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Ohhhhhh, right OK. It's been a long time since I pored over my old AD&D materials.
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Dec 1, 2020 20:22
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Greetings, I have returned from outer space! I see that the thread was incredibly busy while I was out so I'm going to catch up a bit, but here's a shortlist of what I ended up doing while I was out there for a week or so: Systems - Created some systems to randomly generate and describe elevator automatons on demand - Revised Cooking to a flavor/reactions d66 table and then also tableized the cooking prototype I wrote in the thread the other week - Created "dead adventurers" and cause of death / simple reward loop system inspired chiefly by Dragon's Crown - Created like three pages of ideas using FUDGE dice - Created a 'Fighting Formations' system (every xianxia and wuxia story ever plus every SRPG ever and Tash Kalar) - Created a dungeon generation system based on a 3x3 rubik's cube I also did other stuff but they are related to specific things not related to the Megastrata Project, and also recorded something like 10 hours of game design notes on audio, probably lowballing it and it's closer to 12 or 14 hours instead. Lots of stuff that I'll be putting design notes into the thread about. As a brief retrospective, one of the primary things regarding megadungeons and designing systems for them is that all megadungeons categorically have specific features that most people would get aside from the "big two" that I mentioned early on page 1 about systems and aesthetic. Getting more specific about what those systems are and what the aesthetic is has the devil in the details, which also means that there's many more paragraphs of dumb bullshit to wax on now that I'm back at a proper keyboard. Shoutouts to two implements though that were instrumental in doing this design work: - reMarkable 2 digital e-paper tablet with a pencil; battery lasted forever and I can transfer notes to digital format directly for later design treatments - Zoom H5 portable recorder with the X/Y microphone for talking into while alone in a cabin in the countryside for a week. The amount of stuff that was recorded was mostly me trying to think out loud while pacing back and forth or sitting down at night with a cup of coffee. A smartphone is also useful as a stand-in voice recorder as well.
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Dec 5, 2020 21:41
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First up is a system for generating and creating automatons. In general, I like two things about making 'details' - Weird stuff that players take an interest in has meaning - Weird stuff that GMs take an interest in has meaning, but may be purely self-serving In this case, I wanted a way to go ahead and give some compact but fun prompts to describe these robots that control the rope elevators to and from all points in the megadungeon. I feel like that if you have an element that is not particularly interesting or onerous in your game for no good reason, you should just throw it out if there's no meaningful purpose to it. I think that some things that other designers and GMs take for granted are some of the things that are a primary design weakness when trying to design for everybody. As a tangent I was reading Wolves of God by Kevin Crawford, who created other fantastic games like Spears of the Dawn, Stars Without Number, and Godbound, among others. There is a fantastic sense of narrative and mechanics that combine together that many people have considered to be boring and uninteresting and re-interpret them using a ruleset that was previously treated as old and tired but have a fresh coat of paint in it, which is old school dice scaling and dice progression from the heyday of D&D. Wolves of God, in specific, has a pretty simplistic rules system for task resolution and generally tough saving throws and the like, but it also has extra rules for cattle raiding and holding feasts. That's fantastic and weird enough that honestly, you probably wouldn't see these things in any other game except maybe Dramasystem (in which the original example of procedural conflict resolution was stealing some herds from a neighboring tribe...anyway). The point is, if you were putting things that seem weird into your game, setting, rules system, whatever, that is cool as long as it remains cool to you and your very specific table. It cannot be overstated how the importance of relevancy and interest both come together and create disconnects for products that have to go to market to turn a profit, especially traditional games stuff, and double especially medium to large scale studios making video games. Anyway. Automaton Naming Conventions I created 20 to 26 names based on mundane objects that popped into my head at the time, which coincidentally ended up being plants, both edible things and florals, that sort of thing. I decided it would be fun to create this list of names based on your standard alphabet, one name per letter. This meant I have some letters which I don't have a good name for, but if you happen to know a cool vegetable or flower that starts with the letter X, Z, or Q, then get at me. After these names I created 1d6 tables for the following traits: - Number of eyes - Number of arms - Demeanor/personality - "Accent" color (mostly of just the eyes) This would give me something to quickly roll or choose based on extenuating factors that I haven't figured out yet to describe a given automaton, and if I wanted/needed to later, I could absolutely do something like ascribe a code number to their names for that extra-robot naming feel.  This is an export from reMarkable 2 so it's all hand written, but it gets the general point across. Anyway, that could mean that Wisteria-6341 has three eyes that glow orange and has two arms, and is easygoing. Maybe I can use that to riff on later because Wisteria-6341 can now serve as an iconic generative entity of the "Wisteria"-class of automatons. What does that even mean? I dunno, but maybe I can make a Mystery out of it! Even though this looks like a purely aesthetic system this is an "ideas generator" system because it inspires me, the system designer, to go off and improvise based off of a seed idea. This can then be extended in the same way as generative design does for Zone scoping and design, and it still remains pretty simple, a bit weird, and leaves a lot of room open for interpretation. Personally I think these automatons crewing the rope elevators are neat asides that help prime the pump of the Megastrata's presentation a bit. They have always provided a very minor piece of set dressing for the players across 8 combined sessions (across both groups, roughly) and it's nice to add a little bit more specifics about what their personalities might be like. Also, in designing this system, note how I have somewhat odd key words for each of these small tables. This is intentional because I want to be able to describe and act out these characters (since really, that's what they are) using interesting narrative terms that will remind the players of them in the future. Whether or not they do anything with that information is ultimately up to them, but it provides a further branching point for exploration in a way that I'm sure nobody else really cares about. That said, because I care, then I went through the trouble of designing this rather simple system. Next up I'll tee up some design notes about the "killed by" random delver system.
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Dec 6, 2020 02:23
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There is likely to be some continued expounding on stuff I've been faffing about with at length (the so called stout timber and nails, as others have said) but I'd also like to think that there might be questions and other discussion topics related to megadesigning in the megadungeon space or otherwise. I'm not a good megadungeon historian by any means but the stuff Halloween Jack posted is interesting from Gygax's "Appendix N". I noticed that a lot of smaller systems recently have been putting their ludographies at the very front instead to help give a better idea of the tone and aesthetic that the game is shooting for, and I think that is something pretty useful all things told. I don't know that I necessarily have a full ludography since it's "everything" but I think the primary drivers are from second or third order iterations of a lot of the things that were cited as references for Appendix N. In case anybody is interested some enterprising and helpful people have compiled more deeper reads into Appendix N. Goodreads has it in brief: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/91186.Gary_Gygax_s_Appendix_N_
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Dec 6, 2020 05:19
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I'm not sure who has played Dragon's Crown, but in that game, you find the bones of dead adventurers while you're out doing the needful and can either revive them to have them as AI buddies when you're back out in the field, or you can bury them for a low chance at getting some kind of reward. I went through probably an hour and a half of tape talking to myself while in outer space about death mechanics, but ultimately, I felt like it would be interesting to encounter dead delvers in the Megastrata, but also have something meaningful behind it which might yield more development. Even though this is only like 1/4th a page it still gives some simple but odd prompts to inspire additional creation. I don't know when I would roll for random dead body finding, but it could possibly be part of the scrounging step or as generic loot during play. The first and second charts provide some combinations which when stitched together may create and then clue in players to a situation that they were either suspicious of or previously unaware of, since if something was around to kill another delver, then surely that thing will be around for a bit longer. The last table just determines what kinds of incentives players would have. They could get a nice material reward of some kind for bringing the bones back to town - I don't think the burying aspect makes much sense in this setting for the point the players are in the game right now, but in the future they may encounter adventurers that have no way of being resurrected and that might raise a new round of questioning and dynamic plot lines. The chances of there being something that aren't outright a benefit may discourage players, so I might curate this in a very specific way so as to encourage the system, and the chances are 50/50 that they'll get a "good" versus a "not good" result, but not necessarily bad. Keeping in mind that these are prompts, they can be open to interpretation. Perhaps a delver that died as a result of their party in an embarrassing way brings conflict, but that could lead to further payoff in the future, or maybe they're running some kind of racket that now involves the players, which is a classic PC-NPC interaction. The players don't really have anybody they know aside from odd monsters they've met in the Megastrata. It's something that will likely require more in depth treatment though since the idea itself is pretty simple, but the implications can be extended out in interesting ways. For example, using the key words that popped into my head while designing the tables implies that these are the most six common causes of death in the Megastrata for delvers, and the circumstances around those deaths are such as well. How do delvers treat dying, if they know they will eventually get a free ride back to town eventually with practically zero penalty? Do people establish formal agreements and leave them on their body somewhere to promise a bounty if they're brought back to town earlier than when a rescue crew would go find them? How often should these encounters take place? I think that in general terms, having one new social interaction take place after an expedition has concluded is more than enough to suggest there are enough delvers out there that things do happen and they need to be abandoned to their fates on a regular basis. How much more work would this make for me? Maybe I can use the automatons as a template and then create different kinds of personalities from there as well.
