Building an RPG system
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
@PotatoEngineer said in Building an RPG system:
we only had a combat every 2-3 sessions
I only played Rolemaster for about 3-4 sessions.
Yyyyup. I was only in two combats that campaign.
In the first combat, I died. Took two hits: I knocked the first one down to a dull roar by spending a fate point. Then the second hit was a Void E-crit that rolled 00. I spent my last fate point to knock it down... from "utterly annihilated" to "dead and frozen solid." But we had a cleric with resurrection spells, so no worries. Everyone else had died and been brought back at least once in that campaign, so they called it the Official Welcome To The Party.
In the second combat, I didn't even get a turn before we collectively curb-stomped the randomly-spawned enemy.
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Now that I am playing Eon again, I had forgot how much of it is all tables. The only way to do lethal damage is to roll enough damage to trigger extra effects. I am going to show you a fan-made table for quicker lookup of the extra effects.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/490423439258025996/741998952185987112/unknown.png
So we got the three types of wounds, cutting, crushing and penetrating. 7 parts of the body, the full hit area table got 26 areas to pinpoint a more exact location hit. We have the three damage types (T S B). A d10 to grade the severity (lower = more severe) and even more specific hit area. And the colors show how to divide/multiply the raw damage caused by the attack to the damage types. The letters on the right shows other effects of the attacks, I'm not well versed enough in the specific mechanics to know what they mean.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
@Gurth One thing about the dice pool (and other variable-dice) games that's left out is that you're offloading a lot of the complexity into determining how many dice to roll in the first place. And that can be exceedingly complex, because it's situational.
I was comparing systems in which you roll a bunch of dice and add them up, to systems in which you roll a bunch of dice and don’t add them up. I was not comparing them to systems in which you roll one die, or a fixed, small number of dice (like 2D6).
In any case, I think your focus is far too much on wanting the system to be as quick as possible. I don’t particularly care if a system is quick or slow, as long as it’s not cumbersome.
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@PotatoEngineer said in Building an RPG system:
I've played Rolemaster, and it's made of tables. So our character sheets became character binders, with a copy of all the tables our character used. (Because Rolemaster has a crit table for each of... 20? different damage types...)
It has a table for the results of an attack roll for each (basic) type of weapon against 20 Armour Classes. I don’t own any recent editions, but the Arms Law & Claw Law book for the older ones has 30 pages of tables for individual weapons (dagger, falchion, hand axe, composite bow, two-hand sword, and plenty more) that have columns for AC 20 (full plate) through 1 (normal clothing) vs. rows for rolls from 150 down to anywhere between about 10 and 50 (this on an open-ended D100 plus bonuses). The outcome is the number of hit points of damage you cause, plus possibly a letter indicating a critical hit.
The system isn’t actually overly slow or cumbersome, except for the tables: you roll 1D100 and add your bonuses, modifiers, etc. and that immediately tells you the outcome of the attack, without making armour saves, damage rolls, etc. However, adding numbers to a D100 roll isn’t that easy for most people, and if you get a critical hit, you get to make another roll on a critical table. Of course, for the typical RM player, that’s the fun bit they’ve been waiting for.
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@Gurth fundamentally, I value speed and simplicity over fidelity or granularity of results.
I want everybody to be able to take lots of actions. In part because my boredom threshold is really low, but also because I've been in games where each person's "turn" takes 10+ minutes. That means you spend all session doing one thing. One combat, one social encounter, etc. People tune out real fast.
Another factor is that I've often had to run very short sessions. Most of my school club games were timeboxed to 1.5 hours max. Or had to fit in a 30 min lunch period. So I'm very sensitive to wasting table time. It's one of my personal pet peeves.
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@Benjamin-Hall That would certainly explain your focus on fast systems. My background is pretty much the opposite: for about half of the past 20 years, starting halfway through the afternoon and playing into the small hours was not unusual. Even though in the last number of years we’ve been limited to playing three or four hours on an evening (through events outside of my control), high speed resolution is not something I specifically look for in a system.
