GAME MECHANICS
What are your favorite game mechanics that you think are very clever or unique and would consider using in other games?
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GAME MECHANICS
I like the flashback mechanic of Blades in the Dark.
It's a big time-saver for any kind of game that includes planned missions.
>Style Points
Ubiquity, and Hollow Earth Expedition specifically, are the only game where meta currency works. Rather than being granted for talking in funny voices or setting yourself up for a failure first, you are provided them by playing along the lines you've defined during character creation. They also have different application than typical meta currencies, so it's never "mother may I pay this up"
>Momentum
2d20 is a complete ass of a system, with countless flaws, but Momentum encourages team-play in ways that many games struggle to even convey, by simply dangling a carrot in front of players and making it both easy and fun to get said carrot.
>I would rather not do the planning and just retcon the game
Good for players, absolutely horrible for GMs to deal with. And the fact BitD was marketed as a heist game invalidates the whole thing further.
I've heard some cool stuff about the momentum mechanic.
How does it actually play out ingame?
>flashback
I run Shadowrun pretty loosey goosey and I'll take it over roleplaying 3 hours of planning and shopping any day.
>How does it actually play out ingame?
The party is gaining a cumulative bonus as long as actions are tied together. For example, Char A suppress-fire enemy, so Char B and C get +1 for their actions. Now B and C can use that +1 to make a really hard action (decreasing the momentum) OR do something that will bring it up to +2. So A goes something for the benefit of the party, B bumps it up to +2 and C then uses normally impossible to conduct roll, using momentum and reducing it to +1. It's still a bonus, so when A moves again, he uses the +1 to finish enemies that are still standing.
It's like playing with a footbag - you want to keep it in the air as long as possible as a group, but the higher it flies, the easier it is for others to pull stunts with it.
As for planning - for me that's the entire fun that comes from heist games. If I'm to skip all the planning and prep part, then the heist itself is 15-30 minutes, and there is no real opposition. As a GM, there is even worse aspect of it: it doesn't matter what and how I prepare, because players can retcon it as they please, rather than actually prepare themselves against pre-existing obstacles. Flashbacks for me read like Harper is genuinely incapable of grasping why there are those in heist MOVIES and thus applying them to a game on a completely wrong premise
As someone who has played and run a LOT of heist games, I am extremely confident that "planning" is just weird masturbation. I've sat there and let players plan for an entire session only for them to have not noticed a detail that was available for them to know and have their entire 8 hours of real life planning wasted. Or one bad roll because their plan was to never get caught all the way in and all the way out. Or in one case, they just forgot what step 3 was because they spend 5 hours planning step 47 and then tried to jump right into it. Planning for heists is a garbage way to waste your TTRPG time.
Oh, and the assumptions. So many "planning" sessions hinging on assumptions that have not been verified or even hinted at. I can't even remember how many guards they thought they hinged their entire plan on being able to bribe without establishing any sort of relationship with them or finding out which, if any, are crooked enough to go for it. A complete stranger just walks up to whichever set of guards are at the door tonight and openly offer them a big sack of money to go take a piss and not come back for a couple hours. Yeah, that'll work.
... except this is precisely the sort of shit that BitD flashbacks allow and outright encourage
>- So you are facing 4 guards in the corri...
>- FLASHBACK! I bribed them week ago!
>- Ok, roll... The guards pass you with a knowing smirk. You pass them unmolested
And please don't give me the standard crap how stress counterbalances it, because it doesn't. That's one of the biggest pitfalls of BitD - it pretends to have counterweights to its completely busted mechanic, while it doesn't.
Yes, but the flashback mechanic assumes you've actually done the work to make it happen. Instead of spending hours talking about doing it, it makes you actually do it.
>Instead of preparing for the situation and maybe even going for it, you are given a "Get out of jail" card to use when facing the obstacle you could have planned ahead for
ftfy
And again, it's not a bad system on its own. It's that it invalidates the whole point of making a heist. A BitD session with a heist job to steal diamonds from a drug kingpin took my group 45 minutes. It was just one use of flashback after another, with people doing a relay race with them. We did it on purpose, to see how fast we can blast through a heist without ANY prep whatsoever, just going directly for the job. Needlessly to say, the GM ended up quite furious in the end, but at least one of the players brought up Quest for El Dorado with himself, so we had something to play for the rest of the evening.
And now it's my turn to say you're doing it wrong. Flashbacks don't have a fixed cost, better ones are supposed to cost more of your limited amount of stress.
>Flashbacks don't have a fixed cost
And you can still use "cheap" (literally and figuratively) tricks to get past it, so that doesn't change the practical application of it.
>limited amount of stress
A party of 5 can each flashback 6-7 times without any ill consequences during a single scenario. That's more than enough to get into a vault, take out all the riches and walk away without a scratch, doing it all on a run, with zero prep.
To say nothing about a situation where someone sets himself up as a victim, so they can push the limit even harder. Who cares, they will just make a new character, and the system encourages this, because your current PC isn't tied with past achievement of the PC, but gang's status.
Yeah, that's a GM problem. As written, flashbacks have more limits than that. Also you are supposed to do some legwork, it's part of setting up a job.
>Also you are supposed to do some legwork
>supposed
A key word
The problem is that you don't have to, and there is literally nothing preventing you from reality-warping the game to bash through anything thrown at you. You don't even need to use your PC abilities or ask the GM to be allowed, you just can do it, here and now.
And it will cost you an assload of stress and might not get the result you want. You can't dictate the result when you flashback, and you don't control the price. The wackier you are, the more it costs. You will quickly run out if you lean on it that hard. GM problem.
Nta, but as written, BitD is unplayable, yet self-confident piece of trash, which spends more time patting its own back over how "superior" it is over "other, lesser games", than providing concrete, functional rules and guidance on utterly broken elements of it. And unlike the other anon, I see no merit in flashbacks, because all they do is doing the zoomer-friendly instant, dopamine rush, for the sake of the rush alone, rather than playing the game. It's like making the core element of your game cheat codes to it, and saying that this is of utmost importance to constantly use them, because winning gives dopamine. Except effortless winning does absolutely nothing, and the scenario can be over before it even started, since everyone is a winner and everything went smooth. Why play at all, when you can't lose, no fence is too high and no obstacle is hard?
