1 monkey writing Shakespear on the first attempt?

[Myrkridia]

This is my first post at these forums. Give me a verbal slap on the wrist if I should have introduced myself somewhere before posting. Like lots of other people here, Im designing a table top RPG. Been lurking the forums for a week or so, and now Im after some input about the game. Im writing both mechanics and a setting, but Im much further along with the mechanics, they are mostly done. I imagine I`ll be doing some playtesting towards the end of this month, with some people I play DnD4 with, but Id like to fix as much as I can before then.

Except for classes, the game has a lot of the familiar labels games use to describe characters. The core of the system is a dice-pool/success mechanic using D12. When attempting whatever, the relevant attribute is the number of dice you roll, while the score in the relevant skill/knowledge is added onto the result of each die. Each die that rolls over the difficulty number, including the skill, is a success. Currently, the number 3 is a standard, as the average human will have 3 points in each attribute. I intend to cap attributes for a starting character at 5.

What is the best way of stopping a character from doing something he would never be able to do without training? A good example would be a carpenter doing brain surgery due to a stupidly lucky roll. Ive got 3 options for how to prevent this, let me know what you think:
-I could just deny them the roll on the grounds that they really have to have relevant training to perform in the capacity.
-I could set difficulties that are higher than 12. For example, at 4 points and upwards, the "First Aid" skill slowly starts covering surgery as well, and any type of surgery has a difficulty of 16 or more, so the character has to have at least 4 points to have a chance.
-Another option could be to add specialized training to a skill and not allow them to succeed unless they have the relevant specialization. For example, "First Aid" could become "First Aid and surgery" once the character learns about surgery as well.

Another issue I have is that D12 might be too small, as each increase/decrease in skill/difficulty has significant impact. At some difficulties, changing the the difficulty by 1 could change the chance for success by over 20% if the character has high attribute scores. Is that too much, and do you think using D20s instead could be a good solution? There is nothing else in the system that is really dependant on that D12, so I could easily just change some difficulty numbers and be fine with another type of dice. I really like the way skills add to each die you throw, but if players get too high skills too fast, the system will break down and they will succeed at everything (which means I have to start applying inflated difficulties). Does it get unwieldy to roll dice-pools with D20s?

So, any opinions? Hope this post didnt get too "TLDR"...

[Eero Tuovinen]

Welcome to the Forge, Myrkridia.

I don't want to hurt you by being too negative, but I sort of have to be to express a single fundamental point about what you've written so far: I spent several years fiddling on the level of game design you're working with here. My own experience is that I never got anywhere before I learned to take things like dice mechanics as completely secondary in the greater scheme of things: I first need to understand the social environment and reward cycles of play before messing about with the dice even means anything. I know exactly how much aesthetic effort one can invest in figuring out the perfect dice mechanic that expresses everything succintly with one unblemished equation that never requires more than simple modifiers to be utilized in any situation, but after creating one or two of those I slowly learned to see it for the distraction that it is: the actual game is not getting improved, and the "perfectness" of a given dice mechanic was always more about me getting more comfortable with it than about the mechanic approaching some universal standard of flexible strength.

The above might not apply to you; it might be that you already have all the large-scale stuff figured out to a diamond edge and simply are fine-tuning the smallest of detail, or perhaps you're perfectly happy with a sort of unverbalized design environment - you mention the new D&D in your post, perhaps your game is just going to be "like D&D, but with better mechanics". If either of those is the case, then perhaps you really don't need anything more than some pointers with your dice mechanics; even if that is the case, though, we need to know more about your design goals to be able to really say something meaningful about the issues you raise. Is it a problem that a +1 equates to a 20% improvement in success rate? We have no way of knowing without knowing what sorts of things you use this success mechanic for. So based on my experience with this sort of design I find it likely that you need to question your design goals yourself, but even if you're actually perfectly comfortable with the big picture, at the very least you need to tell us more about your higher-order goals for us to have any chance of commenting intelligibly about your dice. Some games quite genuinely need even a 5% step (3rd edition D&D gets lots of mileage out of it, for example), while many others are happy with much less granularity; I'd say that the majority of rpgs don't really use more than a 30% step, if that, to make the game's reward cycles work as intended, but the designs are really all over the place in this regard.

This might seem like a simple put-down, but do let me know if you can take this sort of thing constructively. I'd like to hear more about your actual game and the central ideas behind the dice mechanical fiddling. Or we can look at different dice mechanics, too; I'd be worried that your design won't benefit from obsessing over those details if the foundations are not laid right, but it's your design, your thread and your call.

