Fighters in any other D&D-like game are fricking horrible in comparison without it. Fighters in DCC actually play like Fantasy Warriors and not "Hirelings with bigger numbers"
>Mighty Deeds of Arms from Dungeon Crawl Classics
Can you give a cursory overview of the concept? Sounds interesting.
I can't hack it into every system because it would need a complete overhaul.
But Call of Cthulhu's roll under percentile with three levels of success is by far the best mechanic I've played with. Yeah it's simple, but holy shit is it effective.
Either I didn't understand the system when we played it or it's the worst mechanic ever. I could be the best Goddamn sharpshooter (or whatever) in the world -- nay, the best POSSIBLE -- and the moment a task gets "difficult" my success rate is capped at 50%. Absurd.
The same exact result could be achieved by flipping a coin for success/failure and rolling a d10 to see if it is critical.
>Can you give a cursory overview of the concept? Sounds interesting.
The Warrior class can choose between a number of status effects they can inflict on any given attack without giving anything up or using any resource, along with having carte blanche to leap off of banisters and kick people in the face, swing from chandeliers, and stab cylopses in the eye
What I dislike about mechanics like that is that they implicitly mean other character classes than warriors (and dwarfs) can't do these things. And the mechanic underneath (forfeit damage to cause an additional effect) isn't anything special. Other systems either detail exactly the mechanics to e.g. disarm or trip and opponent or leave it mostly to the GM to adjudicate. DCC sits in a weird middle ground.
And is there even any cost to declaring a mighty deed, or are you biting yourself if you don't attempt a mighty deed with every single attack? The text reads like you might not get to add your deed die to damage, but the example adds it.
Its because the warrior always adds his deed die to attacks+damage no matter what he does. But you might not always have an amazing deed to do or an idea in your head.
There's no cost to doing it so it's ultimately a flawed idea. Battlemaster in 5e executes this concept much better but grogs aren't allowed to like anything from 5e so
>stiffles creativity
Not necessarily. They cover just about everything, and make a few things that others can also do better. The rules are, and everyone forgets this, if you hit, you can choose to disarm, knock back, or knock prone, but deal no damage. Battle Master allows you to do damage and one of those. It allows you to forgo an attack to allow someone else to attack or move. It allows you to open them up for another attack, giving the next attack advantage. It allows you to goad so they have disadvantage on attacks other than against you. You can parry and reduce damage.
There's 16 Maneuvers. You get to 3 at level 3, and 9 by 15. That part does suck. I'd allow them to learn all 16. But how you describe them is up to you. Maybe you do swing from the chandelier.
Another rule that people forget is that advantage isn't limited to abilities. The DM can give it to you. Again, high ground or a successful check to swing from a chandelier.
5e is well built. The issue isn't the system itself, the issue are the players. Most never read the rules and learned from podcast, and the rest learned it from their friend... Who learned from podcasts. 5e is also built for FAR longer sessions. The book says 6 to 8 combat encounters per day, and Mike Mearls, the guy who designed 5e, said 8 to 10. It was built for the 3.x and AD&D fan and it is the best of older editions with some nre stuff. And if you play it as intended CR isn't broken, casters are weaker than martial in combat even at higher levels, especially if they want to keep their utility powers, and Warlock and Monk become the strongest. But good luck finding anyone who plays that way. Most 5ebrains play it as a story game with a long rest after every session.
I posted over half a year ago about how I handle it. Takes 5-7 2-3 hour sessions with short rests between most to do a day's worth. Includes traps, 1-2 puzzles, and a session of pure RP. My group loves it. But again, good luck finding a group like that.
>There's no cost to doing it so it's ultimately a flawed idea.
The fact that it costs nothing is why it works. It encourages doing different and intersting stuff and makes the decision point "Which of those options do I want to use" instead of "Do I want to deal damage or have options"
7 months ago
Anonymous
I never said anything about it being free making it bad. I juat explained how Battle Master works.
>The rules are, and everyone forgets this, if you hit, you can choose to disarm, knock back, or knock prone, but deal no damage
Not quite. The attack is replaced by a contested check to achieve the above.
Battle master instead can add a check to avoid the above onto a successful hit (as well as increasing the damage of the hit). The target is less likely to pass the check as it's against a set DC (instead of being a contested check), so it's significantly more effective.
Yea. It's an attack roll against their Athletics or Acrobatics. But it's still an attack roll. I should have been more clear.
Deeds are a neat idea but have the same flaw as Dirty Tricks in Pathfinder, "infinite possibilities" isn't actually infinite and eventually you're going to default to something that is effective in-universe to the point you have no reason to try something else. If you can blind somebody with pocket sand as a dirty trick or deed, and blinding them doesn't give a save, you just do that against most enemies. Conversely, deeds/dirty tricks that require rolling well AND the enemy still gets a save are just trash and not worth using compared to a similar effect that just works. If pocket sand requires you roll well on your deed AND the enemy gets a reflex save, you'll never dale gribble again and will just stick to tripping people or disarming them or whatever.
It's a decent idea but would really benefit from a bit more structure, "roll your 1d6 and something cool happens, maybe!" is running into the same issues fricking 5e has where people say "lol just improvise an action, the DM will come up with something cool!" which doesn't help you as a player much in terms of agency
as someone who has played a DCC character longer than most (from 0 to 7), mighty deeds have a couple issues. first off, martials are still a joke compared to spellcasters, especially in DCC.
second, it's heavily reliant on the dm to not only describe a battlefield with enough detail to take advantage of, but also every single mighty deed is a "dm may i" situation, which gets tedious in actual play. the other poster talking about how you end up in a routine of doing the same few "good" deeds was 100% on the money
it's a nice concept in theory, but having to arbitrate with your dm not only if you can do a thing, but also make up the effects of said thing every turn gets is not fun
>and the moment a task gets "difficult" my success rate is capped at 50%. Absurd
It doesn't matter how good your skill is, there's always something that can make it difficult.
>Either I didn't understand the system when we played it or it's the worst mechanic ever. I could be the best Goddamn sharpshooter (or whatever) in the world -- nay, the best POSSIBLE -- and the moment a task gets "difficult" my success rate is capped at 50%. Absurd.
Part of that are the changes to CoC 7e, which apparently seeped into the new BRP as well. Basically, they want you to use the push and bonus/penalty dice mechanics. With the side effect that skill percentages no longer represent your actual chance of success. Failing a non-pushed roll means nothing happens, failing a pushed roll has negative consequences, while failing a pushed roll while insane means you lose your character.
Older editions also had different levels of required successes, but the math was just roll-under, with situational bonuses/penalties to your effective skill %.
>Failing a non-pushed roll means nothing happens
Not true actually, it just means something bad isn't guaranteed to happen, whereas failing a pushed roll 100% guarantees it.
If the situation is such that the original failure would logically lead to bad consequences, then the consequences should happen regardless. In that scenario, a pushed roll might simply make things worse, or add a completely new problem. >while failing a pushed roll while insane means you lose your character
I don't think that's a thing.
>Not true actually, it just means something bad isn't guaranteed to happen, whereas failing a pushed roll 100% guarantees it.
An ordinary failure should mean nothing bad happens, at least nothing that inflicts damage or sanity loss. Unless your failure is also a fumble, which I omitted for brevity. >I don't think that's a thing.
Every non-combat skill describes consequences for failing pushed rolls. The sample ones for being insane usually cause an investigator to be uncontrollable and often set them up for destroying either themselves or what/whoever they're interacting with. You keep digging a deeper and deeper hole you can't get out of yourself. You keep swimming and refuse to come out of the water, until you drown. You literally become lost among a foreign culture.
Depending on what makes the shot "difficult", yeah a 50% sounds about right
Even the worst best marksmen isn't going to be super accurate when under fire, at long range, with a moving target
I'm still using CoC 2nd edition with minimal homebrew rules and it works great for us.
20% of your skill score is an exceptional result. Easy tasks are %X2. Harder are %/2. 96-00 is a fumble. Oh, and the 20% is of the modified skill score, not the raw number, so an easy task will have more chances of having an exceptional success.
Good shit. ACKS Heroic Fantasy book has a similar thing if you want something more B/X-adjacent. I think second edition is going to include it in the core rules.
Strong Hits from Fragged Empires. On a 6 you get a critical effect based on gear / abilities. Might melt armor on heat ray, might give you free ammo on biogun.
> An homebrew kingdom-building game based off Pathfinder's 1st edition Ultimate Campaign.
So-so. Don't combine with a margin-of-success / failure mechanic, it gets out of hand quick.
> SW Saga
Worked way better... once you rebalance the whole game around 3d6 instead of d20. Meaning you're not playing SW Saga anymore. Things like +5 on a skill focus feat just don't work around 3d6.
