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I think someone beat you to first game in a tweet, but I can't remember who. As for short rpgs, some guy's running a 200-word rpg contest right now until the 1st of May: http://schirduans.com/david/2015/04/200-word-rpg-challenge.html He said on story-games.com that he's accepting old work too, so you could submit Unfinished.
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Apr 22, 2015 11:38
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Re: your specific issues (and a couple others):
and now, brace yourself for MY OPINIONS/design theory Firstly, I feel like the mechanics as-is are similar enough to Microscope that you could actually hack Microscope to get a game that does the same thing, but more focused and with the benefit of a lot more playtesting behind it. You could replace Events with things themselves and their physical descriptions, and replace Scenes with the narrative flavour text (but still having each flavour text answer a question posed by someone). That said, I think it's a neat concept. Actually, more than The Quiet Year or Microscope, the concept reminds me of Dialect. If you're not familiar with it, it's a game about language growing and dying in an isolated community. You create new words, then play out scenes showing how those words are used. Someone tried running it on here, but it stalled early on because it's a little tricky to run mostly-aimless scenes in PbP one at a time while holding everyone's attention. We (the facilitator and some of the players) discussed how to change the game to make it more PbP-friendly and settled on getting rid of the scenes and maybe adding more actions in the same vein as creating words. That would let us play out a story through the medium of dictionary definitions of new fictional words (the words themselves, etymology, definition, and examples of use) and other similar things. It's still on hold for unrelated reasons, but hopefully it'll get off the ground again and we'll see whether it actually works as a game. Though that stripped-down idea is pretty similar to yours, there are some key differences that make it much more focused:
I think it boils down to narrative. At the moment, your game allows for storytelling, but doesn't really support it, outside of the rule where two things can be linked together and kind of the rules for how themes change in each phase. It feels more like an exercise, tool, or add-on than a full game. I think you need a story (or structure people can build a story on) to give the items and flavour text a purpose that people can work towards, and to help the things and flavour text have emotional meaning. To figure out what that story could be, think about what flavour text is and does, what sorts of world-building you want people to do with the game, and why you specifically picked flavour text as the medium to communicate and play this game. Maybe there's a frame story about a typical group of adventurers exploring ruins and dungeons, while the main game is played out through flavour text of the places they explore, the things they loot, and the creatures they fight. If the flavour text is outside their perception, then you can use it to create dramatic irony (e.g. someone massively misinterprets the function of an artefact found in an ancient ruin), indirectly flesh out the characters, or comment on what an adventuring party is (how they're obsessed with fighting monsters and taking their stuff), or whatever else. Other examples: an archaeological dig investigating the ancient past that's maybe suppressed by a conspiracy or influenced by politics. A desperate last-ditch attempt to preserve human knowledge during collapse of civilisation (stolen from The Talos Principle). Or go the Soulsborne route and have a largely-ignorant hero on a quest while the real story plays out in the background, via flavour text, until the hero comes in to shake things up. Regardless, the frame story part doesn't need to be mechanically or narratively deep in itself, it just needs to be a jumping-off point that 1) gives you subjects to create things on and 2) makes it easier to create things with emotional and symbolic meaning.
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Mar 1, 2019 17:54
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You're missing a couple: 0110 01100, 00110, 01010 01110, 10110, 01101 EDIT: the basic input you want in anydice is this: code:The full input you want is something like this: code:UnCO3 fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Aug 20, 2019 |
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Aug 20, 2019 00:24
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Recently I’ve been thinking about putting together some posts about using maths, stats, and simulations to understand how games work and design them better, and, well, here’s a test post. There’s no overarching story or angle, so for the most part you can skim and read what interests you. The three things it goes over are a couple of different dice mechanics you can use to get:
*stuff like
So, without further ado… DIMINISHING RETURNS with DICE A lot of games, especially more traditional ones, make you spend points on a character’s skills or stats, but this can lead to people focusing on just one or two very specific things and not having well-rounded characters. So, let’s say you want people to not over-specialise – you want them to have a reason to spread their character’s competence around and be mechanically multi-capable. You need a system with diminishing returns, where spending the same amount gets you less and less than it did before. I’m gonna look at four different ways people have done that (intentionally or not), 2 specific ones from published games and 2 more general ones:
d10x This one’s terrible. Here’s how it works: roll 2d10, then multiply the results together and compare against a skill level from 1 to 100; you get a finite number of skill points to spend on different skills and you succeed if a result is below (or equal?) to your skill level. