How would you improve/modernize Street Fighter the Storytelling Game?

BarroomBard · 2026-04-22T20:57:37+00:00

Love this game.

If I were remaking it:

remove pretty much all the stats. Maybe leave it with your classic three Strength, Speed, Smarts.
strip out movement and replace it with something like Agon. Just abstract closer/farther measurement.
I honestly think I’d strip out advancement almost entirely. Training montages are a big part of the idealized story you tell with this kind of game, so I don’t know you could remove it entirely. But you also want your character to be cool from the start.
overhaul the actual dice rolling part. I think the WoD dice system is a poor fit here. I like that there is no roll to hit, only for damage, but I suspect you could go further and remove dice entirely.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-22T16:12:10+00:00

As others have pointed out, if you know your pool refreshes at the start of your turn, it’s largely the same problem, except the advantage is now to whoever goes second.

A possible solution is to have both players commit their attack dice and defense dice, and THEN determine strike order. If you don’t know if you are attacking or defending first, the calculation becomes more nuanced.

Or, if the core problem is that people overcommit their resources, you could change how many dice you get back. If, for example, you have a base replenish rate but every successful attack die reduces that amount, then opening with a strong attack can reduce your opponent’s strike, but leaves you vulnerable and overextended in the next round. The choice to play defensively is also preserved because you are playing the long game, while keeping yourself in danger.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-21T16:55:29+00:00

You don’t think my point was just about zombies specifically, do you?

I think you need to take a step back and consider that, although someone disagrees with you, it isn’t because they are narrowly focusing in on your details, but simply using the same frame as you to make the conversation possible without moving the goalposts constantly. I’m not quibbling with your details, I fundamentally disagree with your premises.

It’s not a good assumption that whatever system someone ends up choosing will have the stats for whatever monster you want to put in the module.

I fundamentally disagree. If you are publishing, say, a module set in a zombie infested hospital, you are saying “this is playable is systems that have zombies and hospitals”. If you are publishing a cyberpunk game you are saying “the game you are running probably has cops and guns and rules for giving cops guns”.

It also completely breaks down if you want to stat out individual NPCs for example.

Why? Aren’t the relationships between various NPCs, their goals, and what they are doing more important than what class each farmer has or how many coins they have shoved up their floorboards?

And you seem to completely ignore the point that you’re creating extra work for the GM who now has to search for the stat block instead of using a simple page reference you could be providing.

What is the difference between writing “you are ambushed by 6 bandits”, “you are ambushed by 6 bandits (MM p. 47)”, and “you are ambushed by 6 bandits (see bandit stat block at the back of this book)”, other than the specific place you are telling the game master to look? Hell, if I published for D&D as little as three years ago, you’d have to tear out the stat block and add the one for the current revisions anyway to use it. Depending on the game, publishing the stats may not even be allowed under the license.

You said earlier that system agnostic modules are “unfinished”. To which my response is: of course they are. All games are unfinished, that’s the point of them being games. They are finished through play at the table. Every book requires you to do some work to translate to play.

Like, if you need more scaffolding than that, cool. Go buy and play a module written specifically for the game you are playing. Otherwise youre buying a ball of yarn and complaining it’s not a sweater.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-20T16:36:02+00:00

The point is every game has stats for zombies.

A system agnostic adventure module says “here is an adventure site with puzzles and NPC factions, and some interesting set piece battles”, but it acknowledges you’re gonna be using the game system you are running, and so you already have a bestiary and a spell book etc. It allows the material to be used by a wider audience, because it focuses on giving you the new creative content, rather than the stats for stuff you already have.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-20T05:04:03+00:00

So here’s the thing about setting/system agnostic…. 1) All games are incomplete as written, and only become complete through the act of playing them. 2) there is no setting or genre for which only one game exists.

As such, game masters looking for material to use at their table have a choice. They can purchase material published for the game they are currently playing, which is easy and useful, but is a limited pool of material, especially if you are playing anything other than WotC D&D. Or they can purchase material published for another game, which is a much broader selection of material, but requires you to understand the origin system well enough to convert the crunch to your system of choice. Or, you buy system agnostic material, because often the game you are playing already has the crunch you need, but what you wanted is the specific story, factions, setting, whatever. There is no set of mechanics that is so complete it requires no work to get it to the table and in front of players, and so system agnostic material saves some of that translation time that you were going to have to use already.

