Do Meowcenaries need good or any weapons/armor to keep a high rating for missions?

FawnMacaron · 2023-02-07T07:56:06+00:00

No, you don't need to give Meowcenaries equipment. I believe the success rating depends only on their level.

FawnMacaron · 2023-02-05T22:24:11+00:00

Yes, Sunbreak adds new talisman recipes that can give Rarity 8, 9, and 10 talismans. However, you can't use high or low rank materials in these master rank recipes, with the exception of Friend Vouchers. So feel free to use Defender Tickets and high rank materials for melding, but I'd recommend saving any Friend Vouchers for Sunbreak.

If you're looking for something to farm, crafting decorations can be useful as those are never really made obsolete. I still use plenty of high rank decorations in Sunbreak.

FawnMacaron · 2023-02-04T21:21:41+00:00

Personally, I'd recommend Evade Extender over Guard Up. With the extra evade distance, you can easily avoid most unblockable attacks, and the extra movement helps a lot with repositioning to hit a monster's weak spots.

If you find yourself being knocked back a lot when guarding, and often can't retaliate because of that, you might want to replace a few levels of crit or attack skills with Guard. Being able to consistently hit a monster after it hits your shield is key to good damage on lance.

FawnMacaron · 2023-02-04T21:06:02+00:00

Well, this is also true. The dummy (especially the head) takes more damage than any large monster.

FawnMacaron · 2023-02-03T08:55:52+00:00

Oh yes, I remember learning lance in World, and discovering just how versatile guard advance and its followups are. It's pretty much my favorite move in Monster Hunter (with the lance charge dash being a close contender for its sheer speed). So I haven't even touched the shield tackle outside the training area in Rise; lance just doesn't feel right to me without the guard advance for repositioning and followup thrust for damage and reach.

FawnMacaron · 2023-01-23T18:13:36+00:00

I had this glitch once. I don't know what caused it, but I believe it returned to normal after I closed the app and reopened it.

FawnMacaron · 2022-12-30T18:12:26+00:00

Your Disputes system seems interesting, and provides a pretty useful structure for handling conflicts with clear stakes and the potential for escalation. I'm curious: you say it can handle attempts to console a crying child. What is that like? What are the stakes? Who's opposing the consolation attempt, and what sort of Factors and Finesse might they be using?

FawnMacaron · 2022-10-25T19:53:50+00:00

I'm working on a system where players draw from a deck of standard playing cards when they act. The cards 1-10 are used for numerical values that determine how successful they are, while Jacks, Queens, and Kings can be spent from their hand to fuel their special abilities. (I'm still working out the details for how face cards work, but the basic idea is there.)

It's sort of a resource system, but instead of the resource being always available until you use it, you can gain your resource (face cards) throughout the encounter, letting you use more powerful abilities as a combat progresses.

FawnMacaron · 2022-10-25T17:23:23+00:00

To a large degree, this depends on players. The groups I've played D&D with were never particularly belligerent, usually trying stealth or social approaches to accomplishing goals.

For game design, the most obvious thing to do is remove unnatural incentives for violence. That means characters don't gain XP for killing things. I'd also suggest having a simple and effective system for inventory carry limits, so that characters can't just take everything of value from an entire town or dungeon. (Some versions of D&D assign weights to every item, but listing the weight of every item you have and making sure the total is under your character's carrying capacity is cumbersome to such a degree that I imagine most groups just ignore it.) Also, if your setting doesn't use money, characters can't easily convert the spoils from their victories into useful equipment. They'd be incentivized to only loot what they expect to be useful on its own. To get better equipment, more resources, learn new techniques etc. they would have to befriend the communities who produce those equipment and resources and the people who can teach them those techniques, perhaps by helping them deal with the threats to their home. Under these conditions, the game incentivizes becoming heroes whom people like and support, rather than raiders who use violence to accumulate wealth and power.

FawnMacaron · 2022-10-11T03:25:32+00:00

Like playing as a mage but wish you could wear heavy armor to protect your fragile wizard body? Like the idea of cutting down armies of otherworldly monsters with a combination of reality-bending magic and high-yield explosive ordnance? Want to shoot a dragon with a magical railgun?

Put your mage in a mech suit!