I wish the rest of Fragged Empires, mainly equipment, auto-fire and how you do improve, were better. Good core ideas under piles of shit.
I can't hack it into every system because it would need a complete overhaul.
But Call of Cthulhu's roll under percentile with three levels of success is by far the best mechanic I've played with. Yeah it's simple, but holy shit is it effective.
Have yet to find a system where adding CoC's luck mechanic hurt the system (except for systems that already have something similar of course).
How it works:
upon character creation, players roll an additional value called luck. The average outcome should be around 50% of the die used to resolve checks (10 for a d20, 50 for d100, 5 for d10 etc.)
For something like naturally lucky D&D halflings you could give a bonus to this luck value even
Whenever a player asks something that is strictly not up to their character's ability and you as a DM would just is a sheer matter of luck, you use this luck value.
For example The player finds a lantern and asks if there's still any oil left in it or if a bookstore has a certain volume on sale.
BUT luck can also be spent as a finite resource to add to rolls. If there is a check or attack roll that has to succeed the players can permanently expemd their luck points to succeed but this of course lowers their luck overall.
As a DM I find it super handy to let my players roll themselves for certain things. It makes it so that instead of being at the Mercy of the DMs arbitrary decision, the players have their fate in their own hands.
Except that they can spend it, reducing the luck over time. Also just because the median is 50% doesn't mean some people don't roll higher or lower than that, creating lucky and unlucky characters.
NTA btw but I've used that mechanic before
>BUT luck can also be spent as a finite resource to add to rolls. If there is a check or attack roll that has to succeed the players can permanently expemd their luck points to succeed but this of course lowers their luck overall.
The system I play in has fate points for that. Each PC starts with 3, and can use them to reroll dice. Spent fate points can be gained back as rewards for good roleplaying (like staying in character even if it comes at a detriment for the PC), creative ideas, gaining favour by acting in accordance with a god's decrees, etc.
That being said, rolling a random luck stat seems a bit too much. I get the point but I feel like if one PC just happens to be luckier than the others the party will end up using him as an errant boy to check the next room etc. For me, these "luck" checks are baked into the skill checks: you check the room and if you roll well you find a lamp with enough oil for a few hours; you roll just good enough and you find a lamp with just a bit of oil left; you roll badly and you only find an empty lamp or no lamp at all.
I guess that works because the system I am playing (The Dark Eye) is really autistic with its high variations of skill checks, and the skill checks always have a degree of success (rather than being a binary success/failure).
"Hey Jeff can you ask the GM if there's any oil left in the lantern? I already used some luck points and don't want to frick us over with less than a 50/50."
Speaking as a CoC GM, if I heard one of my players utter those words I would
A) make them roll the worse of the two pools
B) frick up the party's whole day like Dad just got home drunk after being laid off.
The player who found the lantern makes the roll. You know you can communicate with the players, right? You can even tell them to frick off if you feel like it.
If the characters are together then it's likely all of them find it. Besides you wouldn't have formulated the roll until someone asks if the lantern had oil left, as you didn't think of that (In this example). This isn't an issue of communication, just illustrating how the mechanic could end up playing out.
Speaking as a CoC GM, if I heard one of my players utter those words I would
A) make them roll the worse of the two pools
B) frick up the party's whole day like Dad just got home drunk after being laid off.
I was gonna say he'd just whisper that to Jeff in the previous post. If they can spend luck as a metagame element there's no reason to prevent them from considering it in other circumstances.
Conspiring to use the mechanics dishonestly is a capital offence at my table. It's your idea, you spend the fricking luck. I don't give a shit about how meta it is, the attitude is where the problem lies.
This same shit is why I don't play D&D. The idea of planning your build is just cheating with extra steps.
>Conspiring to use the mechanics dishonestly is a capital offence at my table
Sounds like you have shitty mechanics that encourage players to subvert them, and are extremely sensitive about this.
Kind of like how bad rulers are the ones that need the most oppressive police forces.
I don't try to hack a specific mechanic to EVERY system, but there are some mechanics that i like to import to different games:
>Chaosium Stormbringer
I plug in here the Delta Green "doubles mean extraordinary success/failure" and the blackjack resolution for opposed rolls (instead of the convoluted BRP matrix). Stormbringer is already an half baked attempt by Ken St. Andre to crossover some T&T assumptions into proto-BRP so i can literally hack and jury rig the system without issues.
>Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e
I backport some mechanics from 2e such as allowing some untrained skill rolls with a malus (in 2e is -20, in 1e i prefer -30) and the tables for magic misfire. I also use the CoC mechanic for pushing rolls limited per session by the amount of fate points the character has.
I don't feel the need to alter much of other games i run, but when i do is straight homebrewd houserules, so nothing taken from other games.
That's awful. Compounding on the swinginess of the d20 without any of the mechanics to compensate while also making said swinginess not matter for the sake of arbitration by a DM.
Is this what YouTube people think ttrpgs are?
Yes, I've had this mechanic recommended to me by people who enjoy watching D&D as much as they do playing it. I don't see how it could cause anything other than frustration for players.
It doesn't really impact "swinginess". The only thing it really does is make 1's and 20's more common. Otherwise, mechanically, it's really just a waste of time. "Swinginess" is better determined by the TN. A 50/50 split with a d20 with a TN of 11 is about as swingy as things can get.
What are you on about? It turns the flat line of distribution into an inverse bell curve, where it's either really powerful or really weak, which is inherently more swingy
I don't think we have the same definition: > Granular margins of success / failure on a d100 roll.
Binary usually don't take into account critical miss, or critical success, and put a bit of granularity on those and it'll make you wish for a x5 crit modifier instead.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Binary 50/50 is so extreme, that it's primarily mitigated by the outcome of either result being minimized.
>Is this what YouTube people think ttrpgs are?
What do you think? The hobby is infested with losers who share NAT FRICKING TWENTY memes on reddit or wherever. That's who games are geared towards now. BG3 especially is guilty of this and even has critical successes on skill checks.
Every single mechanic mentioned in this thread is fricking awful and makes a game worse if ported over.
I give a pass, but it's more of a practice than a mechanic in itself. And XP isn't isn't exactly a good mechanic either.
Considering "every system I play" is one that I make, my universal mechanics fit into them better than they would shoehorned into something else.
I may be stretching the limits of your question, but the combination of my attributes, abilities (both power and skills), and power modifier mechanics are intertwined, and therefore one may not exist in its true form without the others.
All I'll say is it involves a lot of maths, and a number of people here have already expressed distaste for how I do things.
But hey, it's a good thing they'll never have to play it.
If the combat system is somewhat defined and concrete, and turn order matters, then I will give my players a limited resource to trade into extra rounds. I no longer know if I got it from wfrp 2e or d&d 4e originally.
It's not really something that can be incorporated into other games, but I really like the "roll over for X, roll under for Y" thing that some small games use.
Newest one for me is the way Complications work in Mini Six. Some games give character build points for flaws. Mini Six does not, but every session your Complication meaningfully impacts you, you get XP. Gone are the minmax builds, in a single stroke.
I like AngryGM's random encounter system. Anytime my players spend time (or even if they just mess around too long), I put a die in a bowl. Anytime they do something dangerous, the dice get rolled and there's a chance an encounter pops into the situation. Once there are six dice in the bowl, I roll for an encounter no matter what and empty the bowl.
The way that players metagame in response to the bowl of dice speeds up games, and also causes them to push their resources harder to reset the bowl on purpose so they can coordinate a safer situation when needed.
I use a similar concept called "time dice", can't remember where I got it from.
Whenever the party spends a long time at a place discussing anything, they roll the time dice, which is a d6 to d12 depending on the number of players, usually a d8.
Write down 1s and 8s, they nullify each other, ignore other results. >Majority of 1s
Something bad happens, usually a random encounter, trap or worse. >Majority of 8s
Either nothing or something that might point them towards the right way to go or give a lil bit of info that might help them reach a conclusion for the discussion >Neither
Nothing happens, or something is approaching but not here yet.
If nothing or something good happens, next time you also roll an extra dice of which only 1s are counted, and more and more dices are added.
The idea is to allow players to take their time but also don't make it too long, with some consequences. Just punishment or random encoutners makes players play recklessly or worry too much. With this I've seen that most of the time, the result is nothing, which doesn't mean random encoutner but still hurries the players. And if it rolls 1s or 8s, I use that to get the discussion unstuck in some way.
It says right there in the doc, they aren’t using binary success. Which is ironic, because the mechanic’s only usefulness is cutting out the middle entries to reduce a difficult check (where ~75% of the results fail) to what’s essentially a 50/50... which you would only want to do if you know you have to roll high, meaning the player has to have some fricking idea of what the target number is.