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Dec 8, 2020 04:51
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aldantefax posted:I'm not sure who has played Dragon's Crown, but in that game, you find the bones of dead adventurers while you're out doing the needful and can either revive them to have them as AI buddies when you're back out in the field, or you can bury them for a low chance at getting some kind of reward. Eye of the Beholder 1 and 2 (and maybe 3?) have this, and it definitely contributes to the sense that those dungeons are lethal yet people have gone into them before you.
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Dec 8, 2020 05:29
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This thread is fascinating, thanks for writing down your thoughts. I have some questions but I want to re-read a bit more (was skimming this in bed at 1 AM)
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Dec 8, 2020 18:21
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Eye of the Beholder 1 and 2 (and maybe 3?) have this, and it definitely contributes to the sense that those dungeons are lethal yet people have gone into them before you. I could never get into a Dungeon Master series game - I remember actually trying to play Eye of the Beholder 1 on SNES and I just could not figure it out since it was a rental with no instruction manual or anything. It had just a little too much unexplained interactivity that my young brain could not parse, but I also had Wizardry V during that era, and I totally got that! Fellis posted:This thread is fascinating, thanks for writing down your thoughts. I have some questions but I want to re-read a bit more (was skimming this in bed at 1 AM) Cool, ask away. I have some stuff regarding FUDGE dice coming up in a bit but it is a bit more jumbled and just kind of brainstorming about how to implement them to the Megastrata project, but there are multiple parts to it, so after I've had coffee or what not I will maybe post up those written notes and see about that. Also to come: cooking, flavors/tasting, and combat formations!
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Dec 8, 2020 19:28
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1.) So I'm pretty unfamiliar with GURPS aside from the basics, how are you dealing with mapping/floor generation if you are having floors shift around every few dungeon periods? Are you just using a randomizer to generate a floorplan and then populating it or are you abstracting it a bit? I thought GURPS was a bit more tactical of a system. 2.) Generally, how would you approach using the mystery system in another game system? (which I adore, great idea and I'll have to read your cited sources for it). Like say you have a generic XP system, would you have them donate XP towards unlocking stuff? Again, sort of unfamiliar with GURPS, but iirc ~10 points is a significant ability 3.) If you were running a solo group, would you adjust the mystery values downward or give other ways to convert resources into mystery points? (say money, and maybe it doesnt get refunded at the end) I'm not looking for ~an answer~ just curious how you'd approach that 4.) How much interaction between the multiple groups running your megadungeon is there? Both OOC/IC interactions. Is everyone on the same discord and chat or is it strictly in-game?
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Dec 9, 2020 19:40
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this reminds me heavily of my idea for a game set on a train made of a shuffled stack of index cards where even i don't know what's behind the next door
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Dec 9, 2020 20:40
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Simple questions to ask with long-ish form answers.Fellis posted:1.) So I'm pretty unfamiliar with GURPS aside from the basics, how are you dealing with mapping/floor generation if you are having floors shift around every few dungeon periods? Are you just using a randomizer to generate a floorplan and then populating it or are you abstracting it a bit? I thought GURPS was a bit more tactical of a system. GURPS is plenty tactical but it does not mean that everything must be on the tactical map. I have a post in progress which I'll bump to next on the list but the gist of it has to do with discrete phases of play. "Exploration" phase is where the players are moving "encounter zone by encounter zone" - these are semi to fully abstract constructs similar to ICRPG (great ideas from Hank btw) or may involve a map without a grid to represent what players can expect. Each zone represents some kind of challenge or transition and links to other zones which may get players to where they want to go. Others may be to completely separate areas or new floors of the Megastrata entirely. Example of the gameplay loop diagram which I need to clean up for readability:  There are a few video games which represent this in a somewhat tongue in cheek fashion. Riviera: the Promised Land for the Gameboy Advance, later the DS and PSP (it may have enjoyed other remakes, but worth a look) had different routes and the locations were very compact "Here is a thing to deal with, it may be combat, might not be, but do something about it". The way that players may choose to interpret these locations can be your traditional mapper's delight where they will start scribbling notes, or it could just be moving from one picture to another and then using theater of the mind. This is generally quite fluid and depends on the group. Actual combat (should it happen, and it often does) involves turning on the hex grid and placing terrain and drawing out the general framework of a place. Things are kept semi-vague except for using height levels and wooden blocks as shapes in Tabletop Simulator, or using stitched together maps that I take from 2 minute Tabletop for Roll20. Floor generation has mostly to do with (secrets). But, in general terms you could pick three to five pieces of evocative imagery and then use those to qualify your encounter zones. Budget 30 to 60 minutes for a single encounter and if there is combat, budget 60 to 120 minutes depending on the complexity. I'll throw this into the stack of preparation related stuff to talk about in longer form later, but in short: 5 room dungeon and ICRPG are great ways to approach this. edit: I forgot to actually finish the above thought. The actual shifting of zones means you can wholesale replace content by just updating one image instead of rekeying an entire encounter. This would generally mean that not only do you have the flexibility to change things around quickly if things are not going so great, but you can change things quickly if things are going great. There is nothing quite like getting a small bit of inspiration and saying "the ground gives way!" to another encounter in a different context. Example of tactical combat map:  Example of curated encounter zone:  Example of encounter map before getting to tactical combat:  quote:2.) Generally, how would you approach using the mystery system in another game system? (which I adore, great idea and I'll have to read your cited sources for it). Like say you have a generic XP system, would you have them donate XP towards unlocking stuff? Again, sort of unfamiliar with GURPS, but iirc ~10 points is a significant ability I would just wing it but make sure it is tied to a resource that the players have as a form of agency. Agency is the key word here, because if you just give them points and they have no other meaning to them, then they don't need to make a choice on how to spend them and it rapidly falls to the wayside unless you find a way to "force them" into the subsystem, which does not particularly sound fun. If there is any point system and we were using that, then I would provide rewards based on what the system normally hooks into for rewards. Thus, if I was running D&D 5e and there was a Milestone system in play, any time there is a Milestone or progression towards one, I would make it a point to introduce it. One of the games that I'm running for 5e D&D just rips out FATE points and puts it into D&D. The players each get 3 to start and they cannot bank them. They get progression to the next Milestone (and thus, level) when they spend the points. If they spend enough points, then they do heroic awesome stuff, and they also directly control the level-up process. This was another experiment that I used before I rolled out Mysteries, and I don't see why you can't combine these ideas even if the normal mode of 5e D&D's rules don't support this at all (since you don't do anything with XP or Milestones in that system). quote:3.) If you were running a solo group, would you adjust the mystery values downward or give other ways to convert resources into mystery points? (say money, and maybe it doesnt get refunded at the end) I'm not looking for ~an answer~ just curious how you'd approach that I would either scale the values, provide other ways to accelerate them, or throw the system out altogether. It is something worth discussing if the system is introduced and the players are not necessarily latching onto it to find out the why. Maybe they don't like it, or they're confused about it, or something similar. However, group negotiation aside, you could easily fine tune the system by using a formulae. Consider that for GURPS the average session completed will have 2 to 4 points awarded, and mission completion will likely yield 5 points at the end of the session. This means that the Mysteries develop at a rate of 0 to 3 points per person per session, so taking a group of 4, if they all signal they are really into a specific Mystery, then they can still achieve a 50-point mystery with small milestones in 4-5 sessions. Not too shabby, and still follow through. Since Mysteries are meant to be some amount of effort to get I would want to make sure that the effort is well rewarded for that group if they are investing worthwhile material resources in it. It might not be a reward they expect, but it will certainly be something to validate their investment. Note that there's no reason this couldn't be an in character system (paying GP to further a plot), but when you do things like consider the economics of a game world then things start to get kind of wonky. I guess players can send me money on Paypal or Venmo if they want to make me develop a Mystery faster, heh heh heh. quote:4.) How much interaction between the multiple groups running your megadungeon is there? Both OOC/IC interactions. Is everyone on the same discord and chat or is it strictly in-game? Enough since both groups use the same Discord set of channels and can see each other. Some people never talk but other people talk very frequently. Some are in the middle. There is intentionally no divide between in game and out of game chatter, but there is a free chat in character room if people want to roleplay being at the tavern. I don't restrict when players can communicate with one another. Since this means some players might be around when another session is happening, this actually allows them to help look up rules, make pointers or give advice, or be cheerleaders / rabble rousers. I think this is totally fine since I am taking the line where all player engagement of almost any kind is better than a disengaged player base. Since we use Discord for everything and some players are in multiple games I use roles and categories to distinguish who is who. All players for almost all of my games are in this Discord server as well. Channel list to give you an idea of how this is:  During gameplay of course it is whoever is chatting wherever, but all dice rolls should be done in the specific session. We do have a dice roller in the server for in between session things and downtimey stuff. Deviant posted:this reminds me heavily of my idea for a game set on a train made of a shuffled stack of index cards where even i don't know what's behind the next door One of these days I hope that someone actually does get proper translation rights and assets to bring Meikyuu Kingdom over to the English-speaking world, since there is a sourcebook where you have a mini-kingdom in the Dungeon Hazard that is actually just a kingdom on a train, and not like a weirdly sized one either, just like a normal train with a couple of rail cars and is in motion on some kind of weird dungeon hell rail. There are many board games that use a randomizer of some kind to provide a co-operative "players vs. board game" experience. I haven't seen one yet that has been able to accurately reproduce the very silly madness that Monster Hunter has wrecked upon people, but there are many out there. aldantefax fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Dec 12, 2020 |
