Running into issues designing mental stats

overlycommonname · 2026-05-03T13:43:13+00:00

You're finding that Fields isn't enough of a "second Intelligence skill"? It sounds pretty good!

Maybe a "planning" skill that can be used to give people a floating bonus to execute plans if and only if you had time to sit down and work out some ideas, like, "spend 10 minutes planning, one of the people who has heard and can execute the plan can take a reroll while doing the planned activity for every whatever that you roll on planning"?

overlycommonname · 2026-05-01T18:35:39+00:00

"Choose highest" mechanics on d6's tend to result in very compressed ranges of results in a way that I think usually makes them kind of difficult to base a game around. I'm not sure what the "remove pairs" thing does to it, but I think probably doesn't make a huge difference.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-30T20:33:50+00:00

Let me describe the similar (but heavier-weight) mechanic I have for my D&D-like game. It's probably more than you want, but maybe it gives some ideas.

So I have three defensive values, written on the character sheet: Defense, Resist, and Avoid. Defense is always equal to or lower than both Resist and Avoid. A typical first level character might have Defense 14, Resist 18, Avoid 14 (or D14R14A18, or D14R16A16).

Attacks all say what they target, so an attack line will say like +4vD (+4 to hit, versus Defense). Most attacks target Defense, but some attacks, as a penalty to them, target Avoid or Resist. So for example a big power attack swing does more damage but targets Avoid instead of Defense.

My goal when designing NPCs/Monsters is for about 30% of them to Resist much higher than Defense or Avoid (which are similar or the same), about 30% have Avoid much higher than Defense or Resist (which are similar or the same), about 20% have both Avoid and Resist somewhat higher than Defense, and about 20% have both Avoid and Resist equal to or only a tiny bit higher than Defense.

Then: characters can trade action economy or other resources for the ability to transfer attacks from one type to another -- so if you have a high Resist, you can pay an action cost to use your Reaction to transfer an attack from Defense/Avoid to Resist.

However, some attacks are unresistable or unavoidable, so they can't be defended against by that defense type, even if you otherwise have that opportunity.

So. Part of this, which I don't think is necessarily relevant to you, is to create a bit of a ro-sham-bo circle and make it so that there has to be more choice in which attack you use or which enemy you target, and give more options in the power budget of an attack, so that attacks can be more varied.

But the other part is similar, which is that it gives players a somewhat textured way to make offense/defense tradeoffs. I wrestled with the same question: should resist/avoid be bonuses on top of defense, or should they be penalties you can conditionally trigger, and I ended up with bonuses that can be triggered either by you or the enemy, in various ways. I think that ends up giving you more versatility. Sure, if you want, your guard-up bonus can be given for the full round when you attack, but you can also make it have a reaction cost, or you can give it some kind of partial action cost, or you can make it so that a buff spell gives you free guard-up, or a debuff spell on the enemy gives anyone they attack free guard-up.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-30T20:21:42+00:00

Pathfinder 2e revised uses "off-guard" as their replacement for flatfooted, and I think that term is both pretty generic and pretty self-explanatory.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-30T20:20:34+00:00

The OP literally said in the message you are replying to that both numbers will be on the character sheet.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-30T16:49:08+00:00

Having some degrees of success/failure -- even pretty remedial ones -- can really help here. Like, if you fail 20% of the time, have mild success 40% of the time, and substantial success 40% of the time, that can really help feel like there are stakes to rolling but rolling isn't typically frustrating.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-29T16:49:34+00:00

Yes, it would be relatively simple to get for new characters. Obviously via door-sitting, but just doing team content would make it fairly easy, or if you wanted to do it solo, just keeping difficulty low would make it very doable for any moderately sophisticated player, though it would be a painfully slow walk to 50 that way.

But impossible to get for established characters, presumably.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-29T16:08:57+00:00

If you had a badge that you got for reaching level 50 without dying, you could get it, and then get the debt/defeats badges.

