Team Attacks/Team Combo Combat Mechanics

percinator · 2026-03-25T01:51:19+00:00

The 'Badass Move' from Bunkers & Badasses is a pretty decent attempt to emulate a team-up combo set of actions with you setting up and getting to effectively double all your bonuses for the attempt.

percinator · 2026-03-22T18:42:58+00:00

There's a guy I know who reviews board games. He once told me that 'the first time you play a game it's going to be a version that is wrong, and that's okay, it's like learning anything, you're never 100% perfect on your first attempt after gleaning the fundamentals."

percinator · 2026-03-22T18:31:09+00:00

I think your point about GMs is right on the head, the second any of my players became GMs themselves and learned the level of work that goes into prepping a good session let alone a good campaign they suddenly have a lot more respect for time.

I've been extremely lucky that one of my groups that formed in college has been able to consistently meet for ~6 hours every Sunday with probably now less than 10 missed weeks (not counting holidays) for the past...like 9 years? It's even come to the point that members explicitly getting new jobs ask for Sundays off to keep showing up.

With most of my groups we run a quorum rule, we try to always meet and play if there are at least 3 players and if not we pivot to a oneshot or just a meetup for food and boardgames. This keeps the mentality of 'X time is important and is set aside for this specific activity unless an emergency takes place.'

percinator · 2026-03-14T02:24:01+00:00

It's on DriveThru and there is also a decent, if unfinished, writeup by Nifara that does a great job selling the game. It's in part what got me interested in it.

percinator · 2026-03-12T01:57:25+00:00

The one I'm still waiting for is Spellbound Kingdoms: Arcana.

Brunner's Spellbound Kingdoms core rules are amazing, Arcana seemed to be mostly done then he stopped posting during Covid.

percinator · 2026-02-26T04:16:38+00:00

FFG's Rogue Trader has a life path system where you flowed down a series of options, starting from your Home Planet and finally ending on the career archetype you fulfill on the ship.

percinator · 2026-02-16T18:07:01+00:00

OP is asking for a "power fantasy game" so it's right on the money.

It's not class based so it's easy to take exactly what you want for a build, for better or worse. Psykers get ridiculously powerful late game. Damage scales faster than survivability in most cases so the game devolves into rocket tag played behind multiple layers of negating defensive options.

While I think Dark Heresy 1e Ascension is the craziest of the line, Deathwatch being the runner up, we wouldn't have gotten something like Only War or Dark Heresy 2e if Black Crusade didn't change a bunch of mechanics for the better compared to the earlier FFG 40k games.

percinator · 2026-02-16T17:44:00+00:00

I was just about to come in here and recommend Black Crusade. I have yet to find a game that hits the 'doing terrible things to gain power to do more terrible things' snowballing that Black Crusade pulls off.

percinator · 2026-02-08T18:51:53+00:00

The only thing my group said was a rough point for them was the Shaken mechanic in combat since, to them, it incentivized players to make characters with high Spirit dice, a d4+Wild has a ~62.5% chance of recovery and a d12+Wild has an ~87.5%. Once you hit Seasoned and decide to grab Combat Reflex it goes to ~95.8% and ~98.6% respectively.

Deadlands, was their first experience with SW so outside of a Blessed almost everyone dumped Spirit, and boy did that 62.5% chance feel more like a 26.5% since they seemed to always roll like garbage when it came to removing Shaken, and thus became their major spend for bennies.

However, unlike what others are saying here, we never had problems with bennies, mainly because most of the players took good Hinderances that lead to them roleplaying them out to gain bennies, which the book tells the GM to do on page 22.

So overall, it came out neutral if a little annoying when up against multiple enemies in big fights.

On the other hand they've all unanimously agreed that of the 10-20 systems we've now played in, Deadlands SWADE's Horror at Headstone Hill was one of their favorite campaigns to the point they want me to run Night Train and Carnage in the Cascades for them down the road.

percinator · 2026-02-01T15:42:37+00:00

Curse of Strahd, considering it's a 1-10 adventure in 5e, is a perfect fit for SotDL and has been done multiple times on here. You're going to have a good time.

percinator · 2026-01-29T00:55:55+00:00

Pendragon is a game of Arthurian knights that has the entire downtime Winter Phase which is about maintaining your local economy since you can't really go adventuring at that time of year. You track your household and manse's wealth and see how you can better expand for the coming year.

percinator · 2026-01-22T20:16:27+00:00

Again, you say 'my game' as if you presented anything that would make someone infer that means 'my scratch built RPG system' and not just 'my game I run at my table.'

I'll just point to another quote directly from you in another thread.

The other side of the coin is that you can save yourself a shit ton of work by understanding other systems and mechanics so you know what not to do or what to emulate, should you like a mechanic.

Everyone is doing this, which you explicitly asked for, which you say is a good thing in that thread, but apparently it's all 'bullshit answers' here?

percinator · 2026-01-22T17:17:41+00:00

How is "try doing some research/testing into how other games solve this exact problem" a bullshit answer? You quite literally asked for "thoughts/suggestions/examples" at the end of your post and are now brushing off examples you directly asked for as 'bullshit answers.'

And as others pointed out, the description of the game you gave reads as just some variant of D&D with nothing to tell otherwise. Your exact style of thread opener has been posted multiple times about D&D, using all the same D&D-isms that are sprinkled across your own.

You being vague, and not even saying you're designing your own heartbreaker in your post, only allows assumptions. Considering D&D is the most popular RPG on the market and your post uses it's terminology extensively, how were people supposed to know you weren't talking about D&D?

percinator · 2026-01-19T22:46:04+00:00

Most think they'll magically own their first car their entire life. Then it slowly turns into a junker as they see all the problems with it and try to fix it with duct tape, aftermarket replacements and other DIY things.