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Dec 10, 2020 02:50
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Okay, so let's talk about accessibility and onboarding since there was a slight amount of interest in it. While the intended design audience for the Megastrata project is myself, the secondary audience is the players who tag along. I say secondary because unless I'm designing these systems in a way that I find fun, then I will have nothing to present to the players, ergo start making the euphemistic jerkoff motions. That part is maybe another discussion though. When designing a megadungeon to present to players, the questions are then as follows: - What will the players spend their time on based on design? - How will the players make progress? - What mechanisms are part of the core gameplay loops being presented? In video games this usually one of the first things developed, and is particularly useful if you're designing a game for a jam or just getting started. I personally don't find it particularly fun to have things shoehorned into a game just for the sake of padding like achievement hunting video games and collectathons unless those subsystems reinforce the gameplay loop - as an example, I like Monster Hunter Freedom Unite and its collection mechanics, but I don't like Super Mario Galaxy or similar games for its collection mechanics. Why is that? Both games require collection and they reinforce the gameplay as a target, so clearly I should like both of those things, right? Not to be misunderstood here (a popular past-time in a hobby where strict interpretations of the written word are by and large how people start fights about esoteric matters), but they certainly are not the same, because of three things: - The number of people involved in a gameplay loop - important detail that I'll return to in a moment - The core gameplay loop that is being reinforced - The validation and reward for completing the gameplay loop To put things into perspective, Monster Hunter allows you to execute on its crafting and gathering systems in service of the very compact core mechanic of "get equipment to slay big monsters, with your chums". Super Mario Galaxy uses its core gameplay loop to unlock more of the gameplay to continue looping on (here is bee mario, here is a new jumping interaction, and so on). It does not provide a vehicle for enjoying these mechanics with other people unless you are driven to broadcast the discovery process to an audience, which is fun, but not what I want out of a game. In the context of a pen and paper game, the systems must encourage people to interact with the game world and each other. If you only focus systems on personal advancement, then you get phenomena like people who post character optimization builds online as proof that they have the best analytical brain for rules interpretations, and someone can then take that and put it into a game without uttering a single word to another person about their character, or even working with the rest of the group. In other words, there is a critical flaw where the system of "cooperation with the table" does not take place there, and many rule sets fall short because they avoid character interaction details entirely from a mechanics perspective, or they don't lean in hard enough. Very rarely do systems lean into cooperative mechanics so hard that it gets narratively weird like in Dramasystem by Robin D Laws, but in general, this is a thing that just causes a separation of player from the rest of the group. To take the above paragraph aside for a moment, I like to have character creation take place as a group rather than in a vacuum, at least for a game like the Megastrata project. Cooperation is so key in the way the systems and aesthetic are presented that "going solo", while accounted for, is something that no player wants to actively pursue quite just yet, and going solo full time is something that likely has not crossed the minds of any of the 8 to 11 players in the group. So, onto the accessibility and onboarding discussion. When attempting to understand what I want to present to players, I decided to map this out like you would see in an old school instruction manual for a video game (remember those?) - this is something that some tabletop RPGs do, but not many. The world's most popular so-and-so does not describe the full gameplay loop in an easy to digest way, nor does GURPS. As someone who is consuming a new ruleset or game on how to play it, I want to be informed, ideally in one page, what the players should be doing at a high level. It need not tell me the exact details of how the game are played, but it should give me a reference map of how the game is expected to be played. Strong statement time: if you cannot pitch your game idea to yourself in a single page, then you likely need to go back and redo your idea or pitch. Let's take a look at how I've broken down the expected gameplay flow for the Megastrata Project, and following that, discuss in greater detail what drives me to demonstrate this in long form. A Gameplay Loop Generally speaking, this should be a pretty straightforward explanation of how the game works on a session to session basis. This is what I would consider the fundamental aspects of a megadungeon gameplay loop to be as well, but some of the things clearly can be changed around or struck out if you're using this for a different megadungeon. Play is divided into two phases: Town, and Megastrata phases. In each phase (megaphase??) the actions that are taken are pretty clear cut. - R&R: Rest and Recover. Players get a full heal whenever they are in town. This may trigger events and time passing, which is usually one week outside of the Megastrata, but is abstracted to a unit of time known as the "Dungeon Period". See Valkyrie Profile from tri-Soft for a further examination of how this type of system works. - Quests: Self-explanatory, but quests can be randomly generated at a rate of 1 per 3 Dungeon Periods per player to the "Quest Board". Quests will also eventually expire between 1 to 6 Dungeon Periods. This may mean that players can make decisions about what they want to do and research quests in greater detail. - Gear: If the players are going to do things like level up and change equipment, this is how they'd do it. Megastrata Phase - Elevator: I wrote at length about the automatons, but the going to the Elevators signals the distinct gateway and transition to the Megastrata. I describe it by having the characters use their Guild badges to go in from Town and cross the boundary into the actual Megabore, where the Elevators are. This is a place to telegraph some dangers ahead or provide some weird events that may not have immediate mechanical or narrative significance, such as the automatons acting in certain ways while the rest of the group is assembling. - Zone entry: After the players are dropped off as close to the zone as possible, they need to make last minute preparations and ensure they have all their dungeon procedures in order. Who's carrying the torches? Party marching order? What about the donkeys? And so on. Breakout box: Procedural Loops In general terms this is where the main gameplay loop happens until it's time to clock out and go home. Delving crews will use their skills and work together to understand and influence the world around them through various types of ways. The world around them, meanwhile, may also change on its own accord, so players can be inside of the procedural loops but get bumped from one thing to another against their will (such as being ambushed or triggering a trap). Thanks to the mess of arrows and boxes it can be a bit tough to decipher, but this means that as players execute procedural loops, they will get loot, and the loop is made clear for players to understand what they need to do. Note that the actual procedural loop can be entered/exited at any point. However, the "investigate/decide/skill" parts of the loop are exclusively player driven. State changes and new info are something that I can provide as a GM. There is no shortage of time when tabletop players of all skill levels do not know what to do, and I feel like having something to remind them of what they can do is useful. They may not think to even ask what they can do, but if they did, almost 100% of answers I would provide to them for assistance fall in the primary gameplay loops on this one page. --- The rest should be pretty straightforward but the main thing here is that if I did not write this out, it would be difficult to concisely articulate what I want players to do in this game. I can point them to the campaign one-pager, sure, or this thread, or I can talk to them directly, but none of those things can be as clear as a diagram. The next steps of this would be to clean it up and to use symbols to accompany each of the notes on the page. Something that I notice is done to great effect in a game like Ryuutama is that the layout in the English release retains video game like iconography that clearly dictates what you're supposed to do. This is also commonly featured in Euro-style boardgames, though the meaning can be lost somewhat in those as they get rapidly more convoluted. Everybody knows what a treasure chest spilling forth with gold and jewels accompanying the word "LOOT" means. Anyway, a single page like this requires more than a trivial amount of effort to make and explain in detail here, but I think it's a fantastic exercise and super important if you're bringing on new players to an existing game. I would like to be able to run the Megastrata Project as an "evergreen game" such that it can be run in many contexts with many different kinds of people who are both highly experienced and people brand new to the concept of these games. Without a common map and language to work with, this task would not only be difficult, it may in fact be impossible. For now I will put this topic to rest by encouraging this design exercise. Also, if anybody knows someone who can interpret this layout into a clean and professional looking sort of thing with some game friendly iconography (custom or otherwise) let me know since I do want to make this look nice and pretty.
