Designing my first RPG.

[Requia]

I'm working on an RPG project and looking around the net for advice on design. While I've found a lot of good advice in general, I'd like something that goes over different mechanics and the strengths and weaknesses. IE, flat dice versus bell curve versus dice pools, dealing with action economy, alternatives to hit points and so forth.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Welcome to 1km1kt.net!

To start you off, here is a link to some , courtesy of the J.H. Kim RPG site. (Home of one of the largest free rpg lists on the net as well)

My personal philosophy is to compare game design to cartography. First you want to set benchmarks of what the game is supposed to do. Once you have an idea of where you want to go, Then you go in again as set the landmarks and ideas, in successive passes add more detail to support these concepts.

Initial bench marks can come from either the mechanics - you've read other games and have something you want to improve upon - or from the story. An example of the mechanics angle is that you don't like players constantly using appearance as a dump stat, so the game will try to make attractiveness a cardinal virtue or otherwise make the stat far more useful than it is in D&D. From the other side, if its a game about near future astronauts in a hard SF setting, you're going to need rules for being fatigued on space walks and inertia in micro-g.

The main question you must ask yourself, is what the goal or theme of your game is. In turn you know how much should be left to chance, or if there should be some pool of action points that let players choose to be successful in dramatic situations. Guns jamming in the middle of combat is dramatic when fighting zombies, but doesn't really fit the heroes of an action movie. (Unless its all about martial arts - then you can make guns do less damage than spin kicks to encourage people to be honorable and enter the ring rather than use weapons...)

Multiple dice bell curves can even out luck, while single dice can accentuate it. Rolling 1d12 you have a roughly 8% chance of rolling a 12, on 2d6 its 2.7%. Conversely, rolling a 7 on 2d6 is a 17% chance, and rolling a result of one is not possible.

One Idea I've been toying with for a while is allowing players to chose whether they want a certain ability to be based on 2d10 or 1d20. The d20 has much better chance of rolling higher (ie a 20 is a flat 5% chance rather than 1%), but also has a 5% chance of critical failure, while the 2d10 makes success more predictable.

The more actions you allow characters in combat, the slower the game goes. RIFTS from palladium books is a major offender here, because a mere 15 seconds of combat can take an hour to resolve, as each person has multiple actions taken one at a time (ie roll initiative, everyone takes first action in order, everyone takes second etc...) and armor is ablative, so you just keep shooting until they die. (And things can have hundreds of hit-points. Sure the rail-gun does 1d6x10, but against the 450 mdc power-armor, that is still 13 attempts, not including if you miss.)

If you haven't guessed, the poor mechanics of Rifts cam be a very good warning to others about how not to design a game, and the basis of the from mechanics approach I mentioned above. Its the first RPG I played, so I'm a bit nostalgic for it, but that is rather off topic.

Conversely, keeping things limited, and giving people only one cation will make combat go a bit quicker, though you might not get as much back-and-forth duels and tactical thought. Speaking of which - having hex/map based combat can make things a bit easier to envision and strategic, but also slows things down as you draw the scene and get out miniatures.

Hit points, if the least easy to envision. do stand as one of the easier conventions to use - get hit x number of times, and you're out of the fight. Other options could include stacking penalties for each wound - but that starts a phenomenon called the death spiral where once injured, everything gets harder and harder, making the character less able to catch up, so it becomes a game of first hit wins. A more indie route would be to have literal "plot points" that are spent to influence the scene or narrate what happens - and being injured depletes this pool as well, giving the victor the ability to decide your fate in the story.

If you could give me a bit more specific clues about what your game is going to about or how you want it to run, I can probably give some more credible advice on mechanics for you.

Good luck with the game.

[SheikhJahbooty]

What he said.

Wow...

I think Chainsaw already hit all these points, but to break it down perfectly clearly, just in case:

Most projects fall into the categories of:

1) I like ____ RPG but the part about _____ annoys me so I'm going to write a game that fixes that.

Example: I like GURPS but all the arbitrary price values on perks and flaws annoys me so I'm going to write a game that gives away perks and flaws for free but charges or gives experience points during play whenever they come up, so nobody can get a flaw that gives points but never penalizes the character or buy and perk that frustratingly never helps.

2) I wish there was a game that encouraged _______ type of behavior.

Example: I wish there was a game that encouraged players to make deals behind each other's backs, some way to reward players for leaving one of them to hang out to dry, so I could make a Reservoir Dogs RPG.

3) I wish there was a game that used ______.

Example: I wish there was a game that used fortune cookies for resolution, or if you can't buy a whole sack of fortune cookies, because you don't know where to get one, there should be some way to find out what fortunes they put in their cookies and create a randomizer that will pick one at random.

Does the game you want to write fall into one of these patterns?

[Requia]

Palladium made an RPG?

*shudders* I can see exactly how that turned out.

That link is incredible too, I'll be a while reading it.

My main goals for the system are:

it should integrate well into the setting I'm using
it should encourage team tactics, what the best option is for the PC in combat should be different depending on how many allies she has, and what the strengths and weaknesses of the enemies are (IE, if you have a glass cannon wizard in the party, warrior type should be able to tank by both getting in the way of the enemy, and even actively blocking attacks mad against the wizard instead of attacking the enemy (which means opposed rolls (which means no linear dice)).
avoid one kind of weapon or armor being the best, but keep them differentiated (IE, a greatsword still does more damage than a spear, but the spear has a defense bonus). (hmm, dice pool sounds really attractive when I consider this, since its easy to create parity between the two).

