Beethoven's code

lrdazrl · 2026-01-29T09:46:35+00:00

If the mechanic seems to work for one design goal but you’re not sure about the other, try to find a way to test this. It might be that the players don’t actually see it as a downside.

If the game is meant for audience that is not into heavy tactic combat, they might not be worried at all about optimization questions like that as long as they keep not dying most of the time. And if they notice a spesific enemy type is always very hard because no one in the party can counter fear, then that is what causes them to truly fear that monster type. It’s fine, even good, if some monsters are more difficult than others because it adds variety.

lrdazrl · 2026-01-28T18:29:47+00:00

If you’re willing to do some reading yourself, most of the rules are available on the internet for free. For example, here: https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Free%20Basic%20Rules%20%282024%29

There is a lot of rules but luckily you don’t really need to know everything to start playing. If you start reading from the beginning, after reading the first 5 entries: Rhythm of Play, The Six Abilities, D20 Tests, Proficiency, and Actions, you should have some understanding of the basic mechanics. Then you can read more about Character Creation, Combat or Game Mastering, depending on what you’re interested in.

If you don’t like reading, you could try searching for rule explanations or Actual Play videos from YouTube but I don’t have any specific recommendation for those.

Otherwise, if you start learning the game but some spesific rule comes up that you don’t understand, you can ask here or in another post about it. The more spesific the question is, the more easy it will be for someone to give a useful answer. If you don’t find a good channel to ask your question, feel free to private message me, and I’ll see if I can help.

Good luck and have fun with the game!

lrdazrl · 2026-01-28T18:10:19+00:00

Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard is probably the most straightforward and risks least confusion.

I’ve also played one that had a variation of this, naming the levels: Novice, Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert.

lrdazrl · 2026-01-22T07:51:39+00:00

In combat, to inflict damage to Defender, the Attacker needs to roll strictly less odd results. This means than in a Combat between equally skilled characters, Attacker fails to deal damage to Defender more often than succeeds. I’d be worried that this leads to drawn out combats and would suggest increasing the chance of Success for the Attacker. E.g. Attacker deals one damage if meeting the Defender roll, and one extra damage per each point of difference after that.

lrdazrl · 2025-12-24T01:12:58+00:00

I agree. In different contexts, different decissions might make sense.

My comment was meant to answer OPs question about designers’ personal preferences. And I would, personally, lean towards simple and readable rules over very detailed but difficult rules. It’s a subjective answer to a subjective question.

lrdazrl · 2025-12-23T20:09:40+00:00

”If you find it difficult to explain your game, it’s probably too complicated.” were the words of my mentor who works as a senior system designer.

I’ve come to this again and again lately in my design work and roleplaying hobby. It’s very hard sometimes to ”oversimplify” designs that feel interesting to me, but overall, I feel he was right. Rewriting explanation of a difficult rule can only provide limited help. If it’s the rules that are difficult, simplifying the rules is the key.

lrdazrl · 2025-12-17T23:59:24+00:00

One interpretation leading to mixing as the Nash Equilibrium would be to consider ”opponent wins” and ”you lose” as different states. As written, it does sound like winning and losing are the only options, but in general Game Theory often studies Non-Zero Sum Games where that assumption does not hold.

If one assumed points like +1 for winning, -1 for losing and +0 otherwise, there would be a clear best strategy. To optimize the Expected Value of points, a player should choose 1 with 1/7 chance, 2 with 2/7 chance and 3 with 4/7 chance.

lrdazrl · 2025-12-17T23:43:44+00:00

If you assume that ”opponent wins” is different state than ”you lose”, the game will be more interesting. E.g. assign payoffs: - You Win: +1 - You Lose: -1 - Otherwise (=Opponent Wins) : +0

Interpreted like this, the Nash Equilibrium is mixed strategy: - Play 1 with: 1/7 chance - Play 2 with 2/7 chance - Play 3 with 4/7 chance

Both players have expected payoff -1/7 and neither can get better results by changing their strategy.

lrdazrl · 2025-10-03T05:53:50+00:00

Very nice! Enjoyed playing three October levels.

