Yup, and the combat system is identical whether you’re trying to stab someone with a sword or trying to talk your way out of a traffic ticket (social combat). And it works pretty well.
Of course, it is worth noting that FATE is the opposite of a “simulationist” system; it is specifically focused on the result of taking damage actually have narrative effects (Stress and Consequences) rather than mechanical effects (Hit Points/Health/et cetera) that are resolved through natural healing, medical treatment, or magic. So weapons don’t do a certain quantifiable amount of damage; they consume some amount of Stress (that the receiving player can allocate as they see fit) and have a Consequence on the player that may be meaningful in future play such as a deformity or disability, versus just moving a counter. Some systems, like Runequest have a kind of hybrid where the damage above a threshold may have additional effects (albeit with even more complexity in resolving combat); others just treat hit points as a counter and as long as they aren’t negative the character is still alive and capable of acting normally.
Which system you and your players prefer really just depends on the tone of the game and your sensibilities. Trying to be excessively simulationist in the mechanics generally leads to really drawn out combat (Space Opera, Runequest 3rd Edition); trying to be narrativist can result in ambiguity over the relative effectiveness of skills and weapons; and trying to be too streamlined can result in ridiculously unrealistic consequences such as a character being repeatedly roasted by a dragon but still having sufficient hit points to move and attack even though they are suffering third degree burns and their armor should be melting off of them. For a pulpy game, the latter might be just fine; for a more realistic game, the complex simulation of combat might be more appropriate provided that it results in quick, definitive combat, i.e. serious wounds actually disable or kill the character. One thing I hate are combats that go on indefinitely with characters able to shrug off major damage like multiple gunshots or being crushed by dint of a big hit point pool or instantaneous healing magic. That shouldn’t work unless you are the Wolverine or Hulk, and in that case you can just treat all regular damage as inconsequential.
Stranger
My favorite system is the one Fantasy Flight Games uses for Star Wars. It is a blend of simulation and narrative play. Weapons have damage and inherent effects; a lightsaber can cut through a starship hull, a repeating blaster can mow down a group of mooks but is hard to aim, an ion blaster does extra damage to droids and other mechanical things. But dice don’t have numbers; they have symbols that represent success and failure, as well as advantages and setbacks (minor things that help or hurt, like catching a second wind or dropping your weapon), and “triumphs” or “despair” (really awesome or horrifying cinematic results).
The game has specific damage and health and stamina and armor (called “soak”) all as defined numbers. Yet around all that math is the opportunity to shoot the door controls to trap stormtroopers in a supply room, or cut the chains holding a speeder engine in a repair bay to drop on a rancor’s head, or throw a used stimpack in a convincing way to trick a bounty hunter into diving for cover as if it was a grenade. It’s the best of both worlds to me.
I miss that game. I hope my group has the will to play it again someday.
To be clear, I never meant to imply that D&D was the One True System. It’s just the one system that you can be pretty confident that everyone in a discussion like this is familiar with, and hence can be useful as a reference point. And also the system that I, for one, am most familiar with, just because that’s what the group I’m in plays.
That qualifier (about not addressing AD&D) wasn’t directed at you or anyone else specifically; it is just a topic that tends to bring up strong opinions that I am frankly not knowledgeable enough to respond to. I once made a comment about the AD&D (first edition) alignment system and how it really didn’t really guide players toward character motivations nor have any mechanical effects beyond class selection, and got schooled by multiple people ‘correcting’ me on the convoluted history of alignments in various editions of the game and why it was great (or not) in the current edition, a topic about which I had no knowledge and zero interest because I don’t play that game.
