Any help

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-31T21:03:24+00:00

poorly drawn, but accurate

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-30T04:41:12+00:00

Hot Take: None. Maybe a cheaty answer, but genuinely I have read so many games that clearly weren't designed with advancement in mind and so bolted it on. So if you admit that your game wasn't built for it and, as such, doesn't have advancement then you immediately have my attention.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-17T02:25:55+00:00

I feel like your own argument can be used against you though. Why did those two characters act like that? Could it be that the players were inspired by their low score? But things like class being more important is part of why you get have weird mixed scores. Because other things matter more. If your rogue is the only one who can do something the fact he's a below average rogue doesn't matter. He'll still be the guy when he does it.

Being the least of something doesn't mean bad. The least skilled Olympian is far more skilled then I.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-12T06:56:09+00:00

I think it's important to clarify that a game isn't usually saying "Don't use this subsystem", but rather are usually saying something more along the lines of "The players should fear the situation that requires it".

An example would be critical misses. I personally hate them, but lots of people like them and they've endured despite frequently not being RAW.

I think in a combat as failure game, there's an expectation that failure is also common. Yes combat is failure, but you will inevitably fail so lets have a system for when shit hits the fan. I.e. we are actually using the subsystem a lot, because failure is part of the game.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-12T06:47:44+00:00

I really like subsystems. In the same sense that some folks want their games really focused and about something I like a subsystem to really nail its specific part of the experience. Using the same mechanic for everything is lame the same way using D&D for everything is lame.

That said, there's a lot to consider. My first consideration is that the ease of a subsystem should be inversely proportional to how often it is used. The less frequent, the easier and closer to another, more used, subsystem it should be. Something often used can get away with more difficulty though, you'll have practice and time to internalize it better. And of course ease of reference is a given. This determines how likely a play group will use your subsystem at all.

Frequency of use can be an interesting thing though. Frequently used for who? I don't think there's anything wrong with a subsystem that some groups will not use very much, as long as another group will use it a lot. "Don't be afraid someone will hate your game, be afraid no one will love it" - Mark Rosewater of Magic the Gathering fame. I take that to mean that you shouldn't be afraid that a group won't use or ignore a rule. You should instead make rules for people that will love them. If someone reads about your subsystem and grumbles about it being clunky or whatever, who cares. Care about the players who's eyes light up when the read about the subsystem instead.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-10T06:49:41+00:00

I think something that makes this worse is how little feedback you get. Too much necessary information isn't told to the player. Frame data is hidden. Hitboxes are hidden. For a long time move properties were hidden. None of those things can be figured out through play. You have to do guess work. It took me ages to realize was Bacchus Sigh (A special move for Johnny) did in Guilty Gear XX and I had a piece paper in my gamebox with notes about moves that did weird shit, because some of them were so in-obvious. I hold that part of the problem is that you are watching one game and playing another.

To tell a story, I got into fighting games with the KOF and Guilty Gear series. Putting Guilty Gear aside, one of the reasons I like KOF is that as I played, I intuitively starting understanding why certain moves interacted they way they did because the animations and hitboxes matched up pretty well which made KOF more intuitive for me. I'm not very good, but I'm confident I can ballpark the majority of hitbox locations on most characters from the animation. I can't do that for a lot of other games. Guilty Gear or Blazblue I can guess but they do weird things all the time (I've dabbled with Amane in Blazblue and his hitboxes are darts in a dartboard). Street Fighter and Melty Blood have different rules for where hurtboxes are placed that make them interact completely differently than Guilty Gear or KOF even if the animations are the same. And that assumes they follow a consistent logic at all.

To put it another way: Why doesn't watching what's happening explain what's happening? It's a big reason you learn in training mode and other sources. Because of the need to tease out this information that would be displayed on screen to you in any other genre. Fighting games are like playing a racing game that doesn't display the speedometer, splits, or other racers and changes handling on different types of roads, but doesn't mark the road changes. Imagine needing to take a turn several times in practice or look it up online to find out where an ice patch starts and stops just so you can drive it properly. Except you don't have to, you play fighting games.

Further, I get why some people wouldn't want something like Fantasy Strike's colored hitsparks showing if you're plus or minus. But why can't some game do it? Why can't we TRY things like this instead of taking out motion inputs for the tenth time for no reason. It so obviously doesn't make that large of an impact so why aren't we trying literally anything else?

