Gameplay Diary 4/8/2024

Gameplay Diary 4/8/2024

Rough week, huh boss? One player couldn't show up and can't show up next session either, another had to show up late making the game last only 2 hours, and we're so close to the end too. All of that to say I think everyone still had a good time but I've been thinking about the length of campaigns a lot lately. My current campaign and last campaign have gone on for a year and two years respectively. That is to say they were both long and by the end of them both my players and myself were feeling a bit of burnout. It is easy to look at a long campaign and see it as an accomplishment. It is an accomplishment, wrangling players for that long is a herculean task and running a game for that long is something I will always have respect for. All of this and yet I still can’t stop thinking about how so much advice for art that I’ve seen is to take an idea and cut it down into its bare necessities. Trim the fat, remove the excess, ensure every word has meaning. When you control the art this is not an easy task, when you control part of the art it can become confusing. Consider asking an improv artist to ensure their act has only the best of the best when they don’t have a clue as to what exactly will be going on. Players meander, players take their time, players look at the smallest parts of the world for hours at a time. It is rare when a player does this towards the big dramatic part of the campaign you planned out three months ago. This is not a slight against players. I am proud of them for focusing on what interests them in the worlds we make. To continue the analogy from earlier, you are then asking an improv artist to cut down an act that is unknown to them while their stage partner chooses a random amount of time to focus on each topic for. So the issue is that my campaigns often have sections that could have been cut or made much shorter because either I, my players, or both did not enjoy them but I have no idea if the next section will be gold or copper sold by ea-nasir. Perhaps this is just an issue I face. Perhaps it is an issue that can not be solved. Perhaps there is no issue and this is nothing but a section of doubt I must overcome. If anyone understands this rambling mess and has advice, I’d gladly take it.

Grand Providence development update 2/18/2024

Hello! This week was one of my downtime weeks where I spent more time taking in game design and ideas than putting them down to the page. While this means less progress, it does not mean no progress. The main two rules I worked on are ones I am happy with so far and both of them should open up a large swathe of options for the Providence as they make combat encounters.

First is the terrain. Often when I look up how to make combat more interesting I see many people bring up terrain yet when I tried to find interesting terrain rules I came up short. My main inspiration for what I wanted was something similar to the terrain effects in Divinity: Original Sin 2. While that game has many effects that end the turn that I don’t agree with, the way players and enemies can manipulate and combine different terrain effects was great. Taking that and combining it with the different types of terrain I already had, slowing terrain, debuffing terrain, and damaging terrain, made the integration simple. This type of terrain includes fire, water, blood, poison, oil, and ice. Secondly I made terrain that has less combinations with other terrain types but are more focused towards making players who are using stealth have more or less options. These types of terrain focus more on sight and sound to ensure that if a player wants to hide they have to plan their route. This type of terrain includes tall grass, fog/smoke/steam, and sound tiles made up of things like twigs, glass, or trash that, when stepped on, can be heard from different distances away. If you’re reading this and have any other types of terrain you’d like to suggest, go ahead and send a message or an ask!

The second mechanic I focused on is the enemy creation template. Next week I will be focusing more on manipulating the values to make enemy creation balanced but this week I wanted to make it interesting. Right now the enemy template is kept simple but can be easily modified by the three different modifiers that can be applied. Boss enemies gain a large amount of bonuses so that they can handle groups of 4 people without too many secondary enemies to help. Basic enemies gain one of eight different combat focuses that all modify their stats in a simple way or give them an ability to use. Minion enemies gain no combat focus, have no SP, and have only 1HP so they are almost always guaranteed to die in one hit. The main goal of this is to be able to make one enemy, say a goblin, and have it so the Providence can easily make minion enemies for when they want to swarm the players, normal enemies when they should encourage more interesting combat, and boss enemies that can challenge a group of players alone. This is one of the mechanics where knowing if it works or is balanced will take a long time but, right now, I feel good about it.

