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Agoat
Dec 4, 2012

I AM BAD AT GAMES
Lipstick Apathy

Bottom Liner posted:

Oh hey, this might be a perfect thread for this.

I've been working on an idea and just got my prototype in and wanted to solicit feedback here for the general concept. I've gotten a lot of interest so far but wanted to see what you folks think of the idea.

Basically I took traditional random generator tables and put them into a deck of cards form factor with story cube style icons and modifier phrases relevant to the card type. There are 6 categories: world/location, characters, enemies, quests, dungeons, misc (magic items, crits, etc). The idea is that GMs can use it to plan out campaigns and sessions or use it for on the fly generation. I've been able to make some pretty fun scenarios in 2-3 minutes with it and not having to flip through a bunch of pages in a book is so much easier.

Here's what it looks like (first pass at design and print)

This is really cool, and I love the design of the cards, too.

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Agoat
Dec 4, 2012

I AM BAD AT GAMES
Lipstick Apathy
I'm making my first game! :toot:

I call it Burst Tactics, and I think it's coming along really well. The premise is that it's a 4v4 Tactics game, set in a cyberpunk-ish setting with SWAT-styled factions. Characters will move and act using a small pool of action points in hopes of eliminating the enemy team (and later on, accomplishing map objectives). What sets this apart from other games like this, however, is the "BURST" mechanic. If you save your action points, you'll be able to activate certain abilities on your opponents turn, creating new strategies. There are other mechanics like this that I'm working on, like COMBO abilities... but Combo Tactics does not sound as cool or good. A strong example of a BURST is for the SMG-wielding character below. They can launch a counter-attack if they saved enough action points on their turn prior. The shield unit can go into a "shield stance" on their turn, gaining access to a BURST passive, reducing incoming damage and allowing friendly units to fire through the shield unit.

Combat is largely handled via line of sight checks and action point usage. Some characters have melee abilities with defined ranges, and other characters may even push or pull enemies in combat. With all of these different effects, I'm making sure each character fits these three checks:

1) The character is fun to play.
2) The character is fun to play against.
3) The character serves a strong purpose without being considered an essential pick.

One of the best parts of working out of tabletop sim is that I can update the game anytime I need. So if a certain strategy develops that is near-impossible to beat, I can give other characters new tools to help counter it. To this end, the SWAT characters down below are the base models for balancing, my "Ryu", so to speak. Every other faction will be balanced against the SWAT faction (Windheaven SWAT Unit) to ensure that not only is the most accessible faction viable, but every other faction doesn't get too far out of hand.

Another "feature" in Burst Tactics is our "open lore" concept. Truth is, I'm not an artist or a modeler, I use Hero Forge for all of the characters within the game. So I'm opening up the world for everyone to create their own characters and teams since all the tools that I use are freely available, anyway! I figure it'd be cool to turn a weakness of my own into a strength for the game. Once Burst Tactics is up in early access, I'll be providing design documents so that players can make their own characters, maps, and rulesets that fit the game. This part is entirely optional, and won't be used as a crutch or an excuse for an incomplete experience.

The entire game will be playable within Tabletop sim, though nothing is stopping players from printing out the maps and playing in person. Of course, that means the game is entirely free. I really just wanted to create a fun experience and learn more about making games. :)



There will be a handful of factions on launch, the idea being that you can choose units within one faction to create your team. I'm also working on "Hero Units", named operators that have powerful abilities that they use to support their team, or in some cases redesign how a team would operate. Part of me is worried that they'll entirely overpower the rest of the cast, thankfully I can always repurpose the models to be normal units if this becomes too much for players to enjoy.

I'm doing the first bit of testing next week, and I'll be making a lot of changes based on observations and feedback. I'm a little nervous to share this, there's some really cool projects in this thread. I hope y'all don't mind.

My biggest challenge has been presenting the game in tabletop sim in a way that is easy to use for people not already familiar with the software.



