... or N-NUTS.

I recently started GMing again. Not having any RPG books and not knowing about the wealth of digital material floating around, I scribbled a system out over a couple of lunches. While I'm now reading through proper games, I'm going to keep tinkering with my own rules for now (with the very clear understanding that nothing I propose is very likely to be revolutionary -- hence the title).

I'm opening this thread to invite feedback and new perspectives on any various challenges that may arise.

Tally ho!

Feedback on what? Challenges of doing what?

What do you want to do with your system?

Quote from: Ladybird;800965Feedback on what? Challenges of doing what?

What do you want to do with your system?

Indeed. What are you after? What do you want help on?

I should probably have clarified that, eh? Thanks for asking Ladybird and Silverlion!  

At the moment, I've got a lovely bunch of players. They're really committed and supportive in play, but have no interest in systems. That's a perfectly fine position, but I really enjoy the process of discussing and tinkering with the game mechanics. So, I thought I'd put my musings here, thereby sparing them and hopefully finding elegant solutions to my design musings that I'd never conjure up alone.

I currently have a simple system designed around the setting and the particular preferences of my players (e.g. most of them love rolling multiple dice, so we use a dice pool). However, the system is skeletal. My objective is just to round it out, without (substantially) changing what I've already introduced to the group. I don't think they'd mind, but I'd like to be fair and consistent.

The challenges I alluded in in my first post are minor. Things like "how should progression work?", "should I mechanically differentiate weapons, and if so, how?" or "what's missing from this spell list?". I know that ultimately what the answers depend on what works for our table, but I'm interested in getting feedback or creative suggestions on different ways that have been used to approach the design.

I'll put an extremely brief overview of the system in the next post, then I'll just add queries as they occur to me.

Blather about stuff with no concrete information yet? Count me in!

It sounds like your players like the system being simple. What about you? How complicated do you want your game to be? Will you be frustrated if your players reject your elegant design? Are you hoping to distribute it more widely?

Progression: decide on the top end of player character power, and adjust the rate of advance accordingly.

Weapons: differentiate them functionally: two handed, one handed, ranged, thrown; maybe special modifiers for some trick weapons.

Spells: so far actual spells are missing, so I won't speculate further. (OK, I boldly predict that the equivalent of polymorph is somewhat broken, because it usually is. Also, different types of spellcasters are either too similar or too different. )

The system uses d10 dice pools.

Characters are described by 10 very broad skills, a small number of traits (2 initially) and two statistics (health and legend, which works like WFRP Fate Points). There are no attributes; if a player wants strength to be a defining aspect of their character, they select "Very Strong" as one of their traits. Each skill has a value from 1-10, which denotes the number of dice rolled when using that skill.

Characters resolve all tasks by rolling 1 or their skills. The target number sets the difficulty and the number of successes describe the quality or speed of the outcome. In some situations, characters can contribute successes in the same or supporting skills in order to complete a task (e.g. each member of a coven of witches could roll Magic and therefore cast a spell more quickly and safely).

The skills are:
•   Athletics – dodging, running, climbing, swimming, jumping, throwing, lifting
•   Charisma – etiquette and social nuance, bluffing, persuasion, intimidation, haggling
•   Engineering – building, fixing, repairing, demolition, creating objects
•   Fighting – unarmed and armed close combat, melee defence, repair, sense ambush, first aid
•   Lore – history, science, languages, research, medicine
•   Magic – identifying magic, casting charms, resisting manipulation, sensing evil
•   Ranger – survival, riding, herbalism, foraging, tracking, path-finding, awareness
•   Shooting – use of thrown and fired missiles, ranged defence, repair, sense ambush, first aid
•   Stealth – sneaking, distraction, ambush, concealment of equipment
•   Thieving – streetwise, sleight of hand, poison, manipulate gadgets (traps, locks, tools)

All characters have at least 1 point in every skill, including Magic. The magic of most people are charms, such as preventing milk going sour, stopping boats from leaking, or keeping evil from crossing the threshold (the players build upon these to cast more powerful effects).

That's the basic outline.

First question to follow.

Quote from: rawma;801084Blather about stuff with no concrete information yet? Count me in!

Haha, awesome!  

Quote from: rawma;801084It sounds like your players like the system being simple. What about you? How complicated do you want your game to be? Will you be frustrated if your players reject your elegant design? Are you hoping to distribute it more widely?

I'd like my system to be as simple as possible and as complicated as it needs to be, if I can say that without being facetious. I want it to resolve tasks quickly, with interesting outcomes -- I think that's my main goal. As well as to provide a framework in which the players can be distinct and awesome, while being challenged and threatened.

I have no intention to sell or distribute the game, though if anyone wanted a copy they'd be very welcome and I'd be very flattered.  