>Why play at all, when you can't lose, no fence is too high and no obstacle is hard?
I wouldn't know, since that's not what flashbacks do. That does seem to be what some people here think planning is supposed to do, and I don't really see it.
>since that's not what flashbacks do
>"I bribed the guard"
>Easy to pass roll to do so
>"I poisoned the dogs yesterday"
>Another easy to pass roll
>"I consulted with the ghost of the former owner"
>Yet another easy to pass roll
>"Actually, we hired bunch of randos to dress like us and head the opposite direction"
>An easy roll and money expenditure
Geee, what a fun session to have. If only you did any of those things and planned ahead, rather than just doing random improv all the fricking time.
>b-but waste of time
So is pushing flashbacks. Instead of playing the game, you are skipping it over, just to get to the finale. Why not just showing up, and GM hands out a tally of exp and money to people and everyone goes home already?
If you just flashbacked all of those things, you are now running out of stress and frankly only just got into the building by my reckoning. Now what? You've got to get into the back rooms, basement, and vault, and then get out. You've already used about half of your stress.
>you are now running out of stress
There are 3-4 other people in the party.
And the ONLY use Stress has is fueling flashbacks.
Which is just as easily to recover when spread all over the party.
BitD is a poorly-designed resource management game that tries to sell itself as a TTRPG. Hence why so many people often compare it to a board game, despite it would instantly fell apart as an actual board game, due to how poorly designed it is.
I meant as a party. Your whole party is running out of stress after that many flashbacks. You can't recover that much of it when you're in the middle of a heist. You still have 3/4ths of the way to go, and back.
>Anon lists 4 flashbacks
>A party of 5 is now out of stress
Yeah, you never even read BitD, but are strawmanning defense of it. Congrats, you're the biggest homosexual I've met on /tg/ this week.
>3-4
>5
>running out
>out
Learn to read, gay. If you no-prep flashback every single obstacle, you will be running out of stress before you can get anywhere meaningful. Flashbacks are the least efficient method of doing anything and you will not have enough stress to breeze all the way through a heist on them unless your GM is lowballing the cost so much that you might as well not be playing a game at all. The literal examples in the fricking book aren't even that soft on the players.
Anon lists 4 flashbacks to get into the building with at least three more specific areas to get through. Even if one party member is completely fresh, they won't be after getting into the back of the building. Then you've got a basement and a vault and an exit. You're gonna die.
>Anon lists 4 flashbacks
I've listed 4 flashbacks to: trick the guards, remove the dogs, get info for hidden vault and waltz out of the building without a chase
If is you who insist that this only got me inside of it, solely for the sake of being moronic contrarian.
>Further proves he never read the rules
>I've listed 4 flashbacks to: trick the guards, remove the dogs, get info for hidden vault and waltz out of the building without a chase
Players don't get to dictate the results of their actions. You can trick the guards you would have directly encountered outside, and the dogs you would have directly encountered outside, and get info to know where the vault is and maybe even how to open it. If your GM let you just win off of that alone, then you could have just played any of your planning games and said "I plan to trick the guards, steal the thing, and walk out" and then been allowed to do it that easily. That's a problem with your GM.
Gee, it's almost, just almost you are starting to see how moronic the flashbacks are and how poorly counter-balanced they are with inconsequential stress mechanics. At this pace, in another 50 posts, you might even start to notice why so many people see them as a detriment to heist games.
>if i use them completely wrong, they're moronic
Yeah, like I said, this is the equivalent of saying "I plan to steal the thing by walking in and doing it" and then the GM letting you win if you roll less than a 7 on a d6. Someone's running the game wrong. Your understanding of how these things work does not line up with what's actually in the book or how people actually play. Your heists are too short, your obstacles are too few and far between, your costs are not proportionate, and your allowances are too forgiving.
>Someone's running the game wrong
Or maybe the game is designed wrong and incredibly easy to abuse?
>Your understanding of how these things work does not line up with what's actually in the book
Again, golden standard of irony.
> or how people actually play
I'm sorry if your group is too dense to spot that Stress is not balanced at all and you can spend it carefree. But that speaks more about their self-imposed restrictions rather than reading the rules of the game and applying them.
>Your heists are too short
The point is that the FRICKING SYSTEM makes any heist short as hell, because you (a) remove planning entirely from the picture and (b) allow to blow through any random obstacle while (c) offering fail-forwards even if you somehow frick shit up. But I guess pointing this out means I'm reading rules of a different game and also applying them wrong, for BitD is this awesome game with everything fine-tuned and no super-abusable and broken reality-warping abilities exist in it, along with strong incentive to run head-long into danger and just blow through it.
Did I also mention that short from a heart attack, it's almost impossible to die in BitD, so you can even just do a rush-and-grab and when guards are on your back, simply kill them all.
It's little wonder this game caught up so well with people below 30, for its endless gratification and dopamine injection is the perfect shit for zoomers to slurp with big grin
I don't like narrative systems and I still think you're moronic. All narrative systems should come with a warning, "Do not play in games run by uptight people, they will use the system wrong just to prove a point".
There's also nothing wrong with playing a game that you can't lose, "dopamine farming" describes literally any hobby, but I understand that it's still possible to lose in narrative systems, it's just more of a storytelling thing based on GM fiat.
I like how Dramasystem does it.
There's next to no GM fiat because the drama token mechanic balances out who gets the spotlight and decisions are often consensual.
You could probably easily play it without a GM.
Interesting, I've never heard of this.
https://pelgranepress.com/2011/09/29/introducing-dramasystem/
>Robin D Law
Well, shit, I guess I'll just add that to my list of stuff-this-guy-wrote-that-I-haven't-read-yet.
>if my character doesn't die, nothing that happens to them matters!
Uhuh.
Nta, but that's a very valid point. Your character surviving till next time is the only thing that matters
I'm playing games to be amused. The failure state is that I'm not amused, not that "my character" "dies" or shit like that. I don't self-insert any more than I would for a punch and judy puppet show.
Games are not a meaningful accomplishment and it's frankly pathetic to pretend they are. The worst games I've ever been part of have been due to people who think like that and I'd literally rather have just gone to work, I'd have met more interesting people, had more agency and accomplishment, and have made money on top.