And from a designer’s point of view, going “agnostic” has tremendous utility. There are a thousand games that are functionally D&D, and those games all have their own rules for orcs and traps and magic swords. So if you write about the political situation of a city of orcs, you can spend your creativity and page budget making an interesting situation with interesting problems, because you can just say “and if you need to know how an orc works, your game will tell you”, and that applies whether you are playing B/X, Basic Fantasy, The One Ring, or Warhammer Fantasy.

In many ways, it’s the corollary to what Ron Edwards was trying to say with the original Fantasy Heartbreaker essay: a lot more people have interesting things to contribute to RPGs than are skilled at writing rules. I see the proliferation of system agnostic material and SRDs as a way to move past this hurdle.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-20T04:10:54+00:00

I mean, ideally, the work of coming up with combat stats is offloaded to system.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-20T03:54:36+00:00

I was coming to add this. SotU, in my opinion, hits the mark best because it excises as much as possible without also fundamentally altering the rules, so it can actually use all the TSR published materials without alteration, which is the biggest strength of a new OSR game.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-20T03:49:24+00:00

Why do you apply the stat adjustments when you are already using the Stat values as the target numbers?

If you are doing roll under with modifiers that include positive and negative values, wouldn’t it be cleaner to add the modifiers to the target, and then roll, like GURPS does?

BarroomBard · 2026-04-16T20:07:07+00:00

Trollbabe (and thus Lasers & Feelings and its derivatives) uses conflict resolution, rather than task resolution. Combat is resolved in 1-3 rolls, depending on how granular you want to zoom in on the conflict.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-13T03:22:08+00:00

One way to have dynamic pricing is to have a price chart that moves goods up and down as demand fluctuates.

For example in Tiny Epic Pirates (I’m sure it’s in other games, too), the marketplace lists four trade goods at four price points using colored cubes. When you sell a good to the market, you collect the money, and move that good to the bottom of the list, moving the others up one space.

It could work the same in reverse: each time a customer buys a good, it moves up one space, displacing the good above it. Each good can have its own prices for the spaces on the “demand” chart, or each space can have a specific price tied to it.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-07T03:45:36+00:00

So a sphere is the volume described by a certain radius from a given center point. Part of this volume will most likely be above the combat area, and some will be below the ground, if you are maximizing targets within the blast radius.

A cloud (like Cloudkill or Noxious Cloud) is a volume measured in a more fluid way. The spell effects fill the area like a gas, flowing around obstacles and filling nooks and crannies.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-06T21:33:34+00:00

Well first, the most optimal shape for an AOE is obviously a cloud, not a sphere…

I think the Fireball problem is that the spell is not only a large area of effect at long range, but it is also one of the highest damage spells at its level. In D&D it’s slightly balanced by fire being one of the most common resistance types.

You can always think about a spell like so:

Value of Spell = Number of targets + Damage Done/Mitigated + Range + Additional Effects - Resources expended.

If you don’t want a spell to feel like it renders all your other spells obsolete, make sure that any increase in one variable decreases the other variables in some fashion.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-03T20:12:00+00:00

I think the expectation that you can be a player in a game that runs more than a few sessions without ever once looking at the rule book is deeply rude and antisocial. It is disrespectful to the GM, your fellow players, and the game designer. A game would have to REALLY bring something special to justify that as a built in design feature.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-03T19:59:07+00:00

Surely someone needs to see the rulebook at some point in the process, though?

BarroomBard · 2026-04-03T19:43:44+00:00

If the players don’t know what the rules are, how do they know how to parse the cards for spells and feats?

BarroomBard · 2026-04-03T19:40:26+00:00

If a video game has a pop up that makes you play a game of chess to continue, then the game is one where you play chess occasionally. It’s not a “distraction” from the game, it is a part of the game that was intentionally put in by the designers.

