What are some games that are not like this?
Preferably in the same genre as Dungeons and Dragons with the elves and dwarves and the magic and all of that.
(I am trying not playing D&D)
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Missing in RPGs
What are some games that are not like this?
Preferably in the same genre as Dungeons and Dragons with the elves and dwarves and the magic and all of that.
(I am trying not playing D&D)
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Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
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What, RPGs where missing an attack is impossible? Might wanna try playing with action figures at the sandbox.
PF2e. You have 3 actions, all of which can be used on the Strike action. You take a penalty for multiple attacks in a turn, but that's the price you pay.
Hell, even 5e lets Fighters make several attacks per turn with one action.
If you don't like failure however, . You can't land every attack, sometimes you roll bad and you miss. Touch shit, get over it loser.
I mean, depending on what he's means or is looking for, shit like many games have where enemies dodge/parry your attacks might be good enough as "The enemy did something to not get hit." Just plain "I roll the dice to do a hit. Oh, I miss." There are more ways to handle attack resolutions than D&D (and many other system's) "roll the dice and that's it" approach.
There's Tokyo Nova where you have a hand of 4 cards and the option to do a blind draw from a deck (those with a crippling addiction to having blind luck decide things can even pick the class that gets bonuses to blind draws). You know if you can pass the check before even attempting the action, but you might still do it to either get rid of a bad card or force an enemy to play a card in response to your attack (defender plays their reaction result card before the attacker puts down their card). There's also Nechronica's support/hinder system that lets you burn enough of your own resources to make even a swing that should be a critical failure land.
There's at least two retroclones I can think of, that does something like that.
One where you only roll for damage and another one where the fighter class has two attacks, one of which auto hits.
I can't remember the names of these games though.
I mean there’s turn based RPGs where missing is impossible. Mechanicus for example attacks always hit and the only factor is line of sight, and in Rogue Trader PC melee attacks always hit but can be parried or dodged. I don’t think it’s a concept without merit, melee ability can reduce dodge and parey attempts while ranged ability can simply increase weapon range. You could also just have autohit criteria even if it vastly limits the damage or tactical effectiveness so if a player is getting annoyed at constantly missing they can stsrt enduring that they’ll at least do something.
Well, games in the RuneQuest family give you a parry/dodge. If your attack hits, but gets parried/dodged, it's more exciting than if you just miss.
You aren't going to find this in a game (as far as I know), but one thing I've done before is, instead of giving you a single attack, implement a sequence of attack, counterattack, and followup. That means if I come at you with a sword, I roll an attack on you, you get to respond, then I followup with another attack. (Note that at the end of all of this, the attacker is up one attack on the defender, just like they'd be under normal combat rules.) Under these circumstances, missing on one of your attacks matters less, especially if the initiative of the defender gets advanced, so they get act next. Then it's back-and-forth with each combatant getting to attack 3 times before their turns are over.
There is also the concept of having some sort of expendable resource (fate, luck, drive, etc.) you can spend to boost an attack before or after the fact. This doesn't necessarily ensure you can hit whenever you want to, but it can significantly reduce your chances of missing, at the cost of depleting the resource (so you can't do it all the time, but you can strategically boost your chances). You could also make it so you can take hit point damage (by pushing yourself too hard), or accept some kind of injury in order to boost your attack roll after the fact, or whatever.
There's a system that does something kinda different, but it's not available in english afaik. All characters still have AC but it's like 2 for most, hard as frick to get higher, only dangerous monsters like dragons have anything above a 7 (it's a d10 system). Health pools are fairly small so every hit matters, both for you and monsters.
Instead of stat numbers you have die, so a warrior has 2d10 in agility, while a wizard has only 1. You also have +n/-n based on race and equipment. If an attack is above AC you are at risk, you can choose to block it and roll your agility, if you score higher then the attacker, you block it, monsters can do the same. Pgs and most monsters have one parry per turn, with various abilities and enchantments that can increase that number.
Even if you get parried, you wasted the enemy's parry for that turn so your mates just have to overcome AC. Enemies with high AC are formidable, but so is a player in full mail, neither is invincible with the right/wrong strategy.
To be fair this is why over the course of class progression martial classes tend to go from "I whack things with a big stick" to "I protect the squishies so they may vaporize the bad guys"
You don't actually miss tho
explain further.
D&D is moronic and combines being dodgy with being tough in a single AC score.
yes this is in addition to representing being more tough by giving things more HP.
but you still did 0 damage so you still "actually" miss (tho)
unless you're saying you could add like, Miss counters on targets that have gotten attacked and missed. or something.
No. You hit, but get parried. You hit, but your blade doesn't bite into their armoured hide. You hit, and the ghoul ignores the wound. You hit, and the orc grins as they catch the head of your spear in their now-bleeding palm. You almost score a telling blow, but the duelist pulls off a desperate maneuver that bats your arm up at the elbow. You miss because the rust monster skitters and slips on loose gravel, and your mace sparks off the tunnel floor. You miss because you're still hung over. The orphan panics anyway.
YOU'RE PLAYING A ROLEPLAYING GAME. ROLE PLAY.
I am playing a wargame. Frick the drama, tell me how many enemies are down, and how many friendlies are still up. Nothing else is significant.
Then quit whining about missing you homosexual. Also, D&D isn't a wargame, no matter how much you pretend it is.
A wargame that is designed for you to win, yet you still complain its too hard
No shit, you can describe things how you want in an rpg. The point isn't the word "miss", it's that if you miss (or "fail to hit", or whatever you want to call it), you've effectively wasted the last 5 minutes of your life waiting for your turn. With any given attack, there's a 40%~ chance that your character does (mechanically) nothing.
That is the nature of a game. You win, you lose, you hit, you miss. If every attack hit and dealt damage it gets boring. There's no risk, and therefore rewards feel empty. Play some story game without randomness if you want that, or just act stuff out with your group, or go play vidya where skill matters. You are very clearly not meant for TTRPGs, and that's fine. Not everyone likes everything.
No.
If you don't care about the context and outcome then you aren't cut out for tt RPgs. Do something else with your time because you're wasting your life pissing yourself off and you're wasting our time derailing the session. You need to respect everyone's time more.
Or he could play a game where the context is informed by the mechanics instead of having to invent bullshit out of thin air.
>context is informed by the mechanics
It literally is though.
Play games where fights end in a reasonable amount of time instead of D&D HPbloat shit.
You're a fricking crybaby.
You aren't hardcore for jerking off to the thought of literally wasting your time.
Never said I was hardcore, dumbass. Most people don't seethe over a chance to miss existing in games. Just stop playing D&Dogshit.
i love arguing with people who argue as if the fiction level of an rpg with rules and difficulty levels is literally the only part of the game that exists and who pretend to not know what simple phrases like "You missed" mean
Jessie, what the hell are you talking about
This is true for just about any game, but not D&D. See
When you apply this to D&D it comes off as "maybe the combat will be good if we describe it harder." It's video game combat about hitting bigger dudes with bigger weapons to make bigger numbers come out. But if hitpoints aren't meatpoints then it's the most bloated and badly paced rules-lite narrative system in existence.
I dunno what you're talking about dude. I play first edition and most swings don't land so I've learned to give them as much flavour as hits and my players seem to enjoy it, especially when I ratchet up the tension for a monster's incoming hit that doesn't land.
Also I glossed over all the meatpoint discussion ITT but personally I just describe landed hits as being severe the lower an actor's HP is. It seems to work fine in a narrative sense and gives the players an idea of how injured a creature is. I really don't understand why this is a point of discussion.
(Me)
Another thing to note is I'll throw in rulings if I come up with something specific for a hit/miss, like one or both parties getting pushed back 5 feet, or a strength check to break a grab. My players sometimes use their chance to kick down doors as an attack during combat. Doesn't have to be a perfect simulation but it's a bit of fun.
This is the biggest cope of D&Dtards.
Your system does not actually represent the feeling of what you want it to. Your intention or what it "should" be about is irrelevant. It feels like whiffing an attack, so that's what it actually is.
>You hit, but get parried
Getting parried is a miss, no duellist ever would consider a parry as "being hit"
>You hit, but your blade doesn't bite into their armoured hide
That's called hitting their touch ac, but not matching their regular ac
>You hit, and the ghoul ignores the wound
DR
>You hit, and the orc grins as they catch the head of your spear in their now-bleeding palm
So it's just a straight up hit then, one that caused damage
>You almost score a telling blow, but the duelist pulls off a desperate maneuver that bats your arm up at the elbow
So a miss
Christ you are a massive fricking moron
>D&D is moronic and combines being dodgy with being tough in a single AC score.
Well yes, all of that culminates in "Hard to hit".
AC represents your ability to mitigate the negative consequences of being assaulted with the intent to kill and subdue. That's a mouthful so they called it Armor Class. Any time you ever read the the fricking books going on four fricking editions now, they always explain that it's a combination of passive defenses, active defenses, sheer luck, and personal grit. Hitpoints are how many times you can survive your collection of "don't frick up" strategies being overcome by the opponent before you're totally at their mercy. They aren't meatpoints. They represent your stubbornness, your heroic plot armor, your good fortune, various minor and major injuries, and general fatigue. Then there's exhaustion, which is not just physical taxation but mental wherewithal and spiritual fortitude. These systems are supposed to work together to simulate all the twists and turns in a narrative that would lead further towards and further away from a character's ultimate doom.
But no one fricking reads these books or cares to put in that much work so it's all treated like video game bars and everyone gets exponentially more blood in their bodies as they off goblins.
If 0hp meant you ran away, or surrendered, that would make sense. If you actually die at 0hp, the misses have to be actual misses, and hp have to be meat and blood. Can't have it both ways.
Those are also things 0HP means, you illiterate.
Yeah, that’s why at 0HP you start making Surrender Saving Throws, or Run Away Saving Throws, and definitely not only just Death Saving Throws
They're still not misses. Not purely.
If you played a game of DnD and every single time someone's AC meant that took no damage you said "The arrow/sword/claws hit you. Luckily the attack struck your armor/iron-hard pectorals, failing to penetrate the leather/skidding off the chain mail/deflecting off your shield/failing to even break your skin, leaving nothing but a perfunctory scratch." you would be playing the game correctly.
People that assume failing to beat AC means the attack must have missed are being unimaginative and robbing themselves of cool descriptive moments where instead of failing to connect, it is trusty equipment or sheer grit and tenacity that obviate the damage.
That was part of the reason 3.X had "Touch AC." Beating Touch AC meant that you hit the target while beating "true" AC meant you hit the target and penetrated their armor. Most large monsters had pretty low Touch ACs while having fairly high true ACs. A high level Fighter attacking a Great Wyrm Red Dragon would therefore be hitting the dragon 4 times but only penetrating 1 or 2 times. Like many of 3.Xs rules this factor was heavily underutilized outside of giving casters easy ACs to hit with spells.
Yes, because someone swinging three pounds of steel into your chest will do absolutely nothing to you if you're wearing chainmail.
>Yes, because someone swinging three pounds of steel into your chest will do absolutely nothing to you if you're wearing chainmail.
If someone is swinging three pounds of steel into your chest, it sounds like they rolled pretty high.
Chainmail is in fact highly effective against these kinds of blows.
> 0hp meant you ran away, or surrendered
if you read the rules you'd knew that player characters are NOT affected by morale.
For npcs, that is the case.
Not really relevant. Pay attention to the conversation you're responding
but you don’t die at 0hp, moron
wow, it sure is amazing how the system was designed to do the opposite of what it's supposed to do
>"Hey John, Percy's kinda... on FIRE over there."
>"Oh, he'll be fine, because he's really stubborn."
>"Hoh jeez, being immolated really took a lot out of me. Could use a nap after that one, even if it's just two or three hours."
>"Hey Orson, could I get one of those good ol' potions over there?"
>"You didn't get hit at all the entire fight, though."
>"Yeah, but I'm almost out of don't-frick-up strategies."
All of those things happen in fantasy media from books to movies to other medium of game. You're mad about the genre.
Point to where in the books it says any of that shit or else admit it's your private headcanon copium
Point to where it says they're meatpoints. Your dumbass side made first claim. Support it.
>Page 196, PHB5e
>Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck.
Some frickall about armour class. I assume it’s to do with armour. But then, hit points go down even if you don’t get hit, so maybe a large AC actually stands for Angelic Cow.
It takes some reading but you do see it in the armor area at least in 5e (because it is the easiest one to find and most people here plays that edition we will be doing that). They do have flavor text for what light armor is, what medium armor is and what heavy armor is. Supposed by this is the fact that light armor doesn't restrict dex, medium restricts it up to 14 which is the peak of what we humans call pretty damn fast and agile and heavy armor doesn't have dex at all. This means that AC takes in account active dodging while the +2 to let's say studded leather is the hardness of the leather actually stopping a blade so that's the passive defenses.
Now let's get funky in this b***h. Cause now both Barbarians and Monks get unarmored defense for the barbarian its Consitution and Dex. In the flavor text of constitution it says "Constitution measures health, stamina, and vital force." With it supporting that with more flavor text "because the endurance this ability represents is largely passive rather than involving a specific effort on the part of a character or monster. A Constitution check can model your attempt to push beyond normal limits, however."
So really we know that constitution has to show how resilient you are and in the case of AC its via attacks from blades, blunts and piercing along with everything else. Ties to the flavor of the armorless barbarian stereotype where you can just stop blade strikes with your juicy bara-breasts.