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Thank you SheikhJahbooty, that is a very good summary. I can be a little overly loquacious at times.

One randomization method to consider is a deck of playing cards. There are quite a few ways you can draw information from a deck (black vs red, highest card, rating of 1-10 with face cards as something special...) and they are fairly easy to come by.

Perhaps your game can work on drawing cards against a difficulty of 1-10. Each player also gets a small hand they can chose to use, versus simply drawing from the pile. If you have allies, you can trade cards/boost the number held in this reserve. The different suits can give a bonus to certain abilities, for example hearts boost magic, and spades boost melee. Hence, a fighter protecting a mage can trade heart cards for spades and both benefit. Weapons with an advantage can accept one or more picture cards as something other than an extra success or other bonus rather than automatic failure in certain conditions. So a defender a pike planting it against a Calvary charge can gain extra resistance when he draws a jack, while using a dagger against said charge isn't much good. Conversely, knives might gain a face card when fighting armor to show how stilettos can slip between plates.

As to some other examples of games using card mechanics: (based on black-jack), [ur=http://yearoflivingfree.info/sacred-steell]Sacred Steel[/url] (Yes/No draws), and (Air Combat with cards used in several ways)

A method that doesn't require rewriting whatever system you currently have would be to enforce certain co-dependencies on the character classes. The classic case would be mages are only healing and defensive spells, while in turn the fighters benefit from this and keep enemy away. Of course, that has been rather over-done, and may make the white mages bitter about being little more than a walking first aid kit.

A more unique way might be to somehow junction the attributes of a party working together. The protector might gain a few of the magic user's hit points, while the latter siphons a bit of extra willpower. A variation would be that everyone has a certain aura that lets an ability or theirs rub-off - so just standing near the knight improves your resistance, encouraging the wizard to be either near the front or the knight to hold back and guard. Or each person has a selection of drama points, that benefit other classes, but not themselves - so they have the motivation of reciprocity to assist others. In one of my games, experience points are used to improve the abilities of others in your group - or heal - so its a trade off between improving the group or protecting yourself. Something like that might work as well.

[Requia]

I'm more looking for benefits to the team that are a result of character actions, not out of character or passive abilities (unless maybe its spellcaster stuff).

Hmm, certain weapons could provide a defense bonus to adjacent allies though, this fits what a spear does fairly well.

[SheikhJahbooty]

This is the first thing that comes off the top of my head.

Every character has a defense score. If you are "engaged" with this character, you have to roll at least this number to land a blow.

Every weapon has an engagement penalty. For every character you are engaged with, past the first, you subtract this number from your defense score.

Wizards cannot cast spells and engage enemies in the same round. Someone attacking a wizard while he's casting a spell get's an easy shot.

Unless... The fighter in the party engages all the wizards opponents as well. The fighter has a huge defense score anyway, so he can take a few extra engagement penalties, and presumably he has more than a dagger (high engagement penalty), something like a two handed sword (lower engagement penalty), or a spear (lowest engagement penalty), so he can hold off a bunch of attackers at once.

Weapons could be rated on initiative, damage, defense, engagement penalty. Combatants could be rated on those things as well.

If more than one person engages you, you shouldn't get penalized the sum of their defense scores, maybe you get penalized the highest defense score, but they have an easier time hitting you because you have to engage them both, or engage one and let the other get a clear shot.

Obviously needs some work, but I think it has a lot of potential if we can find a way to extrapolate it to other types of conflict, like a band of thieves sneaking into a fortress, each would try to keep track of one or more guards as they sneak past them. If the thief cannot "engage" the guard then the guard has an easier time stumbling on the thief that lost track of all who he was trying to sneak past.

If you're going to use a battlemat, you can replace the engagement penalty with a control penalty, and you suffer that penalty to control (attack and block attacks from) a larger area of the mat, more opponents.

That's just the first thing that came off the top of my head. I hope it inspires something.

[Requia]

I like the engagement penalty. Actually I love it. A lot of maneuvers start to have a positive effect without any special rules (like a tight formation of pikemen or sword and board being able to take on a larger uncoordinated force) forces the party to think of ways to split the opponents up instead of engaging them en mass.

Mechanically opposed rolls can be reduced, and bonuses and penalties are going to pick up fast, so I think a dice mechanic with a lot of granularity is called for. Anybody have an odds spread for 2d10?

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

[Requia]

Sacred Steel seems to balance weapon attack and weapon damage, there's no speed I can see, either in terms of number of attacks or initiative. I might be missing it though.

What I was planning to do is that light weapons would be faster, as in get more attacks, filling the slot two weapon fighting does in D&D (two weapon fighting will be different). This has the same effect of making daggers a good choice for hitting unarmored targets and a poor one against armor, the engagement penalty also makes it a poor choice for mass combat, but there will be abilities (probably limited to the 'skill' classes or equivalent) that remove engagement penalties for a limited number of foes, bringing the dagger back to a high end weapon for the right character build.

Another thing I've worked out is that combat will be split into two phases, a move phase and an attack phase. Only one group gets to move each move phase (there will need to be a party initiative mechanic I guess) so say the party wins initiative, everybody moves, then both sides attack each other, then the enemy moves until combat ends. It still has a lot of the realism problems as combat movement in other games I've played, but it lets the party coordinate its maneuvering without extra headache for the players and stays simple enough (where as any realistic move mechanic I can come up with is a headache).