Professionally I’m a video game designer, but my current job doesn’t give me many opportunities to scratch the design itch, so in my spare time I design board games. I’m curious if there are any other tabletop designers here. Either board games or card games or RPGs are fine, as long as it takes place around a table. What are you currently working on?
I’m certainly not a game designer (don’t have the time or singular focus) but I’m very interested in game mechanics, both in resource allocation/worker placement and co-op network optimization games. For RPGs, I’ve worked on settings and adapting mechanics but not creating an entire system de novo; the closest I got to that was working on a hybrid dice pool mechanic but I tend to default to a percentile skill/attribute system (e.g. Chaosium’s BRP or Design Mechanism Mythras) because it just seems more intuitive and allows the narrative to overshadow the mechanics.
Stranger
I’ve run games many time (running one now based on DC Adventures) but never made a tabletop system.
I’ve made RPG video games, but not professionally. (Mobile and online games.)
Not a game designer at all. Just often come up with random ideas.
One idea I think would help keep a board game fresh is to have a multi sectioned board, that is constructed at random before the game by say dice rolls or such. Or maybe even better, sections of the board are added at random during game progression. maybe have double sided game board sections that are flipped during the game.
Think Magic: The Gathering but utilizing packs of cards that people already have at home (tarot deck, worst case); nobody has to buy anything. OK, I have just described Contract Bridge. But there are some original ideas where I unfortunately do not have the time to give them the work they need, but we will see…
One of the folks in my game group has many designs in the works (I’ve played plenty of prototypes – several are pretty good), he does have on published board game (an app was made from another of his board game designs).
I have thought about it, and I think I could make an OK game, but I don’t think I could make a GOOD game, and certainly not an evergreen game.
Brian
Stranger
Not quite. If you have a game board that has some sort of tracks to follow with goals/conditions at certain points. Break up that type of board into sections, so it can be changed. It depends what the board game concept is here. I’m sure it has been done. Just throwing out the idea as one aspect of the OP’s game to keep it fresh, more complex. Static board layout game after game can often lead to always doing the same strategy.
I have not done any game design myself, but have participated in play-testing a few things, and a few of my acquaintances have games at various stages of development. I got to play White Wolf’s Exalted and Scion games a few times when they were in development because a friend worked for them. The main writer for Basic Fantasy lives not too far from me, and I have played it when he runs it at a local game convention. I have play-tested Nylon by Happy Zombie Studios, which looks to be morphing into a slightly different game called Wave Crashers. It seems to still be on track to eventually become commercially available. Another friend had a western-themed worker placement game (you send your lawmen out to apprehend various outlaws and collect bounties) that was developed to the point of getting ready to go to Kickstarter a few years ago, and whoever he was working with on publishing it had him sign an NDA on the project. Poof! I’ve never heard another word about it. It was a good game.
Betrayal at House on the Hill uses random tiles that are placed as you play, so the board is never the same, and there are 100 different random scenarios or “Haunts” if you have the base game and the Widow’s Walk expansion. Between those, you have a different combination of board layout and player objectives each time you play. There are other games with similar mechanics.
Recent kickstarter — the expedition leader chooses which side of the board to use:
Hawaii — the placement of the tiles is fixed at the start, but is different each game
I am sure there are others, those just came to mind.
Brian
Yes. That is a great example of what I was thinking. Better more interesting mechanics than my basic thought.
I suppose I could thrown in an idea I’ve had kicking around for a while but I’ve never done more with it than run a few probability analyses.
Every RPG combat system I’ve seen has two phases: roll to hit, and if you hit, roll for damage. It creates a certain amount of tension, which is good for the subjective experience, but slows down things somewhat - you have to hunt for a new set of dice after you’ve done the to-hit roll. Also, the to-hit roll sometimes affects the damage roll (critical hit on Nat 20, e.g.)
So I thought about how it would be possible to put both rolls together and get an outcome with a single roll, that aggregates to hit and damage into one, and has nonlinearity for critical hits and the like, all determined by a little mental math on a single roll of a handful of dice.
So I figured: let’s try numerator/denominator dice: the attacking weapon largely determinate the numerator, and the defender largely determines the denominator.
Say, a longsword might be d20/d6. Every so often, you get that 20-damage critical hit; 1/8 of the time you miss cleanly (and another 1/6 of the time, you do very little damage). Strength or magic weapons might either add to the numerator, or move it up another die class (from d20 to d24, for example).