Cont
For monk its Dex and Wisdom and with dex as we said before is the active dodging but what of wisdom? Well wisdom is "reflect an effort to read body language, understand someone’s feelings, notice things about the environment, or care for an injured person." and "how attuned you are to the world around you and represents perceptiveness and intuition"
This means that the wisdom is more like you being aware of how your own body is moving in the world at large. Where your body naturally moves itself in relation to the enemy, or even how your enemy moves and countering that with your own unrestricted movements you know.....like what you see in kung-fu movies and other shit.
Also hit points is a mixture they can be meat points I mean you use con to calculate hit points in the first place and lower con means less HP it doesn't make sense whenever someone says "Its not meat points" it quite literally is. However, if your DM is a realismtard then you can say its more like stamina and luck points like how its said in Uncharted that Nathan Drake doesn't actually takes the bullets but rather his luck is there causing basically little scraps as it rush past him. So a Barbarian can tank the dragon's tail attack his sweaty chest being sturdy enough to take it. A rogue could instead need to do a burst of speed to limbo under the swing nearly breaking their legs and neck to do so. Winded and weaker than what they were before but still technically "uninjured" until the final hit which causes them to keel over.
>They aren't meatpoints
they're totally meat points. they're reduced in objectively measurable and repeatable amounts by falling from certain heights, swimming through lava, and poison entering your bloodstream.
a poisoned arrow or dagger hitting you and failing a con/fort save is not "heroic luck", the arrow has literally hit your fleshy meat and you have failed to resist the effects of its poison, causing you to become poisoned, take damage, and potentially be blinded or knocked unconscious or whatever.
these are explicitly physiological effects of a poison hitting you, injury poison by definition must cause injury to take effect, it's an entirely different category from contact poisons or inhaled shit.
What you're actually seething about is that YOU don't like that hit points are meat points. They are meat points, a high level character is literally a dragon-ball Z character or capeshit superhero capable of shrugging off falls from great heights and being dunked in lava or shot with a hundred arrows. Grinding XP to level up in D&D has more in common with fricking xianxia cultivation than it does mere skill and training. If you don't like that go play a game without character advancement, or where you're hard capped on defenses as a human and never become more bulletproof as you level
What hit points represent change depending on the narration of the GM. Because it's a roleplaying game. The rules of the game are not the laws of physics.
Because positive energy also restores stamina and luck. And that's what healing magic is made out of.
"they totally mean X even though that isn't represented in the rest of the mechanics anywhere at all"
I'm happy you're satisfied with that, but that's obviously moronic for numerous reasons.
I'm sorry that you're too stupid to see how a character twisting and jerking to narrowly dodge weapon blows or suffering a grazing blow from a poisoned arrow might serve to slowly whittle down their ability to keep going or still manage to introduce poison into their system, Anon. Have you tried being less moronic? Maybe consider doing some exercise, once you realize that your growing stamina means you're more comfortable taking falls and "rolling with it" from a blow you'll understand, or did you genuinely think there was no difference between a professional boxer punching another pro in the head and having one land a blow to your clearly empty skull?
Adding to this, let's go over some common stupidity for the sake of completeness. "The arrow did its full damage, so it had to be a direct hit!" At higher levels that 'hit' takes away a significantly smaller portion of the character's health, meaning it has done far less harm to them compared to the harm it would've done to an untrained and untested shlub covered in Cheeto-dust and chip crumbs (who would probably be shrieking in agony or dead depending on where it landed). It's not difficult to realize that your health would be negatively impacted by the kind of sudden jerking, twisting, and contorting necessary to turn a telling blow into a frighteningly near miss, that it strains your body to take a blow from a mace and to move with the impact or to ensure that it connects with the most protected part of your body and thus leaving you sore but unbroken. A highly trained, heroic figure likely knows how to move to keep himself from getting offed, how to protect his head and neck to avoid taking a shot in those places, how to turn so that the most protective parts of his armor are facing an otherwise unavoidable shot, etc. His HP represents both having the stamina to keep going as well as the general health and durability that an athlete at his best will naturally possess, and yes, at the uppermost levels at least some of that becomes highly unrealistic because by level 20 you are on par with heroic figures out of myth and legend, so there is some amount of silliness going on. I know there's a lot of abstraction going on here, but it's not actually difficult to understand and to narrate if you aren't a sub-90 IQ ape.
No verification required, I have the mandate of heaven.
submersion in acid, submersion in lava, submersion in boiling water.
All of which have stats in most editions.
Not "heroically grazing over", submersion.
Obviously, these sources damage your luck and stamina like anything else. What's the issue?
oh, so you're just pretending to be stupid.
I think you're too autistic to understand what an abstraction is. You must be awful to play with.
it's incredibly common for mechanics to not match intended themes.
It's strange for someone to deny this, despite the mechanics so clearly indicating they do not follow the themes.
Those deal so much incredible amounts of damage that practically not even a high level fighter will survive unless he was prepared somehow, or has some method of resisting heat/acid.
So due to sheer damage, they'd fall afoul of the extreme damage rules and die instantly. 20d6 damage is a frickton.
No abstraction needed, they just frickin' die.
Now, if someone barely survives, then clearly they did some badass thing like dousing themselves in water the second before they were immersed, channeled ki, wreathed themselves in clothing long enough to survive that six seconds, or had sheer divine protection of some kind.
Name three
>They aren't meatpoints
Explain healing.
>They aren't meatpoints
Why is the healing spell called Cure Wounds if there are no actual wounds to cure?
They're totally meat points except when they aren't. D&D is inconsistent. It developed from war gaming and simulationism often takes a backseat to gamist concerns.
>They aren't meatpoints
No matter how many times they write it, the presence of healing magic makes this completely untrue. D&Dogshit does use meatpoints. Any system that doesnt use wounds, with nore or less static endurance, is using meatpoints. The spells describe how they heal wounds. Losing hitpoints due to "expending luck" and then getting your luck "healed" makes no sense. Its moronic hand waving by lazy leftoid designers at WotC
It's literally half-truth in 4e.
>Hit Points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck.
>A surge of positive energy washes through the creature, causing it to regain 70 hit points.
These don't contradict each other anon, nor declare anything as meat points.
Yes positive energy could restore luck, the will to live as well as physical and mental durability.
You disagree because you have built up an idea of what these spells do without actually reading them without this bias.
The spell literally says "Cure Wounds"
Maybe it cures their wounded pride or something idk.
And if a fireball explodes right on top of you, I suppose your luck just makes the fire not burn you right? Face it D&D is bad.
You got out of the way but your fate is now closer to death, fate points would be a better term than hitpoints, shame other games use that term for stupid metacurrencies
Why can't D&D apologists accept their goofy HP grinding game as is, instead trying to convince us it's FATE but with excessive unnecessary math.
Why can't you accept an abstraction most people easily understand? Why do you need a 1:1 representation of everything?
People understand it as you cut off a number of meat.
People understand it as ablative plot armor. ~~*People*~~ like you are the ones who can't wrap your head around that.
>people in this thread are so upset about not doing damage to the ablative plot armor on a turn that they're discussing ways to remove misses or hand out participation bonuses
Sounds like this concept sucks
I wasn't agreeing that the removal of misses is a good thing. I was just pointing out that >91830197 is subhuman because he still thinks in meat points.
To be fair it's hard to shed the meat points idea when many systems tie HP to physical stats like constitution or strength instead of a dedicated Luck stat or some sort of morale value. There's also systems like Traveller where your health pool is directly tied to your stats to better represent the idea of getting properly wounded. Also an issue with ablative plot armor is that it can make it feel like one or both sides has stormtrooper aim as any hit that's not explicitly a kill of someone using the system is abstracted as a miss or otherwise ineffective. This can kind of work if the enemies use meat points and the party uses plot armor but it still risks losing some of the potential tension that can come with the party being at risk of injury. For that you'd at least need some sort of secondary system like rolling for an injury on a table on a critical or something. I think a hybrid system with low pools of actual meat points and an extra layer of plot armor that takes damage first might be a good way to go about it, especially if they're tied to two different stats. That'd allow for the strengths of both to come into play, as well as mechanical depth where you can build for tankiness either with high meat points leading to more injuries that are survivable and high luck leading to less injuries but higher risk of fatality if your plot armor runs thin.
It is not everyone else's fault you and your group has an action movie mindset about the abstraction of hit points. Stop being that homosexual.
Health is mostly tied to level in games like D&D. Stats are a smaller part of that. High level characters aren't physically larger than low level characters, so level and level related secondary stats such as HP can't be meat related.
meat points isn't "amount of meat", it's amount of meat * toughness of meat
getting stabbed by a knife is a big deal for a low level wizard but a seasoned warrior can shake it off more easily as "just a flesh wound"
also I don't think it's reasonable to argue that something doesn't physically make sense to tie to level when you're talking about a game with such enormous linear growth in power
Then they don't read the books for the games they're playing. What else is new.
No, the books pretty clearly indicate that it's meat points in every mechanical sense.
Heck, even being immersed in lava doesn't immediately kill you, it just removes a certain amount of meat.mkgsw
They’re meatpoints
Yikes
One thing that should be mentioned about D&D (though I don't know how much it applies to 5e, which I'm not really familiar with), is that low-level characters suck at hitting. So it's not just that missing sucks; it's that it happens a lot when you're just starting out. Low-level enemies (and party members) are very squishy, so to compensate, the chances of success for low-level attacks are kept (relatively) low. In games without the same extreme ramping of hit points (with starting characters and monsters that go down after being hit once or twice), attacks can have significantly higher chances of success without threatening to turn the game into rocket-tag.
I remedy this issue by making my own games.
How I do it is the defense check the target of an attack is a range of critical > direct > block > avoid, from least damage reduction to most damage reduction, and unless a reaction skill or defensive passive says it can negate damage, there's a minimum amount of damage an attack does.
But there are also work-arounds like causing vulnerability, exploiting weaknesses to different types, and such, so ideally, player damage is almost never going to be negated.
And that isn't to say players are molly-coddled; HP is low, and after a certain amount of damage after 0 HP, they're gone for good with no saves.
It's a little more "bOoK kEePiNg", but for my purposes, it feels better and is more fun than how D&D does it; especially 5e.
Ventangle uses a system where every attack roll is opposed and allows for a counter.
If you miss the enemy does damage, if the enemy misses you do damage.
This also speeds up combat and makes it feel more frantic as well.
I've been ideaguying something like this.
Is there still a nominative attacker/defender or is it purely an opposed "combat roll"?
I was thinking along the circles of
opposed roll (with modifiers depending on weapon/move) and then potentially modifiers to the degrees of success, before multiplying out by weapon damage and subtracting armor.
A "move" could be something like "reckless: +1 to combat roll, +3 to enemy success"
>Is there still a nominative attacker/defender or is it purely an opposed "combat roll"?
Yes certain bonuses and abilities depend on being an attacker or defender.
>(with modifiers depending on weapon/move) and then potentially modifiers to the degrees of success,
The modifiers to your roll is just your level but there are also upgrades to that on specific weapons or bonuses like attacking from stealth.
It does degrees of success as well +2 damage for the attacker critting, +2 for the defender fumbling and +2 for a gap between rolls of more than 5.
The standard starting character can actually be oneshot with a two damage weapon (the standard) because of this. It's makes it a very fast paced system.
interesting
what dice are you rolling?
Sound like warhammer 4e combat, take a look for inspiration.
Interesting, I played a few of the 40k RPGs but it was a while ago and I don't remember if it played like this too. It says that when you win an attack roll you gain advantage, does that stack over multiple turns?
Damage just being success levels + weapon damage is interesting too
In testing on my own I find that each attack roll potentially resulting in damage to yourself as well is pretty interesting and raises tension
Just play a TTRPG that takes inspiration from wargaming so that missing doesn't feel as bad.
lol. Is it just me, or does something being advertised on Ganker make it somehow less desirable than if I heard of it through word of mouth.
Na that makes sense, this place is a shit hole. It's just the shit hole I love. There's a free preview version so you dont gotta blow $$$
Well it's done a great job of making it look like an excel spreadsheet.
Oh and only 64 dollars on drivethru, mixed with the collage of fricking AI art. So I assume they used ChatGPT to generation the (random three digit number) of Items/Classes/monsters
It's really enticing anon I don't know what you mean.
Lol. And who could forget the memorable characters, such as:
>frog wizard
>woman in white dress
>black spikey armour guy
>mushroom thing
Truely this is the indie game that will revolutionise the ttrpg scene, and get those 5e drones to stop playing DnD!
Nope, no chatgpt for items classes or monsters.
Whatcha mean by an excel spreadsheet? I'm happy to get critcism (only way my game gets better). I had a thread a year ago where people tore my game apart and it emerged way better because of it. So I love negative criticism if you could be specific about it 🙂
yea I wish I could have real art instead of AI art.
True
Name 120 classes right now, homosexual.
You're full of shit I'm not giving you money, go fricking die.
Who the frick needs 120 classes? How the frick do you even make all of them feel unique? At that point just go classless point buy.
Here's the preview version with 12 of them. It's dated, and has some narrative abilities that got switched into the narrative expansion and replaced with mechanical ones.
I just really liked writing classes.
>juxtapositionist
What the frick is that.
Uses a bunch of portals linked to other planes of existence and gets some teleportation shenanigans. Portal Mage I guess?
Alright, because I'm autistic I will review this preview page by page until I get too bored to continue.
>A 6-phase combat round, unlike any other roleplaying game. Enabling a variety of unique, flavorful, and interesting actions for players to perform. The initiative system minimizes downtime. Players perform their actions at the same time each phase, in an epic back and forth with their enemies
It's kind of impressive how in your opening hook, you presented nothing of substance. Buzzwords.
The presentation of its brand of fantasy is also pretty uninteresting beyond "Wow, this is wacky!"