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@Gurth said in Building an RPG system:
@Benjamin-Hall That would certainly explain your focus on fast systems. My background is pretty much the opposite: for about half of the past 20 years, starting halfway through the afternoon and playing into the small hours was not unusual. Even though in the last number of years we’ve been limited to playing three or four hours on an evening (through events outside of my control), high speed resolution is not something I specifically look for in a system.
Yeah. I admit my biases, but as I've gotten older I've lost all the patience I never had. And attempts at "realism" just drive me batty, since they're always less believable than more abstract systems.
3-4 hours is my max, the point at which I'm done. Especially as a DM--having to be "on" for that long without a serious break and having to deal with a bunch of simultaneous issues just burns me out pretty fast.
I want rules that help me do things I can't already do (and do so quickly and simply so I can focus on the narrative and world and players) and get out of my way when I don't need their help.
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@Benjamin-Hall Whereas I have trouble with overly abstract systems because they’re always far too generic. I prefer a system that doesn’t limit players, but which does have specific rules for common situations that players often want to try — not entirely separate systems AD&D-style, but additional rules that build on the basic ones. I do not like, “Here’s the basic dice rolling mechanic, now go off and do your thing with it!”
For example, some years ago we gave the Doctor Who RPG a try (just playing the intro adventure in the main rulebook), and after the three or so sessions that took us, I just about had it with the system because it was far too abstract for my taste. Pretty much everything depends on the storytelling going on and the GM’s interpretations of that, which is absolutely not my style of play.
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@Gurth I like a balance between abstraction and detail. But prefer unified action resolution mechanics (ie you're generally rolling the same sorts of checks, just with different numbers). "Roll Fight" doesn't do it for me, I need more detailed combat. But an AC/HP abstraction is fine for me.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
prefer unified action resolution mechanics
Same. I don’t want different mechanics for everything, like having to roll high on 1D20 for one type of check but low on percentage dice for another, for example. One or two basic systems that the rest of the rules build on to cater for the situation is far superior, so that trying to hotwire a car uses essentially the same rules as shooting a gun or climbing a wall or fast-talking someone. However, I don’t want a generic “situation is difficult” modifier that applies to all of them: I expect a set of modifiers for tinkering with cars, another for shooting guns, and so on.
(Though there’s the specific exception of AD&D, which, as I’ve said before, I enjoy exactly because of the jumbled mess its rules are.)
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@Gurth said in Building an RPG system:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
prefer unified action resolution mechanics
Same. I don’t want different mechanics for everything, like having to roll high on 1D20 for one type of check but low on percentage dice for another, for example. One or two basic systems that the rest of the rules build on to cater for the situation is far superior, so that trying to hotwire a car uses essentially the same rules as shooting a gun or climbing a wall or fast-talking someone. However, I don’t want a generic “situation is difficult” modifier that applies to all of them: I expect a set of modifiers for tinkering with cars, another for shooting guns, and so on.
In that we basically agree.
(Though there’s the specific exception of AD&D, which, as I’ve said before, I enjoy exactly because of the jumbled mess its rules are.)
It's...doable. But only because it's so open and free, and most of those rules are optional or can be disregarded entirely without too much strain.
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I been working a bit more on this project lately, so should start posting a bit again. Been a bit of back and forth thinking, rethinking, considerations and reconsiderations. And I have also got to the point where I need to start putting a [FINAL] stamp on some parts to move forward. So, as far as the finalized parts go, the base attributes. Which are similar to the D&D six but not quite to give a stable and recognizable starting point to keep building from.
In my first draft I managed to expand it to 8 attributes with 8 sub-attributes to get my plan to feel good. But then I took a step back and figured that 16 was too much so I cut it down to 6 main attributes, with potentially 2 special attributes added. So the six are:
Strength for bashing power, armor-wearing and strength-based abilities.
Dexterity for sneaking, athletics and natural protection.
Endurance for health, stamina and how much you can push yourself or beating your body can sustain.
Intelligence for knowledge-based abilities and magical skill.
Willpower for mental stamina, spellcasting ability, determination and persevering through grimness.
Charisma for the ability to command attention, inspire and/or demoralize others through words and actions.Pretty logical stuff. The differences being changing Constitution to Endurance for a shift in focus, and replacing Wisdom with Willpower as I felt I had more use for a stat based off the power of mind.