[Mikael]

What Eero said.

But anyway, why are you adding the skill to every dice and comparing to the target (many calculations) instead of deducting the skill from the target before checking which dice exceed the modified target (one calculation)?

High difficulty seems the most intuitive way of representing surgery. If that's the kind of game you are creating, with a set skill list, you can then give representative ranges of difficulty numbers for all skills.

[Myrkridia]

I feared that Id only get some very specific answers by writing specific questions, and Im glad I was wrong. Eero, you werent too negative at all, and I dont mind your post in any way. Id rather thank you for reminding me that mechanical details can take too much of my attention.

Mikael: You are right that reducing the difficulty or increasing the effective die rolls with their skills are mathematically identical. The first way offers faster resolution of the roll, while the second way illustrates the characters skill at something in a more "flavourful" way. Id just let it be up to the GM to decide how he wanted to run things, and not set it in stone, rules-wise. As for the list of skills, Im making a list of discreete skills currently containing about 50 skills. If people dont find the skill they want in the list, they`ll make a new one up themselves (with GMs approval). 50+ different skills might look like a jungle, but I imagine people would quickly skim over most skills, and just fine the skills that are relevant to their character concept.

I guess I`ll zoom out from mechanical detail to what Id liek to do with the game. Some of them might sound like bad reasons for wanting to make a game to some.

One reason is that many of my friends have a lot more experience with the games we play, wether thats DnD, Vampire, Shadowrun or whatever. Id like to run games as a GM as well, but I dont like the idea of doing that when all the players know a lot more about the game, both setting-wise and mechanic-wise. Making my own game would eliminate that pretty effectively.

Eero, you are completely right about the "perfect mechanic" thing. Another reason I want to make a game is that Id like to make a system that can describe a lot of different things in a straightforward manner that can be grasped quickly. Also, some games really have some horribly messy character sheets, and I wanted to make one that was more straight forward and uncluttered.

Another reason, that has something to do with the actual game, is how much I enjoy exploration in RPGs. I often felt that killing the goblins, charming the dukes daughter or climbing the mountain were all tasks that would reward me with a chance to see more places in the world. One of my most memorable RPG moments was when we were stuck on a murder-mystery type quest in a DnD game, and someones character accidentally found a secret door. It exposed a small network of rooms and ways nobody in the castle knew about. I felt pretty excited about that, seeing what was hidden in those small dark rooms was probably the most fun I had during that adventure. Ive got friends who enjoy combat a lot, others who like to go into the psychology of their character, and others who appreciate intrigue and politics. I like exploration. Not to the exclusion of everything else, I like talking to people and fighting monsters as well, of course.

Finally, Ive made a point out of writing the game in my native language, partially to prove that it can work just as well as writing in English. It will also be interesting to see if the players attitude towards the game will change since Im not writing in the language we are all familiar with when it comes to RPGs.

Other than these 4 reasons, its pretty much only some vague notion of what I percieve as a "good RPG". That means combining mechanics that are both easy to remember and can be used in a lot of situations with a setting that has interesting cultures and people.

After my studies, Ive got quite a few ideas about how to create some interesting tensions for the players to get involved in, on a large scale. I really like the idea that who you are depends a lot on what nation or ethnicity you feel like you belong to. Ive made up a handful of races for the game, and I want to write a setting where the players cant assume stuff about an NPC based on their race. Its not going to be valid to go "Orcs are hostile, we kill them, elves are good, we talk to them". In places where races are mixed, or where the culture revolves around trade, people might be more open to different races. In a remote homogenous society, rampant racism might be the norm. It sounds interresting to explore a world where people of the same race can behave radically different due to social factors. I know that last bit sounds like pages and pages of describing stuff in far more detail than anyone will ever care about. Im aware of that trap, and hopefully, I`ll avoid falling in it.

I have mostly been working on mechanics lately, so thats why none of my questions concerned the setting, or exactly why playing the game isnt a waste of time. There are some things I still havent figured out.

