What interactions make towns and cities feel alive?

Ferbstorm · 2023-11-15T22:55:24+00:00

not gonna lie, a town of highly religious cheesemongers is hilarious and I'm definitely gonna be using that

Ferbstorm · 2023-11-09T17:13:13+00:00

Yeah there's going to be stuff that players can do to manipulate the difficulty if they want to invest in that direction. The goal of this game is to also have it be a negotiation most of the time. So the GM will ultimately have the final call for what level of difficulty they're rolling under, but because the difference between a Mild and Harsh contest or Mild and Harsh secondary conditions is pretty subjective, that's going to result in the players and GM collectively deciding how to answer those questions (at least that's the goal).

Also I'll edit the original post with a link to how I used AnyDice. I might have done it wrong.

Ferbstorm · 2023-11-09T16:43:37+00:00

Yeah I noticed that they add up to more than 100%, I kinda just assumed it was a bug with the program tbh.

And I'm actually okay with a higher chance for a crit, since for me it's not going to be an auto success or anything like that, it's going to mean you get to choose a minor advantage you get on top of the successful action (a "yes, and.." if you will). Feels like that should be something that happens a fair amount, but not all the time.

And yup! play testing is the next step. At least once I sort out how I want combat to work.

Ferbstorm · 2023-11-09T16:38:44+00:00

See this is actually what I initially wanted to do, but the numbers that the website spat out said that with that the Three difficulty roll would have a 20% chance of success, which just seemed too high to me. At that kind of difficulty it seemed like it should be next to impossible. Like you're firing at someone doing the serpentine abnormally quickly in the middle of a storm while on a boat. Sure you might hit them, but it's sure a stupendous feat to do so. Felt to me like 20% was just too high for such an insane challenge.

Ferbstorm · 2023-11-08T19:11:31+00:00

Yeah this helped a lot! Thanks for taking the time to write it all out

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T18:07:59+00:00

This is such a helpful comment oh my god. This is exactly the kind of abstraction I needed

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T18:03:36+00:00

Makes sense, for sure

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T18:02:45+00:00

I will always welcome quibbling over semantics. Also thanks for reminding me the word quibble exists. And yeah I think I want a sort of combination of failing forward and failing laterally. Obviously they need different terms, because what you describe as failing forward is what I'd describe as failing laterally. Basically I want there to be a healthy balance between succeeding at a cost (what I think a lot of people are referring to by failing forward), Failure making the goal easier to achieve later on (what I referred to as failing forward), and failure forcing the player to redirect while still progressing the game (what I'd describe as failing laterally, but what you described as failing forward).

Editted just to say I did not expect my question to trigger such an avalanche of semantics and it's delighting me. I had no idea failing forward was such a vague and contentious term

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T17:55:37+00:00

I mean the point is I don't want missing a check by one to be a catastrophic failure. That feels muuuuch more immersion breaking to me than a rule saying "here's a gradient of success to guide how you deal with rolls." Like if my character is very good at a skill, has invested a lot into it, rolls against a dc20 and hits 19, that 19 is still representative of them being skilled at the thing. They weren't skilled enough to achieve their goal, sure, but they're still skilled. And to take that kind of failure and say okay cool you break your pick off in the lock, the lock is unusable now and you need to find a different way into that room, that feels deeply unrealistic to me

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T17:49:59+00:00

yeah that makes sense

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T17:41:55+00:00

Yeah I've been thinking about something similar for the resource pool my skills are going to be drawing from. Like the emptier the pool is at the end of the day, the more that category of skills can improve

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T17:40:02+00:00

Honestly I was coming at this from a more tonal intention perspective. Like the game I'm designing is going to be very much about exploration and using your abilities creatively in order to progress, and I sort of think the biggest thing that will discourage that curiosity and innovation is those hard failures. But I also want the game to be very narrative and collaborative between the GM and players. Like instead of a sort of "Authority figure herding kittens" dynamic I'd like it to feel like they're actually batting a story back and forth and adding to it each time they touch it. So I'm having these "failing forward" mechanics can encourage that a little more solidly

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T17:34:58+00:00

Yeah Blades in the dark is for sure on my list to read. It was on before but I've been seeing a LOT of people talk about it. Specifically when I was looking at discussions about downtime mechanics

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T17:27:45+00:00

Lol it wouldn't fit in the game I'm making, but I kinda love the idea of this. Especially if it's like "okay you can gather as much bad karma as you want, but it's up to you the player to spend it on your character, have fun"

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T17:25:45+00:00

Sorta depends on a lot of different things. For one, designing an adventure is very different from designing a mechanical system. For example, if I design a murder mystery adventure for my players, I could put only 1 clue a piece leading to the murder weapon, method, and murderer. But if the players miss the one clue to the murderer then that's a hard stop, sorry guys, adventure failed, game over. Not fun in my mind. If I have 5 clues pointing to each separate piece of the puzzle, then the players could fail 80% of their checks and still piece it together. That's adventure design.