A couple special attributes I have been thinking about is having Perception as a sort of senses-governing attribute. A problem in Drakar och Demoner is the fact that the two observation skills ends up being the ones to level first because you use them all the time. So thinking to shift it out to a special attribute, but needs to figure the specific workings of it. So you got Perception as a base stat for Vision, Hearing, Feeling, Smell/Taste, Detect Magic.
The other special attribute being Size. Drakar och Demoner has this as a base attribute, and the correct way to do Size is to do max at character creation because it's cheap, gives a lot of powerful bonuses, and has absolutely no benefits for smaller characters. So you just do max for your race regardless of the class you're playing. Because you can't change it after character creation either. Instead my idea is that you have a Size, it has steps, and larger character gets one set of + and - and smaller gets another set of + and - so size does matter in both directions. And not like DoD always pick max because the bonuses to health pool and movement is so useful even for casters.
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
my idea is that you have a Size, it has steps, and larger character gets one set of + and - and smaller gets another set of + and - so size does matter in both directions.
That’s kind of what I would expect, if you have a stat like that. Smaller is more difficult to hit, perhaps, but bigger gives better reach in combat, for example?
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
So as some may know I am into playing RPGs, and I have been working on my own campaign setting for a while. One of the problems I have is that I also need to invent a new magic system, and perhaps even a full RPG system, for this setting, as my concept of how magic works in the world is incompatible with how magic works in the systems I am most used to. So I am sorta looking at for the basic system using either of, or doing a "mashup" of, Drakar och Demoner and Eon.
The basics of DoD is "inverted" from D&D, with 1 being a critical success and 20 being fumble. That's because success is determined from rolling equal or below your skill in what you roll against. Eon uses the same principle, but with d6 instead of d20, with more d6 meaning more difficult and 3d6 being normal difficulty. Eon also uses infinite rolls, where any 6 is replaced with two new dice rolls.
A problem, however, is magic. Taking DoD as an example, it's very much the linear warrior and quadratic wizard problem, where magic users start out really weak but can end up really strong (if they survive) thanks to magic being VERY expensive to increase in skill. In the latest campaign I tried learning healing magic, as the group lacked a healer, and I got... a little skill in it thanks to surviving. But for any caster starting out it's sinking all your XP into one or two spells to get good at that. But the best way to get XP is to level up the most used basic skills first, like riding or detect danger, so you have a constant way of getting XP. Basically, the first successful roll against a skill for every in-game day will give one XP. And no, you can't just use every skill just for XP, it has to be motivated for the situation.
So I am looking at trying to ease being a caster without making them all overpowered. DoD has the conecpt of MP already, so can use that better methinks. In DoD a spell costs 1MP, and spending more MP will make the spell more powerful (but also harder to cast). So rank 1 healing will heal 1d6 on successful cast, and each rank added will cost 1 more MP, heal 1 extra d6 but add +2 to the roll making it harder.
I am thinking more of making distinct spell ranks, with cheap less efficient spells and expensive powerful spells, making it more of a strategical call if want to be able to cast more small ones or spend it all on a big bang. Also remove the overly harsh penalty for running out of MP that's in DoD: instant death. Just fainting would be more fair methinks...
But yeah, would be interesting to hear if anyone else has some ideas or input on this too.
Mechanical XP might be limiting here, it may be more useful to make mechanical AP and have a mix of story and mechanical XP. d20 vs Nd6 is a matter of linear vs normal distributions and you may want both of those as well.
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I have lately been trying to focus on two things: magic and combat. Magic on a conceptual level, combat on a technical level.
Trying to figure how magic works in the world is important, so there can be rules for what magic can and cannot do. As well as trying to figure how magic works. One skill and can learn any spell? Divide into magic schools? Does spells count as individual skills? I was sitting around thinking about schools too, of which the number has changed over time between 3 and 8. I went through the elements for a bit, and the debate right now is pure elemental magic vs schools that are based off other stuff than just the elements.