>Reference sheet
Most people will assume that your tabletop game is probably terrible if you need a reference sheet other than your character sheet.
>Champions paragraph I
Wow, Not!Exalted
>Paragraph II
A lame excuse for literary and mechanical dysfunction that solves nothing.
>Paragraph III
Pointless statement.
>Paragraph IV
It's an ok excuse for senseless leveling, but this won't matter for 99% of groups.
>Frontloading a bunch of key terms and concepts
Also kinda cringe. This is going to drive away people and cause more confusion than it will solve. Alot of these sections also tell me absolutely nothing of value. Why have a section on "Weapon Attack" if it describes no mechanics and says nothing other than "This is how good you attack with weapons :)"
>Non-Combat statistics
Why are Size, an important factor in combat, and Reach, an also important factor in combat, AND Critical hits, over in this section? And why do they have more mechanical explanation than foundational mechanics do?
>Fate points
Terrible name for something that doesn't have anything to do with fate and overlaps with common mechanics in other games. And yes, part of making a good game is considering how yours compares to what's already normal in the market. 80% of your potential players will already be familiar with another type of fate points.
Also, why are there death spiral mechanics in a heroic high fantasy game?
>Saying what classes and paths are twice
This is why you don't frontload key terms. Introduce things in an order that makes most sense, as a player would make their character, or that a player would encounter while playing, in order of importance. If you start off explaining the mechanics behind Critical Hits before you've even explained how attacks work, your game sucks and most people will rightly assume there is nothing worth reading when basic formatting isn't present.
>It’s recommended to discuss beforehand which player will play what basic class. AoC can be played with an imbalanced party. However, the game is meant for a 4-player party with each player playing as a different basic class.
I love board games, but they don't work well as a substitute for TTRPG mechanics. Your game should be intentionally designed to function with whatever mechanical composition the party decides on. And while yeah, the rules can't stop the party from being imbalanced, explicitly saying it's not made for that and designing it in a way that's not made for that, is going to make it a rougher ride.
>Dead levels as a feature
This really is just looking like "DnD but with worse formatting and more annoying mechanics"
>Equipment section
Why detail exactly how much food, clothes, and money every character starts with, and then harp on for nearly 1/6th of the page about how this isn't a survival sim and you should ignore that?
The entire character creation chapter, doesn't actually give you enough information to create a character with. I cannot stress this enough, but most people who tolerated the low quality from before will stop at this point. I have seen google documents for free and unfinished community-made ttrpgs with better formatting than this.
I don't know how you guys missed it but
> "DnD but with worse formatting and more annoying mechanics"
Is wrong.
"DnD but MOBA"
This is correct
Same thing. Or well, not really. MOBAs are boring but quick and easy to make work because they're vidya, this is boring, slow, and difficult to make sense of because it's not vidya, and was designed by an idiot.
>Maneuver
More delayed mechanical resolutions, which is unintuitive. We still receive no mechanical exposition.
>Conflict
>Conflict actions crit on a natural 1, dealing maximum damage. Damage from the Conflict phase resolves at the end of Reaction.
Re-explaining critical hits for the 2nd time, and also giving yet more disjointed mechanics to track. It seems expected that any kind of complicated fight needs to have a combat log.
>Reaction
>This phase is all about actions that have specific triggers from earlier phases. The most common one is the use of a specific conflict action. For example, lighting a foe aflame who was hit by a conflict action that dealt fire damage.
I think the problem is obvious here.
>Gambit & Debuffs
Same issue as with Premovement and Buffs. Random half-explanations of mechanics in the middle of sections for other mechanics is just not good.
>Modular Rules
This section doesn't belong in combat. Also while the concept isn't bad, it's disfigured here. It's a jumble of things that are strictly mechanical (Like when a character actually really dies in a fight), things that are mostly setting/fluff/thematic (Like how common resurrection is), and stupid shit that's purely stylistic, like whether you can narrate your actions mid-combat. And that's all that's actually there, so there's little actual point to the section. You might as well reduce it to just when death occurs so it's actually relevant to combat.
And this is where I'm ending things, because frankly, after a quick glance at the basic classes, I'm bored and have no interest in continuing. This looks like pure slop and I can't see a single reason why anyone would put down a copy of 5e and pick this up instead, and I don't like 5e in the first place.
I'm in this anon's boat here as a whole after glancing at it myself.
As a guy who is trying to make his own RPG for others to read and is struggling with it, I'm not really in a place to throw stones. You said you were charging around $65 to $70 for the whole thing? If you ask me, it's not worth charging anything for it yet. If you haven't, you should find yourself a good editor who can bear with this process. I plan to do it with mine when I have something that me, my gaming group, and the strangers on Ganker approve of (minor gripes/obvious troll posts at most).
I wish I can give you better advice on the technical side of things, but I think I can take a crack at the personal side of things. You're passionate about this project, and you have a vision of taking the world by storm with an alternative to D&D. I can't imagine why else you would charge so much and bother to get ads on Ganker to advertise it with comparisons to D&D. What exactly does your game offer that D&D doesn't? From what I can read it's mainly vestigial differences, with it wanting to be D&D, except "better". Your game still depends on D&D for it to be anything. What does it have that can make it stand on its own two feet without needing that other game to prop yours up with? Your game exists in D&D's shadow. It may take inspiration from others, but is it really its own game after all of that? Did you mature enough as a game designer to get out of D&D's shadow yourself?
I'll be going to bed, but if this thread is still up and you responded, I will read it and respond back.
>Dice rolls are d100 roll under target, target is skill-difficulty/enemy's stat
Alright, so d20 but longer. This continues to remain DnD but worse.
>Rolls are player-facing
Taking away one of the DM's best tools for controlling the shitty math of TTRPGs is a sign of lacking experience.
>Rounding and targeting
Has a random tangent about how you can target yourself with abilities that target allies. Why is it there?
>Wording
>Pay close attention to the wording of each ability; ex. ‘may target each enemy once per combat’ vs. “may affect each enemy once per combat’’
You should explain the difference here, or just remove this section altogether and word things better instead of having a cautionary deflection for continual bad formatting.
>Combat has 7 phases
Internal consistency already broken.
>Initiative
You use the more complicated and slow method as your primary one, and then offer an ultra-simple alternative that's faster. Eitherway you've created a problem here, since unless you have mechanics that explicitly interact with the initiative roll, there's no reason to not use the faster method.
>Premovement
Still lacking in mechanical explanations.
>Buffs
Randomly explaining a commonly known concept in the middle of the phase breakdown is another example of awful formatting. This should have its own section where appropriate, or else Premovement should be given a full mechanical breakdown instead of this useless mess.
>Movement
>Enemies within reach of you at the end of your movement phase are considered within reach range for the purpose of Conflict actions even if the enemy moves away during their movement phase.
This sounds annoying to track and unintuitive, which really sucks.
Having Initiative is also massively important done this way, because holding it offers near total control over who can be targeted.
>Rolls are player-facing
>Taking away one of the DM's best tools for controlling the shitty math of TTRPGs is a sign of lacking experience.
What an awful reason for denouncing player-facing rolls
>write all this shit and reveal you're a fudgepacker
You don't even play games by the rules so your opnions are pretty worthless
Are you the same anon who made Array of Champions, or are you just a troll pretending to be that anon?
Stop cheating the dice rolls storypussy
Alright, you're a troll.
Put as much effort into calculating the odds for your shitty games as you spend on analyzing /tg/ heartbreakers nobody will ever play. Then you won't have to fake rolls all the time.
Do you think I'm the anon who gave his take on the first few pages? Because I'm neither that anon, nor do I know where you're coming from with any of what you're saying.
Continued
>7 phases vs 6 phases
Ah, yea there was inner conflict that went on about whether initiative is truly a phase, funny that the conflict survived into the core product and after $500 worth of purchases from customers and 2 playtest groups nobody highlighted them to me. Will fix.
>Initiative
"Options are bad"????. This emerged from both my playtest groups vastly preferring the other form of initiative, so leave it to groups to have what they have more fun with.
>Premovement
It explains all there is to it.
>Movement
It's fun.
I don't know what mechanical explanation you need beyond "In this phase you can use words that have the relevant keyword (Premovement actions in the premovement phase, maneuver actions in the maneuver phase, etc.)
I think you've never played a war game before if you find this confusing, it's still really simple compared to a good skirmish game, or even one of the mainstream games like age of sigmar or something.
This is basically a RPG for wargamers that don't like traditional rpg combat like me. That's all it really comes down to. Outside of calling me out for the inconsistency and the placement of the description of crits I feel that most of the stuff thats rustled you is just personal preference (like how you enjoy fudging).
I think getting a good editor is definitely a goal i have when i can afford it. The cool thing is by being PDF only my game evolves with my customers now instead of just my playtesters. It's really cool when someone bet money on your product knowing the risks of this being indie and therefore not perfect (hell it's using bloody ai art as the cover!) but then getting so into it that they email you with suggestions. It's awesome.
As for what my game is, it's a high fantasy over-the-top nonsense of a war game. (to be continued)
>"Options are bad"????.
If you can't read my post without getting confused, I can see why you produced the game you did.
You should have the faster and easiest option upfront, and offer something more complex if need be later. There isn't really any noteworthy difference between either method, though, so there's no real reason to even have the alternative.
>It explains all there is to it.
This system is really shite, is all I can say then.
>It's fun.
No.
>I don't know what mechanical explanation you need beyond "In this phase you can use words that have the relevant keyword (Premovement actions in the premovement phase, maneuver actions in the maneuver phase, etc.)
They quite literally don't even have these mechanical explanations.
>I think you've never played a war game before if you find this confusing
This is an irrelevant cope to your rules being poorly formatted. I've enjoyed a number of them (Conquest recently, Warmahordes in the past) and I like my own systems to have mechanical depth. Your rules really are just poorly put together in terms of formatting.
>This is basically a RPG for wargamers that don't like traditional rpg combat like me.
I qualify for that definition, and I wouldn't make my home group suffer through this even as an april fool's joke.
You seem to have the misconception that the ruleset you imagine in your head is exactly what you have written down on the pdf, and that it is just as fun and just as easily understood for others. It's not.
I also don't know why you think I'm bothered. I enjoy reviewing things since I'm always on the lookout for new games with interesting spins on pre-existing ideas, or new things to offer. Yours received a scathing critique because that's all there is for me to do with it, as it offers nothing else but consistent and glaring flaws in how it was put together and presents itself. Maybe some of the class or path ideas would be conceptually interesting, but mechanically, nothing was.
Thanks for the feedback guy, i'll take a look and see what I can do to make those first 20 pages feel better to read.
A fricking moron, they can't possible be of any substance.
I'm not putting your turd on my computer fricking name them
You don't have to download a pdf to view it. Also why do I piss you off enough to swear?
Because you're a disingenuous c**t. You're making the claim that you didn't use AI to write your classes. He's calling bullshit and so am I. I'm working on an OSR book which includes classes and I can name them and their role easily:
>Commando: Thief/Mage/Fighter
>Priestess: Divine/Arcane Caster with astrology
>Cantor: Like a Bard but better
>Provocateur: A thief who is good at financial manipulation
>Gladiator: A fighter that can specialize into four different forms at level 5
>Mutant: An absolute wretch who eventually becomes a conglomeration of flesh with cool nifty powers
>Sorcerer: An arcane powerhouse who gets brute force spells instead of high level ones.
>Vigilant: A ranger who specializes in fighting in the darkness and has elfshot.
>Oppressor: Secret police fighter (as in someone who is both secret police and fighter, not someone who fights the secret police)
You just used ChatGPT or some other AI "writing" problem to come up with your content.
Guy, there's nothing disingenuous. Is it really that big of a deal I didn't want to take the time to copy paste my table of contents and format it for this post, especially when you could just, oh I don't know. Click on the PDF's and see what i've genuinely done?
Heck, I published my core rules in 2022 (with dogshit formatting back then). There's a thread that predates chatgpts release where I discuss all my classes.
The shitty table of contents from that post
Part of the table of contents now, again if you just click on the narrative expansion PDF, which is completely free and posted in full on this thread you can see all 120 classes, and if you look at the free preview pdf, which while dated still gives an overall view of what my writing is like for twelve classes should show that it at least wasn't done by AI
Hey! Those classes look suspiciously like what the AI generated for me when I asked for 120 pc classes. No Bardbarian in your list though, which probably means the AI wins.
Guy, I posted proof that I made these before AI writing was even a thing. Is it just autism?
Nah mate, I am just pointing out that the AI would do a better job than you at a fraction of time.
All right, without looking in your book, memory only: what is the difference between a Chaos Knight and Death Knight AND between a Sword Saint and Samurai?
Sure, but lets begin with their common ground before we can discuss their differences.
Chaos Knight, Death Knight, Sword Saint and Samurai are all 'paths': sub classes that are larger than basic classes, each of the 4 basic classes has 30 paths, you get 1 ability per level from your basic class, 3 abilities per level from your path and a signature ability from your path (for a total of 41 abilities at tenth level). You also get 21 abilities from 10 levels of progression from your race.
Anyway, the 'Valorous Hero' Basic Class specializes in the Maneuver phase of the combat round so the Samurai, Sword Saint, Chaos Knight and Death Knight all share that they are front liners who deal big damage.
Mechanically and narratively however they are differentiated. Mechanically through their path abilities. The Chaos Knight deals with more random damage than the other 3 paths, as it must expend a maneuver whenever performing a 'Strike' to modify that 'Strike' with a distortion, this distortion can result in a successful strike dealing 0 damage, normal damage or double damage. As the chaos knight levels they can get to mitigate the randomness of this strke (and even free themselves from it entirely if they desire) alongside their other path abilities such as swapping positions, random debuff purging, randomly modifying the damage they receive, 'switch hitting' with melee and ranged abilities among a number of others within their suite of abilities.