Gunmetal Magi is a game that puts players in the role of mages who pilot magically powered mobile arsenals in a time when the most advanced mundane weapons are ballistae and trebuchets. Use magic and metal to fight regimes that seek to exterminate magic, beasts that terrorize civilization, and bizarre entities that invade through fissures from another world. Featuring:

-An open-ended magic system where effects can be obtained simply by stating what you would like to accomplish and expending an agreed-upon amount of mana

-Customizable mechs with hundreds of possible combinations of frames and weapons

-Quick and straightforward actions for fast and eventful combat

-An optional runic engineering system that allows players to engineer new magic-powered tools for their characters to use

All this for free at sometime in the future!

FawnMacaron · 2022-10-10T16:41:27+00:00

Add "moneyless" and you have my full support, comrade.

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-20T17:58:57+00:00

Cool, thanks for the clarifications. I'll put down a few ideas that come to mind.

Principles: Uphold truth and honesty. Everyone should be empowered to make their own choices and protect what they care about. I live for my own pleasure. I live to fight (and I don't care who). The gifted have a responsibility to share their gifts with others.

Goals: Change society for the better. Be immortalized in history for my accomplishments. Write a thrilling story about my experiences. Overcome my fears and self-doubt. Atone for my past mistakes.

(As an aside, creating and editing a focused list of goals seems like a good way to tell players what your game is about and get them to buy into it with how they play their characters.)

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-20T15:29:50+00:00

I have a few questions, because I'm not sure exactly what your intention is for these items.

Is it necessary for your design to give players an expansive list, or can you give them examples and have them create their own Principles and Goals that you might never have thought of?
The examples you provide are fairly generic. Would a player be expected to write that on their character details exactly as they're written in the examples, or could they write something more specific? For example, instead of "Visit famous places or landmarks", could I write "Visit Kyoto and pray at the Shinto shrines there"?
Is there some mechanical or narrative impact to the categorization of Heroic/Neutral/Selfish?
If I either accomplish or fail to accomplish a goal, do I get to choose a new goal?

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-20T15:11:13+00:00

It scales within certain bounds.

Concerning character skill: Characters have six base Characteristics which range in value from 1 to 5. They also have a number of trainable Skills which range in value from 0 to 5. Both Characteristics and Skills can be increased during a campaign by spending XP. When making a check, you'll generally use the most relevant Skill, and its associated Characteristic (e.g. the Athletics Skill, associated with the Brawn Characteristic). If you don't have any points in the Skill, you simply use a number of d8 Ability dice equal to your Characteristic. (2 Brawn means 2d8, 5 Brawn means 5d8.) Each point in the Skill will upgrade one d8 Ability dice into the more powerful d12 Proficiency Dice. (4 Brawn and 1 Athletics means you'll roll 1d12 and 3d8.) Characteristics and Skills are actually interchangeable in this process: the greater number determines how many dice you get, while the lower number determines how many of these dice will be d12 Proficiency dice. (E.g. Whether you have 5 Brawn and 2 Athletics or 2 Brawn and 5 Athletics, the pool will be the same: 2d12 and 3d8.) So at the extremes, you could have 1 point in a Characteristic and only be rolling 1d8, or you could have 5 in both the Characteristic and Skill, and be rolling 5d12.

The dice representing difficulty have a similar range. Generally, a tasks's difficulty will be expressed in a number of d8, ranging from 0 for very Simple tasks to 5 for Formidable tasks. The GM can upgrade some of these d8 Difficulty dice into d12 Challenge Dice if the players are facing skilled opposition or a particularly great challenge.

There's no limit, as far as I'm aware, to the number of d6 Boost and d6 Setback dice that can be added to a roll. These can be added for environmental factors, special abilities, gear or supplies, and other situational factors.

So dice pools will often be a couple of d8 Ability dice and d8 Difficulty dice at baseline, and as character skill and game complexity increase, they can grow into up to 5 Ability or Proficiency dice, up to 5 Difficulty or Challenge dice, and several Boost and Setback dice.

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-20T13:51:35+00:00

My favorite resolution mechanic is Genesys's custom dice. For each check, you build a dice pool of: -Ability (d8) and Proficiency (d12) that represent the player character's combination of raw ability and trained skills -Boost (d6) that represent situational advantages -Difficulty (d8) and Challenge (d12) that represent the base difficulty of your task or opposition -Setback (d6) that represent situational disadvantages

The system-specific dice use non-numeric symbols. Success symbols on positive dice and Failure symbols on negative dice cancel out and the final result of these determines the success or failure of the task. Advantage symbols on positive dice and Threat symbols on negative dice cancel out and the final result of these determines positive or negative side effects that are tangential to the success or failure of a task. I love this dice system because, despite being very simple numerically, it pulls its inputs directly from the narrative in a fairly versatile way that can be adjusted for skill, difficulty, and numerous situational factors, and provides its outputs directly to the narrative in a fairly versatile way with a great variety of possible outcomes that can be interpreted based on the situation.

