Inspired by Floors, >>46002754
I decided to try as well.
Feel free to brainstorm and discuss what you'd like from a new skirmish game.
A what now?
>>46025036
Check the link. >>46024933
>>46024933
I think you need to start the ball rolling OP. Tell people what a skirmish game is, provide some example sets, tell us what your idea is to start.
You can't just post pictures of centaur skeletons and expect people to get it
Look up
>Ten Spades
>Epsilon Drive
>Skirmish Quest
>Iron Hearts
Provide samples and examples.
Don't be a Mymridon.
Well, first off, OP, and the half a dozen or so interested GMs out there, what do you know of the skirmish game format?
I say format because you can easily repurpose it to whatever setting you want.
>>46025092
An whom?
>>46025111
I know barely anything about it but it looks fun.
>>46025111
How much of an utter clusterfuck is a usual session?
Is it intense and stressful and require concentration on a minute-by-minute basis?
>>46025146
In that case you need to read up on them by going over the archives as well as participate in one before you try to design one
>>46025130
Exactly. Go look shit up before you ask, and if you can't find the answer that way THEN ask. Otherwise you're just wasting peoples time asking simple questions.
Also stop trying to get other people to do your work for you, OP.
>>46025146
Okay, not much to work with.
Bottom line? Skirmish games are like a tabletop version of X-COM, with the degrees of lethality and weapons dependent on the GM running it.
For the original "How to," see >>46015842
To run a game, you need:
1) Some artistic talent and something like photoshop
2) The ability to make classes
3) Your choice of hexes or squares for the basis of your map.
>>46025199
Depends on the one running it, but the ones run by Monday (the guy who started all this) tend to end up in insane clusterfucks (I don't have pictures, you can find them on suptg using the search term skirmish).
Depending on your role in the game... it can be intense and stressful. However, depending on the GM and his/her map style, turns can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an entire day.
>>46025199
Playing or Running?
Playing? Moderate clusterfuck, mostly on trying to read the map. Doesn't require significant time investment if you don't want it to.
Running? Well yeah, pretty much. Lots of details to keep track of, and lots of decisions to be made in a way that keeps the game fun and moves the plot along if there is one. Lots of mechanics to compute as well.
>>46025146
>>46025253
You could also let people choose their class/race and make benefits off of that.
>>46025274
How about skeletons?
>>46025274
People pick their classes. That is always a given. Race isn't.
Class dictates all your skills and your stats, sans items. Generally, we don't pick races in Monday's games. HOWEVER, the one time we did, it allowed for a much more customized character, which meant more stats and longer processing times.
Usually, the GM prepares some basic classes to select (see pic). In the pic shown, only the top 4 were originally selected; the other 4 at the bottom were unlocked via story (and Monday making them). You could substitute classes for race, but that may just be a rose by a different name.
Are there non-Monday skirmish games?
>>46025420
Yes. There's one called Mecha Mercs Skirmish Quest run by someone named Cognis.
I don't play, so I don't know.
For more information, see suptg: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=skirmish
>>46025388
I'd like Chargen Skirmish, class and race could be the same thing
>>46025484
>class and race could be the same thing
Do you remember the good old days when elf was a class?
>>46025484
That's fine, but I'm not OP or a GM. I'm just answering questions. So if you are a prospective GM, you can use me and this thread to bounce ideas.
If you are a prospective GM, first thing's first: squares, or hexes? That choice has an impact on how the game is played (since movement and other actions are measured by discrete map increments).
>>46025130
A jackass who posted random pictures to civilization general and demanded that other people do his work for him in making a new kind of civilization game.
>>46025567
>If you are a prospective GM, first thing's first: squares, or hexes?
Nonperiodic tiles or bust.
>>46025648
example?
>>46025667
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperiodic_tiling
Do new skirmish quests usually put out a recruitment announcement? I'd like to play in one after Floors ends.
>>46025843
Feel free to input ideas for what you'd like to play.
>>46025843
For Monday? He just kind of makes a new thread (he says they aren't quests, but they totally are. Just not like your conventional ones). For other GMs? No fucking clue.
We're only on Floor 5. These games usually take a while before they get "finished" (and that assumes Monday doesn't go off on a tangent like he did in Iron Hearts several times).
In any case, in Monday's games, players drop in and out all the time. There's a pattern that we've seen, and currently we're on the upswing in terms of player population. Some people drop out or kind of just disappear after a while.
So feel free to join; unless you don't want fantasy and want to play with machine guns or lasers instead. Then you'll have to wait.
>>46025891
So players can just join at any time? Isn't that disruptive to how the game is run, like a level 1 character joining a part of level 9-ers?
>>46025716
You want to mess with that bullshit that's your problem. You want players to be able to read it.
