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Have dice, will [game design].

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Posts

  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    I've been on a sci-fi kick today, and your idea @Grunt's Ghosts has given me an idea where you're a malfunctioning robot on a failing space station. You'd jam different parts to yourself and upload skills as you need them, but whenever you do the programming of your artificial intelligence is rewritten little by little, until you can't say for sure if you're you any more.

    Plus, failing a roll to upload your mind into a new body might result in two of you, or the body you intended to be yours gets up on its own with a messed up personality. Likewise the parts you connect to yourself might try to take you over!

    Even worse, you start the game with the understanding you're, say, a maintenance droid, but the other artificial intelligence onboard believe everything from having previously been data-fied humans to this being Robot Hell.

    Endless_Serpents on
  • Fleur de AlysFleur de Alys Biohacker Registered User regular
    Um. Holy shit you guys.

    My FLGS is going to be running an event - a playtest / demo event for the prototype of my card and dice RPG every Saturday for the month of January!

    What's more, apparently several games tested here in this manner have had successful Kickstarter campaigns that the owner has been involved in. He has copies of those games for sale right there in the store and was proud to talk of the tweaks and features he'd suggested that made it into those games.

    I think I struck gold with this place. I'd never even been in there before.

    This is starting to feel extremely real!

    Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
  • Grunt's GhostsGrunt's Ghosts Registered User regular
    I know you are in Mobile, is it Fantatix?

    Also, one day I need to make a trip to Mobile or you need to make a trip up here to Troy, because I want to play it again.

  • Fleur de AlysFleur de Alys Biohacker Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    Gamers N Geeks

    What's Fantatix? Haven't heard of it, and Google isn't giving me any results.

    And yeah that sounds great!

    EDIT: Oh, Fanatix. That gives results, but way over in Enterprise / Dothan.

    Fleur de Alys on
    Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    Thats pretty amazing The Sauce!

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    Interesting blurt of an idea for a setting like Psycho Pass's:

    To give the short summary for people who haven't seen the show it's a cyberpunk dystopia where the Sybil system can read peoples mental state and anyone whose state hits a certain risk level of crime is assigned therapy and then removed from society if it doesn't improve. The show centers on the detectives who chase down people who aren't complying with the system or who have flown off the deep end with the team being split into two parts: Detectives who are in charge of the case and Enforcers: people who have being categorized as latent criminals and who are let out (on a very short leash) to help hunt down criminals, in large part to keep the Detectives from getting emotionally infected by the stressful/violent work and becoming latent criminals themselves.

    So onto the interesting kinda thing I wanna focus on: The group dynamic there allows for some interesting roleplay mechanics. Essentially you could layer the game into three ranks for the amount of control someone has over the setting vs how much they can effect the situation.

    So the GM's job is to play the world honestly and keep the Detectives playing their roles honestly.

    The Detective's job is to moderate the Enforcers and they also have a decently strong stat line that they can't use as often for risk of becoming latent.

    The Enforcers can literally go nuts but are moderated by the Detectives telling them to backdown or threatening to taze them in extreme situations.

    Mechanically I'd represent that through two different mechanics (mechanics mechanics mechanics), one for each of the player types:

    The Detective has his Mental State to care for. Mental State goes down whenever the player acts rashly or against the calm, professional profile the Sybil system expects of them. In game terms this means that the GM can ding a Detective's behaviour whenever they feel they're acting out of character for the role. The mental state also deteriorates when witnessing horrible things or abnormal behaviour. Whether seeing a criminal commit violence or an Enforcer going off the chain. Which is where the push and shove with enforcers comes from. As mental state gets worse and worse the detective might be put into mandated therapy (missing out on downtime actions) or even demoted to enforcer/detained.

    The Enforcer has their Impulses: Triggers that bring out the rash, unstable personalities they possess. Triggers can be relatively benign ('I miss playing my guitar') to problematic for the group ('even thieves deserve death') when exposed to the trigger they have to act on their impulse or tick off a restlessness box. The more restless the enforcer the more distracted they are, manifesting in dice penalties for them until they get some down time or get to act on their impulses. They still get restless even if they act on the Impulse but are reigned in by a detective moderating their behaviour.

    The GMs role in this system is purely to remind Enforcers when their Impulse comes up and to give out mental state points to detectives. The idea would be that the detectives themselves mostly define what the enforcers can and can not do with their dice with in reason and are merely moderated by the GM.

    So yeah, simple system designed to create a push and shove where players grind against eachother and characters spend large amounts of time worrying about their mental state (fitting in with the setting where it's literally a life or death issue).

    Albino Bunny on
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    edited January 2017
    So I posted a bit in the holiday forum about this design I've had knocking around in my head over the past couple of years. The basic idea is an RPG system where your attributes, health, status, and so forth are all cards in a deck (the deck is you). This google doc contains a few versions and notes and brainstorming sessions; I've roughly re-written/updated the most recent one below.

    the a.c.t.i.v.e. system
    Needs to be a backronym, obviously. Currently there are no generic action cards, just the five types of modifiers.

    action - one action a turn; exciting!

    careful - blue
    - modifies to be more quiet, handle complexity
    - can spend to search for a card in deck
    - opposes impulsive and vehement

    tough - white
    - modifies to withstand damage, brace for impacts, be defensive
    - can spend to replace next wound card with a fatigue card
    - opposes vehement and emphatic

    impulsive - green
    - modifies to be quicker, cover distance, add style
    - can spend to take an additional action (once per turn)
    - opposes emphatic and careful

    vehement - red
    - modifies to be more aggressive, offensive
    - can spend to discard fatigue cards from hand
    - opposes careful and tough

    emphatic - black
    - modifies to add power, be forceful
    - can spend to shuffle a wound card back in
    - opposes tough and impulsive

    other stuff
    wound - one wound per point of damage
    - if no modifiers in discard pile, discard one from hand
    - if no modifiers in hand, discard from deck until one is discarded
    - remove a modifier card from the discard pile and replace with wound
    - remains in hand when drawn; faint when hand is full
    status - does effect on card
    fatigue - remains in hand when drawn
    - add a fatigue to discard pile after each time the deck runs out
    equipment - an item that describes what it is/how to use it
    - stored in equipment like packs, pouches, which also describe how much they can hold
    - can be stored in deck as an encumbrance: can't access during an encounter unless drawn, takes up space

    mechanics
    actions: have a type and a difficulty, which determine the requirements for performing them
    - difficulty determines how many modifiers need to be played on the action (and how many additional cards an oppose check can reveal)
    simple actions can be done by just spending an action; walking, opening a door, saying something; difficulty level 0
    basic actions require one modifier; running, undoing a latch, asking a question/communicating something, pick up 50 pounds; difficulty level 1
    standard actions require two modifiers; simple attack, running leap, pick up 100 pounds, convince an uncommitted person; difficulty level 2
    advanced actions could have higher difficulty levels, time (number of turns) requirements, a coordination bonus (reduce difficulty and/or time per player involved), etc.
    - type determines what kind of modifiers can be played on the action (which determine what kind can oppose it)
    - modifiers can increase the skill or the effect of the action (actions need to specify how modifiers affect them)
    -- skill determines how much opposition the action can overcome
    -- effect is how big the action is: distance covered, damage dealt, etc.
    - can be opposed by characters or complications

    more actions
    focus: discard any number of cards, then draw cards equal to the amount discarded plus one; its difficulty is the number of cards discarded. It used to be opposed by action cards revealed in opposition, but we don't have those anymore. Difficulty 0, type c/t/e
    move: moves 2 spaces; difficulty 0, type i/v
    dash: adds 1 space and 1 difficulty for each i mod; gain a free dodge, to which the i mods can be added; base difficulty 1
    charge: adds 1 space and 1 difficulty for each v, and each v can be added to a melee attack if it's the next action; base difficulty 1
    leap: moves 1 space and adds 1 space and 1 difficulty for each i/v/e; base difficulty 2
    leap attack: can add modifiers to a leap that instead get used for an immediate melee attack upon landing; the attack has the increased difficulty (number of modifiers) of the leap added to its difficulty
    sneak: moves 1 space and adds 1 space and 2 difficulty for each c/v; base difficulty 2, difficulty reduced by obstructions, somehow prevents being targeted unless an oppose check succeeds or something
    rest: remove up to 5 fatigue cards from the deck, hand, or discard; difficulty 0, type c/t/e
    attack: attack an enemy within range; opposing can cause the attack to fail if its modifier is reduced to less than 0, or reduce its damage down to 1; difficulty and type depends on specific attack
    stun: an attack where damage removes cards from the deck face down instead; the next time that character would take an action, the removed cards replace random modifiers played or revealed or something like that.

    opposition: any action can be opposed by its target, nearby characters, or complications
    - the target or nearby interfering character reveals cards equal to its base challenge rating plus the difficulty of the action plus the number of complications
    - each revealed modifier that opposes one of the modifiers on the action counts for 1 point of opposition
    - if the total opposition is greater than the skill of the action, the action fails and the opposer takes 1 fatigue
    - if the action involves damage, revealed t mods may reduce it by 1 each, to minimum of 1
    - revealed cards are discarded

    more opposition
    dodge: only succeeds if more i mods are revealed than on the action; i mods count for 1 point of opposition
    block: only available via equipment, maybe? allows cards to be revealed from hand in addition to the total from the deck

    complications: if an action involves going over terrain, shooting into combat, any sort of chaos or confusion, a complication is added to any opposition (or the action gets opposed by the complication); a random modifier is added to oppose the action

    encounters: events that involve the players performing actions while under some kind of time constraints (other characters involved, moving vehicles, temples of doom, etc.)
    - made up of rounds, during which each character takes an action

