System

[Wannabe writer]

So after having a tonne of good ideas for settings I feel like making my own system. There is a great deal of fear for me making a system, because in the past I have been abused by designers on this very topic. Game design is not an easy topic, and sadly the people who have attempted it around me have become terrible. Whether it is the feeling that one of their creations could be wrong or as I pointed pout to one their research needed some more work.

So it is with great trepidation that I walk down this path.

So after research I feel as a Storyteller (that is the term I like as I feel it suits the role well)for about fifteen years and a player for about ten, I feel i do have a grasp of the topic. I forced myself to look at all types of systems, from the most crunchiest all the way to the most rules light. I have my idols of systems and I know what I feel is wrong with them, or perhaps what I would like to see in them. When i embarked on writing a free RPG I felt that i would just clone or adjust a open system, that has changed mainly due to the desires of a system that I would like.

The yes system is a set of ideas that a storyteller can use, ignore, steal from or reshape. The driving goal in this system is that 99% of the time the players succeed, but there is no free lunch and each action starts to build consequences. Sadly as I type this I know have two very different ways of running the system.

Now I am over my Facebook journal section, lets get to the guts of the issue how do people feel about cinematic rules systems. I am to make characters based on nouns with a few numbers, but most importantly a system that builds consequences. Success is not always what it is cracked up to be, in my system you can succeed but it could be in a bad way or have unintended consequences. My main concern is that players may react badly to unintended consequences. i would love some opinions on this matter, would you as a player enjoy a system where you achieve most of your actions but often at a cost?

[Onix]

I'd be fine with it as long as I can go with the cost if the result is important to me or skip the cost and fail if the compromise is too much.

[Rob Lang]

is a big, fat meaty system. Crunchier than a bucket of bolts. My group plays a lot of Icar. We also liked Dead and Back (CA's post apoc game), which has medium crunch. I also created the system, which is super light. 9 pages light.

In Shared Pool, you pass most of your actions most of the time and the Stats are very much a statistic nouns and a number. Actions and combat at Stat + D10s + mods > target. Nothing to set the world on fire there.

Where it is fun and interesting is that when you want to do something extraordinary, you need to roll a die and that die comes from the pool of D10s in a hat in the middle of the table. You start of with twice as many D10s in that pool as players and then you get more for doing cool stuff. You can also choose to fail, which, if cool enough, puts more dice into the pool. You can take as many D10s from the pool as you like but you're going to be labelled a bastard.

Turns out my players like both. They like crunch and they like light. They like to see the simulation of the crunch - it's satisfying to admire from a distance millions of points of damage coming from an orbital strike you called in. In the shared pool, the system is simple enough that you can easily see the affect your actions are going to have on the team as a whole. Burn all the dice before a fight and you're in trouble.

The vast majority of consequences should be predictable. "We burnt all our resources on the minions, oops!" but they should be recoverable from "We're going to have to fail the boss this time and fight another time." When the system just tortures you at random, that's not going to go down well with my players. Show the risks, let them choose. Add some random.

[Onix]

Oh, one other niggle, I've heard "cinematic system" so many times that my eye's glaze over when I hear/see it. Tell me what in cinema you're simulating.

[Wannabe writer]

[Onix]

Some people like zero to hero. I'm usually a fan of it because it suggest a long game but also there's an element of "I survived the hard times and now I'm cool".

That said, not every game needs to be zero to hero. A lot of themes demand that the character start off highly competent. You can't have a zero to hero spy and still can do a good job.

In my experience, players are usually satisfied that their character is competent when they succeed 70% of the time. Highly competent is usually a 80% success rate, and mastery is 90+%.

I agree with the success at a cost concept. I re-engineered the whole stress system for The Artifact 3rd edition just so I can do that. So if the character gets a 70% chance of an unqualified success but can take a consequence to succeed the rest of the time, players will probably have a ball with it.

[kylesgames]

I also like encouraging GM's to treat failure not necessarily as an action failing, but an action having unexpected consequences.

For instance, the players really, really, really need to by pass that locked door. While doing so, they manage to permanently damage the lock when they force the door open, making it obvious that they've been there, and keeping them from locking the door in the future.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

I'm with Onix that "cinematic" is not a genre, it is a sub-classification. "Dragnet" is a police procedural and mostly realistic, "48 Hours" is a cinematic take on crime with more guns and action. Sherlock Holmes solves mysteries, Batman fights crime in a dramatic way.

So try to find a genre or story you wish to focus on first, then look at what makes it more dramatic and where to induce points of failure. Everything is a simulation, it is just a question of how detailed.

If you haven't already, check out the 1km1kt.net game . It really embodies what you're thinking about, since too great of a success can have bigger consequences for the character than actual failure. (If you seem too good to be Human, maybe you really are one of the androids everyone is hunting...)

A few years ago I started a project called "LaGrange Grunge" and one of the big ideas was managing a group of friends/co-conspirators. You could either roll dice to see if they are might be available in the near future, or spend the dice to call in favors and get an immediate response - though such impositions means they're less likely to help later. Feel free to use the idea if it helps.

[Wannabe writer]

[Rob Lang]

I like the idea of saving up all those complications as a pool. Rather than a +2, get a token. There would be a wonderful feel to that: the player with a pile of tokens in front of them!