The other is the combat. Do I base it on a simple system like DoD or a more advanced system like Eon? I like the Eon system and conceptually it fits some of my design goals, as it is very hard to hit the hard limits of running out of HP. You’re more likely to be incapacitated, faint or die from grievous wounds or pain before hitting the hard limit there. My goal is that the HP value is just a measurement of how much your character can take before it starts negatively effect the actions. And having an unlimited negative scale, just higher and higher chance of death the more in the negative it goes.
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
Do I base it on a simple system like DoD or a more advanced system like Eon?
There's probably a downside to this flirtation with THAC0 that DoD seems to be doing. DnD hitpoints are a universal complaint. Only I understand that they are perfect. I recommend more like Eon, w/e that works out to, sounds better. You may end up needing to trim it which may end up being difficult, depending on how much rolling you want happening.
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
figure how magic works in the world is important
Does it come from everywhere, somewhere, everybody, some people, some one person, everything, some things, some one thing etc.? Considering the sourcing vs the method might help avoid falling into a renaming of the very well worn innate/studied sor/wiz delineation.
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
Trying to figure how magic works in the world is important, so there can be rules for what magic can and cannot do.
This. Avoid D&D-style magic that can do anything and everything, only limited by the spell designer’s imagination.
My goal is that the HP value is just a measurement of how much your character can take before it starts negatively effect the actions. And having an unlimited negative scale, just higher and higher chance of death the more in the negative it goes.
Why give a positive and a negative scale? IMHO, if you want damage to be counted in points, you’re far better off saying that an unwounded character has 0 damage, and then adding to that every time they get hit. The higher the damage gets, the bigger the penalties, and/or the harder it gets to stay alive.
For example, have characters make a save every time they’re hit, with the difficulty based on (or modified by) their current amount of damage. Fail and you go unconscious, fail by too much and you die in $some number of turns?
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@Gribnit THAC0 from my understanding is weird, as AC determines your ability to land a hit on the opponent. Both DoD and Eon doesn't use that system and instead does a simple skill check roll vs weapon skill for hitting and then calculates damage with damage roll - target armor = damage inflicted.
The big difference lies in how this works. DoD has HP combined with HP per body part. Being hit you subtract the damage from total HP as well as the body part's HP. Running out of HP will make you faint, running out of HP in a body part will make it unusable. HP goes into the negative too. Taking double your max HP in damage will kill you. (So with a 12 HP character, reaching -12 is fatal.) For body parts, reaching the double will permanently disable (or remove) that body part from you. Which for some body parts also is fatal obviously.
Eon does away with HP (sorta). It tracks Pain, Trauma and Blood Loss, as well as Bleeding (which increases Blood Loss). If a blow does under 10 damage it's a minor scratch and does 1 blood loss and 1 pain and that's it. And with the total pool being ~50 on average killing someone with minor cuts will take a while. For every 10 damage inflicted an extra effect is added, and those are the lethal ones where you an extra roll for each added effect, which range from "flesh wound" to "instant death" depending on type of weapon and area hit. And depending on the effect and total damage inflicted, those adds differing amounts of pain, trauma, blood loss and bleeding.
Damage is also tiered, and for each tier reached you have to make a saving throw as well as increasing the difficulty of all rolls until healed. Saving throws are aways made against constitution, and increses in difficulty for each tier reached. From 1d6 to 6d6 iirc. Pain, Trauma and Blood Loss are the three you make saving throws against, where pain will cause fainting from the pain and trauma/blood loss is lethal damage and causes death. Reaching the max in either is instant fainting or death, but it is more likely you will fail the roll before hitting those. Bleeding is just a blood loss over time effect.
While I like the Eon system it is also quite complicated and roll-heavy. Roll to hit (#d6), roll damage (#d6), roll where you hit (1d100), roll for extra effects (1d10 x # effects), check tables, apply damages, do saving throws(#d6). So if I base it on that I would look to try and simplify it a bit.
Although the advanced combat rules for DoD also introduces pain, my DM desribed it as "so unwieldy that not even $hardcore_gamer uses it when he's DMing".
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@Gurth said in Building an RPG system:
Why give a positive and a negative scale? IMHO, if you want damage to be counted in points, you’re far better off saying that an unwounded character has 0 damage, and then adding to that every time they get hit. The higher the damage gets, the bigger the penalties, and/or the harder it gets to stay alive.