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad – the principle is, most of the results will be pretty low, so you get more out of spending points on lower skills than on higher skills:   Above left: A table of all 100 results in the d10x system. Uh, basically, it’s a multiplication table. Above right: A plot of your % chance of success at each skill level from 1 to 100. The curve slows down the further right you go, as each extra point you put in gets you (on average) less of a boost to your chance of success than each previous point. You can see what they were going for, but you should also be able to see what’s terribly, terribly wrong. Some examples: You get more for pushing a skill from 99 to 100 than you do from 10 to 11, or 64 to 69, or 90 to 99. Why? How? Narratively, there isn’t really any reason. Mathematically, it’s just not possible to create the number 11, or 65 through to 69, or 91 through to 99, by multiplying 2 whole numbers from 1 to 10. There are a lot of numbers like that in the range from 1 to 100. This shows the problem a bit more clearly:  Above: A plot of the extra % successes you’ll roll after increasing a skill by 1 point. It’s very uneven. A lot of skill point increases, even lower down where you’re supposed to get better returns, give you nothing. There are 58 points on that plot where you get 0% extra chance of success for putting an extra point into a skill. There are 6 where you get 1% more, 23 where you get 2% more, 4 where you get 3% more, and 9 where you get 4% more. Here’s what it looks like when we put all those into a flatter curve, so all the +4% at the start, then the +3%, and so on:  Above: A plot comparing the d10x curve to a much more ordered curve with the same distribution of % bonuses. It’s still pretty bad, but at least it makes sense the whole way along. As I said, this one’s terrible. There’s one tiny interesting thing about it (the curve is slightly sigmoid – S-shaped – if you look at the start), but that’s kind of washed out by the 100-point scale and the generally bad mechanic. Unknown Armies’ ‘flip-flop’ Greg Stolze’s Unknown Armies also uses a 100-point scale for skills, and also uses 2d10, but more conventionally as a replacement for a d100 (as in, use one d10 for the tens digit, the other for the singles digit). There’s a reason for using 2d10 rather than 1d100, beyond just that a d100’s physically impractical (if you’re playing in real life), and that’s that each character has an ‘Obsession’ specific to them, linked to one of their skills, that lets them ‘flip-flop’ the tens and singles digits of a roll. For example, if your Obsession skill has 35 points and you roll 62 (normally a failure), you can ‘flip-flop’ the roll to 26 (a success). Here’s what that looks like:   Above left: A plot of your % chance of success at each skill level from 1 to 100. Just like the d10x curve, this one slows down, and just like d10x, it’s got slopes and plateaus, but these are more predictable. Above right: The same data, but it’s the increase per level. Like d10x, there are lots of gaps, but unlike d10x, it’s a lot more regular. It has a similar problem as d10x, but more regular and predictable for your average player. It’s not great, but it’s nowhere near as bad as d10x:
*unless/until you develop a mental shortcut for reading your results, like looking for at least one d10 result that’s under your Obsession skill’s 10s digit Roll and keep highest Roll 2d6k1, for example, which means ‘roll 2d6 and keep the 1 highest’. You roll a bunch of dice, usually equal to a stat and maybe plus or minus some dice for circumstances, equipment, etc., often succeeding if you roll greater than or equal to a target value. Obviously adding more dice boosts your chances of success, and it’s fairly intuitive that you get less and less for each die you add. Only one of your dice needs to succeed, and if you’ve got 5 dice in front of you and you add a sixth, you’re obviously adding proportionately way less than if you’ve got 1 die and you add a second. You can see this pretty clearly if we, let’s say, roll a pool of 1 or more d6s against a target of 6. We either succeed or fail, and we only fail if all our dice fail. For 1d6, there’s a 5/6 chance that all our dice fail. For 2d6, there’s a (5/6)*(5/6) or 25/36 chance that all our dice fail, and for 3d6 there’s a 125/216 chance that all our dice fail, and so on.  Above: A plot of that data out to 10d6 (1=success, 0=failure), done using Anydice, an online dice calculator (here’s the anydice code that generated that plot). It’s a smooth curve with diminishing returns, specifically an inverted exponential decay curve with the equation y = 1 – (5/6) ^ x. Even if you don’t have much maths knowledge you’ve probably heard of exponential growth, where something grows out of control at a faster and faster rate according to how much of it there already is – this is the opposite, something decreasing at a slower and slower rate, then flipped upside-down. So that’s real nice and reliable. You always gain from increasing your stats, and you always gain less than you got the last time you put a point into that stat. No sudden swerves, no plateaus, no pitfalls, no traps. If you’ve got 5 points to spend between two stats that each start at 1, and you spend them all to raise one stat to 6 and leave the other at 1, you know what you’re setting yourself up for. If you want more granularity in the system you can just increase the die size from 6 to 8 or 10 or 20 for finer-grain detail. The only real problem with this system, as-is, is that you need more dice – the two previous mechanisms only needed 2d10, but now you need… however many is the limit on a stat. Double that, if your system lets people roll against each other. Worst case scenario, you’ll need as many dice as the max level of any stat * the number of players, including any GM. That seems like a pretty rare scenario, though, and you can avoid it a bit by tweaking the target and limiting the number of dice. For example, rolling 1 to 5d6 against a target of 5:  Above: A plot as before, but using the new rules (anydice code). So our dynamic range (the range of our output) is fairly similar, but our input range is narrower and easier to work with (but not so narrow that your options are totally constrained). The nicer thing about this, as well, is that there’s one level where you’re pretty bad, one level where you’re 50-50, and three levels where you’re increasingly good. How many levels of “my character is real bad at this” does a game need? There are other problems with this system (roll and keep) if you use it as a base to build other things on top of, depending on what you add on top. For example, adding flat bonuses can be either way more effective than adding more dice, or way less, depending not only on how big the bonus is, but how many dice you have. It’s a second-order consideration that you don’t want to be thinking through while you’re playing the game. However, in itself it’s pretty straightforward and intuitive. But… let’s say you want a system that uses only 2 dice, let’s say 2d10s like above, but has a nice smooth curve. 