Thank you for reading! I hope this gave you ideas for what to do, or maybe what not to do, for your own games.

Grand Providence development update 3/3/2024

Hello! Let's get right into it.

The first set of rules I worked on were small, miniscule even, but I believe them to be important. These are the rules of what happens during different stages of being encumbered. These are important because having a simple binary set of unencumbered and overencumbered makes the decision for players simple depending on the severity of them. Does being overencumbered make the game terrible to play? If yes, never be overencumbered. If no, carry as much as you want until the GM yells at you for having an entire library worth of books in your back pocket. While having gradients is good, it can also get out of hand in the blink of an eye. Keeping this in mind I decided that there would be four states of encumbrance along with keeping the low numbers and simple assignment of Bulk to items. This makes calculating a character's encumbrance level less of a math problem for players and Providences. Carrying less than half of your carry capacity means a slight bonus to stealth, more than half means an increase in the dodge and parry action cost, going over your total carry capacity means an increase in the movement action cost and a slight detriment to your exploration speed, and finally carrying more than twice your carry capacity means you get one less ambition at the start of each turn. These detriments stack as well so the more you carry the more you feel the effects. These effects also, I hope, lead to players considering their options. Lugging around a treasure chest during combat? Terrible idea. But doing so when your only punishment is going a bit slower while getting back to town can be appealing.

The next set of rules were based around enemy types and their different resistances and vulnerabilities. In Grand Providence, resisting one of the four damage types does not mean you half that damage. Instead creatures will have Toxic Resistance 4 which means any time they take toxic damage the damage is lowered by 4. Vulnerabilities work the same way. While it is tempting to have every monster have a personalized set of damage resistances and vulnerabilities, this can cause a large amount of strain on both players and Providences when multiple creature types are present in a fight. Due to this I wanted to follow my general design philosophy and keep the rules simple. Each of the nine different categories of enemies, one of which is broken into six subtypes, have a generalized set of two resistances, one which is higher and one which is lower, and one vulnerability. While doing this I also ensured that the different damage types were represented as close to equally as I could. This was due to one of my friends and players who has issue with D&D, specifically with how many monsters resist poison. He is a rogue at heart and enjoys the idea of poisoned blades but the high amount of monsters that resist said poison makes it so he feels that the play style is too detrimental. The other reason I wanted to keep each monster type with generalized damage resistances and vulnerabilities was for the hunt of a monster. In many games players can have a hard time preparing to fight something because the options are too varied and scouring through a list of monsters that have the specific signals given can feel like studying while grinding a game to a halt while the other option is to keep studying in game until you find the answer which als grinds games to a halt. With this normalized system players can study where a monster attacked, find signs of it being a flora monster of some kind and know that, in general, fire is a good idea while toxins and corrosive damage types should be avoided.

The final set of rules were ones for the Providence only. These are the rules for making towns. Oftentimes making towns, what kind of shops and how large the shops are, what kinds of buildings the town has, and all other decisions are up to the GM while also having a low amount of mechanical structure to them. This often leads to GM’s either needing to do a large amount of work to make each town or just letting players buy whatever they so desire. That's not how I like to do things. So I took all of the shops and divided them into three sizes. A small blacksmith will have less or lower tiers of items than a large blacksmith. I then took all of the shops and divided them into four focuses a town can have, Core, Scholarly, Crafting, and Religious. Then I took all four of those and made five levels of focus the town can have for them. A town with a high focus on their Core and Crafting will have a better blacksmith and general store for example. I then took a large list of different buildings of interest for a town and divided them into these four categories. This way, when a Providence makes a town they will know the shops, the type of items they sell, and a list of different buildings that town will have. Keeping with this generation I then suggested a number of focus points a town will have depending on its size and then made the lifestyles and training levels depend on a towns size. This way when players hear that there is a small religious town to the west and a large craftsman town to the north they have a general idea of what they can expect from those towns.

That’s all for this week. If you have any questions, comments, or criticisms send me an ask!