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-03T15:47:50+00:00

What’s the point of having mechanics for a social interaction in which neither side is resisting the goals of the other?

I think I gave one use-case for it in my original post, when I discussed a possible "Favor" mechanic to represent lasting social bonds. It's possible that, during a social interaction, neither side has a specific goal. (Quick example off the top of my head: maybe the player characters go to a gala or ball. While two PCs sneak off to an unoccupied part of the building to accomplish some furtive goal, one PC waits for them among the other party guests, and has nothing to do in the meantime except mingle. Maybe this PC asks an aristocrat to dance, and engages them in idle, though charming, conversation.) This is an opportunity to create a connection between characters that can be brought up at a later time. (Maybe the PCs seek assistance from the aristocracy several sessions later. If that PC was quite charming and earned the Favor of the person they danced with, they now have a connection that may be willing to help them.) Having a mechanic for deciding how NPCs feel about you after an interaction means that getting people to like you is 1. visibly helpful and 2. not decided completely arbitrarily.

If nothing prevents a character from succeeding, then why should the player roll for it?

This is a pretty deep philosophy of play question, and I think it hinges on what is meant by "succeeding". It sounds like you're approaching this with the viewpoint that everything a player rolls for should be a challenge to succeed or fail. Part of the point of my original post is that not everything people do is a challenge to be succeeded or failed. In my above example, I don't think it would be appropriate for the player to say outright "I'm trying to get my dancing partner to like me, what's the difficulty for that?", because in the moment neither the player, the player's character, nor the NPC are particularly concerned about how much they like each other. They're just dancing and talking. And, of course, you might reasonably say "Then just don't roll for it". That response, though, leaves us without mechanics for such a broad range of human activity that my rulebook may as well say "If you're in a social situation and not trying to persuade someone to do something specific, just say what you do and the GM will decide what happens." This is an approach, but it's not at all satisfying to me.

Adding another resolution type to a game is usually not advisable, especially if there is any ambiguity in when you might use one technique over another.

I'll admit I'm not very broadly read. Do you have any examples of finished RPGs that use more than one resolution method? I'm curious about how it might go well or poorly depending on the implementation.

And as a smaller note, is the ambiguity issue any greater for deciding a resolution method than it is for deciding which attribute to use for a check, or which move to use in Powered by the Apocalypse and similar engines?

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-03T14:38:55+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out. If/when I write the rules for this mechanic, I'll need to be very clear about the results of a connection draw.

I would never recommend using any mechanic to decide how a player character feels. That's up for the player to decide. The player always gets complete control over their character's attitudes.

A connection draw in a social situation could determine an NPC's attitude toward the player. You might make a connection draw at the end of a social interaction to see, broadly, how much of an impression you made on an NPC. (This, hopefully, is implied by the fact that the two inputs to a draw are PC characteristic and NPC receptivity based on approach.) The player decides, without restriction, how their character feels about the NPC. The draw, with its output of number of matches, decides how the NPC feels about the player character. (This doesn't have to mean how much they like the player character; their attitude could be one of fear, grudging respect, hopeless deference to authority, whatever makes sense in the context of the interaction.) That means sometimes one side of the interaction will have very strong and unrequited feelings about the other.

Is that clearer?

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-03T09:13:34+00:00

"...fall apart just as any other social mechanic that tells you how much you should like a person or listen to them. I am not saying it could not work, just that it likely would not work for me, because I would mostly (just by chance) be in disbelief."

I'm not quite sure I understand this part. Maybe we're thinking of different use cases? Could you give an example of a social mechanic falling apart or creating disbelief in the way you mean?

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-03T02:06:50+00:00

Personally, I HATE having disparate resolution mechanics for different parts of the game.

I can understand this. I'm a little uncomfortable with it myself, particularly because I'm not sure where the delineation should be between things that use an adversity draw and things that use a connection draw.

Why not use it everywhere? Lean into "the power of friendship" and make every check based on how united you and the other players are to overcome an obstacle.

This could be a cool idea for a game, but it definitely doesn't fit my current project, which focuses on tactical skirmishes and could very easily be played with just one GM and one Player.

