ATTACK! MCDM's new rpg and removing the to-hit roll

[cbwjm]

I still need to watch the video, I'm quite keen to see what they come up with.

I quite like the attack/damage system in fabula ultima. You roll 2 dice (anything from d6 to d12) add any bonuses to the total, and if you hit you deal the high roll +X, so it is all based off the same roll rather than having separate hit/damage rolls.

 

[darjr]

Heartbreaker is a term that's lost it's sting in the era of cheap publishing. But no, MCDM's isn't hitting there for me... yet.


Much of what people "know" about T&T is wrong. Especially 5th ed T&T - there's a good reason it remained the standard edition and in print at profit from 1979 to 1995 or so... It's also the second most comprehensible edition of T&T.

That's not done any favors for Gygax's non-D&D designs...

well. There were other issues....

Getting sued into oblivion being a big one. Trying to make a game as far away from D&D as possible to not get sued again being another. Having a fair amount of hubris didn't help either, but to be fair I'm not sure many other folks could have avoided that. And third, capturing lighting in a bottle isn't easy, in fact it's considered impossible.

 

[overgeeked]

Huh. I bounced off of T&T hard and it's been a while. thanks!

I've bounced off T&T a few times myself. I have found a more recent iteration, Lairs of the Leopard Empresses, to be a much more detailed and understandable version of the core system.

 

[overgeeked]

I still need to watch the video, I'm quite keen to see what they come up with.

I quite like the attack/damage system in fabula ultima. You roll 2 dice (anything from d6 to d12) add any bonuses to the total, and if you hit you deal the high roll +X, so it is all based off the same roll rather than having separate hit/damage rolls.

That is a good one. But there are so many variations on this over the years. Roll to hit and the difference between the TN and the result is the damage dealt. Opposed dice pool rolls, count successes, winner gets more successes and deals the difference as damage. Collapse PC and NPC round into one player-facing roll. If the PC succeeds, they deal damage. If the PC fails, they take damage...the NPC doesn't roll or act, only react. Etc.

 

[aramis erak]

And third, capturing lighting in a bottle isn't easy, in fact it's considered impossible.

Hardly... look up «Leyden Jar». Perfectly captures lightning in a bottle.

At least until one touches it.

Likewise, many creators routinely produce hit after hit...

Truth is, most successful creatives in history are historical not because they had one big hit, but because they continued to make multiple successful creations, time and time again...

• Music: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Solieri (despite the misportrayal in Amadeus), Elvis, Nat King Cole, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Madonna Louise Chicone, John Williams, Lerner & Lowe...
• Literature: Steven King, Danielle Steele, William Shakespear, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, HPL, AC Doyle, ER Burroughs, Jules Verne, Emily Dickenson, EE Cumings, Jane Eyre,
• TV: Steven J Canel, Donald Paul Bellisario, Alfred Hitchcock, Gene Roddenberry, Gene L. Coon. Lucille Ball/Desilu Studios, Mary Tyler Moore (she was the creator of MTM productions, which had a bunch of hits)
• Movies: Steven King, George Lucas, Alfred Hitchcock, Buzby Berkely, Lucille Ball

Tabletop Games: GDW - a studio putting out a product or two a month for a period of over 20 years, each member putting out something new monthly and contributing on several others. The big names? Marc Miller, Frank Chadwick, Loren K. Wiseman, Tim Brown, David Nilson... only a couple flubbed lines, but their best known games have editions either recently or currently in print.
Monte Cook, likewise, from D&D 3E, Arcana Unearthed, Numenara, and that stupidly expensive follow-on...

Steve Jackson Games. Steve himself has dozens of credits, the most notable being The Fantasy Trip, GURPS, Car Wars, Munchkin, Isaac Asimov's Star Traders, Globbo, Illuminatis....

The Flying Buffalo crew: a dozen T&T solo adventures each from Bear, Ken, and Steve. More coming, under the Monsters! Monsters! brand. And a game with a solid fanbase since 1975.

The UK Steve Jackson and his writing partner Ian Livingston - hit adventure after hit adventure - Fighting Fantasy. Now, others are writing for them.

Oh, and scientifically? Lightning usually strikes the same spot multiple times - it's just static electric flow. And if the ground is higher at one spot, that spot gets hit repeatedly.

Colville et al have shown their creative prowess repeatedly; even if I don't care for their show, I can appreciate their success. They've been established as creators, the question now is only, "Can they launch this successfully?" And it looks like they can. They've a line of successful 5E splats, multiple successful kickstarters, even during the lockdowns,

 

[Aldarc]

I quite like the attack/damage system in fabula ultima. You roll 2 dice (anything from d6 to d12) add any bonuses to the total, and if you hit you deal the high roll +X, so it is all based off the same roll rather than having separate hit/damage rolls.