There are two reasons traditional RPGs gravitate towards combat. The first is, of course, that D&D (originally a wargame with proto-RPG mechanics tacked on) has been the Mount Fuji of the TRPG space for its entire existence—the first TRPG most people play, the TRPG others are compared to (implicitly or otherwise), the TRPG whose name is synecdoche for the entire medium.

The second is, I think, more interesting. Combat is relatively easy to generalize.

From rocks to guns, from magic to laser swords, from predatory microbes to atomic bombs, combat is trying to hurt something badly enough that it can't hurt you back, before something does the same to you.

There are a lot of differences, of course. Dying from blood loss is different from dying of decapitation, or burns, or getting crushed by boulders, or having your soul sucked from your body. Heck, dying from getting cut by a sword is different than dying from being impaled by a sword. Plenty of games simulate the differences between different kinds of injury...but they don't have to. It's easy to make a moderately deep combat system that feels about right for rocks and guns and magic and lasers and bombs.

Contrast that with, for instance, social situations.

You could design a debate system similar to stereotypical RPG combat, where you win an argument through sheer attrition—exhausting the opponent's will to continue arguing. This fits some social conflicts quite well; political arguments at Thanksgiving, criminal negotiations at the edge of violence, certain debate club a-holes.

But there are obviously also social conflicts where it's completely inappropriate. Deceiving a guard, mediating conflict between rivals, flirting with a potential informant. Trying to win a debate club match with facts and logic instead of brute force, for that matter. Or trying to win the match with emotional appeals, or by focusing on weaknesses in your opponent's arguments.

Swords, lasers, and fireballs are all different, but they have the same methodology: To hurt something badly enough that it can't hurt you back. Representing them all within the same mechanical system is simple. Different debate club strategies, not so much. A rational argument, an emotional appeal, and an argument of attrition are only doing the same thing in the abstract sense that they both want to win the argument...but they're doing that with completely different methods.

Representing different attacks with the same mechanics is simple. Systems like FATE literally use the exact same rules for all attacks, and it works well enough. GURPS and D&D and Shadowrun and so forth add more detail, but fundamentally, magic and swords and guns and giant rocks and fire deplete the same hit points the same way. None of this is realistic, but it's all verisimilitudinous—a plausible simulation of reality.

Representing different debate strategies is harder. Maybe you have mechanics that represent building up various kinds of arguments, putting together logical connections between premise and conclusion or questioning your opponent's connections. Maybe building an emotional argument with the same mechanics could feel right. But what about the a-hole who's trying to tread rhetorical water and grind down his opponent's patience?

And the framing of "debate club" is pretty narrow. The goals of each participant are consistent; they want to win the debate, which involves convincing an external panel of judges that they made their argument better. Factors outside the debate club are mostly irrelevant, unless you're in the kind of high-stakes dystopian high school where threats, bribes, and references to the other party's emotional trauma are a normal part of club activities.

Some social situations are overcome by following the rules, others by breaking them. Sometimes success is determined by whether you sway the person you're arguing with, sometimes by whether you sway a third party. Sometimes the social situation is a direct conflict, sometimes you're trying to find a solution that benefits everyone. Factors outside the immediate situation can play a role in all sorts of ways. And so on, and so forth. And none of these factors are binary—there are mixed bags and shades of gray everywhere.

Practically speaking, you can either have social mechanics that are shallow and unverisimilitudinous, or you can have social mechanics that fit a relatively narrow range of possible social situations. And that can work very well! If you have a clear, specific idea of what kinds of characters your system is designed for and the kinds of conflicts they'll get involved in, that's great.

But a social system designed to work for cultists acting as a duke's servants, which centers around maintaining propriety and arguing that whatever weird stuff they're doing is actually what they're supposed to do, is not going to work if those cultists decide to go hire a thug to kill the duke and start haggling over prices. What does a criminal like that care about propriety?