And don’t even get me started on what these frickers are doing with AC. No love for dumb&dumber as a system, but I really feel for the people who want to play a game and get landed with these charlatans.
Main reason it's so convuluted is that it's forcing a mechanic to try and take a more complicated (in this case, gradient) system and make it even more complicated in order to make it more like a simpler (binary) system. The easy thing would be to just do what D&D already does, where some rolls are gradient and some rolls are binary, as appropriate, but the disadvantage there is you don't get as many chances for everyone to emote wildly when a 1 or 20 is rolled.
You'd think one in ten chances is high enough, but I guess attention spans are a lot shorter for youtube games.
A mechanic I mostly took from ICRPG is that every skill check goes against a pool of points that the player is trying to exceed. In essence, every attempt to pick a lock is like attacking a monster with a number of hit points. Depending on the system, I do either a second roll with a die to determine how many points in they are or I do a count of how far they rolled over and count the excess pips as points. I also establish an amount of time each attempt takes. The longer a lock takes to get picked the higher the probability that a wandering monster or a guard finds the PC trying to pick the door. This could be anything like prying open a door or hacking a computer.
If there isn't a pressing concern and the PC has the skills, then I just do a single roll and use that to tell them how much time they used to open the lock.
Clocks from BitD to track shit in moment and over the course of multiple downtimes.
Pushing for a reroll but bad consequences on a failure from Call of Cthulhu.
Meta currency that bounces between Players and GM ala Doom from Conan.
The apocalypse countdown system from Mork Borg.
If I could work in how melee combat and 'alignment' works from Pendragon into every single game, I would.
Essentially you have two scores that determine your chances of success/crit success and on a number of successes that exceed the roll your overflow successes enter a metacurrency pool that can then be spent, with diminishing returns, for more dice on further rolls/other bonuses/special action activations.
Basically it's what Shadowrun 6e wanted to be.
Oh, That does sound cool. I like that idea of making use of "surplus success." We've all rolled that Nat-20 on Initiative or Spot or the equivalent.
The bonus element of Momentum is that the pool is shared. So player A creating Momentum means player B and C can use it, and thus THEY stand a chance to not just succeed, but generate their own momentum OR do something that would normally be impossible with just their default dice pool
for me it's gotta be the classic fate points/karma pool.
it does everything you could possibly want to do with dice fudging, with the added bonus of not being the GM's responsibility to decide when is a good time to do it.
I always use some kind of degress of success and failure.
Like when some fighter gets a big hit in and does max damage, the opponent will provably fall to the grounds or be pushed back or whatever. Doing minimal damage will do frick all. Kinda the same with any skill checks, the most important thing is making the check , but then it can get flavored with some roleplaying and mechanical result.
Also I always use some kind of fate points, meaning a one-time get out of jail-free card you get at character creation. One per default, more when the players do roleplaying characters, or let some stuff like race, background, profession up to chance.
Goal Tracking. Player states a goal, rolls for a "quest" that the GM contrives for them to achieve it as an alternative to crafting, gold expenditure, or just blind luck for a few different things.
So if a player wants a particular spellbook, item, creature, ect, they can straight up say they're angling for it, and I'll give them a side-goal that I assure them will end with them obtaining it.
The sanity system from The One Ring. It's the best I've seen for showing the weariness, depression, and seeping corruption from contact with the unnatural and evil. It needed more shadow paths homebrewed in, but otherwise it's modular enough to fit anything we play now.
The ressource die from Forbidden lands. Basicly all your basic ressources (food, water, arrows, etc) are tracked using dice instead of numbers going from D4 to D10. So whenever you use a ressource, you roll that dice and if it comes up as a 1-2 you lower that dice to the next one until D4 where after that your out of that ressource.
It really removes the hassle and bookkeeping from players and makes them engage more with exploration and the management of their personnal stocks.
How is it any less bookkeeping? You're still tracking the same things, you just reduced the usage step from "reduce number by one" to "roll a die to see if you should reduce a number by two". It's literally more work.
I also find the acceleration weird, where the less you have the faster you use it. I'd expect the opposite both in world (as you take more care as it runs out) and in game (as it encourages bailing early rather than pushing your luck).
>I also find the acceleration weird, where the less you have the faster you use it.
Its more that the amount you spend constitutes less of the whole, i think. So it isn't that you have you have 100% water, and then you spend 20% water for failing. Its that you have 100% water, and each time you spend a little bit, and when you fail the roll you notice that you only have 75% water. And so you get more choosey as to when to spend it. And when you have only a 1d4, you have to be *really* choosey because it could cost you the last of that resource to succeed.
If these rolls are being made passively like each day then yeah you're right and it doesn't make sense. However, if you have to make a choice as whether or not to use it, I think it makes perfect sense for resources where the actual physical amount is arbitrary.
The examples were food, water, and arrows. You could maybe argue that arrows are something you choose to use or not, but "Do I defend myself?" makes it kind of a no-brainer because the consequences of not doing so are so severe and immediate. Food and water are pretty mandatory though.
I still disagree that it's the right way around. As it stands there's no reason not to use the resource when it's full, and every reason not to when it's nearly gone. Reversing the steps switches some of that around: when you're full there's more temptation not to waste it (but still less penalty for doing so), whereas when you're nearly out the good odds make it more tempting. This encourages the generally more interesting behaviour (both in terms of story and game) of actually using shit and having to deal with running out, rather than saving it "just in case".
Which is what it feels like the mechanic wants to accomplish. As I said it doesn't reduce bookkeeping at all, it makes resource management uncertain and prevents planning, encouraging you to push your luck and deal with failure rather than playing smart and safe.
The sanity system from The One Ring. It's the best I've seen for showing the weariness, depression, and seeping corruption from contact with the unnatural and evil. It needed more shadow paths homebrewed in, but otherwise it's modular enough to fit anything we play now.
I use a resource die to track shadow
My brain is objectively the biggest
Explain, never played 5e, what does the BM do?
Battlemasters have a pool of dice they use to power their maneuvers. To use a maneuver, of which they have a small selection that grows with level, they declare the maneuver and roll a die from the pool. Success is either automatic or dependent on an attack roll OR a saving throw, and the maneuver die roll determines the effectiveness of some aspect of the maneuver.
IIRC the pool refreshes on a short rest, so it's a resource that's usually there.
>To use a maneuver, of which they have a small selection that grows with level,
So in true nu dnd it stiffles creativity. At least mighty deeds lets you do whatever as long as the master aproves. Don't take it personal, its just I'm exasperated be everything post 2nd edition.
I ain't taking anything personal, I'm not the original person who brought up Battlemasters.
I do think it has the advantage of actual rules attached. People complain that martials are always playing mother-may-I and deeds do nothing to change that.
Only if you have a group full of combative buttholes. I, however, play with adults whom I am friends with.
>I, however, play with adults whom I am friends with.
Sometimes I feel that half the problems /tg/ complains about derive entirely from the fact they can't get any friends to play with them so they play with the other randos that washed out of normal play.
>Sometimes I feel that half the problems /tg/ complains about derive entirely from the fact they can't get any friends to play with them so they play with the other randos that washed out of normal play.
This is not a feel, this is a reality. Social as they might be, and the changes the hobby had over time, a lot of players in Ganker are still asocial autist or sociopaths that play ttrpgs with whoever they have aviable and not with friends.
This is specially noticeable qhen discussing problematic pkayers or GMs, you can tell who cares about playing a game with bros and who wants some escapism and numbers autismo te get some degree of enjoyment in their life. Enjoyment they don't want to share with others, despite the nature of the hobby.
>stiffles creativity
Not necessarily. They cover just about everything, and make a few things that others can also do better. The rules are, and everyone forgets this, if you hit, you can choose to disarm, knock back, or knock prone, but deal no damage. Battle Master allows you to do damage and one of those. It allows you to forgo an attack to allow someone else to attack or move. It allows you to open them up for another attack, giving the next attack advantage. It allows you to goad so they have disadvantage on attacks other than against you. You can parry and reduce damage.
There's 16 Maneuvers. You get to 3 at level 3, and 9 by 15. That part does suck. I'd allow them to learn all 16. But how you describe them is up to you. Maybe you do swing from the chandelier.
Another rule that people forget is that advantage isn't limited to abilities. The DM can give it to you. Again, high ground or a successful check to swing from a chandelier.
5e is well built. The issue isn't the system itself, the issue are the players. Most never read the rules and learned from podcast, and the rest learned it from their friend... Who learned from podcasts. 5e is also built for FAR longer sessions. The book says 6 to 8 combat encounters per day, and Mike Mearls, the guy who designed 5e, said 8 to 10. It was built for the 3.x and AD&D fan and it is the best of older editions with some nre stuff. And if you play it as intended CR isn't broken, casters are weaker than martial in combat even at higher levels, especially if they want to keep their utility powers, and Warlock and Monk become the strongest. But good luck finding anyone who plays that way. Most 5ebrains play it as a story game with a long rest after every session.