I feel like this discussion has kind of gotten off-topic from the o.p.; trying to get back onto topic, although I’m not working on a game I like learning and playing around with game mechanics. I haven’t played it yet but have Unsettled from Orange Nebula sitting on my game table and it looks really interesting; unfortunately, I don’t have a group to play with right now and it is a strongly collaborative gameplay system, so I’ve been mostly limited to watching playthroughs. I’ve been trying to find good solo games but most one-player games either seem to become fairly trivial with repetition or are essentially a “Choose Your Own Adventure” scheme in tabletop form, which can still be fun but has limited novelty and not much character agency. My current favorite is Spire’s End, which is a narrative choose your option game but has some mechanics to at least give some sense of agency (although most endings lead you to failure or death). I’ve been trying to conceive of a mechanism that would allow for a more flexible and novel character choices for replays but still offers narrative consistency, i.e. some kind of a flowchart that creates conflicts and challenges on the fly that feed into a consistent throughline and in which character actions influence the outcome but I haven’t spent much time on it lately.
Stranger
A lot of board games are coming out with solo modes with various approaches – some you have to beat an opponent (which may or not play by the same rules as you), some you just try to score well. A lot of Co-op board games can be played solo (or two handed). A friend only plays Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island | Board Game | BoardGameGeek solo as he wants to make all the decisions.
Whether these would satisfy you I can’t say (I’ve played the solo Agricola a few times but otherwise not much of a solo board gamer)
Brian
A lot of boardgames with an adapted solo mode are essentially two player where the solo player is playing both roles in a coop mode against a clock or against some kind of default behavior which doesn’t offer the challenge of variability of another player. Of course, no solo game will offer the social aspects or inherent unpredictability of human players but with most solo games or coops played solo (e.g. Pandemic) it is pretty easy to find optimum strategies and then the game just becomes repetitive.
Stranger
A tile-laying & worker placement game, themed around mushrooms (as in, the worker meeples are a bunch of fun guys).
I got a 3d printer/laser cutter and thought designing a game might be a fun use of its functions (3d printer for the meeples and 3d terrain pieces, laser cutter for the hex terrain tiles and tokens)
It’s early days as far as rules creation goes, this being a collaborative exercise with my wife and kids. But the brainstorming’s been fun.
I assume “fun guys” was an unintended autocorrect for “fungi” (or funguses). Sounds interesting.
Stranger
No, it was quite deliberate. They’re little mushroom men. Not strictly meeples, more like figurines. “Mushmeeps” is what we’ve been calling them. They come in two sizes, normal workers and upgraded brutes (better at fighting). Different colours for different tribes.
The lore is that your players are young fun guys setting off to explore the forest and help your tribe prosper.
The tiles (chosen at random) are double-faced hex tiles that are laid out by players turn-by-turn. There are green and brown tile faces. Which tile face is laid upwards is determined by a die role. Tiles have variable initial resource values - laying a tile gets you that many resources. They also all have a connectable mycelial network (so think Carcassone roads but every tile has at least one “road” across it, maybe more). New tiles can only be laid by a mushmeep in an adjacent hex. There will be a tile flip mechanic, as well as a small set of personal, more beneficial tiles that players can pay resources to lay instead of a random one. Constructions can only be placed on brown hexes.
Tiles are laid around a central 7-tile-sized “Home base” with shared/competitive action spaces - bank (for resource exchange and card purchases), new mushmeep budding station, construction yard, mushmeep upgrade area, stuff like that. All players start with one mushmeep in the base ready to move out, and some resources.
One set of constructables are tree stump terrain pieces that give control of surrounding resource tiles, ongoing control of these will involve some sort of hidden stat Att/Def fight mechanic, we think.
Leaves and logs are resources, determined by tile, and the basic turn is 1 Tile Lay + 1 Move + 1 Gather + 1 Base Action (this basic order can be affected by various things). There is a VP mechanic. There are cards that can be purchased with resources - these might include combat enhancement, resource multipliers, tile flippers, and straight-up VP items. Control of stumps is also worth VP. That’s about as far as we’ve gotten so far, and the ruleset is subject to change as we evolve the game.
They’re Shroomfellas!!!
Most of my game design these days are Mafia/Werewolf forum games where there’s an informed minority of players working against an uninformed majority. I think forum games can be very similar to table-top games played over the internet. There is a lot of trade-off to be made between players’ decision spaces and rules complexity, which is where most of my design work is done. These are all published over on Giraffeboards.