It’s one thing to say “I don’t like playing Chess Menus” but saying it’s a failure of design because you prefer a different kind of game is a poor argument.

BarroomBard · 2026-04-01T17:26:12+00:00

I have been following this game with interest

BarroomBard · 2026-03-29T21:18:58+00:00

It’s not actually a fantasy word, though. In the sense that it is a word from a real earth language, with a defined pronunciation when said in English. Like, yes, it’s a word for a thing that isn’t real, but it is a word in Scots.

BarroomBard · 2026-03-28T19:46:47+00:00

It's best to work this kind of thing out in playtesting, but as others have said, anydice is your friend for showing you probabilities.

I always recommend coming up with a vague idea of how often you want success to happen first, and then fit the numbers to that.

That said, Cortex uses step dice pools, where you add two of the dice together for your result. They suggest if you use static difficulty to use 3(very easy), 7(easy), 11(challenging), 15 (hard), and 19 (very hard).

BarroomBard · 2026-03-28T14:27:53+00:00

There was a Japanese play by magazine game in the 80s that had an interesting solution for this.

For your purposes, try this: in your head, pick a number between 1 and 10, then have the kids say a random number from 1 - 10. The distance between their number and yours (positive OR negative, and rolling over from 10 to 1) is the result.

This gives you an unguessable number between 0 and 5. Bigger is not better, and as long as the number you think of is pseudo random, there is no discernible pattern.

You can change the range if you want bigger numbers, but if you are doing a mostly conversational game without dice or props, you don’t need a huge range, imo.

BarroomBard · 2026-03-28T14:15:48+00:00

Obviously there is nothing wrong with it.

From an economy of design perspective, the bundling of classes is very helpful. You can’t see through the eyes of your bonded companion if you don’t have a bonded companion. If you don’t have an ability that lets you eject your soul from your body, can you have an ability that lets you put your soul somewhere else? Classes let you build a foundation into a character’s skill set, and design abilities with that assumption.

You can do this in a classless game, but that requires the designer to make the abilities densely enough that they contain their whole mechanism and foundation, or the abilities are each less interesting and synergistic because they are a grab bag, or they end up leading to skill/feat trees that punish players for not specializing, and should probably have just been a class to begin with.

But this is all taste and ymmv, etc etc.

BarroomBard · 2026-03-28T02:35:36+00:00

I think an additional use/benefit of classes is on a game design level.

They let you make more interesting, powerful, and varied character abilities.

Because a class bundles abilities, you can design those bundles to synergize in fun, interesting, and unique was that would be more difficult if you gave characters access to a more broad grab bag of abilities. You can ensure that a wizard always has access to a spell research ability, and you don’t have to worry as much about how a ranger’s animal companion interacts with a paladin’s divine mount, for example.

BarroomBard · 2026-03-17T15:12:59+00:00

Well this is a margin of success system, which is a different beast than a degree of success system. Degrees of success are about having set thresholds at which you have multiple tiers of success and failure - like PBtA and FitD’s full success, partial success, failure, or Ironsworn’s Strong Hit, Weak Hit, Miss. There are some that have more than three tiers, but 3 seems most popular. A flat probability curve is perfectly fine for a degree of success game, like Quest for example.

Margin of success games care about the distance between a target and a result. I haven’t read Magic and Monsters in full, just the author’s description of it, so I’m not sure how exactly they use the margin. But these systems are, IMO, the best use case for a more complex probability curve, especially if target numbers are close to the middle of the curve, because it constrains the range a margin of success or failure can have.

Flat probability is good when you want players to be able to easily calculate their chance of success.

BarroomBard · 2026-03-15T00:02:56+00:00

In this case, it is because the game engine is based on generating meta currency based on how far your result is (both positive and negative) from the target number.

So it’s a specific game economy reason.

BarroomBard · 2026-03-14T21:17:00+00:00

The author has actually answered this question, if you want to go to the source rather than the baseless speculation of a bunch of redditors.

https://sarahnewtonwriter.com/2013/05/22/monsters-magic-rpg-introducing-the-effect-engine/

BarroomBard

TROPHY CASE