I posted over half a year ago about how I handle it. Takes 5-7 2-3 hour sessions with short rests between most to do a day's worth. Includes traps, 1-2 puzzles, and a session of pure RP. My group loves it. But again, good luck finding a group like that.
>The rules are, and everyone forgets this, if you hit, you can choose to disarm, knock back, or knock prone, but deal no damage
Not quite. The attack is replaced by a contested check to achieve the above.
Battle master instead can add a check to avoid the above onto a successful hit (as well as increasing the damage of the hit). The target is less likely to pass the check as it's against a set DC (instead of being a contested check), so it's significantly more effective.
I adapted AiME rest rules. No long rest during an adventure -- simple as. Finish your job, go home, rest for a few months, do some downtime activity, and THEN you get your spell slots back.
[...]
>There's no cost to doing it so it's ultimately a flawed idea.
The fact that it costs nothing is why it works. It encourages doing different and intersting stuff and makes the decision point "Which of those options do I want to use" instead of "Do I want to deal damage or have options"
The fact that it costs nothing means you're an idiot if you don't do it every single round, which means martials now have to play mother-may-I with their attacks, too. Seems like a step backwards if anything.
I never said anything about it being free making it bad. I juat explained how Battle Master works.
[...]
Yea. It's an attack roll against their Athletics or Acrobatics. But it's still an attack roll. I should have been more clear.
>But it's still an attack roll.
If you mean the regular shove-instead-of-damage rules, then no, it is an athletics roll.
Circles from Burning Wheel. The ability to conjure NPCs out of nowhere that your character would reasonably know is a great mechanic. It's also great because if you fail the roll the GM could invoke the enmity clause which conjures an NPC from your past that your character is not necessarily friendly with and you have to work wo bring them over to your side.
Nothing is so good I've hacked it into everything, but a couple things I've used a lot across many systems. Namely:
>Threat/progress clocks from Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark
These are good for reminding players of impending events, which helps to ground them in the setting and build attachment to what's happening in the game. >Mage the Ascension's dynamic magic
I use this as the basis for how magic works when it's otherwise unspecified by the system. Even with Vancian and other explicit styles I like to imply that it's just the dominant paradigm of the setting. >the nwod/cofd concept of "the sanctity of merits"
Besides applying it to cWoD and Exalted, the idea behind it informs basically every game I run. Essentially, I will guarantee the floor of your character's overall narrative power, immediate interruptions and death aside.
Whenever you cast a spell, you have to roll on my table of minor inconveniences. What, you thought that reaching into the chaotic ether of primordial power was free? Oh, and if you fail at casting a spell, something really bad happens.
Play Pass Turn Order.
Instead of using a speed stat or a dire roll to determine turn order, you only use a single opposed roll for each side, and whomever gets the highest selects a member togo. Then the other side selects a member to do, and it goes back and forth.
Even in the most nothingburger shitshow games like D&D it forces the players to think tactically.
You should try it.
Have you considered that this only works in a highly specific background, in even more specific list of games and combat resolutions?
I mean from the perspective of the games I play it sounds like overcomplicating things, not making them more simple, as none of them has the "roll for Ish" issue in the first place.
I highly suggest checking on Continuous Combat from Ubiquity system (HEX, All for One, Desolation, Leagues of Adventure etc). It both resolves the issue your suggestion is solving and, more importantly, is both highly fluid and even more tactical, without overengineering shit (or using any sort of rolls). It also has the neat byproduct where you might actually want to use melee and unarmed in a gun-heavy settings anyway, because they do have their advantages when already reaching a motherfricker up-close in this style of turn order.
Also, when the group gets into it, turns LITERALLY takes the space of 3 seconds.
Not sure if it's a mechanic, BUT Explicitly telling players where and how they get experience and progress. Basically actually writing out 'quests' in a journal regardless of game flavor.
Players respond really well to it and being given an explicit idea of what they'll get (even at a meta level as in experience or boons their characters wouldn't be aware of) helps with their decision making and organization. Pretty much anything that helps keep players focused from week to week is useful.
Oh, also foregoing battle maps entirely and asking players for what they think should be a in the combat area given the overall scene. Just generally offloading some thoughts to players when I can't think of it or when they go in a random direction.
Spiritual Attributes from Riddle of Steel, while its always good to get nominal biographical and motivational input from players, it's very much decoration in some systems or for some people. Tying them into the system's usually existing adjudicated bonus system (eg +1 for a beneficial circumstance etc) keeps the character as a character relevant, should that be something you want to emphasize.
Does anyone remember a house rule that made the rounds a bit for making 5e deadlier? It had to do with making it so death saves brought a character back with permanent injuries or something to that effect? Or something like death was permanent unless coming back with an injury?
Hmm. I think there might actually be something like that in the DMG.
>Sometimes I feel that half the problems /tg/ complains about derive entirely from the fact they can't get any friends to play with them so they play with the other randos that washed out of normal play.
This is not a feel, this is a reality. Social as they might be, and the changes the hobby had over time, a lot of players in Ganker are still asocial autist or sociopaths that play ttrpgs with whoever they have aviable and not with friends.
This is specially noticeable qhen discussing problematic pkayers or GMs, you can tell who cares about playing a game with bros and who wants some escapism and numbers autismo te get some degree of enjoyment in their life. Enjoyment they don't want to share with others, despite the nature of the hobby.
That's a fair point. While there ARE problem players/GMs, it does often feel like people who treat the game as an antagonistic competition instead of a social activity.
Not an RPG but most miniature wargames benefit from Chain of Command’s Patrol Phase
>Chain of Command’s Patrol Phase
Care to elaborate?
>Chain of Command’s Patrol Phase
Care to elaborate?
It's a predeployment mini game before the match that determines deployment zones. It represents patrols making contact, intelligence and reconnaissance of the field. You alternating placinv patrol markers on the field at most 12 inches away from each other until you run out of patrol markers or get locked down by an enemy patrol marker being placed within 12 inches of yours. From these patrol markers you can place Jump Off points, which is the zone from which your forces will deploy. The Jump Off points placement area is determined by taking one of your patrol markers and 2 of the closest enemy patrol markers and forming intersecting 2 lines with them, making a triangle shaped area that you can place your Jump Off Points. The Jump Off Points must be placed behind or inside cover, otherwise you place the Jump Off point on the edge of the table. I'm not explaining it very well but it's good way to deploy forces near key terrain features youve captured in the patrol phase and get you right into the action instead of deploying 6 inches from the edge of the table and spending turns moving towards the enemy.
If you want a better explanation of it than I could ever write just go to the WW2 files of /hwg/ and download the Chain of Command Rulebook to read the 2ish pages dedicated to it or look up videos of Chain of Command on YouTube
I play B/X. Occasionally, if there's a risky attempt at a task, I roll a fudge dice along to see if it went up or downhill, in addition to the main roll. >success with no marks = as expected >success with + mark = better than expected >success with - mark = worse than expected >fail with no mark = probable failure > fail with + mark = probable failure with a hint of a possible recovery (later; i.e. all is not lost) >fail with - mark = improbable failure
Dominion’s injury point system, with some minor tweaks for ease of use, easily gets hacked into every game I run. It is satisfying for a martial to chop a dragon’s wings off, but can add a level of grittiness as players accumulate their own permanent scars.
Essentially how I run it is when rolling higher than your target’s armor you can get injury points which are applied to body parts of your choice giving minor stacking negatives per point until the body part becomes permanently mutilated in some way.
I haven't hacked it into every system I play but despite 5e getting a lot of flak the advantage/disadvantage system is actually a good design idea in general for giving on the fly benefits/penalties instead of a static number. I'd like to use it in other systems.
Its more narrative and handwavium, if you've got a crunchier and more realistic game going then I could see your point.
If I were to port Advantage to another system I'd probably use it as the mechanism involved in PCs helping each other, since its a frequent occurance and some systems don't have satisfying mechanics for figuring out what "helping" actually does (though I'm also a fan of ruling too many cooks producing an overall negative).
Inspiration. I'm sure it's a generic answer but I use it in everything. >Call of Cthulhu
Blessings from Beyond >Impossible Landscapes
King's Boons >Night's Black Agents
OPINT
I love rewarding players and I love the "oh crap" moments that lead to people using their tokens to guarantee awful things don't happen.