But the defender can change things as well. They might dodge at +1 die class, which brings it up to d20/d8; they might have armor that adds to the denominator, so now it’s d20/(d8+1).
Note that I certainly haven’t seen every RPG combat system out there (I started with Melee/Wizard and the original D&D set, but haven’t done much recently at all), so there’s probably some other one that’s put both pieces into a single roll. What’s more, it does take some mental arithmetic to pull off, so might be better for a computer RPG; also, you tend to have a lot of (boring?) median-value attacks for a while before a low-probability strike hits home.
So if no one’s done it before (they probably have) and you think it’s genius (you probably don’t) and you decide to put it into a system of yours (you probably won’t), all I want for the 1% inspiration I’ve put into it would be a small hat tip in the credits - after all, you’d be putting in the 99% perspiration to make it work.
That is a tile placement game (not to be confused with Scrabble, Mah-Jong, or other games where players lay tiles to spell out a word, make patterns, et cetera, but not creating a map or network). @Retzbu_Tox mentioned Betrayal at House on the Hill which is a specific type of tile placement game mechanic called map addition but there are many other tile placement games that are more abstract such as Summit (a favorite among my climbing friends) and In The Hall Of The Mountain King, where players reveal a quasi-randomly placed tile map but then alter it to attempt to gain advantage. I’m not knocking the idea; as you note it is a way to add unpredictability into a game to avoid players from developing a dominant optimizing strategy, and I once tried to do this with Clue but nobody liked it (even though Clue is kind of a boring game that can be easily optimized by a moderately clever player), but it is fairly common as a mechanic in modern boardgames.
Stranger
Personally, I like dice pools in principle, because it allows for a good hierarchy of difficulty: In any given area of skill, there are some things that untrained people have almost no chance at, but novices can do easily; some thing that novices have almost no chance at, but experienced people can do easily, and so on. In the real world, there are often five or six different levels of this. In a game with single-roll-versus-difficulty, such as d20 games or most percentile systems, this is only possible if your range of difficulty numbers (and also bonuses) is five or six times as large as the range of the die, which can get pretty ludicrous, but it’s not too hard with dice-pool mechanics.
I say “in principle”, because in my limited experience, actually using dice pools at a tabletop seems to slow down play a lot more than d20+modifiers, or whatever. Though that might just be relative inexperience.
I would agree that the dice pool mechanic can better represent the non-linear nature of skill knowledge and application, but working out exactly how a dice pool should work to reflect that is pretty subjective. In practice, they end up being complicated for players (how many dice? which type?), and not intuitive for how likely a given action is to succeed. (You can make a chart or nomograph showing resulting likelihood but then you putting even more of a burden on the players.)
By contrast, a percentile system is very intuitive—everybody understands that a 20% chance is not hopeless but not great, and a 85% chance is very good—and has sufficient graduation to represent novice to expert. The problem of a percentile system is that linearity; a chance to hack into the US Department of Defense and access ICBM launch codes shouldn’t be possible for anyone but an expert with very special access, and even then should take exceptional effort and resources. If the skill system gives a default of 1% to anyone to do this it is ridiculously overstating the possibility. This can be addressed either by having graduations of difficulty that multiply the skill rating by some fraction (1/2 for difficult, 1/5 for formidable, 1/20 for impossible), making the skill advancement non-linear, or using a penalty/bonus die mechanic which is actually kind of a sneaky way to tack on a dice pool to a percentile system. All of that is additional complexity, however, although Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition at least does all the math on the character sheet so the player doesn’t have to.
A D20 system obviously doesn’t give very fine graduations and isn’t quite as intuitive (although anyone who can multiple by five can make easy conversions to an equivalent percentile) but for everything except edge cases it is workable and only requires rolling and reading one readily distinguishable die. 2D6 or 3D6 give distributions that are closer to a Gaussian distribution and it doesn’t take that much effort to add up the values or suss out how likely a roll is to succeed, but they also strongly tend to the mean, so if it is roll+bonus mechanic anyone with any bonus can radically skew their chances of success.
In the end, all of the mechanics are just a way of resolving conflicts in a randomized and consistent fashion that is suitable to the tone and genre of the game, and it is up to the gamemaster to make judgment calls and decisions on what actions are permissible and how difficult they are, so the selection of a particular dice mechanic is kind of arbitrary. Using a more complicated-than-necessary mechanic makes more work for the GM and more confusion for the players, so what works best really depends on the GM and players’ experience and comfort rather than any particular distribution.