2d10 keep lowest, roll equal or under your stat Here’s the results curve for 2d10 keep lowest, and the chance of success for 2d10 keep lowest rolling under a start from 1 to 10:   Above top: A plot of the probability of getting each result from 1 to 10 when rolling 2d10 and keeping the lowest result. It’s a downward slope. In other words, if we create a cumulative curve, it’ll diminish over time, as we add less and less (anydice code). Above bottom: Roll 2d10, keep the lowest, and succeed if you roll under or your stat from 1 to 10 (anydice code). Basically, this is the cumulative curve – if your stat is 1, you succeed if you roll 1; if it’s 2, you succeed on a 1 or 2; if it’s 5, you succeed on 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. Add all the probabilities up and you get diminishing returns. This is a pretty specific system, though. If it’s what you need, then that’s fine. The other problem is that rolling and keeping the lowest has a pretty negative feel, which might not suit your game. Roll and keep highest is a positive statement, and a lot of (probably most) RPGs are about competent, powerful people, so when you flip that into “roll, then take the worst outcome” you’re making a negative statement about the story, the themes, the characters, the world, or a combination of these things. Conclusions? There are a bunch of ways of getting diminishing returns with dice! Some of them are pretty straightforward, some aren’t. Sometimes diminishing returns is the goal, sometimes (as in UA) it’s probably not (but it still happens). There are more ways to get diminishing returns and which one you pick, if you’re after this mechanic, depends, as with any mechanic, in a large part on 1) whether it’s mathematically clear and intuitive and 2) what feeling it creates. RESULTS TENDING to the MIDDLE So you want people to feel safe when they roll – like they can expect roughly where the results will be (in the middle) and maybe get something that’s a lot higher or lower than the average. Here’s a couple of ways to do that: Bell curves – rolling dice and adding them together, or counting successes vs a target This is pretty easy to do. If you just roll a bunch of dice with uniform probabilities (whether that’s rolling regular dice, or rolling against a fixed target) then eventually you’ll build a bell curve of probabilities:  Above: A plot of the results for dice pools of 1d6 through to 6d6 (anydice code). Aside from 1d6, which is just a flat, uniform distribution from 1 to 6, they’re bell curves with peaks halfway between their lowest result (1 per die) and their highest (6 per die), so at 7 for 2d6, 10-11 for 3d6, and so on. A lot of games use simple mechanics like this – Dungeons and Dragons (for random-rolling character creation), GURPS, PDQ, most dice-based PbtA and so on. You can skew the results by rolling several and dropping the highest or lowest:   Above top: A plot showing how rolling between 2 and 6d6 and adding together the 2 highest results skews the results curve towards higher results (anydice code). Above bottom: Similar, but instead of keeping the highest 2, it’s dropping the lowest 1 (anydice code). One thing to keep in mind with these curves is that you get increasing returns up to a certain point, and then you get diminishing returns after that. For example, rolling 3d6 vs a target of 15 and adding a bonus from +0 to +9:  Above: A plot of your chance of success rolling 3d6+0 to 9 against a target of 15 (anydice code) – the plot is sigmoid, S-shaped, i.e. it speeds up until you get to the midpoint, then slows down. There’s (at least) one other way to do this, differently to just adding together uniformly-distributed results… Roll and keep the middle With this, you roll an odd number of dice, then keep the middle one. Rather than a bell curve, this gives us a much more rounded distribution:   Above top: A very rounded plot of roll-3d100-take-middle (anydice code). Where a bell curve tails off, this one spikes down, and is much broader than a bell curve across the same range. This avoids the really low and high results without concentrating the results around a narrow peak – still allowing somewhat low and high ones as well as those in the middle. Above bottom: A plot of 4d100 and take the second-highest or second-lowest, giving rounded, but skewed distributions (anydice code). RESULTS TENDING to the EXXXXTREMES What if you want the opposite? Results that are more likely to be very low or very high than average? Wild swings and clear victory or defeat more often than average outcomes? No middle sliders? Or, in other words, what if we chopped a bell curve in half and put the right half on the left and vice versa so the peak is half at the bottom of our range and half at the top? Chopping a bell curve in half and putting the right half on the left and vice versa, or, using the modulus function So, this is actually relatively easy. We literally just take any mechanic that gives us a bell curve and roll over the results once we get to the halfway point – so if we’re rolling 2d6, any results above 7 roll around to 1, 2, 3, and so on. Roll an 8, 8-7=1. Roll a 9, 9-7=2. Roll a 10, 10-7=3, etc.. This basically chops off the right half of the distribution and adds it to the left:  Above: A plot of the rollover system described above, using 6d6. There’s a second step here, which is that I’ve adjusted the results to fall into a 3d6 range (half of 6d6), which means subtracting 3 (since the average of 6d6 is 21 and the maximum of 3d6 is 18) to get into that range (kind of). There are 2 problems, though they’re not huge. The first is that it involves some arithmetic, which slows things down, so it’s probably not great for resolving things during play (but before/after play or during setup, sure). The second is that it’s not balanced, i.e. symmetrical. That’s partly down to personal preference, though. Roll 3d and use the middle as a decider Here’s a symmetrical mechanic: Roll 3 dice and use the middle to decide whether you take the highest or the lowest. Using 3d6, if the middle result is 3 or less, your actual result is the lowest die. If the middle result is 4 or more, use the highest die. For example, if your roll is 1 2 6, use the 1; if it’s 1 5 6, use the 6. Here’s the curve:  Above: A plot of the results curve for the system above – it’s bimodal, that is, has two peaks, rather than the one peak of pretty much all of the systems mentioned before (anydice code). This one still needs some mental work, but in a different way to above, and it’s pretty clear from a glance at your results whether you’ve done well or badly (do you have at least 2 good ones or at least 2 bad ones?). Alternatively you see your highest result – e.g. a 6 – and think you’ve succeeded… then see your middle result – e.g. a 2 – and realise that you’ve failed. This mechanical narrative kind of covers for the time spent comparing results. Oh, and things get a little weird (in a completely expected way) when you do opposed rolls with this mechanic:   Above top: A plot of probabilities for each outcome when you roll twice and subtract one from the other (anydice code). It’s a bimodal distribution again (if you ignore the left half where you lose) – usually your result matches your opponent or is way higher than theirs (or theirs is way higher than yours). Above bottom: Same, but for 3d50 (anydice code). UnCO3 fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Oct 14, 2019 |
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Oct 14, 2019 15:40
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ZearothK posted:I really like this effortpost! I have a homebrew (that started as a Warhammer Fantasy/40K d100 hack) that uses the flip-flop as part of the basic roll and I came to the same mathematical results when simulating it. I'd like your opinion of that core mechanic, if you could. It has worked pretty well with the three groups I've played with (and I had other GMs adopting it), but I acknowledge it might be working despite the twist I added to it. You have a skill at 64. You spend a point to upgrade to 65. You roll a 65.