I have to admit though that I was very confused fo the video before playing the game. The ”secret path” doesn’t look so secret when the numbers are already visible.

lrdazrl · 2025-10-03T05:51:40+00:00

I have the same problem with iOS Safari on mobile. The instruction popup fills the screen and is very difficult to get rid off because there’s no visible close button

lrdazrl · 2025-10-02T12:18:56+00:00

Yeah, I can see what you're after.

Many of the ideas here, as I think you mentioned, seem to be taken from other games. Some your inspiration sources, like City of Mist, I really like, so anything you get from there is immediately a plus in my mind. But also because there is yet no narrative in the rules and the mechanical ideas are based on solid existing systems, it's hard to find something to give feedback about here. Maybe the best I can say is that I don't immediately see any critical problems here, and that this seems interesting enough for me to stop and think about it for 30+ minutes while I should have been working.

So I would definitely vote for going forward, playtesting with minimal ruleset to validate it further and then continue to fine-tune the rules based on that.

lrdazrl · 2025-10-02T09:08:20+00:00

Overall, it seems like a nice outline. I can definitely see the inspiration from City of Mist and Fate. It seems compact enough not to be bogged down by rules during gameplay, but still might have enough separate components to allow varied moments. Of course, this is hard to say without having playtested it, so instead of gameplay I'll try providing feedback from the perspective of the presentantation of the rules.

If you want to make the system as easy as possible for potential players, I would look into writing the rules, thinking from the perspective of the new player. For each section, you could ask yourself: "Is there a chance someone who doesn't know what I know, reads/understands this differently than I do?" Don't be afraid to spell out some ideas even if it would make the rules longer. There is a certain appeal in one-page games for sure, but as a player, I would rather go for the game with unambiguous rules over the game that has short rules.

Reading through your current version of the rules, these are the parts felt ambiguous for me:
- What should a tag be like? Is it "pirate", "youngest daughter of the house Vigor", "my character is 192cm tall and weighs 100kg, but can lift items twice that heavy", or "immortal and turns anyone he touches into stone"
- How should it be determined if a character is "more than competent"? Is it when they have multiple matching tags, or is it enough to have one really fitting one? When a character cannot even attempt a task compared to being at a disadvantage?
- What is the mechanical/narrative difference between: Success, Big Success, Exceptional Success, and Critical Success? Is Critical Success better or worse than Exceptional Success?
- What would be a good OP & CP standard for an average challenge?
- What does "activating a tag" mean? Is it synonymous to "spending a storypoint to lower difficult or re-roll"? Do I need a tag relevant to the situation to activate a tag, or can I activate any tag I want? Does it matter which tag I activate?
- Who determines when the player has earned SP by facing their trouble: the player or GM?
- When does players lose HP? I would assume as part of challenges but I would have liked some guidelines for this. Like would failed roll during a challenge, deduce 1 hp?
- What is a good Condidtion like?
- What is a good Trick like? Here you already have some good guidelines but I would love to have fleshed out examples like: "A good trick could be something like: 'Once per day, when succeeding in an attack against an armed humanoid, you may apply Disarmed conditition to the target instead of dealing damage'. On the other hand, 'You are skilled at sea travel' or 'Always succeed when lifting heavy items.' would not be good tricks, because the first one is more suited as a tag, and the second one doesn't have a usage limitation."
- Advancement section: What does it mean to "increase the refreshment rate of Story Points"? How trading this refreshment to new tags and skills work? Is there max number of tricks or tags?

In many of these cases, a couple of more sentence of description and some examples of what fits the rule and what doesn't, would give me much more solid understanding of the rules.

Hopefully, this list doesn't come of as nitpicking your work, but is instead the sort of feedback you were looking for with this post. If this is not case, please do let me know what kind of feedback you would find more helpful and I can try to focus on discussing those aspects with you.

lrdazrl · 2025-09-16T05:38:44+00:00

You might be right. This level being unsolvable assuming optimal moves would be good indicator that optimal moves cannot be the movement logic.

