What do you guys think of using multipliers on games?

In my combat system I'm thinking about using a "damage multiplier", which multiplies the degree of your success in hitting by a value as damage (Roll+Attack-Defense)*DM (normal weapons have DM of 1, 1/2 or 1/3, and all damage is rounded down) DM, any suggestions on this?

Feel free to ask anything to me too, even if you can't properly answer my question...

>>bump

www.nullstrike.com

My current hobby project, a ~28mm skirmish game. Always looking for feedback on mechanics on army lists (or the couple pieces of fluff I've written so far)

>>45908500

Fractional multipliers should be fine. You'd want to be very careful about balancing them as they get bigger though, since that will escalate quickly.

Also, some people might be turned off by having to do math.

>>45908500
You need to take a step back and think about what you're trying to accomplish with the mechanics, and whether this is a useful tool for it.

For example, Rogues To Riches is designed to have a variety of different ways for it to end up that it takes about five turns to kill a monster with similar stats to a PC. That ends up with accuracy, damage, ignoring armor, and AOE as levers. But those options don't belong in the game without the goal they're helping meet.

>>45909117
I will try to take a look at the fluff (I"m not really into skirmish)

>>45909158
I've been working on the statistics, but I'm worried about the latter

>>45909212
I'm trying to make basic precision focused characters as good as raw strenght ones in closed combat. This was the best I could've come up with so far without making use of hit tables and special conditions.

I've went down a weird rabbit hole where character progression and plot progression are tied together. You can spend a few levels on starting and resolving a revenge plot, for example. This works out fine - mechanical-sounding options like taking a level in Paladin have plot hook generators stapled to them, plot-sounding things like trying to prove yourself to your father have mechanical benefits.

Getting a magic item is also be something you do with a level, and maybe you decide to unlock its secrets and it gets stronger (spending more levels). Again, it works.

I'm having a bit of trouble reconciling this with mounts, though. You can get a horse and level it into being your trusty steed and that's fine. But it's also entirely normal for a hero to end up riding something straight up better like a pegasus or griffin later in the story. Do you pre-bake in a plot where your trusty steed dies and then later you find something cooler? Are you just getting better at handling animals and riding the best thing you can handle? How is that latter option compatible with people who actually want a horseplot?

>>45909469
It's not necessary....It can be done this way, but I think it's more a matter of what you can get than what you can handle...You just leave your horse on your house/ stable or set him free before turning to another steed, if player says he wants to give it to another player said player will have to level up it again in order to gain its trust and all of its abilities..

This sounds interesting, very interesting if well done...

>>45909414
> I'm trying to make basic precision focused characters as good as raw strenght ones in closed combat. This was the best I could've come up with so far without making use of hit tables and special conditions.
Ah. Multipliers generally favor hybrid builds, I don't think it's quite what you want. (7x1 is less than 4x4, even though both are 8 points.)

If you have a typical roll-to-hit, roll-to-damage system, you can get what you want by having degrees of success on to-hit rolls, and using those to grant extra damage. The extra damage needs to scale more slowly than damage scales for strength characters though, otherwise precision is strictly better.

If you pick something with multipliers anyway, I recommend doing 1x, 2x, 3x instead of 1/3x, 1/2x, and 1x. It's much easier for most people to calculate. You can lower the original number being multiplied to make everything work out the same.

>>45909648
I've been a little more worried about having a mulplication or division operation to be used frequently on my combat system.

I'm kind of doing that already my formula for damage is : (Attack roll - "AC") * Weapon Multiplier + Weapon Damage (Which varies with Strenght), with weapons with better multipliers have less pure damage. In the end what you get is that some builds have a great range of damage, some builds have reliable damage, and some builds are balanced