The Death Knight on the other hand, is characterized by having a sturdier frontline via resurrecting slain foes. They play more into the front lining aspects of the Valorous Hero with more abilities that keep them kicking around for longer such as immunity to poisons and disease. Additionally, unlike the Chaos Knight the Death Knight is a little more versatile in its damage types having access to both dark and unholy in addition to regular ones like slashing, piercing, bludgeoning etc.
(to be continued)
The Sword Saint on the other hand is this weird class that modifies their sword to have the benefits of the other weapon groups (weapons have 3 more abilities for you to use). It's version of frontlining is more based around outright declaring an action missed (a limited resource). Its mastery of the sword culminates in an ability where they cannot be hit by swords unless the opponent is also a sword saint.
The Samurai is about honor duels and getting stronger from winning them. It plays a lot of hats (infantry, ranged, cavalry) so that it can be what it needs to be.
Narratively, these classes are very different. The Heroic Spirit of the Chaos Knight doesn't only provide the player character with the usual trauma, but addles their mind. Reclaiming your identity, culminating in mastering the power of this spirit to be a Lord is the key narrative hook. Meanwhile, the Death Knight is a reviled heroic spirit. Defeating prejudice and founding a knightly order is the in-built narrative hooks. A Samurai is all about clan honor (yay stereotypes), finding a lord to serve and being the best retainer thats out there. The Sword Saint is about autistic devotion to training culminating in founding your own temple.
Different degrees of depth gone in because my memory is hazy (i literally wrote 90% of the content a year ago).
>Providing additional use cases so that if you don't go first you still get your ability is AI
No wonder /tg/ doesn't play games. They can't read.
I derped it would still work in both those scenario's with just 'start of combat round'. The wording was for ambushes, to let them enter that stance during ambush round.
Good formatting cut it down from 1200 pages to 544. God, I knew nothing about formatting design back then.(To be fair, I think there's still room for improvement, but at least i'm satisfied enough with it that i don't feel embarrassed to charge $)
I'm saying there's no fricking way you came up with and did the mechanics of 120 classes and still kept them distinct AND were able and willing to write them out by hand.
>When a swashbuckler enters combat or at the start of a combat round
Either you "write" like an AI or you used AI.
No, that looks like basic 3E-esque rules writing. The frick is this schizo shit?
Plz understand, anon has never read a rulebook before
>I'm saying there's no fricking way you came up with and did the mechanics of 120 classes
NTA but you are uncreative as frick if you think coming up with 120 classes is hard or even noteworthy. Only weird thing about that is that if you have that many classes you should just make a classless system.
There's a free preview version with 12 of them, the narrative expansion to the core rulebook is also free and lists all 120 of them (though has none of the games combat mechanics in there as its focused on narrative). It's free because it was meant to patch a hole in the core rules (it being all about combat)
I read this and it seems so fricking slow. If this was free, I may give it a shot, and see how it plays. And if it's good I'd actually buy it. Not many RPGs I bought after reading through them, but some. I'm iffy if I would buy this.
I think the pacing is good as long as everyones paying attention to the combat and has their reference sheets filled out (multiple copies of page 3 of the character sheet).
The Drivethrurpg preview edition does a bestiary preview with 1 level enemies if you wanna test things, but yea I get not wanting to commit to shit.
You might be right, but I also just like talking about my game. It was unfortunate that the negative feedback this time around didn't really have anything constructive to it, that thread from october 2022 was fantastic for me getting better at making my game, but seems this time people just aren't even reading and seem to have some sort of delusional obsession about AI. I have no idea where I could shill to an actual audience, but is what it is.
Why the frick would a game have reserved space on a sheet for "burrow" and "flying" movement as if those were common features for most characters to have, but not a "swim" movement
Swim is same as ground if you have a swim move speed, otherwise its half, didnt really need a spot vs. burrow and flying which can be wildly different from your ground.
also flight and burrow are common for pc's to have.
>pacing is good as long as everyones paying attention
Ah yes. This shit right here. Here's the thing. If you pay all the attention, you still can't decide before, because the state will change. So no. This isn't fast at all. I'll read the preview and all that, but as is, right now, this seems slow.
But its simultaneous initiative, it's only changing based off of what you as a group decided?
Idk, might just be my 2 playtest groups are to used to it now and i need to try with randos so i can have a second groups view.
>and seem to have some sort of delusional obsession about AI
While I get that the people constantly whining SLOP SLOP SLOP are annoying and hurting their cause, there's legitimate reasons to avoid it that don't boil down to how ethical it is or isn't. The vast, VAST majority of AI art looks incredibly similar as a result of being overwhelmingly trained on the most popular pieces on sites like ArtStation and the fact that most people don't try to push it to do anything else. The result is that it comes across as incredibly generic and lacks any distinctiveness that could set it aside from any other system on the market. Something like 40K wouldn't have a tenth of the market it does today if it weren't for its over the top gothic aesthetic setting itself apart from the sea of sci-fi that emerged in the 80s after the success of Star Wars. On the other hand the art you're using for your book wouldn't look out of place in a Chinese gacha game and it makes it that much harder for the average person to give a shit.
As for advice on the game itself the sheer number of classes and races might seem like a good way to upsell your system but on the other hand it could easily be interpreted as bloat that divided your attention too thin to balance things and keep them interesting and might make learning the system too time consuming to consider over other options.
Reason i call it delusional obsession is all the claims about ai writing. Anyone criticizing the art to me is like fair enough. Ai arts worse than real art but better than no art. Would replace if i had the $$$.
There are a lot of starving artists out there. You can get pretty good commissions for under 50 USD per piece. You definitely could get a better price for a whole book, say 20USD. So for about 24 hundred you could get a decently illustrated book. That is pretty decent imho.
Its decent for a thing that will get ROI. I suppose though the saying of gotta spend $$$$ to make $$$ holds true. Maybe i'll be able to build a budget for that some day.
Before anyone says 'how can you talk about roi when you bought 3 Ganker ads'.
All 3 ads i make a profit if 2 people buy, small loss if 1 buys. So, was a easy buy.
That's because 99.9% of Ganker is insufferable hipster homosexuals who will pretend to like something not because of its actual quality, but because it's obscure and "normies" don't know what it is. They want to feel like speshul snowflakes by playing a dogshit system that nobody plays because it's dogshit.
>120 classes
That's bullshit. I bet it counts multiclassing combinations as a separate item.
>120 classes
>24 races
HUMAN. FIGHTER.
Based
Hmm,
thats a shame. I'm not to sure how i can improve it without a significant budget.
It does not. Theres also no multiclassing, in order to have 120 balanced classes something had to give. That thing was the character building mini game. Its just pick your basic class -> pick path -> pick race -> pick equipment. You can almost build a character by just reading the table of contents and they'll function well.
Go to 5iver. Hire Phlip and Indog artists. You'll spend less than you do for AI tokens and get better art.
(Yes I know it’s some wacky ES hybrid)
Your game is really, really ugly and plastic. I can't even understand how someone would have this bad of an aesthetic sense.
>120 classes
Just make it classless, hot damn. There is no way you're gonna balance that many classes. I don't want to play Ganker fantasy heartbreaker Rifts.
It is balanced, I promise 🙂
But I had to sacrifice the character building mini game that many people (especially those whose system of choice is something like 3.5) to get that result. You're not getting point buy or rolling stats or whatever.
that many people enjoy*
"Have you tried not playing D&D" is a worthless post that low IQs make in every thread because they've seen others do it, so their stunted brains give them Fitting In Endorphins for doing the same. Why would I want to play a game by one of them?
Grapes are a worthless fruit that low IQs eat behind every gate because they've seen others do it, so their stunted brains give them fitting-in endorphins for doing the same. Why would I want to eat something grown by one of them?
I think it's pretty fun. Maybe you'll feel the same? 🙂
I don't pay for games, neither does 90% of /tg/ so no one will ever try to play your game unless you post the pdf for free.
Not that I'm saying you should, I'm just saying shilling on /tg/ is a waste of time.
This dude named his RPG like a badly translated chinese gatcha game that buys ad space on torrent sites.
I'm curious about this game.
So... How does it avoid the "missing attacks are a waste of time" problem?
Shoot me a message on insta, if you have specific illustrations you would like to see made by a human. I'm no Frank Frazetta, but I'm always happy to help fellow anons.
Alternatively: maybe you can get AIs to bring you much more unique results if you suggest some unusual styles. Treat it as a different medium and use it to make stuff which would be impossible otherwise.
The nature of back and forth phase based combat is that you're constantly doing stuff so a single missed action doesn't mean you did nothing that round and isn't as big of a deal. Additionally, as you level you can do more conflict actions regardless of class so when you're at level 20 (which is what the game is meant to be played at, 1-19 are training wheels) its really unlikely you're going to miss all 4 of your conflict phase actions, but even if you do there's still like 20 other actions you performed throughout the combat round.
Array of Champions anon, i see there's been a bit of activity since my last post
>Buzzwords
I disagree. I think its nice introduction, but hey I can't tell you to like my thing.
>Reference Sheets
Maybe they will. However, it takes inspiration from wargaming which is a genre where people will potentially have an entire reference book or set of reference cards. So, kind of the trade off that if I want wargaming combat and not normal RPG combat there has to be reference material for the players to not slow combat to a crawl.
>Misc. Critiques at paragraphs
Disagree, you do you beau.
I don't think it will cause any confusion. At least it hasn't from two separate playtest groups. I don't know what to tell you anon. This post feels like unsubstantial negativity rather than constructive negativity i can take something from and that's a shame since you made the effort to post it. The exception being about critical hits, you're right that it's incredibly random for it to be described at that location. Will update. There are injury mechanics so that I have more levers to pull for class design like classes that get stronger when they take more damage.
Idk 4E encouraged people to make a balanced party. I wanted to do the same. The game still technically works, just like 4E still technically works if you run 4 strikers, but it wasn't designed for it. I think it's ok to be upfront with that
>Dead levels
There are no dead levels in Array?
>Equipment Section
A basic foundation for larger potential survival/ roleplay based on the GM, that's really about it.
It shares nothing in common with D&D other than being a fantasy roleplaying game. It's just stealing from wargames.
>Criticizing D100 and player facing rolls
Lmao
>Rounding and targeting
Because it's important information before we dive into things?
>Wording
I figured people can tell the difference between targeting and affecting when it's highlighted (TBC)
So, when i say of a wargame, I mean in combat. The narrative expansion is big for setting structures and guidelines for roleplay, but more or less I want people to have the freedom of an RPG with actually fun combat (I don't find combat fun in most TTRPG's, D&D/D&D adjacent or otherwise).
The only thing it shares with D&D is that its a RPG, and it's fantasy. It's much higher fantasy and more heroic than D&D (destroy mountains, cutting through enemies 300ft away with your sword, resetting combat with your time powers, silly shit).
So as for what it offers that D&D doesn't
-Combat that's fun for wargamers
-Over-the-top heroic abilities
-Good Class/Path Design
-Good Monster design - they aren't just stat sticks with abilities that amount to flavor text.
- Custom Magic item rules that are easy for the GM to utilize and make their characters stronger
-Modular rules to tailor the game to your preferences officially without needing to 'homebrew'.
I don't think it depends on D&D to be anything. It's just kind of a fact that D&D is the biggest game so its easy to get more clicks if you bring it up, that's all there is to it.
So, yes it *is* its own game, for better or worse.
Not me.
>-Combat that's fun for wargamers
Fun cannot be designed, so this is a subjective notion.
>-Over-the-top heroic abilities
Also rather subjective. Spellcasters in D&D arguably have a bunch of them, and even in later editions one can argue for Rogues in 4E having the potential to take a power to make foes deal their own damage to themselves, or the Eldrich Knight in 5E being able to teleport around short distances. It's not "slicing mountains in two" over the top, but it's still far from mundane.
>-Good Class/Path Design
What is good or not is very subjective. Give us the goods, and those who consume it will decide whether it's good or not.
>-Good Monster design - they aren't just stat sticks with abilities that amount to flavor text.
I don't see them in the text you provided. Will you provide an example of how you make a monster that doesn't wind up being a stat stick with abilities? Again, "Good" is subjective.
>- Custom Magic item rules that are easy for the GM to utilize and make their characters stronger
I only see Enchanted Clothing, but I don't think that's what you have in mind when you speak of magic items. Care to post an example? Also, "Good" is subjective.
>-Modular rules to tailor the game to your preferences officially without needing to 'homebrew'.
What if I don't want character classes? Would the game easily function without them? How far does this modularity go?
In conclusion, the points you gave me are subjective and sound rather wishy-washy. The majority of what you told me about your system is something any other "D&D killer" on the market can say about their game. So, what concrete things does your game do that D&D can never hold a candle to?
>The only thing it shares with D&D is that its a RPG, and it's fantasy
This is really just cope. It shares a ton of things with DnD in its presentation and the way it's designed, and you even referred to DnD when describing design decisions earlier. Denying it just kind of makes you seem like you lack experience with other systems.
>So as for what it offers that D&D doesn't
>-Combat that's fun for wargamers
>-Over-the-top heroic abilities
>-Good Class/Path Design
>-Good Monster design - they aren't just stat sticks with abilities that amount to flavor text.
See, this is part of why I'm engaging with this. The way you present this is interesting.