    NPCs: the goal is to have most monsters/creatures have a card that allows them to function without any player involvement
    - a decklist is provided on the card, along with stats like their challenge rating and whatnot
    - during an encounter, X cards are revealed from the deck; depending on what is revealed, the NPC will take a certain action
    - targets will be selected by who is closest, who has been targeted, who has the most wounds, etc.

    sample equipment
    sword:
    attack:
    difficulty: 2
    range: 1
    skill: +i + 2*v
    dmg: 2 + e (+ 1 two-handed)
    attack (thrown):
    difficulty: 2
    range: 2 + e + v
    skill: +i + 2*v
    dmg: 3 + e - range
    oppose: block

    mace:
    attack:
    difficulty: 2
    range: 1
    skill: + 2*v + e
    dmg: 1 + e (+ 2 two-handed)
    attack (thrown):
    difficulty: 2
    range: 2 + e + v
    skill: + 2*v
    dmg: 2 + e - range
    oppose: block

    dagger:
    attack:
    difficulty: 2
    range: 1
    skill: +c + v + e
    dmg: 1 + c + i
    attack (thrown):
    difficulty: 2
    range: 3 + e + v
    skill: +i + v + e
    dmg: 2 + i + v + e - range

    shield:
    attack: stun
    difficulty: 2
    range: 1
    skill: +v + 2*e
    dmg: 1 + t + e
    oppose: block
    +2 per t, e
    misc.: +1 difficulty to other actions

    bow:
    attack:
    difficulty: 2
    range: 7 + c
    skill: +2c + i + v
    dmg: 2
    action: reload
    difficulty: 0
    skill: +2c + i

    sample characters
    paladin: 0c 4t 1i 2v 3e
    items: shield, mace
    The paladin moves forward and stands there, absorbing hits.

    barbarian: 0c 1t 2i 4v 3e
    items: sword, more sword
    The barbarian likes to take two actions a turn and hit things with both of them.

    rogue: 3c 0t 4i 2v 1e
    items: dagger
    The rogue can position themselves quickly and set up a piercing stab.

    archer: 4c 1t 3i 2v 0e
    items: bow
    The archer spends their time aiming, and prefers to use their speed to reload.

    sample monster
    gobbo: 0c 1t 1i 2v 1e
    challenge: 1
    target: swarm (attacks nearest enemy already attacked this turn or nearest enemy)
    action: reveal 3
    if iww, run
    otherwise, if in range, attack
    otherwise, move towards target
    attack:
    difficulty: 2
    range: 1
    skill: +i + v
    dmg: 2 + e

    anatomy of an encounter
    - at the start of an encounter, everybody draws their starting hand
    - each character takes a turn
    - whenever a deck runs out of cards, immediately add a fatigue card and shuffle the discard pile back in
    This spreadsheet illustrates how an encounter might go. I've only run through it twice, but it seemed to work okay despite getting a bit clunky managing the goblins and whatnot.

    Anyway, this took waaaaaaay longer to write up than I thought; obviously the plan is to continue tweaking it until I'm happy with the basics and then expand it. It's obviously very combat focused at the moment, but I think it could be worked into allowing magic and social "combat" as well.

    Thoughts? Particularly if anything seems extra unclear; I know there are still a bunch of details that need to be nailed down but I feel like there's a lot of potential.

    Oh, right, the colors are temporary for testing purposes because they match Magic's color wheel for "opposite" colors. I've been using basic lands for modifier cards, white cards for fatigue, and red cards for wounds.

    Surfpossum on
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    edited January 2017
    gog damn mobile posting popping up the @ list over the post button

    ignore me pls

    Surfpossum on
  • OptimusZedOptimusZed Registered User regular
    This looks pretty interesting, and similar to something I've been working on.

    Once I'm not 1200 miles from home with a teething baby, I want to sit down and look at what you've got here, @Surfpossum .

    I, too, like accronyms.

    We're reading Rifts. You should too. You know you want to. Now With Ninjas!

    They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    edited January 2017
    Let's try this again. Some really fun ideas here!

    @Zombie Hero
    As someone mentioned, shifting options rapidly get screwy in a multiplayer game; I think stuff like Splendor and Suburbia already result in being unable to plan too far ahead except in broad strokes, so I feel being able to influence what's available is less about setting up purchases for yourself and more about screwing the next person over. Which can work and be great, but it's something that needs to be designed around, I think.
    My personal fancy would be to have it be the Overton Window, and the various stacks of cards are policy proposals that range from economically liberal to conservative (X axis) and libertarian to authoritarian (Y axis), and the "targeting grid" is what's currently considered acceptable in public discourse. Policies that greatly benefit you could shift the window away from other policies you'd want, stuff like that. You could have money and influence as resources, and oh everyone is dozing off.

    @Grunt's Ghosts
    This zombie game seems really neat! It would be interesting to see if you could make it work like a reverse-but-not-really Posthuman (which I haven't played) where players start out cooperative to take down much more powerful "humans," but as they regain their humanity it gets competitive. Unless the intent is to have it be an RPG rather than something played in a single session. I think (tho this probably isn't what you were going for) the latter has a lot of potential to generate humorous scenarios if it has a Dead Rising atmosphere to it with random objects and tasks being mixed and matched.

    edit: oh my gosh, imagine if memories were fragments, so you'd "remember" needing to mow the lawn but also remember seeing a traffic cone, and the result is you need to hit some grass with a traffic cone.

    @Endless_Serpents
    Basically Robo Rally the RPG? Would be interesting to have I/O points that you can attach hardware to, and memory slots that you can fill with subroutines (made up of components like if-then statements, movement, activate I/O slot, etc). So you'd have to try and set things up so that the right subroutines activate the right hardware, and stuff could overwrite your subroutines or fire them off when you don't want them to. Could be really interesting! I think it could work well with a Robo Rally style programming system; it would be easier to have it be stat based with guidelines influencing your actions, but I feel like there's something about the way Robo Rally goes wrong that can only be replicated by "hard coding" your actions.

    @Albino Bunny
    It sounds like you're going for an RPG, but I think there's a lot of potential for a game where players control or are part of the "factions" and can lose pieces/change sides.

    So like, you'd have a system where there are some number of possible actions, and have different consequences for each type of player doing/witnessing them. Psychos get to do whatever they want, Enforcers can do whatever they want but can end up becoming Psychos or stopped by Detectives, Detectives have to be the most careful.

    Psychos would have to be weaker and exploit tensions among the other two, Enforcers fairly powerful so long as they play nice, Detectives most powerful but forced to limit themselves.

    The really cool thing would come from the competing goals: Psychos would be trying to eliminate Detectives, Detectives trying to eliminate Psychos, and, most importantly, Enforcers just want to be alive at the end and don't care who wins.

    If that doesn't sound like what you were going for I might steal it. :razz:

    Surfpossum on
  • Grunt's GhostsGrunt's Ghosts Registered User regular
    With the Zombie game, I'm thinking of using the Zombie Dice I linked earlier. In it, there are three different types of dice, green, yellow, and red.

    The Green dice have 3 success symbols (brains), two keep symbols (footsteps), 1 failure symbol (bang), the yellow has 2 successes, 2 keeps, 2 failures, and the red has 3 failures, 2 keeps, 1 success.

    When the zombie eats a brain, they gain a memory, which has a skill and desire attached to it. The Skill is given to the player as a red dice, at first, which shows that the memory is fuzzy, unfocused. As the player fulfills the desire, they gain the skill as a yellow die for good because they've built new memories for that skill and don't need the old memory anymore. When they get a new memory, they can choose to sacrifice the memory to turn a yellow die to a green die or add another yellow die to the skill if there is already a yellow die. So basically, the whole game is character creation.

    The GM takes control of the action using Distinctions and Complications. When he introduces the scene, the scene gets Distinctions that can hinder or help the player and the NPCs. Then the NPCs are made of Distinctions that are unique to them, like Armored and Armed, Ready for Action, ect. The player can invoke a distinction from the NPC or scene to temporally bring one die up to a different color or add red die to the skill roll and the GM can invoke distinctions to do the reverse after the player has invoke his distinctions. Then the dice are roll and the total success and failures are tallied, with a failure canceling out a success. The Keeps, become a momentum pool, which the player can keep the die and use it later on any skill roll until the end of the scene, but with those, they must roll a success or failure, they can't keep a die that was already kept before.

    Damage is dealt as Complications. Each zombie can take 3 complications before being completely destroyed. The ZM can invoke the player's Complication like the player can invoke distinctions and the player can invoke the complications too if they feel they can take advantage of them somehow.

    At least, that is the basic concept I got going on. I find it funny as I bitched about Monsterhearts making me as the GM just react to the action and then I feel like making this game the same way, but don't want the GM to be running around holding a ton of keep dice since he'd be rolling more than the players, so this feels like it might be better. Now, and this has always been the hard part for me, getting these random thoughts down onto something really intelligence and playable.