For example, have characters make a save every time they’re hit, with the difficulty based on (or modified by) their current amount of damage. Fail and you go unconscious, fail by too much and you die in $some number of turns?Yeah. That line of thinking came from me trying to adapt the DoD-style health system which does use negative health as a measurement of closeness to death. The reasoning being that being on positive health would have no penalties, while going into negative would start imposing penalties on actions and carry the risk of faiting or serious wounds.
While an Eon-style system may be better as that starts at 0 (unwounded) and counts upwards with increasing difficulty to stay alive. Based off your constitution you can take more of less punishment (5-10 "HP") before going up a tier in damage and needing to do a new saving throw.
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I also remembered that I have a combat chart for Eon, as I printed and laminated a few for my DM so we could use whiteboard markers for easy marking/erasing instead of ruining the charsheets. Cropping out the damage section:
Blood loss and bleeding, Trauma and Pain with the tiers. Depedning on constitution the rightmost columns are blacked out as appropriate. The dices listed to the left is the increased difficulty on all actions taken while damaged, as well as the number of dice you roll as saving throw for going up a tier. Eon uses unlimited rolls (the Ob before dice notation) meaning any 6 is rerolled with 2 dice, repeat until no 6. Normal difficulty being 3d6, so if I have gone up one tier in Trauma and two in Pain I would roll 6d6 for any skill check (3 base + 1 trauma + 2 pain). Saving throws however only uses the number of dice listed in the column, so upon reaching the fourth tier of trauma damage I would roll 3d6 vs my constitution to not die, not adding any penalties from pain or blood loss. And reaching the max (fully filling out the 8th tier) is instant death (or instant fainting for pain).
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
Trying to figure how magic works in the world is important, so there can be rules for what magic can and cannot do. As well as trying to figure how magic works. One skill and can learn any spell? Divide into magic schools? Does spells count as individual skills? I was sitting around thinking about schools too, of which the number has changed over time between 3 and 8. I went through the elements for a bit, and the debate right now is pure elemental magic vs schools that are based off other stuff than just the elements.
In-world, the schools of magic are really just teaching centres, a bit like an academic discipline at a university. Those are absolutely not fixed, and just because things are split in one wizards' college doesn't mean that they are in another. As such, you can describe the differences any way you want and make sure your players think the difference is important despite it not actually being so. Gotta introduce some of the ridiculousness of real life…
Mechanically, you've got three main classes of spells:
- Cantrips, which almost anyone can do (if they know them) and which are little more than basic magical tools.
- Battle magic, which is typically stuff that you can cast quickly and either deals damage or has some sort of protective effect.
- Major castings, that can have huge effects but which you don't want to have interruptions during casting.
One of the effects of being a higher-level magic user might be that you can cast things faster, so that a spell of major fireball goes from something that needs a day of continuous correct chanting for a neophyte to something that takes a few seconds (consequently much safer) for an archmage. Yes, that means that what was a major casting for one is a battle spell for the other; I can imagine a warlord doing a siege wanting to have some low level casters about to throw spells at the target, which would take a lot of time but the enemy isn't really going anywhere.
One of the major spells being considered in a setting I was involved in was a mass alignment change (and personality rewrite) done to all members of a species in a substantial (multi-country-sized) area where the casters were located on the other side of the continent. We were positing that this was going to be extremely dangerous for what was (the equivalent of) a team of archmages to cast over the space of at the very least several months. And in-setting the idea of casting something of that scale (without being an actual god) is generally held as completely outrageous, and would in fact be a superweapon-class spell.
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@dkf said in Building an RPG system:
One of the major spells being considered in a setting I was involved in was a mass alignment change (and personality rewrite) done to all members of a species in a substantial (multi-country-sized) area where the casters were located on the other side of the continent. We were positing that this was going to be extremely dangerous for what was (the equivalent of) a team of archmages to cast over the space of at the very least several months. And in-setting the idea of casting something of that scale (without being an actual god) is generally held as completely outrageous, and would in fact be a superweapon-class spell.