>>45909976
>>muh can't write in english while distracted

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hey!
i need some input on an idea i had for a pathfinder game i wanted to run

basically there is this city that is surrounded by a dense forest with monsters n shit in it, generally they didnt cause too much of an issue until the ancient imperial forest dragon that watched over the forest was killed by the ancient imperial underworld dragon. because of this, there was no one to keep the balance so the monsters began to overpopulate the forest. because of the overpopulation of monsters now threatening the lives of the people inside city, a group of old adventurers overthrew the king.(the fucker wasn't doing anything to help the people) with the king gone they purged the nobles and took over the guard and created the Defense force.
sadly though this only lasted so long, the guards quickly died off, leaving the city vulnerable. the old adventurers made a plan. they would give anyone who wanted to join the defense force free stay at the inns, free food, and access to guilds and the training they provide previously accessible only to the rich and highly skilled, as well the boat fare if they wished to come from another land. anyone in the defense force under age would be granted total freedom as if they where "of age" giving younger kids who join the defense force the right to marry of their own free will, own property/business, drink, etc....

the players would be defense force cadets, all joining for their own reasons and then join together in a squad. they will be given a small quota to fill (killing monsters) in order to stay in the defense force.

thoughts?
as a player would you want to play this?
what issues could you foresee coming from this?
is there anything i should add to it to make things more interesting?

>>45909117
You could work a little bit more on the Lore section, when exactly and what was the Great Collapse, who exactly the Crusaders were (humans or aliens, or both?), when the Terran crushed the minor alien races, they exterminated it or just explored it work and resources?

>>45910087
City survival, why not.
With a good Gm I would certainly play this.
It's hard to point at some issue at this point, except for stuff on the fluff...
There should be rewards for staying in this defense force, or else I see no reason why people should really come or stay to defend this city (only reason I can see so far is to get some good training)

>>45909597
Leaving your horse in the stable would be equivalent to voluntarily going down some levels. Which you can do: it's not like this thing is going to have rules about experience points or anything.

I think you're right, and I'm overthinking it. I can put in a cross-reference to a grieving plot if people want to ham it up when their horse dies. But otherwise you just go down some levels by losing or ditching the horse, and being a couple levels behind the party you can now spend two at once on something hard to break apart like having a griffin.

>This sounds interesting, very interesting if well done...
Thanks! There are still some open questions I need to work through before I'm sure I can do it well.

This is an outgrowth of a system called Rogues To Riches that I published on /tg/ a few years ago. If you dig up a copy you can find some hints of this direction in it (Paladins do particularly well). After publishing I wanted to ditch the D&D-esque classes and rewrite with classes that more tightly fit common character arcs. That had some problems, which I just recently realized can be fixed with ...sort of extreme multiclassing (classes exist, but they're merely suggestions).

One of the things Rogues to Riches does extremely well is combat balance, but it does it using tricks that lean heavily on having a class system. For example, Fighters get +1 accuracy with anything that's a weapon and Battle Mages can enchant their weapons to ignore armor. The game's math conspires to make these equal. But if you combine the two your effective accuracy goes way outside the power curve. But you can't because it's a class system. I'm still working on alternate ways to make that happen without classes.

>>45910510
the people primarily joing the defense force would be younger individuals who cant find work,have no place to stay, have no money, etc... its a way to get the previously non functional members of society trained and working for a more than fair trade.

>>45910709
Yeah, putting your life on the line along with other urchins and low-lifes trying not to suffer horrible deaths, just so that you can improve you chances of not getting killed and have something to eat and somewhere to stay while you don't die sure seems worthwhile...And also, bringing experienced folks to work on this defence force sure would be a terrible idea and even if it wasn't they sure would come only because they are good guys and there is free food/inn/transport for them...Irony aside, you need to put some other rewards, or either once anyone reach some basic skill/resources level they would quit this force for something better/safer and all you would ever have is untrained forces

>>45910640
About classes you could probably use some "paths" insteads of classes, for instance you need to have X steps in an Y Path in order to take this "Upgrade/Level Up" which will provide X steps in the followying Z Paths...

>>45911132
> "paths"
It's pretty much just feat chains, albeit in a system with particularly large, chunky feats. I like the name "paths" for the chains though. Sounds nice and melodramatic when you capitalize it. And it naturally leads to calling feats Steps instead, which breaks some assumptions people will have going in about feats.

The idea I have is that the game will have Archetypes, which are collections of related Paths. At character creation, you'll take the first Step on two different Paths, with it being highly recommended but not at all required to pick two from the same Archetype. When you level up, you take a new Step, going down an existing Path or starting a new one. Some Paths, like "you get a horse" won't be in any Archetype, but still freely available whenever.