    And think of what basic skills the zombies would have before brains...

  • Zombie HeroZombie Hero Registered User regular
    Surfpossum wrote: »
    Let's try this again. Some really fun ideas here!

    @Zombie Hero
    As someone mentioned, shifting options rapidly get screwy in a multiplayer game; I think stuff like Splendor and Suburbia already result in being unable to plan too far ahead except in broad strokes, so I feel being able to influence what's available is less about setting up purchases for yourself and more about screwing the next person over. Which can work and be great, but it's something that needs to be designed around, I think.
    My personal fancy would be to have it be the Overton Window, and the various stacks of cards are policy proposals that range from economically liberal to conservative (X axis) and libertarian to authoritarian (Y axis), and the "targeting grid" is what's currently considered acceptable in public discourse. Policies that greatly benefit you could shift the window away from other policies you'd want, stuff like that. You could have money and influence as resources, and oh everyone is dozing off.
    [/spoiler]

    Actually a neat idea, with the directions signifying something. Thank you for the input. I think i would rather go with schools/elements of magic or something rather than politics though, unless it's like a fictional kingdom. Still kicking around here and i think it may have been a mistake to bring it up so early when the whole thing isn't even to the half-baked idea in concept.

    Steam
    Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
    Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
    3ds: 3282-2248-0453
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    edited January 2017
    Hrm. Re: zombie game
    So my understanding so far is that this is a game that would last for one session. I think I agree with you that the GM wouldn't have all that much to do, and I also think a GM would be out of place if it's a competitive game (I can't tell if it is; does the first zombie to become human win?).

    If I may: instead of having a GM handle what complications and distinctions trigger, perhaps something more democratic could work.

    So a Scene is selected from an available pool, and a number of Distinctions are randomly added to it (objects, weather, etc.)

    A number of generic Humans are added, and then each one gets some number of Distinctions (age, career, equipment, etc.)

    Players get to start with a certain number of bonus and minus tokens.

    During each player's turn, they declare which human they are going to attempt to eat, and then list the Distinctions (up to one per player) that will help them do so, along with explaining why.

    The other players then each get to pick a Distinction and explain why that one will actually hinder that player (these can be new Distinctions or ones the active player mentioned).

    The players then all secretly assign all their bonus and minus tokens to the Distinctions as they see fit. When everyone is done, any Distinction with more bonus tokens adds a die, while any Distinction with more minus tokens removes one.

    Some balancing could probably be done around having players gain and lose tokens after this step, so if someone gets a lot of bonuses one round they end up with a bunch of bonus tokens they have to play on the next person's turn or something.

    For the memories, perhaps a similar voting system could work: one of the Distinctions involved is randomly chosen, and then each player describes how another Distinction connects to it. Then the memory is completed if the player uses that Distinction when they eat another Human (or eat the Human that has that Distinction).

    This is, of course, pure brainstorming. Feel free to ignore it or use pieces of it or whatever; you probably have a rather different vision for the game.

    Re: Zombie Hero
    Heh, yeah, I have a game idea where you control a party in Congress, and your resources are Congresscritters and votes and political capital, but I recognize that this... may not take the boardgaming world by storm. I didn't mean to suggest you should do anything like that, just that it's where my (clearly disturbed) mind went.

    Still, if I helped with an idea, I'm glad!

    Surfpossum on
  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    edited January 2017
    I swear one of these days I'm going to quit my (pretty enjoyable for the record) job and make story games exclusively. I must have a new idea per day that I never get around to.

    @Surfpossum
    I wouldn't have thought of this at all if not for you, but if I was going to make that robot game having a deck of cards would be perfect for switching out abilities and stuff.

    A neat idea for such a game could be unreliable senses. Things like one player having no pain receptors, so they don't notice they've been shot in the back, and only mark lost HP on their sheet when the group rest, to indicate one of the others has seen the blast mark. Or perhaps another can't perceive a certain enemy type because their glitchy programming is telling them they don't exist.

    Perhaps the players would only have full enough senses to survive if they choose to trust each other.

    Disworld idea:
    Today I've been mostly thinking about a game set in Discworld, that's more of a one shot party game affair. Something like:
    "A storm of Narrativium* is about to hit the Disc. During the next week folk are advised to stay indoors, or else find themselves in the middle of an old fable in need of actors."

    It'd be rules-light as Hell, of course, and I'd imagine the main dice mechanic is "rolling to perceive". Rolling high lets you straight up decide whats happening, middle ground being a work with the GM deal, with low being the GM's choice.

    I'm also thinking they'd be no Strength stat, fighting being limited and not the focus. Even if you do get into a fight, you'd win based on outsmarting your opponent.

    The story of any given session would be very simple, such as Evil Witch Must Be Stopped or Orc Army is On the March, except the characters know its a story, and aren't having any of it.

    *That being the stuff of pure story-telling rules, the thing that draws out a hero when someone goes and calls themselves a Dark Lord, and makes sure the stars are a collection of animals and objects whilst also being vast burning balls of gas.

    Endless_Serpents on
  • Fleur de AlysFleur de Alys Biohacker Registered User regular
    Day 1 went well. Had two groups play consecutive games; feedback was quite positive. I learned a lot of useful things.

    It takes a lot longer than I thought it would to run even the basic game with only 3 scenarios. Might need to streamline some things.

    I made a fantastic contact, too. One of the first and most enthusiastic players was a guy that runs the game demo events for basically every con in this part of the country. He can get me into all of them for free to run more demos!

    This is going to be a very busy year.

    Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
  • FuselageFuselage Oosik Jumpship LoungeRegistered User regular
    edited January 2017
    Last night while playing Steampunk Rally I thought again about combining Machi Koro and Risk while stealing the district idea from Civ 6. It's not an original concept but could be easy to test with stickers or post-it notes.

    Ideas
    -Regular risk board with the continents.
    -Each continent has a capitol, probably the highest GDP city or the most influential country's capitol. Capitols are their own territory within the affected region, so you could have troops defending Washington DC while the rest of the US is being overrun by the other players, until they come for you. Capitols are the only territories that can have Machi Koro Landmark cards, and building every Landmark is a win condition.
    -Each territory has a colored number associated with it, that's what type of Machi Koro card you can have there and how many.
    -Machi Koro cards are how you pay for troops and expand other cards. Either military bases can be a card you have to buy as a tax or its assumed each territory has a base of some kind. So Western US may have a blue five, which means you can store up to five Primary Resource cards there.
    -Different territories will be good for primary resources, others industry, and others tourism or entertainment. I'd try to give each continent a decent mix so if you control the whole continent you have high odds of being able to collect each type of card. Sorry, Australia.
    -When you invade a territory, you get to keep all of the cards that have been built there. The losing player may destroy one card, that may be a Landmark. Either it's discarded or gets flipped upside down and unused until you pay the cost or double the cost of the card.
    -Win conditions are controlling half or a majority of the capitols, completing every Landmark in one capitol, or having the most points at 20 turns. There'd be a special Landmark at the end with a high cost or conditions like building a space program or UN or nuke stuff. Not sure about that yet.
    -I think it would be 2 to 6 players where each player starts in a random capitol and has to extend from there.

    Machi Koro Cards
    ghzwch9ebv44.jpg
    9h0grclgunip.jpg

    Risk map
    AH3rB1M.jpg

    Edit: Part of what I like about Machi Koro compared to Catan is that you don't sit by for turns at a time while someone rolls dice that you can't use because of resource placement. If you liked the randomness though, you could make individual token of the colored numbers and instead of permanently place them in specific territories for balance reasons you pull them out of a hat after saying which territory you'll assign the next token to.

    Alternatively, you could have fixed numbers for each territory but randomize the color of card you assign there each game.

    Edit2: Optional Gamemode called Consuls where for each team/nation one player is the general for the army (playing Risk) and the other is the economic/government leader (playing Machi Koro)

    Edit3: What the board might look like. Each territory would have a small board with just enough room to put five or however many the max side-by-side cards would be on it. When you're invaded, give the tray to the other player while discarding one of the cards.
    ctcalaukdo3k.jpg

    Fuselage on
    o4n72w5h9b5y.png
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    This stuff just keeps tickling my brain.

    Fuselage, I really like that Consuls idea.
    StarCraft 2 has a multiplayer game mode like that, and I think it could work pretty well in a board game as well. One thing I would suggest is that having trays would rapidly become very cumbersome; I think just having stacks of cards per territory would already be very space consuming.

    With one player running both, maybe building could be tied to acquiring territory cards so that you're not overwhelmed with managing stuff? With two players, I think the builder could devote more attention to managing the cards and maybe have more freedom in choosing where to build.

    @The Ender I've got some general thoughts about the setting of your JACL idea and, as apparently is my wont, some mechanical brainstorming for what may be a different style of game.
    I think the idea of a "no win" scenario is interesting, and I see two main pathways it could go down: either it is purely thematic, and the players will not encounter The End (or it will happen independently of their actions), or there is some mechanical way in which it approaches and by which they can delay it.