 Above top: A plot of the probability of a success at cost in the above system. It's a jagged, uneven curve that sharply rises, slowly turns, then sharply falls. Above bottom: A plot of the chance of success at each skill level, assuming a success at cost is worth half as much as a clean success (not an objective measure, but it helps to visualise this). It's like the UA flip-flop curve, but with an uneven slope rather than slopes and plateaus. Another thing that I didn't discuss before is that these tests, to get these probability distributions, don't represent actual play - the tests plotted above simulate rolling the dice a million times, but players will actually roll far, far fewer times, and even fewer at any given skill level. I mean, if your stats are in the 1-100 range and you increase a stat from 65 to 70, then roll 3 times, then increase it from 70 to 75, how likely is it that that middle increase actually affected the outcome of any of that tiny number of rolls*? What it did do for sure is put you in a position to get that skill to 75, but that's a completely different part of the system. So, your experience as an individual player is fuzzier, coarser, in a way that makes the underlying probability curves seem smoother. That kind of roughness in the second plot doesn't matter so much. Your collective experience as a group of players might be closer to the curve, and the average of let's say hundreds of groups will be even closer, but that experience is getting more and more abstract. UA's Obsession skills are still kind of bad (though disguised), because the results curve is much more uneven, so you're much more likely to see no benefit when increasing a skill. Overall, it's not too bad, especially in the system you've got now. You'd have to rebuild everything, e.g. roll+stat vs a lower target and an upper target (like PbtA), if you wanted a system with smooth probabilities, and then you'd lose the particular psychological effect of flipping the results. *1-0.95^3=about a 14% chance that one or more rolls actually turned from successes into failures UnCO3 fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 13:00
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ZearothK posted:Thanks for the feedback! I did a similar plot with a similar brute-force method with the same mathematical results, funnilly enough, but the extra analysis is welcome. I purposefully put player stats in my homebrew range from 30 to 70 (at the extremely high-end), because succeeding at a cost is the most interesting result the dice can give out and that spread is the region with the higher odds of it happening. It is also very convenient that it gives an effective chance of success at 50% to 90%. ZearothK posted:Not quite, ORE has the height of a match determining its quality and the number of matches (the width) determining speed and sometimes how effective you are. The chance of a match is easy to calculate, but when it comes down to finding the chance of a minimum height happening it gets way more complicated.  Zeerust posted:Thanks for these effortposts, I still feel like my grip on dice math is kind of hazy and I love hearing about different resolution systems! My current game uses roll X keep 2, with the highest or lowest chosen based on whether you're rolling with a net bonus or penalty. I was originally using this with a moving target number (e.g. enemy defences, test difficulty), but I felt like it was too opaque at that point, so fixing the target number range feels like a much fairer system for players to actually predict success. It also has the diminishing returns you've mentioned, which I feel is good for dealing with characters getting overspecialised. As Splicer says, a system where you add duplicate rolls together runs into problems where you can only get multiples, leading to an uneven distribution. It's not as bad as d10x, but it's still pretty rough. Here's that vs a target, plus a system where you do the same but the maximum result is always 6:  Above top: A plot of the probability of rolling equal or above a target in the above system with a pool from 1d6 to 5d6. It decays over time in a sort of stepwise way - results 1-6 have a high probability, 7-12 have lower probability, 13-18 have even lower probability etc.. Above bottom: A plot of probabilities for the same system, but any result over 6 is treated as a 6. The more dice you add, the more the curve shifts up, as it gets less and less likely that you'll fail a test against the lower targets. Zeerust posted:True. If I had a better idea of how the probability shakes out, I would think you could have a target number range with numbers exceeding that giving you 'raises' that you can spend for extra narrative / mechanical clout.  Above: a plot of the number of bonuses achieved in the above system for each number of dice from 1d6 to 5d6. They decay rapidly, but the more dice you add the more likely you are to get bonuses. At 4d6 you're about as likely to get 1+ bonuses as not, and at 5d6 you're more likely to get a bonus.