Storyshitters have terrible habits but at least if they actually make a story that I'd want to read (admittedly almost never happens) they've actually accomplished something.
That said, I love planning out schemes the way west point students write papers on hypothetical wars that can't even happen. The thought experiment itself is what's engaging, I don't really care if some shitty game designer accounted for the factors correctly and I recognize that whether it works or not "in game" ultimately depends 100% on whether the GM decides to ignore things that actually matter or pile up shit that doesn't.
> Your heists are too short, your obstacles are too few and far between, your costs are not proportionate, and your allowances are too forgiving.
NTA, but it sounds like a pretty piss-poor narrative-based system for heists if every single heist has to be a 5 level complex of multi-layered security just to ensure that the PCs can't breeze through with the stress they have available.
And in my experience playing the game, it was that, where any planning felt rather pointless when improvising and flashbacks was more than enough to get up to some hidden safe on the second floor of a manor.
And I can safely say that as a party of three we were never hurting for stress. You can blame that on the GM for not running things properly, but the way you're framing it makes it sound like we were supposed to be burning 5+ stress on a single flashback instead of the 1 or 2 points it usually ended up being.
If that's the case, then the rulebook really wasn't communicating that properly.
Just going over a couple examples here
though
>poisoned the dogs
The book's flashback example section calls out feeding fireweed to some goats as being 1 stress.
>consulted with a ghost to learn a secret
Also an example given in the book listed under the 2 (or more) stress section.
There's no direct examples that correlate to bribing guards or having a group of identically dressed decoys, but even if they're both 3 stress each (which still seems like a stretch, since the book gives smuggling a bomb as an example of 2 stress) then at most that's 9 Stress to a single character, not the entire party. That's enough to cause Trauma, but only if we assume that bribing people is a 3 stress flashback.
Flashbacks are not the only use of stress, it's also for reducing consequences, and since it cannot retcon anything, also can't magically get you out of a jam. Flashbacks can also require rolls and other resources, and those rolls can frick you up. If you flashback bribed a guard and failed the roll, that guy might have just taken your money and then told his employer about it and now you have to mitigate clock ticks and also those guards are still right there expecting you.
Or you did bribe that guard, but he's not here now. Or there's unexpectedly a second guard who isn't in on it. The important part is that flashbacks aren't free and actually cost more than just doing something live. You can roll for an action, or you can spend stress and roll for an action. Either way, you still have to actually do something. Flashbacks just give you a wider and more expensive array of things you can do.
>The important part is that flashbacks aren't free
No shit. I said they weren't free. But they also aren't so expensive that performing four flashbacks will leave the entire party on the brink of Trauma.
In my experience, flashbacks resulted in us breezing past everything to the degree that we were never in a jam in the first place, because being able to retroactively rig things in our favor was plenty.
That's specifically because it's far better to spend stress early and often, be it pushing or flashbacks, because it means you're more likely to be approaching from a controlled position rather than a risky one. You're better able to determine how you're engaging with things and try a different avenue if it isn't working.
If you fail early, that failure compounds more failure and you end up with stress, harm, and consequences.
As you said, because flashbacks can't retcon anything, you want to use it after you've gained information but before the consequences are actually a threat.
To use the example of bribed guards, sure things might go south if you try and flashback and bribe them and roll poorly, but things also might go south if you try to deal with the guards in literally any other way and roll poorly.
>Flashbacks just give you a wider and more expensive array of things you can do.
And I think you're drastically underselling just how massive that is.
>To use the example of bribed guards, sure things might go south if you try and flashback and bribe them and roll poorly, but things also might go south if you try to deal with the guards in literally any other way and roll poorly.
Then it goes poorly and also you've pre-spent your stress. That's the tradeoff, you spent stress before you even tried something, if you roll very well and don't need to spend anymore stress, then you would have rolled well and not needed to spend stress in the first place if you hadn't flashed back. If you rolled mediocre or failed, then you pre-spent stress, then spent more stress to mitigate consequences, and that's where you'll be running out. Saying the game is easy when you roll high every time is true for pretty much any game. If you pre-planned everything and then rolled so high you never needed to deviate, then you'd be breezing through all the same.
>then you would have rolled well and not needed to spend stress in the first place if you hadn't flashed back
Except that's where the wider and more expansive array of ways you can approach a problem comes in, because doing something in a straightforward manner in the moment could put you in a very risky position and lead towards the aforementioned failure spiral.
>Saying the game is easy when you roll high every time is true for pretty much any game
I'm just telling you what my experience with the game was, which was slowly and methodically ticking off points of stress for narrative control rather than actually having any of the cool daring heist moments described in the book, because the game gives you all the tools you need to ensure a heist goes off without a hitch so long as you put in a modicum of forethought.
>to ensure a heist goes off without a hitch so long as you put in a modicum of forethought
>as you put in a modicum of forethought
That same book tells you to never, ever, under any circumstances, plan ahead, so I can understand why the anon is so stubborn in insisting that you will instantly run out of stress. After all, planning is bad, slow and stops the game, so you should never do any. And putting any sort of forethought into your actions is planning them, ergo you are playing the game wrong.
Honestly, I don't really think there is a way to play BitD "proper" without it being your very first (nad only) RPG experience. Everyone else is abusing the mechanics presented to no end, including the greenhorns, but the green people will be buying the in-book descriptions and parrot without a forethought (ha!) all the bullshit John Harper claims, self-censoring the fact they blow through the game without ever facing meaningful risk or opposition.
Planning ahead is literally what you're supposed to do before a heist. You don't even get a heist without some amount of planning. Just not autistic hours of planning every little detail.
>Planning is good
>Planning is autistic
Which one is it, then?
Because the book continuously tells you that planning is bad, and replaces any level of planning with flashbacks. After all, the heist "movie" (since he apparently wrote a screenwriter guide, not a TTRPG) as understood by John Harper is as follow
>The premise of the heist, as a job to do
>Personal drama of characters that's somehow related with it
>Going to the place and doing the heist after bunch of bickering and more personal drama
>Performing the heist on a go, since "audience" didn't saw any planning and thus you should never insert it prior
>Any situation that can be a problem should be resolved by a flashback
>Any situation that can be dealt on site should be resolved by brute-forcing it ("pushing" as the game describes it)
>The heist ends, everyone goes back to their own personal petty dramas
This isn't just a bad game. It's not even how you structure a heist movie, to the point of comical misunderstanding why and how their plot is structured.