That's a pretty scary concept, particularly since I don't believe in D&D good/evil alignments.
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@PleegWat said in Building an RPG system:
@dkf said in Building an RPG system:
One of the major spells being considered in a setting I was involved in was a mass alignment change (and personality rewrite) done to all members of a species in a substantial (multi-country-sized) area where the casters were located on the other side of the continent. We were positing that this was going to be extremely dangerous for what was (the equivalent of) a team of archmages to cast over the space of at the very least several months. And in-setting the idea of casting something of that scale (without being an actual god) is generally held as completely outrageous, and would in fact be a superweapon-class spell.
That's a pretty scary concept, particularly since I don't believe in D&D good/evil alignments.
That's an even scarier concept, since I believe in the strong (gauge-field strong) form of D&D alignments, good luck not breaking the universe in like 30-odd ways.
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@Gribnit said in Building an RPG system:
@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
figure how magic works in the world is important
Does it come from everywhere, somewhere, everybody, some people, some one person, everything, some things, some one thing etc.? Considering the sourcing vs the method might help avoid falling into a renaming of the very well worn innate/studied sor/wiz delineation.
There's a forum rule against reimagining the frameworks of RPG magic systems? golly.
So, on probability distributions, the observation that "any increase in combat certainty, amortized, helps the party" looks relevant. This indicates, "the fewer the dice, the more the drama". You may want to consider a few ways to get in the 1-20 range - 1d20 is pure luck, 2d20 is rather more reliable and less explosive, 4d6 (yes, it maxes higher than 20 but thing in this category are also, easier...) for stuff you should pretty much be able to reliably accomplish, and 6d4 for stuff that is really, really easy and commonplace.
Sort of an odd result from this, is that tense, dramatic situations hinge on fewer die rolls than less important stuff, but, eh oh, it keeps the dice moving.
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
easy marking/erasing instead of ruining the charsheets.
Scotch tape (magic tape, whatever) is the RPG player’s friend. Put it over any area on your character sheet that gets written onto and erased a lot (like damage, money, that sort of thing) and you can mark in pencil and erase pretty much indefinitely. Just make sure to use an eraser that won’t smear pencil lead all over the tape.
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Well, I need to continue this thing (which I have). But, parallell to me developing a system, my DMs house rules are evolving into their own system too by him taking bits and pieces from other systems and swapping out parts of DoD '91 with them. So the experience system and weapon skills from Mythrax are the latest, and apparently the combat system from Pendragon (cannot confirm if and how much, as I have never played it). I have noticed this needs some tuning, as stuff has ended up weird.
There is now action points, so can do several things each round of combat. We figured that unlike Mythrax, there was no benefit to saving any action points for defense as defending against attacks is now automatic. So just all out offense with the actions.
There are weapon styles, so one skill for three weapons. Right now this seems to be a package of melee weapon, dagger, ranged weapon and a special ability. The concept could work, but the current iteration does not. Especially not the abilities. The one who lucked out on the character (we got premades, and picked at random) got the heaviest hitting weapon (2H sword) and a special ability of "gets one free attack every round of combat". I also got a 2H weapon but a glaive, with ability "every round of combat, get a free attack on any enemy in melee range that is not focused on you". And the one who got the worst character sheet also got the worst combat ability with spear "get a free attack on the first round of combat if the enemy isn't also wielding a spear". Seems a bit... unbalanced.
The next part are the combat rolls themselves. Both the attacker and defender does a skill check vs weapon style. Like DoD you want to roll equal of below your skill level for success. Whoever wins does damage to the other. Both fail, nobody does damage. Both succeed, whoever has the least difference between skill level and roll wins. So the best is rolling exactly on your skill, which counts as a crit and doubling the damage dies. This also leads to a situation in where both have a decent chance of succeeding, the one with the lower skill has a higher chance of winning as there is a smaller span between 1 and skill level for them. If the attacker wins, full damage roll to the defender. If the defender wins, half damage roll to the attacker.
So, if one has slvl 16 and the other 12 and both roll a 5, the one with 12 will win because 12-5 < 16-5. It just seems very backwards to me.