TRPG designers traditionally value player freedom. If the players want to hire someone to assassinate the duke, the GM should let them try, and the rules should include some kind of guidance for it. At the very least, it should tell them what die to roll. That's easy if you can draw a clean line between the "real" mechanics and the roll-a-die mechanics.

But if your core mechanics are a certain set of social situations, it can be tricky to define the place where the core ends and roll-a-die begins. If your cultists try to convince some peasants that they need the chickens in their bag for normal reasons, but don't have any reason to maintain social propriety, half of the social mechanics seem like they should apply, but half don't matter. And there's an endless spectrum of possibilities where some of the mechanics may or may not matter.

Focusing on social mechanics requires either superhumanly flexible design, sticking to a very specific set of circumstances (even if it restricts player choice), or just using roll-a-die mechanics for everything.

In my opinion, the middle option is best. Look at txttletale's underside, for instance. If everyone is onboard with playing a cape game in a setting whose superheroes and villains act in a certain way. But if you want to play more idealistic heroes or chummier villains or something, the mechanics won't really support that.

The cost of having good social mechanics is very specific social mechanics. And that's something I think is fine, but it goes against TRPG design wisdom.

Gameplay Diary 3/11/2024

Hello, short post this week as things were mostly the same as the last session. A lot of roleplay and trying to learn about NPCs. The main topic I want to focus on is actually my friend's game, which we played right after mine. To give background, the other players and I were sent to find out what was making the population of a dungeon act aggressive towards the inhabitants of the village. The first issue that we came across was the fact that we were told that our reward for the quest was based on how many creatures in the dungeon we left alive. The second was the fact that we were on a time limit without information on how long we would need to spend in this mine. The third was that the NPC who gave us the quest had no other information or leads to give us outright. This leads to a group of four adventurers going into a dungeon with a strong “Do not kill” protocol in mind which then leads to all of us running through the dungeon to find the source of the issue as fast as possible. Not ideal if you worked on the dungeon as he did but the optimal strategy for a group who has such limited knowledge. Now the blame can easily be placed on us as players. We didn’t search out any information but, to us, this dungeon could have been large and demanded every second of our time. The problem with a GM blaming players is that it never works. As a GM you should expect players to show up, play your game, and do nothing else. The people you play with are smart, cunning, and good problem solvers. Players, with a capital P, are flighty, quick to act on limited knowledge, and prone to running into more problems than they can solve. All of this made me consider the idea of how GMs make dungeons. There is a large amount of information on how to make an interesting dungeon. The five room rule being one that many people look to along with the ideas of different elevations, a theme that spans through the puzzles, fights, and lore, and ways to guide players through a dungeon so they see everything you want them to. I would like to take all of this game design knowledge and transform it into a way for Providence’s to follow a few steps or guides that will lead them to making an adventure, dungeon included, that helps the Providence know how much EXP each section gives, what kind of knowledge is necessary for the players to not get blindsided, what kind of knowledge is beneficial but not crucial for the players, and how to have different parts of the adventure flow into one another. This is a daunting task as the modularity of an adventure and the Providence’s ability to improv when the players go off of the plan is one of the largest draws for TTRPGS. The idea of just throwing a Providence to the wolves, saying something along the lines of “Dungeons are things in the ground and adventures are fun romps you experience with friends, you figure out the rest” irks me as the GMs, especially those who are new or don’t research level design, can fall into simple pitfalls that make an adventure not live up to what they expect. My main goal of the mechanic will be to assist in avoiding these pitfalls while also keeping the “Adventure outline” simple and easy to make so that a Providence can make up additional sections or entire adventures using the system without too much strain and without ruining the flow of the game. If anyone has any advice with things that are similar to this or have any questions, feel free to send an ask or a message!

Gameplay Diary 2/25/24

The gameplay diary this week is that there was no game. My pet has recently died and I have a case of the flu so I was in no condition to run a game. Running a game is a large amount of work so always remember to be selfish and weigh the fun you would get from it against the work put in. Hobbies should be fun, after all.