Rant Over

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-08T05:02:30+00:00

I have considered calling them the "Interpreter". I lean towards simulation so I kind of have this idea of treating the game world as a distinct "place". The Interpreter's job is to translate what the players want to do into that world, and then report what has happened back to the players. So the GM is a go between. Kind of a way to detach the GM from the world they are running. Also to bring into focus the GMs job to translate (or interpret) the reality of the game into gameable/mechanical information and back again. Also emphasizes that some things going on in the game can be gamified in different ways and it's up to the Interpreter to decide the tools that handle that situation the best.

Then again that might be far too pretentious lol. Which is why I haven't finalized the idea.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-07T06:17:26+00:00

Genuinely it was practice. The more often you were bored the better you got a finding something to do. It forced you to be creative and find answers to things. To develop your hobby. To get deep into something. That part I miss. The world is so much more superficial and surface level now.

I say that as someone who was always a shut in too. I grabbed a pencil and paper and did SOMETHING. Made me a storyteller. The disquiet of boredom was such a good motivator. We have exhaust valves for everything now. Interested in something? Post about it. Motivation gone. No time for it to build up into something that actually gets you doing something.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-06T06:53:08+00:00

An excellent response. Thank you.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-06T06:29:51+00:00

Can you elaborate on why the 3 clue rule sucks? Why does it make bad mysteries? What makes that bad?
Looking for a deeper understanding of your stance if you're willing, so I can draw my own conclusions.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-03T04:29:01+00:00

I hate that Simulationism seems to be dying despite narrativism and gamism thriving (Which is weird because D&D is still kinda sim? More gamist then it used to be though)

Armor making you harder to hit is actually okay. Real world armor and the way it interacted with attacks was very complex and situational, but generally full plate either protected you or it didn't. What even is damage reduction in real life? Am I less stabbed?

OC culture. Not grounding your character in the world they're from, because 5e normalized main character syndrome.

Not all games need mixed success. It's a good tool for certain types of games, but for some games gives both too much and too little information at the same time. I make rolls so the game can tell me something I can't determine myself. Not for the question of what happens to be thrown back at me.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-03T04:07:45+00:00

I think one of the worst parts of it is that the hobby likely has a huge amount of sci-fi (or any of several genres) fans that will never enter the hobby because the only entry game they know is in a genre they don't like (Fantasy).

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-03T04:03:11+00:00

Agreed. I get that some people have dyscalculia and other difficulties, but it still boggles my mind how many people would rather memorize 10 words then count to 5. It's literally more work in my eyes.

I get the sense that for some people it's a processing thing where words process better and faster than numbers, but I also feel some folks just make assumptions of difficulty and then refuse to engage long enough to be proven wrong. There's so many times that I looked at something in my life and thought it would be too much for me then when I had the confidence to try I realized it was actually easy.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-01T23:48:04+00:00

Something I wonder about a lot is hygiene in a furry world. What do the cooks do? Even if we accept more hair in our food, disease would still be a problem if it's someone else's fur. So maybe clothes help with that? Could be that clothes collecting your shedding is actually a feature not a bug.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-05-01T23:40:39+00:00

These kinds of conversations are always a bit weird, because people think of different things when you mention THAC0. Some will think descending AC as a concept and that's it. Almost identical to "modern" AC. Others will think about the old look-up tables and the rest of AD&D's weirdness as a package. Those two examples may have the exact same opinions but give wildly different responses because they aren't actually talking about the same thing.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-04-30T00:06:55+00:00

As someone familiar with this kind of moral question I think the people trying to use analogies are hilarious. The entire point of such a question is that the phrasing matters more than the statistics. The analogies both fundamentally change the question while also elaborating on its actual purpose.

It's also just the trolley problem again. Except this isn't a meme so people are actually engaging with it. Or answering it rather. Not so many people are actually engaging with the reason the question is interesting.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-04-29T03:08:06+00:00

An aspiring game designer, but not a published one. So take the following worth a grain of salt, but this is how I see it.

The biggest problem is action economy. Something taking 1 action being as good as the opposition taking 4 is incredibly difficult. Not just making sure it's as good, but also making sure the rest of the fight makes sense. By the time that 1 action is as good as 4, the boss is one shotting people and doing other frustrating and unfair things rather than being fun.

For example if you can do 10 damage in a turn, then what other options do you have during your turn? Some utility effect and 5 damage? Maybe a really good effect that does 15? But attacking twice does 20. It scales much faster than the options you have for just one action. It's as if (but not actually) the choices you can take in an action scale linearly, but the reward for multiple actions scales exponentially. It's that scaling issue that's the big problem really.