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Dec 10, 2020 22:43
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Here's a mockup of the gameplay loop from the above. I used all free open source icons from https://game-icons.net/ just for demonstration purposes. I set a Google Drawing dimensions to 8.5 x 11 inches for the page dimensions. I'm sure I could put this into a slightly more streamlined fashion. e: in case the transparency makes the arrows all weird...  e2: the actual Google Drawing itself: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1IZvN2fatfDWt3GlHfmFkouRY45llEdMiax86hGT9-XQ/edit?usp=sharing aldantefax fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Dec 11, 2020 |
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Dec 11, 2020 22:31
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aldantefax posted:Here's a mockup of the gameplay loop from the above. I used all free open source icons from https://game-icons.net/ just for demonstration purposes. I set a Google Drawing dimensions to 8.5 x 11 inches for the page dimensions. I'm sure I could put this into a slightly more streamlined fashion. That reminds me of the game structure diagram from Blades in the Dark.
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Dec 11, 2020 22:48
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That reminds me of the game structure diagram from Blades in the Dark. More games need this kind of thing for real. That took maybe 15 to 30 minutes to lay out after having a think about it, and I think I'm probably going to do more things like this as well for new games I run even if it's for a well-established system (if it doesn't have one already that I can copy and paste and show to the players).
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Dec 11, 2020 23:01
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aldantefax posted:More games need this kind of thing for real. That took maybe 15 to 30 minutes to lay out after having a think about it, and I think I'm probably going to do more things like this as well for new games I run even if it's for a well-established system (if it doesn't have one already that I can copy and paste and show to the players). Yeah, absolutely. "Where are you, structurally" is a good thing to be able to visualize. Maybe even have a token to lay on the diagram to keep things focused.
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Dec 11, 2020 23:08
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Here's version 2 after some re-positioning and changing around the verbiage a little:
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Dec 12, 2020 01:02
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Is the idea that each of Navigation, Trials, and Combat represent discrete instances of the What should I Do Next loop, or are they supposed to be separate?
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Dec 12, 2020 01:46
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Leperflesh posted:Is the idea that each of Navigation, Trials, and Combat represent discrete instances of the What should I Do Next loop, or are they supposed to be separate? Don't take this as speaking for Aldantefax, but one way you can view it is as an external cycle. Navigation -> Trials -> Navigation (repeat) or Navigation -> Trails -> Combat -> Navigation (repeat) The what should I do next cycle can be applied within Navigation or Trials. Or combat, sort of, although the procedure for combat is usually more specifically detailed. In other words, the Inform Discuss Determine Intention, Stakes Roll (or GM decides that the result is obvious based on Intention, so no roll) Determine Outcome loop is the smallest gameplay loop and is iterated consistently over the course of a game. DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Dec 12, 2020 |
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Dec 12, 2020 02:58
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It is useful to consider them as general categories of your activities that all leverage the procedural loop in the breakout box. More detailed explanation below: --- In the context of GURPS specifically the actual procedural skill usage is documented in DF2, but that loop can change if you're using a different system entirely. For example, if you were running a more rules light system such as PDQ, skills don't actually exist there, so you'd need to figure something else out in its place. The color coding is such to imply that those are the three procedural categories that players can expect to enter into the actual loop into as DalaranJ mentions. Similarly, in GURPS each bracket of skills has to do with one of these three things - diplomacy often does not come into play nor do other social skills because this is a game about dungeon crawling and rather than using social skills to assume your character knows how to roleplay for you, it is instead omitted because a procedural skill related to social interactions is to clue you into what may be useful information (because the player may not know what is true and false - Signal to Noise). This would mean that a player who is a "Holy Warrior" attempting to observe the correct religious rites could attempt to "Use a skill" to know what those rites are. They may or may not be on the mark, as tests of knowledge about various things in the game world are closed rolls and the players do not see the results. It is then they will be presented with new information that they can then use to make judgment calls and decide what comes next. If they are not leveraging skills and thus using their character sheet, they are either doing nothing or freeform role playing. It is actually quite likely they will be in the loop without realizing it by interacting with the group on an expedition. Because GURPS Dungeon Fantasy presents discrete niches they fall into those three categories. You can categorize characters based on what they are good at because they are typically great at two things (Barbarian, Scout are the most useful at navigation and combat), or really fuckin' good at just one thing (Knight, Swashbuckler are combat exemplars), or a generalist in all three. Dungeon Fantasy explicitly points out that it is combat heavy, but also notes that combat should provide no experience points, especially in a megadungeon setting. This is because it's expected that most delver groups will fight often enough that it is not rewarding and rather a consequence of the delve while they try to get at the other juicy bits. Navigation and Trials do not explicitly generate loot or require roleplaying, but those are activities that present experience points. It is my belief for this game specifically that if you are leveraging your character's skills and working together as a group, then roleplaying is taking place without having to say something in character. Note that this is intentionally structured as such and leaves out interaction as a discrete pillar, but in a game that is chiefly based in interpersonal reactions and lots of diplomacy and politics like a Birthright / Game of THrones / Dramasystem type game, I would modify the loop accordingly. Combat might not even factor into that game as a primary circumstance. Or, combat may have different ways of processing, such as in LANCER RPG, where combat narratively is just like any other skill test, but "Mech Combat" has more than half of the core rules dedicated to it. There's a little more to unpack about in and out of character roleplaying metagame, which I will likely bring up for further discussion some time later. Overall response is generally good for the players: 
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Dec 12, 2020 05:28
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A new megadungeon manga started getting scanlated: https://mangadex.org/title/50317/dungeon-sherpa-meikyuu-michisaki-annainin It's about a Dungeon Sherpa! Pretty wholesome so far
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Dec 12, 2020 18:03
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My brain is a bit scrambled right now and I don't want to go unpack the FUDGE dice brainstorm at the moment in detail but I do want to talk about how to create systems for inspiration and discovery since maybe half or more of the systems I do have are centered on that rather than procedural rules. Generally speaking, my brain is full of bullshit. After acknowledging the above statement my options open up a bit when I'm trying to figure out what I want to do. I mentioned in the OP the idea of paralysis from tabula rasa, a blank slate, and not knowing where to go from there. However, especially when I am tired or super busy, I have a short attention span, and as stress and fatigue increases, that attention span will drop considerably. I am able to operate in these constraints to do a short burst of work that I commonly refer to as a "sprint" similar to Agile methodology and also metaphorically. Inside of each of these small bursts of focused energy I can use for whatever the task at hand is, and that can be "create a system" or "use a system to roll up some prompts", in the context of kitchen sink design. While this is in the realm of sound design, Andrew Huang has a fantastic video of creating without specific purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXQHiozYGTE The TL;DW version of the above video is that it is highly useful to create without a specific goal in mind, as long as you record stuff. You may never use any of the creations but that's okay! Generally this folds back into game design stuff since maybe you create a system to create how farts smell and go on a wild tangent and nobody really has a need to know about this system but you made it for yourself and the sake of making it. Maybe you could remix that sometime in the future to "weird dungeon smells" which sounds like something people have come up with, but so what? Just because people have the same ideas as me doesn't mean they interpret and present them the exact same way. Anyway, on the topic of fart tables, here's another one of the more 'out there' ideas where I started putting some notes down regarding creating Megastrata encounters by using a Rubik's cube:  A Rubik's cube is a 3x3 puzzle cube that is randomized and then solvable through some very discrete steps. I learned how to solve one using the two layer method that is the standard way most people solve a cube the first time, but I thought, hang on, here's a random thing but has specific defined steps to solve, which also means I could use this as a randomizer, and then use each configuration based on some specific rules to say what each color represented. Then it would be a matter of figuring out how to get to the next step of solving, and I can then use that for, I dunno, floor threat generation, or something. I didn't really go in super hard on it but it is cool to think about and maybe I can make something out of it in the future, but for now it will likely sit there as an unused idea unless I decide to come back to it for a treatment later. Cubing is fun though and I recommend it if you're looking for a neat spatial puzzle. Then you can always do the puzzle from Hellraiser, which you can go look up if you want (the video of the puzzle solve from the movie does have some body horror to it so I won't link it). They actually make that puzzle as a replica too!