Pic related is what you get when thinking like John. Don't be John.
Planning is what it is. And it does happen sometimes in BitD.
Half your complaints are that flashbacks are too powerful, but then when defending planning, you say that plans should never be disrupted by bad rolls or else the game and GM are bad. How is that not at least as powerful?
The counter argument in this thread has been that planning should allow you to blow through everything without any risks because a "good system" won't let you catastrophically fail any roll that would result in your plan being thrown off or you getting caught. So at the end of the day, you can't really complain about one system letting you win when the other system also does that.
The counter made by people who support flashbacks, yes. For they genuinely seem unable to wrap their heads around the fact that failure of the plan =/= not having fun performing it, along with failure of the plan =/= the whole scenario going to shit
Which is doubly ironic when you realise ANOTHER element that's integral to BitD, and the real reason why there are no obstacles or meaningful consequences (even if the game uses that word twice per page) is the fail-forward as an actual, codified game mechanic. You literally can't fail in the traditional sense, and thus your heist can continue, despite messing up rolls.
The actual counter-argument to all of this is that sitting as a group and planning a heist is a fun activity to do and skipping over that just to directly jump to semi-improv job proper is missing the whole point. It's like being a big fan of football, but instead of watching the matches, you are only allowed to read the end-of-season table of scores.
>b-but autistic planning
I never said that or even suggested. You projected that on me, paraphrasing the infamous disdain BitD has as a book toward players that WANT TO plan ahead on any level. Which ties back to my argument - green people will be parroting the book without second thought, even if they are blowing through its obstacles just and easy as fast as everyone else.
So then what's your actual problem? You seem okay with deciding your success outside of the time you actually execute the plan, and also seem fine with failures not actually stopping anyone. It seems like it just boils down to being too fast for your liking, which is absolutely autistic.
>So then what's your actual problem
1) Flashbacks as described are pretty much "cheat mode". They are not balanced on any level, and the examples provided further cement them as broken
2) The book spends third of its 300+ page count to shit on idea of planning your actions
3) Another third is spend on shitting on just about any other RPGs
So it's a poorly designed game that has the sheer balls to self-claim itself superior to anything else, and do so by beating you over the head with claims how great it is and how bad everything else is. But there is more
4) Despite having variety of safety nets as its core features, the game insist on being high-risk and big stakes
So the false marketing continues, and creates unreasonable and unrealistic expectations from the game - if not about how super-duper the mechanical aspects are, then at least how much challenge there is to face.
>It seems like it just boils down to being too fast for your liking, which is absolutely autistic.
If I can resolve a game scenario in 30-40 minutes, what am I supposed to do for the rest of the evening? This isn't even about heists and planning at this point, but what the hell I'm supposed to do for the rest of the evening now? How this elevates the game, rather than being a glaring issue that it's over in less than an hour?
>If I can resolve a game scenario in 30-40 minutes, what am I supposed to do for the rest of the evening?
Do another one? Each session needing to be perfectly truncated with precisely one major mission in it doesn't convince me that you aren't autistic.
Ok, so I've spend the evening playing 3 heist scenarios in a row. I think I have enough heists for next half a year thanks to overdose. Evening saved, no reason to touch that particular game for a loooong while. Another great success from Evil Hat Productions!
No, seriously, do you even play at all, or just shitposting randomly at this point?
Don't look at me. Look at John Harper. The man clearly struggles with the concept.
I do play, and my games don't devolve into a series of cakewalk flashbacks with no consequences to mitigate, because my group knows that players don't dictate results, consequences, or mitigation costs.
You insist that your GM running a cakewalk means the system is bad, and then describe your cakewalk as if that's how everyone runs the game. Then you insist that anyone who has a different experience must just be a new player who has never played anything else. You're an arrogant b***h.
>You insist that I project a lot of stuff nobody said, in dire attempt to present a strawman as believable situation
ftfy
Bro, literally every argument against flashbacks has been that they make things too easy because they're cheap and negate everything just because the players choose to use them. That's a cakewalk caused by the GM. The game doesn't let players dictate results.
>No, I never in my life played a single narrative game, how could you tell?
>it's narrative, that means when my gm runs it counter to what the rules actually say in a way that sucks, that's how it is for everyone!
Players don't dictate consequences or the result of mitigating consequences. There is no fixed amount that the consequence is supposed to be reduced by. They also don't dictate exactly how a flashback works, whether they even can flashback, or whether they have to roll for it, which then loops back to consequences they can't unilaterally dictate if they don't ace that roll.
Well I also mean the obsession with planning a lot. We had a guy do it once, but it didn't seem to help much, and the rest of us weren't feeling very enthusiastic about the exercise.
Keep in mind that nobody but people insisting that BitD "solves" the "problem" of overplanning ever hinted on that. As in - people plan on the same level as you prescribed, having general action plan and maybe doing some extra spying when actual heist is the theme of the session. Apparently that makes such people autistic overplanners that hate fun and waste hours on nothing ,rather than fast-forward for d3+1 heists through that day. Sorry, fail-forward through them.
>If you like being challenged, you are autistic
Time to commit sudoku over being ESL
I'm sorry your GM coddled you. Also the descriptions of a "good system" here include no challenge at all. You can't fail, you planned it!
>Things nobody have said, implied or claimed are real, because BitD defender has a schizoid episode
The response to "I don't like planning because it's wasted time if things go wrong" was "Just play a system or with a GM that doesn't let things go wrong". It's right at the top of the thread.
The rules literally have an example where a player has to spend an almost double digit amount of stress to turn their head being blown open into a broken limb. It also contains numerous examples of what flashbacks do and what they cost, and getting to completely bypass everything in the entire heist for nearly free isn't in there. Stress is not an unlimited resource and players don't dictate results or costs.
>The rules provide you a completely different example to absolutely extreme situation
>This means you can't retcon bribing a random schlub without getting a heart attack from overstressing
And here we can witness a Harper drone getting overwhelmed by how moronic is his game of choice
>if i bribe a random schlub, i win
If I plan to bribe a random schlub, do I win in your games?