Hope y'all don't mind the giant post. I'm really excited to share this game and have people playing it. :)

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

IshmaelZarkov posted:

Followed, looking forwards to sharing it to people once it goes live.

The layout of the KS looks good. The audio on the video could be touched up, but it's still clear enough that you get the point across. Great job!

I redid the video with all product shots and much better audio. I think it works better this way.

Project goes live tomorrow at noon!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rollthedicegames/the-dungeon-master-deck?ref=4hrilr&token=b475cb48

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rollthedicegames/the-dungeon-master-deck


It's live! Felt pretty scary/good hitting that launch button.

Agoat
Dec 4, 2012

I AM BAD AT GAMES
Lipstick Apathy

Day one and you're almost at your goal!! This is awesome to see.

I sent your Kickstarter to some of my friends that play DnD. :)

IshmaelZarkov
Jun 20, 2013


Backed and shared. Looks like it's going well so far.

For those of us too damned scared to actually pull the trigger on a Kickstarter, what was the process you had to go through to get it going?

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
Thank you.

It was a smooth and easy process as far as Kickstarter itself. I did put together a marketing plan that involved reaching out to podcasts and youtube channels that were in the space for promotion and or review and got a whopping 0 responses from the 12+ I sent messages to, which sucks. I made a TikTok account to show the concept and prototype and my early videos did well, getting a few thousand views, but as soon as I mentioned kickstarter the algorithm punished me and now anything I post gets <50 views. I am running a targeted Facebook ad that shows only to people that like D&D + Kickstarter and that’s getting a decent return, but 2/3rds of my pledges so far come direct from Kickstarter itself and the various discovery pages.

So in short, Kickstarter good, social media garbage. The whole process feels a bit random too, especially with how arbitrary the “Projects We Love” selection is and how powerful that is.

Fashionable Jorts
Jan 18, 2010

Maybe if I'm busy it could keep me from you




I really appreciate how its useful for just about any game system, not just d&d. Backed!

(ouch, canadabucks hurts)

IshmaelZarkov
Jun 20, 2013

I just had the single best moment in my brief game dev history happen to me.

One of my playtesters just asked for a copy of the trial rules cause he wants to run it for one of his groups. Not as a playtest, but because he actually likes the system.

I've been having a terrible couple weeks, and this really turned my mood around. Needed to share with folk who'd appreciate the sensation.

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting
I have substantially more time that I can devote to projects lately, so I'm looking at pursuing some ideas I've worked on partially in the past, in that way where even if you lost all your documents, you could recreate it all because it's still systems, not fleshed out with fluff. So no matter which way I go, there's a long way to go, but there are good bones, I think, and I like these things.

I have a pet idea for a pnp rpg system that aims to generally disincentivize fighting without a good reason, but not because fighting is a chore to do. The setting is a sort of interplanar prison, being a plane that a bunch of other planes have agreed to toss their problems into like a dimensional oubliette. Stats directly address how good your character is at improvising based on what they already know as well as understanding new things quickly, because the idea is that everyone in there knows the score, there are some cities, and some people are trying to be peaceful. People have been born there, and manage to get away from the places they tend to dump everyone on, but there's still a really rough culture in general because turns out most of the convicts are guilty. Because of the nature of the place, the DM can put pretty much anything they want in it, and it can always be fairly hostile, I figure.

I've also intended it to have some other ease of use mechanics like a defined ending point or "win condition" of escaping that plane, and having each player secretly tell the DM whether their character is guilty of the crime they were convicted for, and who was responsible for getting them caught / framing them. That idea needs a lot of writing, and it's pretty much entirely just writing and math and more writing, and playtesting after that, and a bunch more cycles of course, but so much writing. The amount of expansion necessary on the fiction of it is how I got to realizing I really do not care about the setting at all, and I just want to write the systems to support a kind of reaction in players through gameplay, along with the sort of ~design rhetoric~ of things. How do people get into world building? Is there some kind of writing process people follow? I wouldn't expect intricately detailed worlds to just pop into existence, and I can't go up to some world builder and go HEY BUDDY WANNA GIVE ME YOUR WORK FOR FREE

Or I dunno maybe there's someone wanting my work for free

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.
Hello there, fellow goons.