    I feel like the former is better suited to a long campaign, wherein it is more "just" a thematic aspect of the game world: the way D&D has gods, or how Shadowrun has megacorporations. Or, if we want to get philosophical, the way we die. We know many things end, and many things won't be fixed, but we have to keep trying, so that people can have good lives, and their children, and so on. We have to try as hard as we can for as long as we can. Just because there is an end doesn't mean what's in between is meaningless. However, I feel this might be difficult to capture in a game aside from as a story element. If we take video games as an example, something like Dark Souls or Dear Esther or various story based games allow for a great depth of feeling regarding certain themes, but they tie in to the actual gameplay only indirectly.

    The other option I think would be better for a shorter game, something played out in one go. This was what actually got me thinking about video games for a bit: these days, most games we play with the expectation that we can win, or to experience a story, but there is one element, I think, that makes a game that we expect to lose work: the high score.

    I think this would lend itself quite well to your scenario: the score could be what year you make it to, and a secondary score would be your... morality? which would track how many choices you made that were frownworthy. This would lead to players trying to last as long as possible within certain categories: I made it this far but hit this level of baditude, I made it only this far but kept my moral purity, etc.

    Of course, now that I finish my thoughts I already see a potential third way: have a sort of doom counter that advances or retreats based on the players actions, but only the GM knows why. This would cause all sorts of delicious argumentation among the players as to what decisions caused the change, and could have all sorts of connections to the gameplay itself. Hm. Hmmmm.

    Mechanically:
    I feel like you simply must have some giant mass of numbers representing these things, and the most personal any of your troops should get from a mechanical standpoint should be squads. The way I see it, the JACL itself should be valuable enough that it would take damage rarely and only under catastrophic circumstances. Normal damage would be the loss of troops (ground forces, vehicles, aircraft, etc.) and resources (munitions, material, food, etc.). Though of course these would all actually be resources: impersonal and to be spent as needed.

    Having hundreds of resources would also make it easy to sacrifice "large" quantities while still having "a lot" left, and lend itself more to a feeling of slowly being ground down.

    There could be an event deck, similar to the politics cards in Twilight Imperium. Some prompt comes up with a number of options. Each option has a cost associated with it: resources, morality, what have you. And each player's vote is strengthened by their resources, like the planet populations in TI. Some options would only be available at certain moralities.

    If you wanted to have the hidden doom mechanic and have former GMs be able to participate, perhaps another deck of cards, where conditions are randomized and can combine in different ways, would allow players to "know" what could move the counter but not know what is currently active.

    @Grunt's Ghosts I'm running off with this idea in a slightly different direction, I think. If you don't mind, I may end up trying to possibly re-skin it and/or make something of it, more like Stuff and Nonsense rather than an RPG. Maybe it's because I have very little experience with RPGs that have a solid beginning and end; I've only played a few sessions of D&D, and nothing like Monster Hearts or The Quiet Year.

    I also hope I'm not stepping on anyone's toes by shoving my opinions on everyone's work out there! It's very self indulgent of me, but I hope it comes off more as brainstorming than being pushy. I know having other people say "you should do this" is rarely The Best.

    But this is fun! For me.

  • The EnderThe Ender Registered User regular
    Surfpossum wrote: »
    This stuff just keeps tickling my brain.

    Fuselage, I really like that Consuls idea.
    StarCraft 2 has a multiplayer game mode like that, and I think it could work pretty well in a board game as well. One thing I would suggest is that having trays would rapidly become very cumbersome; I think just having stacks of cards per territory would already be very space consuming.

    With one player running both, maybe building could be tied to acquiring territory cards so that you're not overwhelmed with managing stuff? With two players, I think the builder could devote more attention to managing the cards and maybe have more freedom in choosing where to build.

    @The Ender I've got some general thoughts about the setting of your JACL idea and, as apparently is my wont, some mechanical brainstorming for what may be a different style of game.
    I think the idea of a "no win" scenario is interesting, and I see two main pathways it could go down: either it is purely thematic, and the players will not encounter The End (or it will happen independently of their actions), or there is some mechanical way in which it approaches and by which they can delay it.

    I feel like the former is better suited to a long campaign, wherein it is more "just" a thematic aspect of the game world: the way D&D has gods, or how Shadowrun has megacorporations. Or, if we want to get philosophical, the way we die. We know many things end, and many things won't be fixed, but we have to keep trying, so that people can have good lives, and their children, and so on. We have to try as hard as we can for as long as we can. Just because there is an end doesn't mean what's in between is meaningless. However, I feel this might be difficult to capture in a game aside from as a story element. If we take video games as an example, something like Dark Souls or Dear Esther or various story based games allow for a great depth of feeling regarding certain themes, but they tie in to the actual gameplay only indirectly.

    The other option I think would be better for a shorter game, something played out in one go. This was what actually got me thinking about video games for a bit: these days, most games we play with the expectation that we can win, or to experience a story, but there is one element, I think, that makes a game that we expect to lose work: the high score.

    I think this would lend itself quite well to your scenario: the score could be what year you make it to, and a secondary score would be your... morality? which would track how many choices you made that were frownworthy. This would lead to players trying to last as long as possible within certain categories: I made it this far but hit this level of baditude, I made it only this far but kept my moral purity, etc.

    Of course, now that I finish my thoughts I already see a potential third way: have a sort of doom counter that advances or retreats based on the players actions, but only the GM knows why. This would cause all sorts of delicious argumentation among the players as to what decisions caused the change, and could have all sorts of connections to the gameplay itself. Hm. Hmmmm.

    Mechanically:
    I feel like you simply must have some giant mass of numbers representing these things, and the most personal any of your troops should get from a mechanical standpoint should be squads. The way I see it, the JACL itself should be valuable enough that it would take damage rarely and only under catastrophic circumstances. Normal damage would be the loss of troops (ground forces, vehicles, aircraft, etc.) and resources (munitions, material, food, etc.). Though of course these would all actually be resources: impersonal and to be spent as needed.

    Having hundreds of resources would also make it easy to sacrifice "large" quantities while still having "a lot" left, and lend itself more to a feeling of slowly being ground down.

    There could be an event deck, similar to the politics cards in Twilight Imperium. Some prompt comes up with a number of options. Each option has a cost associated with it: resources, morality, what have you. And each player's vote is strengthened by their resources, like the planet populations in TI. Some options would only be available at certain moralities.

    If you wanted to have the hidden doom mechanic and have former GMs be able to participate, perhaps another deck of cards, where conditions are randomized and can combine in different ways, would allow players to "know" what could move the counter but not know what is currently active.

    @Grunt's Ghosts I'm running off with this idea in a slightly different direction, I think. If you don't mind, I may end up trying to possibly re-skin it and/or make something of it, more like Stuff and Nonsense rather than an RPG. Maybe it's because I have very little experience with RPGs that have a solid beginning and end; I've only played a few sessions of D&D, and nothing like Monster Hearts or The Quiet Year.

    I also hope I'm not stepping on anyone's toes by shoving my opinions on everyone's work out there! It's very self indulgent of me, but I hope it comes off more as brainstorming than being pushy. I know having other people say "you should do this" is rarely The Best.

    But this is fun! For me.

    ...Holy shit I love that doom clock idea. I am writing it down & will do some kind of thought bubble exercise with it tonight or tomorrow.


    The JACLs are mechanically represented as a sort of character class; your character sheet involves the JACL you've chosen, your captain and a few extra traits. I'm aping the fundamental structure of the X-Wing minis game as far as that element goes.

    Character advancement has two tracks: you can earn Trust & Favors by successfully completing missions, and you can literally go buy exotic stuff with gold bullion from the Capitol Arsenal. Trust & Favors are... nice, but pedestrian. The Capitol Arsenal is full of amazing toys, and gold - if you really put your effort into getting it - is easier to come by than Trust or Favors. However, it is very illegal to go deal with the Capitol Arsenal, and likewise (by association with this illegal trade scheme) very illegal to transport around large quantities of gold or things explicitly intended to secure large quantities of gold (like, for example, really powerful drills made for breaching vaults). The Capitol Arsenal is operated by a UVO entity of enigmatic nature; nobody knows why the fuck it wants all of this gold or why it is willing to sell humans a bunch of next level guns in exchange for gold, but Fender's governing body is pretty sure this arrangement is going to get them all killed at some point and so outlawed the practice.

    There are likewise two primary layers to play: missions where you have a specific objective to achieve and typically must overcome a UVO force to achieve it, and examinations where players basically answer to the civilian authorities that oversee all operations. On top of having their JACLs, players have a shared body of political representatives that basically go to bat for them during the examinations (you could think of them as a legal team. Kind of). Fuck-ups in missions and/or being caught shipping gold around can get players in hot water during examinations, and either phase of the game has an element of existential danger (the danger in missions is that, well, the UVOs might just fucking kill you - in examinations, the danger is that you become a persona non grata & lose all credibility with your superiors.


    I want there to be a wide variety of valid approaches with different costs to each layer of play, too. Maybe you just roll hard in missions, going gun to gun with the UVOs and blowing them away before they do the same to you; may you go fast, getting in and doing what you need to do before hostile forces can react. Etc. Likewise, maybe you just play nice and/or sneaky with the examinations, doing your best to appease superiors; or maybe you just be absolutely terrifying psychopaths and strike so much fear into your superiors that they simply don't want to deal with you too much.


