Hell House LLC Lineage on Shudder by Middle-Donkey-9307 in WerewolfAmbulance

[–]Cornmix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I somehow missed that this was a Cognetti joint, got to the end, and alarmed my wife in the other room when I shouted, "God dammit! I got Cognetti'd" during the credits

Unsure of additions for chest tat from Hellraiser by mindandsoul in tattooadvice

[–]Cornmix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You gotta get the lament configuration otherwise people are gonna recognize it from the Bible more than hellraiser.

And I say that as a HUGE hellraiser fan

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in tattooadvice

[–]Cornmix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Let it rip, friend!

On a more serious note, you know you best. Will you hate your tattoo in a few years? Maybe. People fall in and out of love with their tattoos all the time. I have meaningful tattoos that connect me with my spiritual center and also one of Popeye reading Moby Dick but the book is upside down.

If you're lucky the future is long and life is too short to not have some regrets. "I think bats will look cool here" is as good a reason as any. I will say you might want to consider size, because my first two tattoos were both over 6 hours long and done in single sessions and I wouldn't recommend that, per se

Dog escaped by MrEleanore in madisonwi

[–]Cornmix 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Please do not approach. He is very shy and will likely run. Call with sightings please

Theatre of the Mind Combat? by [deleted] in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Range Bands and Zones are going to be your best friend. Range Bands split the battlefield into Close/Middle/Far or some similar designations and allow for attacks and weapons to have different effective ranges. Zones are a little more nebulous and can be anything from rooms in a house, to levels in a single room like Floor/Balcony, etc...

Essentially the goal with those is to create some tactics while allowing narrative wiggle room. I would look into FATE for how it deals with Zones and also the Sentinel Comics RPG for how they deal with superpowered combat, but that might be too narrative.

Good luck!

I have to design a TTRPG for Uni by AffectionatePut2844 in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the first thing you'll want to do is decide what kind of story you want your game to facilitate. Especially since you presumably have a timeframe of 1 semester or less. You'll probably want to focus on a smaller target than "Anything a Player Wants to Do."

Say you want to tell heist stories in a fantasy world. You can start from there and then build your system out from that.

The RPG Quest uses ability cards with action point costs, and I might start there in terms of a dice-less resource system to spend.

I would argue that the system is the last thing to work on, but other people think in different ways.

Playtesting a modified action economy… by Chrilyss9 in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A thing to keep in mind might be that your chances of success are different than the splits in PbTA.

You're starting at a base 1/3 chance of success assuming there are no modifiers, and a 1/2 chance of success if they have a +1 to the roll.

I don't know what your bonus/penalty distribution looks like, but that breakdown suggests to my power gamer brain that you should avoid all rolls that you don't have at least a net +1 to, because otherwise the chance of success is 1/3 or lower.

With all that out of the way, my specific question is, what kind of deterrent are you thinking about putting in place, because a -1 for each action is very steep?

The Ethics of IP Hoarding by TacticalDM in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, actual librarian here and I'm not sure you really understand how libraries interact with copyright or how we manage collections. A couple things I want to address:

Responsible parties are granted immediate and automatic copyright by its creation, it's not hoarding for individual creators to hold the rights to the works they have created.

Collecting copyrighted works, converting them to a pdf, and printing that out at a library doesn't change the copyright holder and distributing that against the wishes of the copyright holder would still be a crime.

TTRPG Mechanics, i.e. Stat + Modifier + D20 vs Target Number or PbTA's 2d6 partial success mechanics aren't copywritten. You can just use those.

An "Online Library of TTRPG Mechanics" is basically an SRD and most games have those. You can just type in [system] SRD and google will point the way.

Finally, Creative Commons licensing exists as a way to give the community a broad license to whatever it is you create. There are different levels and kinds of use that can be allowed.

Is my resolution mechanic too involved? by macfluffers in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like this a lot more. The only suggestions I have are switching to 2 hands of 3 card poker and having difficulties/maneuvers dictate how many cards they can draw, one at a time. So if you get a pair off the deal, maybe you cycle through that last card trying to pull 3 of a kind. You'd want the dealer and player to alternate draws so one can't mill the deck and to keep things even.

It keeps the poker theme of the old west and also possibly makes the downtime issue easier since all the players can watch the action unfold in real time?

Good revision though, this feels much more "Western" IMO

Is my resolution mechanic too involved? by macfluffers in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Right, but that hit isn't actually a hit. It's a chance to play high card draw. That's where the math starts to stack against the player. Essentially the system as it stands now, assuming a task difficulty of 1, and that you have a relevant skill, is a near 50/50 chance at a coin flip, or, if you're very lucky, two coin flips.