These past few weeks I have broken my time-honored routine of starting dozens of projects and never really sticking to properly develop them, I sat down and threw my obsessive energies at a yet-unnamed future motorsports TTRPG. Currently at the third big iteration, I think I'm happy enough with it to consider it playtestable and thus would love to show it around for feedback.

The primary self-imposed benchmarks are to be able to use it to replicate Redline on track and Drive to Survive off the track, so if that kind of thing sounds fun to you please check it out: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LN68MkC8buv8Ay-gwRZtMVoaXMfMf82v?usp=sharing

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

Covok posted:

Anyone here remember Friendship, Effort, Victory? The Battle Manga Powered by the Apocalypse game I was working on? Well, I finally remembered it existed and made a new draft. I plan on this being the near final draft. Like, it's been in development for too long.

Anyway, I really, really would appreciate any criticism you guys might have. Anything I missed, anything you think I should tweak, anything.

So, first off, what is FEV?
  • light, freeform roleplaying game
  • focus on shonen battle manga
  • use archetypes, moves, and gm rules to reinforce the narrative
  • quick, fast, and fun
What has changed since the last draft?
  • got rid of control in an effort to simplify and quicken play (control was an initiative system)
  • merged the playbooks back to better the overal system
  • tweaks a dozen and a half moves
  • added awakenings
  • removed tensions and super simplified tecniques
  • added an example of play and explanations for every move
  • redid conditions to be less confusing and more familiar and easy to come up with
So, without further ado, here is the link to the latest draft

Once again, any comments are appreciated.

https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1482079452121243648



HOT-BLOODED YOUTHS!


TENSE MELODRAMA!


SHONEN ACTION!

Join the fray in Friendship, Effort, Victory, a shonen battle manga tabletop roleplaying game. Inspired by works such as Bleach, One Piece, Naruto, My Hero Academia, and other battle manga, Friendship, Effort, Victory uses the acclaimed Powered By The Apocalypse Engine to deliver the flashy, dynamic battles and intense, climatic drama of those sensational works. 

  • Choose from 10 classic archetypes to quickly and easily make your character. From the overly cheerful, friendmakers to the angsty, vengeful loners to the fiery, unpredictable rivals, your characters will feel like they would fit right into your favorite stories. 

  • Friendship, Effort, Victory subtly guides players to the themes and key moments of classic battle manga by guiding conflict resolution with simple mechanics. 

  • The dual health system keeps battles tense and emotional. Characters have the ability to buy off their physical damage by taking emotional damage in its place. Death only comes when a character chooses to accept its embrace. When that time comes, accepting death gives the character a burst of power and a second wind that ensures the hero goes out in a blaze of glory.

  • No one is ever left out of the fight. In a genre known for amazing one-on-one battles, players may worry they could be left out. The spectating mechanics allows non-combatants to offer support to any match, even if they aren’t present for the scene. At any time, non-combatant can introduce how their character is interpreting the fight, giving characters bonuses, buffs, and debuffs as makes sense. 

  • The Arcs, General, and Villain systems keep the world dynamic and the threats serious. The Arcs system manages many different threats the world faces due to the Villains mechaniations. The General and Villain system ensures that Villains never fall easily and keep the Sagas from ending too soon. Through the plot armor the Villain system provides, Villains always feel like a major threat. By making the Generals key to removing that plot armor and making the Villains vulnerable, stories grow horizontally. Instead of a mad dash to the Villain, heroes focus on their own matchups, knowing that their victories against the Generals take the team closer to ultimate victory. 

Covok fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Jan 16, 2022

Jimbozig
Sep 30, 2003

I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Lichtenstein posted:

Hello there, fellow goons.