The one thing I cannot stand are systems that use variable and arbitrary mechanics for resolving different types of conflicts; it is much easier for players to understand the basic mechanic being applied across all scales than switching back and forth between different types of dice, different scales of success, and different ways of applying consequences. All conflict resolution is abstract at some level and up to the GM to interpret so trying to make these really finicky, detailed mechanisms or have the GM have to search through table after table for a resolution (hello Rolemaster!) is just unnecessarily clunky. Beyond that, I think choice of a system is more or less at the discretion of the GM and acceptance of the players.
Stranger
Depends on what you mean. Take D&D, for example: Is it the same mechanic for skill checks and for combat? A skill check and an attack roll are both a d20 plus a few modifiers, versus some target number… but a combat, even at its simplest, is many, many attack rolls, followed by damage rolls, counting off against a hitpoint pool for each combatant, while a skill encounter usually consists entirely of that one check. One can envision a system where skills were as detailed as combat, but where combat consists of a single roll of a “combat check”.
I don’t really want to address AD&D specifically because any criticism tends to bring out the worst in people for whom it is the One & Only RPG, but in general I prefer systems in which the mechanic for physical conflicts (e.g. melee or ranged combat, indirect fire, et cetera) is the fundamentally the same as resolving other types of opposed interactions such as social conflicts, “cyberspace”/hacking, chases, et cetera. Obviously for certain types of conflicts where a degree of simulation is desired, such as melee combat, there are additional steps such as hit location, armor penetration, damage, fatigue, special maneuvers, et cetera but a skill to skill contest can be essentially the same, which streamlines the experience.
For example, in the aforementioned Chaosium CoC7.0 system (as adapted from their Basic Roleplaying SRD), a melee attack involves the attacker rolling against their pertinent attack role (with bonus/penalty dice according to size/visibility rules and as the Keeper deems appropriate), the defender rolls a counter-attack or Dodge roll as appropriate (again, with the pertinent bonus/penalty dice) and the results are compared to see who has the superior level of success to assess whether and to whom consequences are applied. It is the same mechanism used in other opposed rules, such as if two characters are actively trying to Fast Talk or Charm each other, or a character is attempting to ram the vehicle driven by an NPC in a chase, so the players only have to learn one mechanism for conflict resolution and the only lookup is how levels of success work, which players will memorize after a few checks. It makes for a gaming experience where the mechanics tend to fade into the background and little time is wasted with players asking how things work or the GM spending time looking up tables, allowing the focus to be on the action and roleplay.
(Of course, characters in Call of Cthulhu are likely to be wiped out the first time they meet a Mythos entity, either by being blasted by 8D6 points of wind/fire/cosmic energy damage, being flung into an inexplicable dimension, or driven insane by just being stared at by the eye of Cyaegha, and are even likely to be helpless against a cult of tommygun toting cultists who will take the investigators back to their secret undercity lair to be sacrificed in order to open up a portal for Tsathoggua if they are just gunned down immediately, so one can argue that detailed combat rules for this game are probably not all that important in the scheme of things.)
I don’t mean to pitch BRP is the best system (although it is one I strongly prefer for my own reasons) but just an example of a best effort of consistency and simplicity across all types of conflict resolution while still allowing the mechanic to be flexible in representing a contest and allowing different types of consequences. The same could be said of a game like FATE, where the conflict resolution is more abstracted into an explicitly storytelling mechanism, or Traveller where the same 2D6+skill is compared to a difficulty level for any type of conflict or task resolution. It just bugs me when a system has one set of rules for combat (or has a bunch of different lookup tables depending on the type of combat and opponents), another for magic/psionics/mutations, yet another for special talents or abilities, and an forth, because you spend more time looking up rules and trying to negotiate edge-cases or things that the system doesn’t anticipate than just making sensible rulings based upon applying an general overarching mechanic and playing the scenario.
Stranger
Steve Jackson came out with GURPS (“generic” role-playing system) where you just roll 3d6 for everything, and successfully published loads of supplement books for D&D-type fantasy, futuristic weapons, Cthulhu cults in 1930s’ New England, you name it. It does not predate BRP, of course.
The Fate system, which @Stranger_On_A_Train mentioned, incorporates damage into resolution of the attack roll. Attacks are opposed rolls (i.e., the attacker makes a roll, and the target makes a roll to defend themselves) – if the attacker’s roll is higher than the defender’s roll, damage (“stress”) is dealt, equal to the difference between the rolls (so, the better the hit, the more damage is done). There is no separate “damage roll” in Fate.