>>45911682
Yeah, and it sounds lots of fun, like multiclassing, except that you are actually supposed to do it and create variations on your "theme"... but balancing those will be kind of hard do (use some "loose" mechanics or else things can get ugly)

>>45909117
Ah, I see you've added the not!Guard. Coming along smoothly.

Trenchbreaker anon here, taking on a three-letter acronym since that seems popular.

My artist who did the mecha art for Trenchbreaker so far seems to have dropped out of contact. Does anyone know any good mecha artists?

>>45912190
>>mfw mine are just my initials...

>>45911845
Outside of combat, Rogues To Riches uses something extremely loose, where you can just make up the names of your skills. It's descended from Risus, with slightly different dice mechanics that end up making it feel more serious.

In combat, it's a typical tactical grid thing, with some advancements. There are some complicated math equations that keep things balanced. (The math doesn't appear in the book. Pulling that off made it even more complicated.)

I'm currently sitting and trying to develop a card game. In it each player has a field that represent their nations divided in four parts and can discard a card and/or refuse drawing new cards to place more tokens on the field - either their own or opponent's. To play more powerful cards you need to have token in certain category outnumber opponent's.

What can I do to prevent stalemating?

>>45912723
I think rewarding taking risks would be what you are after. Maybe putting card that have bonuses for aggressive play styles like +1tokens if you took a province or some thing

What are the important roles of a monster manual in an RPG system? Especially in a game that already has solid monster-creation rules.

I can think of several:
- An extra channel to convey the setting
- Something fast for a GM that's winging it (or lazy)
- Demonstrating how to express classic monsters in the system

But I'd like to hear any I missed.

At what point do you feel comfortable to tell verisimilitude to go fuck itself in favor of fun mechanics?

I'm writing ye olde attrition-based dungeon crawler but due to the combat mechanics competent players can often avoid taking any damage. Casters suffer attrition via using up their spells, which is required to get out of some tricky situations unscathed, but warrior-types can just keep going and going like annoying energizers. I'm considering giving warriors a mana pool equivalent in the form of stamina and make them use a bit of it for special attacks even though this doesn't really correlate to reality. This will connect them to the core theme of attrition.

>>45915342
Maybe have warrior equipment break as they use them? Or have them easily overwhelmed by multiple attackers.

>>45915342
If possible, rig the math so there's still a few likely points of damage.

>>45915377
That was my first thought too.

You can only carry so many swords into the dungeon, and they're all slowly getting chipped and worse after each battle. Adds a little bit of resource management, where of course you use your most beat up sword to fight goblins, but when you hit a mid-tier monster you need to decide between using the slightly bent sword or bringing out the still-good one and not having perfect equipment for the BBEG.

So, I'm working on a wargame, and as I don't have a miniature manufacturing or distribution capability, the game will be utilizing pawns that can be made out of foamcore or cardboard. When the game has a website or complete rulebook, it will include printable templates for the pawns as well as printable skins for them, featuring artwork of the game's units.
My question is that, since the game features vehicles, at least at this late-conceptual stage, how do I execute them? I was thinking of doing something like Star Wars pocketmodels. Players print templates and skins for the vehicle, cut them out of foamcore and slot them together. My first prototype vehicle template is only 7 components, so it's still very accessible for the unskilled hobbyist.
I'm looking for advice regarding these vehicles. Is what I'm doing the best way to get cheap minis out to anyone who wants to play the game?
FYI: the feel I'm going for is most comparable to an in-between of 4th and 5th ed 40k in a harder scifi setting

>>45917796
This is not what you asked but I suggest that you use chits. Chits tend to lead to the game being considered to be more niche but are commonly accepted by hardcore wargamers who are used to them.

>>45912723
No cards for discarding/removing opponent's cards/tokens? Or perhaps have an additional method of scoring?

>>45917796
I agree with >>45917840, chits are whole lot easier to PnP. One thing about PnP stuff is the more effort it takes to make a full game, the less likely people will be bothered to make it, especially untested and unproven games. There's definitely people out there willing to make the effort, but there aren't many.

One way you could go about it is using cardboard stands, which is similar but less taxing to do than using templates. Another way is to completely use cards for everything. Both of these methods are basically print-then-cut, which can be done fairly quickly.