Mighty Deeds of Arms from Dungeon Crawl Classics
Fighters in any other D&D-like game are fricking horrible in comparison without it. Fighters in DCC actually play like Fantasy Warriors and not "Hirelings with bigger numbers"
Patrician taste
>Mighty Deeds of Arms from Dungeon Crawl Classics
Can you give a cursory overview of the concept? Sounds interesting.
Either I didn't understand the system when we played it or it's the worst mechanic ever. I could be the best Goddamn sharpshooter (or whatever) in the world -- nay, the best POSSIBLE -- and the moment a task gets "difficult" my success rate is capped at 50%. Absurd.
The same exact result could be achieved by flipping a coin for success/failure and rolling a d10 to see if it is critical.
>Can you give a cursory overview of the concept? Sounds interesting.
The Warrior class can choose between a number of status effects they can inflict on any given attack without giving anything up or using any resource, along with having carte blanche to leap off of banisters and kick people in the face, swing from chandeliers, and stab cylopses in the eye
Okay. Sold.
What I dislike about mechanics like that is that they implicitly mean other character classes than warriors (and dwarfs) can't do these things. And the mechanic underneath (forfeit damage to cause an additional effect) isn't anything special. Other systems either detail exactly the mechanics to e.g. disarm or trip and opponent or leave it mostly to the GM to adjudicate. DCC sits in a weird middle ground.
And is there even any cost to declaring a mighty deed, or are you biting yourself if you don't attempt a mighty deed with every single attack? The text reads like you might not get to add your deed die to damage, but the example adds it.
Its because the warrior always adds his deed die to attacks+damage no matter what he does. But you might not always have an amazing deed to do or an idea in your head.
Other classes can (probably) do that stuff they just can do them and deal damage at the same time.
Besides it's not any different than only clerics being able to pray and do stuff with it
There's no cost to doing it so it's ultimately a flawed idea. Battlemaster in 5e executes this concept much better but grogs aren't allowed to like anything from 5e so
Explain, never played 5e, what does the BM do?
>There's no cost to doing it so it's ultimately a flawed idea.
The fact that it costs nothing is why it works. It encourages doing different and intersting stuff and makes the decision point "Which of those options do I want to use" instead of "Do I want to deal damage or have options"
I never said anything about it being free making it bad. I juat explained how Battle Master works.
Yea. It's an attack roll against their Athletics or Acrobatics. But it's still an attack roll. I should have been more clear.
Battlemaster doesn't execute anything better. It's a piece of shit that has a deeply flawed design.
Deeds are a neat idea but have the same flaw as Dirty Tricks in Pathfinder, "infinite possibilities" isn't actually infinite and eventually you're going to default to something that is effective in-universe to the point you have no reason to try something else. If you can blind somebody with pocket sand as a dirty trick or deed, and blinding them doesn't give a save, you just do that against most enemies. Conversely, deeds/dirty tricks that require rolling well AND the enemy still gets a save are just trash and not worth using compared to a similar effect that just works. If pocket sand requires you roll well on your deed AND the enemy gets a reflex save, you'll never dale gribble again and will just stick to tripping people or disarming them or whatever.
It's a decent idea but would really benefit from a bit more structure, "roll your 1d6 and something cool happens, maybe!" is running into the same issues fricking 5e has where people say "lol just improvise an action, the DM will come up with something cool!" which doesn't help you as a player much in terms of agency
If you are not roleplaying your martial class like this anyway you are not roleplaying at all.
No point if your heroic descriptions don't mean anything mechanically.
as someone who has played a DCC character longer than most (from 0 to 7), mighty deeds have a couple issues. first off, martials are still a joke compared to spellcasters, especially in DCC.
second, it's heavily reliant on the dm to not only describe a battlefield with enough detail to take advantage of, but also every single mighty deed is a "dm may i" situation, which gets tedious in actual play. the other poster talking about how you end up in a routine of doing the same few "good" deeds was 100% on the money
it's a nice concept in theory, but having to arbitrate with your dm not only if you can do a thing, but also make up the effects of said thing every turn gets is not fun
>and the moment a task gets "difficult" my success rate is capped at 50%. Absurd
It doesn't matter how good your skill is, there's always something that can make it difficult.
>Either I didn't understand the system when we played it or it's the worst mechanic ever. I could be the best Goddamn sharpshooter (or whatever) in the world -- nay, the best POSSIBLE -- and the moment a task gets "difficult" my success rate is capped at 50%. Absurd.
Part of that are the changes to CoC 7e, which apparently seeped into the new BRP as well. Basically, they want you to use the push and bonus/penalty dice mechanics. With the side effect that skill percentages no longer represent your actual chance of success. Failing a non-pushed roll means nothing happens, failing a pushed roll has negative consequences, while failing a pushed roll while insane means you lose your character.
Older editions also had different levels of required successes, but the math was just roll-under, with situational bonuses/penalties to your effective skill %.
>Failing a non-pushed roll means nothing happens
Not true actually, it just means something bad isn't guaranteed to happen, whereas failing a pushed roll 100% guarantees it.
If the situation is such that the original failure would logically lead to bad consequences, then the consequences should happen regardless. In that scenario, a pushed roll might simply make things worse, or add a completely new problem.
>while failing a pushed roll while insane means you lose your character
I don't think that's a thing.
>Not true actually, it just means something bad isn't guaranteed to happen, whereas failing a pushed roll 100% guarantees it.
An ordinary failure should mean nothing bad happens, at least nothing that inflicts damage or sanity loss. Unless your failure is also a fumble, which I omitted for brevity.
>I don't think that's a thing.
Every non-combat skill describes consequences for failing pushed rolls. The sample ones for being insane usually cause an investigator to be uncontrollable and often set them up for destroying either themselves or what/whoever they're interacting with. You keep digging a deeper and deeper hole you can't get out of yourself. You keep swimming and refuse to come out of the water, until you drown. You literally become lost among a foreign culture.
Depending on what makes the shot "difficult", yeah a 50% sounds about right
Even the worst best marksmen isn't going to be super accurate when under fire, at long range, with a moving target
I'm still using CoC 2nd edition with minimal homebrew rules and it works great for us.
20% of your skill score is an exceptional result. Easy tasks are %X2. Harder are %/2. 96-00 is a fumble. Oh, and the 20% is of the modified skill score, not the raw number, so an easy task will have more chances of having an exceptional success.
Good shit. ACKS Heroic Fantasy book has a similar thing if you want something more B/X-adjacent. I think second edition is going to include it in the core rules.
What's yours and what systems did you hack them into? How did it go?
Some form of push mechanic. "Push" or "reroll" but increase the stakes or cause a complication.
Sure you did buddy. You get a D+ for at least replying.
Rolled 1, 5 = 6 (2d6)
I hate that. It takes away so much of the suspense of rolling if you can just reroll, even with consequences.
Strong Hits from Fragged Empires. On a 6 you get a critical effect based on gear / abilities. Might melt armor on heat ray, might give you free ammo on biogun.
> An homebrew kingdom-building game based off Pathfinder's 1st edition Ultimate Campaign.
So-so. Don't combine with a margin-of-success / failure mechanic, it gets out of hand quick.
> SW Saga
Worked way better... once you rebalance the whole game around 3d6 instead of d20. Meaning you're not playing SW Saga anymore. Things like +5 on a skill focus feat just don't work around 3d6.
I wish the rest of Fragged Empires, mainly equipment, auto-fire and how you do improve, were better. Good core ideas under piles of shit.
I can't hack it into every system because it would need a complete overhaul.
But Call of Cthulhu's roll under percentile with three levels of success is by far the best mechanic I've played with. Yeah it's simple, but holy shit is it effective.
This. I'm a new dm that's running a coc game and a dnd 5e game. Coc's d100 rolling is absolutely fantastic
I try to use dynamic initiative (like Shadowrun for example) as much as I can. Also the hidden agendas from Alien works really well with some games.
FFG's Edge of the Empire meme dice. Yes, I know >paying for dice. I get it. But the system was awesome and the best "resolution" mechanic of any RPG
Have yet to find a system where adding CoC's luck mechanic hurt the system (except for systems that already have something similar of course).
How it works:
upon character creation, players roll an additional value called luck. The average outcome should be around 50% of the die used to resolve checks (10 for a d20, 50 for d100, 5 for d10 etc.)
For something like naturally lucky D&D halflings you could give a bonus to this luck value even
Whenever a player asks something that is strictly not up to their character's ability and you as a DM would just is a sheer matter of luck, you use this luck value.
For example The player finds a lantern and asks if there's still any oil left in it or if a bookstore has a certain volume on sale.
BUT luck can also be spent as a finite resource to add to rolls. If there is a check or attack roll that has to succeed the players can permanently expemd their luck points to succeed but this of course lowers their luck overall.
