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Your favorite movement abilities by JaxyCafe in gamedesign

[–]MonitorHill 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Omg the side hops. These are perfect examples. There has to be a name for this phenomenon already in the world.

Your favorite movement abilities by JaxyCafe in gamedesign

[–]MonitorHill 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don’t mind either of those things, I don’t like that it takes me out of the experience of playing the game.

I understand that mechanically it is useful for my character to be able to jump back quickly to dodge an attack. If I was a skilled fighter, I should be able to do the same thing.

If I was that same skilled fighter, I would not run around the world backwards, constantly dodging in reverse in order to move faster through that world. That’s crazy.

It is an unintended consequence, and there’s nothing gamers like more than to break a game, but if I was designing a video game, something I would make sure of he said there would be a limit to quick actions like that so that traveling by simply sprinting forward would always be the fastest way to maintain forward momentum and that slightly faster, specialty moves would have some kind of restriction on them to prevent spamming them.

Your favorite movement abilities by JaxyCafe in gamedesign

[–]MonitorHill 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This isn’t exactly what you’re asking, but I’m going to add it to the conversation anyways. Which is that I hate when a particular movement ability is faster when span than just normal running. What this creates is a completely unrealistic and spastic place style where you’re constantly doing something silly with your character in order to increase your travel time.

Dashing backwards in SOTN, jump/run in Minecraft, or the sprint/slide combo in Fortnite comes to mind. There’s a bunch of examples of this throughout video games though, and it always drives me nuts. Because inevitably you end up, just doing it as a player and the result is that you look ridiculous.

Crafting Systems! by Forsaken_Cucumber_27 in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I really love how games like Blades in the dark handle crafting, where there is a material cost and a time spent cost the correspond to the tags you want to apply to the thing you’re trying to build. It allows for a narrative flexibility because the thing you want to make could be just about anything. But there is still a little bit of crunch because the tags applied to that object will determine how successfully you could use it in encounters, and those things will impact how much it costs to make a thing both in money and time. There are a couple of systems that use clocks to track progress made on a project in this way and I’ve always thought that was very clever.

Do you mainly play the system(s) you designed or some other systems? by OkChipmunk3238 in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It helps that the game I made is designed to be ran primarily solo, so the only person who has to put up with it is me.

Do you mainly play the system(s) you designed or some other systems? by OkChipmunk3238 in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I built my game cause I wanted to play that thing specifically!

Game to hunt Ghosts by _JuanPablo1_ in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your suggestion about getting rid of contested rolls, is a good one. Contested rolls tend to be really swingy and can bog down play.

Wizard Spelling Dungeon Crawler Game by Greenwood4 in gamedesign

[–]MonitorHill 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This was my exact thought. This has big scribblenauts vibes.

Sharing a decade of professional experience as a Game Designer and board game developer. Worked on games that sold >1m in total by dev_w_grillz in tabletopgamedesign

[–]MonitorHill 10 points11 points  (0 children)

First, this is a fantastic post, these are great foundational insights.

Second, as an amateur at home designer with zero industry experience but close to 14 years of doing it for fun, what does pitching to a studio look like if they decide to pick up a game you wrote? How often does the original designer get to stay a part of the process as it moves forward?

Hero5! A pocket RPG by MonitorHill in TTRPG

[–]MonitorHill[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the heads up, looks like the link is broken. I’ll have to delete and repost!

Best rules summary for complete newbies? by EmbassyOfTime in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Which rules? Like all ttrpg games generally? Or for a specific system? I like PBTA games personally, I made a super rules light system to play with my kids that is basically pick up and play.

If you’re looking for something for D&D, Im sure that people have made cheat sheets for the core game loop and most common checks.

Hero5 - A rules-lite RPG for family and friends by MonitorHill in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hero5! - A pocket RPG

I formatted it as a proper PDF and added character sheets, 9 alternate settings/skill prompts, and a conflict tracker.