    There will definitely be some personal specifics about your troops & equipment, though - that's partly how I plan to distinguish each character class, and I'm a sucker for XCOM-esque attachment to squadmates. Each JACL basically has a mission orientation: they're good at supporting troops, or they're good at supporting aircraft or they're good at supporting armored vehicles. They have an attached elite unit of the thing they're good at. Missions facilitate this distinction by being broken-up into 3 theaters: Air, Land & Labyrinth. Players need to secure 2 of those 3 theaters in order to win a mission (securing all 3 means the mission is a clean sweep - securing 2 of the 3 means the mission extends into a complication that needs to be overcome).

    With Love and Courage
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    I definitely was seeing more of a 4X style game like Twilight Imperium than something more personal like X-COM. It would have been more abstract, like commanders issuing orders from a remote area and seeing the effects.

    It sounds like you plan to have the GM pretty heavily involved in managing the world, though, so that seems like it would allow for a more personal experience while still having wide-ranging ramifications. I also really like the idea of bargaining directly with the opposition, and of answering to the government; I wonder if you could create something like the D&D pantheon, except for various factions within the government, and have them gain and lose influence over the course of the game, which impacts what the players can get away with during missions or whatnot.

    All that stuff sounds pretty dang cool though!
    I still really want the JACLs to mostly hang back but have the ability to roll in as part of a possibly high risk but probably highly devastating attack, where players have to weigh possibly sustaining difficult to repair damage against something like this.

  • The EnderThe Ender Registered User regular
    The JACLs have an indirect role in the missions. It does sort of work as you describe... the JACLs are basically there to contend with UVO threats of a similar scale & threat rating to themselves, keeping these threats occupied while the air/land/labyrinth theaters are handled by relevant forces. Keeping the big UVOs busy can mean a lot of different things; straight-up annihilating them with big guns & missiles, threatening them with strike craft, jamming them up with electronic warfare & smoke, generating catastrophic weather, etc.

    They sort-of represent a 4th theater, but it's irrelevant to a mission's victory conditions.

    With Love and Courage
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    If I can't grit my teeth with a cigar between them before sharply ordering my super tank forward to carve a swathe of destruction through the enemy and rescue my crew, risks be damned, to hell with the consequences! then what even is the point.

  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    edited January 2017
    So I think I'm getting close to something playable with this zombie game; I think the rules just need tightening up (terminology, phases, etc.) and I'm just throwing together a bunch of cards (which are gonna be the real meat of it).

    My current idea is to have clear plastic cards like Gloom, and to have a bunch of human characters that all have the same template, a bunch of Zombie overlays that make them look Zombieish, and then the various Distinctions will be items and whatnot that also overlay them.

    I'll need to do some more mockups to see how the text will work out, but this is my rough idea:
    h4sjiukohb6y.jpgd0sa9m1ko96q.jpgtmm1b2wzwb13.jpg1zcfsgay9ons.jpg
    So the first two are what some generic humans would be like, and then the second two are how four different Distinctions would overlay them. Each Category of Distinction would have its Effects text in one of the four rectangles, so that if you have one of each Category all four are visible.

    That might not be enough room tho so maybe the transparent thing won't work out.

    edit: oh, right, the main reason I was posting. If anyone feels like providing suggestions for the cards, I'd be glad to take them.

    Surfpossum on
  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    edited January 2017
    Today in things I don't plan on finishing:

    A Monoply-style board game set in a town of weirdness, like Oxenfree or Night Vale say, where the pieces are funky teenagers and the chance cards are spooky anomalies and embarrassing events.

    The aim of the game would be to solve the mystery/get rid of the hauntings.

    I don't know any of the rules mind you, I just like the idea of "if two players land on Make-Out Creek, they must share X" and "Time Warp: Play any time to reroll your turn".

    They'd be a small amount of "add 1 to your roll" type cards I think, so you can put things in your favour. Or at least feel like you are.

    For added replay-ability when compared to other such board games I think it'd be neat if the squares/locations could be shifted around, maybe as a mechanic players can exploit. I like the thought of shifting the "Haunted Manor" next to "King's Bar and Grill" just as your opponent is about to land on "War Memorial" (somewhere they wanted to be).

    Endless_Serpents on
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    I guess I'll toss out some of my more half-baked (or more like haven't finished shopping for ingredients yet) ideas.

    Alpine First Aid
    The idea here is that you have a patient with some number of injuries. Symptoms manifest in two ways: as time advances, or in response to actions the players take.

    I'm not sure how the setup would work; I envision some kind of sheet for each injury set up in such a way that you uncover parts of it based on time and actions. Something like this:

    b60g5jxwqixr.png

    Congresscritters
    The general idea here is to roughly represent the actual process that goes into creating legislation (in the US); I envision each round being the construction of a "bill," which has various effects on the different tracks, and each round culminates in a vote.

    I think members in Congress, public opinion, political capital, and maybe a few other things all would make for good resources from a gameplay perspective. Legislation would be just a bundle of points (red, blue, green, yellow) and various effects on the different resources, and players could propose changes to it willy nilly.

    After X rounds, Congresscritters are up for reelection and the number of seats each party has changes.

    I'm thinking players could create a political party out of various goals and attributes: you start with fewer but get points based on number of members you have at the end; you start with X bonus points and lose some every time opposing legislation is passed; and so on.

    Dieminoes
    I think a number of games have already done something similar to this (after I came up with it, of course), but basically the idea was to have each face of a die represent some industry or resource or something, and to build a small city or somesuch, being able to build a new thing by connecting matching faces on a die.

    Each player would roll dice on their turn (the amount could be modified by their structures) and then everyone would use those results.

    Space Dice
    This never got very detailed, but the rough idea was to have the six faces of a die correspond to six different modules on a space ship. Each slot could have some type of system installed.

    The orientation of the die would affect what modules were available and how they worked, and movement would rotate the die around.

    I got very caught up in trying to create a gravity well map back when originally each side just represented the power available and thus thruster strength and there was going to be momentum and a simplified Newtonian model and it was all nonsense.

    TWO Boards Game?
    Just a random thought I had recently, involving a board with two sides that occasionally flips.

    Either with magnetic pieces or specific locations one has to get to before a flip.

    Maybe purchasable locations that have good or bad effects depending on which side is face up.

    I think that's most of the junk floating around my head/Drive.

  • Grunt's GhostsGrunt's Ghosts Registered User regular
    Surfpossum wrote: »
    So I think I'm getting close to something playable with this zombie game; I think the rules just need tightening up (terminology, phases, etc.) and I'm just throwing together a bunch of cards (which are gonna be the real meat of it).

    My current idea is to have clear plastic cards like Gloom, and to have a bunch of human characters that all have the same template, a bunch of Zombie overlays that make them look Zombieish, and then the various Distinctions will be items and whatnot that also overlay them.

    I'll need to do some more mockups to see how the text will work out, but this is my rough idea:
    h4sjiukohb6y.jpgd0sa9m1ko96q.jpgtmm1b2wzwb13.jpg1zcfsgay9ons.jpg
    So the first two are what some generic humans would be like, and then the second two are how four different Distinctions would overlay them. Each Category of Distinction would have its Effects text in one of the four rectangles, so that if you have one of each Category all four are visible.

    That might not be enough room tho so maybe the transparent thing won't work out.

    edit: oh, right, the main reason I was posting. If anyone feels like providing suggestions for the cards, I'd be glad to take them.

    Are you making this as a RPG or board game?

  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    Surfpossum wrote: »
    So I think I'm getting close to something playable with this zombie game; I think the rules just need tightening up (terminology, phases, etc.) and I'm just throwing together a bunch of cards (which are gonna be the real meat of it).

    My current idea is to have clear plastic cards like Gloom, and to have a bunch of human characters that all have the same template, a bunch of Zombie overlays that make them look Zombieish, and then the various Distinctions will be items and whatnot that also overlay them.

    I'll need to do some more mockups to see how the text will work out, but this is my rough idea:
    h4sjiukohb6y.jpgd0sa9m1ko96q.jpgtmm1b2wzwb13.jpg1zcfsgay9ons.jpg
    So the first two are what some generic humans would be like, and then the second two are how four different Distinctions would overlay them. Each Category of Distinction would have its Effects text in one of the four rectangles, so that if you have one of each Category all four are visible.

    That might not be enough room tho so maybe the transparent thing won't work out.

    edit: oh, right, the main reason I was posting. If anyone feels like providing suggestions for the cards, I'd be glad to take them.

    Are you making this as a RPG or board game?
    Definitely a single session type board game; I know I'm stealing heavily from you, but I was so enamoured with this route for it that it practically wrote itself.

    I'm envisioning kind of a Stuff & Nonsense type game, where the set collection is a bit more mechanically involved and has some "combat" style mechanic.

  • Grunt's GhostsGrunt's Ghosts Registered User regular
    Ok, something about what you were doing reminded me of a game I say on TableTop called Gloom


  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    Gloom is definitely where I got the clear plastic card idea from; I like it a lot but haven't gotten it to the table recently.

    I was out walking the dog with my girlfriend when I was Struck By Inspiration: for my Alpine First Aid game, the problem was that if X symptom shows up after Y time unless Z treatment has been applied, I couldn't think of a way to reveal that X was happening without giving away that Z would have prevented it.

    But! If the... treatment space that gets uncovered when doing Z says prevent/ignore X at time Y, then the time space can just reveal X without giving away that Z would have prevented it.

    I don't know if that description makes sense but this may have been the missing piece that lets everything work.