>>45910510

Expanding the lore is on my to-do list. (http://www.nullstrike.com/notes) It's something I mostly just work on when I've got some inspiration for it, honestly.

>>45911999
I've added some infantry, at least. Haven't touched the vehicles yet.

>>45914797
It's also a chance to sell an extra book and make some extra money. Can't forget that.

>>45915342
Maybe an energy pool. If your warriors are all front line types though, having them conserving their health might be enough. (having to track the condition on all your gear doesn't sound very fun, but you might be able to make it work)

>>45917796
I have considered something similar for when I get farther along with null strike - I was looking into using poker chips or similar tokens for infantry, but haven't found a good solution for vehicles yet.

>>45912723
Sounds like you should playtest it a few times, see how it actually plays and then adjust as needed.

>>45917840
>>45917988
By chits you mean something like coins or chips in place of minis, right?
I'll strongly consider that, but I feel like there needs to be some kind of vertical element to help visualize shooting attacks and cover and the like.
If I do produce printable chits, it will be in addition to optional pawns/vehicles

>>45917858
Yes, lots of cards are about moving them around , adding or removing, so I guess it can still work.

>>45917796
I've always thought it would be interesting to design a war game around existing junk people can find/buy.

Army men, chess pieces, hotwheels, dead spiders.

>>45919707
That's pretty much all early wargames were.
See H.G. Wells' contributions and other games of the time. It's all about using whatever one would have in their home.
Needless to say, these concepts weren't popular, less so after miniatures and game-specific tokens were introduced and Wargames really took off.

Posting the reason for me wanting to do so would take too long so I'll open with the bottom line instead: how can I dramatically extend the duration of a deck-building game a la Dominion?

>>45919991
Darn, posted too soon.

The problem is that at a certain point a deck gets too fat for new cards to be significant and allowing a lot of deck thinning makes players quickly reach the point where they have a near-optimal deck and further cards just weaken the deck.

Does anyone actually use the term 'Patter' for sleight of hand anymore? I feel like I've explained what Legerdemain means more times than I have players, it's probably not the best term.

>>45920046
Teaching players new words is a time-honored tradition of roleplaying games. Don't drop it.

>>45919991
That's a toughie. Do you really want to intentionally bog it down? I guess I would add an additional phase that certain cards only work during.

>>45919991
>>45920031
Probably an interaction somewhere else that makes deckbuilding not as straight forward "play all cards in my hand, buy new cards I can afford, get all points possible, end turn", since that's where the snappiness of most deckbuilders come from. I'm using area control combined with deckbuilding in one of my projects, you get a selection of 3 cards when you control an area, then if you improve that area you get 1 card. SInce you need to collect resources and do stuff like fending off attacks for a bit, every new card takes time to get, and the decision of which card to get is ever more important.

>>45912190
i really dig the art of the Hard:suit guy and its varied so maybe you could ask him?

>>45920031
>>45919991
It would help to know your actual goal, since it informs design decisions. For example, whether it's more desirable to patch fat decks to be enjoyable or patch thin decks to upgrade more slowly.

One useful thing is cards that care about the part of your deck outside of your hand. In Dominion parlance: "Reveal the top 5 cards of your deck and play all the treasures, put the rest back in any order." That should be more effective with multiple resources.

There's also this thing that some free to play games use to pad themselves out (and it's so effective that it's illegal in Korea). The only way to get the next better thing is to combine two of the previous thing. So if Remodel in Dominion was phrased, "Trash two cards with the same cost. Gain a card costing 1 more," and that was the only/primary way to improve your deck. This slows things down and makes worse cards desirable in a way that deck thinning can't solve.

I wanted to make a game two people could play on a sheet of paper with only a pen. Something more complex than tic-tac-toe or seabattle.
So it obviously should have full information, some geometry-based principle, no grid-based tableau (it might be unmarked paper) and no moving figures whatsoever.
I'm a bit stuck on mechanics. Any ideas where I can get some inspiration?

>>45921387
Dots and Boxes?

>>45921421
Nope, it's lame. I was thinking more of drawing (elemental) symbols that formed combinations that gave players abilities. For example, you should start with being able to draw one basic symbol per turn near your other symbols and progressing from there (to drawing nonbasic symbols or several at once or far away).