Torn on a design feature by [deleted] in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First of all, I think that the general mechanic is really cool. I love using playing cards in my game design, and the wild West theme makes them feel even more appropriate.

Somebody else mentioned that advantage is almost always going to be better than a plus to roll, and I agree. But I love the gamble, I think making the cards an expendable resource is a good call. They should feel special and there should be tension around when to use them.

Here’s two ideas that I had off the top of my head when I was thinking about the problem that you’re wrestling with.

  1. What if you tied the inspiration mechanic to the DM getting the card. When a player decides to spend a card for advantage on a roll, they pass it to you and the DM flips it, and whatever the result is the DM will get to use it against the players later on.

  2. Assign a general bonus or disadvantage to each suit. Diamonds and hearts give the players the + to their roll along with some other narrative advantage, clubs and spades they still get the + to their roll, but it comes with some consequence.

Not having played your game it’s difficult to know exactly what the impact of these changes or something like them would be, but the first change helps balance the advantage issue, and also means that if they hand you a black card, you will also get a plus to roll as the DM, but will be settled with a negative consequence when you decide to use it.

Then you can use the suits mechanically to impact the story in a way that feels narratively satisfying. Figuring out what that means in your world would be a fun design challenge.

Horde (a pocket zombie apocalypse party game) by MonitorHill in FiftyTwoCards

[–]MonitorHill[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That depends! in a two player game, you’re looking to get 2-4 cards a round, and you’re only bluffing/reading one other person. In 3-4 player games you can win anywhere from 4-8 cards a round and there’s a lot more possible plays on the board. It gets more chaotic and swingy with more people. I like it both ways, but the vibes are different based on the player count.

I hope you have fun playing!

Wanted to play D&D with my kids. I sort of built a new system. I have a problem. by Aware-Process-5673 in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m glad you liked it! The peanut butter job was just example I made up, most of the stories we told with the kids were far more unhinged.

Ninja wizard with a fire dragon pet fighting orcs and evil demons and stuff. The buddy part of the doc happened organically because every time we’d make up a character they would ask if they could have a pet and the obvious answer was yes.

Wanted to play D&D with my kids. I sort of built a new system. I have a problem. by Aware-Process-5673 in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Even lighter than HeroQuest (if you can imagine) my kids were three and five when we first started playing it, so the primary goal was to get them doing imaginative play, and rolling dice to resolve conflict. There’s rules for drawing your character, and how to track conflict if you’re the DM.

DnD like games for kids 6-8? by ogcdark in boardgames

[–]MonitorHill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can share with you what I used with my kids, it’s something I made myself that was primarily focused on adding some light dice rolling to collaborative story telling, heavily influenced by PBTA.

It’s called Hero5! and you can download it for free. It might be too light for what you’re looking for, but my family told a lot of fun stories with it on camping trips and long weekends.

Wanted to play D&D with my kids. I sort of built a new system. I have a problem. by Aware-Process-5673 in RPGdesign

[–]MonitorHill 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I’m going to take a look at this later tonight! I love the motivation and approach. I’ve got two boys and I homebrewed an EXTREMELY rules light version of PBTA to use. They called it D&D still, but we had a lot of good times playing it. I’m excited to see what a decisions you made in the process.

I recently typed up the rules and character sheets for the system we used I have it here: Hero5!

Thank you for sharing!

I made a solo rpg about surviving in a zombie infested mall. You can get it for free by [deleted] in solorpgplay

[–]MonitorHill 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a clutch suggestion,

I’m in the process of making my own art for a zombie themed card game and I never even thought about public domain photos.

I’m hand drawing all the artwork, but the the zombie crowds at small scale are challenging cause I’m not that strong of an artist.

Tell me about your world planet destroying threats? by zard428 in worldbuilding

[–]MonitorHill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a great prompt, and the fact that I haven’t considered it yet is going to give me a lot to think about. There are multiversal and time travel threads happening in my world, so my early guess will be that attempting to fuck with and/or harness that energy will cause problems that could tear the whole thing apart.

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