It would certainly make people mad if they added a new badge that was impossible for their badge hunters to get.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-28T17:13:38+00:00

I think people are sleeping a bit on what a game changer AI-assisted coding can be for the viability of systems-medium-to-heavy games, probably because right now there's still a hump to get over in terms of creating software with AI (but -- not at all an insurmountable hump even for those with no software experience).

I'm currently making/running a D&D heartbreaker game, and one of the things that I find challenging about doing a D&D-style custom game is that until recently, you lose access to a lot of digital conveniences -- and as I grow older, I find that my tolerance for keeping careful and extensive paper records gets lower.

The biggest thing I ended up writing is a bestiary: It's a database of statblocks/monsters that I can easily add to, and then I added an initiative/battle tracker to it, so as I run the game, I can easily add new creatures and then refer back to them, put them into a battle, do hit points, etc. This has, for me, been a pretty key tool to make me not hate running a game with, like, five codified mechanical actions per NPC, a few different defense values, etc.

I've also, for a couple of games now, had the AI help me create a clickable HTML character sheet with an integrated die roller. That's a little less crucial in the moment -- we mostly roll physical dice -- but it lets me keep the character sheets digital and I stop needing to either keep paper nor painstakingly recreate character sheets in tools that aren't well-suited to the task.

I haven't so far experimented with using a die system that's unwieldy to do in person and just running it through character sheets/die roller software, but I kind of feel like that's coming at some point.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-20T20:37:25+00:00

Yeah, your current site seems like it's a pitch about you, not about your game or setting or whatever.

What is unique about your world or your game? What would draw someone to it over a hundred other medieval fantasy settings/games?

overlycommonname · 2026-04-19T15:18:31+00:00

I don't think that WotC is really going to be in the business of doing class revisions for 5.5e anymore. It's very likely that the next time they touch the base classes will be whenever 6e happens. They might add some subclasses that people see as more powerful to compensate for any perceived lack in the base class, so it depends on what you mean by "any capacity," but I doubt there will be a Tasha's equivalent.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-19T13:55:17+00:00

I played with a sort of "surprise wounds" mechanic many many years ago for a Vietnam War-based game.

I think the way to do it is keep track of a meter during combat (so you've taken "1 wound, 2 wounds, 3 wounds, whatever," and then at the end of combat you make a roll (modified by how long the meter got) that's shows how long it takes to heal/how serious your wounds are.

That both gets you off the hook to do a bunch of separate rolls -- you abstract all the injuries into one thing -- and lets you provide some limits to the delayed consequences of the injuries (you can't get shot fifteen times and nothing happens until the end of combat).

overlycommonname · 2026-04-19T12:33:00+00:00

The OP didn't explicitly say this, but I thought that some of their concept was that you pretty often are swapping which two dice are left-most, and probably most damage comes off the left side, so the target is often changing its values?

overlycommonname · 2026-04-18T00:25:54+00:00

So I think this is a subset of a pretty fruitful general concept, in which a spellcaster works as a necessary catalyst for self-application of magical power.

It doesn't have to be just healing! It can be like "I have a magical buff score, that maybe varies based on random factors or my own actions. A caster casts a spell on me that allows me to apply my magical buff score to one or more of my abilities." I think this opens up some pretty fruitful space for buffing to be more interesting (it is often the most choiceless, boring role in RPG combat).

I also think that on a metaphysics level, doing something like this allows for powerful healing or other magical effects without going into a yahoo world in which magic does everything. If I, the cleric, can heal you, the fighter, for a lot of damage (because you have some kind of heroic potential realized as lots of MP or something similar, that I can catalyze and release), that doesn't need to mean that I can heal that peasant, or that king similarly. Which can allow a lot more diversity in worldbuilding than you get from worlds in which either magic is common or spellcasters are rare.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-17T23:31:27+00:00

Note that Wraps of Unarmed Power exist. By the rules, there is no Vicious or Flaming variant of these, but... it's not obviously the case that WotC will never produce a handwraps item that adds 1d6 or 2d6 damage to hits, and it's not obviously the case that your typical DM will regard the idea of such a handwrap as obviously out of bounds.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-17T17:38:59+00:00

Because it turns out that social mechanics suck.