Your core features - Combat, mechanics, classes - You basically just give them banal buzzwords as descriptions. "They're good. They're heroic. They're fun."
These words don't hold any substance though so people just roll their eyes at it.
But, your last line on monster design ALMOST starts to describe something real. It states a clear intention for game mechanics, but it does still fail to describe how that is reached or, if approached with a bit more humility, what you're trying to do to reach that intention. But you don't do that and it doesn't show up in the book, either.
As an aside, this
>-Modular rules to tailor the game to your preferences officially without needing to 'homebrew'.
Is also just a bad approach, and is probably why every modular rule section I read sucked. Homebrew is fun and groups do it on their own. It doesn't need to be addressed or prevented, and should be encouraged if anything, without direct interference or consideration. This will allow you to write mechanics with tighter focus or juggling a bunch of rules that most games would never see used anyways, and will give interested GMs an opportunity to create their own spin on how things work.
Not the Array of Champions anon, but I do wonder about your opinion on presenting modularity in books. The Cortex Prime book does it on page one. My own system is one I think is pretty easy to swap elements in and out of, but at the same time, calling it "modular" does give me an uneasy feeling like I am sounding like other systems that claim the same thing but aren't in actuality.
What would convince you that a modular system is worth looking into? How can I present it in a way that you would take seriously?
The best way I've seen modularity handled in a way that doesn't interfere with the overall design is through layered depths/complexities. Off the top of my head, I recall WFRP doing this with armor and weaponry, where you could keep it simple with generalized armor levels and broadly defined weapons, or have specific armors and areas armor covered and weapons that had individual qualities on how well they functioned against certain targets.
I find this the best since it still maintains what is almost the same overall coherence, but still presents different rules that might see actual use depending on how much combat matters to a group. Combat itself isn't radically altered, but suddenly you don't have three guys with swords, but one guy with a broadsword that does extra damage on unarmored locations, one guy with an arming sword that's slightly better against armor, and one guy with a rapier that is far easier to hit targets with but causes less actual harm.
On a meta level, the big difference is that modularity in some systems is "built-in" and design elements are compromised to accommodate that, but in this example, it's an after thought and nothing is compromised for it.
I'm not familiar with Cortex Prime so I have no opinion there. But most games that do actively try to be modular tend to run into issues with making those compromises. I think anything that's trying to do something new or fix old problems is at least worth looking into, though.
As someone who isn't familiar with WFRP, I am a little lost on your example to be honest, so bear with me.
If I am getting this right, modularity is fine so long as there is something of substance to back up a modular rule to fill it in with. There needs to be real choices behind the swapping out, rather than just leaving behind an empty hole.
Or am I not getting it right?
Not exactly. It's mostly that I think modularity shouldn't compromise the overall design or design intentions.
In that case, if modularity comprises the overall design, then it looks like the overall design was made without any real concrete vision for its basis- so that it's all relative.
Would that accurately describe or stance, or no? I just want to avoid pitfalls with my own design if I can avoid it. Thanks for being patient with my probing.
Sometimes. I think it can also just compromise the design vision itself, though.
To further elaborate, an example would be the modular initiative rules in AoC. Flipping a coin for initiative, or having the players make a collective roll for initiative aren't really achieving a different method of interaction, one is just slower and more cumbersome than the other. But they are different in how they resolve which means the same rules couldn't typically affect both.
Let's say you had a class with an ability that gave you an extra d6 or d4 to roll for initiative, for example. Its a slight bonus that could support an entire party. But what if the group is using the coin flip method? You'd need a new rule for dealing with that specific interaction. And that rule can't mathematically be balanced to be equivalent to that particular d6 method.
This sort of modularity creates an instance where certain decisions and mechanics will just have to be avoided, or else problems will have to be created and then ignored because there is no workable solution that doesn't involve just removing the modular rules.
It's not a crippling flaw, of course. Sometimes it may even be better to have two ways to do one thing if there really are two excellent and distinct methods that matter.
But in the above example and in most cases, it is a flaw, and the problems it creates get worse as you scale up: If you had three ways to handle initiative and three abilities trying to interact with initiative, you need nine different methods now, only three of which are probably ever going to be used by a given group in a given game.
Whereas if you stick to one method that's solid and focus on that, you don't run into any considerations like this.
Alright updated based on the feedback. Some things are unchanged (like my modular rules, I like these) others are, either way you made my book better, so thanks.
Ernest Hemingway spoke about how a good writer has to kill his darlings, and while he was referring to literature, it's not much of a stretch to apply it to the creation of a tabletop RPG. You can't be above killing off or even outright transfiguring the whole book if it means seeing it to becoming its very best. It sucks to do. It really does. Anybody who has ever made a book will say that it sucks, but it is necessary. Don't get in the way of the growth of your treasure- because it's about your treasure, and not you.
I think I understand better. If it is going to be modular, all potential options in the book need to be supported for it. Like how in WFRP with the weapons, be they simple or complex- both are supported. But in Array of Champions as of the preview last I checked, it was a dice roll or a coin flip, and the coin flip isn't supported by certain class features.
It's not that it isn't supported - I didn't read that far - But that it would have to be supported or accounted for if those features existed, and will create problems otherwise.
Which in the end adds extra work, but doesn't really make the system more interesting.
I get you. Without the support of the other sub-systems in the modules, the system becomes a franken-system where it just looks hideous.
My idea would be that for the initiative coin flip in Array of Champions to instead keep using the d6 die, but to declare "Evens" or "Odds". Then if there are class abilities that help with this, then they can pick one extra number of the type not called on the d6, so that if they choose Evens, they can also pick "1", "3", or "5" so that if it comes out to that result, they will go first.
I didn't read that far into it either, but I would think something like that would be a step in the right direction for a modular ruleset.
I'm the anon who made this post:
I've been reading your replies, but it still seems like you are the only one who understands your game. Have you ever had someone else GM the game for you? For that matter, have you ever had somebody who is unfamiliar with the game try and GM it for you? It's a whole other ball game to understand your system, and to teach your understanding of the system to others. I found the text tedious to get through, as it listed off what you want and have in your game without actually providing the structure on how to apply it in the first few pages where they are mentioned. I have to skip around the book to find where it was mentioned much earlier.
It's fine to have options, but it's best to not front-load all of them. More options =/= more interesting. Keep the list concise, and less is often more. With a smaller list, you can focus your attention on those, and build off of it in later suppliments, or maybe your own players will be inspired to make their own stuff based on it.
Also gauging your replies thus far, I have one more piece of advice that is more important than anything I said thus far: Humble yourself. You're defending what you made against /tg/ as if what you made so far is the top of the proverbial peak. What if it isn't actually at the top of the peak, and you're only making it out to be at the top? The pitch I'm getting from you reminds me of a snake-oil salesman looking to sell what they have by any means necessary without an actual care for what the product is.
Is Array of Champions really a D&D killer? Or are you puffing it up to be a D&D killer? To have AoC be that killer, you need to entertain the notion that it might very well not be. That what you have is not that great. When you have a thing that needs improvements that you see that way, that's when it can start being a force to be reckoned with. It's awesome to get suggestions, as you say. My suggestion here is to humble yourself.
I have had two people GM my game, one from each playtest group. They did so pretty smoothly as I got a lot of feedback from them that helped shape the game to be approachable.
This threads the first time I'm getting feedback regarding confusion about the layout. The rules aren't complex, taking up less than 20 pages. I don't know how to take your feedback into an actionable account. I don't think there are to many options either and that its indeed concise.
I'm defending what I made because it's fun to discuss what i've made? Idk, i feel you're reading oddly into my writing tone to takeaway that defending your product means you're not humble. Like come on, whats the actionable feedback in the original anons criticisms of the first 4 paragraphs? Or how about when he says something outright wrong like 'dead levels'?
Why is genuine passion about your project snake-oil? The game is basically free for judgement, its missing 108 paths, 20 races, the custom race building rules. The only people who are going to buy it are those who read that core and went 'yea this seems neat I want to see what the rest of the player options are'. If I didn't care about the product I think I would be talking more about 'D&D/Your Favorite System is Bad' than I would be about the influences wargaming has had on the creation of my game.
As for whether it's really a D&D Killer, that depends on the market. I don't like traditional RPG combat but that doesn't mean others are going to like wargaming combat with their RPG's instead. So, of course it may not be a D&D killer. Again, you've read too much into my tone and created your own biases surrounding it to think I've been anything but humble about it (outside of my ads, but if you're not going to puff yourself up in a ad then who else will?). I've explicitly stated that i've taken feedback from my customers and implemented it, so wouldn't that indicate I'm open to seeing my game as something that needs improvement?
the previews missing 108..*
Anon you shoulda listened to
You had your playtest groups GM it, and that's good. But what about those outside of your group? It'll be tricky to organize, but with the internet I think it's doable.
Complex is fine so long as if it's the price you pay for depth. But the organization of the book is something I found wanting. It's too much up front and has little to no context (citing Key Terms and Concepts on p. 6), and it bored me. As the other anon said earlier, spread them out as the concepts are introduced. It's fine to have a reference sheet at the end of the book for ease, but not right at the beginning.
Nothing wrong with defending, but what I wonder is the reasons behind the defending. Are you just trying to correct misunderstandings, or do the points give you a tinge of fear? If fear is in the equation, ask yourself why you feel fear. If something scares you, then that something is important and worth taking seriously. If it is about misunderstandings, cite the page where it is, and then ask yourself why it was misunderstood. If the answer was written several pages later, it's an indicator to put that answer earlier in the book. But if it's because of fear, and you're pushing back against it, then the problem is most likely in the creator of AoC. I suspect fear is in the equation, because you invested so much into it so far, even getting money mixed up in it. You have a lot to lose if ever you face that the problems stem from you or anything you did. But then again, I am not you, and I have been wrong about people before. I will say that you're in good company with me if the reason for your defense stems from fear that you were mistaken all along, because I am in no place to throw stones at such people.
Genuine passion for a product isn't snake-oil, but the presentation of your product makes it sound like snake-oil. Is AoC snake oil, or is it not? If it isn't, don't sell it with subjectivities. Sell it with that passion and openness that inspired you to make it.
Cont...
Continuing from
It's true, I did form my own conclusions based on what I saw, and it in turn formed my own biases. I'm not the only one who does this. I saw AoC as something you know it isn't. I am clearly not the only one in this thread who thinks so. This sounds like an issue of disconnect between the image and what the product is. Put a bum in a suit and clean him up and people will think he's sophisticated. Put an erudite out on the streets wearing ragged clothes, and people will avoid him. It's on you as the creator to depict the game for what it really is. The halo effect is real, and when I saw your ad, it told me that your game is trying to ride clout, and with the AI art it made me think your game is an attempt at a cash-grab.
Your game is not a two-bit prostitute, so don't act like her pimp by depicting her like that. Your game is your treasure, so treat it with that care. So when I say to be humble, it is to see yourself as somebody who didn't depict her as who she actually is. You got caught up the moment, and it left a sour note on me, and at least the vocal anons in this thread. That I think is unbecoming of you and your game.
Lastly, instead of defending your game. Try and understand the anons giving you the feedback. Try and understand their perspective. By all means, show them what's already in there, but also try and understand why they didn't get to that point.
This was useful, thanks for the feedback. I took down the 3 ads i had running because of it, going to replace them with something more cheery and doesnt mention the dungeon game. I think you're right in that ai art is already a point against my game, i shouldn't make it worse by trying to have negative-based advertising.
Understanding the anons in this thread i have a mixed time doing so. Some its easy, some its hard to tell if theres anything genuine to take away from and some are mixed. Either way i appreciate this post for making me reevaluate how i advertise.
I dont think im going to respond to the post before this or the one from the other anon before that because its just going to seem to defensive and i think i would rather allow for my rulebooks to speak for themselves and implement any actionable feedback i get in my email.
Thanks.
Then I wish you all of the best in your endeavors. Yeah, sometimes the anons are playing tough-love, while other times they get kicks out of being buttholes. But who they are can be determined through that understanding, but it does take being humble to see that understanding through and to see what really is. Yes, it is a vital thing to know how to take criticism, but a whole other to know what criticism to take.
As an anon who is trying to make a good product, I'm happy to support you more if you bring your work here after you make your changes and adjustments if I am around. I should also mention that I am the same anon as the one before the response you responded to, but I think we have an understanding now.
It's the editing that separates the game designers from the wannabes. If you can go through with pulling your ads like that after all that, I believe you can make something good!
Thanks guy, we'll see what sort of feedback I get as I have more customers with each new book. (Next is the setting guide, which feels relaxing to write after focusing so much on mechanics).
Yea that's fair. I'm now on pic related now conceptually, but it's a little to basic, plus there's them having their outlines cut out. Gotta think more on it.
>i shouldn't make it worse by trying to have negative-based advertising
As an observer to this conversation I think this is a great idea. I had seen the ads before this thread and it created a negative bias for me, and I don't even like D&D.
>They did so pretty smoothly as I got a lot of feedback from them that helped shape the game to be approachable.
This seems contradictory. If you received alot of feedback that helped change the game, how is it possible that it also went "smoothly"?
>Like come on, whats the actionable feedback in the original anons criticisms of the first 4 paragraphs?
That you act this way is probably part of the humility issues other see. You
1. Assume actionable feedback is deserved
and
2. Assume that because you see none, it does not exist.
The second is the more egregious one, because it does exist.
If I were in your place, I would take the first paragraph as an indicator that my game lacks a properly distinctive feel in how it presents itself.
I would also want to look at this other system and learn it in depth to see what I can do better than it.