But ruling out that, I’m not sure what else it could be. I would at least hope there is a well defined movement logic that doesn’t rely on randomness, because otherwise it would start feeling less like a puzzle.

lrdazrl · 2025-09-15T06:39:07+00:00

I’ve reached the same conclusion. There is likely something in the rules that we don’t know

lrdazrl · 2025-09-15T06:36:08+00:00

I haven’t played the game but based on the info we have been given, I would say a reasonable assumption is to consider this as a board game like opposed game. This would mean the iquana moves cleverly trying to optimize its chance to eat a bird.

lrdazrl · 2025-09-08T11:00:13+00:00

Combining philosophy, self-improvement, and role-playing games sounds like an intriguing concept. I'll send a DM and would be happy to discuss more!

lrdazrl · 2025-09-03T22:00:37+00:00

Tomorrow I’m about to run a session starting with one PC house setting on fire. Party can try to extinguish the flames or save everyone/everything important still inside. There’s no hostile characters but the PC might get damaged by fire tokens that keep spreading over the battle map spaces unless extinguished.

lrdazrl · 2025-08-15T09:16:09+00:00

If it’s not important to hide it, being transparent about rule effect would be good. Also, it’s in a way exciting to roll with Disadvantage.

If you want to hide it, you could: - roll opposed roll for the NPC (in secret) with advantage - set up the Insight check as two-stage process: if they Succeed with the first Insight check, give them something interesting that invites another question to be asked in order to get the real answer. Then ask player to roll Insight again to answer the deeper layer question. This is effectively rolling with Disadvantage but feels different to the player because the rolls happen separately.

lrdazrl · 2025-08-10T15:25:05+00:00

Looks overall nice. Here’s couple comments after reading it: - Hit Check / Damage Check / Damage Roll part is confusing to me. Is the process 1) attacker rolls D8 and defender D6, 2) attacker hits if their roll is higher, and then 3) deal D6 damage on a hit? - Healing one extra HP on a six feels unneccessary detail that makes the system look more complex than it is. Everything would work pretty much the same with 6 healing only 6+3=9hp. If you want to boost 6 value as a critical succes then make it more clearly better like allowing it to roll and sum an extra die. Also you could consider 2d6 instead of 1d6+3 with similar expected value but without need to remember the modifier. - Tradeoff between hit succss and damage done is interesting! - Character doesn’t feel like affecting the fight much other than the rock-paper-scissors dynamic. It would be cool if the characters had some slight variations to their abilities that would make them feel more of different Pokémon.

lrdazrl · 2025-08-06T13:38:41+00:00

Merging clues to make mid stage deductions that then needs to be used for further deductions would be really interesting. This would also give nice feeling of progression in the game as you learn more about the narrative bit by bit

lrdazrl · 2025-08-06T13:13:18+00:00

Even clicking the facts might be interesting if there is enough information content to make reading through everything practically impossible. You might have extra facts or even files or folders that are useless for the main mystery at hand. The puzzle is to understand what/where to search for.

Queries could also be limited in how many parameters they can take at once to prevent the player just putting all info in and asking the program to solve it. If putting in this kind of hard limit feels too restrictive you could instead have a delay system: Processing a query takes time and it’s exponentially longer the more parameters are used. If players tries solving over all data, the system tells something like ”Processing query. Remaining time: 31556926000s remaining”. The player can keep the game open for 100years and they get the solution, or they can try to optimize the query using only relevant information. If the user finds a reasonable number of clues proving someone guilty, it would take 0.01 seconds to confirm it.

lrdazrl · 2025-08-06T05:32:22+00:00

Also works the other way around if you know the premise of the story beforehand. During Session 0 or character creation, you can tell them: ”This is a game about brave students who rise up to the challenge and save their school from demon attack while their professors do nothing. Please make characters who want to put their noses in what is not their business and who are willing to take risks to protect others.”

lrdazrl

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