As a DM I find it super handy to let my players roll themselves for certain things. It makes it so that instead of being at the Mercy of the DMs arbitrary decision, the players have their fate in their own hands.
But if Luck is usually around 50% then there's no difference between the player and the GM rolling.
Except that they can spend it, reducing the luck over time. Also just because the median is 50% doesn't mean some people don't roll higher or lower than that, creating lucky and unlucky characters.
NTA btw but I've used that mechanic before
>BUT luck can also be spent as a finite resource to add to rolls. If there is a check or attack roll that has to succeed the players can permanently expemd their luck points to succeed but this of course lowers their luck overall.
The system I play in has fate points for that. Each PC starts with 3, and can use them to reroll dice. Spent fate points can be gained back as rewards for good roleplaying (like staying in character even if it comes at a detriment for the PC), creative ideas, gaining favour by acting in accordance with a god's decrees, etc.
That being said, rolling a random luck stat seems a bit too much. I get the point but I feel like if one PC just happens to be luckier than the others the party will end up using him as an errant boy to check the next room etc. For me, these "luck" checks are baked into the skill checks: you check the room and if you roll well you find a lamp with enough oil for a few hours; you roll just good enough and you find a lamp with just a bit of oil left; you roll badly and you only find an empty lamp or no lamp at all.
I guess that works because the system I am playing (The Dark Eye) is really autistic with its high variations of skill checks, and the skill checks always have a degree of success (rather than being a binary success/failure).
"Hey Jeff can you ask the GM if there's any oil left in the lantern? I already used some luck points and don't want to frick us over with less than a 50/50."
Speaking as a CoC GM, if I heard one of my players utter those words I would
A) make them roll the worse of the two pools
B) frick up the party's whole day like Dad just got home drunk after being laid off.
The player who found the lantern makes the roll. You know you can communicate with the players, right? You can even tell them to frick off if you feel like it.
If the characters are together then it's likely all of them find it. Besides you wouldn't have formulated the roll until someone asks if the lantern had oil left, as you didn't think of that (In this example). This isn't an issue of communication, just illustrating how the mechanic could end up playing out.
I was gonna say he'd just whisper that to Jeff in the previous post. If they can spend luck as a metagame element there's no reason to prevent them from considering it in other circumstances.
Conspiring to use the mechanics dishonestly is a capital offence at my table. It's your idea, you spend the fricking luck. I don't give a shit about how meta it is, the attitude is where the problem lies.
This same shit is why I don't play D&D. The idea of planning your build is just cheating with extra steps.
>Conspiring to use the mechanics dishonestly is a capital offence at my table
Sounds like you have shitty mechanics that encourage players to subvert them, and are extremely sensitive about this.
Kind of like how bad rulers are the ones that need the most oppressive police forces.
With 6th you just roll Luck. Done.
I don't try to hack a specific mechanic to EVERY system, but there are some mechanics that i like to import to different games:
>Chaosium Stormbringer
I plug in here the Delta Green "doubles mean extraordinary success/failure" and the blackjack resolution for opposed rolls (instead of the convoluted BRP matrix). Stormbringer is already an half baked attempt by Ken St. Andre to crossover some T&T assumptions into proto-BRP so i can literally hack and jury rig the system without issues.
>Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e
I backport some mechanics from 2e such as allowing some untrained skill rolls with a malus (in 2e is -20, in 1e i prefer -30) and the tables for magic misfire. I also use the CoC mechanic for pushing rolls limited per session by the amount of fate points the character has.
I don't feel the need to alter much of other games i run, but when i do is straight homebrewd houserules, so nothing taken from other games.
That's awful. Compounding on the swinginess of the d20 without any of the mechanics to compensate while also making said swinginess not matter for the sake of arbitration by a DM.
Is this what YouTube people think ttrpgs are?
Yes, I've had this mechanic recommended to me by people who enjoy watching D&D as much as they do playing it. I don't see how it could cause anything other than frustration for players.
It doesn't really impact "swinginess". The only thing it really does is make 1's and 20's more common. Otherwise, mechanically, it's really just a waste of time. "Swinginess" is better determined by the TN. A 50/50 split with a d20 with a TN of 11 is about as swingy as things can get.
What are you on about? It turns the flat line of distribution into an inverse bell curve, where it's either really powerful or really weak, which is inherently more swingy
Literally nothing is more swingy than a 50/50 split between two binary outcomes.
I don't think we have the same definition:
> Granular margins of success / failure on a d100 roll.
Binary usually don't take into account critical miss, or critical success, and put a bit of granularity on those and it'll make you wish for a x5 crit modifier instead.
Binary 50/50 is so extreme, that it's primarily mitigated by the outcome of either result being minimized.
No combat feels as "swingy" as 50/50 win or lose.
>Is this what YouTube people think ttrpgs are?
What do you think? The hobby is infested with losers who share NAT FRICKING TWENTY memes on reddit or wherever. That's who games are geared towards now. BG3 especially is guilty of this and even has critical successes on skill checks.
wow this sounds FRICKING moronic
>"a new mechanic introduced by Brennen Lee Mulligan"
Oh, that explains why
>when you roll two checks that are equidistant from 10 you take the highest
Of course you do. :^)
>all those typos
I'm convinced this is bait, no way something this infuriatimg would've made it out the door
I always give out XP for exploration, looking into new places and exploring them, regardless of the outcome.
Every single mechanic mentioned in this thread is fricking awful and makes a game worse if ported over.
I give a pass, but it's more of a practice than a mechanic in itself. And XP isn't isn't exactly a good mechanic either.
Gold as XP.
Considering "every system I play" is one that I make, my universal mechanics fit into them better than they would shoehorned into something else.
I may be stretching the limits of your question, but the combination of my attributes, abilities (both power and skills), and power modifier mechanics are intertwined, and therefore one may not exist in its true form without the others.
All I'll say is it involves a lot of maths, and a number of people here have already expressed distaste for how I do things.
But hey, it's a good thing they'll never have to play it.
I've seen you post this almost exact same post before, and I just want to let you know that nobody is interested and nobody gives a frick
OP asked.
Make better threads.
NTA but you didn’t answer OP’s question even slightly, so of course no one cares for your empty hole of a post
If the combat system is somewhat defined and concrete, and turn order matters, then I will give my players a limited resource to trade into extra rounds. I no longer know if I got it from wfrp 2e or d&d 4e originally.
It's not really something that can be incorporated into other games, but I really like the "roll over for X, roll under for Y" thing that some small games use.
Anyone knows a good system for alchemy? Something than is fun to add but it doesn't become too cumbersome.
Newest one for me is the way Complications work in Mini Six. Some games give character build points for flaws. Mini Six does not, but every session your Complication meaningfully impacts you, you get XP. Gone are the minmax builds, in a single stroke.
I like AngryGM's random encounter system. Anytime my players spend time (or even if they just mess around too long), I put a die in a bowl. Anytime they do something dangerous, the dice get rolled and there's a chance an encounter pops into the situation. Once there are six dice in the bowl, I roll for an encounter no matter what and empty the bowl.
The way that players metagame in response to the bowl of dice speeds up games, and also causes them to push their resources harder to reset the bowl on purpose so they can coordinate a safer situation when needed.
I use a similar concept called "time dice", can't remember where I got it from.
Whenever the party spends a long time at a place discussing anything, they roll the time dice, which is a d6 to d12 depending on the number of players, usually a d8.
Write down 1s and 8s, they nullify each other, ignore other results.
>Majority of 1s
Something bad happens, usually a random encounter, trap or worse.
>Majority of 8s
Either nothing or something that might point them towards the right way to go or give a lil bit of info that might help them reach a conclusion for the discussion
>Neither
Nothing happens, or something is approaching but not here yet.
If nothing or something good happens, next time you also roll an extra dice of which only 1s are counted, and more and more dices are added.
The idea is to allow players to take their time but also don't make it too long, with some consequences. Just punishment or random encoutners makes players play recklessly or worry too much. With this I've seen that most of the time, the result is nothing, which doesn't mean random encoutner but still hurries the players. And if it rolls 1s or 8s, I use that to get the discussion unstuck in some way.
Go back to your general. The dice give it away.
There is no DCC for funky non-Platonic dice right now. And the image dimensions are more of a /slop/ giveaway.
>Verification not required.
It says right there in the doc, they aren’t using binary success. Which is ironic, because the mechanic’s only usefulness is cutting out the middle entries to reduce a difficult check (where ~75% of the results fail) to what’s essentially a 50/50... which you would only want to do if you know you have to roll high, meaning the player has to have some fricking idea of what the target number is.
And don’t even get me started on what these frickers are doing with AC. No love for dumb&dumber as a system, but I really feel for the people who want to play a game and get landed with these charlatans.