Quote from: rawma;801084Progression: decide on the top end of player character power, and adjust the rate of advance accordingly.

Weapons: differentiate them functionally: two handed, one handed, ranged, thrown; maybe special modifiers for some trick weapons.

Spells: so far actual spells are missing, so I won't speculate further. (OK, I boldly predict that the equivalent of polymorph is somewhat broken, because it usually is. Also, different types of spellcasters are either too similar or too different. )

Good stuff and appreciated. Actually, I'm about to post a question about progression below...  

I have an idea about character progression.

Characters develop through their skills. Essentially, when it's time to improve, the players choose 1 skill and increase it by 1 (so no difference between 1-2 or 9-10). That may yet bite me on the ass, but it was a conscious decision.

I wonder whether, in addition to skills increasing (let's call that horizontal development), the skills themselves could be upgraded (let's call that vertical development).

So, say, Fighting could be increased from 4 to 5 (horizontal) or the character could receive training in new, more sophisticated training and upgrade Fighting to something else (like Duellist or Commander, say). The new skill could offer better or just different options, as well as offering a way of increasing characterisation over time.

I particularly like the idea of this in conjunction with Magic, with (say) one character going off to learn Necromancy and another learning Elementalism (and other characters sticking with the simple Magic they learned as a fisherman or smith).

However, I'd want the characters to have fewer points in the "advanced" skill than they did in the basics. Yet would not want the character to become less capable at the core tasks.

I suppose they could just learn new skills, but ideally I'd like to keep things tight and stick with the base 10.

The combat system uses a dice pool to reflect both attack and damage.

Any ideas how to manage weapon differences? For example, I don't want large weapons to automatically become more accurate because of the system. I've thought about rolling successes and then adding a bonus on top, or letting each success count for more than one unit of damage. (Or giving small weapons lower target numbers but a maximum amount of damage that they can inflict.)

Or should I just take a more laissez-faire approach and just say weapons don't matter?

Or am I ignoring a historical precedent which shows that small weapons can be equally deadly? (and that I should therefore lump LARGE WEAPONS and ACCURATE AND DEADLY WEAPONS into a category like BETTER WEAPONS?)

Etc.  

Quote from: Majus;801095I have an idea about character progression.

Characters develop through their skills. Essentially, when it's time to improve, the players choose 1 skill and increase it by 1 (so no difference between 1-2 or 9-10). That may yet bite me on the ass, but it was a conscious decision.

I wonder whether, in addition to skills increasing (let's call that horizontal development), the skills themselves could be upgraded (let's call that vertical development).

So, say, Fighting could be increased from 4 to 5 (horizontal) or the character could receive training in new, more sophisticated training and upgrade Fighting to something else (like Duellist or Commander, say). The new skill could offer better or just different options, as well as offering a way of increasing characterisation over time.

I particularly like the idea of this in conjunction with Magic, with (say) one character going off to learn Necromancy and another learning Elementalism (and other characters sticking with the simple Magic they learned as a fisherman or smith).

However, I'd want the characters to have fewer points in the "advanced" skill than they did in the basics. Yet would not want the character to become less capable at the core tasks.

I suppose they could just learn new skills, but ideally I'd like to keep things tight and stick with the base 10.

Yeah that works.
Either add a new feature or bump it the new feature but the new feature is now a place you need to add points

So magic 3 + Summoning 2
Ranger 5 + weather sense 2


etc

Quote from: Majus;801111The combat system uses a dice pool to reflect both attack and damage.

Any ideas how to manage weapon differences? For example, I don't want large weapons to automatically become more accurate because of the system. I've thought about rolling successes and then adding a bonus on top, or letting each success count for more than one unit of damage. (Or giving small weapons lower target numbers but a maximum amount of damage that they can inflict.)

Or should I just take a more laissez-faire approach and just say weapons don't matter?

Or am I ignoring a historical precedent which shows that small weapons can be equally deadly? (and that I should therefore lump LARGE WEAPONS and ACCURATE AND DEADLY WEAPONS into a category like BETTER WEAPONS?)

Etc.  

Really hard to do with a combined hit/damage system.

you could have some weapons needing lower threshold values so more sucesses you can add dice so more successes. You could lower the threshold but decrease the cie or other combos but hard to differentiate here

Quote from: Majus;801111Any ideas how to manage weapon differences? For example, I don't want large weapons to automatically become more accurate because of the system. I've thought about rolling successes and then adding a bonus on top, or letting each success count for more than one unit of damage. (Or giving small weapons lower target numbers but a maximum amount of damage that they can inflict.)

Or should I just take a more laissez-faire approach and just say weapons don't matter?