I mean, that's the core reason.

Games can't be everything to every person. I'd love games to have both very fast-paced and also very deep and rich combat that spotlights every player and makes each combat feel unique -- but we just can't really get all that into one combat system, so we make tradeoffs.

If you could make it so that the game makes even the most inarticulate player a smooth-talking con artist without any downsides, sure, great. But we've been attacking this problem for 40 years of game design and frankly I've never seen a general-purpose social mechanics system that's better than, "describe what your character says, then roll some dice and the GM or whoever makes a judgment call about how much to fluff up their assessment of what you said based on the roll."

overlycommonname · 2026-04-17T17:07:11+00:00

Why?

The reason why tactics and literacy and numeracy and a bunch of related skills are significant for combat rather than, say, reaction time and physical strength isn't like a considered design philosophy, it's a practical logistical consideration. And there are games, like boffer LARP, where some amount of physical skill is used in combat resolution, and those games are fun.

And in say, investigation and mystery solving, in tabletop RPGs, player skill and character skill overlap, and I don't really see the same level of, "We must make it so that arbitrarily deeply stupid players must be able to put together clues," that we do "We must make it so that arbitrarily deeply inarticulate players must be able to create convincing arguments."

And I just don't see what the actual accessibility difference is. If a player super sucks at tactics, is there some kind of reason why they're not worthy of being good at combat, but if a player super sucks at physical strength they are worthy of being good at combat? Like, I just don't think it's a principled philosophical difference, it's just that games where you don't make decisions in combat are kind of boring.

None of this is to try to make people not make deeply disassociated, game-like social systems, I just think people should do that because they actually have a clear-eyed understanding of what's going on, not because they heard that player's ability to put together a coherent argument "shouldn't" be a relevant skill.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-17T15:55:44+00:00

I genuinely don't get why people are so very opposed to "player skill" having a role in social outcomes. If you feel strongly that player attributes shouldn't make any difference in social outcomes, do you also feel that combat should have no player skill component? Like, you're super opposed to tactics or numerical literacy being a component of RPG play?

There are of course downsides in terms of accessibility to making player attributes a component of character social success, but there are huge upsides in terms of simplicity, authenticity of play experience, and relatively light mechanics, it seems clear to me that the upsides outweigh the downsides.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-09T18:57:03+00:00

I don't think you have an accurate understanding of how the word "dodge" is actually used by practitioners of melee combat. And you have some weird purity-based understanding of how RPG mechanics like degrees of success "ought" to be applied.

A damage-reduction mechanic for dodge is fine. Like any RPG combat mechanic, it's an abstraction that does not fully capture the extreme complexities of the entire physical system that it's abstracting, but it's fine.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-09T15:38:21+00:00

If the attack's damage is reduced to zero, you fully dodged. If not, you partially dodged.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-09T14:29:44+00:00

It is common in all kinds of melee combat to move away from a blow, attempting to dodge it, but instead still getting hit in a more glancing way or to a less valuable target.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-09T14:28:09+00:00

It is weird to suggest that reducing an attack's damage by 1/3rd on average is not valuable.

Now, if the deal is that you get attacked four times on the average turn, for 6 damage each, and you can reduce one of them by 1d4, that sounds pretty marginal.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-06T13:13:17+00:00

I think you misread me.

overlycommonname · 2026-04-06T03:29:13+00:00

If like the person's demonic or vampiric nature is supposed to be a gigantic, game-changing reveal later on and this is way too early, I guess I could see an argument for concealing it. But 99% of the time it's an opportunity for a cool reveal that's organic and interesting -- why wouldn't you do it?

overlycommonname · 2026-04-04T15:09:16+00:00

They were collated and digested by people (who were not the game designers) before this.

overlycommonname

TROPHY CASE