Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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Lightning's Heraldry said:
So how do game designers becomes game designers? Where do they start? I agree most houserules are bad, most homebrew systems are even terrible. But if you blanket refuse all of them where do people start? I want more good systems to read so I accept that I will have to occasionally read shitty design as a byproduct.
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At what point does someone drawing become an artist?

You don't need a degree in game designology or whatever. You just have to not be a drooling retard smearing finger paint on the mona lisa and calling it an improvement. Now excuse me while I throw up for comparing 5e to the mona lisa by accident.

Where do people start? Wherever they want. Just think things through and take it to someone else first.
Even though I still feel like a noob that barely knows what he's doing, I've been DMing for years, and I'm kind of over new systems unless they offer me something. And that something should be offered right up front. I don't feel the need to fill my room up with TTRPGs I'll never play.

To use 5e homebrew as an example.

My problem with 5e is it's slow, and complex without adding depth.

Spheres 5e. A friend came up to me basically saying "Dredd, you got to try Sphere's 5e!" and the sales pitch is "It allows players to make any character in any setting!" but then I look into it, and it's over 600 perks, all of which interact in different and novel ways, and the DM is supposed to know all of it. I pass. A more complex and slower 5e does nothing for me.

Then there's Nimble. A bunch of house rules and stand alone system that removes unnecessary die rolls and mechanics. A faster, smoother, and more freeform 5e. That I'll go for. Grogs might piss and complain that there's 60 spells instead of the 500 or whatever 5e has now, but when everyone uses the same fireball, silvery barbs, etc. What good does 500 spells do you?

I don't care about 5e Hardcore mode, 5 torches deep, Level Up Advanced 5e, or any of the other homebrew or fixes for 5e. They don't bring anything to the table I don't already have. Everyday Heroes offers a new setting (take GI Joe to Ravenloft! Run a DnD party through Escape From New York!) while Nimble offers a smoother game while being 5e enough to be broadly compatible.

If you're bringing a d20+mod game to the table, what does it do I don't get from the countless OSR and 5e variants?


As for other systems. The same applies. I'm not going to care about PbtA game #5212 unless the setting is extremely interesting. Aliens RPG is a setting people like, while making stress and resource management something that isn't just book keeping. We can argue about how successful it is, but at least it does something to generate interest.

And a final point here. I apply this to board games as well. I don't play new board games these days unless they do something new or spectacular. My head is full of rules for lots of different but similar games that it gets confusing. I don't need a dozen Agricola or Dominion variants. I'll just stick to the few I like.
 
Capsaicin Addict said:
Very accurate, and I say this as someone who's played a fair number of casters. Even in 1E/2E/BECMI a magic-user could bring a tremendous amount of bullshit to the table at higher levels.
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Most of my players were also GMs of their own campaigns and whenever we'd play in each other's campaigns, we'd try to break each other's games. One of my favorites was gnome illusionist/thief which was utterly broken to the point I was forbidden from playing it.
 
Judge Dredd said:
My issue with houserules, and especially homebrew systems, is that most people aren't game designers, and each house rule adds a small amount of mental load and potential for rules conflicts.

eg. I remember HEMA guy telling everybody about his house rules he wanted for a game of 5e he wanted to DM. He never put it together as far as I know, but he wanted hit tables to determine where you were hit, what happened when a part hit 0hp, etc. Basically making every hit nightmare of tables. Spells were added, changed, or removed based on what personally pissed him off. Not in a "I'm removing goodberry because I want a gritty survival game" kind of way, but a "I'm removing hold person because my fighter dumped wisdom and I kept getting fucked over by it whenever even a low level caster entered the scene" kind of way.

I also object to trying to house rule 5e into something it's not. Want a modern game? Play Savage Worlds, or Everyday Heroes, or Spycraft, or CoC, or fucking anything other than 5e. Want a grimdark meat grinder set in Dark Souls? OSR is right there. Shadow of the Demon Lord is supposedly Dark Souls like. I'm fairly sure there's a Dark Souls RPG.
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Look, I can't help that you were playing with a retard. It happens.

But it sounds like HEMA guy wanted to pour way more granularity into his combat that most players want to deal with. Like Phoenix Command for hand to hand combat. The bit about magic, though, shines more light on his problem: he was butthurt that some people had hard counters against him.

Which, I get. It can be frustrating to watch one or more PCs no-sell an attack and/or straight up obliterate an opponent. Them's the breaks. I watched someone cut a golem in half with an acid spell because it was a conjuration effect that didn't allow for spell resistance. Back to the drawing board.

HEMA guy, though, he sounds like he takes it a bit personally.
 
Call me a tourist but I've been deep diving into TTRPGs due being able to run solo campaigns with LLMs. I've tried play with actual humans before but it's tough for all the reasons everyone already knows. I've probably had more fun with solo play than any of the actual plays I've done.