These past few weeks I have broken my time-honored routine of starting dozens of projects and never really sticking to properly develop them, I sat down and threw my obsessive energies at a yet-unnamed future motorsports TTRPG. Currently at the third big iteration, I think I'm happy enough with it to consider it playtestable and thus would love to show it around for feedback.

The primary self-imposed benchmarks are to be able to use it to replicate Redline on track and Drive to Survive off the track, so if that kind of thing sounds fun to you please check it out: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LN68MkC8buv8Ay-gwRZtMVoaXMfMf82v?usp=sharing

I also wanted to try to make a game that would work for redline or f-zero or even wacky races. But the first attempt I made was godawful and I abandoned it. So color me very interested in this! I'll be checking it out for sure.

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.
Oh by the way, I was posting here to kind of also say FEV is a GWW success story.

Calico Heart
Mar 22, 2012

"wich the worst part was what troll face did to sonic's corpse after words wich was rape it. at that point i looked away"



Flamme Rouge handles racing in tabletop format incredibly well, and is well worth a play if you haven't already.

Dr. Video Games 0069
Jan 1, 2006

nice dolphin, nigga
I've been working on an idea for a story driven board game. Most story board games use either a preset story or random events, and I'm trying to come up with something in the middle where it's structured but not preset. I've been looking at rpg rules for inspiration, but I am not very familiar with modern rpgs so I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations that might be similar to what I'm trying to do. I've paged through the rules for Dramasystem, Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel and a couple others and found some good ideas, but they all lean toward character driven rather than plot driven. I'm curious if there's anything in the realm of tabletop rpgs that gives the players or GM clear mechanical direction on how to advance a plot with maybe a little less player autonomy. I don't mean completely railroaded, but I'm imagining something like the GM sets up a conflict designed to test a character's strengths or weaknesses, and the player either chooses how to respond to that or has to pass a skill check - but either way the narrative progresses, with each scene increasing the narrative tension and escalating to a climax - that sort of thing, but with the system driving what scenes happen next, and how they escalate. Maybe something like keeping track of streaks of successes and failures, and generating a comic or tragic arc based on that.

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting

Dr. Video Games 0069 posted:

I've been working on an idea for a story driven board game. Most story board games use either a preset story or random events, and I'm trying to come up with something in the middle where it's structured but not preset. I've been looking at rpg rules for inspiration, but I am not very familiar with modern rpgs so I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations that might be similar to what I'm trying to do. I've paged through the rules for Dramasystem, Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel and a couple others and found some good ideas, but they all lean toward character driven rather than plot driven. I'm curious if there's anything in the realm of tabletop rpgs that gives the players or GM clear mechanical direction on how to advance a plot with maybe a little less player autonomy. I don't mean completely railroaded, but I'm imagining something like the GM sets up a conflict designed to test a character's strengths or weaknesses, and the player either chooses how to respond to that or has to pass a skill check - but either way the narrative progresses, with each scene increasing the narrative tension and escalating to a climax - that sort of thing, but with the system driving what scenes happen next, and how they escalate. Maybe something like keeping track of streaks of successes and failures, and generating a comic or tragic arc based on that.

I don't know of any of these, so I'm also interested, cause I'm working on something for a pnp game where there is a win condition, and along the way, the DM has frontloaded info that can be used for ~twists~. Basically, everyone in the party is a convict, and part of player creation is telling the DM if they are truly guilty or innocent of their crime, and who got them caught/framed. By the end of the story, everyone's past should be addressed. However, I have nothing telling the DM how to do it.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos
This sounds a bit like what Wildermyth tries to do, if you're willing to go into video games for inspiration. Or King of Dragon Pass, although that's a bit more elaborate and possibly obtuse.