The second paragraph is basically stated to be unnecessary - Which it is, it's really just a dumb excuse to have the all-too-common instance where the level 1 fighter is a level 100 fighter in his backstory. In your shoes, I would probably remove it outright.
Ditto for the third paragraph. It's needlessly confusing in the opening statements for your game.
For the fourth paragraph, I think the better word would be "inconsistent" rather than "senseless", but the idea there is still the same: It's still mostly unimportant and most groups won't care for it.
I feel it bears repeating that the opening pages of your game are the MOST important. First impressions are important.
>I disagree.
It's not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing. Your introduction presents a slurry of buzzwords that describe nothing, and didn't really align with any of the mechanics that were presented. The only thing it actually offers is a description of how turns work, but even that turned out to be incorrect.
This is a common mistake with designers, to think that by stating the intent of the system or what its meant to convey, it will do so. It does not. Your mechanics will not begin to feel the way you want them to feel by telling people how you want them to feel. They must actually work the way they're meant to and come off the way they're meant to. If they don't, they're failures.
>I don't think it will cause any confusion.
See the above. What you "think" is irrelevant. It replaces a common mechanical term with another common mechanical term, but does not use the latter's standard meaning.
If "Your name for hit points here is pretty similar to another term that doesn't mean that, you should change it" isn't constructive, you're not looking to improve.
>Idk 4E encouraged people to make a balanced party.
4E also sucked.
>There are no dead levels in Array?
'Number go up' is a dead level.
>A basic foundation for larger potential survival/roleplay
Which is then heavily discouraged. If your game is not meant to involve something, you shouldn't dedicate a paragraph or two towards it. A GM that wants to engage with that sort of stuff will do it on his own.
>Because it's important information before we dive into things?
It's not. It's not even relevant to the section it's in.
>I figured people can tell the difference between targeting and affecting
The problem is that it's not explained if there is any mechanical difference there that actually matters. "Pay attention to the wording. No, I won't explain how this example might create different mechanical implications."
If you really made the game just for yourself, you wouldn't have bought an ad. Clearly you give a shit that other people play and like your game. Dismissing other people's feedback just because you disagree with it will mean your game will not reach the audience you want it to.
I get this feeling from the way you respond to criticism that you care more about the game "being done" than you care about the quality. You seem unwilling to fix issues with the formatting or changing any large sections of your rules because it would take a lot of work to change those things, and doing that work would mean your game isn't done yet.
Saying "I made it for myself/people like me, you don't have to like it" and such are REALLY common choices of defense by designers when their systems receive criticism, especially in regards to core mechanics or design decisions. It used to confuse me since outside of solo RPGs, there are no systems you make just for yourself. Games are made to be played with other people, and the only reasons I see for sharing them beyond your own group is due to a lack of a group, or because you hope for even more people to play it.
It's even more silly when you consider that negative feedback is always implicitly the other party saying "This thing is not for me in its current configuration" and explaining why that is. The designer's defense is, in this sense, an affirmation that his creation is flawed but that he has no intentions of contending with that fact.
That all said, I don't really mind it since it's usually a good warning sign. I've never seen any designer who needs to stoop to such points make anything genuinely innovative or unique. And only one out of a few dozen that actually had put effort into making their creation look solid and perform well at what it was meant to do (HKRPG).
>AI slop
I'll pass
Fair enough if AI art turns you away, I just think its better than no art, would replace with real (quality) art in a heartbeat if I could afford it.
If you spent your time and effort making doodles instead of excuses you could draw the art yourself
I think my doodles are worse than ai and i have no interest in spending the years to make that not the case. 'learn to draw' is bad advice to a game designer.
I smell a mad artgay. Not everybody has time to develop every possible skill to create something.
This is why I like systems that give players an out. Like systems where you can spend a limited resource every fight to re-roll. And I think Exalted as some sort of willpower spending to just declare hits doesn't it?
Palladium games. You get lots of actions as you level up to compensate for lack upward stat growth.
In Frontier Scum, you always hit what you shoot at it it isn't a "tough shot".
In Into the Odd, you roll damage for weapons, then subtract armor (no hit roll). It's still possible for an attack to be ineffective, but unusual for it to do nothing at all. Jk8nd
>Into the Odd
Oh yeah, that's the one I was mentioning there
You want games that coddle you so much that you're protected from any possibility of failure?
It's because the failure isn't engaging or fun that this discussion is had. Earlier anon mentioned war games, they have failure still be fun through the sheer amount of dice you roll and decisions you make that lead into that failure. 5E is just 'i swung my sword at the nearest guy and missed'. Doesn't feel great.
I think the chance of missing has a big influence on that. A chance of missing between 5% and 25% tends to be fine for most but issues pop up when the "normal" miss chance is 50% or higher (though the occasional hard to hit opponent is fine if not overused).
This. I remember playing early 4E and there was a full combat where my character missed every single attack over a 4 round fight. Might as well have not existed beyond providing flanking.
Were you using math fixes back then? Way math works in 4e, you'd normally have 70+% chance of hitting enemies even several levels above you before accounting for Combat Advantage and other circumstantial bonuses/maluses.
Can still happen of course, but wew lad.
Play Mausritter. Every attack hits. No rolling required.
>What are some games that are not like this?
Pretty much any dice-pool based game is going to skew towards hitting to some degree, even if you don't hit them particularly hard.
Depends on what you find frustrating about "missing" op:
A) you hate missing because your character has only one chance per round in doing something significant and have to wait your turn every time in attempting that?
B) you hate missing because the game limits your interaction with the scene with that specific action (either because it's the most convenient or whatever) once per turn so success is the only thing that allows you to have a slight impact on the scene?
C) something else entirely.
Expand on that.
Combination of A & B. I'm not OP, but that is a screeshot of a comment I made specifically in a 5e thread about D&D's gameplay pattern for martial characters.
This isn't an issue if turns are short. Play a system with faster combat and/or tell the other players to stop wasting time.
Wrong.
Oh shut up. Success is never guaranteed and you need to get over that.
However, if you're sat for half an hour waiting to miss again then your frustration is understandable. We've all been there.
It doesn't matter how fast a game is if you're failing more often than you think you should, fricktard.
Making 9 attacks over 4 rounds in 30 minutes and missing roughly half feels different than making 4 Attacks over 4 rounds in 2 hours and missing half.
They're both utter shit.
>failing more often than you think you should
Maybe you're just entitled.
Why are you replying honestly to a fricktard who just goes "nuh-uh"?
I'm visiting my parents and I'm rather bored.
It's less of a problem, but even in a quick game, if you miss a couple of times in a row, you can feel pretty useless and left out.
Avatar Legends has three options when you roll in combat
>Complete success
Use a Practiced or Learned technique OR use two Basic and/or Mastered techniques
>Partial success
Use a Basic or Mastered technique
>Failure
Your choice of do nothing, or take a hit to your emotional stability to use a Basic or Mastered technique
Worlds without number has a mechanic called shock damage whicj is basically a minimum amount of damage you can deal, even if you miss. It can be mitigated by things like shields and powerful armor. Some ruleslite have you just roll damage and not to hit. Free league games generally let you reroll misses at a cost/risk
Of the games I've played, I know ICON, Stars Without Number (and other Sine Nomine games) have "fray" damage. Even on a bad roll, you deal a small amount of damage to the target, representing shallow cuts and glancing strikes, rather than a telling blow. ICON and D&D 4e also have combat effects that take place before you make the attack roll, or that are guaranteed to happen hit-or-miss.
It is all about game feel. You could fairly easily rework the math to hit as many times as you want, even always, and spread the damage accordingly. The result would be the same, the feel? Not so much. In general "failing" 1/3 of the time has been set by several studies as acceptable by most people that are not toddlers. The chance of failure makes success more exhilarating added to that some sprinkles of critical hits, larger on hit damage, and you have a pretty addicting system for a light tone adventure game. Higher pay off and all that.There is of course the of-chance that you are going to accumulate some consecutive misses, and that can feel bad, but the math are there so it is really not a common occurrence. Some man-baby that one time missed 5 attacks in a row and never got over it is not the sample you want to draw from when making design decisions.
Another factor is the frequency of attempts. A string of 5 misses out of a night of 30 attacks with 10 total misses that night feels different than a string of 3 misses when you only made 9 attacks the entire night.
Those studies can blow it out their ass because that's what 4E did and missing all the time was a constant complaint from day fricking one all the way to it being retired for the Next playtest.
>muh 4e
Everyone uses those studies, from vidya to casinos to 5e. If you think this rule of thumb is ignored anywhere, especially where randomness is involved you are pretty ignorant. Crybabies where just a bit louder with 4e for a multitude of reasons.
But people at casinos lose much more frequently than 1/3.
The 1/3 win/lose ratio is the base where one can start tuning, there are a lot of other thing that go into it. Eg someone can start with 1/3 or better ratio that gradually gets worse but by then the sunk cost fallacy has set in and it will be followed by the gamblers fallacy.
>It is ignored outright by every single edition of the game predating 4E.
Well the studies where neither mature nor widespread before 3e and 3e is the first edition to actually apply game-design principles in the game. Plus if you actually check 3e AC vs an average fighters Attack Bonus you will see that the fighter, has roughly 60% chance to hit an enemy of equal or less CR in the first levels. Sometimes more and sometimes less but again, this is a rule of thumb, not an absolute. It just means if you fail more than 1/3 times you feel bad, nothing more, nothing less. Plus what
said. The bloody thing gives you a baseline that you tune, a starting point. Pulling games that you consider bad that applied the principle doesn't mean that the principle is wrong. It could mean that the games design sucked in general or specifically that they applied the studies wrong but it actually means nothing because the games you sited spend thousands of dollars in playtesting and surveys and you are just some rando crybaby in a mongolian hand painting forum.
>has roughly 60% chance to hit an enemy of equal or less CR in the first levels
You mean the levels where most players consider the accuracy too low so they try to stack as many circumstantial bonuses as possible to sidestep the unreliability? You don't fricking say.
>It just means if you fail more than 1/3 times you feel bad
No, it means it also feels bad when you succeed more than 2/3 the time which is obviously wrong if you use your brain.
>Pulling games that you consider bad
I don't consider 4E bad. I'm telling you, 4E actually did build the game around what you think is a workable baseline. It wasn't a popular decision.
Case in point https://www.enworld.org/threads/d-d-4e-and-psychology-hit-chance-too-low.248098/
The game doesn't actually have a 50% hit rate like the OP says, that's him feeling like a 65% is a 50/50. At level 1 it's 55% with the lowest accuracy build the game expects players to take, a 16 in your primary stat and a weapon with a +2 proficiency bonus: you have a +5 and level 1 baseline monster AC is 15. But 4E also expects you to constantly get combat advantage which makes it a de facto 65%, with each separate increase over the baseline being an extra 5%. Your hit chance will change some one way or the other over the levels but after Expertise corrected for an error in accuracy scaling it doesn't go off of the baseline by much.
If a 65% hit rate was really good enough as a baseline you would have never seen complaints, or the complaints would be relegated solely to late Paragon and Epic. That's not what happened.
You also gotta remember that 4e has four different "AC" scores (AC/Reflex/Fortitude/Will) and each PC/Enemy will have different scores, with at least one of those going below average. Having a variety of attacks so you can target those defenses can easily raise you above the 65% bar.
I'm aware. This doesn't change that 4E was dogged literally from day one of its existence about low accuracy. The only reason you can't see how bad it really was is because the forums no longer exist.
You are a bit off on a few things there. While 15 was the baseline defense for a level 1 monster; it was not the baseline for monsters that were fought in melee outside of "Brute" type monsters.
The AC math for things like Soldiers assumed you had started with a +3 primary stat bonus and increased it every opportunity, were using a "highly accurate" +3 weapon, were using an on curve magic weapon (+1 weapon per 5 levels rounded up) past first and had an expertise feat giving +1 for every 10 levels. If you started with even with a +2 stat bonus, used an inaccurate +2 weapon and were using a below curve magic weapon (because the enchantment you wanted was as late as level 5/10/15/20/25/30) and didn't take an expertise feat you would have a 20% lower chance to hit than intended. This would have been a 45% chance of hitting.
>You mean the levels where most players consider the accuracy too low
If you show me the survey that confirms your anecdotal assertions ,maybe, I will believe you. Stacking bonuses is not really an argument either way. It is what you do in 3e in general. If the baseline success rate was 75%+ the players would still seek to stack bonuses, because why wouldn't you improve your odds when the game gives you the tools to do so?
>No, it means it also feels bad when you succeed more than 2/3 the time which is obviously wrong if you use your brain.
You pulled that out of your ass. None of the studies say that. Read them. 1/3 is the baseline for loss. When winning starts to feel bad is a completely different discussion. Not that it is obviously wrong mind you. One would assume that constant success can get boring.
> It wasn't a popular decision.
And I am telling you,that means literally nothing.
>If the baseline success rate was 75%+ the players would still seek to stack bonuses, because why wouldn't you improve your odds when the game gives you the tools to do so?
Because the higher your chance of success is before you start doing it the less you need to do it. This is simple math.
>You pulled that out of your ass.
I did not. The same studies say that failure also feels worse when your success rate is above 2/3s. Fricking read them.
>And I am telling you,that means literally nothing.
And I'm telling you it does.
>it also feels bad when you succeed more than 2/3 the time
> that failure also feels worse when your success rate is above 2/3s.
Those are two different assertions. Which one is it?
They're not mutually exclusive.
>I'm telling you, 4E actually did build the game around what you think is a workable baseline
>the edition which took "strictly better" to 80% of its powers and took 3 (8 if you count setting and heavy support) books to get a single monster manual right
I seriously hope you meant 5e or 3e and accidentally pressed the wrong number twice because random "poison that uses wand save" of AD&D is still million times better than the horrible rape of logical and decent use of math that 4e did.