That is a good one. But there are so many variations on this over the years. Roll to hit and the difference between the TN and the result is the damage dealt. Opposed dice pool rolls, count successes, winner gets more successes and deals the difference as damage. Collapse PC and NPC round into one player-facing roll. If the PC succeeds, they deal damage. If the PC fails, they take damage...the NPC doesn't roll or act, only react. Etc.

Cortex Prime does something similar. You assemble a 3+ dice pool based on your traits with different die values. You roll. Add two dice together of your choice. Then you can take another unused die for the "Effect," which can be physical damage but also include things like emotional, social, fear, etc. depending on the setup. But it's all the same roll. The GM also rolls (in OPEN!), and that becomes the Target Number the player has to beat with their roll.

 

[Mannahnin]

In combat no one rolls to hit. Only the damage dice. If you don't do enough damage to get thru armor your opponent can counter, a small bit of static damage that goes thru armor, no dice rolled at all. If you roll max damage (a crit) you get a free action, or another attack.

It sounds awesome. In fact I might adopt that crit rule in other games. Matt said there were folks in the discord that did so for D&D 5e.

A second action on a crit, instead of double damage, is a really interesting idea. It also would largely be something that martials, rather than spellcasters, would be able to take advantage of in 5E, given that many spells don't involve attack rolls.

As a historical note (and not to diminish the creative work MCDM are doing), getting a bonus attack on a crit is one of the two recommended optional critical hit rules in AD&D 2nd edition, along with "double the damage dice then add static bonuses". I have a smile on my face noticing that 5E uses the more well-known of those, and MCDM is experimenting with a variant on the other.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I usually hate bidding systems but I loved this. What a great game.

God wasn't it?

The system they came up with just worked tremendously well in my experience, and I really didn't anticipate it before playing it. I'm glad people talked me into it.

Anybody talking about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ design better bring a solid paper. Otherwise, they’re just talking about what they like. Which is fine, but let’s be honest about it.

I don't think that's right actually. I think you can fairly objectively talk about it - sometimes it's as simple as having a goal, knowing what it is, and finding the right way to meet it - a lot of RPG design doesn't even manage that, and I think it's fair to call that design, bad design. Or even non-design in some cases.

If you think I'm talking about A5E, btw, you're mistaken. A5E is, in my book, relatively well-designed. The goal is coherent, there's a vision as to how to reach it, and it's informed by actual creative and rational ideas (not necessarily novel ones but that's fine!), not just endless poorly-written surveys of literally 0.01% of players. It's also different to the rather incoherent bumbling that Kobold Press seem to be engaging in.

Further, you really don't like the term lazy design, and probably cowardly design even less, but I think both can be pretty apposite re: both RPG and videogame design at times. Particularly when companies stop having their own ideas, and start just being informed by the fear of failure, rather than genuinely having a goal, a vision beyond "don't fail".

Maybe large-scale success becomes the enemy of good or daring or clever or original design? (all potentially different things, of course) I don't know. But I don't think it's a friend, that's for sure.

I also don't understand why would WotC go to the trouble of making all this polls if they just ignore them.

The problem I see with the polls is that they seem fairly aimless and incoherent themselves, and from WotC's own description of the process, they're basically just reacting to these incoherent polls, and completely inconsistent about whether they even put stuff to polling - not everything gets a poll question, I note - c.f. absolutely tons of last-minute changes in DND Next, many of them spectacularly ill-advised (like moving to the 6-8 easy encounters from 3-4 medium ones, and just renaming easy to medium, and medium to hard). And on the very rare occasions when they do genuinely believe in something, it's clear they're going to do it regardless of polls (c.f. removing half-races, however well-guided or misguided that ultimately turns out to be). I just wish they had more of a belief and interest in the core system and classes! And a better vision for the material they do put forth for the polls - some of it has been bizarre "nobody asked for that" stuff, other bits have been so little modified that it's kind of surprising they're even being polled on, and it's not like they're offering an array of competing visions to see which is vibes. I mean, there's some wisdom in that, because you don't want people forever mourning a path not taken (c.f. people still annoyed by the loss of the DND Next Sorcerer), but equally, a lot of this stuff has been both milquetoast and unasked-for, which is just not a great combo. Bard at this point is necessarily not even going to vaguely resemble what they polled on, because they've changed fundamentals about the system. Will they poll on every class they've changed the fundamentals about again before it goes to final edits? My guess, based on DND Next is very much "no". They simply won't have time for further changes, because just like in 2013/14, they've stuck themselves with a deadline short enough that their own process doesn't even fully make sense.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Whats good design in one game simply isn't going to be universal. I personally think I came up with a rather brilliant way to systamatize Crafting through dice rolls, but I think itd only really work in the context of my moderately crunchy game. Transplanting it into a PBTA game would simply not work.