>>45921247
>The only way to get the next better thing is to combine two of the previous thing.
Not him, but ooh, this actually might work pretty well with deckbuilders, like some sort of analog 2048 using cards. Hopefully it comes with some sort of mechanic to max out the card's affection for bonuses.

>>45921387
You're probably gonna need to look at a wide array of games to get inspiration for something that specific, so go crazy and watch playthroughs of everything.

My first idea for a game using only a sheet of paper and a pen would be to first divide the sheets in half, then play a word game like shiritori or something. The one who loses needs to draw the last word on their side of the paper, and the aim is to draw a thing with a coherent story or message.

Another idea is to first declare areas that the players own on the paper, maybe by drawing circles or squares. There'd have to be a restriction on size, shape or placement. Then both players put a set amount of markers in their areas, maybe 20 each. Then players take turns drawing a line from their areas to the other player's, without crossing any lines or the opponent's areas that they aren't moving into. Stop once there's no possible moves, most successful lines win.

>>45921555
You asked for inspiration, not for us to guess what you were thinking.

>>45920497
That's a pretty neat trick. Good luck with that game.

This thread has to be the nicest general on this site. This is probably why it is so slow and prone to page 10 evaporation haha

>>45922834
Kill yourself anon, also: bump

>>45922277
Chill, dude(ette).

>>45921617
I've been digging through interwebz and bgg in particular and had found this. This guy thinks in direction I was thinking.
https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/50637/making-games-you-play
If anyone interested in similar themes I'd advise looking into "Microscope" and "How to host a dungeon" as a comparatively famous examples of rules-light setting-building games. What they lack is "game" as it is, i.e. some kind of competition between players. This's exactly what I wanted to add.

I'm writing up a quick thing on how to play Risus+Aspects. Different dice mechanics are appropriate for different genres, so you have to pick before starting a campaign. I felt like sharing them:

Serious - Roll (2+your dice)d6, keep the highest 3. If you invoke an aspect, add a dice, but still just keep the highest 3.

Hammy - Roll (2+your dice)d6, keep the highest 3. If you invoke an aspect, add a dice, and keep all the dice instead of just the highest 3.

Zany - Roll (your dice)d6. If you invoke an aspect, add a dice.

Stupid - Roll (your dice)d6. If you invoke an aspect, add a dice. If you roll a 6, find and roll an extra dice. Keep going until you stop rolling 6s or you can't find any more dice.

>>45917796
If done well, the cut-out vehicles could go over well. Reminds me of that pirate ship game.

>>45917796

Places like Staples and Kinkos offer 3d printing services these days.

You might consider building some models that people could have printed

>tfw you want to post your rules but you're afraid of them being confusing or just plain stupid

I may post them right before I go to bed, just so I don't need to see the negative feedback that will kill me until the morning.

>>45934721
I posted a system to /tg/ once where players had a single secret combat number, 1-100, and combats were resolved in a single opposed roll of 1d6 + that number. (Note the theme is samurai fights.)

And people went bananas for that..

So don't worry too much about it. /tg/ is pretty reasonable. They only really get cranky when you write something that breaks their expectations for what it's going to be. Also most things are forgiveable if they're short.

>>45934721
But that's good feedback. Knowing where people find things confusing or badly written means you know what to fix or work on.

>>45934721
Posting right before going to bed could make you curious enough to see any responses that you might not be able to sleep though. Plus what >>45922834 said, this general is usually pretty chill, in multiple meanings.

I'm still trying to decide a damage resolution system. The problem is, I'm trying to keep the idea of rolling off to hit with attacks, but I can't come up with a system that feels like it goes with that mechanic. Current mechanic is:
>Each player rolls D12 for each point of Attack or Defense
>Chooses highest
>Attacker modifies their roll for bonuses and penalties
>If higher than Defender's roll, the attack hits
And that's where I'm stuck with how to proceed.

All I've got so far is that if you hit, you roll so many dice, depending on weapon stats, add the weapon's power, and if you roll the armor or higher, it wounds. A lot of other ideas that I have are still too swingy or bog down things too much, like I thought of including the degree of success into the resolution, without it being the sole factor like my current system uses, but I feel that would also bog it down.