I’ve spent a lot of time redesigning commercial board games so they’re more fun for my family. Generally, that means less competition and more cooperation. Playing without hidden cards, win conditions based on the group’s score, removing/modifying zero-sum mechanics, etc. I’ve redone Settlers of Catan and AH’s Civilization. I greatly appreciate games like Spirit Island which are designed with optional rules to use or not, depending on the needs of the play group.
I’ve done some board game design. Sketched out: a tile-based civilization-style game (managing populations, technology, and trade), a tile-based classical-Greek city builder game (managing populations, buildings, and gods), a card-based fantasy kingdom (managing domestic and foreign politics). I also have a superhero-themed dice game that’s in play testing among family and friends; I’m vain enough to think it has some commercial potential, so won’t go into details here.
All of my board-game designs are non-competitive. Usually players have different (but not opposing) win conditions. Things like a “trophy” for meeting this or that criterion first, last, or currently. And then each player needs some number of trophies and the group as whole needs some greater number, all before any end-game condition is triggered. This can lead to non-zero-sum tactics, like helping those behind to catch up, and mutually advantageous trades as players specialize. There’s an expectation that no one is trying to intentionally spoil others’ play. Quarter-backing is explicitly discouraged.
I’ve also sketched out the core mechanics for a table-top role-playing game. Loosely based on D&D and Pathfinder, but with a lot of influences from City of Heroes. Fantasy-themed, but with character classes and abilities more like CoH. It’s more of an outlet for my world-building impulses than game design at this point.
Slightly off-topic, my kids have developed a real-life version of Among Us that they play with their friends at parties. They set up “work stations” scattered about the house where some menial task has to be done (thirty jumping jacks, fill ten plastic cups with water, sorting a deck of cards, etc) while one or two secretly determined bad guys “kill” the others. And then the votes where they lie to each other and try to suss who the bad guys are. Kids can be such clever sociopaths.
Here’s the prototype for the game I’m currently working on (“The Book of Tales”). There are 32 land tiles, and you draw 16 at random to create a 4x4 map so every time the board is different. The four cities are placed randomly too.
Another design I’m working on right now is based on the Electoral College. 
It’s a fantasy world where you move around the map slaying monsters and throwing feasts to gain influence. Your influence is tallied secretly, so while you may have a vague idea who’s ahead in each territory, you can’t know for sure who controls it until the end when the influence is tallied.
Then there’s an elimination phase. You drop the player with the fewest points and redistribute their territories to the players who came in second. Repeat until there’s only one player left. You want to try to just barely get the most influence in each territory. You can win by cobbling together a coalition of medium-sized territories an ignoring the big ones.
I really like the look of the map. Clean design, but organic lines. Interesting but not too busy. A nice design like that makes it a real tough problem to have map tiles matching up when mixed around. Especially when you have land and water.
I am trying to remember a specific game mechanic that was included in a game that was inspired by Game of Thrones. It was a difficult game. I think it was that there was an overall turn limit. But also some other complication to that concept as well? There was something that required the overall strategy you might take to change. It has been years since I played it. Can’t remember the exact name.
Adding an overall turn limit, or turn limits for goals can add tension and desperation to a game.
Does anyone know if it is possible to buy an old game called 88’s.
A WW2 game on a hex grid map. Playable from simple to high complexity. Single vehicle level.
I would like to take a crack at converting a lot of it to computer calculation. The data cards are the key.
May be messing with the thread, but as there are gamers here anyway, thought I would ask.
This looks to be it; Noble Knight Games is my go-to place for out of print stuff, and they have great customer service. They have two copies right now, one of which is in very good condition, and both are “unpunched.” Not cheap, but it’s there.
Someone in the UK has it for 45pounds (plus shipping, which could be a lot)
Brian
Thanks very much for the replies. Wow, unpunched! Never played.