>Your whole party is running out
>Learn to read, gay
The irony is golden, since you apparently have no idea what you are even typing in
>4/5 at half
Yeah, that's running out when trying to mitigate the consequences of a failure can take you down by more than a quarter of your total.
>And the ONLY use Stress has is fueling flashbacks
You did not play the game.
>Another easy to pass roll
NTA but wtf are you talking about here? Every single roll in bitd has a fixed difficulty, meaning that you are just as likely to fail to bribe the guard as you are to knock him out in close combat. I don't see how flashbacks make obstacles easier.
Except you can't use Flashbacks to remove something that the GM has said already exists. You need to preempt the flashback. If the GM already says there are guards on patrol you can't use a flashback to remove them. You can "yes, but" with a flashback, so you could use one to say you bribed a few so while there are guards on patrol there aren't as many as usual.
This just sounds like your group didn't have an actual full grasp of the rules.
And that isn't even to mention Stress.
>Except you can't use Flashbacks to remove something that the GM has said already exists
Consult conclusion of
Bribing a guard is equal with making him not present. Him being there and him affecting anything are two separate things
Great so you wasted Stress and your Coin to do so. You used up the two major game currencies to get this done.
You really don't have a grasp of the game. If you're playing every heist to the point you're always out of stress by the end you're going to frick yourself in the downtime phase.
Again, you clearly don't have a grasp on the rules.
But you can't retcon. If you walk right up to the guards and they draw their weapons and demand you leave, flashback bribing them doesn't work. You cannot undo the fact that you're now facing down the barrels of two guns. Bribed guards don't do that. These can't be bribed guards.
Also, it kind of reminds me of "Bandits". Ever saw this one? It has a truly crazy sequence where the main characters run away from prison, rob a bank and find a safehouse, all within 7 minutes of running time, all as complete improv in-universe. And stuff like that works in movies just fine...
... except we are at the table, playing the game, and we just blasted through the scenario with no real obstacles to face and no real gameplay other than the sort of games kids play, one-upping each other with crazier and crazier powers
Okay, but how does planning help there? Isn't the point of a plan to be able to beat everything and breeze through as easily as possible?
I'm getting some mixed messages here, like planning should allow you to not get caught, but also using something like flashbacks to not get caught is bad. Why? Ultimately they do the same thing if you just let plans work all of the time, except the plans are way slower.
Let me explain the practical difference
>Planning
>Your GM has an actual set of obstacles to overcome
>Party's job is to plan ahead against those, taking precautions, spying, bribing, getting plans etc as actual activities in-game
>They don't have to be detailed, you can easily get through overview of them, but there is an actual, physical process going on
>Then comes the execution, obstacles are addressed either according to the plan or according to the situation at hand
>Heist might or might not succeed
vs
>Flashbacks
>Your GM has an actual set of obstacles to overcome
>None of this matters, because the party can just walk in and proceed with the job right of the bat
>There was no actual planning, and whatever happens is a constant flux
>Any obstacle that can't be overcome with a class-specific ability can be removed with a flashback, neutering it when lacking set of skills to actually deal with it
>There is no fail state, other than running out of spare stress, which there is a very generous pool of party-wide
And before you post something in tune of "but flashbacks can't remove things from existence": what is "akshually, I bribed the guard" than removing him from the equation and thus making him a non-factor?
Flashbacks aren't guaranteed and they aren't cheap if you did none of the legwork or expect something outlandish. This is literally how the system is written. If your GM let you blow through literally everything using flashbacks, then you weren't playing it right.
>>Then comes the execution, obstacles are addressed either according to the plan or according to the situation at hand
And when hours of real life game time are wasted on plans that don't pan out, that's really annoying. Even if you succeed, you could have succeeded without using up everyone's limited real life time on hypotheticals that didn't matter. That's the issue with planning.
>And when hours of real life game time are wasted on plans that don't pan out
Which sends us back here:
Either you are using wrong system (likely) or your GM is ass (most likely).
Besides, your counter-point is equally bizzare: you didn't "waste" hours on playing the game, you just won it in few minutes. So what with the rest of the session, now?
>without using up everyone's limited real life time
I wonder why are you even play games, or post on Ganker, given your strawman attitude
Okay, so what is a good system or GM supposed to do when something seems to not be going according to plan? Warp the world around what the players wanted? Is the GM supposed to follow the script the players laid out? How does this actually work?
The original anon listed HEX.
I would add GUMSHOE. Fudge (but not Fate) handles this sort of shit pretty well. Dogs in the Vineyard, while useless for heists (it's just not this kind of game, despite being on surface level a wstern), does handle similar mechanics pretty well. And the old-ass Gunslingers & Gamblers, to keep it western, was pretty neat, despite its incredible mechanical simplicity. Each of those games handles situations differently than "there is always a fail state of your roll, no matter how awesome you are in specific field" and "circumstances only modify the outcome, not the set-up itself".
> Warp the world around what the players wanted
That's what flashbacks are effectively doing, despite BitD and FitD repeating like a broken record that they totally don't.
>Is the GM supposed to follow the script the players laid out
GM already had a script, players made their plan according to it, because remember, this is a heist job. There is a pre-existing "obstacle course" to overcome and prepare as much as possible ahead of time. You do play heist games, right? You know how those go, and not just strawmanning?
Okay, so what you're saying here is that you're fine with changing things on a meta-level and guaranteeing success as long as it was loosely specified before hand? I'm not seeing the big difference here. You give everyone big bonuses that make it impossible to meaningfully fail because they did it in a certain order and tagged each other up and down the path.
Ideally, failure will make future challenges more difficult without being an endpoint, and/or will deny the PCs some of what they want without being an endpoint.
Anon questions your concept of 'wasting time', and I see what he's saying, because ideally making plans and attempting to execute them would be fun no matter what the consequences were (feeling differently doesn't make you wrong but it might mean you're playing the wrong game). But also, ideally, most failures shouldn't be endpoints.
You know, this gave me idea. Someone listed flashbacks, which are contentious at best, as a great thing... but the real selling point is fail-forward. It's not something that BitD invented, but it's something they've packated into an actual game mechanics: your failure is not an end-state, it just means you have to deal with the consequences, but that doesn't halt the game and/or fail the scenario. Again, it's not something that BitD invented, it's been in use for decades by people, but they gave it a name and recognizable form. This has great application to CoC, which traditionally is routinely depending on succeeding a specific skill check in the specific moment, or else the game grinds to a complete halt, and turns into compulsive re-attempting to pass the roll. Well, you've failed, but that just means the cultists will be stronger, rather than stopping the game.