I condense the Cyberpunk 2020 core book down to the essentials, and built modular lore dumps, mostly from OCRing the Night Cities Source books. From this the LLMs do a decent job at following the game mechanics, requesting dice rolls for skill checks as needed. Not awful with tracking skill bonuses, but I still do it myself. There's a universal issue with LLM that as the context gets longer the reasoning starts to break down. You need to make sure the LLM doesn't start hallucinating, at a certain point it can be like co-GMing or assisted creative wring. Eventually you have reload your prompts and start in a "fresh" context. So you have to journal your campaign in summarized form (you can get the LLM to help generate these).

GLM 4.7 is my favorite free model, but z.ai has massively oversold their services, so it can be slow (especially during Indian work hours).

PS. Death in Space looks cool
 
Judge Dredd said:
There's a twilight zone episode called "Steel" which supposedly based on the same story. I haven't seen Real Steel, but I'm guessing it's different despite the same concept. Robot boxers.
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Both are based off a short story.

Adamska said:
It's not an issue when it's baked into the design IMO. There's a reason there's the term linear fighters, quadratic wizards, and it's been a thing since the 1970s. You sacrifice early game fragility in order to lay down the hurt later on. It was a reward for you not being killed either through good usage of your spells, or your party doing its job. Complaining about this is sort of like complaining about roles in Shadowrun, or the Clans/Tribes/Traditions in the World of Darkness; it's baked in and just play something else.
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The issue is after 3.5 when everyone levels up at the same pace/same XP.

when a Fighter is 7th level and MU is trying to make it to 4th, it levels the playing field a bit.

4e's solution was to make it so everyone could become a caster and buff spells used skills instead of stats to determine success. +5 from INTing to 20 was still nice, but given you got +5 for having a skill trained it reduced the importance of having min-maxed stats.

Bœuf Bourguignon said:
Symbaroum
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Never heard of it.
 
When was the last time anyone here did a True and Honest XP based levelling system? I've always wanted to do it and even have a simple system built in my head to do so, but never got around to it.

Part of me thinks that it would alter the dopamine hits in the group wildly when there's the explicit gamification aspect of DO THING, GET NUMBER, MORE NUMBERS MAKE YOU BETTER.
 
Brain Problems said:
When was the last time anyone here did a True and Honest XP based levelling system? I've always wanted to do it and even have a simple system built in my head to do so, but never got around to it.

Part of me thinks that it would alter the dopamine hits in the group wildly when there's the explicit gamification aspect of DO THING, GET NUMBER, MORE NUMBERS MAKE YOU BETTER.
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What the fuck are you talking about? Milestone leveling is for faggots.
 
Brain Problems said:
When was the last time anyone here did a True and Honest XP based levelling system? I've always wanted to do it and even have a simple system built in my head to do so, but never got around to it.

Part of me thinks that it would alter the dopamine hits in the group wildly when there's the explicit gamification aspect of DO THING, GET NUMBER, MORE NUMBERS MAKE YOU BETTER.
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I don't play or run systems with discrete levels anymore. They are simply inferior to gradualist advancement as far as a feeling of natural growth.
 
LovisXVI said:
I don't play or run systems with discrete levels anymore. They are simply inferior to gradualist advancement as far as a feeling of natural growth.
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This. Tracking xp and nothing happening for ages and then suddenly a huge spike in power sucks, and doing detailed tracking of xp for that is a fucking slog.

Also unless you're playing a system with detailed XP tracking that uses levels, actually has different level progression for the power scaling of players, what's the point? If everyone requires 5000 xp to level up, but Bob missed a session and was short 150 xp, that just means he ends up leveling up a session later and it isn't like you're going to do that mid-session.

Blarmed&Dangerous said:
What the fuck are you talking about? Milestone leveling is for faggots.
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Yes but if you're just doing "these encounters that the party WILL do or I'll just replace them with an equivalent" and they're all leveling up at the same rate, unless for some reason you're providing extra XP at random and not just for solving an encounter a different way, it may as well be milestone leveling anyway.
 
Brain Problems said:
When was the last time anyone here did a True and Honest XP based levelling system? I've always wanted to do it and even have a simple system built in my head to do so, but never got around to it.

Part of me thinks that it would alter the dopamine hits in the group wildly when there's the explicit gamification aspect of DO THING, GET NUMBER, MORE NUMBERS MAKE YOU BETTER.
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My current DM is doing 5e with XP-based leveling, rewarding XP for both combat (split evenly among the group) and good roleplaying as a bonus for individual players. In theory, it's not a bad idea, encouraging players to consider how to approach situations by using everything in their characters' toolbox. In practice, I can tell that it's somewhat tedious for him (and for us) whenever he tosses a chunk of XP around, and it doesn't really change the leveling flow that much. I think all of our characters are maybe a few hundred XP apart at most, and like @p1138 said, if someone was just a little bit shy of leveling up with the rest of the group at the end of a session, it would be stupid to hold off until the middle of the next session for them to catch up.