Or am I ignoring a historical precedent which shows that small weapons can be equally deadly? (and that I should therefore lump LARGE WEAPONS and ACCURATE AND DEADLY WEAPONS into a category like BETTER WEAPONS?)

Yes, to all of the above.

A stab through the heart is basically just as lethal whether it's a stiletto or an artillery shell, but some players really like comparing mechanical differences between weapons; and any approach has to recognise that the physical nature of the weapon is going to be relevant sometimes, too. You have to abstract something.

So this is really a question that you, the designer, should be answering, before then putting that answer in the language of your game mechanics and seeing if it works that way in actual play.

Now, if you were asking what I prefer, it's "weapons do damage based on the wielder's skill, plus maybe a consistent random factor, and the weapon's properties get used for narration", but I'm not designing your game.

Interesting thing about dice pools is you have to ways to modify, Number of dice and Difficulty or how you determine successes.

What you could do with specialties is allow them to lower the Diff number by one. this has a much greater effect then increasing number of dice. So you would want to limit being a specialist to 1 or 2 at max.

So a fight 5 specialty in dueling one would mean the roll 5 dice like always but instead of needing a 7 they need a 6 when dueling.

its a thought. would also make real high end fight scores of 7-8 specialties very serious skills as the more dice they roll the more significant that specialty becomes.



As for weapons that depends a great deal on how you deal with damage as to if it is worth differentiating.

Quote from: Majus;801095I have an idea about character progression.

Characters develop through their skills. Essentially, when it's time to improve, the players choose 1 skill and increase it by 1 (so no difference between 1-2 or 9-10). That may yet bite me on the ass, but it was a conscious decision.

You have to be reasonably sure that there isn't an overwhelming push to always increase the same skill or to always start a new skill; not perfect balance but enough that the tradeoffs and characterization guide the choice more than the straight mechanics of one skill. (If you need to force a little more width, consider forcing it: every 2nd point can't be used on your best skill, every fourth can't be used on your best two skills, every eighth point can't be used on your best three skills, etc. But if your players are more interested in roleplaying than picking apart the mechanics it won't matter much.)

Is there an upper bound to a given skill? Maybe the diminishing returns of the mechanic you use limit people from building up one skill endlessly, or maybe the demands of their adventures rule out overly narrow characters.

QuoteI wonder whether, in addition to skills increasing (let's call that horizontal development), the skills themselves could be upgraded (let's call that vertical development).

So, say, Fighting could be increased from 4 to 5 (horizontal) or the character could receive training in new, more sophisticated training and upgrade Fighting to something else (like Duellist or Commander, say). The new skill could offer better or just different options, as well as offering a way of increasing characterisation over time.

I particularly like the idea of this in conjunction with Magic, with (say) one character going off to learn Necromancy and another learning Elementalism (and other characters sticking with the simple Magic they learned as a fisherman or smith).

However, I'd want the characters to have fewer points in the "advanced" skill than they did in the basics. Yet would not want the character to become less capable at the core tasks.

I suppose they could just learn new skills, but ideally I'd like to keep things tight and stick with the base 10.

I think I favor throwing on the advanced stuff as binary skills that apply in narrow circumstances but are cheaper than advancing the base skill: so get two bonuses for the price of one, but only in certain circumstances, and ideally the advanced stuff would include special things that are not better chance to do something/more damage. But again you have to balance them somehow so that players don't always choose basic skill advance or always choose advanced skill bonuses.

Quote from: Majus;801111The combat system uses a dice pool to reflect both attack and damage.

Any ideas how to manage weapon differences? For example, I don't want large weapons to automatically become more accurate because of the system. I've thought about rolling successes and then adding a bonus on top, or letting each success count for more than one unit of damage. (Or giving small weapons lower target numbers but a maximum amount of damage that they can inflict.)

Or should I just take a more laissez-faire approach and just say weapons don't matter?

Or am I ignoring a historical precedent which shows that small weapons can be equally deadly? (and that I should therefore lump LARGE WEAPONS and ACCURATE AND DEADLY WEAPONS into a category like BETTER WEAPONS?)

Etc.  

Are you going for realistic, "realistic" defined by other games, or just fun to play?

My earlier suggestion of only a few kinds of weapons was serious enough; a lot of different weapons in games with many weapons tend to be descriptive differences only. So, two handed weapons get an extra point of damage if they get any, one handed weapons allow using a shield, ranged weapons hit at a distance, improvised/broken/inferior weapons get a dice pool penalty. Every other special kind of weapon translates into a special (like the binary advanced skills mentioned in my last post, or possibly the traits you mentioned earlier) that does something interesting (chance to disarm or knockdown, bonus versus a single opponent but penalty versus many opponents or vice versa, etc) and perhaps needs both the weapon and the relevant advanced skill to get (weird martial arts weapons).