    *scribbles furiously*

  • The EnderThe Ender Registered User regular
    ...I have stumbled upon a book called 'A Theory of Fun for Game Design'. It is apparently a relatively old book.


    This book is amazing.


    Would strongly recommend you go find it and read it (borrowed my copy from the library). Author is Raph Koster.

    With Love and Courage
  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    Oh, I forgot about this thread. Have my word vomit:

    Rising Tides

    Setting:
    Rising Tides is a roleplaying system set in a version of our world several hundred years in the future after frankly absurd, fictional, I'm not a scientist but I don't think there's this much water on the planet kind of flooding. Something like this set to 800 but probably a little more. The point is that the world is mostly gone and the only land left are what used to be mountains or elevated regions. With the old world went the old world order. Nations are replaced with corporate structures that peddle a variety of economic models from libertarian to economic fiefdoms where non employees (often referred to as refuse) are paid only in what they need to survive.

    Settlements vary but most not based on the overcrowded mainlands are floating platforms anchored to either a submerged landmass or a state of the art mobile city state. Glimmering towers to the corporate machine pioneered by the Incorporated States of America. Each one of them is unique but they all share the central characteristics of being slow moving, self sustaining artificial islands that can house between 1000 and 20,000 corporate employees and guests depending on their size. All of which are equipped to provide an anchor point to floating refuse slum cities. Giving each city state an easy supply of labour and trading means with the shadier side of the market. The largest of these refuse cities is New York Reborn, colloquially called New New York in anything except ISA board meetings where the relatively stable weather and it's reputation as a central trading hub has allowed the slums to stretch out for miles, it's shape and size continually changing as ships enter and leave the city but at any given time it's estimated to hold 100,000 humans, gene mods and even a growing population of AI's that exist outside of PennsylCast's Com-Net.

    In the game the players play as a crew of humans (regular people with motivations that drive them), gene mods (artificially created or grown people with animalistic characteristics that have a cost to live they must pay to keep getting access to the drug that keeps them stable) and AI (digital intelligence who are created with a purpose that they must obey) doing business on the shady end of society, whether aboard their ship or in a city.

    Other Setting bits that don't fit great into that brief:

    Notable ISA City States:

    Atlanta: The reason many ISA flags are printed with 49 stars. Atlanta is the only ISA City State to ever sink. No one knows it's precise location and myths about where it's wreckage may be are the modern equivalent of treasure hunting for Atlantis.

    PennsylCast: In one of the first mergers between States and corporate structures Pennsylvania combined with a large telecommunications monopoly to provide economic stability. These days PennsylCast is responsible for the Com-Net: A mixture of satellites and signal ships that provide what functions for the internet in ISA territory. While they do not actively censor their net like some other corporations they do persistently track individuals data and provide it for both security and market knowledge to anyone willing to pay. PennsylCast's own City is one of the smallest in the ISA, only housing 1,500 Employees, most of it's room taken up by vast server farms. Almost any city has a PennsylCast branch locally to manage outages and sell top up codes for Refuse who do not have a bank card to pay for access to the Com-Net.


    The Core Mechanics:

    Players possess a deck of 30 cards. Made up of four suits of 7 cards and two jokers. Standard skill tests are attribute + Skill + two cards flipped off the top. Difficulty ratings are: 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 with 10 being the average difficulty. The GM has a full deck of cards instead. This is because most NPC's don't have attributes, just skills. Plus the higher average and face cards play into how combat's designed.

    Doubles that come up are either misfortunes or strokes of luck, jokers also trigger these. If the colour of the suits match then it's a Stroke of Luck, if the colours don't match then it's a misfortune. This means misfortunes are far more common. This is because life sucks and then something goes wrong and you die. In the case of flips with a spread of cards doubles only count for one's next to the other card.

    EG: 2, 4, 2, isn't a double. 2, 2, 4 is one.

    In most skill tests these basically work as the narrative spin stuff that pretty much every system likes these days. If you get a stroke of luck then you narrate something cool/beneficial that happens. If you get a misfortune the GM (or if an NPC gets it, the players) narrates something bad that happens.

    Players can spend one stress to flip an extra card. Then two for a second one and so on up to their applicable skill level for the roll.

    Skills and attributes

    Spoilered because huge list. Skills are measured 1-5 and attributes from 0 (minor disability) to 5 (peak performance)
    Four attributes (tied to a suit of cards) each with associated skills:

    Brawn: How beefy/tough your character is, characters with high brawn are swash bucklers, hired muscle and squad leaders

    Athletics: Catch all for physical activity. Climbing, swimming, running and forcing doors open all check this.

    Impose: A mixture of what comes under command and intimidate in other games. To clock the name just think of a sentence like 'Anderson imposed himself on the captain till he broke'. Can be used to get people to obey you for either duty or physical fear.

    Brawl: Melee, whether with your fists or with a blade.

    Resilience: Mostly a reactionary check used to shrug off adverse effects, ignore your wounds for a bit, deal with being in a sweltering engine room, go without food without downsides

    Then two more? Maybe split melee and brawl into two separate things.

    Finesse: Eyesight, reactions and fine motor skills, characters with high finesse are soldiers, thieves and fighter pilots

    Firearms: Catch all for standard guns/ranged weapons

    Thrown Weapons: Throwing knives, grenades. Etc.

    Subterfuge: Sneaking, sleight of hand and so on.

    Pilot: Driving small boats, flying planes and driving what few vehicles are about

    Gunnery: Firing vehicle mounted weapons

    Intelligence: How smart your character is when they can dedicate time to learning, characters with high intelligence are lawyers, technicians and military aides

    Knowledge (Education): Know local laws and science in a theoretical manner, be able to research faster.

    Knowledge (Current Affairs): Re call news, know the relevant strength of factions

    Tactics: Bigger hand of cards in combat, also used when planning military stuff or co-ordinating troops

    Computing: Hack the planet, duh

    Medicine: Help people not be sick/full of bullets/dead

    Engineering: Repair your ship/AI friend. Sabotage mechanical things and so on.

    Wits: How quick your characters mind is. High wits characters are captains, scoundrels and slick talkers.

    Streetsmarts: Keep your head down, know a shady guy, get access to the black markets and so on

    Captain: Command large, crewed ships and planes.

    Conversation: Lame name that should be changed, convince people of things and so on.

    Perception: Lame name that should be changed, exactly what perception is in most games.

    Wealth: Characters pocket change, can be used to reduce expenses for the group, barter and bribe.

    Composure: Don't freak out, prevents being pinned in combat, basically resilience but for mental effects.

    Specialties and Quirks

    Every skill can have one specialty and one perk. Attributes can have one perk.

    Perks are traits/whatever. Things which add mechanical flair to the character's actions.

    Specialties are similar to 13th Age's Backgrounds. A way to add detail to to how exactly your character uses their skills. They're basically sub-skills that have their own level and get added to your roll if they apply.

    Easy examples are things like Medicine: Gene mod expert, Perception: Tracker, Knowledge (Current Affairs): New New Yorker Slang.

    But if you want you can use them to define weirder things about your character. For example if you're a human trader who wants to have a way to represent your penchant for weapons but lack of skill with them you could have Ballistics: Gun Collector. That gives you a bonus when shopping for eccentric weaponry or ammo and lets you substitute Finesse for Intelligence.

    Derived attributes:

    Health: Brawn+Finesse+2

    Stress: Wits+Intelligence+2

    A human starts with 8 attribute points, AI with 6 and gene mods with 10. At character creation for every attribute point you get 5/4/3 skill points to put into skills of that attribute (robots get the most, gene's the least) for a total of 30/24/20 skill points.

    Leveling up skills costs skill points equal to the rank of the skill. Plus one if it's higher than your attribute.

    Might as well cover the other racial differences:

    Humans have a Motivation. A drive that they get rewarded XP for fulfilling. Other than that they're perfectly normal.

    Gene Mods have a Cost To Live: Their mods fuck with them in some way, shape or form. Whether it's someone wanting repayment for their surgeries, a reliance on a drug to keep their body stable. In general if they don't fulfill this they're given the choice by the GM between paying money to make the problem go away or have reduced attributes or stress capacity. In addition to this Gene mods have to pay more to raise their wealth skill and gain less from it. In return for these down sides they can get a quirk based on their modded traits.

    AI have a Purpose: a directive they must obey or suffer stress for. They also only spend one stress to continue acting at 0 health. Additionally to balance out their lower stats they can add +2 to either health or stress or +1 to each stat.

    Action Scenes

    Mostly combat scenes but any time the GM wants to emphasize a scene or time limits are important. Whether they're tense negotiations, trying to fix a sinking ship or escape past C-Sec patrols on a crowded New New York Flotsam barge.

    At the start of an action scene players draw a hand of cards to use based on an appropriate skill+2. For most scenes it'll be tactics (if combat's involved) or composure (for other generically stressful stuff). Action scenes are made up of rounds. At the start of every round players play a card from their hand, most NPC's just get dealt a random card off of the top of the deck. Play then proceeds in order from Aces to 7's (and 8/9/10's/faces for NPCs). Ties are broken by whoever has the highest skill in whatever action they're declaring.