Main reason it's so convuluted is that it's forcing a mechanic to try and take a more complicated (in this case, gradient) system and make it even more complicated in order to make it more like a simpler (binary) system. The easy thing would be to just do what D&D already does, where some rolls are gradient and some rolls are binary, as appropriate, but the disadvantage there is you don't get as many chances for everyone to emote wildly when a 1 or 20 is rolled.
You'd think one in ten chances is high enough, but I guess attention spans are a lot shorter for youtube games.
A mechanic I mostly took from ICRPG is that every skill check goes against a pool of points that the player is trying to exceed. In essence, every attempt to pick a lock is like attacking a monster with a number of hit points. Depending on the system, I do either a second roll with a die to determine how many points in they are or I do a count of how far they rolled over and count the excess pips as points. I also establish an amount of time each attempt takes. The longer a lock takes to get picked the higher the probability that a wandering monster or a guard finds the PC trying to pick the door. This could be anything like prying open a door or hacking a computer.
If there isn't a pressing concern and the PC has the skills, then I just do a single roll and use that to tell them how much time they used to open the lock.
tgxrp
Clocks from BitD to track shit in moment and over the course of multiple downtimes.
Pushing for a reroll but bad consequences on a failure from Call of Cthulhu.
Meta currency that bounces between Players and GM ala Doom from Conan.
The apocalypse countdown system from Mork Borg.
If I could work in how melee combat and 'alignment' works from Pendragon into every single game, I would.
>Clocks from BitD
Oh look, it's another episode of "BitD invented clocks"
Must be tough being both this new and such a zoomershit.
>back in the day invented clocks
Momentum from 2d20.
The system is dog-shit bad, especially in non-Conan incarnations (but Conan has its issues , too). But Momentum? That shit is lit.
Can you describe it? I'm intrigued by the name.
Essentially you have two scores that determine your chances of success/crit success and on a number of successes that exceed the roll your overflow successes enter a metacurrency pool that can then be spent, with diminishing returns, for more dice on further rolls/other bonuses/special action activations.
Basically it's what Shadowrun 6e wanted to be.
Oh, That does sound cool. I like that idea of making use of "surplus success." We've all rolled that Nat-20 on Initiative or Spot or the equivalent.
The bonus element of Momentum is that the pool is shared. So player A creating Momentum means player B and C can use it, and thus THEY stand a chance to not just succeed, but generate their own momentum OR do something that would normally be impossible with just their default dice pool
for me it's gotta be the classic fate points/karma pool.
it does everything you could possibly want to do with dice fudging, with the added bonus of not being the GM's responsibility to decide when is a good time to do it.
I always use some kind of degress of success and failure.
Like when some fighter gets a big hit in and does max damage, the opponent will provably fall to the grounds or be pushed back or whatever. Doing minimal damage will do frick all. Kinda the same with any skill checks, the most important thing is making the check , but then it can get flavored with some roleplaying and mechanical result.
Also I always use some kind of fate points, meaning a one-time get out of jail-free card you get at character creation. One per default, more when the players do roleplaying characters, or let some stuff like race, background, profession up to chance.
I fricking love spell dice
AI art, still shit, still ugly. Still spam.
Goal Tracking. Player states a goal, rolls for a "quest" that the GM contrives for them to achieve it as an alternative to crafting, gold expenditure, or just blind luck for a few different things.
So if a player wants a particular spellbook, item, creature, ect, they can straight up say they're angling for it, and I'll give them a side-goal that I assure them will end with them obtaining it.
Good way to thread plothooks and bait them too.
The sanity system from The One Ring. It's the best I've seen for showing the weariness, depression, and seeping corruption from contact with the unnatural and evil. It needed more shadow paths homebrewed in, but otherwise it's modular enough to fit anything we play now.
The ressource die from Forbidden lands. Basicly all your basic ressources (food, water, arrows, etc) are tracked using dice instead of numbers going from D4 to D10. So whenever you use a ressource, you roll that dice and if it comes up as a 1-2 you lower that dice to the next one until D4 where after that your out of that ressource.
It really removes the hassle and bookkeeping from players and makes them engage more with exploration and the management of their personnal stocks.
Why don't they just use cards?
How is it any less bookkeeping? You're still tracking the same things, you just reduced the usage step from "reduce number by one" to "roll a die to see if you should reduce a number by two". It's literally more work.
I also find the acceleration weird, where the less you have the faster you use it. I'd expect the opposite both in world (as you take more care as it runs out) and in game (as it encourages bailing early rather than pushing your luck).
>I also find the acceleration weird, where the less you have the faster you use it.
Its more that the amount you spend constitutes less of the whole, i think. So it isn't that you have you have 100% water, and then you spend 20% water for failing. Its that you have 100% water, and each time you spend a little bit, and when you fail the roll you notice that you only have 75% water. And so you get more choosey as to when to spend it. And when you have only a 1d4, you have to be *really* choosey because it could cost you the last of that resource to succeed.
If these rolls are being made passively like each day then yeah you're right and it doesn't make sense. However, if you have to make a choice as whether or not to use it, I think it makes perfect sense for resources where the actual physical amount is arbitrary.
The examples were food, water, and arrows. You could maybe argue that arrows are something you choose to use or not, but "Do I defend myself?" makes it kind of a no-brainer because the consequences of not doing so are so severe and immediate. Food and water are pretty mandatory though.
I still disagree that it's the right way around. As it stands there's no reason not to use the resource when it's full, and every reason not to when it's nearly gone. Reversing the steps switches some of that around: when you're full there's more temptation not to waste it (but still less penalty for doing so), whereas when you're nearly out the good odds make it more tempting. This encourages the generally more interesting behaviour (both in terms of story and game) of actually using shit and having to deal with running out, rather than saving it "just in case".
Which is what it feels like the mechanic wants to accomplish. As I said it doesn't reduce bookkeeping at all, it makes resource management uncertain and prevents planning, encouraging you to push your luck and deal with failure rather than playing smart and safe.
I use a resource die to track shadow
My brain is objectively the biggest
Battlemasters have a pool of dice they use to power their maneuvers. To use a maneuver, of which they have a small selection that grows with level, they declare the maneuver and roll a die from the pool. Success is either automatic or dependent on an attack roll OR a saving throw, and the maneuver die roll determines the effectiveness of some aspect of the maneuver.
IIRC the pool refreshes on a short rest, so it's a resource that's usually there.
>To use a maneuver, of which they have a small selection that grows with level,
So in true nu dnd it stiffles creativity. At least mighty deeds lets you do whatever as long as the master aproves. Don't take it personal, its just I'm exasperated be everything post 2nd edition.
I ain't taking anything personal, I'm not the original person who brought up Battlemasters.
I do think it has the advantage of actual rules attached. People complain that martials are always playing mother-may-I and deeds do nothing to change that.
>I, however, play with adults whom I am friends with.
Sometimes I feel that half the problems /tg/ complains about derive entirely from the fact they can't get any friends to play with them so they play with the other randos that washed out of normal play.
>Sometimes I feel that half the problems /tg/ complains about derive entirely from the fact they can't get any friends to play with them so they play with the other randos that washed out of normal play.
This is not a feel, this is a reality. Social as they might be, and the changes the hobby had over time, a lot of players in Ganker are still asocial autist or sociopaths that play ttrpgs with whoever they have aviable and not with friends.
This is specially noticeable qhen discussing problematic pkayers or GMs, you can tell who cares about playing a game with bros and who wants some escapism and numbers autismo te get some degree of enjoyment in their life. Enjoyment they don't want to share with others, despite the nature of the hobby.
>stiffles creativity
Not necessarily. They cover just about everything, and make a few things that others can also do better. The rules are, and everyone forgets this, if you hit, you can choose to disarm, knock back, or knock prone, but deal no damage. Battle Master allows you to do damage and one of those. It allows you to forgo an attack to allow someone else to attack or move. It allows you to open them up for another attack, giving the next attack advantage. It allows you to goad so they have disadvantage on attacks other than against you. You can parry and reduce damage.
There's 16 Maneuvers. You get to 3 at level 3, and 9 by 15. That part does suck. I'd allow them to learn all 16. But how you describe them is up to you. Maybe you do swing from the chandelier.
Another rule that people forget is that advantage isn't limited to abilities. The DM can give it to you. Again, high ground or a successful check to swing from a chandelier.
5e is well built. The issue isn't the system itself, the issue are the players. Most never read the rules and learned from podcast, and the rest learned it from their friend... Who learned from podcasts. 5e is also built for FAR longer sessions. The book says 6 to 8 combat encounters per day, and Mike Mearls, the guy who designed 5e, said 8 to 10. It was built for the 3.x and AD&D fan and it is the best of older editions with some nre stuff. And if you play it as intended CR isn't broken, casters are weaker than martial in combat even at higher levels, especially if they want to keep their utility powers, and Warlock and Monk become the strongest. But good luck finding anyone who plays that way. Most 5ebrains play it as a story game with a long rest after every session.