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Oct 15, 2019 20:29
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oriongates posted:But mainly, trying to figure out the size of the grid right now. Thoughts? 3: ~28% 4: ~55% 5: ~77% 6: ~90%
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Oct 15, 2019 21:32
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It turns out that people have already looked into the stats for PbtA and FitD, so I’ll pass on those and instead look at using stats and simulations to understand Cthulhu Dark. INVESTIGATING CTHULHU DARK Cthulhu Dark is, as the name suggests, a rules-light Lovecraftian horror game. It streamlines the genre into a few basic mechanics that mostly revolve around Insanity. Not Sanity, as most Mythos-inspired games do, but how far from sane your character is. It’s their only stat, starting at 1 (e.g. a bit nervous, slightly insomniac, academically curious about dangerous things) and maxing out at 6, where your character goes irrevocably insane and leaves the story. What’s worth investigating is how you get there, and understanding that can help you pace your story to get the sort of outcome you’re after. Cthulhu Dark is designed with one-shots or short series in mind and has a clear arc – the characters delve into an unsettling mystery and uncover horrifying truths they probably wish they’d never found, and then the story ends. This is reflected in the mechanics, which quickly lead the game in one direction – rising Insanity. That means it’s actually pretty viable to simulate the game, which I didn’t do in the examples before. The statistics we had before were for understanding single moments (a roll of the dice, spending points during traditional character creation) – the simulations I used this time are all about looking how a system or situation changes over time. I’ll explain how it actually works below. The ground rules of Cthulhu Dark When a character takes action, they roll a pool of d6s. They get 1d6 if the action is humanly possible, 1d6 if it’s within their ‘occupation’ (this being cosmic horror, that includes things like ‘occultist’, ‘linguist of alien tongues’, ‘dreamer’ etc.), and 1d6 – the player’s Insanity die – if they’re risking their sanity to achieve their goals. The higher the top result, the better the outcome. One of the expansions to the original game (Dark Tales and Dark Depths) adds two more aspects to this: firstly, if you roll any 1s, you suffer a drawback (e.g. it gets late, you realise someone’s watching you, someone experiences a deep sense of dread); and secondly, if your highest result is a 6 and you’re investigating the mystery, you see or learn something beyond human knowledge, usually triggering an Insanity Check. Insanity Checks are the other major mechanic. Every time one of the following happens, the player(s) affected must roll an Insanity Check:
Here are some example rolls for your investigator, who happens to be an occult librarian:
Here are your chances of causing an Insanity Check when rolling different pools of dice (1d6, 2d6, 1i6, 1d6+1i6, 2d6+1i6):  Above: A bar chart of the probability of getting an Insanity Check when rolling each possible pool of dice when using the second or third rules above, or both. The first two bars add up to more than the third because it’s possible that you roll a 6 and you’re your Insanity die beats the rest, but you still only make one check. Okay, so how does Insanity change over time? The upshot of this system is that the higher your Insanity goes, the less likely you are to fail an Insanity Check and experience that break. There are diminishing returns, as your characters become desensitised the more horrible things they see. This is what we’re going to simulate. Not just “how likely are you to trigger an Insanity Check from a single roll”, but “how does your Insanity change as you make more Insanity Checks one after the other”. How do we calculate that? By rolling it, tens of thousands of times:
 Above top: A plot of 3 characters’ Insanity levels over 20 randomly-rolled checks each. The results are spread out – each one is random – but you can see they follow a rough route. Character 1 goes insane fast, character 2 keeps sane for quite a while, and character 3 gets to 5 Insanity fairly quick and holds out there for a while. Above bottom: A plot of mean Insanity level (of 40000 tests). The ‘error bars’ show the ‘standard deviation’ – put simply, the spread of those randomly-generated paths. ~2/3 of the results fall in that range. The curve starts at 1 with 0 std (because everyone starts at 1 Insanity, so there’s no spread). It rises with diminishing returns – that desensitisation I mentioned before – reaching 5 Insanity at about 9 checks. After 13 checks it’s closer to 6 than to 5, so you’d expect the majority to be completely insane. Another thing is that the standard deviation rises sharply, reaches a peak between 5-10 checks, then slowly drops off. We can already tell a couple of things from this data:
 Above top: A plot of the number of characters at each Insanity level for a group of 4, in one test. By the end, 3 of 4 have gone completely insane. Above bottom: A plot of the mean number of players at each Insanity level (of 10000 tests). The group cycles through each level, with all starting at 1, then most at 2, then most at 3, then most at 4, 5, and 6. As Insanity rises they get less likely to fail a check, so players – and the group – spend more time at each level than the one before. Using this, you can see how diverse the group’s Insanity levels will be at each point in time. In a group of 4, it’s unlikely that anyone will have gone insane until check 8, where the scales tip. By check 9, you’d expect one character to have gone insane; by check 13, more are insane than sane; by check 20 the balance of probability is shifting towards everyone being insane. If you want at least one character to go insane, it’s a good bet if you have at least 10 horrifying things to encounter. All that said, these plots assume that everyone’s present for every roll, which they might not be (especially if some people are risking their sanity more than others). The model is incomplete (‘wrong’) and that’s okay, it’s still useful There’s one more mechanic that I didn’t mention before that also helps Cthulhu Dark tell Lovecraftian horror stories, and that’s denial and destruction of evidence of the horror. When a character reaches 5 Insanity, they can destroy evidence to reduce their Insanity by 1 each time. They protect their minds at the cost of allowing the danger to grow un-checked – because it probably isn’t