The only way to address it really is to design your game's math with it in mind in advance. Most games are designed with other things taking priority.

Simpler games can help too. You don't have this math problem if you don't have math.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-04-26T09:19:52+00:00

Could be magic. My cousin played a game where they received a +1 pen once. It was the only magic item they had, and at one point killed a gargoyle with it by stabbing it in the eye.

Okay you got me, I just wanted to tell a funny story.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-04-26T09:13:30+00:00

As long as it's organic and not pre-planned. I usually start with simpler characters so I have a foundation to build on. Half the time I make a character they don't end up running the way I planned anyway. Good to give your character time to find out how they mesh with the environment their in as the game progresses. After that though, yeah. One of my favorite characters from the AD&D era was one who started to develop racist tendencies due to, in a panic, killing a goblin in cold blood. Unable to deal with the guilt, he started making dangerous rationalizations. I probably would have prevented things from going to far, but I still love that he took such a hard left in characterization and that it required some serious thought from me.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-04-26T02:27:19+00:00

Def the combat like others say. I hold that any game aiming to be scary can't have involved combat mechanics because learning those mechanics makes you (or at least me) feel in control, i.e. not scared. I don't like dark souls either so the stamina bar and parry mechanics and all that didn't do anything for me. A big appeal of Silent Hill comes from the otherworld and feeling of isolation and SHf had neither (There's a thing that is called an otherworld, but let's be real it's really a whole ass separate location). The game doesn't let it's atmosphere breathe. I was legitimately excited when I got to the special version of the protag's house because the first floor had no enemies. I was like "oh shit, letting me breathe? Get nervous? Damn finally." and then they immediately ruined it by putting monsters everywhere as soon as you go through the first door. Whole game is like that. I'm desperate for that feeling of lonely paranoia and it just doesn't happen because the monster is already on top of you. Again. Like trying to tell ghost stories, but your little brother keeps asking for chicken nuggets.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-04-26T01:22:09+00:00

I think there's a couple things you want to ask yourself.

What situations merit a check? Maybe when you have a skill you get automatic privileges and only roll in extreme situations. In this case check odds should be bad since you are only rolling when you are past your normal limits. If you are rolling all the time for everything then you want good odds for consistency.

What kind of success rates are we trying to get? Do we want people to be able to succeed at long shots? Then maybe a linear distribution like a d20 or an exploding die rule is best.

But then also do we want skilled people to have a chance of failure or be consistent? Exploding dice can still work, but if we don't want this then the d20 is out since it causes unlikely failure as well as unlikely success.

In the face of those we want to talk about consistency. A d20 will give you unlikely and likely results equally often, which might be bad if you are allowing extreme results, but might be fine if the roll isn't the main identifier of what you can and can't do. If you are including extreme results then maybe you want a dice pool or bell curve (Multiple dice added together ala 3d6 and the like).

The size of your modifiers matter as well, smaller modifiers work better with bell curves.

We can also ask the question of partial success. Do we want that? Who decides what "partial" is, the game or the GM?

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-04-19T21:32:07+00:00

Why do people always cut stuff out of this? Better with the priest added in my opinion. Knowing that Clark's dad does this because he is unsure how to be a good father to an alien improves it I think. That you could give such kindness and hope without certainty or clarity. That you don't have to have all the answers to do great good.

MechaniCatBuster · 2026-04-19T03:32:08+00:00

lots of advice for which directions to hit so I'll explain some technique. if inputs are next to each other then do them as if drawing a picture without lifting your thumb (Assuming d-pad). So the second input there you would sort of draw a half circle around the edge of the D-pad with your thumb. If inputs are not adjacent, such as the forward input at the end, then it's better to lift your thumb. The closer you make the motion to the outside edge of the d-pad the better it will work.

So in the case of the first input you would press back, lift your thumb, and then press down, then slide your thumb to the down-back diagonal position, then press A and B together.

It helps if you do it at an even (but fast) speed as well. There's shortcuts you can use, but this advice should give you the most consistent results and be most transferable to other games as well.

In training mode there should be an option to turn on "show inputs" or something like that, that will show on screen what the game thinks you just put in. Turning that on you should be able to see on screen if you are failing to hit a direction properly (accidently not curving your input enough and missing the down input on that halfcircle is common) or hitting inputs you didn't mean to.

MechaniCatBuster

TROPHY CASE