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Dec 12, 2020 22:33
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Fellis posted:A new megadungeon manga started getting scanlated: https://mangadex.org/title/50317/dungeon-sherpa-meikyuu-michisaki-annainin A lot of newer manga series (and by newer I mean within the last 10 years or so) and also light novel series have to do with a combination of reincarnation into a game-like fantasy world with monsters and dungeons and the like but also highly mundane activities inside of that world that don't necessarily correspond to high adventure or dungeon crawling explicitly. For anybody else who is like "the gently caress is the deal with anime and the like" anyway, here is a very incomplete list of stuff that generally has mentions of or is focused primarily around a dungeon lifestyle. I've taken the liberty to bold a couple which actually have had a direct mention in inspiration lists from earlier in this thread: - that slime anime/manga - that spider anime/manga (i don't know that the anime ever actually happened) - danmachi (the one about girlfriends where bell cranel is best boy) - dungeon meshi (the one about cooking gryphon eggs and such) - konosuba (extremely focused on the mundane lifestyle in a parody fantasy world) - rezero (the one with the maids and such) - grimgar (focused on interpersonal relationships in a party) - sword of the berserk (not made in the last 10 years but still relevant as a primary inspiration source for some, features some goofy aspects but in a very serious grimdark way. "oh no, he's so angry, and it's really scary") - goblin slayer (what if the dark souls guy was in a highly graphic and problematic parody/satire of D&D and was a murder hobo ranger while everybody else just wanted to have cool fun times) - tower of god (mentioned elsewhere, originally a manhwa webtoon, might have been based on a ttrpg campaign) - record of lodoss war (OVA + TV) - not strictly about dungeons but has a minimum of one dungeon and one dragon - wizardry (OVA) - surprisingly not that bad but not that good, japan loves the wizardry series way more than SIR-TECH did - BLAME! (technically counts since it got a movie but isn't fantasy, still an important inspiration to call out) - Solo Leveling (a lot of ideas are taken from this but to discuss further is taking place at a later timeframe) - Skeleton Soldier Couldn't Protect the Dungeon (not bad but also not good either, decidedly mediocre but has interesting stuff) - Chaos Dragon - extremely silly - Overlord - the legend of bone daddy and his powerful dungeon generals and fifteen minute buff cycles - Red Storm: special mention because it is a webtoon done by the guy who writes Peerless Dad, which is a fantastic webtoon about a dad that has no peer. Features prominent RPG mechanics and has distinct ties to xianxia comic genres. Haven't actually read it - Made in Abyss - not for everybody but a dark adventure about going deep into a big hole. Sound familiar? - Rokka no Yuusha: super underrated series which more accurately represents the amount of dithering that parties do at a tabletop RPG on a single puzzle than anything else I've seen recently, but may be more than 10 years old already. If it is more than 10 years old, I will gnash my teeth. A lot of the stuff out there blows but they all each have idea nuggets that you could pull out that interact with. Genre fiction is all well and good but I actually don't really watch anime anymore, but I do read plenty of manga/manhwa/manhua/webtoons. I'm sure there's probably entire threads in ADTRW about at least one of these series, and if there isn't a thread that is like "recommend me a dungeon anime" I think it's always good to put in reading a few chapters of stuff that you don't like until you figure out why you don't like it since you can qualify why it is dumb and bad when people ask you if you liked x y or z. Usually I will respond with "eh, it wasn't for me" if it was something I dropped. I don't know of any modern western fiction / comics / etc. that aren't franchise based like the Pathfinder or D&D, MtG comics that are out there which focus more specifically on dungeon delving in a non-parody fashion. I know that there's an entire thing from Magic the Gathering about Zendikar and such and the product lines are starting to complement each other, but I haven't seen anything that is quite as out there as Dungeon Meshi. There are tons more "I'm in a fantasy world now!" things but they don't focus on tabletop RPG-like stuff. I'm sure there are more and I literally just forgot one that I thought was a good candidate to put on that list but you get the idea.
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Dec 13, 2020 05:19
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I have some ideas that are unrelated to the other stuff that have popped into my head again recently with involving music as part of the design process and also perhaps the actual gameplay of a megadungeon. I think that as time goes on there is more of a desire to push for multimedia immersion for games beyond theater of the mind descriptions, images, physical products, and so on. It is more common to have background music for a game to signal that the session is about to begin, reach a dramatic point, or conclude, but what about having that as a core part of gameplay? A bard, as an example, is mechanically pretty simple - they contribute support buffs to the party and debuff enemies through music and performing arts. However, this is really all just hand-waved, or has been in all the groups that I've played in since the 90s. I'm not sure if there has been any incentive beyond mechanical benefits the class provides for them to actually embrace the musical or performance aspect of that. This is of interest to me because people do generally enjoy it when there is background audio to enhance an activity. A long long time ago I created a very simple game that was about selecting songs to use in place of dice rolling for skill task resolution. If you're trying to climb a mountain, find an appropriate song to cue that's related to the task you want to do, or maybe make your own. That was maybe eight or more years ago that I had this idea but I never developed it in great detail, but I think there is some merit to adding specific triggers to encourage people to add more musicality to the game. An experiment I've done with one-shots is to have people select a theme song for their characters by bringing one to the table. At any point during the one-shot, they can trigger it and their character gets some kind of big advantage since it's their distinct chance to take the center stage. Sadly, nobody has ever actually used it, but I still think it's a cool idea. Anyway, aside from doing this, I have thought about also incorporating sound design into the megadungeon design from a music perspective. However, since I'm not a musician and creating new music is rather cost-prohibitive, I've thought about finding existing tracks that have various versions of them to use as a gradual build up to some kind of finale. This ties into some sound design wizardry that takes place in various games - I was watching and listening to some videos about how video games (specifically, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance) incorporates the music design by using multitrack audio by only invoking vocals at certain points (typically at the final phase of a boss fight), but there are other ways of doing this by layering more tracks on top of one another to get a similar type of effect. I'm thinking of how this can be leveraged inside of a game to make the audio portion more of a thing. I have the luxury of having a mixer (Rodecaster Pro) that allows for triggering different sound pads, which I could use to fade in music on the main audio track. Mechanically, it would be neat to be able to trigger this and cause something to happen similar to what was done in those video game type things. Perhaps something like a 13th Age-esque "Escalation Die" can be used in conjunction with the music rising in intensity? I think if I wanted to do something with this in a more meaningful way there ought to be some systems surrounding it that encourage player interactivity or engages with the aesthetics of the game in some way. I also recognize that this is a very niche application because it's super easy to overdo adding music to a tabletop game, so figuring out systems, aesthetic, methodology, and curation of what to add is all somewhat hairy. Still an interesting aside to ponder, perhaps I might have more on this in the future.
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Dec 14, 2020 05:49
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There's this rising trend of module vinyls, where the world and mechanics data is on the record sleeve, and the music is foundational to the setting. Seems to have started with Death Robot Jungle.
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Dec 14, 2020 05:54
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Absurd Alhazred posted:There's this rising trend of module vinyls, where the world and mechanics data is on the record sleeve, and the music is foundational to the setting. Seems to have started with Death Robot Jungle. Do you have sources on other examples aside from this? First I've heard of it, but I know audio tie-ins for games happened pretty early on (I remember the AD&D 2e Glantri box set for Mystara had a CD that came with it).
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Dec 14, 2020 06:11
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aldantefax posted:Do you have sources on other examples aside from this? First I've heard of it, but I know audio tie-ins for games happened pretty early on (I remember the AD&D 2e Glantri box set for Mystara had a CD that came with it). There's this from the developers and publishers. DRJ is setting-agnostic. EF also recently funded Putrescence Regnant for MÖRK BORG on Kickstarter; another KS project that was funded is Ancient Undead Spider Wizard, using some kind of rules lite dungeon crawling system. Full disclosure: I backed the latter two and ordered the first.
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Dec 14, 2020 06:26
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there's a system that uses a death trigger system, where normally youre not in any real danger but if you flag yourself with the death trigger you get additional power (i think in the original system its some extra die in your pool, its been years since i stole it) but in return you're opening your character up to something permanently bad happening to them like death of loved one, limb loss or personal death. lets the players set the stakes on encounters, ties the narrative to the crunch in a fun way. ive adapted the concept into lots of different rule sets (M&M 3E and numenera/cypher system mostly are what i play though) and the idea of typing that flag to an insert song seems really cool. everyone loves it when the hero does something badass in an anime and the OP starts playing!!! im still sad about meikyuu kingdom btw  wish i could play this though! your groups are lucky. i've approached this kind of maximalist design a few times as a GM, one as a full setting construction to be run system agnostic but considered with the vast flexibility of M&M 3E in mind and one as a sort of accompaniment to the outer space setting of Deadlands. It's very fun work, especially when a group gets to see more than just scratching the surface of it.