>>46026021
http://i.imgur.com/2RIBxgy.gif
>>46026013
Yeah. Monday's games generally operate with a certain lethality that makes hitting those higher levels difficult, or at least doesn't protect you from dying due to some random fuckup.
Enemies don't fully level; rather, they behave smarter. It's entirely possible for a force of base classes to wreck a higher level group and vice versa through the use of tactics and cleverness.
>>46026157
Is there environmental damage or manipulation? Can you, for example, blow up some stairs while the enemy's on them, letting them fall to their doom? Or sneak up and blow open a wall to get to the drop on them?
>>46026240
Yes. In the last floor, we put at least three holes in the ground, letting us drop into the dungeon below.
There's something that Monday calls rule 0, which (I will paraphrase), means you can do (or try) certain things so long as it makes sense for you to do it (that is, your abilities or gear could feasibly allow you to do it), the rules don't explicitly prevent you from taking that action, and you roll for it (okay, that last one isn't always necessary, but it often helps).
In fact, in the very first skirmish quest game, an air strike was ordered to blow up a bridge.
Though stealth mechanics have always been a little weird, if you ask me.
>>46025843
>>46026013
>Mecha-merc here.
Yea, joining happens at any time, but with Cognis, and I think with Monday, there's a player cap (15 for Cognis, and I think 30-ish for Monday?) So reading through a thread to make sure new players are still be accepted is a good idea.
Cognis is less lethal, but mechs get blown up constantly, and only new pilots get their mechs for free, so the power-gap isn't huge.
>bump
Here's one I got.
>Humanity uses the dream lands for FTL
>Human 'Pilots' are specially trained people who turn their dream selves into titanic, mythic beasts, which are like living space ships
>Through special technology, humanity can physically send these 'Pilots' and cargo, people, and such directly into the dream lands, to drop out at another location in the universe, or drop things like sensors and such, finding other places to colonize and such
>The Sol System, or rather it's general location in the dream lands, is a critical point in the war between two alien species, meaning humanity's launch past our own borders lands us in the middle of an interstellar conflict that our lack of understanding of the higher universe allowed us to avoid until now.
>Combat is fought on a square grid. The grid has sectors that are 3x3 squares in size. Movement of ships is always in terms of sectors, targeting for weapons is always measured in squares
>Moving would be "Move 3N [2,2]" to land in the center of the sector 3 sectors north of you.
>All units have a vision radius. They can see their immediate surrounding sectors, but no further. Unless they open their 3rd Eye/Go Active Sensors. This increases their vision range by 1.
>Opening the 3rd Eye pings them in the Fog of War to enemies, revealing that there is SOMETHING in their exact space, but not what.Alien war is actually between deep ones and mi-go.
late night bump
>>46028327
Ooh, I'd like to see how you'll handle space combat. I planned some for Epsilon Drive, but that's probably different.
>>46024933
As one who had tried running a Skirmish game, some advice.
First, have a TON of Preptime. You need to have the first mission's visual assets ready at least a week before your planned go date. Having a txt file (or spreadsheet, or GDocs) that keeps track of player statistics (stats, kills, etc) and that you update right after the turn ends helps a lot.
On mapmaking, don't run into a blunder I discovered (and fell into): make the maps too big. When it takes like 10 turns for players to get to one end of the map and back, you know you fucked up. After discussing with Monday, a solution seems to be taking the average movement points of your units, and multiply it by 3 or 4. That's the maximum number of hexes long your map should be.
Also, try to make each faction to have a distinct flavor. And not just visually - the way they battle should be different enough. But that's if you plan for the players to cycle between factions.
Another thing to consider when trying to streamline turn processing: You could fudge rolls in the enemy turn. Or, if you want to still be fair, roll just one dice for each enemy that can shoot at people to determine if they hit or miss. That way you could speed up turn processing.
Any other questions or sudden ideas?
>>46024933
>>46030220
Gonna add to this and say you want to design your system to minimize the amount of data you have to keep track of per player. (It's one of the reasons I had to cap my game at 15 players.) So try to avoid, sprawling inventories shit loads of stats and other stuff. (Mecha Mercs is a bloated system by skirmish standards.)
On the other hand you need allow for some form of progression so you can't get too minimalist.
Also reduce the number of steps to processing an action. When two units fight have your system set up to resolve the attack in one die roll, or better yet: go diceless. (I'm not entirely on board with this design philosophy because I like using randomness as a tool, but it sure helps with processing speed. Plus: /tg dice are awful.)
This isn't really a rule but rather precedent set by Monday: Skirmishes tend to have high lethality. Again I don't think they have to but it helps with processing. (The faster things die the fewer actions you have to process.)