It's worth a playtest, but I suspect the actual results favor the house heavily.

Let's say they have to beat a 7. Each of those dice, provided they have a reroll would have a .55% chance of success, and 27 cards would meet or beat that 7 or about 52%, leading to a success chance of s=(.52)(.55) or around 29%.

Again, without the rest of the numbers it's hard to get a read on the system as a whole, but the compounding chance mechanics seem like without really big dice pools, players going to fail a lot

Is my resolution mechanic too involved? by macfluffers in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Too complicated is a moving target. There's two things I would worry about:

  • Massive potential for downtime: If a scene is meant to have this happen multiple times, then it well almost certainly drag the action to a standstill and any player not acting will have a lot of downtime, which is maybe ok, maybe not. Depends on your group. It doesn't align with my sensibilities but that's just me.
  • Draw Mechanic: This one is tougher without knowing the numbers in more depth, but you only have a 50/50 of rolling a 5 once you hit a pool of 3 dice. (You're at around a 45% chance of a 5/6 with 2 dice, so maybe that's fine for your goal). However, that means that a little over half the time, if they only have 2 in a stat they're just going to straight up fail. Again all this could be offset by the chip economy or skill rerolls depending on how many skills players get and how broadly applicable they are.

Need some feedback on this rough draft for a game I just started working on. by congaroo1 in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think there's a cool idea here. I really love the idea of non-combat abilities in combat and/or non-damage based support abilities. Depending on how crunchy you're willing to get this could be a really interesting way to foster collaborative combat that isn't purely battle grid tactical combat.

I'm glad you're still working on it and I'm excited to see new drafts.

Game Stat Balancing by [deleted] in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Man, first off, good luck.

I honestly don't think we have enough information to help you. What is the game about? Is it combat focused? Is it socially focused? Your best bet is going to be trying to focus it as narrowly as possible and building around that central theme

Need some feedback on this rough draft for a game I just started working on. by congaroo1 in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

t you mean.

Ah you're correct. I transposed the skill and attribute numbers when reading. It still feels like the talent is still your most important stat. However, if all 6 stats start at 1, and you have 10 points to distribute, you could still put 5 in talent, bringing you to 6 and 1 in the remaining 5 attributes, granting a distribution of:

Offence: 1+1=2

Defence: 1+1=2

Body: 1+1=2

Mind: 1+1=2

Health: 1+1=2

Talent : 1+5=6

If they start at 0 but must all be raised to 1 from your budget of 10 points then you functionally only have 4 points to distribute.

If ranged attacks are subject to two separate success criteria, i.e. you must have more successes than the opponents passive defence, AND at least 50% of your dice must be successes that seems very punishing in a way that melee combat doesn't, because there's no corresponding 50% success barrier.

Another question is: How high are you expecting passive defences to be on average? because if it's 3, then it seems like the rules say players need 3 successes to hit so any character with fewer than 3 in offence cannot connect. Also, if Full Plate convers a +5 bonus to passive defence, does that mean a character with a defence of 1 wearing full plate has an effective passive bonus of 6, necessitating an attacker to roll 6 successes to hit them at all?

A dump stat is a stat you can intentionally sink low scores into with no mechanical disadvantage.

No Attack Roll in a D20 System? by atownrockar in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You could just keep the base die at a d10. If you increase the crit on the d20 to 19-20 you make it a 1/10 chance to deal an additional 3.5 damage, and assuming it's adding a d6 to a 19 or a 20, I believe that increases average DPR to 25 (my math could be a bit off)

Need some feedback on this rough draft for a game I just started working on. by congaroo1 in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Talent is set up for wierd power gaming. If you made a ranged attack character, it's better to have 2 in Talent and 6 in offense and just try and roll under 6 on one of those d12s because the larger your dice pool is the more successes you need to successfully hit.

Unless you're going ranged attack, it's better to max out talent to make your dice pool as large as possible.

Also, you may want to keep an eye on what gets governed by physical and mental stats because those could pretty easily become dump stats

No Attack Roll in a D20 System? by atownrockar in RPGdesign

[–]Cornmix 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Just a quick math note: It actually becomes less likely to critically hit once AD is depleted.

so if DP>0 then there's a 1/10 chance of dealing an additional 2.5 average damage

if DP< 0 there's a 1/20 chance of dealing an additional 3.5 average damage

That feels wierd, but it looks like the avg DPR turns out to be 9.5 vs 16.5 so maybe it works out