My dude, the vast majority of even possible encounters at 1 has AC between 8 and 13. While 14 or 15 are likely if its a solo fight, thats still a 4v1. There are maybe 50 monsters max including adventure npcs that dont have 14 or less AC at starting bracket (out of 500+ or 290 if you dont include adventure and hostile encounter option npcs) that you can have multiple as a non-boss encounter at starting levels (those being things with explicitly noted shield like generic gnoll and lizardfolk fighters, tiny shits like pixies and sprites or obviously armored like giant crab and kruthik)
Please shut the frick up if you don't know what you're talking about.
>Black person seething and coping over pointing out the shitstain of a edition was completely unplayable without severe DM math wrangling to the point of making a new game till mm3
Beware to not fire fart yourself to death while shitting with your charisma monk with stolen Tome of Battle power names.
It is ignored outright by every single edition of the game predating 4E, is the literal baseline in 5E in a game where it is a joke to raise it higher, and is only applied in 4E and 4E got shit on for it. You don't know what you're talking about.
>If you think this rule of thumb is ignored anywhere, especially where randomness is involved you are pretty ignorant.
The studies were fine. 4e and 5e were just tuned stupidly. They are tuned so that near optimized characters have just over a ~50% chances of success rather than a 65% to 70% chance of success.
>In general "failing" 1/3 of the time has been set by several studies as acceptable by most people that are not toddlers.
That's interesting. 13 out of 20 is the magic number for me, and that's as close as you can get to 2/3 on a d20. It's where things are modestly comfortable.
Avoid Savage World at all cost. Imagine hitting but doing "zero" damage because the game only book-keep relevant damage (=beating a Threshold, everything else is brushed off). Imagine shooting a monster and it does damage in world (the monster is shoot, it bleeds, etc.) but on paper the count is zero.
I know matt colvilles new rpg doesnt do misses. Dont know much more than that, though. Seems to get good feedback.
Its a worse 4e clone. but his audience eagerly gobbles up whatever he puts out.
13th Age sort of does this. When you miss, you do minimal damage because you're a fricking adventurer who knows how to wield a weapon with the intent to kill. It's not much damage (I think it's just your level), but it's something.
in my game this usually doesn't happen like that because since is a dicepool vs dicepool system, almost always both sides will have sucesses, so even if it ends up in a draw with nothing happening, it is naturally read as an active interchange of blows, parries and dodges.
Despite its reputation as a whiff-fest, WFRP 2e actually does make missing valuable if you waste an opponent's parry/dodge. Of course, if you're the "IT HAS TO BE MEEEEEEEEE" kind of player, that's no consolation.
A weird disconnect people have with that game is they want one-on-one manfights when they're still 'guy with a pitchfork who got tired of living on a farm.' Early game especially, the system encourages you to fight in a dirty and treacherous manner.
First guy in the comic is right though. It's fine to make up something on the spot if you don't remember some obscure rule, but then you read it up afterwards and use it from then on.
Games need significant modification, often.
I simply -cannot- imagine a player saying this to me after I try to run them through shadowrun. This type of player would be dust, mewling on the ground, unable to even understand what a stun track did.
>What are some games that
have a nice day spammer
You just make avoiding an attack have some additional consequence.
In Exalted 3e there's onslaught penalties — essentially your AC equivalent is reduced for every attack you avoid until the start of your next turn. That means even if you stack a shitload of defenses, a big enough barrage of attacks can grind you down until you start taking hits.
In Anima:BF attack/defense is an opposed check where the difference is used to calculate damage. Whiffing attacks has generally two effects: you open yourself up to an counterattack if in melee and the target takes a staking penalty to their defense rolls for the rest of the round. Like in Exalted, you are effectively reducing the target's AC even if you miss.
In Princess Wing, every attack hits by default, but most attacks also come with an Evade value. Instead of dice the game uses discarding cards from hand to activate your powers/gear, and to avoid an attack you have to discard a number of cards equal to their Evade. Means you're choosing between taking damage and throwing away the important resources you need to fight back.
Man, my luck has almost run out. I'd better get a CURE WOUNDS spell cast on me to get my luck back.
Anyway as far as missing constantly, I dunno, get better at fighting IC? The way d20 games do it is garbage because the d20 is swingy garbage. Dicepool systems are better, since you get to hit more reliably or you get partial successes or something.
>Anyway as far as missing constantly, I dunno, get better at fighting IC? The way d20 games do it is garbage because the d20 is swingy garbage. Dicepool systems are better, since you get to hit more reliably or you get partial successes or something.
This is bullshit. A 50% chance on a d20 is no more swingy than a 50% in a dicepool system. Often it turns out that in a dicepool system the standard pool ends up having an obfuscated chance of success greater than 75% which is why it feels better.
It's not obfuscated. If you know basic probability, you know this for a fact. Therefore my argument stands - either get better at fighting in a d20 system (get more modifiers to increase your percent chance) or switch to a system where it's baked in by default.
Guy, you just claimed that the "d20 is swingy garbage" and now you claim that you have basic knowledge of probability. Those two are mutually exclusive events.
The d20 IS swingy garbage and that's with my knowledge of probability. Swing-y just means it has a wide distribution.
It depends on the resolution of those dice, on whether you're looking for a single value or some number of successes. Idjit.
>Swing-y just means it has a wide distribution.
Why? we don't take account of each individual discrete result, it's a pass/fail test. We don't care how narrow or wide said results are.
This is only true if you're looking at a single test, rather than multiple tests at multiple different DCs. With D20 you have a fairly wide range of DCs that are likely to go either way, with say 4D6 and that same range of DCs that are actually handled by the system, a lot of them will either be "very likely success" or "very likely failure"
Another way of looking at it is that when say rolling to pick a lock the difficulty of lock you could manage to pick with a roll will vary wildly in D20 whereas with a dice pool system the difficulty of lock you'd manage to pick with a roll is much more constant.
>We don't care how narrow or wide said results are.
Even if we don't care specifically about degrees of success (although you might) there's a case for caring about the expected degrees of success - in a lot of systems you can adjust a task to be easier or harder (doing it faster or slower, in the dark, etc) and what adjustments are reasonable to make as a player depend on how much "buffer" you have in terms of expected degrees of success.
This is nonsense.
The range of target numbers are not affected by the dice range.
An approx 75% chance of success is the same in a d20, d100 and a 4d6, and that applies to any chance of success, at any number of attempts. All these are discrete results.
The only difference between a wide and a narrow distribution is the likelihood of "extreme" results and this inherently only affects the weight of the modifiers. In a wide distribution the weight of a single modifier is constant, in d20 a +1 is always +5%, while in a narrow one the weight is initially larger and as it accumulates it decreases. That is it. Everything else is system depended and has nothing to do with the dice.
>The range of target numbers are not affected by the dice range.
Of course they are, unless you're not actually using a system to assign them. The 75% chance of success doesn't exist in a vacuum, you're getting at the number that results in 75% somehow.
In D20 slightly changing how you get to that number results in 70% or 80%, but in 4D6 taking a step from 76% you get 66% or 84%.
+1 from having the right tools or -3 from doing it in the dark or whatever mean very different things when your CDF function isn't the same and you're not stuck with bounded accuracy.
>in d20 a +1 is always +5%
This is misleading. It's true, but also adding and subtracting probabilities is also nonsense.
5% -> 10% means you're hitting twice as often, 50->55% means basically nothing in terms of EV or anything else.
You've got a fair amount wrong here and you are very much misunderstanding what dice pool systems are.
With d20+Y vs DC, each 1 point shift in Y or the DC changes the chance of success/failure by a fixed 5%. d20+3 vs DC 13 is always a 50% chance.
With 3d6+Y vs DC each 1 point shift in Y or the DC changes the chance of success/failure between 1.08% and 12.5% based on the difference between Y and the DC. If you start at DC-Y=11 an increase in Y or a decrease in the DC changes the success/failure change by 12.5 but on the other hand if you decrease Y or increase the DC success/failure changes by 11.57%. 3d6+3 vs DC 13 is always a 50% chance of success.
Both of these are single roll systems just with different distributions based on the die rolled and not "Dicepool" systems.
Dicepool systems are systems where the number (and possibly size) of the dice rolled fluctuate. An example of a dicepool system would be "roll X d6s, the number of dice with results of 5+ = number of successes." Each additional die in such a system increases the chance of getting a success and also the number of successes.
>+1 from having the right tools or -3 from doing it in the dark or whatever mean very different things when your CDF function isn't the same and you're not stuck with bounded accuracy.
You really don't know what the terms you are using mean. "Bounded Accuracy" is a term that refers to limiting the range of values Target Numbers and Bonuses/Maluses can have it has nothing to do with chances of success/failure on a roll.
>50->55% means basically nothing in terms of EV or anything else.
Wong. It means your chance of success is increasing by 10%. You really do not comprehend statistics at all.
I'm using 4d6 because the math is easier to compare with d20, the concept behind a bell curve of expected results is going to translate. Dicepool systems to often care more about degree of success though.
>Wong. It means your chance of success is increasing by 10%. You really do not comprehend statistics at all.
Yes, and this is basically meaningless compared to that +1 on either other end of the curve where it'll increase your chance of success (or decrease your chance of failure) drastically.
The difference between having to roll a 10 vs an 11 is not something a player is actually going to feel
>I'm using 4d6 because the math is easier to compare with d20, the concept behind a bell curve of expected results is going to translate.
No it doesn't. 3d6 (3 to 18) is just as easy (if not far easier) to compare to d20 as 4d6 (4 to 24) and the data is far more widely available online. This site (https://www.thedarkfortress.co.uk/tech_reports/3_dice_rolls.php) for example has the 3d6 distribution with the associated probabilities for each result.
You really do not know what you are trying to talk about.
anydice will give you the distributions for anything you care about.
3d6 is more common (and I think a better thing to use) but a common complaint people have is that since 3d6 only has 15 different results modifiers are necessarily more meaningful. in 4d6 that is not the case.
Repeatedly telling me that I have no idea what I'm talking about while not being aware about how to either get or calculate the probability distributions of 4d6 isn't exactly a solid argument.
I fricking hate you
>Swing-y just means it has a wide distribution.
No swingy means extreme outlier results can show up at random. Great Axe damage in 3.X D&D was swingy as while 1d12+1.5 Str was the norm there was a chance of getting 3d12+4.5 Str damage at random. "Explosive" dice (getting a max result on a die lets you reroll the die and add the new roll to the original result) are also swingy.
A D100 has a wide but regular distribution so it is not swingy unless you give much greater meaning to the top and/or bottom results.
It is obfuscated because "rolling X number of successes (which is rolling Z or higher) in a pool of Y dice" is much more complicated to figure out than the probability of XdY+Z vs TN.
I'm actually betting you think 2d6, 3d6 and 2d20 are dice pool systems rather than the single roll systems they actually are.
I think it is partially tied to playerbase demographics shifts over the years. Fuzzy probability in things such as videogames has messed up peoples actual understanding of probability.
You should put on a bandage to restore your will to live.
Well, creativity is also an indication of ones understanding of what they deal with and judging from the posts in this thread where people can't even imagine the idea of 120 classes without the use of AI, it seems peoples creativity is gone, everything must be perfectly spelled out for them to comprehend it.
Ok, please go ahead and write your AI game if it's going to be better.
Is there context to this?
Because out-of-context it's easy to see it as meaning
>rolling to hit and having a chance to miss, as a mechanic, is shitty because I want to be always getting my way! >:(
, but as far as we know it might be part of a broader discussion and mean something else entirely.
For example, I can imagine a discussion about, say, a combat focused character class that doesn't get extra attacks. In the context of such discussion, the person may had been complaining because having just one attack as your only means of affecting combat every turn is very volatile and can feel bad. So in this hypotetical scenario, they wouldn't be complaining about the mechanic of missing attacks, but about the design of a combat class that doesn't get extra attacks and doesn't get other means of affecting combat or mitigating RNG.
Rifts. You get multiple actions per turn and if your opponent has too high a dodge/parry for you to hit normally, you can trade blows for an automatic hit (but it costs your next action). Also certain attacks (grabs, trips) bypass parry and others (AoEs, projectiles) bypass dodge.
I've found this downside can be mitigated by faster combat. Stars Without Number has been kind to me in that regard.
>wahhh missing is bad
Are you fricking kidding? One of the biggest issues with D&D (besides muh caster supremacy that only söyboys give a frick about) is hitting too often. Look at any movie fight, swordfight where they are fencing for like 3 minutes before one kills the other or disarms him. Not this shit "I slash him for 258 damage, but ....but....uhhh...actually I didn't really hurt him at all because hit points are an ABSTRACTION and he's just getting TIRED and I just used up some of his LUCK and shit" stupidest fricking shit ever. But no one cares about a tense battle, they just want to slog through hit points like le HECKIN epic Raid Shadow Legends and see the green bar get shorter cause that activates monkey brain dopamine circuits. That's all modern D&D is, a dopamine-saturated skinner box with fantasy dressing. Most of the modern nu males playing DnD don't even want to play a fantasy game, they fill up their character with so much modern-day shit like bards with electric guitars and clerics lugging around a fricking Keurig cause the b***h made DM let him ~~*(reflavor*~~) his healing spells as magic coffee.
No, when these homosexuals changed 5e to be beta b***h shit where everything has a 13 AC with the goal of you hitting 85 percent of the time, because that was what the marketing department found sold the most books, we knew D&D was lost forever. If you agree with this shit, you should be shot and killed. Go play Dark Scrolls or WoW and frick off from this game.