If you like keeping track of all those numbers and such, more power to you. Personally, I would use XP internally while designing the campaign as a way to keep track of how much stuff the characters have to go through before they level up next, using the given XP values for combat and assigning values to plot-related events or as a reward for things like clearing a dungeon. Then I can determine if I need to add more things to do before a level up, or remove some if it feels like it's going to take too long. Dunno if I'd communicate XP earned at the end of a session or only tell them when they've leveled up, but it would at least let players know roughly how far along they are.
 
Brain Problems said:
When was the last time anyone here did a True and Honest XP based levelling system? I've always wanted to do it and even have a simple system built in my head to do so, but never got around to it.

Part of me thinks that it would alter the dopamine hits in the group wildly when there's the explicit gamification aspect of DO THING, GET NUMBER, MORE NUMBERS MAKE YOU BETTER.
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My last DnD campaign, which was a while ago. I found that due to my group being both larger and often much more busted in taking down monsters that CR valuation and EXP is just a bit on the jank side. A hard fight often forces me to give them too much EXP because of the shittery they can do when motivated. Easier fights also don't do much, so pacing was always fucked.

Milestones ain't perfect either, but it's working well for my purposes, especially since it's easier to mark and balance for.
Manly_Brony said:
If WFRP 2ed counts than me, me, me, me, me.
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Yeah, that one usually works just fine by my reckoning.
 
Brain Problems said:
When was the last time anyone here did a True and Honest XP based levelling system? I've always wanted to do it and even have a simple system built in my head to do so, but never got around to it.
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When I ran Pathfinder 2 Abomination Vault. Which ended last year.

It's a flawed system for reasons others went over. But PF2 in particular is brutal because there's big power bumps between levels. So either they're a level or two under and get stomped, or they're a level or two over and crush everything. I switched to "fast" leveling (800exp per level instead of 1000) at some point in part because they were undermanned, but by the end nothing could really harm them as written. Even the built in buffs to scale encounters did little.

p1138 said:
If everyone requires 5000 xp to level up, but Bob missed a session and was short 150 xp, that just means he ends up leveling up a session later and it isn't like you're going to do that mid-session.
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This created another issue for me where people who couldn't be bothered to turn up didn't get XP and thus had less motivation to turn up, and it punished people who took time out of the game due to work or family obligations. So I ended up boosting the latter to match the current party rank anyway.

I think to get exp to work you'd need a large group to run a, and I know this a long dead topic, West Marshes game with a party of competitive and/or self motivated players. ie. Unicorns that don't exist.

One I did have some success with was session based leveling with catchup. PCs needed 2 sessions to level, 1 if they were behind, and 4 if they were ahead. The campaign only made it to level 3 or 4 so not enough of a good sample size.
 
Judge Dredd said:
This created another issue for me where people who couldn't be bothered to turn up didn't get XP and thus had less motivation to turn up, and it punished people who took time out of the game due to work or family obligations. So I ended up boosting the latter to match the current party rank anyway.
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Oh yeah, for grown adults who have other shit to do, if you're actually calculating XP like that it can easily(especially at the earlier levels) turn into a negative reinforcement scenario or even just not wanting to be the equivalent of a ball and chain that the party needs to carry until they can catch up. If you've got other responsibilities, or hell even other hobbies "I may as well go do something else" can become appealing and it's already hard enough to find a table that can stick together for any length of time on a regular basis as it is.

Now running catch up sessions on an off day can help with this, but you can't always explain what Steve the fighter was doing last week on a mini adventure when he just popped out of existence in the middle of a dungeon crawl, and then popped back into existence at the party's camp. It also means scheduling sessions on other days which can eat up even more time in a schedule.

Judge Dredd said:
One I did have some success with was session based leveling with catchup. PCs needed 2 sessions to level, 1 if they were behind, and 4 if they were ahead. The campaign only made it to level 3 or 4 so not enough of a good sample size.
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I'm not sure that's a great idea either unless the game you're running has an incredibly tight focus(basically being a railroad). Can't say that I've played using such a system, but in something like FFGs systems where gradual character progression happens via session xp, it tends to make sessions farting around town not doing a lot ending up too similar in reward to sessions that were hard fought battles for the PCs, if that makes any sense.
 
p1138 said:
gradual character progression happens via session xp, it tends to make sessions farting around town not doing a lot ending up too similar in reward to sessions that were hard fought battles for the PCs, if that makes any sense.
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It does, which is why you don't calculate it like that. A session would be playing ...well, a session. At the time I was running an episodic, combat focused near-railroad. Players could choose things, but a "session" was the planned combat encounter/mini dungeon. I was running it almost like Stargate where each session they'd portal in to some location, solve a problem, leave.

It turns out there's a bunch of these settings. Planescape, Infinite Staircase, The Labyrinth, and City of Arches all seem to follow this theme, and those are the named ones I know of.

I had a large pool of players most of which played each week. Some of which could only play once every two weeks. For what it's worth, it went well. It was me who had to flake and had to postpone the game for 10-15 weeks. When I came back, everyone was scattered and it never picked up again. I also tried a similar leveling up system for a bunch of one shots that shared a setting, but the various game systems stopped that.
 
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