I posted over half a year ago about how I handle it. Takes 5-7 2-3 hour sessions with short rests between most to do a day's worth. Includes traps, 1-2 puzzles, and a session of pure RP. My group loves it. But again, good luck finding a group like that.
>The rules are, and everyone forgets this, if you hit, you can choose to disarm, knock back, or knock prone, but deal no damage
Not quite. The attack is replaced by a contested check to achieve the above.
Battle master instead can add a check to avoid the above onto a successful hit (as well as increasing the damage of the hit). The target is less likely to pass the check as it's against a set DC (instead of being a contested check), so it's significantly more effective.
I adapted AiME rest rules. No long rest during an adventure -- simple as. Finish your job, go home, rest for a few months, do some downtime activity, and THEN you get your spell slots back.
The fact that it costs nothing means you're an idiot if you don't do it every single round, which means martials now have to play mother-may-I with their attacks, too. Seems like a step backwards if anything.
>But it's still an attack roll.
If you mean the regular shove-instead-of-damage rules, then no, it is an athletics roll.
>which means martials now have to play mother-may-I with their attacks,
As opposed to not having those mechanics at all?
Circles from Burning Wheel. The ability to conjure NPCs out of nowhere that your character would reasonably know is a great mechanic. It's also great because if you fail the roll the GM could invoke the enmity clause which conjures an NPC from your past that your character is not necessarily friendly with and you have to work wo bring them over to your side.
Nothing is so good I've hacked it into everything, but a couple things I've used a lot across many systems. Namely:
>Threat/progress clocks from Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark
These are good for reminding players of impending events, which helps to ground them in the setting and build attachment to what's happening in the game.
>Mage the Ascension's dynamic magic
I use this as the basis for how magic works when it's otherwise unspecified by the system. Even with Vancian and other explicit styles I like to imply that it's just the dominant paradigm of the setting.
>the nwod/cofd concept of "the sanctity of merits"
Besides applying it to cWoD and Exalted, the idea behind it informs basically every game I run. Essentially, I will guarantee the floor of your character's overall narrative power, immediate interruptions and death aside.
>Threat/progress clocks from Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark
Finally, someone who knows that system besides me.
Whenever you cast a spell, you have to roll on my table of minor inconveniences. What, you thought that reaching into the chaotic ether of primordial power was free? Oh, and if you fail at casting a spell, something really bad happens.
>What game, you ask? None, for I play none, as you can easily guess from my "brilliant" idea!
Play Pass Turn Order.
Instead of using a speed stat or a dire roll to determine turn order, you only use a single opposed roll for each side, and whomever gets the highest selects a member togo. Then the other side selects a member to do, and it goes back and forth.
Even in the most nothingburger shitshow games like D&D it forces the players to think tactically.
You should try it.
That sounds moronic.
Only if you have a group full of combative buttholes. I, however, play with adults whom I am friends with.
Have you considered that this only works in a highly specific background, in even more specific list of games and combat resolutions?
I mean from the perspective of the games I play it sounds like overcomplicating things, not making them more simple, as none of them has the "roll for Ish" issue in the first place.
I highly suggest checking on Continuous Combat from Ubiquity system (HEX, All for One, Desolation, Leagues of Adventure etc). It both resolves the issue your suggestion is solving and, more importantly, is both highly fluid and even more tactical, without overengineering shit (or using any sort of rolls). It also has the neat byproduct where you might actually want to use melee and unarmed in a gun-heavy settings anyway, because they do have their advantages when already reaching a motherfricker up-close in this style of turn order.
Also, when the group gets into it, turns LITERALLY takes the space of 3 seconds.
Have you considered that nobody but you plays your arthaus niche games?
>arthaus niche game
Yeah, you are just here to shitpost dumb mechanical ideas. Thanks for sharing
Not sure if it's a mechanic, BUT Explicitly telling players where and how they get experience and progress. Basically actually writing out 'quests' in a journal regardless of game flavor.
Players respond really well to it and being given an explicit idea of what they'll get (even at a meta level as in experience or boons their characters wouldn't be aware of) helps with their decision making and organization. Pretty much anything that helps keep players focused from week to week is useful.
Oh, also foregoing battle maps entirely and asking players for what they think should be a in the combat area given the overall scene. Just generally offloading some thoughts to players when I can't think of it or when they go in a random direction.
Spiritual Attributes from Riddle of Steel, while its always good to get nominal biographical and motivational input from players, it's very much decoration in some systems or for some people. Tying them into the system's usually existing adjudicated bonus system (eg +1 for a beneficial circumstance etc) keeps the character as a character relevant, should that be something you want to emphasize.
Seconding.
Some players struggle to keep the persona of a character on if there isn't something to link the number bits in their brains to the creative bits.
Some players need to be adequately motivated to take the slightest modicum of risk.
Some players are ideal and deserve the little boost for keeping things flowing.
Does anyone remember a house rule that made the rounds a bit for making 5e deadlier? It had to do with making it so death saves brought a character back with permanent injuries or something to that effect? Or something like death was permanent unless coming back with an injury?
A very common rule was that every time you get knocked down, the number of saves you fail to die decreases by 1. Successes to stabilize don't change.
That wasn't the one, I think, but I like that, too. It definitely revolved around permanent injuries/scars/losing limbs.
Hmm. I think there might actually be something like that in the DMG.
That's a fair point. While there ARE problem players/GMs, it does often feel like people who treat the game as an antagonistic competition instead of a social activity.
Seconded, I'd also like to learn more.
It's a predeployment mini game before the match that determines deployment zones. It represents patrols making contact, intelligence and reconnaissance of the field. You alternating placinv patrol markers on the field at most 12 inches away from each other until you run out of patrol markers or get locked down by an enemy patrol marker being placed within 12 inches of yours. From these patrol markers you can place Jump Off points, which is the zone from which your forces will deploy. The Jump Off points placement area is determined by taking one of your patrol markers and 2 of the closest enemy patrol markers and forming intersecting 2 lines with them, making a triangle shaped area that you can place your Jump Off Points. The Jump Off Points must be placed behind or inside cover, otherwise you place the Jump Off point on the edge of the table. I'm not explaining it very well but it's good way to deploy forces near key terrain features youve captured in the patrol phase and get you right into the action instead of deploying 6 inches from the edge of the table and spending turns moving towards the enemy.
If you want a better explanation of it than I could ever write just go to the WW2 files of /hwg/ and download the Chain of Command Rulebook to read the 2ish pages dedicated to it or look up videos of Chain of Command on YouTube
I play B/X. Occasionally, if there's a risky attempt at a task, I roll a fudge dice along to see if it went up or downhill, in addition to the main roll.
>success with no marks = as expected
>success with + mark = better than expected
>success with - mark = worse than expected
>fail with no mark = probable failure
> fail with + mark = probable failure with a hint of a possible recovery (later; i.e. all is not lost)
>fail with - mark = improbable failure
I use it with other rolls too.
Heroquests from Runequest
Dominion’s injury point system, with some minor tweaks for ease of use, easily gets hacked into every game I run. It is satisfying for a martial to chop a dragon’s wings off, but can add a level of grittiness as players accumulate their own permanent scars.
Essentially how I run it is when rolling higher than your target’s armor you can get injury points which are applied to body parts of your choice giving minor stacking negatives per point until the body part becomes permanently mutilated in some way.
That sounds very cool.
Not an RPG but most miniature wargames benefit from Chain of Command’s Patrol Phase
>Chain of Command’s Patrol Phase
Care to elaborate?
2d6 reaction roll
I haven't hacked it into every system I play but despite 5e getting a lot of flak the advantage/disadvantage system is actually a good design idea in general for giving on the fly benefits/penalties instead of a static number. I'd like to use it in other systems.
I disagree completely. Advantage cannot simulate real life situations. Circumstance bonuses and penalties can.
Its more narrative and handwavium, if you've got a crunchier and more realistic game going then I could see your point.
If I were to port Advantage to another system I'd probably use it as the mechanism involved in PCs helping each other, since its a frequent occurance and some systems don't have satisfying mechanics for figuring out what "helping" actually does (though I'm also a fan of ruling too many cooks producing an overall negative).
Inspiration. I'm sure it's a generic answer but I use it in everything.
>Call of Cthulhu
Blessings from Beyond
>Impossible Landscapes
King's Boons
>Night's Black Agents
OPINT
I love rewarding players and I love the "oh crap" moments that lead to people using their tokens to guarantee awful things don't happen.