I`ll shut my trap for now.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I find all four of your reasons for writing your own game excellent. I'm also tempted to just tell you to believe in yourself and go play some with your system. As I mentioned before, I know fully well how important system aesthetics and system comfort can be for a GM. I am not exaggerating when I say that all of my rpg design for a decade from the early nineties onwards was merely a matter of superficial mechanical arrangements over fundamental game-play set-ups that I learned from the games I learned to roleplay with. I can well remember how proud I was in the late '90s when I streamlined and generalized the Runequest / Call of Cthulhu rules set into a simple tool for my GMing. And it was very exciting to figure out how to use different die sizes in a WW style dice pool system to create a truly generic and powerfully descriptive dicing system around the millennium. When I took to D&D 3rd edition several years ago the first thing I did was to rip the game open and replace the procedures with something representing generic mechanics and aesthetic beauty. These were, in a way, important things to learn and live through, so I'm not so sure that it's a good idea to just dismiss the urge to doing superficial dice mechanics design offhand. I know that system aesthetics have never gone away for me even as I nowadays can look at them in their correct context; every game I design nowadays has a completely honed mechanical aesthetic paradigm, it's just joined by a more exact high-order game and not just a vague intent to copy everything from the last game I played apart from the dice mechanics. Now when I'm creating my own home-brew D&D the mechanical aesthetics are sleek and ordered, but the game itself is also completely in my control: I know what is happening in the game, I know why, and I know how each player is supposed to play to make the game perform as it should.

Anyway, that's my ambivalent speech about the relative importance of dicing aesthetics. Getting back to your reasons for writing a game, I'm very sympathetic to both an emphasis on exploration and writing games in your own language. You can ask the old-timers here at the Forge, those are usually the topics I jump into saddle for. It also seems to me that you have the key to your design here:

Combining mechanics that are both easy to remember and can be used in a lot of situations with a setting that has interesting cultures and people.

That's a very succint design goal, I like it. There are of course many games that represent different people's ideas of what is easy to use and what is interesting, but that definitely doesn't mean that there's not room for more - I should even say that any game that has a setting at all should make the setting interesting, and any game that bothers with rules should make them eminently usable. When you consider that people consider so different things interesting and have different use skills, both of these factors allow for a lot of variety even in well-designed games.

The next question I'm interested in, though - how do you envision setting exploration to interact with the dicing rules? This is an immensely interesting question for me, because I've been bashing my own head on this very question for years! There are many different answers, but I want to hear yours. Is it that player characters are adventurers who find interesting things (provided by the GM) and then have to dice their way out of trouble? Or is it that they use the success mechanics to uncover the setting in the first place? Or perhaps a mixture of both, or something completely different?

The twin question to the above is even simpler, as it approaches the same thing from the other side: how is having a resolution mechanic with dice like this in service of your design goals in the first place? Above I asked what connects the setting exploration to the dicing, here I'm asking why have dicing in the first place. It might be that one or both of these questions don't make sense, or the answers might be the same. There is much to be learnt here.

When we figure out the answer to those questions, then we have a basis for looking at your dice mechanics with fresh eyes. I think that what a person considers pretty, sleek, easy to use and flexible often has a huge personal component, but that doesn't prevent us from acting as sounding boards for different variants on the mechanics. And more importantly, we can evaluate the resolution mechanics for how well they do their job in relation to your design goals. Who knows, it might be that you don't even need dice to make the game you want - that has happened, as have stranger things.

[Myrkridia]

You have given me quite a bit to think about. Especially the following piece of your post was interesting.

The next question I'm interested in, though - how do you envision setting exploration to interact with the dicing rules? This is an immensely interesting question for me, because I've been bashing my own head on this very question for years! There are many different answers, but I want to hear yours. Is it that player characters are adventurers who find interesting things (provided by the GM) and then have to dice their way out of trouble? Or is it that they use the success mechanics to uncover the setting in the first place? Or perhaps a mixture of both, or something completely different?

The twin question to the above is even simpler, as it approaches the same thing from the other side: how is having a resolution mechanic with dice like this in service of your design goals in the first place? Above I asked what connects the setting exploration to the dicing, here I'm asking why have dicing in the first place. It might be that one or both of these questions don't make sense, or the answers might be the same. There is much to be learnt here.

I had some assumptions about when I would and wouldnt use dice to see what happened. I might have to question those assumptions. I didnt plan on letting the dice control exploration of places and cultures much, as I figured that would negatively limit the game. The dice mechanics are meant to be simulationist, but also gamist in nature. In other words, they are meant to highlight differences between characters, but also provide a framework for tactical maneuvers in appropriate situations. That goal of having players think tactically from time to time can be reached, in a very good way, with stats and dice mechanics, so I dont want to do away with them all together.