Yes.
Unfortunately, the idea of "failing forward" is conflated with the idea of "no failure", and as someone who dislikes narrative games I can sort of see why. Playing something like BitD I tend to feel like my decisions don't matter as much, but of course that's subjective and depends on the GM.
The key, I think, is to have a concept of "the game progressing" which is completely separate from the concept of "PCs getting what they want". The game needs to be willing to go to a place that the players (or at least their characters) really don't want to go. If you have this then failing forward is a great tool, otherwise failing forward is illusionism.
This gets really muddy with CoC, because the best thing that any PC can do in that game is to walk the frick away, the game is all about sticking your nose where it doesn't belong. At the same time the idea of madness gives you some non-game-ending consequence. If the PCs don't find the clue then maybe they have a weird dream instead, and the weird dream puts the train back on the rails and allows the game to continue, but the PC (and player) would have probably preferred to have found the clue.
Different people, different strokes, I guess. It's not like I don't see why people don't like planning, I just don't see a point to throw it away, either.
Besides, a lot of your complains boil down to two factors:
>Using wrong system for the wrong style of game
>Having incredibly incompetent GM
I know it's not a TTRPG example, but it's like with stealth video games: a good stealth game should offer you options after you frick up, rather than forcing a reload to a state before you fricked up. And in case of a good heist game, planning, on BOTH sides of the table, along with picking the correct system to run the game, allows to avoid the standard pitfalls of "one roll ruined the whole 5 hours of planning and now it's just a murderfest/running away".
Which I guess sends us back to my original post about Ubiquity and HEX: it's the sort of system with
>automated successes
that are handled really fricking well
You play as a sneaky thief? Good, a simple door lock is no obstacle for you, because your Lockpicking Rating is 5 and you need just 2 successes to open that lock, so you quite literally can't frick this up. A regular landing of a plane on an airfield? Why rolling, if your Pilot Rating is 9, befitting an ace pilot, so regular landings are just a complete routine for you. But should you be, say, a treasure hunter that only saw Ace McCloud pilot "Giselle", you are shit out of your luck, for your final Pilot Rating is 2 and you need to roll those 2 successes to do the regular landing.
>I know it's not a TTRPG example, but it's like with stealth video games: a good stealth game should offer you options after you frick up, rather than forcing a reload to a state before you fricked up
Yes, and that's what happened. But guess what the frick up contingency is? Go loud and start blasting because your hours of planning failed. Chaos ensues, might as well have just kicked in the door 7 real life actual hours ago because that's where we are now. Your plans didn't account for failure and your failure has resulted in an alarm. Now there's no plan.
Ask me how I know you never in your life played a single heist-based scenario and just talking straight out of your ass
I'm sorry you only play heists against daycares and unguarded boat sheds. When your party tries to take out a squad of radio equipped guards and one of them doesn't go down immediately, that's a problem. When they try to get past all the tripwires and touch one, that's a problem. When wannabe Machiavelli tries to talk his way into an area where no visitors are allowed or expected and then can't explain his presence, that's a problem. When you spend hours planning over and over and over again and then dumbass B just goes ahead and does something nobody else was ready for, that's a problem. These are all things I've seen happen in heist games.
>Even more baseless projecting
Here is the (You) you are after, but I'm done
What heist games are you playing where you can just frick up and get caught and then reset like it's nothing? Certainly not something like Shadowrun unless your GM is extremely forgiving.
Failing forward and getting the results you want even if you frick up isn't how most people play.
Again, stop playing with idiots.
If you're finding your "friends" are consistently inept and stupid it's a sign you need to select who you associate with more carefully
>Ace McCloud
Man, I feel old
I'm sorry you've played with a LOT of brainlets, I recommend filtering your groups a bit more.
Start by removing people who watch television or habitually jerk off, activities known to reduce mental acuity and focus.
Frankly I'd rather just stop wasting time planning nothing for nobody. I don't really want to waste hours planning to find out if this batch of players are capable of actually following plans and/or lucky enough for nothing at all to throw off their plans.
>I make scenario first, vet new group of players later/never
Found your problem
I don't skip planning completely.
I let them plan and describe how they prepare, which gains them preparation tokens.
They can then use those tokens ingame, but they are limited use, so you gotta make em count.
I mainly use it to skip roleplaying legwork that won't amount to much more than "you get thing" and buying sprees, which often eats a lot of session time and doesn't really add anything.
So you could spend a token to have prepared disguises to slip past a guard, for example.
It doesn't prevent you from doing that beforehand, but if you did forget to think of that I'll assume that your characters are professional enough that they wouldn't.
The token resource just keeps it from going overboard.
I usually hand out 1 or 2 per player.
You could also reward players for not using them by converting them to exp after a successful mission.
Given the whole system is written by a stupid man trying to understand how smart people act, and make a game that will make stupid people (normies, netflix watchers etc) seem smart this is to be expected.
What the other anon have said: your actions can increase a group pool of bonuses for everyone to use, decreasing the pool in doing so. And since many actions increase momentum naturally, it's not even about choice between "Do I damage or do I increase momentum" or even potential decision paralysis, because the answer is "Yes". It allows to bump up chances of less combat-oriented characters and make competent characters even better. The main issue is every other ingredient of 2d20, and unfortunately, the momentum is so much tied with how the system works, it's pretty hard to translate into any other system (many have tried, with poor-to-bad results)
Shadowrun was what I specifically had in mind when I read that mechanic in bitd.
>And the fact BitD was marketed as a heist game invalidates the whole thing further.
Flashback planning sessions are literally a heist movie staple though, especially as a twist reveal that what seems like a dire situation is actually exactly according to plan
>Flashback planning sessions are literally a heist movie staple
>movie staple
Found your problem
Come back when you start playing games
>b-but it works in a movie
Which is a linear, non-interactive story written by a single person, performed by actors according to pre-written script. If you can't see why something like that might not fit into a game, you might be beyond no-game, you might be never-game.
I think you've missed the point completely.
