing a game...
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Sep 18, 2012 02:06
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Bob Quixote posted:I suppose my ignorance is showing, but I haven't had a lot of exposure to games outside the ones played with my small circle of friends, who are more of the boardgame crowd in general. It's a bit tricky if you don't want to steal anything and you don't have much in the way of a well stocked FLGS. Free non-traditional games, you say? A Thousand Monkeys, A Thousand Typewriters John Kim's Free RPG List Nine years of entries to the Free category of the Indie RPG awards free, small, experimental offerings from Bully Pulpit Games (ie, Jason "Fiasco" Morningstar) (also don't miss out on the free edition of Drowning and Falling, if you play nothing else on this entire list of lists) That seems like a good start.
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Sep 18, 2012 04:03
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At some level, the rules are doing their job when they make things happen that no one at the table would want to have happen. In the absence of rules, what anyone wants and no one objects to, happens. Therefore, when rules intrude only to say "you may do the thing that someone wants and no one objects to," they are useless and can be deleted, and if they intrude only to cause situations which the players do not enjoy struggling with, they are bad and can also be deleted. The best rules tell you to do things that you wouldn't do otherwise, but that you enjoy doing.
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Sep 22, 2012 02:24
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HotB's mechanics directly relate to the 'setting' (an emulation of a fictional culture's favorite genre of bloodswept melodrama). War is chaos, duels are art, everyone is a stereotype with a fatal flaw, only one interesting thing happens per season, twists pile upon twists... The text must communicate the game to the players. In a perfect world, rules and all their implications would be instantly understood in just a few words, but in the real world, we benefit from some repetition and evocative chapter-opening stories. Still, "Show, don't tell" applies, I think. Try to communicate everything about the setting in the form of mechanics. What you can't, consider dropping or slimming,
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Sep 24, 2012 06:56
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What distinguishes the  magical special abilities?
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Oct 10, 2012 20:38
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I don't personally understand the distinction between designing games and...designing games.
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Oct 11, 2012 06:40
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:A d20 chops things into 5% blocks, while a d100 gives you 1% blocks, and a d4 gives you 25% blocks. 2d6 gives you 9% blocks but weighted into a bell curve. If all of those are, say, to-hit rolls, then it's a trick question: they're equally granular, because they each have the same number of possible results.
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Oct 23, 2012 20:18
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What's a good single-word name for setting elements? Like, you've probably seen somewhere in this very subforum, someone say "Oh my god, I am totally stealing rat pope/fist wizards/the crimson brotherhood/etc. for my game." What would you call those more-or-less-self-contained collections of ideas? Examples taken more directly from what I need to do: I already have "Cultures" which collect crunch available to everyone from a particular place or ethnos, but then I have crunch for, say, mass warfare, alchemy, sailing, dream magics, word magics, being an elf, three-corner wizardry (that is, 'academic' magic of a kind), and the like. What are those exactly? (I don't think a game needs a consistent name for these sorts of things, but I'm writing software which models that "oh man I'm totally stealing that X" behavior, so naming it is important.)
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Nov 23, 2012 15:40
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Thank you so much everyone who tried to help me out. Sorry I wasn't able to reply earlier.  Scrape posted:@DocHawkins, I'd call it a meme, except we've blown out the term. Something to do with an interchangeable unit of information. Packet? This is a great suggestion, because you're absolutely right about what the thing is: a transferrable, self-contained unit of information. I do need a noun first (the verbs tend to follow), and since it would be a thing that players could make, I'd need a 'user-facing' name anyway, so I was looking for a word that would fit both needs. Also, it's important, when writing software that models the processes of an existing 'domain' of knowledge or activity, to use, as much as possible, the existing language of that domain, or to make language that would be immediately recognizable by people familiar with that domain. Effectronica posted:"Worldelement"? It's ugly and mashed-together, but it combines the basic ideas at least. UnCO3 posted:How about 'storyatom'? Mashed together but a little more concise than 'worldelement'. These are great suggestions, because they made me realize my 'single word' restriction was arbitrary and unnecessary. I could make a thing that in code was called 'WorldElement' and in author-facing displays was called 'World Element' very easily. Scrape posted:But these are mechanics you're swapping around, right? Not setting elements? Or is it both? Why not just call it a Mechanic? Now I'm thinking of technical terms like Assembly, but that's not it... This is a great suggestion because it underlines the difficulty of what I'm talking about. Typically, rpgs come packaged in 'books', which present lots of bits of fictional information and mechanical information, usually with explicit or implicit instructions that any one piece of it implies all the others. What I'm looking for is the name of the lower-level collection of fiction and/or mechanics, which can also be applied to the rpg stuff that comes from little pdfs and posts in threads and blogs. The question can be restated as 'what are books composed of?' some loving LIAR posted:If you want to steal from Sumerian/Akkadian mythology/Neil Stephenson, you could call them "mes". What they actually were is up for debate, but if you look at examples of them (list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_%28mythology%29) you can sort of see how the concepts you want to name could be made to fit in. This is a great suggestion because it's evocative as gently caress. I always assumed Stephenson was making stuff up to make a fun story, but no, it turns out Sumerians really thought differently than we do. It's also great because it makes me think that the role of the thing I am talking about is a classification or tag, and that there can be different kinds of those, with different names. Like, when you search your music collection, it will give you songs with titles, artists, albums or genres that match your search query, because all of those attributes are really just one kind of thing ('Metadata') with different names. So I do hope to have Mes be one of the possible names. TK-31 posted:How about Setting Element? This is a great suggestion because it underlines that the name I wasn't satisfied with is still perfectly understandable. Splicer posted:How would you feel about Stephen? These is similarly a good suggestion because it reminded me that it's possible to over-think the issue, and that now I have tons of good ideas. And as it turned out, re-reading all of them yesterday made me realize that I really like the word 'Idea'. So again, thanks to everyone.
