Worried my system is too simple

[Tully305]

As for an advancement mechanic, I envisioned doing something like every five succesful skill rolls resulted in a skill percentage increase...likewise, failures could result in skill percentage loss.

Also, I considered grading the skill increases/decreases based on the level of skill.  For instance you may only move up 1% when your skill is 70% or above as opposed to moving up 2% if your skill is between 40% and 70%.

I also considered using a system of buying attribute or skill increases with experience points on a graduating scale.

Another concept I though of is having random percentile tables to roll in certain tramatic instances that would result in an attribute or skill loss..for instance maybe a security officer is gunshy because he shot an innocent kid by accident and would have reduced ability to react to weapons.  Maybe use a critical success/failure roll (100/01) on a skill that has negative or positivce consequences.

[M. J. Young]

As for an advancement mechanic, I envisioned doing something like every five succesful skill rolls resulted in a skill percentage increase...likewise, failures could result in skill percentage loss.

Let me call your attention to the fact that this results in accelerated change built on change. That is, if your chance of success is 51%, it is likely to go up before it goes down, but it's going to be close; at 80% you're going to roll four successes to every one failure, so you're going to be rocketing toward 100%. At the same time, if your chance of success is 40%, that's three failures for every two successes, so probably you're already sliding downward; once you hit 20%, you're on the fast track to complete incompetence.

Although it seems counter-intuitive, among the fixes for this (that someone used somewhere) is to have failures result in improvement and successes result in decay. Thus the higher your chance of success, the less likely you are to get better and the more likely you are to get worse. That, of course, tends to level out at 50%, if the ups and downs are perfectly balanced.

You probably don't want to talk to me about attributes. When I came on board on the Multiverser design, there were fourteen attributes, and I could see gaps. That was something I was not permitted to change, so I didn't give much thought to how I might change it.

However, as I look at your six, my question is why you have these attributes, specifically. Obviously you must know that there are other possible sets. Multiverser's are Persuasion, Charisma, Animal Magnetism, Strength, Stamina, Resistance, Density, Flexibility, Agility, Hand/Eye, Intellect, Intuition, Education Level, Will Power. Each of them has an important function at some point in play. StarFrontiers uses paired attributes--when they are created, they are generated as the same number but can be adjusted by shifting some from one to the other of the pair: Strength-Stamina, Dexterity-Hand/Eye, Intellect-Intuition, Personality-Leadership. I don't recall what they each did in game terms (and it's been a while, so I might have one of them wrong). Legends of Alyria has three: Force, Insight, and Determination. It's a wonderful design, and there's no reason to have more than these three for what that game does.

To focus back to my question, why do you have these attributes? For what are they used in play? How do they make a difference to the game--not just that they exist as descriptives of the character, but that the value given to each is used in some context that matters to the creation of events?

One thing that is emphasized around here (usually under the phrase "shooting sacred cows") is that you really should build your game from the ground up, and not from the framework of what you think games ought to have because "that's how these things are done". Do you have a strength attribute because every game has one (which is not true), or because being able to tag each character with a numerical value quantifying his ability in strength-based tasks is going to be important to play (which might or might not be true)? What do you expect play to look like that causes you to think attributes matter?

I hope you don't feel like we're picking on you, by the way. People get this kind of grilling when they start putting their designs forward, most of the time, and it's usually because most of us have been through the part about designing a game after the pattern we saw in other games without really thinking about it, so these questions matter to us. There's nothing wrong with attributes. There's nothing particularly necessary about them, either, unless you're doing something with them that matters.

--M. J. Young

[Tully305]

Quit picking on me!!!!!

J/K :)

Really, I am excited that I'm being challenged to think about why I'm doing things; it makes me a better writer and designer to be sure!!!

In my mind attributes serve a two-fold purpose:

First, they give the players a means to define their character, make them more lifelike...for instance, is my fighter pilot some dumb, strong jetjockey who gets lucky in his dogfights or is he the unsure intelligent charcter who has to overcome his deficiencies.

Second, and most importantly, I think if designed properly, they will affect gameplay by either adding to or taking away from a characters success.

How am I going to use this in my game?!?!  Aye...there's the rub!!!

The majority of my game will involve interstallar fighter combat, mixed with some shipboard intrigue and planetside missions.  Kind of like future navy SEALS.  I'm trying to figure out a balanced system of using attributes to define the character as well as affect gameplay.  For example, two fighter pilots may have the exact same skill in fighter combat, but maybe one's intuition or strength will positively or negatively affect their performance.

I guess I'm trying to bring in the quality of intangible attributes (although by giving them values it makes them tangible...HA!) that bring about success or failure in everyday life.

I do admit that not having attributes does seem very foreign to me...almost like going against the gospel....but I do believe that it would serve the two-fold purpose I described above.

As far as skill progression, I totally see your point and wondered about a  system where you can gain skill progression based on critical success or failure for instance (01 though 05 success and 95-100 failure).  I think up to a point you could gain experience from both success and failure (like 60% or something) and then any higher you can only advance through critical success as failure would cause you to lose points at such an advanced skill range.

As for how attributes will affect the gameplay, I envisioned each attribute being rolled as 1D10 and that being the modifier to the skill roll.  For instance, in a dogfight one pilot would roll an Evasion skill of 39% plus his intuition attribute value of 4 for a success roll of 43%.

[M. J. Young]

Fixed crits of 5% chance may be too high, seriously. It means that of every twenty attempts you've got the chance to kill the other guy outright and the equal chance to kill yourself, once each. Game ends a bit quickly that way.

A couple ways to mitigate this:

[*]Tie crit to chance of success. Multiverser doesn't have critical success, but its critical failures are 10% of the chance to fail. That means the better you are at something, the less likely you are to really botch royally.[*]Reduce the impact of a crit so that it might not be so good or so bad. On Multiverser's botch rolls, it's standard for the referee to consider a range of possible outcomes and use one of several fortune-based methods to decide exactly what went wrong. One of my sons suggests that a well-crafted "botch list" always includes at least one "favorable botch", in which what happened was a complete foul up of what you intended, but worked in your favor. This makes the botch less serious, while keeping the tension high, because once we know a botch has been rolled we also know that it could be fatal, but might not be.[*]Reduce the chance for a crit across the board. You'd be surprised just how often 01 and 00 actually are rolled in the course of play.[*]Reduce the number of rolls made in play. If in the course of combat the player characters are going to make twenty rolls with a five percent chance to botch, their chance of not botching in that fight is only about thirty-six percent. Reduce the number of rolls to three, and that chance not to botch is close to eighty-six percent. This means resolving things on a longer scale--each stage of combat, rather than each attack, for example.[/list:u]
As to the value of attributes, I think you can get what you want with a primary skill area approach better than with attributes. Don't do it exactly the same way, but do it as a character descriptor--Character A is a physical powerhouse who isn't very bright but is often lucky, +5 for skills involving strength, +2 for rolls related to chance events; Character B is very intelligent but unsure of himself, +8 for operation of devices and deciphering how things work. (In this regard, I recommend not using penalties to skills based on the character's strengths, whether you use attribute-based or descriptor-based adjustments. If all the score-based adjustments are bonuses, players will make a point to mention them and will accept the blame if they fail to do so; on negative adjustments, players are more likely to overlook these even unintentionally, and it makes the referee the villain to say that he's got to take away a success because they forgot to include the penalty for low whatever.)

--M. J. Young