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Dec 14, 2020 12:21
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Paper Lion posted:there's a system that uses a death trigger system, where normally youre not in any real danger but if you flag yourself with the death trigger you get additional power (i think in the original system its some extra die in your pool, its been years since i stole it) but in return you're opening your character up to something permanently bad happening to them like death of loved one, limb loss or personal death. lets the players set the stakes on encounters, ties the narrative to the crunch in a fun way. ive adapted the concept into lots of different rule sets (M&M 3E and numenera/cypher system mostly are what i play though) and the idea of typing that flag to an insert song seems really cool. everyone loves it when the hero does something badass in an anime and the OP starts playing!!! That sounds like AGON, which got a new revised edition recently, but a little different since the players are the ones to put something on the line, which sounds pretty dope quote:im still sad about meikyuu kingdom btw Someone did do a whole fan translation who has gone on to help with translation efforts for Shinobigami and other fantastic games that got the green light to publish in English, so I'm sure in the deep annals of the internet there is some stuff out there. I think there's worth in exposing the inner workings of design both to players and to other prospective GMs out there. It does feel all a bit mad scientist and crazed artist but once you can start breaking things down into system components and finding out what works the best for them and what doesn't, then I feel like there is worth in sharing those thoughts. Some players or GMs may only stick with one system their entire gaming career, as it were, but the secret is unless they know they're migrating to a different system, as long as the system itself is flexible enough then they don't appear to mind too much unless they're very literal-minded, such that if it exists in an official written text, then there is only one absolute meaning of it, and any other meaning is badwrongfun. At the end of the day it all comes down to what systems work for a given table, regardless of where those things are coming from. I think it would be pretty cut and dry for me if I was exclusively in Forgotten Realms from now until I couldn't pick up a d20 anymore, and only whatever content is published, at that. There is some kind of double standard at work for some people because a lot of the prevailing message has carried through to imply that the good true fun is through using only published content, only published options, and only published methods of defining a character, with no other interpretation for narrative freedom. --- I would say to anybody reading this thread (and it is surprising to me that people are) that breaking free of dogmatic mandates for system design is just as important as designing to earn a living, or designing to cater to your specific player base. I'd argue that it's more important, because if you create something and you're unsure if it's of worth, then let that poo poo go. Not into the garbage bin, but just let it out into the public domain. Let someone else be inspired by weird and odd things that you're not personally satisfied with. If someone else is encouraged to dive into the act of creation and design, or is introduced into this odd hobby that many of us spend many hours philosophizing and shouting at each other about, then it is a good thing.
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Dec 15, 2020 00:03
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I have had a thought pop into my head, such as it is, about representing rules in a very concrete way inside of a game world. This is something that anybody who remembers Final Fantasy Tactics Advance may remember quite fondly. In that video game, there is the concept of combat that is overseen by referees much like you would a soccer match. They would enforce arbitrary combat conditions like, "You can't use magic spells" or "You can't use ranged attacks" even if (or in some cases especially if) it would cause a fight to end faster. These referees were called Judges, and ran around in heavy armor and chocobos and were invincible enforcers of the game systems. People who have played that game also know that they can be manipulated because if they don't perceive an action or cannot get to a place to hand out a penalty, then the rules themselves exist, but have been broken. There may be places where there are no rules - in addition to a whole lot of other consequences, like people who would normally be revived after a fight just...stay dead. If you want to see something rather interesting, go into your first jagd in that game and have your buddy Montblanc not make it out the other side alive. There's actual dialogue (if brief) regarding it, and that game felt way more tense after that, because I didn't save-scum to recover the character. This was a very interesting meta-experience to have in that game (which in and of itself was a game within a game, all very meta-game). However, the idea of "an in-narrative representation of the enforcement of rules" I think is something pretty neat. You can also see this reflected (though maybe I did it subconsciously) by having a clear separation of danger in the Megastrata by having the "Upper" and "Lower" strata. I don't know that all rules or safety guards should be presented in this way since it would get really cumbersome, but I think there is some interesting things here. The most interesting things that players and GMs do are to selectively bend or interpret the rules to allow for emergent gameplay to happen, one might argue, to service the narrative. However, there are also pretty interesting gameplay dynamics for people who have full mastery of the system to create interesting and odd builds, some of which may be highly improbably from a narrative perspective, but are mechanically extremely powerful. Some characters may be extremely powerful on accident - there is an old yarn about how one of the old TGers, the legendary Naar, opened up their rocket scientist brain and made a character in Scion when it was new that accidentally blew the entire system into pieces quite handily. On accident, even! Anyway, I think that there can absolutely be some systems that are similar to how the Judges work in FFTA that can be implemented into any system. For the Megastrata, I might be interested to do this but I think I will use the Mystery subsystem in order to carefully gate this and telegraph it. How would a system like this work? Enforcing rules using narrative vehicles The main thing to understand is, for a lot of game engines like D&D, GURPS, etc. rules are effectively subsystems that fall into one of three categories: - Structural/Essential, which if you rip this out of the system the rest of the engine falls apart or loses its identity ("What if we remove classes/HP/AC/Saving Throws from D&D but only kept the magic system?") - Connectors, where if you removed this it would not necessarily make the game engine fall apart, but it would feel distinctly different ("What if we removed the proficiency bonus from D&D 5e?"). These are systems I feel like can be removed without major consequence, mostly liberally, but that's another topic. - Bells/whistles, which sound exactly like what it sounds like. These serve typically an aesthetic purpose only and can be altered or removed without changing the core engine. ("What if all weapons were made of or shoot laser beams in D&D 4e?") I use D&D in the above examples since even if people might not necessarily like it they are relatable enough. The categorizations though I think are very useful in understanding what it is where change can be induced while avoiding "breaking" a game engine. As an aside, there was a time long ago when I ran Shadowrun 2e or 3e, back in the d6 days. I was quite young at the time and I made a decision for some reason to just let people get all their initiative turns if they had a very high initiative as long as their initiative was still higher than other people. In the game engine, it explicitly states if you get extra actions, they only come after everybody else has had at least one action. You can start to see why in a game where someone playing a street samurai goes "It's Combat Pool time!" and proceeds to unload 30 dice onto the table how important action economy is, so giving them multiple actions ahead of other people was, how you say, extremely loving wack. The above aside is actually useful in understanding how taking a chainsaw to a game engine and making a change that feels right narratively can cause the system to break down quickly. In essence, I was fiddling with a structural system without understanding until much later what horrors I had unleashed, mostly upon myself since I was running the game. When thinking about systems design, then, I'm sure there's a more standardized vocabulary and nomenclature for this, but these three categories should work. Since I've qualified the "game engine" and what "systems" make it into different categories, then we can understand that the things we can insert are specifically systems in the latter two categories that won't jeopardize the functioning of a system. If you wanted to change the core structural systems that make a game engine work, then you likely are on track to make a different game entirely. Thus, using this more specific identification of things, how can we categorize things created and posted to the thread thus far? - Automatons: bells & whistles - Megastrata zone generation: bells & whistles - Mysteries: connectors This also means that some of the things I mentioned earlier in the thread, where the Megastrata Project can be system agnostic, it actually is "game engine agnostic". That explicitly is enabled because it does not depend on the structural game systems which are responsible for making a game engine work, which in this case, is GURPS. This also also means that I can run the Megastrata in all versions of D&D, PDQ, Risus, Mutants and Masterminds, Iron Heroes, Genesys, or literally any other system you can think of, even DramaSystem! I didn't have a good way to think about some of the underpinnings of this but now that I'm rambling it's useful to call it out. Perhaps other people are going "well, no poo poo" and this is all very self-evident, but it wasn't to me. Anyway, moving on: Designing A Connector System for Overriding Other Systems In-Narrative I think at this point you can just say "Take the FFTA Judges system and carbon copy it to the Megastrata Project". This would be fine and require a few things: - An in-world entity that is there for some kind of narrative reason (it is likely someone that has full details only to GMs) - Some kind of randomization from a series of curated tables regarding arbitrary positive or negative constraints to inject into a given encounter (this need not be strictly combat, but may most often be found there) - A penalty that is enforced when specific conditions are met Thus, we could create some kind of thing, we'll just call it a JUDGE for visibility, then create two or three brackets of random tables. - 1, 2: Mechanical constraint. Example: You cannot use "Deceptive Attack". - 3, 4: Mechanical benefit. Example: All enemies on the field cannot use Dodge. - 5: Narrative constraint. You can only use Gesture to communicate with your party. - 6: Narrative benefit. You attract the notice of a Pretender to the encounter. Then, we can bulk out the penalty, maybe with another table and the conditions that "JUDGE must observe a violation in line of sight and can move to a space adjacent to you to penalize you." - 1, 2, 3: Yellow card. You must pay a progressive fine deducted from your guild bank account. Reroll if you already have 6 or more Yellow Cards. - 4, 5: Red card. You are temporarily jailed and cannot make actions for 1 second. If this is your second or more Red Card this session, you are jailed, and roll again. - 6: Black card. Your party is ejected from the Megastrata in 1 second. This might be too mean but at least it's something. However, this system is generally ready to package up and move to another design phase, which is asking the questions to challenge it: "Is this fun for someone? Is this easy to understand? Does this make players want to interact with it more?" In all likelihood unless there is a compelling drive to continue working with this system, then it likely will not hold up because it has no good reward structure, but that could be easily remediated. Then you have a carrot-and-stick type of thing instead of purely a stick. It might also be fun to create larger tables of arbitrary rules to put in, and they would know that the rules are in effect because a JUDGE is on the field. --- Anyway, that was maybe thirty minutes of thinking on the system, so what do you think?