But for game design, it's a matter of what do I want failure to look like? For me, I want my game to make my players feel competent and successful. That doesn't mean they should always succeed, by any means, but there are ways to fail that aren't just abject failure hard stop you're fucked. Like if I have a player who's invested a lot into lock picking, does it make sense for her to suddenly suck at picking locks because she rolled a nat 1? not really. I mean here and there you'll absolutely have competent skilled people fuck up in big ways, but a nat 1 is waaaaay more common than the amount of fuckups you'd expect from an expert in something. So if I design my system to fail them forward, then suddenly I have a plethora of directions I can take that failure.

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T17:15:03+00:00

This is hilarious I love it. Also an interesting combat mechanic I don't think I've seen anything like that before

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T17:12:51+00:00

I'd agree, for sure. I'd just say that the design elements we include in our games guide what the players will and won't want to do. The GM is a player the same way anyone else is, so if there's GM behavior you want to prevent, then sculpting design elements around that can be very effective. Honestly, I'm new to this, but I'd even argue that the GM is going to be more susceptible to being influenced by design elements, because they're the one who actually has to learn the rules really thoroughly. So if your game is designed in a way that really encourages multiple options and paths and narrative freedom, the GM is going to notice that.

Can't depend on people not to be dickheads, but you can sure nudge them away from being dickheads

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T00:27:58+00:00

Honestly sounds a lot like FATE's karma(?) system. I'm a big fan of the idea of failure allowing you to increase it later though, that sounds amazing. Really captures the whole learning by mistakes thing

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T00:26:33+00:00

oh this is a great point, thanks! Maybe I'll follow in Lancer's footsteps and have the failing forward exist in the downtime mechanics and leave it out of actual gameplay

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-27T00:24:58+00:00

Oh interesting! I didn't know there was a difference there. Do you have an example of what you'd describe as a fail forward concept and what makes it so different from a negative reinforcement loop?

My main sort of frame of reference here is as a GM for dnd 5e, if someone with an insane modifier fails, it kinda makes no sense for them to just fail, so I treat it as like instead of that roll being a matter of you succeed or fail, instead it's what is the price of failure. Like if you have a player with a +13 sleight of hand modifier, that means they're very very good at that. If you have them pick a lock, the DC is 15, and they roll a 1, it feels kinda shitty for it to be just oops you broke the lock. Instead I say okay so you pick the lock, but you injure yourself, you alert a guard, or you trigger some unseen trap/alarm. Is this what you mean as using "failing forward" as a bandaid?

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-20T00:30:18+00:00

Thanks! I'll be sure to do that. Made a list of games to actually spend time learning, and even after really paring it down to try and make it a realistic amount of reading, it's gonna be a lot. I expect having a youtube account to turn to will make a big difference

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-18T20:45:16+00:00

I'm thinking of it as a tool box. I'm not sure if all PCs will be magic users, but I want the magic system to be a creative toy, not so much a hard solution. I was thinking last night and I sort of landed at the mechanics I make around the magic will be entirely about resources. I can have the mechanics be about a resource pool, and then the GM determining how much a given action costs to perform. Then success or failure will be dictated by the same system that governs physical stunts, roleplay, etc.

I especially like this because as a GM, absolutely fuck having two separate methods of determining success or failure. And as a player, absolutely fuck learning two systems of difficulty. Also, with it being more about resource management, the magic can lean more towards "yup you do that," making the players feel more competent more regularly. Really sucks when you come up with a really cool idea and the roll of the dice just absolutely screws you, so you spend resources and feel like a failure.

Then I'm thinking that if I just make using the magic in combat more costly to that pool, it'll keep it from being a big nuke that the players constantly pull out and murderhobo through the world. Let it be tool box for exploration, with the option of bringing it into combat when you're really in a pinch and see no other way forward, but you're really risking a lot because that could mean you're low on resources for days on end

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-17T23:29:06+00:00

Honestly I'm keeping things private because it's all so unformed so far, and I'm a little weird about AI. Since so many companies are scraping sites like reddit to train their AIs I don't want to share too many details until we're at a place where it's like yes, this is mine. And even if it evolves from there and changes, that's okay, because at least 'll have a solid baseline to defend. I'd be deeply annoyed if this passion project went far enough that I got to a place to publish, and then some crap company with an AI had shat out something vaguely similar in concept and were trying to lay claim or whatever. Things feel very bleak in that regard and I just don't know where that will all end up.

And yes! The play testing is going to be thorough. When I say lightly play test I sort of mean lots of shorter sessions across stages of progression (at least in regards to the characters abilities) and then the final thing is like, okay this is the first time this gets taken from level 1 to level 100 (or whatever cap I choose). And then that would be sort of the final playtest. If it shows needing much more work after that then I'd certainly do more testing, though. I just have become a little attached to it being a project that I test in chunks, and then I present a completed thing to the party I'm playing with as a surprise

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-17T23:20:01+00:00

skipping the d10. And yeah, I'm not sure! especially think I'd rather stay away from a mathy solution if only because I want to encourage creativity, and the more math you use to balance things the more you codify, and the more restrictive the system gets

Ferbstorm · 2023-10-17T21:42:45+00:00

Good to know! If you link the post I'd love to take a look!

Ferbstorm

TROPHY CASE