[Descent] – realtime lag teaches lessons

[Kaare_Berg]

My big project is a game called Source Code. As a part of designing this game several ideas pop up, circulate, distract and basically get in the way. The idea that became Descent was one such idea.
This is my "Apprentice Game", and I need to spend som time getting it out of my system.

But since this is the AP forum, so I'll get down to the AP part.
We had a short playtest yesterday. I had pitched the idea to one of my players, and suddenly a screaming horde was beating on my door.

To give you an idea of what the game is I'll give you Descent, through Troy's Big Three.

1. Descent is a game about Colonial Marines completing a mission while surviving and fighting alien horrors that try to swarm them.
2 The Characters pursue the mission objectives, kill aliens, gradually run out of resources and occasionally die horribly. Oh and they get to fire big guns, a lot.
3.The Marine Players get to play the Colonial Marines, increase the stakes and add Mission Objectives to get Story Tokens, the Narrator Player throws aliens at the players, push the mission objectives and keep track of the number of aliens killed so he can at intervals up the difficulty.

The Crew
Due to illness and work, my enthusiastic horde had dribbled down to two, but they showed up on time (rare occasion). Our crew was me, the narrator, with Christian and Ole Morten as Marine Players. These guys are long time friends and have tried, patiently, a lot of different games. They have strong opinions and are not afraid to speak them. Christian is an Art Designer, and Ole Morten is perfect if you want to check any game system for mix max loopholes.

The Play
We ran through char-gen, it worked as it should. It was quick and easy and gave the players some handles to hang their imagination on. We spent some time discussing setting dials, and I know we did this ass-backwards, since we technically should've done this before char-gen. But it really makes no mechanical difference for the characters, so we were set.

Play began with three Mission Objectives and an uncomfortable planetary drop for the characters. Alone against a base filled with aliens they proceeded cautiously. They called for a conflict (activating sensors) and I activated an alien.
I am trying to build simple rules regulating how and when the aliens may attack the players and with what numbers. I've got one system, but it is under re-evaluation. It also isn't typed up.
Ole Morten didn't win the conflict so the Alien popped up at close range. Here the game lagged.

Though the mechanics work, they are in effect direct ripoffs from Luke Crane's BWr range and cover rules ( or at least heavily heavily formed by his original rule set)* they involved too many calculations.

This is the short short version of the rules in question;
Roll your positioning pool consists of Close Quarters Battle Attribute + Weapon Skill + range dice from weapon +  auto/cyclical fire dice
Victor may Shoot to Kill, rolling a pool of Power (stat) + Perception (stat) + weapon skill + carryover victories from Positioning.
Calculate damage (victories x damage value of weapon used),
Oh and it is Fortune in the Middle

Even though the calculations are fairly simple and they repeated themselves throughout the entire fight against the alien, it didn't move. As the marines moved closer to Mission Objective 1 the lag recurred when they fought two more aliens. It got better because the players began to know the calculations, but  . . . still to slow.

After that we called it a night and began the discussion.

The problem as we saw it was that though the mechanics for combat did what they were supposed to**, they involved too many calculations. The effect was just like in a pc game***, it lagged. One of the design goals was for both conflict and combat to go snap snap. So as of yesterday the game failed (and yes, this game needs a combat system).

The solution was found on the character sheet.
Simply creating a new attribute called Shoot to Kill and pre-calculating this (power + perception), and reorganizing the layout of a two page char sheet design I'll get closer to the snap snap speed I want.
Interesting.

This is the aha moment I wanted to share.
Now I need to find out how to apply this to Source Code and the exercise will have been worth while

Kaare

*This is one of the reasons I called this an apprentice game. Writing it is both practice and IP infringement, which is why it probably will never aspire to more than a pdf circulated among friends.
**And yes, it is hard to evaluate whether a mechanic works if you don't know any of the rules, but this here isn't a concrete mechanic rule discussion.
***Major influences are FPS games like F.E.A.R, Doom, and movies like Resident Evil, Aliens and others in that genre.

[Josh Roby]

This sounds like an Actual Value / Effective Value sort of issue, yes.

May I ask why you stack up so many different stats to get the Effective Value?  This sounds like a pretty narrow-premised game (which is hardly a bad thing); does the Close Quarters Battle Attribute get used with different Weapon Skills or other skills often, or is this its only real use?  Would it be more straightforward for character generation to determine your Shoot To Kill stat directly, rather than indirectly?

Similarly, what about Range Dice and Cyclical Fire Dice?  Could weapon stats be boiled down to the numbers that are actually used, rather than the numbers that "describe" them?

Basically, the only reason you need so many different inputs into an effective value is if those inputs are used in other processes as well and are used in such a way relatively frequently in play.  If they aren't, there's really little reason to have them in the first place.

[Kaare_Berg]

This sounds like an Actual Value / Effective Value sort of issue, yes.

Think that nails it.

A character have three mental and three physical stats. Different combinations of these give a set of attributes (I might be messing up the terminology here, I haven't got the Pattern Pdf handy). Among these attributes are Close Quarters Battle and , now, Shoot to Kill. So, yes, you need to find this directly.
The list of skills are divided into two, combat and noncombat, and is fitted to the game purpose* (no social skills for instance).

what I have yet to do is finding the proper combinations of stats to give the skills their base value. Nor have I found a use for them in play, so they may be dropped from the final character sheet since they are used only to determine the attributes. On the other hand my players like to use these as bones to hang the flesh of their characters on.

There is one more added step to a combat exchange, that I left out, after you have gone to the three steps; position, shoot, kill, every character that fired a weapon needs an ammo check (again humble bows in the Direction of Luke). So the choice to fire auto or cyclical helps set this obstacle as well.
Since resources are finite (i.e. ammo clips) the choice whether to conserve ammo or not becomes a choice whether to dominate Positioning or maybe keep firing another round. Running out of ammo proved to be a major disadvantage during playtest.
I apologise for leaving this out. I forgot.

Could weapon stats be boiled down to the numbers that are actually used, rather than the numbers that "describe" them

They do, I am trying to rate things in in game effectiveness instead of a 5.56mm bullet has this mussel velocity and therefor has  . . .
Quickly put weapons have a rating for:
Size
QCB value at range (Close optimal and Far)
Rate of fire (SA, A and or C)
Clip size (dice aiding ammo check)
Power (how strong to fire one handed without penalty)
AP (armour penetration)

[MikeSands]

This idea really appealled to me, but I thought that it needed to be stripped down.

I wrote up another game about this over at http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17926.0. I'd like to see how the two designs go as they are developed.

[Kaare_Berg]

Damn it Mike, now I've got to post the damn thing. ;)

And my SO all ready thinks I spend too much time in front of the computer.

Until I do, I'll close this thread and watch yours while typing away.

Josh, thanks for your feedback. Might not be apparent from my reply above, but your helped push buttons.

Peace