Actually sitting and planning a heist isn't particularly engaging gameplay. Sure, some people are into it, and we call those people Shadowrun players and leave them be. Most people who want to do a heist are looking for genre emulation, which is the whole point of pbta and by extension fitd games.
You seem upset
.... and this is exactly where the thread got derailed. In the very first fricking post
When you die in the game, you die in real life.
Played a homebrew system once that had a lot of crazy mechanics apparently for the sake of craziness, and a weird die. But what I thought was really neat was some sort of momentum bar that you build up during combat by taking any kind of aggressive, proactive action. That includes just walking towards the enemy, attacking or something else that contribute to the fight. You could then use that bar for bigger, flashier attacks.
Thought the overall idea was neat and that I should include that in some way for something else at some point.
CoC's luck.
It's a resource for players and at the same time a very handy tool for the GM.
>yo bill, whats with the chained up b***h in your basement?
>thats Linda, she's here on Thursdays
I've seen it both ways. I've spent a lot of time doing legwork and planning and then having to scramble because of something we missed or someone doing something stupid. I will say that I've never had a bad roll completely blow cover, but I have had it throw our plan completely out of whack and force us to act spontaneously. I've definitely wasted more time making plans that didn't play out than plans that did.
Player characters can observe the location for a week or two to learn what's going on daily. Comings and goings.
They can hire a sage or thief to get then floorplans.
They can get one of themselves hired as a guard (or help / bribe an inside man).
They can prepare a plan A and plan B.
If they don't do the above or similar beforehand it's a smash n grab.
No flashbacks, no tokens,
magic, alchemy and violence for when it goes wrong.
It's a Ttrpg session not a movie.
When Mike Mearls got hired by Wizards, he was asked about his favorite game mechanic, and he listed shields from Halo. I didn't play Halo so the idea was new to me, but I did play a lot of Goldeneye, so I remember what it was like to barely win a firefight and then be stuck running around with a sliver of healthy. Regenerating shields reward skill while also leading to more satisfying gameplay.
I really frickin love vancian casting with rigid spell preparation. Where you prepare exactly 1 fireball, and then the perfect moment for a fireball arises, it makes you feel like you have the biggest brain in the world. It does call for a bit more bookkeeping but the satisfaction (to me) has always been disproportionately greater than the effort spent.
In Settlers of Catan you roll 2d6 to see which resources spawn, and the number associated with each resource tile also has a number of stars, so 1 star for a "2" and 2 stars for a "3", and the number of stars literally represents your odds, so 5 stars means 5/36 chance. But you can know absolutely nothing about statistics, and assume that 2 2-star hexes are worth as much as 1 4-star hex, and statistically you're completely right. I don't even know if this counts as game design because it's so simple but I'm still impressed by it.
I love what Smash Bros did to fighting games. Basically, taking damage makes your character lighter, and getting knocked off the map is what actually counts. The basic premise of Mortal Kombat is a death match, they deleted that premise and replaced it with a platforming gimmick while keeping the best elements of the genre.
Deckbuilding games like Dominion are so dope. I keep thinking I'll get tired of them, but I don't, I just gain more and more appreciation for the premise.
Skulls of the Shogun might be the perfect wargame, at least in its core premise, archers are a little powerful and horseman are a little weak but that works out if you have objectives to capture.
I like how ORE takes into account both the number of identical rolls, and their value. This also means that you have an incentive to roll smaller dice even if you don't get anything in return since it increases the odds of doubles or triples or whatever.
In Rolemaster you divide your weapon skill into offense and defense.
It's a super quick, easy and elegant way to determine your current fighting style. I'm surprised I never see it elsewhere.
I can just go all out and dump all my skill points into offense and deal high damage but leave myself open for attack.
I can use all my points for defense when I'm outnumbered until my comrades are able to help me out.
And anything inbetween.
No maneuvers you have to learn or look up in the book. Super intuitive and makes combat very fluid.
People usually just see the tables and think Rolemaster is super crunchy but it's actually very fast, easy and feels very rewarding.
I've homebrewed similar stuff and it seems like there's no reason to do anything in the middle, either you go all-offense or all-defense depending on the situation.
It's similar to 3e-style power attack, except that Power Attack is a tool to optimize offense, so you do some math based on your hit chance and expected damage in order to find the optimal ammount of BAB that you should spend, and sometimes spending 3 points of BAB will give you .125 more average damage than if you spent all 4.
The thing is, the choice between offenses and defense is usually binary, either it's worth compromising your offense in order to defend yourself or else it isn't.
Damage in Rolemaster works very different than DnD.
A bad hit from anything except maybe some small animals can potentially kill or maim you.
Most of the time you will absolutely want to split your points. It's mainly a question which ratio you're willing to risk.
That doesn't check out for me. If combat is unforgiving, that just means that the people in front should always fight defensively all the time, until they have an opening of some kind. Then the guy who comes up behind the enemy should go all-in on offense, every time, because his job is to kill the enemy and stop it from attacking.
If there's no opening, and if you just have to tank the enemy attacks while wearing them down over time, then that's what you do. All the time. HIgh lethality (or maim-rate or whatever) does not by itself give you any incentive to go halfway, if offense matters more then you go all-offense, otherwise you go all-defense.
I can see how stepwise math (or maybe bellcurves) can create an optimal path that's somewhere in the middle. If the first point of offensive gives you a disproportionately great advantage, and further contributions to offense lead to diminishing returns, then you put 1 point in offense in that particular situation. And the game can get interesting if every situation is different, you'd generally want to start on defense until you learn how much offense is optimal, but that still seems like it would lead to finnicky mid-game math even in the best of circumstances.
The magic is in the damage and critical tables.
Every weapon type has it's own table and has pros and cons.
Something that others systems would represent as weapon abilities or special attacks.
You roll a d100 and the skill value you add will generally be somewhere between 0 and 75.
So it's unpredictable enough to keep you on your toes.
I think it is possible that those tables merely obscure your perception of what is optimal. But thanks for sharing. Damage in rollmaster is cooler in any event, I think a lot of new D&D players are disappointed by how non-action-movie it is, and what they really want are weapon-specific damage tables.
I'm sure a gigabrain number cruncher could figure out an optimal way to shift points, but in my experience there's generally too many factors to perfectly predict outcomes.
Especially with an experienced GM who can keep combat going at a good pace.