To answer the first paragraph in the quote above: I think my current approach is pretty standard. The GM would decide what sorts of locations and people are around, and provide the players with whatever their characters know about the place. The GM would also introduce some reason why the characters would want to explore these places. Exploration itself would be diceless, but interrupted by either some sort of puzzle (diceless), some sort of obstacle standing in the way of further exploration (dice) and combat (dice). Puzzles would be problems where the GM could provide a bunch of details about the situation, leaving it up to the players to figure out what to do with those details in order to proceed. Once they know this, completing the challenge is trivial. Obstacles would be problems where is it obvious to the players what the solution is, but they dont know if their character can actually perform the task at hand. An example would be rolling some dice to balanceover a gorge on a thin rope. Combat is the well known "fight-or-flight". As you can see, dice are used mostly when there is a halt in the exploration. The only part of exploration where the dice are used would be to see if the characters noticed a particular detail about the place or situation they are in. There are no dice to determine what places they get to explore, or to decide what they will find there. Those things are determined by the GM. All of this is pretty standard for a fantasy RPG.

Another aspect of exploring a situation is that each problem can have several solutions. Id like the players to not always solve problems by killing the people responsible for them. You can kill the guard in order to get inside the palace, but perhaps it would be wiser to try to bribe him instead, or sneak in unseen?

By now Im not completely sure what I want to say with this post, so I`ll just post it as it is now. You`ve given me some good stuff to consider Eero, so I guess I should think about those rather than posting in this thread for now. I`ll read any posts with interest though, and I might post in some other threads. I`ll post more once I know more about how I want to do things.

[Eero Tuovinen]

No hurry on our regard. The Forge ideally has a considerably lax dialogue rhytm; if for no other reason, then because we all really shouldn't be wasting half of the day writing long posts here.

The way you characterize exploration and dicing as separate bits, with the dicing being an unavoidable evil of fantasy adventure rpgs, interests me. You see, it seems to me that you're describing a very clear relationship between the dice and the exploration. Let me know if I'm writing out of my ass, but it seems to me that the dicing comes about as a consequence of the exploration in your game: characters end up in situations that require dicing because they decide to explore. And they decide to explore because... it's the point of the game? It's fun? Perhaps because that's how you find the dicing situations, and the dicing provides some more ultimate rewards, like gold, booze and women? Or is the dicing a result of mistakes made in exploration, would a smart explorer get to the goldboozewomen rewards without having to roll the dice?

I'm just free associating, but it seems to me that dice are a bit of a punishment in your view of how a fantasy rpg runs. They can only ever provide the player with failures: the only situations where dice come up is when the GM puts up adversity that the character needs to get through to get to his just rewards. This is, of course, fine. Your notes about mechanics being needed to differentiate characters and provide a framework for tactical maneuvers also interests me, because that's something we can bite on when figuring out the right dice mechanics for your game.

Hmm... at this point I'd go back to your original dice mechanics to suggest some random improvements from the viewpoint of using them as a punitive mechanic that provides uncertainty but also immunity from adversity when skill levels are high enough, but I'm actually running out of Forge time. Need to get to real work. Let's get back to this after some thought, eh?

[Creatures of Destiny]

To me this really sounds like OD&D and other old schoool games where players were challenged by exploring and then sometimes had to do some dice rolling if they ended up ina fight or had to make a saving throw because they set off a trap or whatever. Look up Swords and Wizardry to see what i mean (a retro-clone).

So maybe the first thing is to decide waht's determined by dice and what's free-form. As you describe it exploration is free-form, combat is dice-based.

What about disarming a trap? Social interaction?

Maybe there are die rolls that only influence how players work in free-form play - so your intellect roll determines how much time you get to solve a puzzle (on the basis that in the 30 seconds the genius character has she can do as much thinking as an average person (the player) can in 20 minutes). Maybe a search roll determines simply whether you spot Obvious/Unexpected or Hidden things: say you look behind a curtain, if there's a person behind it then that's obvious, if there's a tarantula on the back then that's unexpected and if there's a fine silver needle slipped into the lining then that's hidden - and obviously if the player doesn't say they look behind the curtain then the values change (the person is hidden and they'll never spot the needle or the tarantula).

For the carpenter doing brain surgery, well maybe he could pull off a simple trephining (they did in the Stone Age). But is it bad for character's to do crazy stuff? Player's often like combat because they get to do crazy stuff (often totally absurd in realistic terms), yet skill shecks are often made realistic (hence dull). Allowing carpenters to attempt brain surgery might make their skills as fun as combat.

