Let's Talk About Core Game Mechanics

[Thomas Shey]

I'm just saying that integration might not be desirable beyond making it easy for folks to learn/remember. There is certainly value in a strong core mechanic that includes most aspects of play, but that's different than it being necessary.

Nothing is "necessary", but when the desirability of something gets high enough, I need a pretty solid argument to buy doing it otherwise is doing it for any reason but designer quirks.

 

[Reynard]

Nothing is "necessary", but when the desirability of something gets high enough, I need a pretty solid argument to buy doing it otherwise is doing it for any reason but designer quirks.

Games are designed by, well, game designers, and as far as quirky people go, they're up there IME.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Separately, I’ve always been fascinated by the statistical coincidence that 1d20 and 3d6 have the same mean. That’s a pretty cool piece of symmetry. And it presents an easy fix for anyone who thinks d20s are “too swingy” - just swap in 3d6.

Though as came up when people talked about doing that with Mutants and Masterminds, you better be sure you're okay with what that will do with the general case of the D20 rolls (hint: in M&M effect resistance its a particularly bad idea).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I meant compared to 3d6.

As I noted, its easy enough to bake that into 3D6. You just don't make it a fixed number, but a ratio of the result needed.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Worth noting that AGE sort of hacks 3d6 to have a system for more common "crits" by creative use of both doubles and degrees of success based on the Stunt Die.

The problem I've noticed with dice pool systems is that the value of bonuses is non-intuitive and figuring it out is non-trivial math. That can be a feature or a bug, depending on what you're after.

And sometimes they make it even harder by the way they manipulate the target numbers. Its easy enough to just have a table indicating how many successes you'll have with X dice. But when you want to know the chance of getting X successes when you need Y to succeed at all, it gets more complicated.

We won't even get into the brilliant stunt they pulled with the first edition of the World of Darkness where some bright boy decided manipulaing both the target number and the number of successes needed. Even people with a good understanding of probability could struggle with that one...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, in my mind it's a feature. I want players to have a sense of how hard something is, but I also want decisions to be difficult (if they are not difficult then it's not really a decision).

The problem with those systems (and I should note they're my preferred) is that it can easily be where the decisions aren't difficult because they're some obscure people don't even have any real sense of what the tradeoffs are.

 

[Thomas Shey]

AGE (sort of) does exactly this, granting a number of Stunt Points (SP) for rolling doubles. You get the number of SP showing on the Stunt Die, which also determines degree of success.

SP must be spent immediately, and there's a whole table of stunts you can pull off, but two of them are "Mighty Blow" (2 SP) and "Lethal Blow" (4 SP). But because the other stunt options give you a whole range of cool naughty word (reposition you or your target, knock someone prone, disarm, boost your defense, take an extra attack, set up a second attack, etc.), I doubt people would always just opt for "more damage."

I like this part of the AGE system in concept, and although I hate tables, I think I could memorize this one. However, I've never been able to get my group to play it.

As an aside, the chance of doubles of any kind is much higher than you think, especially once you start factoring in bonuses to the check. In AGE, those bonuses can easily hit +6, even at low levels. That monkeys with the percentages a LOT.

That only changes things to the extent it changes the chance of succeeding at all (since failures don't do anything with the stunt die). Otherwise its always "what's the chance of getting double's out of three dice?" which is to say 44%. It does get more complicated when its "What's the chances of getting doubles on 3D6 and also getting X total?"

 

[Thomas Shey]

Random question on this topic that came up as I was playing around with ideas today: when you are a player in a game do you prefer to affirmatively roll defense for your character or have the GM roll offense for your enemies?

How about "both"? (I should note I got a lot of early experience with BRP based games)>

 

[Thomas Shey]

Games are designed by, well, game designers, and as far as quirky people go, they're up there IME.

Doesn't make me accept it just because the GM liked it. If they can't explain what purpose doing these things serve being different in a way that I think is credible, its just a bad design as far as I'm concerned (as contrasted with a choice that's serving purposes I don't share, which is not "bad" so much as "aimed at someone else").

 

[zakael19]

Which is interesting: DH has a clear core mechanic, but is not afraid to bolt on subsystems and even encourages you to do so with your campaign frames. If only it were just a touch more generic...

I’m playing around with a lower-“power” DH hack. I really like the Duality Dice / Hope / Fear / HP + Stress + Armor core, but I’d prefer a stronger class identity instead of shared domains…

Thinking of code naming it Shadowheart