Doesn't mean its bad design.

You're accidentally illustrating good design though - knowing that transplanting it is a bad idea is part of what makes for good design.

Obviously, trivially obviously, different systems make sense for different games. Literally no-one here is disagreeing on that - though I will say, 30 years ago, they would have.

But just jamming that system into another, different game, even if it's superbly designed for the originator game, may well constitute bad design - design lacks a real, valid goal, that doesn't think about what/why that goal is, and doesn't think about the right way to meet it. Design that ignores context, too. Pre-deciding that a system is necessarily the right system to add to your game without considering alternatives or whether the goal itself is really a goal, or should be really a goal is not good design. You might get lucky and it might work out, but that's luck.

And watching RPGs from the 1980s through to now, it's amazing to see how much real design has improved and even just come into existence. So many RPGs in the 1980s and 1990s have few goals in their designs, and fewer still of those goals are actually rational and considered, particularly re: the solutions chosen. In the 2000s though that's increasingly changed, and the result has been massively for the better. Some people were always thinking it through more seriously - c.f. Robin D. Laws for example.

 

[Nikosandros]

God wasn't it?

The system they came up with just worked tremendously well in my experience, and I really didn't anticipate it before playing it. I'm glad people talked me into it.


I don't think that's right actually. I think you can fairly objectively talk about it - sometimes it's as simple as having a goal, knowing what it is, and finding the right way to meet it - a lot of RPG design doesn't even manage that, and I think it's fair to call that design, bad design. Or even non-design in some cases.

If you think I'm talking about A5E, btw, you're mistaken. A5E is, in my book, relatively well-designed. The goal is coherent, there's a vision as to how to reach it, and it's informed by actual creative and rational ideas (not necessarily novel ones but that's fine!), not just endless poorly-written surveys of literally 0.01% of players. It's also different to the rather incoherent bumbling that Kobold Press seem to be engaging in.

Further, you really don't like the term lazy design, and probably cowardly design even less, but I think both can be pretty apposite re: both RPG and videogame design at times. Particularly when companies stop having their own ideas, and start just being informed by the fear of failure, rather than genuinely having a goal, a vision beyond "don't fail".

Maybe large-scale success becomes the enemy of good or daring or clever or original design? (all potentially different things, of course) I don't know. But I don't think it's a friend, that's for sure.

The problem I see with the polls is that they seem fairly aimless and incoherent themselves, and from WotC's own description of the process, they're basically just reacting to these incoherent polls, and completely inconsistent about whether they even put stuff to polling - not everything gets a poll question, I note - c.f. absolutely tons of last-minute changes in DND Next, many of them spectacularly ill-advised (like moving to the 6-8 easy encounters from 3-4 medium ones, and just renaming easy to medium, and medium to hard). And on the very rare occasions when they do genuinely believe in something, it's clear they're going to do it regardless of polls (c.f. removing half-races, however well-guided or misguided that ultimately turns out to be). I just wish they had more of a belief and interest in the core system and classes! And a better vision for the material they do put forth for the polls - some of it has been bizarre "nobody asked for that" stuff, other bits have been so little modified that it's kind of surprising they're even being polled on, and it's not like they're offering an array of competing visions to see which is vibes. I mean, there's some wisdom in that, because you don't want people forever mourning a path not taken (c.f. people still annoyed by the loss of the DND Next Sorcerer), but equally, a lot of this stuff has been both milquetoast and unasked-for, which is just not a great combo. Bard at this point is necessarily not even going to vaguely resemble what they polled on, because they've changed fundamentals about the system. Will they poll on every class they've changed the fundamentals about again before it goes to final edits? My guess, based on DND Next is very much "no". They simply won't have time for further changes, because just like in 2013/14, they've stuck themselves with a deadline short enough that their own process doesn't even fully make sense.

While I'm not as negative as you are, I do have some misgivings about the development process by WotC. I just don't think it possible that WotC is doing all this polls just to blow smoke and then they throw away the results. Now, whether the polls are well constructed is another matter entirely.