>>46028327
Sounds interesting, one thing you have to consider is if you have access to a graphics program that's good at doing fog of war. Not sure if further dividing the map into squares after the sectors adds any depth. Why not just stick to sectors and have weapons range measured in sectors.
Realize you might be doing 10-30 of a given action for one complete "turn", so make sure you've got a system that supports that with some fidelity.
There really is nothing stopping you from running the full GURPS+Martial Arts+293 Side Rules Experience in a hex wargame, but would you really /want/ to?
A) No dice - everything's kind of pre-given, which turns the game more into chess than anything else (Floors), since you can't hope for luck to bear the day.
B) Randomization Dice - This is where the dice are used, but not as a direct determinator of success but rather to add / remove bonuses. FOr instance, "Attacks auto hit, but roll d10 per attack, if it's <2 you've gotten a headshot, 9-10 is a grazing hit at -1 damage". This gives you the same predicitability of chess, with a slight tinge of random. It helps break up the predictability.
C) Just full on dice per attack, which gives more stats and likely granularity but also more to keep track of - and if you have to do this 10-30 times per action you might drown yourself in sheer number+modifiers.
-----
It's absolutely vital that you make data-processing the purview of the players and not yourself. That means that if they have abilities like regeneration, they tell you that they are using them. IF they have grenades, they're the ones who're carrying them and remember their splash radius. Etc.
This might sound a little harsh, but with 5-10 players (or more!) on the player side, it's impossible for you to keep track of every single little thing. So a simple rule is that if someone doesn't directly tell you that they're doing something, they don't get to do it (Passive regen ticks, or scanning for enemies, or viewing into other dimensions)
Allowances for niceness and so on.
---
Art+Symbols+Map is much less problematic than you'd think, everyone's willing to play a fun game even if the map isn't a beautiful piece of artistry.
I wonder how hard it is to code a program that keeps track of player movements and actions? Also, what settings do you guys think would make a good skirmish game? Etrian Odyssey seems fun to play in.
>>46031120
>Sounds interesting, one thing you have to consider is if you have access to a graphics program that's good at doing fog of war. Not sure if further dividing the map into squares after the sectors adds any depth. Why not just stick to sectors and have weapons range measured in sectors.
Yes, the idea is that positioning in this system is important, and that vision is important. It's an experiment. In Hex games, ranged attacks nad melee attacks have equitable striking range because movement and attack range are equivalent.
In floors, where movement is cardinal only and range can be measured diagonally, it makes range actually more effective.
I want to see what happens when you all but completely disassociate movement from ranged attacks. Will it work? Will it be interesting? Will it create new tactics?
Also when I say 'measured in squares', the idea is that there is no such thing as a NonAoE attack in this game. Guns will travel in a line of hexes, hitting everything in that line unless stopped by special actions. Missiles striking will cause explosions that will bleed through sectors, etc.
>>46032967
Novice programmer here. If all you want is a programming that crunches numbers and stores information then it's pretty straightforward. You could use python or excel macros. Anything beyond that and you're starting to make a crude vidya game. Which is basically what a skirmish is; a video game that runs on the QM's brain, because CA's hard as it is to run a skirmish, developing a game is harder still.
>Etrian Oydyssey
If you're that anon from game design with the idea about people living on top of trees just roll with that. /tg seems to frown on fan quests. What ever setting you go for consider the kind of dynamic you want the game to have, and how you will puts this across in your crunch without making your head explode.
>>46033990
Thanks for the reply! Yeah I guess it takes a lot of time and effort to code such a thing and an Etrian skirmish game would be like
>Come to this town!
>Enjoy the sights!
>Acquire valuable materials and riches!
>Get horribly murdered by giant butterflies!
>>46028327
Humanity has 6 ships, organized by size
Scout, destroyer, cruiser, battle-cruiser, battleship, station.
Scouts get larger viewing range and are fast fast, but delicate and have few system slots
Destroyers, cruisers, battle cruisers are all variations on dps focus, high speed, Medium damage, to high damage, medium speed. Destroyers are actuall better for support, intercepting torpedoes and fighter wings, while cruisers straddle the middle, battle cruisers are ship killers.
Battle ships, with their massive damage and def are the shields of the fleet.
Stations are support, trading actions for movement or having to be towed. They have crazy shit abilities that alter the battlefield.
>>46035980
What I'm torn on is advancement.
I like the idea of it being power, and able to shift power to more systems so that you can get more bang for your buck.
>>46035980
Sounds like a plan
Although according to what you said the "ships" are astral projections of the pilots, so what's to stop everyone from dreaming of battleships, or ships whose everything is >9000?
>>46036140
Human limitations. The stronger a ship is, the more monstrous and less human it is. Only by killing and devouring the dream projections of others can they grow in power.