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Dec 16, 2020 09:30
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Judges are cool. I think everyone remembers the "aw drat, i cant use black magic on this encounter!!!!" bit of it but forgets that you would get bonus rewards from the encounters if you didn't get in any trouble. Having a judge reward individual players with something you consider minor to moderate, or the entire party with something you consider moderate to major for everyone collectively avoiding any penalties is good, because with your current yellow card system what this change ends up boiling down to is "can we afford to pay money (or risk turn loss or even ejection!) and give up on the potential for an unknown reward in order to manage this encounter in a way that is safer and more efficient for us?" and that is the sort of push and pull that is very rewarding to players, as the people interacting with the encounter, and with GMs as the ones (hopefully) having fun constructing the encounters. a related aside, it also helps encourage GMs to curate and manually create some encounters rather than entirely relying on random generation for them. random generation is great if you have no specific ideas, but sometimes you DO have an idea or goal with an upcoming session or two so having that structure baked in can help guide a GM to making better, more interesting and more rewarding encounters that help serve whatever story they need to tell with such specific situations. i think the black card is interesting in some sense, but i would probably not have it be a permanent fixture. yellow card on 1-4 and red on 5-6 for normal floors, black card structure as you described on perhaps perilous floors, or floors designed to test adventurers (maybe related to license upgrade trials?) and then judge absence like in the jagds for extremely hosed up situations. Paper Lion fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Dec 16, 2020 |
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Dec 16, 2020 16:50
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I think there's something interesting about having a lingering threat of being ejected from the Megastrata, because I could see these punitive systems going both ways. Almost certainly there needs to be some kind of clear reward that is done in the moment but it should not be something that 'saves' the players, rather, it should be something that is earned and worthwhile to accrue. Maybe I'll think more on this while I'm at the dentist today. A couple of scenarios that I would like to see from a system like this are similar to what FFTA implicitly wants you to do as part of the metaplot as well as in the moment: use these laws to your advantage, and manipulate the game to only receive the benefits instead of the drawbacks. Being ejected in 1 second from the Megastrata actually would be the fastest way to leave, since to warp out in an emergency, you must take 3 or 10 seconds under normal circumstances. This would make it such that players are encouraged to bend or break rules in the event of an emergency to get out of a situation faster. This system could also be used to increase player agency in other aspects too. Since there isn't a specific time other than "during an encounter", this means JUDGE could impose rules that impact the preparation or post-encounter setup, effectively importing SITREPs from LANCER, or achievement hunting style challenges where the rewards themselves are sizeable but actually require some more in depth planning and tactics. I think that springing this system on a player would necesitate they have more full understanding and control over the system they're playing in, since if they're not using the options available because of too many choices and other extenuating factors, then almost certainly adding another system on top of that will cause more decision paralysis. There's an interesting dynamic here though since if you have a "GM Agent" in the world that can directly provide a representation of some of these rules that isn't omnipotent and infallible, this then implies that other systems like structural ones can be influenced as well, but it would have grave consequences if tampered with. However, the option could always be there for players to mess around with them and reap what they sow, as it were. Heh heh heh.
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Dec 16, 2020 18:27
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Currently also designing a megadungeon, inspired by Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and other roguelikes, centered around puzzle-like combat and combat-like puzzles in 5e D&D. Each floor is 8 regular rooms and 1 boss room, and the party levels up when they move down a floor. There are 1-3 short rests per floor (depending on certain objective completions) and 1 long rest between floors, during which the party can also access the shop to sell stuff, or buy from a predetermined list. Some highlights of how it's meant to work (Requires knowledge of 5e): Burst When the party first enters an encounter, before initiative is rolled, the Burst occurs. During a Burst each member of the party may perform any two of the following actions (duplicates allowed):
This is meant to replace passive perception in most cases, and terrible cases of "we roll to do everything, what do we find?" by making such preparing actions both limited and an opportunity cost. Death mechanics A player who dies loses one attunement slot and one random attuned magic item. Lost attunement slots are restored on a long rest.
Challenge rules The eight non-boss encounters the party faces? They sum to eight medium encounters. It might actually be four easy and four hard encounters, or any combination between, but that's the idea. Chances are the party can handle more than that, though! So any room has an opportunity, before entering it, to face an optional challenge mode.
That's the core of it. There's a few more rules like players worshipping homebrewed gods for extra abilities similar to a subclass, potion belt for up to one bonus action potion per encounter, and a trash bag of holding that you can't take anything out of or use during encounters, but which can hold an infinite amount of loot for sale only. This is meant to be a more focused and minimalist of a design. A minimegadungeon, if you will. Edit: Wording note everywhere I wrote "room" you should read "encounter". Too lazy to redo wording post. Emmideer fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Dec 19, 2020 |
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Dec 19, 2020 08:30
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I like the structure of the Burst and Death mechanics. I do wonder how this would work in other systems as well like other versions of D&D (I'm thinking of 4e here specifically). It also reminds me of the D&D Shadows Over Mystara arcade game (and Tower of Doom but that game wasn't nearly as good) and in-between level "shop mechanics" were featured quite prominently, even going so far as to enable access to hidden areas based on point and click stuff in the shop! I do agree regarding being taken out of a game not being particularly fun. I think this is probably a thing that is intrinsic to tactical turn based systems where if a player is hit with a stun or other disable, it is basically like being dead for a turn, so it isn't particularly fun especially if they need to wait until their next turn to "have fun" again. I'm grappling with that with LANCER RPG as well. Every megadungeon interpretation I think is going to be necessarily different based on the tastes of its designer and whoever is running it, which is also why I probably think something like 5e's Dead in Thay or Dungeon of the Mad Mage can be useful as ingredients but are rather meh for presenting to a specific table or group of tables. I really like the Burst mechanics to commoditize how many rolls can be made. There are some smaller RPG systems that I thought do these kinds of things very well - the Pool, for example, has a finite amount of dice you can use so a character will eventually run out of juice and have to dig into their eponymous but limited resource. One of the other legendary TG posters, Twobirds, I believe, had run a game of the Pool, "The Fall of White City". There are a lot of concessions that are made to make player characters highly survivable while still preserving the feeling of danger or self-inflicted consequences get the most mileage, so the Challenge rules are also neat too. In the very early days of D&D 4e when I ran Keep on the Shadowfell I added a similar kind of mechanic which was really fun, but the module sucked since that was part of the era where nobody knew what they were doing design-wise with 4e's math before it was "fixed". I'm interested in hearing more about your inspirations and design process of these systems too! It's clear that there has been a great deal of thought put into each segment in order to get a very specific kind of game feel.