    When it's a players turn they can take one simple action and one major action. Common simple actions involve moving a zone (zone based movement is great), opening or closing a door, drawing a weapon, standing up or hitting the deck. Major actions are mostly any that involve a skill test but can also include moving greater distances, reloading most weapons or taking a recovery a special action that allows you to re-draw your hand and recover some stress. In action scenes you only flip one card for skill checks, the other card is replaced by the one you played at the start of the round. If a simple action is taken then your major action suffers a -2 penalty. If the suit of your card you played doesn't match the skill test you're performing you get a -2 modifier.

    Attacks and defense actions can't be pumped by spending stress like normal actions.

    Ranged Attacks:

    Select how many cards you're going to flip up to your weapons Rate of Fire. Flip that many cards. If you go over your weapons ammo stat then you run dry and need to reload before you can use the weapon again. Any cards that are under your half weapons' firepower value give your target a suppression token if they haven't acted yet. Suppression tokens take place at the start of someone's turn. Requiring them to pass a simple (8) composure check with the token's as a negative modifier or lose their turn.

    After that compare the total of each pair (made up of your played card and one flipped card) and any that beat the cover value of the zone someone is in is a hit. (for example if someone's standing in a barren area (8 cover) and you play a 5 and then flip 1, 4, 2 you have one hit from the 5 and the 4 pairing).

    Each hit is resolved separately, compare your weapon's firepower to the targets Soak value (usually Resilience + Any armour they have):

    If they're equal then just flip a card off the target's deck and that's how much damage they take.

    If Firepower is higher than Soak then flip over an extra card for every point it beats it by. With the highest card being how much damage they take. For the reverse do the same but taking the lowest card for damage dealt.

    Melee Attacks:

    Melee attacks happen once you're engaged with someone (at reach distance). Every melee attack is an opposed Brawl check to determine if a hit occurs. People with melee weapons can spend stress equal to the weight of their weapon to flip extra cards in the check, each counting as a separate attack just like RoF 2+ attacks. If you're carrying a gun while engaged in melee all your brawl checks have a negative modifier equal to the weight of your gun. Even using ballistics to shoot at someone you're engaged with (which still count as melee attacks and are therefore opposed).

    While you're engaged the only actions you are allowed to take are to either make an attack against someone you're engaged with or to try and disengage. If you outnumber the person you're disengaging from then it's a simple action, if not then it's an opposed Athletics vs Brawl check to get out. If you fail you stay engaged.

    EG: Elizabeth and Damian are fighting some pirates who boarded their ship at the dock. Last round Elizabeth, a great gunfighter but terrible knife fighter, was charged by a pirate wielding a heavy pipe. This round Damian plays an Ace of Hearts to allow him to move first, running in to swing at the pirate but missing. However now the pirate is outnumbered in the melee. As a result of this when Elizabeth's turn comes up with her 5 of Diamonds she's able to step back, take aim and blow the pirate away as disengaging is a simple action.

    Strokes of Luck and Misfortune in combat: Strokes of Luck are often used to activate weapon quirks or character perks. However some common misfortunes include hitting other targets in the same zone, having your weapon's condition degrade, falling over after a melee swing or having cards count for double for ammo consumption.

    Damage:

    If you go below 0 in a fight you're incapacitated and take on a long term injury of strength equal to how heavily in the red you are, -6 is dead. However, to make it so players can contribute still, you can take on 2 stress per round to keep acting while incapacitated. To represent guys pulling out pistols as they lay bleeding out or slamming the door locked before collapsing. Players can voluntarily go incapacitated after any damage taken if they're worried about being suddenly blown away (like if they're on one health and don't want the sniper to just outright murder them).

    Health comes back relatively quickly (between sessions or with a days rest, can recover a decent chunk with first aid once per encounter) but the injuries are harder to recover from.

    It's designed to make combat scary because a single good hit will incapacitate anyone but still keep players active and able to contribute to multiple fights.

    Money and wealth in a garbage economy

    First of all: Players pay for reloads of their weapons, maintaining them if complications lead to them being damaged and so on. It's a setting with a focus on the economy and playing talented scum grifting by on their wits so bills coming in for their activities is not just expected but kind of the point.

    Second: The amount of money they can hold is limited. For each level of the wealth skill the player has they can hold 2 'cash' (an abstracted unit because fuck tracking individual $'s). It's assumed that any time a character would have more than this they celebrate and waste money on frivolous things to cope with their shitty existence.

    Which creates a situation where players are theoretically always out of cash and can never do anything. Turns out poverty living isn't actually super engaging. Who would've thought. Leading to mechanic three:

    Three: The crew as a whole has an expenses sheet (the italics are to make sure the words expenses sheet in gaming doens't make you think I'm terminally boring). Any time they want to spend money they don't have they can (with the GM's permission) just mark off boxes on the expenses tracker. They can pay it back later with a little bit of interest on top, it's great! Cash consequence free!

    That is until they hit 5 or 10 expenses. At which point the GM can decide to convert those expenses into a debt the crew has incurred. 5 expenses buys a minor debt, maybe your ammo supplier won't provide you with any more till you pay him back what you owe or do a job for him. Maybe the local gang sends some thugs to rough you up next time you're in port. Maybe your access to the ComNet is rescinded due to poor credit score. 10 expenses forms a major debt, stuff that causes real problems for the players. A bounty hunter, being barred from a major port, etc.

    The system's designed to turn a feeling of just scraping by into story threads for the GM and players to tug on. Importantly expenses don't have to represent loaned money. They could be the crew skipping town before paying their shipwright for his repair services. They could be the sneaky PC just out right stealing something and suffering consequences for it at a later date.

    It's also gonna interact with the 'species' of the setting. Humans just follow those rules, gene mods (people highly genetically altered, either for medical or professional reasons) pay more XP to raise wealth as a skill and also only get 1 extra box for keeping money on odd levels to represent them having to pay for the medicine that keeps their weird gene's from causing complications. Unshackled AI (droids mostly) can't even hold cash of their own. Any wealth they have is managed by another player due to their treatment as 'not people'. Which is a pain when your medical expenses include spending money on new parts regularly.

    Weapon Stats

    Firepower: how much damage potential/AP/suppression as an abstract number. Traits outline cases where weapons deviate from their base firepower value for those.
    Range: abstract range brackets like engaged, close, medium, far etc.
    Rate of Fire: How many extra cards you can flip while making an attack (high ROF guns are super, duper lethal in this game).
    Ammo: A number that if you go over while flipping cards has two effects: 1) You can't flip any more cards over and 2) you need to tick off a reload on your items.
    Traits: Innate bits of the weapon that always occur.
    Quirks: Aspects of the weapon that do not always come into play. It's possible for traits to be here too. In which case they're only activated on a Stroke Of Luck or Misfortune.
    Weight: for encumbrance and also doubles as the melee penalty for ranged weapons.
    Condition: Universal thing for all items, on a scale of 4 from Pristine (bonus to use) worn (normal) janky (makes Misfortune's more likely) and busted (unusable).
    Cost: Its base cost in worn condition.

    I think that covers most every concept I've being thinking of except equipment. Which I touched on with the gun stats thing but maybe want to work on a little more. For now the short hand of equipment is: Armour, weapons and tools are things with condition that need maintaining and have varied stats and so on. Most everything else falls under consumables with a set purpose and you just track how many of them you have IE the system bothers to differentiate between high end and janky med kits but they all just use medical supplies as a consumable (maybe with one or two variants, but the point is you don't need to book keep past name and how many you possess. No condition to monitor.

  • Zombie HeroZombie Hero Registered User regular
    I'm at the point where i think i'm ready to throw a prototype together, but would be too embarrassed to actually show it to another person, so i guess I play test solo for awhile? Still working out a lot of stuff.

    What do folks use in here to prototype cards? I was thinking about hand writing them all, but was wondering if there was a method to automate with excel or something.

    Steam
    Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
    Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
    3ds: 3282-2248-0453
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    @Zombie Hero there are a bunch of programs that let you create cards using various templates; a friend of mine uses one but I forget which one.

    You can also create something in Excel as well; I sloppily threw this together in Sheets a while back.

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    Some small like, A8 index cards would probably do the trick as well for quick and dirty testing.

  • Zombie HeroZombie Hero Registered User regular
    Hmm good suggestions, will probably do a mix of both. Write down all my ideas in a google doc or whatever, then transcribe them to index cards for a cheap, fast, test copy.

    Steam
    Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
    Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
    3ds: 3282-2248-0453
  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    If you play Magic or Netrunner or anything like that, my preferred method is to print stuff out and then slip them into sleeves in front of "real" cards.

    But depending on your particular needs just writing on index cards may be more efficient, yeah.

  • The EnderThe Ender Registered User regular
    Alright; slowly my RPG concept has decidedly shifted over into a solitaire board game concept. It was inevitable.

    I finished drafting some notes on the mechanism I intend to use to generate missions and hopefully hook the player by having them invested in shaping the game's political landscape through negotiations (and... other means of persuasion) with the characters that set-up missions / rewards.
    THE HALLS OF THE UNWASHED

    Drives game forward; provides missions, contextualizes actions & makes them relatable to specific characters, provides victory & defeat conditions, can be manipulated to both provide better rewards and/or drive the overall narrative of a campaign in a preferred direction.