possible to stop that danger. Obviously, this could have a pretty big impact on the course of the game! However, it’s a complex decision heavily affected by the way the story’s going and what sort of person your character is, so it’s tricky to come up with an accurate way to include it in the simulation… so I didn’t. A simulation doesn’t have to be 100% accurate, and in fact that’s pretty much impossible (and a bad idea to chase after). There's a quote that goes ”All models are wrong, but some are useful.” In this case, the useful part is coming up with this baseline that shows how Insanity changes as you make more and more Insanity checks. It’s technically wrong (or incomplete), but we know roughly what the effect of adding the denial mechanic will be, even if we don’t know the exact statistical effect. Now comes the subjective part. What’s the best outcome? Maybe it’s more interesting that one or two people go completely insane and everyone else lives with the consequences, probably high up at 4-5 Insanity. Maybe, on the other hand, it’s interesting if the characters lose their minds one by one, until they’re all gone. Or, maybe you want the possibility of 1+ characters going insane, but don’t want to push it that far. Or maybe you’re thinking about the story going one way, but the players want it to go the other way and you need to readjust on the fly. Does this teach you how to GM the game? Nah, of course there’s a lot more to it than that, but it does get you part of the way there. Knowing how the game goes gives you an insight that you don’t get just from reading the rules – an insight that you might otherwise have to play/GM a lot of games to figure out. It can also be helpful if you hack the game as many people have done, e.g. replacing Insanity with Disrepute to play out stories of ronin, or replacing it with Zone to play out stories like A Roadside Picnic/Stalker. Knowing the underlying mechanics can help you decide whether your hack’s version of Insanity still works for the stories you want your hack to tell. Conclusions? I did have some more typed up here, and plans for more plots where I tweaked the mechanics: changing d6 to d8 or d10, moving the max Insanity up or down, making it so rolling Insanity higher than or equal to the highest other result causes an Insanity Check, that kind of thing. Most of it wasn’t that useful – the effects were pretty obvious and intuitive, and generally made the game too fast, too slow, too harsh, or too easy on the characters. It turns out that Cthulhu Dark is a very solid game as-is! You could add more rules (which would mean more complexity), but it’s very good at what it sets out to do.
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Oct 18, 2019 13:00
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Pvt.Scott posted:What sort of blasphemous things could you do with a d66 besides using it for random tables? If you mean any kind of roll with 2 6-sided dice where they're not just added together, subtracted, multiplied, or compared in a pool, then... coordinates from 1 to 6 and A to F? Or exponential values, so one die is the number of zeroes behind the number on the other die (so 2, 6 could be 2000000 or 600)?
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Oct 21, 2019 08:17
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I mean, go for it, if you want your game to be a hit in certain regions of Papua New Guinea Unrelated, did anyone put anything in for the 200-word RPG Challenge this year? Here's my entry, Dirty Papers. It's about being an archaeological dig team in ancient ruins, and academic hierarchy, and it's kind of incomplete (I had to cut the longer-term and endgame mechanics off to fit under the limit, but I'll publish the whole thing on itch soon).
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Oct 21, 2019 08:55
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JMBosch posted:My submission was Hush, where I tried to figure out a mechanic for a Pontypool-style poisoning of language and concepts while players struggle to connect with each other after a linguistically-driven apocalypse. Likewise, I had to give up on any more in-depth mechanics to fit the word count, but I guess that's kind of the point of the contest. - More maths+stats+simulations: I thought I’d do a post about a godgame system I designed and then never used, because it builds on some of the stuff I went through before (roll-and-keep dice pools) in a slightly different way - adding together the top results from multiple pools, while also comparing the total result of each pool. Basically, it gets more info out of the dice you roll than just one or two numbers. This next para is just a little about the history of godgames in TG, so feel free to skip ahead. There’s a pretty long history of godgames in TG (continuously all the way back to 2009), and many (but fewer recently) are based on PDQ – Prose Descriptive Qualities – a super-light rules system where you roll 2d6, add any bonuses (traits/skills/gear/etc.), subtract any penalties (flaws/weaknesses/injuries/etc.), and compare against a target set by the GM. It’s so light that it’s very easy to set up any kind of game based on it, but it’s also so light that it doesn’t really guide or help you narratively (except to justify applying as many bonuses and as few penalties as possible). To help fix this, people who’ve ran godgames in the past have come up with loads of extra mechanics to layer on top of their specific games, or hacked other systems (e.g. Spire, BitD, or FAE), or even come up with their own (e.g. Dog Kisser’s pseudo-CYOA, audience-interactive game The Fragile Gods of Somewhere and its descendants like The Broken Gods of Elsewhere). I’m one of those people – specifically, I ran a godgame a couple years ago called Five Centuries of Flux using a PDQ-based system where the major conflict was between your god’s Domains (things they have power over and responsibility for) and their Hungers (desires they can pursue without restraint). That game was a success, mainly despite the system, and a proof of concept for me that the general idea worked. At the same time, I’d been working on a PDQ-like but original system with that conflict baked in from the start. I’ve moved on and never really got to test that probably-better system, but I still think it’s kind of neat, and like I said above, it takes some of the basic mechanics I've gone through before and goes one step further, which I think might be useful to look at. A GODGAME RPG: FROM DAWN to SHINING DAWN Here’s how the basic mechanics work: Your character has a Domain, a list of things that fall under their responsibility and control. Elements, cults, servants, concepts, all that. They also have Hungers, a list of things they desperately want or need: end-goals like ‘Peace’ or ‘Conquest’ or drives like ‘Greed’ or ‘Love’. For example, let's say Zeus has the Sky, Fatherhood, Judgement, and mystery cults in their Domain; their Hungers are Pride and Lust. When your god takes action:
