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Gray Ghost posted:1. Do people really enjoy rolling-to-hit in D&D and other tactically-oriented games? If yes, do people feel more viscerally excited by rolling a 20-sider and crit’ing vs. using other polyhedrals? There are some people who do and some who don't. Personally, I find that the it depends on the game: I think I prefer having a high but not 100% chance to cause a significant effect. Failing many times rarely feels good, but chipping away at a massive HP pool, even at 100% chance to hit, just gets tedious. At the same time, sometimes the desperation of being on a knife's edge, having to roll the 10% chance to kill the monster and not die can be exciting, such as at the climax of a Call of Cthulhu session. Gray Ghost posted:2. Are there any games that do advancement well while limiting HP or health bloat? I’m trying to figure out how to introduce progressively more challenging enemies without making fights a long slog. Most games that let you unlock fun, new things to do or otherwise feel more powerful without that being dependent on HP? Player-facing health bloat is, if anything, a D&D-ism: most games don't do it. You can make enemies more challenging without making fights a long slog by turning them into games of rocket tag instead. This may not be the kind of game you want to make, but having players build, buff, and prepare to avoid save-or-die attacks while sneaking in their own save-or-die effects against enemies with progressively harder-to-avoid save-or-die effects and better resistances to the players' save-or-die effects is a perfectly valid design space. Gray Ghost posted:3. Have you seen abstracted currency systems in high fantasy games that work really well (i.e. Blades in the Dark’s Coin system?) Not really. I haven't looked for them, but for the most part the systems all break apart in trying to make exchange into a roll that determines whether you can or cannot perform an exchange. It's just alien to the experience of how buying something typically works. Gray Ghost posted:4. Do you/your players find separate resolution mechanics useful for different modes of play? It can be useful. Sometimes it's not. It depends to a large degree on whether the resolution mechanics actually accomplish what I want them to.
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May 15, 2023 18:38
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JMBosch posted:I had an idea that might skirt that line, using abstracted currency while avoiding the "actually, you don't get to trade" feeling. Each PC (or the party) has a Wealth stat. When they want to buy something, if it's a really big/valuable item that is available in the current city, they just subtract 1 or 2 Wealth as appropriate to make the big purchase (useful potions, low-level magic items). But for most other stuff they want to buy, they try to roll under their Wealth stat to see if their assets are big enough to track down what they want to buy without impacting their Wealth. If they succeed, they just get the item. If they fail, the item will cost 1 Wealth if they still want to purchase it. Unless you have 0 Wealth, you're never gonna not be able to buy something unless it's rare and/or quite expensive. If the system avoids the need to buy basic tools and equipment (e.g., don't need to list your tools until you need one, then can just fill an empty inventory slot with it), it might be decent. Though you'd probably have to limit PCs selling stuff to just valuable treasures/magic items. So what you have here is a system where each point of Wealth is, necessarily, worth more than the last. However, everything that affects Wealth always starts at the top, meaning a failed roll to get something cheap makes it cost whatever your current Wealth is, making it expensive. The die size involved will affect the exact ratio of cheap to expensive, but if you want to roll Value+1d6 equal to or under Wealth, a Value 1 item can end up costing you your entire point of Value 6, locking the player out of purchases with a minimum of Wealth 6. Among the weird things this does is encourage always trying to buy the most expensive item first, because smaller purchases can lock you out of the expensive ones. And because you don't know what something costs until you try to buy it, you can't really manage a limited budget. It creates a very specific experience of buying where you have no idea what anything costs, which is at best only narrowly useful: it doesn't represent Wealth in the general sense.
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May 15, 2023 21:24
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