When you are playing a game with about 8-10 guys per side, how much bog down do people think is acceptable?

>>45935951
>armor or higher, it wounds
Have a look at Halo: Fleet Battles' system, it works sort of like what you have, except it uses successes rather than roll over/under. You might get some inspiration from it.

As for bog down, what form would the bogging down take exactly? Damage calculation, effect resolution, clean up, etc.?

>>45921387
When I was a kid another kid taught me a game he called "Bacteria". I never seen anyone else whom I didn't teach it in turn play it.

It's played on square field, with each player puts a queen of his colour into a corner. Player must draw two crosses connected to their queens. Up to two of their crosses (called bacteria) could consume adjustent opponents bacteria by filling the grid they are in. Those can be used as continuation to the line next turn or to use your bacteria to consume opponents bacteria through this communication squares.

It was a fun game, but it had its balancing issues. We could make it great. Or maybe it's already is.

>D&D-style crawler
>Want to keep healers useful but not required
>When damage is taken the character's maximum health is reduced by half of the amount until the party exits the dungeon to rest
>Health is recovered up to the current max health at the end of the encounter
>Healers just allow healing in-combat
>Party still has to rest after so-and-so fights
Is the solution reasonable?

>>45938244
Half max health at a single damage seems weird. Mind clarifying on this?

What you could do is whenever the healers are used to heal (or any other method of healing maybe), for every one point recovered, max health is reduced by one point. This basically represents them getting tired as they go. Resting completely recovers their health and increases their max health back up, but a single session/period of rest would only increase it up to half the difference between their current max health and their true max health.

This way, a party with no healer needs to rest more often, but still perfectly viable, as they'd recover completely each rest. A party with a healer can press their luck and go with less rest, but would still end up needing to rest in order to recover max health.

>>45939379
>Half max health at a single damage seems weird. Mind clarifying on this?
Taking N damage simultaneously reduces max health by N/2.

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>>45935837
>>45935008
>>45935006
Okay, here it is then. Keep in mind that this hasn't even been playtested (or 100% proofchecked) so there may be some odd things in the rules that seem to contradict other rules. That will be sorted out soon, but the majority of the rules SHOULD be written as intended. Kinda hard to judge some of it without seeing actual cards, but hey, that's still a work in progress.

>>45939601
Ahh, so basically the exact same thing as I suggested then, silly me. Definitely reasonable then.

>>45939682
It is my fault for not bothering to be clearer. Thanks for responding.

>>45939656
Might want to reword "...purchased, played, or removed from the game" while describing the discard pile, in order to not confuse it with the other 'removed from the game' sentence in the following paragraph.

Gaining victory points every turn for each controlled location could end up making it easy for the lead player to maintain their position, unless Influence balance is particularly swingy. Plus all players do it apparently, not just the current player? And speaking of which, it's unclear whether this a two player game, or if it can support multiple, though most of the rules do look like it's focused on two players.

Why would reaching 25 Influence win you the game when you also have victory points in play?

How does a character become Fatigued?

Overall, despite needing better clarity on a few things, there are some pretty neat ideas, combining area control with deckbuilding. The 'defender chooses which cards to face' is a pretty neat thing too, making the decision of where extra attackers should be placed pretty important. The only problem I can see is again the possibility that the player behind in victory points could find it hard to catch up at all, unless gaining or reducing influence in a location is easy to do. Maybe rather than winning/losing the game at 25 Influence, have it end at 25, then add up points from the cards you have in you deck, like in Ascension?

>>45936042
I've thought about dice pools before, but I'm trying to keep the number of dice low.

The other thing I have to keep in mind is that, due to how morale checks work, I have to keep health pools relatively high.

How does this sound:
>Roll off as describe earlier
>Roll a D12 for every strike on the weapon
>Compare to the armor of the target
>Any hits that roll equal to or higher causes damage
>Amount of damage is determined by the power stat of the weapon
>If the to hit roll difference is high, something like 4+, then you get +1 to rolls against armor
>Weapons with Armor Piercing(X) get +X to rolls against armor

For example, a model shoots a basic assault rifle at the target and hits. The assault rifle gets 2 strikes with a power of '2', versus a basic human in combat gear, giving an armor of '7' and 6 or 7 health. You roll 2D12 and for each '7' rolled, the model takes 2 points of damage. If the initial roll off to hit had the attacker win by 4 or more, then damage would be inflicted on a 6+ instead.