[Myrkridia]

I see I shouldnt discard a thread even if its had a while since its last post

Creatures of Destiny, the description in your first paragraph is pretty accurate. Guess Im not scoring any points for originality in that regard.

As for the free form/dice question: Exploration would be free form. Puzzles would be mostly free form, in that if the players figure the problem out, its trivial for their characters to complete the puzzle. Technical problems (such as disarming your trap) would pretty much always be a roll for successes. Social interaction is the tricky one, in that it is best handled by free form play, but that would make the statistics describing your characters social abilities insignificant. I like statisctics as a way of differentiating characters from each other, so Id rather not drop them.

In cases where I dont want the situation to boil down to a dice roll, but still want the statistic to be meaningful, a solution like the one in your 4th paragraph could work well. As for the social situation being handled freeform, a roll might give the player a clue about the other persons thoughts through the conversation for each success.

My first reason for preventing people from doing outrageous stuff they know nothing about (like our carpenter performing brain surgery on his horse) was niche protection. In other words, I wanted people who were good at something to get a moment in the spotlight whenever that sort of problem came up. Its like... when the wizard cleaves a door in half with his staff due to a natural 20, how boring isnt that for the warrior who has a huge axe and the "Master door smasher" feat/talent/whatever? However, I dont intend to litter the game with lots of situations that require high skill to even attempt it. Most tasks can be attempted by anyone, with better chance for characters with relevant stats.

I might have lied when I said that exploration would be completely free form. "Maybe a search roll determines simply whether you spot Obvious/Unexpected or Hidden things" you said, and that is something I definitely want to include in the exploration. The party is moving down a dark tunnel to a cave with unknown inhabitants. I`ll roll to see wether anyone spots the small ritual dagger laying on the floor, the type used by the priests of the evil death god.

Really, when Eero said "...it seems to me that the dicing comes about as a consequence of the exploration in your game: characters end up in situations that require dicing because they decide to explore", he was pretty much dead on. Maybe Im chickening out here, but I wanted each adventure to give the players a reason to explore rather than defining that in the game system itself.

Im going to play with a few friends soon. I think playtesting is very important not only in testing your game, but also in forming it. A buddy told me that he and this other guy had been discussing D&D2 vs D&D4, and they had told me that they disliked the "moves" in D&D4 (the "normal", encounter and daily powers characters learn) because it facilitates "Analysis Paralysis". People have too many options that COULD be viable, so they have to think for a bit every time its their turn to take a move. I had been considering both a Move system (already defined combat actions you could learn, and then execute in combat) and a system where players simply describe what they are trying to do, and I decide what attribute and skill is relevant, and the difficulty they will roll against. I think the "move" system gives opportunities for amazing amounts of flavour and tactical depth, but can I get to that depth without getting too much AP? The description system is fast and flexible, but Im going to have to find some way of making sure each guy with high sword skill isnt basicly the same as the next guy with high sword skill. For now though, Im going to try out the description method.

Also, Im still nitpicking in mechanics, as you can see. The bigger questions arent less important, I just dont have any good answers to them right now. Maybe play testing will reveal something.

[Creatures of Destiny]

Yes I really like the Obvious/Unexpected/Hidden idea - in fact after posting it I thought about how it might work in my own game (with some changes). But of course I'm happy if you like it and use it!

The two systems you describe will both work but for different people: the first will emphasise system knowledge, while the second will emphasise imaginative tactics.

The free from approach is:
Old hand to new player: "A 10ft pole is great for rooting out traps"
New Player: Why?
Old Hand - Approach 2: "It's a long pole, so by poking around you can set of man traps and check for pits before you step in them.
Old Hand Approach 1: "It gives you a +4 bonus to trap finding checks and a +5 bonus to rolls that help you avoid them"

The advantage of approach 2 is that even someone who knows none of the rules will be able to play along fine. I'm sure you can find a balance that mixes elements of both. Personally I think that tactical play should actually be in play (what do I have my character do and when), not in character creation (builds - what funky combinations of stuff my character has got).

As for the different versions of D&D, check out this where Mike Mearls (4E designer) plays OD&D:
http://odd74.proboards76.com/index.cgi?board=campaignstories&action=display&thread=1203121209

I'm not so sure "niche protection" is so essential - even if the wizard can break down a door on a lucky roll once in a blue moon (and the GM might describe how the door is rotted through with woodworm) - so what? Bet he can't repeat it on the next door. The "niches" are still relevant in that one guy can do something reliably, while the other can still try and most likely fail.