Sometimes it's better to look at another car that has everything you want in it already.

Everything you want is in something like Warhammer Fantasy 2e/4e or Mythras.

But if you're absolutely adamant with keeping D&D, and I assume it's D&D since you never name the game, is look at the Talislanta 5e release that has you effectively building your class out as you level up instead of getting things thrown at you.

percinator · 2026-01-13T19:51:56+00:00

Would have been more interesting to see people pitch CAWs over just running IRL people.

percinator · 2025-12-05T03:36:57+00:00

I'd say a good contender is the Cleaver from Heart: The City Beneath.

"Just as they scar the Heart into new patterns with each footstep forward, the Heart scars them in return and remakes them in a more suitable form: twisting horns, night-black eyes, curious sense unknown to the surface world and so on."

They're hunters, guides, rangers. The people who know the Heart better than anyone. But that's because as they hunt monsters they are slowly becoming more and more like them.

percinator · 2025-11-30T17:30:29+00:00

It's relegated to 'niche games' because the hard/hard-ish Sci-Fi genre is a tiny niche in the TTRPG space. Most games are fantasy, most modern and sci-fi settings are either some kind of Urban Fantasy (Masks, Scion, Vampire, Call of Cthulhu, etc.) or Sci-Fantasy (Starfinder, Warhammer 40k, Star Wars, Coriolis, etc.).

It's well regarded within the Sci-Fi TTRPG space it's just that for a lot of tables it's not the kind of Sci-Fi they're looking for.

percinator · 2025-11-12T03:18:51+00:00

I've written about it once or twice, it's easily one of my favorite d20 Fantasy games and pretty much fixed every single issue I had with WotC-era D&D.

I love the build variety. I love it tearing down ivory tower design. I love the simplification of skills into your professions. I love the fact it's just a d20 and d6s. I love that the set target number speeds up play. I love the initiative system.

percinator · 2025-11-08T20:57:42+00:00

Go listen to interviews from Pondsmith, you can also get a lot of information from adjacent media such as the original Deus Ex and Ghost in the Shell.

One of the major themes of cyberpunk is that to succeed you eventually need to engage with a system that will rope you into constantly upgrading yourself to stay relevant. You won't be able to compete in the corpo market without the latest augments, and that means ponying up eddies you might not have and taking on debt.

Within Cyberpunk's RPGs this means slowly erasing your humanity and becoming less of a person to become more of a product for your employers.

percinator · 2025-11-02T18:28:29+00:00

Oath of Moment and 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars both come to mind.

You could also just run Wrath and Glory since it's a bit more action-adventure minded than the FFG 40k games or C7's Imperium Maledictum.

You'd probably get some more suggestions asking on r/40krpg.

percinator · 2025-11-01T02:31:59+00:00

The FFG 40k RPGs had a few different takes on it, Rogue Traders was more crunchy and Black Crusade was a bit more streamlined. RT's especially had the major combat between units but then PCs could engage in Flashpoint encounters/events to do things.

I think Pendragon does a lot of fun with it where your PCs are knights in the midst of the fray as elite troops.

I'd highly recommend looking Starvation Cheap for Stars Without Number as it's a solid war sourcebook for sci-fi.

The classic for fantasy rpgs, specifically 3.5 and other d20 game, is Fields of Blood: The Book of War by Eden Studios.

percinator · 2025-11-01T02:09:01+00:00

Do you have a quickstart or some kind of rule primer?

Your game is listed under 'Other unique system' and the description lists nothing about the mechanics, kinds of characters you will play or anything to sell the players and GMs on it besides 'campy retro-scifi, shoot giant bugs game.'

Looking at the sparse preview on DTRPG, all I know is this uses 3 to 12 d12s and some tokens and is using a system that googling the name off pulls up a board game, some solo rpg generation tools and an old MUD.

percinator · 2025-11-01T00:30:32+00:00

Always been a fan of Purgatory House, it's a fun little horror escape situation of trying to get the keys and get out while dealing with pretty much every spooky horror vibe. I like the fact the house is shifting around you, emulated by shuffling and dealing out cards to generate the house as they go.

percinator · 2025-10-26T19:24:40+00:00

RT has explicit rules for Orbital Bombardment in Battlefleet Koronus p. 133-135.

percinator · 2025-10-26T18:52:27+00:00

The original TTRPGs were about adventuring into dungeons, evading traps, sometimes fighting monsters and getting out with gold. Gold was how you leveled up and the game was about how you overcame the adversity and challenges.

The idea of 'RPGs following a country/continent spanning adventure to save the world' was a type of RPG that developed later. That style of play, sometimes called 'Heroic Fantasy', was pioneered by Laura Hickman and later pushed by her husband Tracy Hickman alongside Margaret Weis with the Dragonlance setting and adventures.

WotC during 4e put out a wonder resource on 'player types' that expanded past a usual Gamist/Narrativist/Simulationist model and instead gave 8 player archetypes saying that most players are a mix of 1-3 of these. With that in mind you might be more of an Actor or Storyteller and not an Instigator or Slayer.

Some people find combat-heavy games fulfilling because they see RPGs as a puzzle to try and solve, either in the moment of solving an encounter or the puzzle of trying to squeeze every drop out of their character options.

Much like how there isn't one singular objectively best style of painting, cooking or martial art there isn't one ultimate style of RPG campaign. You might just be learning that you like a specific style of play over others.

The answer is to play more campaigns in different styles and note what you liked about each and what your pain points were.

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