If you want tense and narratively impactful movie swordfights, why the frick would you play a system designed around constant attrition and chained combats with trash? To make DnD work like that would require throwing out the concept of static AC, and using a health tracking model more sophisticated than a simple HP pool, at which point you are playing something so far removed from any edition of DnD that you should just...well, go play something other than DnD.
I swear, half of the people b***hing about modern DnD haven't played any version of DnD released in the last 20 years (if ever). And I say this as someone who finds 5e to be the stale white bread of tabletop gaming.
AD&D had minute long rounds to account for stuff like the fact you shouldn't be slicing into your opponent every ten to twenty seconds. But that creates its own problems and distances you from the action, because then a whole bunch of other stuff is happening that you aren't mentioning. I prefer to do the blow-by-blow because it draws you in, and missing ten times in a row would not only be frustrating as hell but also needlessly time-consuming. Still, if you think about how quickly combat ends doing this, it is pretty ridiculous. But as long as you don't focus on that, it's not an issue. In retrospect, I rationalize that there are "phantom rounds" that just don't get talked about, times where more missing an maneuvering occurs. This is similar to AD&D's approach, but keeps each individual round you play "pure", and doesn't forcibly elongate time on a consistent basis, so there's nothing in particular to object to. You don't have to deal with "Why did it take me a minute to do something really simple?" It's just that, somewhere in there, there was probably some back-and-forth, but there's no need to nail down exactly when it was.
As far as D&D's hit point inflation goes, I agree it gets pretty silly at higher levels, and it's a good argument for something closer to RuneQuest, where you get better at parrying and dodging rather than effectively becoming ten times more capable of soaking damage. Of course, hit points are explained away as not merely being meat points, but taking into account fatigue and such, but I think that level of abstraction sucks too.
Stop playing dumb systems that make every fight some moronic minigame with an illusion of tactics. What I do is add all modifiers (+1 for ambush, +1 for higher ground, +1 for body armor your guns weapons would have trouble piercing etc) together and roll a D6 for both sides. Whichever side gets higher wins the fight and you can continue the actual game instead of the autism enabler minigame.
Now I ain't exactly saying that AC is an objectively inferior system than damage reduction via armor and toughness, but I ain't exactly NOT saying that.
Exactly why OG (well actually as far back as the LOTR tie in to chainmail) to 3e had heavy armor with DR rules options. Even if the strike isnt deflected or slides off, the armor and padding takes a good chunk of the energy that would be going to the wearer.
>player misses a ranged attack:
>as you line up your shot and release, the hobgoblin twists his head to face (Fighter), and your arrow rings off his gorget with a clang
>your arrow embeds itself in a nearby tree, startling a small lizard out of it's hiding spot
>the berserker makes eye contact as you release your sling, bringing his shield up just in the nick of time
>you hear a distant echo in the darkness as your arrow strikes the flagstones
>the bandit quickly darts his hand up, deflecting the arrow away in mid-flight, he looks just as surprised as you do
>player misses a melee attack:
>as you bring your battleaxe around, the elf suddenly moves with the blow, absorbing the impact with his thick leather armour
>you hesitate as you bring your longsword up, giving the hobgoblin a chance to duck beneath your blow and shoulder-check you, interrupting your swing
>as you clash with the shield-wall, a gauntlet reaches out and grabs your swordarm, stopping your blade mid-swing
>your spear stabs into the boar's head, but not hard enough to pierce its thick skull as it swings your haft to the side with a screech
>your morningstar tangles with the knights shield as he brings up his defenses just in the nick of time
Imagination issue. If you mumble "You miss..." and look sheepish every time an attack doesn't land of course your players are going to bored.
>you wasted your entire turn doing it
>might as well not even have been
D&D handles both of these things pretty easily though, you get easy access to bonus action attacks from the get go via dual wielding/martial arts, and if you want to make sure you're making a difference even with shit luck just use saving throw spells that still do half damage to most things on a resist.
Reduce enemy AC / armor on every attack, even a miss, so that any attack does something, and you can beat even a tough enemy if you gang up on him.
Justify as armor ablation in modern / sci fi settings, justify as fatigue in fantasy games.
There, done.
>play game of dice
>be upset when the dice don't fall in your favor
Complaints and attempts at solutions are always from the player perspective and completely miss the fact that the GM always has to work with this.
In this case, "Missing should also do something" means that the NPCs missing will frick players hard and fast, because an NPC usually only has to go through one fight, while a PC has to go through multiple fights. Getting off scot-free is there to benefit the players.
>what is asymmetrical design?
Something that doesn't exist in most games and often leads to relentless b***hing by players.
Name three that aren’t gurps or superhero games
The problem is not missing per se but the function of amount of shit happening in a turn and game speed. If your game is somewhat fast but the only thing you do on your turn is moving and attacking with no other worthwhile mechanic, it will feel awful. A slower game where you get to do more shit other than simply attacking (even if they are all related to the attack) feels much more involving. This is one of my biggest gripes with 5e. It just feels so awfully slow, where a 3.5 turn easily takes 2 to 3 times longer but feels very fast because of all of the cards you have up your sleeve at all times.
You could use a system with several degrees of success like others have mentioned, but I think using a single binary roll alongside a wide plethora of player options ends up being more fun.
Bravo hiromoot a topical ad
Oh boy, he actually did it, the shill bought an ad!
Unironically 4e.
Given the number of off-turn, move, and minor actions you have access to, this happens a lot less. Add to that that basically all classes' dailies still have some reduced effect on miss, and a good number of encounters do too, and you'll rarely have a "do nothing" turn outside very low level play.
It looks like diceless (and randomizerless), grid-based tactical RPGs are starting to take off on itch.io.
https://meatcastlegameware.itch.io/tacticians-of-ahm
https://gilarpgs.itch.io/hunt
https://gilarpgs.myshopify.com/products/pox
Do you think that removing random chance from grid-based tactical RPGs makes each decision in combat more meaningful?
No, but it makes the choices more considered from the designer’s perspective. Hopefully this means we’re moving away from monopoly and into a golden age where randomness is the spice rather than the entire meal.
FFG starwars/genesys
You can miss attacks, but it's designed that you'll pretty much always have something happen on any dice roll.
In Genesys, you almost never *just* fail a skill check. You're liable to generate net Advantage or Threat that you or the GM can use to color the scene, introduce new opportunities or complications.
Ventangle is nice in that each attack is a "clash" instead of IGOUGO shenanigans. You roll against their roll and whoever has the higher value does damage, with ties resulting in a stalemate. Add to this all sorts of fun little metacurrencies and passive buffs/debuffs that either add to your rolls, allow rerolls, or nullify damage and you get a system that's fast-paced but still has a decent bit of strategy to it. It's still a very lightweight system, but it makes combat tense and swingy.
>(I am trying not playing D&D)
Good on you, my man! I'd rec. some games for you in another thread.
>What are some games that are not like this?
>pic
OK, here's the problem:
It's not missing the attack that feels shitty. It's the waiting. You have to wait your turn until you can try again. In that time, the entire world gets a turn to choose to do things. This is, and I mean this without any shittery or memery, a DnD problem almost exclusively.
Hear me out for a sec.
AC is a number the attack must beat to hit. You don't roll to dodge or block, you don't get to choose. It just happens.
Saves are actively rolled for. Cool. Unfortunately, they're not as common as a defense as AC is. You also don't choose which save, which makes sense, but you're still not choosing anything.
Turns take a long time each in DnD. There's math to crunch, multiple dice rolls packed behind a single attack if it hits, and spells with detailed effects on the environment and characters around. DnD is designed like this, and it happens to slow the game down.
Everything that happens to your character after that miss is almost entirely out of your hands. There are no choices to make when it's not your turn, and everyone's turn takes forever.
In a game with faster turns, missing is just bad luck. In a lethal game, hitting once can sometimes bring combat to a close then and there, and due to that fact, missing an attack feels more tense, because at some point the dice are gonna change their mind and it'll be messy when it does.
Oh, and games where you roll to dodge/block/parry give choices when it's not your turn, so maybe one of those could help.
Ever since my first time DMing 3.5 back in high school, I've houseruled two things. First, hitting touch AC but not full AC means the strike hits their armour or shield, doing durability damage. Second, hitting flatfooted AC but not full AC means the enemy dodges, which forces them into a five-foot step that doesn't trigger an attack of opportunity, meaning even if the player misses, they can still affect the enemies' positioning. It means more work on my end but it's more enjoyable once I get into the rhythm.
Shadowrun and vampire the masquerade aren't like this.
Any game where each stat and skill you get means an extra whole dice, and another chance to get a hit, essentially means if you are good at something, you will near always succeed, unless you are facing someone as good or better than you at that thing.
And unless you're playing some kind of weird ass game, most people won't be as good at you at the thing you're good at. You can easily cleave through corporate goons if you choose, and continue doing so until HTR arrives.
There is a whole family of games built around this idea, and most of them have free editions. Pick your flavor:
>Original industrial era game in hardcover
https://freeleaguepublishing.com/games/into-the-odd/
>Electric era gonzo citycrawl
https://chrismcdee.itch.io/electric-bastionland-free-edition
>OSR compatible low fantasy
https://cairnrpg.com/
>Knightly hexcrawl based on arthurian legend
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bastionland/mythic-bastionland-rpg-before-into-the-odd/description
>Redwall inspired mouse adventures
https://losing-games.itch.io/mausritter
>Swords and sorcery
https://classless-kobolds.itch.io/weird-north
>Whimsical high fantasy
https://awkwardturtle.itch.io/brighter-worlds
>Mothership adaptation
https://awkwardturtle.itch.io/meteor
>Hard-ish sci-fi
https://adamhensley.itch.io/monolith
Is nu-sr any good? I haven't had the chance to play them
I think they're great, but I hate math and waiting for turns, so I'm obviously biased. The big advantage of ITO games is they immediately put dying in combat on the table, but in practice most fights work out to near disasters with one or two players left standing, driving off enemies or dragging their friends to safety. It's fast and strategic as hell.
>Turn 1, can you take these guys? Open fire from hiding, flood the room, or gang up on one of them?
>Turn 2, everybody's bleeding and you discovered the short ones can breathe fire. Can you down them first or should you run?
>Turn 3, you're either running for your life or you just beat the last one to a pulp. You get your little HP buffer back, but some of the party have slashed strength scores and are warier of future engagements.
I don't know what else out there qualifies as NuSR or NSR or w/e... I imagine some of the leaner color hacks (White hack, pink hack, etc.) count, Mork-Borg clones, Mothership and so on. For a light dungeon crawler that still has rolls to hit or miss, I like Maze Rats (I like it more than Ben's bigger game Knave tbh).
Does missing feel bad because you are a homosexual?
Do you believe that the d20 is swingy and its the reason combat the game sucks?
Do you believe that a "bell curve" distribution, aka 3d6 is better for your needs because the results are more predictable?
Stop being a gigantic gaping vegana and replace your d20 with a deck of 20 cards numbered from 1 to 20.
Perfect "flat" distribution.
You don't need to replace any rules or fiddle with modifiers. It just werks!
The distribution naturally decreases every time you pick a card.
Can't roll the same number twice? That's a feature not a bug!
Guaranteed 1 critical per cycle.
if you believe 3d6 is better then why would you not just use 3d6?
card counting as a game mechanic is cute, though I'd probably use a more traditional deck than cards you have to number 1-20
> why would you not just use 3d6?
Because I am not a gigantic gaping vegana.
Read Mark, read!
MCDM is making a crappy game with a crappy title with autohits
Unironically GUMSHOE
Prowlers and Paragons. While failing to do deal any damage with an attack or inflict any duration with a special effect is of course possible by the rules, a competent GM will give enemies low defenses and increase enemy numbers, intelligence, health, or other qualities to compensate.
4 degrees of success/failure is already more than DnD's number go down or number not go down
>GeneSys
It's already been said but I want to explain more
GeneSys uses special dice that have different symbols on them, you roll dice for your character's skills, the opponents skills/difficulty of what you're doing, and finally modifiers that you or the opponent can throw in.
The symbols on the dice represent success, failure, advantage and "threat".
In the example of an attack, rolling more success than failure means the attack lands. Advantage and Threat however is a resource that you or the GM can spend to change up the situation, like forcing enemies to move around, move around for free, giving allies extra dice, damaging equipment. It's basically impossible for a turn to be completely wasted. Even in the unlikelihood you roll nothing but failure and threat, the opponent gets to react in ways that keep turn dynamic and not just "Literally nothing happens" like a miss in D&D.
>GeneSys
Why hasn't anyone mentioned Realms of Terrinoth?
Unironicaly Genesys rpg.
>Yes it has meme dice
>Yes, it requires a gm who actually buys into the fricking mayhem said meme dice can inflict on anything within range of the roll
>Yes, interpreting said meme dice can take forever if the players are minmaxing
However, you can miss completely and spend luck generated from the roll to do all kinds of crazy shit to the battlefield to aid your friends and/or inconvenience your enemies. You are almost always at least somewhat useful even if you don't reduce enemy meat points.
However, the opposite is also true. You might make a fantastic attack that instagibs 3 enemies bit in the process twist your ankle, accidentally pull down a party members pants and knock them over.
That isn’t even an issue unless your limpdick DM lets the tryhard caster b***hes spend 30 minutes picking their action for a six second combat round. Make your choice now or lose your fricking turn to indecision.
skyrim
Bumping this thread
It's past the bump limit, moron.
Yeah. That's the joke.