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Dec 19, 2020 21:29
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Since I'm returning back to active duty on my job, I think it might be good to talk about building sustainable systems as well to continue development. There's a couple of good small books out there about preparation from the GM perspective in running a campaign that I recommend: - Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep - Odyssey: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management These are just good in general for GMs similar to Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering and Return of the Lazy Dungeonmaster, but through these books it comes down to "how much energy do you have to spend on your creative pursuits"; and, "taking advantage of when you have peaks of energy". When thinking about building a system for a megadungeon, I like to think about how much effort it will be to run the system itself, either integrated with other systems or by itself. There's a lot of interaction that goes on and there's probably a finite level of depth that can be reasonably be executed without forgetting something. GURPS has a lot of simple systems that stack on top of each other but they have lots of connections that spider off into different things that can make it very easy to lose track of what should be happening and when. Other systems have the opposite problem where they have complex systems that are only in their own segment but are too heavy for people to follow, causing misinterpretations. A sustainable system, then, is something that has a certain level of complexity which limits how much interaction it should have with other systems. Running the system itself has a certain level of energy cost, so if it was to be sustainable, that energy needs to be managed by the GM and also go into the system design. This keeps a system easy to understand and informative as to when it should be used. PbtA games are very good about these kinds of systems, as the majority of them are explicitly hidden behind reaction key phrases that are triggers. Assuming all the systems themselves are enjoyable, the general outcome is that you're going to be at a net positive energy wise after running the system with enough in reserve that you can go do other things during the day. Being able to compartmentalize and manage these systems then becomes pretty important if you're doing design interpretation. So, if a system should be easy to understand and not demand a large amount of energy to run, does it mean that other systems that don't follow these guidelines are not sustainable? No, but it does mean you're going to spend a lot more time and effort in executing on them, though. Consider tactical combat versus abstract combat as an example. Tactical combat is a large selling point, especially for GURPS, when considering Dungeon Fantasy and megadungeons. Thus, it is acceptable because combat is one of the core interactions that take place during expeditions that you'll end up in a situation where all the meat is. Earlier in this thread there was talk about not running systems that aren't fun - I'd re-interpret that as say "takes a lot of energy to run this specific component of the system when I'd rather be doing something else". Perhaps a system would be too complex or too abstract, which is how you get arguments around grappling rules in a large variety of systems (btw if anybody is running GURPS with all the technical grappling rules let me know, I'd love to see it in action). I guess if I was going to make sure a system itself was sustainable then you can make some meta-categorization of new systems you're designing: - Simplicity/complexity slider (How difficult is this system to explain?) - Physical/emotional/mental energy to use (I doubt that it would have a physical energy cost most of the time, but maybe if you are playing Dread, a game where using a Jenga tower was a core system mechanic, that might be something to consider) - Incoming/outgoing links (does this system take input or provide output to other systems? How many?) I don't know if there ought to be any other traits for a system that need to be in this categorization, but if you combine this with the other categorization proposed earlier, you could start seeing the underlying glue between how systems link to one another. I would even go so far as to use the above values to create a simplified number, so (simplicity * links) = energy cost, and if you're budgeting how much energy you have for a given session with players or a design session where you're preparing for a game, then it is useful to recognize what systems should be interacting with each other. This is more of a ramble than usual but I think there may be some deeper thought into this when figuring out what this might mean when someone is creating their own megadungeon and personalizing it to their tastes. Some people may crave high complexity self contained systems like loot tables (hell yeah, Encyclopaedia Magicka!!!) or damage tables (hell yeah, Rolemaster!!!), or maybe they like lots of small purpose built systems to handle one thing with a lot of emotional intensity (Dogs in the Vineyard escalation ladder?). I think if you're going for a megadungeon, you probably are focusing on 'discovery' systems and 'combat' systems, so those are the systems that get more complexity compared to other things. Similarly, monster or encounter design may have tools created to make things more approachable, like an experience budget based on some kind of abstracted challenge rating system. Maybe that's something to continue pulling on and finding more out with.
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Dec 21, 2020 22:12
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Interesting topic on the subject of megadungeons and encounter design in general: Traps & Other Environmental Hazards I think these can make for really interesting encounter and level design, but they're really easy to do wrong. In 5e, the system for my megadungeon, traps are done -really- wrong. It's a tactical system wherein out of nowhere, in the middle of a player's turn, they can get screwed out of their strategy if they didn't spot a trap. This feels bad for the player and gives them no room to react. Some have attempted to grapple with the problem, such as the The Angry GM with his "Click!" rule wherein players are given an opportunity when the "click!" happens (e.g. you step on a pressure plate) to describe what they're doing and that can give advantage or disadvantage. I think this is thinking in the right direction, but doesn't go far enough. Turns for a player in a tactical battle system should be sacred, or at least as sacred as possible (I'm looking at you, reactions). Otherwise, players can't do what they want and were preparing to do. The mess of things happening at once is for simultaneous resolution systems, not turn based. The solution is simple: You might trigger a trap in the middle of your turn, but a trap can only ever go off at the start or end of a turn. You walk forward and trip the wire. You have no idea what is about to happen, but it's probably going to happen on the end of your turn. Do you go ahead with the attack you were going to make? Do you dodge around? Do you dash out of the way? The actions a player has to consider have expanded in a positive way, rather a negative one. They can do exactly what they want, but with unknown consequences, or they can look to environmental clues to try and mitigate the consequences. The end is result is traps which, even undetected, lend themselves to interesting battlefield configurations, players paying attention, and psychological warfare. That feels much better than traps which screw a player out of what they were trying to do or, worse, simply do a burst of damage and nothing else. Now there's proper opportunity cost and tactical thinking baked right in, and it no longer feels as punishing to roll badly against a trap - it's your fault if you stood in place like a fool.
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Dec 21, 2020 23:53
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aldantefax posted:Since I'm returning back to active duty on my job, I think it might be good to talk about building sustainable systems as well to continue development. There's a couple of good small books out there about preparation from the GM perspective in running a campaign that I recommend: FYI, there's a sale on these two along with Focal Point: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Running Extraordinary Sessions. When I followed that to DTRPG I found that there's an even bigger bundle with more of their stuff. That's for digital versions - their website says something about them working on new physical fulfillment options, but I can't seem to find that yet.
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Dec 22, 2020 00:33
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Absurd Alhazred posted:FYI, there's a sale on these two along with Focal Point: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Running Extraordinary Sessions. When I followed that to DTRPG I found that there's an even bigger bundle with more of their stuff. Thanks, might pick these up.
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Dec 22, 2020 00:42
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I'm reminded that I own but haven't read Focal Point. All those other books in the DTRPG bundle are pretty good. This week I might clean up and write in detail the Formations system that I was really excited about from when I did my retreat to outer space. I feel reasonably stoked about this one so I will likely have many words to share regarding it.
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Dec 22, 2020 06:24
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aldantefax posted:I'm interested in hearing more about your inspirations and design process of these systems too! It's clear that there has been a great deal of thought put into each segment in order to get a very specific kind of game feel. So this system actually evolved quite rapidly with a combination of thoughts and feedback. It started with two core ideas: The Burst mechanic, and the idea I wanted to make a roguelike in 5e with a procedurally generated layout of 20 layers deep, 1 level each. Almost immediately into design I noticed the procedural design concept was out - balance to make something challenging yet fair and fun was too difficult with randomly rolled and connected rooms. Because that's what I was really after in terms of the roguelike feel, where system mastery and clever/cautious thinking is rewarded. 5e is actually a great system for that! With some tweaks. The death mechanics came out because while dying wasn't a big deal in a normal roguelike - make a new character, try again - it would be untold hours of slapping together a new character. I think "you died, here's a new character" could work okay with 1 player and a lot of pre-generated characters to grind through, but since I was definitely making a dungeon to put an adventure party through, I wanted something that would let a dead player keep playing. Losing attuned magic items and attunement slots was a great way to use the existing mechanics of 5e and, sprinkling just a little on top, use them to put more "weight" into a boss encounter. Psychological weight of the situation is I think something roguelikes, especially older ones, do really well. And when players don't heed that weight, they tend to be punished for it. The challenge mechanic was really just "I want an opportunity for the party to challenge themselves" and again I sprinkled it on top of the existing encounter challenge rating system. It allows me to add detrimental environmental effects or extra monsters to an encounter, and the players get to choose if they want to play with those extra elements or not. You see these sort of "tempting you into an obvious trap" things in roguelikes all the time, delicious loot in a cage-match against monsters way above you. With these mechanics secured, I started building more into the idea of CRPG-like design for additional mechanics and the encounters themselves. Each encounter takes place in its own space the party is teleported to, so the game lacks any sort of exploration aspect outside of exploring within an encounter. What this sacrifices in overall vemisalitude is made up for in letting me treat each encounter like a locked room, and thus fine tune its difficulty before the party ever sees it, ensuring I can confidently claim nothing in the encounter was tailored to harm or help their characters specifically. It would be a useless endeavor even if I wanted to, as the game includes within the god worshipping mechanic to worship the god of character changing for a floor and, at the end of that floor, getting to entirely redesign your character from the ground up for the current level. It's not free, but it's not pricey either. Just a challenge and some time delay. Of course, worshipping a new god will get you the wrath of the old one, something I cribbed directly from DCSS. Overall though I use my potential players as a sounding board for what sounds like content that is overpowered, underpowered, or straight up pointless and finicky. While I can't share with them the encounters I've designed, I've been religiously following the encounter and monster creation rules, so nothing should be broken and, if it is, oh well - you design, you learn, you do better next time. If I ever do finish all twenty levels of this thing, and it playtests well, it'd be nice to publish it. Emmideer fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Dec 22, 2020 |
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Dec 22, 2020 07:46
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