>>45940484
Tha main thing I liked about Fleet Battles was the degrading shield and layers of armor on the ships. But yeah, I'm not sure how you'd use that alongside high health pools.

That seems alright, you even have a form of exploding dice when you roll well enough. Though I wonder if you should still have the 'roll to hit modifiers calculation' thing where it is though. Applying the modifiers before rolling the dice could be a way to make that part of damage resolution less fussy.

Also, how many units are you having again? Was it 10 per player?

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For an RPG that has trinary conflict resolution and no "naturally occurring" critical successes or critical failures (all of that falls to fate point-style resources), is it really so bad to use a plain 1d6 for task resolution?

Every +/- 1 on the d6 is +/- 16.666%, which simply means that there are no fiddly minor bonuses (which I dislike) and each +/- 1 represents a major shift in competence or circumstances.

>>45940741
Nope, nothing wrong with that.

In fact, I'd say only using some number of d6s is a good thing, since it opens up the number of people who have the materials already by quite a bit. Particularly if it's 5d6 or less, since that's a very common number to have for dice games like Yahtzee. (And 1d6 is less than 5d6.)

>>45940707
Degrading like that wouldn't fit, since its an infantry focused game. And yeah, everything needs to be cleaned up for how its worded, the general idea is the better you hit, the more likely you are to damage.

10 or 12 would be pushing the high end of models. Around 6 to 8 is the idea for average size, with more elite forces going lower, like the demons could technically make a full force with only 2 models.

>>45940426
Thanks for the feedback, a lot of the things you brought up are issues that will likely be quickly fixed after a few playtests, just to see how they would best be changed. Glad you like the idea of area control + deckbuilding, I really wanted to have deckbuilding but not as the main focus.

Thanks for the feedback!

File: trenchbreaker.png (438 KB, 753x640) Image search: [Google]

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>>45912190
Hey I love drawing mecha. Do get in contact if you like what you see. Picture related, it's something I painted last couple of hours.

>>45942083
Sorry my oldfag is showing (no more email in Options), my email is [email protected]

Okay, here's a big one: are systems which allow you to build player characters of various power levels but do not allow you to reallocate resources at any point badly designed? The point when you make a character is at the beginning of a campaign, when you know little of the game. As you play the game you get better but are stuck with the suboptimal choices of your past self. This would be fine if you could retool your character at will but most games do not allow for that.

How do you address this issue? I can see two solutions, both of which have their own problems:
1) Just allow the player to rebuild between sessions. The problem is that this kind of clashes with the fiction of most roleplaying games.
2) Ensure all build choices are balanced. This is very difficult and only even remotely possible if you keep the number of build options down.

Thoughts?

>>45942421
Not allowing reallocation of resources is only a single mechanic, it is all the other cogs in a system that determine whether it is badly designed. If the rest of the gears are not tuned to correctly function with each other, that is bad design.

If you're going have such a mechanic in your system, ensure that it is not at odds with the rest of the game. Construct the campaign such that those suboptimal choices either pose a challenge to the character, or prove to be an asset to them. Have flexibility in allowing the players to solve problems in multiple ways, allowing to them to come up with a unique solution.

Even if this wasn't about RPGs, letting a player's choices during setup affect the entirety of the game is only a good idea if it is flexible enough to let the player choose another path if they want to. Take for example Roll/Race for the Galaxy. You always start with a random home world that stays for the rest of the game. You could use the world's ability to your advantage, but the game also lets you focus on something else instead.

So in short, if you have a fixed resources mechanic, then the rest of the game shouldn't revolve completely around said mechanic. Rather, they should revolve around what the player's actions and decisions are under those restrictions.

>>45940426
Also, how does this sound for the rewording of your first point:

>The discard pile is where most non-character cards go after they are purchased, played, or removed FROM PLAY.

>Cards placed in the banished pile are essentially removed from the game FOR THE REMAINDER OF PLAY.