How does this work out across all possible combinations?  Above: A lattice plot of the probability of each result for rolling 1 to 6d6 for Domain and 1 to 6d6 for Hunger (results would be mirrored across the midline, e.g. if you roll 2 Domain/1 Hunger it’d give you the same as 1 Domain/2 Hunger). Bottom-left is an example plot (1 Domain/1 Hunger) with the same axes as all of the smaller plots. Adding dice to one or the other pool makes you more likely to succeed, pushing the peak from 7 to 9. Adding to both pushes it further, and rolling 5-6 in both means you'll most likely get an 11 or 12. So first-off, you obviously get diminishing returns, as usual for roll-and-keep dice pools. That means it’s better to boost each pool a little rather than one pool a lot. For example, rolling 3 Domain/3 Hunger gives you pretty similar results to 6 Domain/2 Hunger (or 2/6). Secondly, it has kind of a neat step-like effect, where going high on one pool insulates you from low results, but doesn’t guarantee that you’ll win against high targets. So, why bother spending so much DP if you could just boost your Hunger a little? Well, as you might expect, there’s a problem with gods or similarly-powerful beings acting on their desires without keeping themselves in check. The more your character indulges in their Hunger, the more likely those desires are to influence or corrupt their deeds elsewhere. Mechanically: After each roll you total up your Domain results and Hunger results, and if your Hunger total is higher, your action has a Consequence (set by the GM) linked to one or more of your Hungers. If you want to avoid those Consequences, you need to spend more DP before the roll to cut down your risk. For example: let’s say Zeus fathers a powerful demigod with a mortal, which the GM decides is a difficulty 9 task. Their player spends 1DP and their Hunger is currently at 3, so they roll 2 Domain/3 Hunger. Their Domain results are 3 and 6; their Hunger results are 1, 4, and 5; their total is 6+5=11, so they succeed; however, their Hunger (1+4+5=10) just barely beats their Domain (3+6=9), so there’s a Consequence. Their player describes the allegorical moment of conception (Zeus turns into a bull/swan/whatever) and the childhood of the new demigod, and the GM describes how the child is brutishly prideful and uses the name and divine reputation of their father as a justification for conquest and dominion even from a young age… Here’s what that looks like when you spend DP against 1, 3, or 5 Hunger:    Above top: A plot of your chance of triggering a Consequence with 1 Hunger, spending 0-5DP (anydice code). The crossing point, where you're just about more likely to not cause a Consequence, is 1 Domain (spending 0DP). Above middle: As above, but 3 Hunger. The crossing point is 3 Domain (spending 2DP). Above bottom: As above, but 5 Hunger. The crossing point is 5 Domain (spending 4DP). So you need Domain to at least match Hunger to get more clean than messy successes. Until Domain equals Hunger, you get increasing returns, and after that you get diminishing returns. If you don’t care about Consequences and/or you can somehow convince the other characters (god or mortal) to not care, then you’re free to boost Hunger right to the top and roll high for almost everything you do. Otherwise, you’ll need to manage things a little more carefully. Rolling any Domain/1 Hunger is at best on par with 2 Domain/2 Hunger (anydice code; click View: Table and Data: Summary; look for 2D2H and compare to 6D1H), so you might as well indulge a bit. This is especially true if you really want to succeed or win conflicts, where having a high Hunger pool really helps out (anydice code; click View: Table and Data: Normal; “1” is the chance of a character rolling 6 Domain/6 Hunger beating a character rolling 6 Domain/1 Hunger). So, that’s the core system! The idea is to give you a lot of power while also pitting four major choices against each other – do you go easy and accept the possibility of failure, dredge your Domain for support at the cost of stressing it out, dive into your Hungers at the cost of losing complete control, or go hell for leather on everything? These all tie into the rest of the mechanics for the game, but at the base it comes down to what your character values, how they relate to that, and how much of that they’d risk to achieve their goals. At the same time, the mechanics for each pool represent what's happening narratively - you're expending or wearing down your Domain, eventually to the point of exhaustion, and you're slowly building up drive and power through always-rising Hunger. - I’ve also recently been working on a post about using simulations as part of my design process with my game The Cromlech Archives, which uses playing cards (so, significantly different mechanics from most of the stuff I’ve gone through here), but I’m also thinking of doing some more stuff, in no particular order:
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Oct 24, 2019 17:12
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I've just set up Just the Two of Us Jam, a game jam on itch.io for 2-player rpgs, interactive fiction games, Bitsy games, and similar stuff! You might have heard of/read/played established 2-player games like Murderous Ghosts by Vincent Baker, Mars Colony by Tim Koppang, or De Profundis by Michal Oracz, or newer games like Together We Write Private Cathedrals by Ben Roswell and say what you mean by Riley Rethal. The only requirement (outside of no bigotry etc.) is that your game has to be mainly meant for two players, so there's a huge scope of possibility. It starts on 01/01/2020 at 01:01 (GMT) and ends on 02/02/2020 at 02:02 (GMT). If you can, please give it a boost on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpeaktheSky/status/1205374217501466624
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Dec 13, 2019 07:52
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If the only way to fail is to roll no matches, and all successes are equivalent (so the results are only ever binary success or failure), then you want the odds of rolling at least one match (which is 1 minus the odds of rolling no matches, which will be easier to calculate).