Calico Heart
Mar 22, 2012

"wich the worst part was what troll face did to sonic's corpse after words wich was rape it. at that point i looked away"



Depending on how loose you want the rules to be, Fall of Magic of is a good example of a story-based board game. The game tells you "your characters are all following the magus across this map". The game board is a big map with several branching paths.

the game never tells you who or what the magus is, and says it could be a wise magician, an ominous star, a traveling band etc. Players take turns deciding which destination they follow the magus to, and when they get there are given several prompts. The player then describes, based on the prompt, what happens to the party. Characters are based on combining a series of names and descriptors at the start that are all very vague (“Heraldo the Crab-singer”, “Dess the Fox), and you each have some vague attributes. It’s a fun game which never goes the same.
On a similar note, The Quiet Year and The Deep Forest are excellent storytelling games that are maybe a bit more “game-y”. Players control a community of people or monsters and draw cards. Each card is an event in the community, and the players decide how it impacts said community. As alliances form and new things are discovered, players draw on the map, adding or changing elements. I like these two games very much.

Fashionable Jorts
Jan 18, 2010

Maybe if I'm busy it could keep me from you



There's also that board game Tales from the Arabian Nights which might give inspiration. I don't remember it precisely, so I might get the description a little wrong.

Fairly simple, characters choose a few of many little character description tiles (Brave, Intelligent, etc). You walk around the board trying to find adventure and treasure - part of the game's victory mechanic is to "have a good story to tell". When you arrive at a place, you potentially have an adventure from a massive textbook of a thousand stories, each with modifiers depending on a few choices you make and which character attributes you have. Sometimes 'brave' means you get rewarded for doing a good deed. Sometimes it means you get eaten by lions because what are you doing, run away. You can also gain more attributes as the game goes, one time my person became poor and crazy and got lost in the desert for the entire game.

I've only played it a couple times, I've never won, but I always had a good time with it.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Dr. Video Games 0069 posted:

I've been working on an idea for a story driven board game. Most story board games use either a preset story or random events, and I'm trying to come up with something in the middle where it's structured but not preset. I've been looking at rpg rules for inspiration, but I am not very familiar with modern rpgs so I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations that might be similar to what I'm trying to do. I've paged through the rules for Dramasystem, Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel and a couple others and found some good ideas, but they all lean toward character driven rather than plot driven. I'm curious if there's anything in the realm of tabletop rpgs that gives the players or GM clear mechanical direction on how to advance a plot with maybe a little less player autonomy. I don't mean completely railroaded, but I'm imagining something like the GM sets up a conflict designed to test a character's strengths or weaknesses, and the player either chooses how to respond to that or has to pass a skill check - but either way the narrative progresses, with each scene increasing the narrative tension and escalating to a climax - that sort of thing, but with the system driving what scenes happen next, and how they escalate. Maybe something like keeping track of streaks of successes and failures, and generating a comic or tragic arc based on that.

I think board games are one of the worst mediums for narrative, but here's a list of games that do it in various interesting ways for you to look into

Sleeping Gods

LotR: Journeys in Middle Earth

Near and Far

Arkham Horror: The Card Game


I think it's much more interesting to think about creating a board game that naturally creates a story from players' actions. Cole Wehrle (Root, Pax Pamir, Oath) designs his games with this approach. He gives players a setting and world to play in but lets the mechanics and players' choices create and drive the narrative without flavor text or pre-written narrative. I find these stories much more engaging and lasting whether they're in a historical or fantasy setting because the players have stake and ownership in what's happening.

If you want to write narrative and gamify it, I would encourage you to move beyond traditional board games and get more into RPG/choose your own adventure territory. Avoid binary pass/fail outcomes or dead ends. Make sure no matter what the players choose or the outcome of their choices, the story moves on. That requires a ton of branching narrative but that's the only satisfying way to really do it IME. No one likes to repeat a bunch of stuff because of random chance (Time Stories, I'm looking at you).

Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Jan 18, 2022

Fashionable Jorts
Jan 18, 2010

Maybe if I'm busy it could keep me from you



Why is it that giving a project a title is the hardest drat thing? The only games I've made that have good titles were ones other people suggested lol

Calico Heart
Mar 22, 2012

"wich the worst part was what troll face did to sonic's corpse after words wich was rape it. at that point i looked away"



This is exactly true. I called my game DEAD IN THE WEST as a placeholder title, and was never able to move beyond it.

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.
https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1484189028824006659?s=20

And we're launched!

Pvt.Scott
Feb 16, 2007

What God wants, God gets, God help us all

Covok posted:

https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1482079452121243648



HOT-BLOODED YOUTHS!


TENSE MELODRAMA!


SHONEN ACTION!

Join the fray in Friendship, Effort, Victory, a shonen battle manga tabletop roleplaying game. Inspired by works such as Bleach, One Piece, Naruto, My Hero Academia, and other battle manga, Friendship, Effort, Victory uses the acclaimed Powered By The Apocalypse Engine to deliver the flashy, dynamic battles and intense, climatic drama of those sensational works. 

  • Choose from 10 classic archetypes to quickly and easily make your character. From the overly cheerful, friendmakers to the angsty, vengeful loners to the fiery, unpredictable rivals, your characters will feel like they would fit right into your favorite stories. 

  • Friendship, Effort, Victory subtly guides players to the themes and key moments of classic battle manga by guiding conflict resolution with simple mechanics. 

  • The dual health system keeps battles tense and emotional. Characters have the ability to buy off their physical damage by taking emotional damage in its place. Death only comes when a character chooses to accept its embrace. When that time comes, accepting death gives the character a burst of power and a second wind that ensures the hero goes out in a blaze of glory.

  • No one is ever left out of the fight. In a genre known for amazing one-on-one battles, players may worry they could be left out. The spectating mechanics allows non-combatants to offer support to any match, even if they aren’t present for the scene. At any time, non-combatant can introduce how their character is interpreting the fight, giving characters bonuses, buffs, and debuffs as makes sense. 

  • The Arcs, General, and Villain systems keep the world dynamic and the threats serious. The Arcs system manages many different threats the world faces due to the Villains mechaniations. The General and Villain system ensures that Villains never fall easily and keep the Sagas from ending too soon. Through the plot armor the Villain system provides, Villains always feel like a major threat. By making the Generals key to removing that plot armor and making the Villains vulnerable, stories grow horizontally. Instead of a mad dash to the Villain, heroes focus on their own matchups, knowing that their victories against the Generals take the team closer to ultimate victory. 

Just wanted to say that this looks awesome. Congratulations on finishing your project!

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

Pvt.Scott posted:

Just wanted to say that this looks awesome. Congratulations on finishing your project!

Thanks! That's really nice of you to say.

Zeerust
May 1, 2008

They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.
Quick dice maths question, if someone wouldn't mind confirming something for me -

Am I right in thinking that an effect that forces a reroll on a die that rolls below a certain threshold has a greater impact than one that simply fixes the minimum you can roll? My napkin math has given me these two scenarios -

If we say the there's a fixed value that replaces any lower die value rolled: I have 1d6 min 2, so any die rolling a 1 is instead fixed to 2. This gives 6 possible outcomes from the roll: 2 2 3 4 5 6. If we take an average from this, we get 3.67, so +0.17 above the standard d6 average of 3.5.

If we say instead that the value is a threshold at or below which a reroll is forced: I have 1d6 reroll 1, so any die rolling a 1 is rerolled until it shows a 2 or better. This should technically give only 5 outcomes: 2 3 4 5 6. The average of this is 4, so a +0.5 improvement on the 3.5 average.

The only notable difference is that the minimum mechanic becomes more impactful the higher the minimum is, while the reroll mechanic is a linear reduction of the range of possible results; however, to have the former catch up with the latter requires more than 50% of the die's total average to be fixed as the minimum, and at that point I don't know why I would even bother asking for a dice roll.