That's something you can offset with good encounter design.
Players bunch up and turtle? AoE fireball.
Players rely on specific PCs to deal damage? Focus them with ranged attacks or have an assassin sneak up on them.
You can seperate players using obstacles, high and low ground, use weather conditions or environmental hazards. There's lot's of options.
From Fistfull of TOWs v3:
Each stand being airdropped is represented by a 1˝ square template of paper labeled to identify the stand it represents. To execute the drop, place the templates every 1˝ along a ruler. Hold the ruler above the drop zone, aligning it parallel to the flight direction. The altitude at which the ruler is held above the drop zone depends on the troop quality:
>Poor = 28˝
>Marginal = 24˝
>Fair = 20˝
>Average = 16˝
>Good = 12˝
>Excellent = 8˝
>Superb = 6˝
Turn the ruler over and let the templates flutter to the game surface. Each stand ends up where its template landed. Stands that land in water are eliminated. Stands that land in cover—woods, towns, swamps, etc.—take a quality check.
>Optionally, if there’s a strong wind blowing across the drop zone, set up a small fan (on low setting) to blow across the table when conducting the drop.
Simple as frick, incredibly fast resolution, no charts or table lookups, no dice rolls, and accurately reflects the chaos of an airdrop in hostile territory.
That's really neat.
I love when tabletop games try to make mechanics feel diegetic and next to none even try.
I ran a dungeon crawl game once and for climbing I had players stack small D6s. The amount of dice was according to the difficulty. It really adds tension.
Shooting arrows was similar.
I had them flick dice into a circle. The harder the shot the further away the circle.
>Game mechanics thread
>Oh cool, time to disc...
>Someone mentions flashbacks
>Thread descends into chaos and "no, u"
... and then people ask why I dislike flashbacks.
It's not the mechanics. It's the sort of autistic screeching it causes from people that both support and oppose them.
Spiritual Attributes in Riddle of Steel
Nice way to give characters access to an occasional edge in lethal systems, whilst also mandating some motivational commitments to help players formulate some goals
>thread about game "mechanics"
>it's all fricking rpg spreadsheet role/roll playing bs
>not one boardgame
/tg/ is dead
>Implying people ITT actually play games
Why do you think there is less than ten posts answering OP, and almost everythign else is autistic screeching about EHP game?
/tg/ has always been 90% roleplaying games.
I'd like to see more blind bidding/poker like mechanics for social conflicts. Too often systems can't shake the shadow of DnD, aiming to build some comprehensive roleplaying framework that is essentially a core system and a detailed combat subsystem. Losing an argument when you run out of 'stress points' is maybe better than nothing but I think a subsystem with actual bluffing and such is underutilised.
if you character dies, you die
Anon, everyone dies
>Did I lock the door? It's not like anyone's every around. I know my neighbors well enough, I'm sure it's okay
I like CoC progression system, where instead of experience point, you get skill increase from using said skill. It's always puzzling to me why only a handful of titles use such system, especially among percentile games.
Because it devolves into autism olympics where people backflip everywhere to get skill increases. Then you have to limit how much you can increase, which still leads to people forcing certain rolls to get increases there.
Easiest to just cut that bullshit and let people spend xp as they wish.
... and CoC has both of those solved, so thanks for making it clear your familiarity with the game ends at the abbreviation
I don't get the obsession with planning. When I played Shadowrun, we just did some legwork and then went into it. There wasn't any detailed hyper-specific plans based off of patrol routes or insider knowledge we had to spend weeks gathering, and we did just fine. Sure, the alarms went off a lot, but the way the GM ran things, high security wasn't static enough to meticulously plan around anyway. Predictable isn't secure.
this flashback thing is meh and its supporters are dumb and try to use dumb gimmicks to compensate lack of good group/dm
- random anon, who got no clue what is thta BimB thing
>d100 roll under
- WFRP: swap the numbers to get results from a different table (eg: hit location);
- HÂRNMASTER: doubles mean extraordinary success/failure
>Players/GM aids
- GURPS: the "common sense" advantage is very useful for insecure/moronic players in playing smart and wise characters;
- EABA: the univeesal table is golden to asses magnitudes, difficulties, measures and so in a blink of an eye. Mutants & Masterminds 3e also has (stolen from eaba) this kind of table;
There's obviously other stuff but those are the first that come to my mind.
>Traveller character creation
Unironically one of the most fun parts of the game, and I love how players can aim for a certain type of character but have to roll with what the dice give them. So if someone makes a golden boy or an edgelord, it's because of the things that happened to the character during character creation.
Reminds me of an old d100 superhero system I played long ago, amazing char creation system but mediocre gameplay. We used it to comeup with ideas for M&M which had a better gameplay.
You basically make your char
-Roll stats including physical appearance
-Roll origin (mutant, alien, mutate, experiment, cyborg, long etc). Each of the origin has radomized number of powers
-Roll for which powers you have. Which are a fricking lot from sonic scream to pheromones control, from super strenght to open portals
-Then you roll if you have secret identity or not, if you're well known super hero, if you're an urban legend kind of thing, etc
-You roll if you're rich, poor, average, if your money comes from your family, or you own a company, etc
-You roll for family ties, if your parents are still alive, or separated, or died in a freakish mysterious accident, or killed by a supervillain
-You roll if you have a rogue gallery, or just a single nemesis, or a company wants to kill you
And more, it was great, specially because most of the "backstory" rolls also came up with tie-in goals and bonuses to skills and abilities. Really sad the system per se wasn't as cool as the char generation.
I fricking love dice pools, using Edge and rolling like 15d6 when playing Shadowrun makes me giddy. All those dice clattering… delightful.
I ran Shadowrun 4th edition at a convention.
Fat neckbeard shows up with a character min/maxed to hell and back for damage reduction.
Gets shot so I tell him to roll armor.
He grabs 40-something dice in a single fat hand.
Tell him I use the 20-dice-pool limit rule from the companion.
He almost burst into tears.
Burning Wheel has simple advice I apply to almost every roll in every game I run: describe the consequences of failure/success before the roll. It will make the rolls tenser and it cements the consequences of invoking the dice so the players know you aren't pulling punches. It also lets you clarify with the player if they were thinking their action would have a different outcome.
Game mechanics?
no, but I have some no games mechanics for you