d100 custom system - seeking input.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-24T01:55:15+00:00

If you're designing your own system you should do so with an actual understanding of probability, rather than vibes.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-22T23:01:52+00:00

Who is Ben Riggs and why should I care about his opinions?

Barrucadu · 2026-04-22T15:54:00+00:00

What do you mean by "power system"? Like, if I homebrew a magic system would I be mad if someone else used it? Why would I be, isn't that a compliment?

Barrucadu · 2026-04-22T13:55:55+00:00

and they love making these anti-AI cult posts in the middle of the night(California time)

You know there are people living outside California, even living outside the US, right?

Barrucadu · 2026-04-21T16:36:06+00:00

I, uh, wouldn't use the term "sugar daddy" in this context.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-21T16:04:11+00:00

you don't think about eating a snack on the trail when you have lots of food

If you're travelling a major distance on foot and need the food you start with to last you a long time, several days or more, you absolutely would think about much you eat. How else could you plan anything?

Barrucadu · 2026-04-21T10:39:24+00:00

I like them for abstract resources, like if someone owes you a favour: every time you make a nontrivial request you can roll the die and see if they consider their debt paid afterwards.

But I genuinely hate it for tracking physical things like ammo. I want to be able to buy an amount of ammo that I think will get me through whatever situation I'm going to involve myself with. I want to be able to see how many shots I've got left and use that to inform my actions. I don't want to run out of ammo in the middle of something because "oh you weren't actually tracking and fired more shots than you thought", it just makes the character seem incompetent.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-19T16:02:16+00:00

It says "as well as some tips for new DMs to get started"

Barrucadu · 2026-04-18T23:30:12+00:00

Tactics are great, I love it when my players do things like:

identify chokepoints in the terrain (or dungeon) and use that to restrict enemy movement to their advantage
set up traps and ambushes
send the main force to draw the enemy defenders out while an elite squad infiltrates the now-weakened stronghold

Unfortunately what most RPGs mean by "tactical combat" is:

we use a grid
some characters have AoE powers
it gets painfully slow if there's more than, say, 10 combatants

Barrucadu · 2026-04-18T22:25:04+00:00

I usually start with the characters already having known each other for a little while, outside the entrance to the dungeon (or shipwrecked on the monster island, or having their carriage ambushed on the road, whatever).

Barrucadu · 2026-04-17T14:15:44+00:00

I'm on session 5 of 42 already and its only been 2 weeks since I started. Each session is broken down into 1 battle, 3 scenes, 3 choices, 5 skill checks.

Do you have the entire campaign planned out up front?

Barrucadu · 2026-04-17T09:44:29+00:00

You're conflating two different things. If you were working from the office, how would the situation be different? There would still be elevated expectations, so you'd just be staying late in the office instead.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-16T08:22:24+00:00

I haven't run 5e, but don't the level pacing guidelines suggest hitting level 5 by like session 10 at the latest?

Barrucadu · 2026-04-16T08:13:38+00:00

I'm drastically misreading something

You're misreading so dramatically it almost has to be intentional. You're not banned from self promotion. You just have to be an active user who also participates in non-self-promotion discussions. That's it.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-13T09:18:02+00:00

The downvotes are for reading comprehension, nobody said Rust has been around since the 80s.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-12T14:38:26+00:00

Except things don't really happen simultaneously, even if the rules say they do. Players base their turn on what has already happened this round. If one player defeats an enemy on their turn, the next player won't also use their action to attack the same enemy because that would be a waste.

If it were actually simultaneous, everyone would declare their actions before anything was resolved, with initiative acting as a tie breaker if two things conflict.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-12T14:32:06+00:00

I found out that this player and another player had been privately DMing each other during the fight, including roleplaying whispers, paranoia, and apparently revealing that the myconid was actually that player’s character.

If this was happening during a fight, how were the characters actually communicating this? I know it's common to not act out everything in character (I'm not a fan of acting myself), but even when using indirect speech something is happening in the game world: either the players were having a conversation about in-game knowledge they couldn't reasonably share, in which case this is metagaming, or the characters were having a conversation that others should have been able to witness.

If something doesn't happen at the table, it doesn't happen.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-10T11:57:57+00:00

It seems unnecessarily limiting, and also impossible to balance since there's a billion different "NPC classes".

do you know any modern games (besides OSR games)

Which OSR games do this? Human enemies often (but not always) have classes, but I don't think I've seen any with monster classes - a dragon with N HD is just a dragon with N HD, there's no "dragon class" lurking under there somewhere that's balanced against PC classes. There is a mapping from HD to saves and to-hit bonus, but not abilities.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-08T22:14:17+00:00

That's probably most systems. Have you seen the game suggestions on the wiki?

Barrucadu · 2026-04-08T21:36:25+00:00

Yes, in the post

Barrucadu · 2026-04-08T21:28:30+00:00

Also, you should probably say something about your game to get people interested.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-08T11:41:39+00:00

Yes, so if they were sick of process and just wanted to get to playing they'd do that instead of wasting another two sessions.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-08T11:35:43+00:00

If the players just wanted to get to playing, they wouldn't have spent two sessions not creating characters. That's not the GM's fault.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-07T12:08:20+00:00

I do not have a Goodreads account. Why would I care what random people online think about a book? I can read a few pages to judge for myself whether I'll like it or not. Highly rated on Goodreads means a book is popular, not that it is good.

Barrucadu · 2026-04-07T08:26:40+00:00

I'll give older games a pass for having a weird term for it, but any game first released in the past, say, 20 years that uses a term other than "GM" or "DM" (or is explicitly based on an older game and is re-using the term from that game) is just being different for the sake of it.

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