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Apr 8, 2020 17:58
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 Here's a plot of the results for pools from 2d6 to 10d6 (10000 trials).
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Apr 8, 2020 20:57
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 I've just published a devlog for Twilight Song that explores how I used computer simulations to refine a key part of the game—the flow of time, the mechanics that control how the story spans many years. It's kinda like what I did earlier in this thread for things like Cthulhu Dark, but formatted a little differently.
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May 14, 2020 20:27
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Cross-posting from the publisher thread:UnCO3 posted:This might be of interest to people here, both experienced and new: the Wretched & Alone Game Jam (nothing to do with me). It's a game jam for games using the 'Wretched & Alone' SRD (free here), a 1-player Jenga tower/dice/card system for stories of inevitable, yet seemingly-avoidable decline and demise. The two games written before the jam are:
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May 16, 2020 18:30
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Zurui posted:I'm working on a game called Five Year Mission where you play as the captain of an exploration ship on a long-term mission to seek out new worlds etc, etc. You manage the crew and their stats/skills to overcome obstacles and accomplish missions. Each mission gives you points and certain point thresholds lead to certain levels of victory at the end of your five years. The game occupies a strange place between "two-player RPG" and "resource-management board game" and I'm trying to fix it so I end up more in the vein of the former and less the latter. I have couple of conundrums I would like feedback on: 1) Whichever way you go, I feel like it'll be more endearing if it involves the characters changing because of player decisions, maybe in pretty unpredictable ways. People can fill in the blanks with their imagination, and building up a character's history gives them way more character than a fixed attribute. 2) Physical whiteboards are probably pretty rare. Digital ones are less so—there's stuff like google drawings or miro or whatever and probably dozens of other not-quite as good websites where you can make persistent whiteboards where you can draw, create, and upload things, then select, move, erase them etc. Then your game only works with internet access, though. Is this for keeping track of characters or a map of the cosmos or something else?
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May 30, 2020 02:27
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2) sounds like something a digital notes tool could handle, or two sets of index cards (or cards torn in half, A4/letter paper torn into 8ths, or something like that).
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May 30, 2020 10:47
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https://twitter.com/SpeaktheSky/status/1289694538257186816 I'm running another game jam, though this one isn't games—it's Trophy Dark incursions in trifold format! The stakes are low (read: there aren't any) and there's a bit of randomisation, plus it's very short form (a typical incursion can easily run to about 4 times the length of this). Here's a thread in the jam forum that summarises a bunch of help, examples, and advice for people who don't know much about writing incursions or designing for Trophy. You can also ask questions there or here (or on the official Trophy discord—ask and I'll see if I can get an invite link). Overall I think this is pretty beginner-friendly, and you're encouraged to license and price your work as you see fit. The list of Themes to pick from will be revealed on the 8th of August, so it's just anticipation-building (and learning about Trophy if you're new to it) until then. EDIT: And I've now published a free set of trifold pamphlet templates for Word (and OpenOffice and LibreOffice), Affinity Publisher, and Googledocs. They're nothing fancy, but I had some people ask for them on twitter. UnCO3 fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Aug 2, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 08:55
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Crossposting from the publishing thread:UnCO3 posted:So I've been spending more time this year releasing fonts than I've been releasing games, but if you make games or supplements then you might find these useful:
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Apr 24, 2021 17:18
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Is the problem figuring out the design, or how to structure the text, or...? (from reading the worksheets it looks like they focus on forming and understanding your ideas more than getting them down on the page and organising them once they're there, so that might be an issue if you're writing a new game without a framework you're hacking)
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May 4, 2021 23:02
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Yeah I was gonna suggest that—it's often a good idea to check out how other people do the thing you want to do, if you think they've done it well.
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May 10, 2021 15:07
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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.
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Feb 28, 2022 16:27
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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.
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Mar 1, 2022 05:25
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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!
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Mar 1, 2022 06:23
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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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Mar 9, 2022 00:18
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IshmaelZarkov posted:Okay devs. Help a newbie out. Check the license terms for whatever you use, though—usually they're super-permissive (you're encouraged to credit the artist, but there's no other restrictions), but some might have actual restrictions (e.g. some Creative Commons licenses). For collections or free art sites there's usually a page linked in the header or footer that has the license terms (e.g. Pexels). You might wanna personalise the art you use a little (if the license allows that) e.g. by using an image editor to apply filters. In one game I made, I used the free image editor GIMP/Glimpse to tweak colours and apply a waterpixels effect to turn royalty-free photos into something unique, like this:   It takes more time than just finding stock art and dropping it in, but then I had people tell me they didn't even realise the art in the game was just edited photos until I told them. More importantly, the art was a much better fit for the tone and style I was going for. Copyrights don't need to be registered anywhere. If you're using non-public domain art then check the license in case there's a note you gotta put in your work for those assets, though like I said, most places that give free art have really permissive licenses. Hope that helps!
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Jul 12, 2022 13:56
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