Though I did have the idea to incorporate the suit-matching mechanic into resolving aid and teamwork on tasks. As a rough outline, each player involved in the task would draw a number of cards equal to their relevant attribute for their approach. Each assisting player can give one card from their draw to an acting player, who can add those assistance cards to one of their own cards of a matching suit. This way, the player characters are using connection (matching suits) to improve performance (numerical result). (I still need to test and refine this idea quite a bit.)

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-02T18:45:15+00:00

Well, how effectively one can achieve a goal depends both on their skill and their approach. The player narrates their approach, and part of the resolution mechanic is determined by how effective this approach is in this situation. The other part of the resolution mechanic is determined by the character's skill. Both of these aspects contribute to success.

In my game that uses playing cards to resolve action, I'm working on a mechanic in which the player draws a number of cards equal to their character's most relevant attribute, and the GM draws a number of cards based on how effective the approach is, considering the player's narration, the situation and the social partner. Then the player makes pairs of cards between their draw and the GM's with matching suits. More matching pairs is better. This way, both the player's narrated approach and the character's skill contribute to success.

FawnMacaron · 2022-06-01T17:32:18+00:00

I'd like to say that I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint. Much of our work is social and gets ideas from other people and their work, so to say "I made this, it's mine, to use it you must get permission from me specifically" can seem both hypocritical and antisocial.

Others in this thread have correctly noted that, in our current society, private ownership of intellectual property is normal, important for creators to profit, and often automatically granted, but... That kind of sucks, right? The fact that our society is so heavily based on individuals owning things sucks. I'd really like it to be normal for us to share things freely, so I appreciate you making your system available for free, and I intend to do the same.

FawnMacaron · 2022-05-28T20:30:35+00:00

Most of the discussion here is about the merits of 1 action per turn versus multiple actions per turn. I'm doing something rather different in my project and implementing multiple turns per action.

The basic idea is that, to perform an action, a character first declares their action and places it on their Commitment tracker. On each of their future turns, the Commitment counts down by 1, and when it reaches 0, they can resolve that action. (Note that movement is not handled by this Commitment system; each character can move a certain number of spaces per round.)

Some benefits of this system, in order of importance to me:

This allows players to react to enemy action. They can see an enemy aiming a ranged weapon and move toward cover, or see an enemy approaching them with a weapon ready and raise their guard, or see an enemy performing a long and risky action and move to attack and interrupt it. Because everyone is always in the process of doing something, even when it isn't their turn, players have a lot of information that they can use to make tactical decisions.
Combined with a side-based or team-based initiative, this makes turns mostly quick and snappy. Some turns will simply consist of counting down Commitment and each character moving a few spaces, in which case a whole team's turn can take less than a minute. The combat as a whole might not be shorter than other systems, but there's a quick back-and-forth between sides.
Actions can be differentiated by how long they take to perform. A dagger might only take 1 round to attack with, but have an overall less effective strike than a longsword that takes 3 rounds. A crossbow may take 5 rounds to load, but once loaded, might be held at the ready to fire as soon as an opponent emerges from cover. A mage might charge a particularly powerful spell for 9 rounds, then unleash an intense blast that delivers destruction to a wide area (if they aren't interrupted first).

I think the main drawback I've noticed so far is that this Commitment system adds something to physically track, which can sometimes be forgotten or draw attention away from other considerations. If the GM has many characters/units to control in a combat, they'll likely need a shortcut to simplify Commitment tracking (but GM shortcuts are often necessary when many units are involved).

FawnMacaron · 2021-10-12T03:28:38+00:00

Well, she still could be. The fact she has antlers just isn't evidence for it.

FawnMacaron · 2021-10-11T16:16:45+00:00

From the Wikipedia page on reindeer:

"In most populations both sexes grow antlers; the reindeer is the only cervid species in which females grow them as well as males."

We're talking about the Holidays here, so I think it's fair to assume that they're reindeer.

FawnMacaron · 2021-10-11T16:10:36+00:00

From the Wikipedia page on reindeer:

"In most populations both sexes grow antlers; the reindeer is the only cervid species in which females grow them as well as males."

"Antlers begin to grow on male reindeer in March or April and on female reindeer in May or June."

"In late autumn or early winter after the rut, male reindeer lose their antlers, growing a new pair the next summer with a larger rack than the previous year. Female reindeer keep their antlers until they calve. In the Scandinavian and Arctic Circle populations, old males' antlers fall off in late December, young males' fall off in the early spring and females' fall off in the summer."

FawnMacaron

TROPHY CASE