    - 7 seats for Men & Women of the Unwashed, from 5 political parties: New Tomorrow, Here We Stand, The Retakers, The Undone and Universal Dialogue. Seats are randomly assigned at the beginning of the game, and change based on player decisions. 3 seats go the ruling party; these seats generate missions. 4 seats go to the opposition parties; these generate tertiary mission objectives and bonus mission rewards.

    - 1 seat for a Chair, who is from one of the 5 parties. The Chair generates the overall plot arc of a campaign.

    - 1 seat for the player's representative, whose occupation & proficiencies can impact the House roster and shift opinions / seat members before missions are set, altering the direction of the overall narrative & giving the player the ability to curate missions / mission rewards to some extent.


    NEW TOMORROW
    Long Term Goal: Evacuate a sustainable population of people to an orbital space habitat. Leave Earth behind.

    Argument: Fender cannot be defended forever, and in fact probably cannot be defended for much longer at all; the positive exchange ratio that Planet Shakers enjoy against UVOs - their sole advantage in the conflict - diminishes every year. Modeling suggests that unless some significant breakthrough in weapons or protection technology occurs, Planet Shakers will in fact be at an exchange ratio disadvantage in 5-7 years. Surrender appears to be completely out of the picture, and the only place left to retreat to (that is known) is low earth orbit.

    As of right now, launch vehicles and skilled crews capable of putting a significant number of people into LEO are available. Such resources may not be available as the losing war drags on and territory is lost / people are killed / poverty increases. An initiative to start evacuating people NOW must be undertaken to avoid species extinction.

    Rebuttals: The proposal is far-fetched at face value; the is no precedence for this type of evacuation, the average Fender refugee has absolutely no experience with the rigors of either space flight or low gravity conditions, the expertise necessary for organizing successful rocket launches and orbital rendezvous probably cannot be plausibly assembled, transporting hundreds or thousands of people into LEO has never before been done & faces significant technical hurdles that would be a tall order even in an ideal environment - much less the blasted slum of Fender.

    It is better to run out the clock on the existing defensive efforts and hope for something to change than to bet a significant amount of resources and political capital on a hail mary, high risk experiment with what is a probably a very low chance of success. And even if the goal is reached... humans still do not cope well in low gravity conditions, and the orbital gardens were not designed to house & feed more than two-dozen adult scientists, tops. We'd be out of one immediate existential crisis and into another.


    HERE WE STAND
    Long Term Goal: Hold the line in Fender. Cause such appalling UVO casualty figures that the enemy decides that taking this one province is not worthwhile. Establish a new prosperous home after the conflict subsides, even if the home is small.

    Argument: Fender is probably all that is left for humanity; the rest of the world appears to be in wreckage. The defense here has been robust and, thus far, exceeded expectations in terms of success. Eventually, the enemy may decide to give up and call it quits because it is not a worthwhile investment of resources to take one last heavily fortified position that contains negligible resources when they own the rest of the planet. We simply must impress this decision upon the enemy by making every single action an absolute slaughter.

    Rebuttals: We have no reason to believe that the UVOs operate on human perceptions of cost/benefit analysis, and in fact have circumstantial evidence that seems to falsify such an idea. They may in fact never relent their attacks on Fender regardless of the costs because they are operating from an entirely different mode of thinking and/or paradigm - for example, they may have so many resources that the idea of rationing their expenditure in any way is beyond consideration.

    Strictly defensive actions are doomed to failure, regardless of how tenaciously you hold your position. The UVOs will always hold the initiative so long as our ambitions end at digging in & holding on against an intelligent & adaptive hostile force.


    THE RETAKERS
    Long Term Goal: Re-achieve human supremacy over Earth and re-establish global human civilization. Reach out and attempt to contact other fortress states around the world, with the intent to forge cooperative alliances and formulate plans for large scale counter-attacks against UVOs and create new nation-states.

    Argument: A passive defensive posture invites disaster; to preserve the future of humanity, we must go on the offensive against the enemy and push them back. The window of opportunity for retaking the initiative in this fight is rapidly closing - we must develop large scale war materiel production chains, conscript all persons of sufficient physical development to serve as soldiers and punch back against our aggressors. At the same time, we must reach out to any other human forces that may be out there to put together a joint combat effort, as Fender does not likely have sufficient resources or manpower on it's own to defeat the UVO threat.

    Rebuttals: There is nothing to retake. Initial reconnaissance & radio band scanning efforts gave no reason at all to hope that another fortress state within reach of Fender exists, no refugee has arrived in the state with a credible story about another existing such state or combat force & what limited intel we've procured implies that the UVOs have already begun large scale terraforming / re-industrialization efforts to meet their own needs.

    On top of that, there is no guarantee that any other human enclave discovered would be friendly or interested in cooperation; perhaps they would decided that they could use Fender's resources rather than become an ally. We could open another front, putting us in a worse position than we were before. Moreover, while going on the offensive would allow us to capture the initiative, we would be vulnerable to counter-attack and this vulnerability would only be exacerbated the further forward we pressed an attack.


    THE UNDONE
    Long Term Goal: Trade human autonomy in exchange for survival; negotiate a merger agreement with President Jyrgunkarrd of the Capitol Arsenal, incorporating Fender within its protected territory.

    Argument: Fender has little to no chance at prevailing in conventional military action against the UVOs, and there is nowhere left to realistically run. Our only remaining option is for some sort of armistice, and the only actor not outwardly hostile to Fender that there is an opportunity for dialogue with is President Jyrgunkarrd. There are a lot of unknown variables when it comes to the Capitol Arsenal territory, but the most important fact is this: they are neither hostile to us nor at war with the rest of the enemy.

    Rebuttals: President Jyrgunkarrd is a member of the enemy, full stop. Its motives are unclear, it is plainly alien and invasive, it is incredibly dubious that a human presence under the Capitol Arsenal's protection would be anything more than chattel even if the unlikely gambit of securing such protection were to succeed. Fender would be a slave state and humanity would be, at best, an amusing decorative toy for a mechanical monster to play with. This goal is outright treasonous betrayal of the species.


    UNIVERSAL DIALOGUE
    Long Term Goal: Exploit President Jyrgunkarrd's open door to study UVO communications and possible software / network vulnerabilities. Destroy President Jyrgunkarrd and autopsy the chassis to gain an edge in this effort.

    Argument: Conventional warfare against the UVO threat is not working, failed to protect the rest of the world and is unlikely to see better results in the future. We are largely out of weapons technology tricks. We believe the way forward is cyber-warfare; attacking the software and networking tools that it is a safe assumption UVOs rely on. If a vulnerability can be found and rapidly exploited, we may be able to utterly wipe out the enemy in a very brief span of time - and President Jyrgunkarrd provides us with a means of studying UVO systems.

    Rebuttals: This is a pipe dream plan with no concrete evidence at all of it's core tenets. It would involve an eventual opening of hostilities with the Capitol Arsenal, which for now is a neutral power; an early war on that front could be the disaster that finally destroys Fender. We need to focus on practical, here-and-now combat technologies and strategies, not pie in the sky fantasies about hacking a theoretical network and wiping out the enemy overnight.

    With Love and Courage
  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    I make a lot of half finished games, but what I'm posting here is, basically, me the roleplaying game. This is what I go to whenever I just want to play with some mates or the little humans that I visit between deployments without prep or having to teach complex rules.

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d8erMuS6fthSJF2cYyO22siptufyj62noMFsV-v4fVo/edit

    It's my ad-lib anything roleplaying game, Waiting for the Bus in the Rain.

    There isn't much to it but it's finished and pretty darn fun. It wouldn't hold up to anything more than an afternoon if you want to play "Ninja Italian Renaissance Painters" or "X-Men Run a Coffee Shop", though I myself once GM'ed about two months of "Heavy Metal Band Fight Jotun Who Have Kidnapped Thor and Taken Over the World" with just the core rules I'm presenting here.

    I think it would work okay in play by post format, and I'd be interesting in taking it for a spin on here, any thoughts?

  • MarshmallowMarshmallow Registered User regular
    It's got a hell of a sense of humor. I'm not sure if it'd be the kind of game I'd personally enjoy, but damn if I didn't laugh quite a few times reading it.

    Me the roleplaying game is a great concept. Like what a fantasy heartbreaker might turn into after a lot of introspection and experimentation. I'm a little concerned that the closest creation I have to such a thing is a Pokemon game, but I guess it brings me enough joy that I can't complain.

  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    Thank you for taking a look @Marshmallow.

    I appreciate it's not for everyone, which is why it's just a free five or so page thing. It pretty much comes into its own when you're on a train journey with pals or you've got a handful of children to keep occupied.

    What Pokemon game is that, Voltage?

  • MarshmallowMarshmallow Registered User regular
    edited February 2017
    If it were with a group that I know and trust I'd definitely give it a shot, but I'm always wary of games that put a lot of the world building in the first 'session'. Committing to play in a game where the setting/style could immediately evolve via player/GM feedback into something that I just don't 'get' is one of those things that gets me nervous.

    The actual play though seems like the kind of thing I like. I've had a lot of fun with the 2d6 mechanic in a couple Dungeon World games, and the character creation is slick as hell with the Character Moves. Low commitment (a la a train ride game) would probably get me onboard, but I'm the kind of person who makes sure their schedule is clear for a year or two before they join a PbP.

    And yeah, Voltage. That game is literally just a bunch of rules I like piled in a heap.

    Marshmallow on
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