Homebrew design challenge

[Hautamaki]

Hey all, I have pretty limited RPG experience having lived for almost a decade now in China, where both players and materials are of limited supply, so I was hoping to get a bit more perspective on some design challenges.

I have a lot of the 3.5 books, and even the 3 core 4e books, but for various reasons I am currently DMing a 100% homebrew system.

There are a lot of design challenges to be addressed in any RPG system but what I want to discuss first is how to find the balance in character advancement where it's still meaningful for the players, but doesn't become so bogged down with gigantic numbers, 100s of choices (of spells/powers etc), and massive amounts of modifiers, many of which will change over the course of the battle.

Frankly, I don't think 3.x D&D handles it well at all, and becomes a chore to run battles past 12th level, being almost unbearable at 20th+. I don't have any first hand experience with high level 4e so I don't know if it does a better job there, but in general I'd love to hear if there are any systems/ideas about character advancement that you think handle high-level gaming really well.

What I did: for HP; diminishing returns. As characters gain levels they earn fewer hp starting on their 6th level, and fewer still on 12th, 18th, and so on.

For attacks: characters can normally attack at most twice per round. But damage output does continue to increase, so high level battles don't last much longer than low level battles.

For options: I run a low-magic homebrew (for many reasons, but high level bogging down of combat is one of the main ones) so while there are a huge number of feats (many of which have magic-like effects) for every class to choose from (a few dozen) it's nothing compared to managing hundreds of spells like 3.x.

For modifiers: I tried to design the character sheets so that the various modifiers can be easily and clearly displayed, calculated, and used during the battle without having to spend too much extra time re-calculating things.


What are your thoughts about how character advancement is handled by various systems? For anyone who also made/runs their own homebrew system, how did you handle this design challenge?

 

[Starman]

Have you tried E6? It seems to scratch the D&D itch for a lot of people who prefer lower magic games.

 

[Haltherrion]

Well... I'm not really sure where you are going with your system or your question but there seem to be some fundementally different approaches to advancement.

On one path, more advanced characters don't have any more capacity to take damage then lower level characters. In this school of thought, bodies are bodies and wounds are wounds, but higher level PCs are more skillfull at inflicting damage and avoiding damage. This is a more lethal world where a well landed sword blow will kill a neophyte as well as a seasoned warrrior but a seasoned warrior has a better chance of avoing the blow. An analog might be the western gunfighter who played the angles (sun in the eyes of the foes, always get the drop on the foe, always use a superior firearm; but once a bullet hit the torso, a good gunfighter was just as dead as a greenhorn).

Then there's the school of thought where the higher level folks are just tougher by some measure and either can shrug off damage from low level folks or just take a lot more blows.

Both schools have their fictional counterparts and both can make for good games. D&D is certainly more the latter and D&D 4E is very much the latter.

The latter system is more forgiving and probably more comfortable for players but isn't inherently superior to another system. They are just different ways to cast it. On the gritty, everyone is mortal scale, the game seems to favor more RP and less combat. On the "you can't touch me unless you are somewhat similarly geared and leveled" it's more forgiving in many ways. What works for you depends on your vision of a game sysyem and what your players are likely to enjoy.

To turn to real game system examples. I always felt that at least the earlier systems of traveler (not personally familiar with d20 traveler) are more like the gritty, lethal, former system. D&D and most other fantasy and space opera games tend more to the latter end of the spectruum. I am more sympathetic to the former system but almost always play the latter systems. Why? Well, gritty and lethal means not alot of combat (becuase lethal == dead characters) which means a lot more work providing a game system where non-combat matters. D&D-ish systems always have the entertainment option of whacking on things for hours on end which is fun in its on way and certainly can still be blended with lots of RP and non-combat stuff.

So far your game system, it really depends on more of what you want to run. Do you want a system that focuses more on RP and players and has infrequent combat or a system that is all combat or a system that is a bit of both. THe latter two points on the spectrum to me have more in common than the first point.

I don't get a sense of what your design goals are from what you have described so far. Maybe you can share some more.

 

[Hautamaki]

Thanks for the response. My design goals is to provide the dreaded 'realistic' combat system--what this really means is I'm going for a realistic feeling, mostly by being internally consistent and doing my best to avoid rules that inevitably lead to rulings that would completely defy common sense; for example in D&D if a character roles higher initiative, he goes first, period. In my game, a character with higher initiative may begin his actions first, but if it's not an instantaneous action that doesn't mean it can't be interupted by other players who are doing an instantaneous action. What this means in actual combat is that ranged weapons are a lot more useful than in D&D because a character with a readied and loaded ranged weapon always gets to fire before enemies can run a whole 30+ feet and smack him with a melee weapon. Of course reload times are also more realistic meaning that crossbows in particular are often times a single use per combat anyways.

That said, what I'm really going for in combat is to have the players have lots of interesting and balanced choices available to them not only from a character building perspective but also from actual battle tactics. This means that I have large lists of weapons, armour, feats, etc, and characters upon gaining levels can rapidly increase their options in combat. What I don't want to happen though is bloat to the point where it takes hours upon hours to resolve combats, so I have made sure that damage keeps pace with the ability to absorb damage, and tried to design the character sheets well enough that relevant information about options and modifiers is available at a glance. It's not that combat in my system is any more or less lethal than another system because after all I think that depends entirely upon the magnitude of challenge the DM feels like throwing at his players, regardless of the system. It's just more that what I'm going for is that characters can die with a lower required amount of dice rolls and mid-game rule referencing than very high level D&D. That said the chance of an unlucky roll resulting in sudden player death is no higher in my game as the randomness of the die has been mitigated in other ways (for example 3d6, and later 4d6 at higher levels, is rolled for checks instead of d20s--you still have a chance to get a 3/4 or 18/24 but it's a much much lower chance than a 1 or a 20). Overall the system's rules and my own tendencies as a DM would probably fall on the side of more combat-heavy than RP heavy but I enjoy RP too and I think that combat, even if it is tactically interesting, is not exciting unless it is meaningful to the players because they are trying to win the battle for a greater cause than simple survival or accumulation of resources with which to faster and more effectively engage in the next battle.


I have gone with low magic mostly because of how easily the unintended consequences of many magical spells ruined the balance of D&D, but also simply because I find world-building a high magic world where spell casters are a mundane element to be extremely difficult in terms of maintaining that feeling of realism. Mundanity of magic makes pretty much every other element of the world obsolete. Armies, soldiers, castles, horses, farmers, craftsman, almost everything... who needs that crap when you can do anything and everything with magic? So to me it's just way way easier to design, imagine, and role-play in a world where magic is something extremely rare, limited, and special. We can picture it by just imagining a standard medieval-tech society and adding in only a few mysterious witches, warlocks, etc, as we desire. Sort of like a Merlin and his evil rivals in the Arthurian legends and so on. Society as a whole functions independent of magic, and only certain individuals on rare occasions ever have contact with magic at all. This means that the PCs themselves are not magical, but the possibility of them facing magical antagonists remains.

Not really sure what else is relevant to help you understand better what I was going for. But thanks a lot for the starting points to further discussions!

 

[Glade Riven]

Realism...such a loaded term. Especially when paired with "magic." Artist Pablo Picasso once said that he had never seen a realistic painting. He was also known to say that art is a lie. This can easily be applied to RPGs. I know I've never seen a realistic RPG - only RPGs with more math.

It doesn't matter is designed to be real. Sometimes reality even feels false. It is more importaint to create a system that has a consistant internal framework. This is a primary ingrediant to the Suspension of Disbelief. If you need a low/no magic society to maintain the suspension of disbelief for your world, so be it.