Fashionable Jorts
Jan 18, 2010

Maybe if I'm busy it could keep me from you



Zeerust posted:

Quick dice maths question

If you get to keep rerolling the 1s forever until you get a not-one result, yes, you are statistically much more likely to get a better result than if you counted a roll of 1 as a roll of 2.

1=2 means you have an average dice roll of 3.6 instead of the usual d6 average of 3.5 (2+2+3+4+5+6=22. 22/6 =3.6)

Reroll 1s means you have an average dice roll of 4 (2+3+4+5+6=20. 20/5 =4

Edit: didn't see you had already done the math lol. But yes, you are right.

Edit edit: many games out there only let you do one reroll per dice. So if you roll a 1, your second roll can still result in another 1. Vastly improves your odds (and feels good as a player to pick up that dud and turn it into something useful), but doesn't remove rolls of 1 from existence.

Fashionable Jorts fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jan 29, 2022

Mirage
Oct 27, 2000

All is for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds
If you want the same distribution as rerolling 1's without actually rolling over and over, you could also consider a roll of 1 as 4. It's not as intuitive but the averages work out.

Zeerust
May 1, 2008

They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.
Thanks for the confirmation, I still overthink some elements of the maths around dice rolls.

I'm finally polishing up Revision 5 of Erebus for public playtest (only took me 3 years :haw:) and I'm working on some 'scenario' rules for combat. The game uses a combat model heavily influenced by 4e D&D, but I'm trying to avoid combat that boils down to slugging matches which drag out to mopping up one or two enemies that can't actually do anything anymore.

As a result, I'm trying to codify a simple scenario system, using Victory Points to determine the victor, similar to LANCER's Sitrep system. I could use some extra eyes on the 'Domination' scenario, which is about as close as I want to get to a standard 'kill the other guy' fight, but with a hard threshold where a side is eliminated.

Here's the current draft for the Domination rules -

quote:

In a Domination scenario, each force receives VPs equal to their total number of combatants at the start of combat, and an Elimination Threshold equal to one-quarter of their total VPs. Whenever a combatant is taken Out of Action, their force loses 1 VP. When a force's VPs are equal to their elimination threshold, they are eliminated; they either retreat from the battlefield, or are mopped up in the aftermath, as they’re no longer able to provide meaningful resistance.

As an example, for a force with six combatants, they would receive 6 VPs at the start of combat, and would be eliminated as soon as they had 2 or fewer remaining.

I've shown this draft to a friend, and they've said the one-quarter rule is unintuitive, but I'm not sure I can see a way out of that, since any rule that scales according to the number of combatants is going to require factoring or fractionalising of some sort.

Zeerust fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Feb 6, 2022

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



Hey, I actually finished a goddamn game to a sufficient degree that I made an itch page!
It's a small game inspired by Dark Souls item descriptions.

https://silk-stone.itch.io/exiles-a-ttrpg-of-item-descriptions

Check it out, it's got a cover and everything.

UnCO3
Feb 11, 2010

Ye gods!

College Slice
Looks good, I'll probably run it PbP later this year.

-

Just published an updated, majorly overhauled version of my writing game of excessive footnotes, killing the author, and woes in translation, called Like Skyscrapers Blotting Out The Sun:



You and a friend/enemy take on the roles of a writer working on their magnum opus after fleeing their old country under duress, and the translator who took them in and is now appending footnotes to the magnum opus explaining Writer's history and intents (regardless of what Writer thinks). The redux switches from .pdf to .html and adds a bunch of features like light/dark modes, text display controls for enhanced readability, and simple dice and card widgets in case you don't have your own.


the top card oracle entry here is one of my favourite prompts in the game

Launch tweet here, on itch here, plus I released the HTML+CSS+JS framework I made as a separate template file for anyone who wants to use it for their own game (you only need to know basic HTML and CSS, and there are a few links to tutorials and resources in one version of the template file). The template's called Write Skyscrapers, and can be found here.