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Nov 26, 2012 19:59
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MadScientistWorking posted:That is because D&D pretty much came up with the prototypical archetypes common to a lot of television and literature. What the gently caress.
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Nov 28, 2012 19:37
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Rexides posted:Each game should have it's own tailor-made list, of course. Yeah, but that list should be "Whatever skills characters have right now." Making a list ahead of time seems unnecessary: I'd say "make up whatever skill you like, use whatever skills make sense at the time, if a conflict happens and someone has what seems like a more specific skill, they get +X." Don't try to play the game before you play the game, as they say. If your system is generic, you can't possibly predict what skills will be of interest to all hypothetical groups. e: also, skills aren't always arrangeable in a tree like that. Different people in different circumstances will see A as a specialization of B or B as a specialization of A. You're unnecessarily forcing yourself into a provably incomplete solution. Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Nov 29, 2012 |
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Nov 29, 2012 20:27
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Well, it finally happened: this thread showed me a completely new mechanic. Congrats, guy! That sounds baller as heck. I wonder how the experience would change with different amounts ...you'd need a different group to get good data, unfortunately. Anyone else interested in playtesting this?
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Dec 9, 2012 07:19
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This rule, like any other, belongs in a game where it contributes to an aesthetic goal. That game, like any other, will not be enjoyable by everyone. I'm becoming less into people talking about their 'group'. Many games will only be enjoyed by some members of your circle of game-playing friends. Those games should be played by those people. Forced inclusion beyond that is counterproductive and weirdly formalized for hobby-fun-activity.
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Dec 9, 2012 22:31
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Oh, if it just means "those people who are continuing to play this specific ongoing game with me," then that's fine and I am overthinking it.
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Dec 10, 2012 03:54
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quote:e: I'm mostly talking from the perspective of campaign play, because oneshots are a different matter. Yeah, but that's just it: what we call 'the one shot' should be the default assumption of modern, inclusive design. Most people's schedules can only accomodate group games which are playable start-to-finish in less than two. Only a few time-rich folks will feel the urge to play Twilight Imperium or Mega-Risk or the default 'yeah just do stuff until things happen i guess' roleplaying campaign.
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Dec 11, 2012 05:35
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Inasmuch as terminology will have an effect on how people will see these things, I am very much in favor of retiring 'oneshot' for 'episodic'.
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Dec 11, 2012 06:29
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Vincent Baker has lately made a series of posts about Positioning, a cool word for the subject of the root activity of roleplaying games.
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Dec 30, 2012 18:39
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The creepiest thing in Bliss Stage is this: for each kind of character, there is a 'This is what it's like for..." section in the book written in the second person to help you get into the dramatic mindset Lehman sees as being part of the horror of it, and one kind of character is the Authority Figure who, through some combination of stress or drug or mental illness, hasn't slept in the past five years, thus avoiding the Bliss which consumes all adults. Half of the mood of that section is grim drive to gently caress the alien invaders up no matter the cost, but the rest is self-loathing, and it ends with:quote:Chances are you're having sex with at least one of the kids, and chances are that you hate yourself for that and for everything else. Personally, I think the flavor and mechanics both serve a purpose, and that that purpose is not evil, and that the game is good, but then I would totally play a game where (adult) mecha pilots grind the kama sutra to get +1 to rocket punches so I may not be a trustworthy source.
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Jan 2, 2013 19:27
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 16:44 |
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I feel a bit  myself for knowing this, but Bliss Stage does predate Aquarion by a few years.e: what a terrible night to be at the top of the page.
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Jan 3, 2013 08:14
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