Jimbozig
Sep 30, 2003

I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Zeerust posted:

I've shown this draft to a friend, and they've said the one-quarter rule is unintuitive, but I'm not sure I can see a way out of that, since any rule that scales according to the number of combatants is going to require factoring or fractionalising of some sort.
To avoid fractions and rounding, pre-multiply by 4.

You receive a number of VPs equal to 4xN. Each time you lose a combatant, you lose 4 VPs. You are eliminated when your value is N or less.


Example:
If you have 6 combatants, you receive 4 VPs. You are eliminated once you drop to 6 VPs or below (which means you're still ok with 2 combatants because you'll have 8 VPs, but once you drop to 1 combatant, you're at 4 VPs and eliminated.)

It is equivalent to what you had, if you always rounded elimination values down. Make the elimination value N+2 instead of N to model normal rounding. Or make it N+3 if you want to model "always round up" (imperfectly).

Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Feb 28, 2022

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



UnCO3 posted:


Just published an updated, majorly overhauled version of my writing game of excessive footnotes, killing the author, and woes in translation, called Like Skyscrapers Blotting Out The Sun:


Is this at all based on Nabokov's Pale Fire? Because that's immediately what I jumped to, though the roles are reversed - the old-country-fleeing commentator, the American poet. Also, this is very cool.

E: Just saw where you got your quotation from, so, the answer is probably a resounding yes, my bad

UnCO3
Feb 11, 2010

Ye gods!

College Slice
No worries! I actually wrote the first version of the game in late 2019 after reading about Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin (where I first saw the phrase "like skyscrapers rising to the top of this or that page"), his friendship with Wilson, and how that all fell apart. Later I found Nabokov beat me to it with Pale Fire, but, against all odds, it wasn't an inspiration for the game per se.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



UnCO3 posted:

No worries! I actually wrote the first version of the game in late 2019 after reading about Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin (where I first saw the phrase "like skyscrapers rising to the top of this or that page"), his friendship with Wilson, and how that all fell apart. Later I found Nabokov beat me to it with Pale Fire, but, against all odds, it wasn't an inspiration for the game per se.

Hah! That's incredible, and also I just posted a review of the game before learning that itch doesn't display reviews to anyone but the creator, so my review wasn't just pompous but also not going to actually work to help you spread it around.

In any case, I'm definitely going to play it with a friend whom I recently got to dive into Pale Fire; we share the ttrpg hobby but haven't been able to play at the same table much at all, and this seems like a great game to play remotely (if we were very dedicated, I'll bet we could play it in epistolary form with a document and email).

UnCO3
Feb 11, 2010

Ye gods!

College Slice
Sometimes I see people repost reviews to the comments section on the project page for exactly that reason.

Anyway, as I suggest in the text, feel free to send me a copy of the results from playing the game!

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



UnCO3 posted:

Sometimes I see people repost reviews to the comments section on the project page for exactly that reason.

And now I've done this - I hope it helps convince browsers to pick the game up!

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



UnCO3 posted:

Sometimes I see people repost reviews to the comments section on the project page for exactly that reason.

Anyway, as I suggest in the text, feel free to send me a copy of the results from playing the game!

One thing that's come up as I've chatted with friends about playing this, is that you could easily make it "Pierre Menard's Quixote, the Game" by having the Writer quote selections from a published classic like Don Quixote which is also a very cool possibility.

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UnCO3
Feb 11, 2010

Ye gods!

College Slice
Oh, that's good—and creates a more asymmetric way to play where people can pick whatever mode suits them (the default game is 2 people writing, this version would be more like 1 person reading (and quoting) and another person writing).

By the way, I updated the main file to work better in Chrome and Safari, so you might wanna check that out! You probably already got an email for the devlog I wrote after uploading the new files, though. Anyway, the new version doesn't change the content, just some annoying display issues in those two browsers.

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