Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Transcendant]

So yeah, sorry to necro, but I don't think we need another thread when this one is still around. With Truean gone .... Yeah.

Anyhow I was just considering something very minimalist, a little more than RTD, but still. Start it out as an RPG I suppose. Just throwing things out here, because I've done this before with multiple settings (zombies, adventurers, dwarves, etc). I'm not expecting it to last forever, but longer than those perhaps. True did teach me some stuff that really helped, and hopefully they'll considering keeping on helping me refine it, but yeah....

You're gonna have X overall things


Personal actions per turn. What you do when based on what.

Melee Combat: Weapon + Strength + Skill + Circumstance
Ranged Combat: Weapon + Dex + Skill + Circumstance
Skill Use: Tool + [ability] +Skill +Circumstance

Reasoning: This allows players some ability to customize and tailor actions within reason. Life still has challenges; these give a chance of meeting them.

Scene planning: T is right. We aren't a AAA studio, so there goes graphics and wide open worlds. Plus I'm just trying to make this work. I tended to overdo the detail, but it can't just be nothing either. I like the idea of having set location challenges at set times for this kinda thing. In theory people could do anything but leveling up and getting equipment would make things a lot easier. No way around it, people are going to have to read some stuff. The locations are going to have to have some point to being there, or else people are just going to "Explore." That's fine, but eventually you want to have some reason to do something somewhere. Hopefully planning helps with that.

Players won't know the stats, but would know there are 3 goblins with swords and armor

Resource consumption, and maybe production: Gotta eat. Maybe have ammo, items, etc. Skills might let things be produced.

I don't know. I might try putting some pieces together here and see how it goes. A lot of this is from True and it'd be great if she came back....

[femmelf]

Have you considered something less like a suggestion game and more like a story with just a slight bit of crowd input, or none? You seem to know where you want your games to go, but people just either don't give input or don't know how. Take a look at some of the community games and stories in the upper forums

[Truean]

[sigh] Fine, I'll give some public input if it'll make you happy. I'm going to close my eyes and type except to put in a hyperlink or two and very minor formatting.

Think of a fairly small, closed area RPG game to start. X distance units by Y distance units. Graph paper? Note location of areas and distance from one area to the next. Standardize distance units, give units speed as distance unit / turn. Standardize the length of a turn, a minute or Z seconds, whatever. This will do the following. A.) let people somewhat choose what objectives / areas to do at a cost of speed (distance/time). Note what happens at each area on a semi script.

I'm going to use an example with mad libs.... "in space" for the heck of it.

"Planet [to do: think up name] colony was founded in 5554 AD, and grew to pop 15,000 by 5583. Several scientific breakthroughs including [describe tech used in game] were found. Rumors persisted of [well contained secret experiments] on longevity. All was well [until it wasn't]. There were [consequences of it not being well anymore]. Faced with this [disaster] and worried about losing their [research] , renounced scientist turned to [well contained secret experiments], which [went wrong]. Now Planet [to do: think up name] faces [consequences of it not being well anymore] and [the no longer contained secret experiments]. You are [insert character] at [insert place and time]. You must [do something to survive]."

I may or may not fill that in later.

So you start out with a starting point. This is Point A, the ... landing zone .... where your transport ship .... 's departure was delayed ... due to some second or third removed indirect side effect of [consequences of it not being well anymore] and [the no longer contained secret experiments]. You are told by the GM that [event 1 happened] at [location A]. Then players will use skills to either solve, defeat, hide from, or run from, the event.

You get a map of the area (remember that fairly small, closed area RPG game to start?) showing points (and you the GM keep the distances between those points on a separate spreadsheet they don't see).

Point B is a communications tower .... (47 distance units west away from from point A where you are).

Point C is a maintenance hanger (27 distance units west away from point A where you are)

Point D is the residential area (39 distance units north from point A where you are)

Point E is a residential area with a hydroponics bay (12 distance units south from point A where you are).

Point F is an armory (19 distance units East from Point A where you are).

etc etc.

This allows players to travel to different locations at different times. They each have something you planned to happen with rewards or consequences and varying challenges. You keep certain things to yourself, for example. The Maintenance hanger has overland transport that will speed the player up but also has a certain [monster(s)]. The communication tower has valuation information, including several security codes but draws [major problem they have to deal with as a challenge]. The armory has weapons and even better weapons if you have the security codes from the coms towers, etc. Residential areas have potential recruits that are poorly armed as well as civilians to rescue. The residential area with a hydroponics bay is overrun with enemies, etc etc etc.

Consider information as a motivating factor, when they have it available to them.

Consider skills as a chance to overcome the stat blocks of various challenges (HP by damage/to hit, stealth overcoming detection, diplomacy gaining bonuses from friendlies or turning only certain enemies non hostile, tech skills overriding locks, making certain bonuses happen, and counteracting bad things, etc etc etc).

Set up a story on a timeline, making the distance / travel thing all the more important, though grant some room for choices, and ways to shorten the timeline (speed up the bad guy's progress) or lengthen it (give the player more time) depending on good or bad reasonable actions. Example, if you don't save the residential area by time index ... whatever, then they will succumb to the  [consequences of it not being well anymore] and [the no longer contained secret experiments]. If however you save them before time index whatever, then you will gain the following bonuses.... Also doing certain things will make various tasks easier or harder to do and thus easier or harder to avoid bad things and earn good things. Somehow figuring out the security codes will make getting the coms tower working and the armory special stash easier, which would make liberating the residential areas easier, which would slow down the bad guy. Getting the overland transit would cost time (more time) but if successful, would make future transit to various other locations/objectives faster (cost less time), but it's a risk to justify the reward and takes time.

Also, figure out the information about and how to stop the [consequences of it not being well anymore] and [the no longer contained secret experiments]. Figure out where the hidden lab is, how to access it, etc.

There I posted, once.

[MaximumZero]

So, I haven't seen this yet, but it seems stupidly obvious: For fuck's sake, don't take on too many players for your game. Too few leaves it uninteresting, but too many can swamp your time and/or break the system. Define a hard limit on how many people you're willing/able to run the game for and stick to it.

[Transcendant]

That's actually really good both of you. How many people would you think? Holy shit T I've missed your really good snarky ideas. That sounds awesome already just from what you wrote so far.

[MaximumZero]

Depends on your game. If the rules are simple, you can take on quite a few. If you have a lot of moving pieces, or turns take a long time to run, limit it to a handful with a waitlist (waitlists are a very good idea for games with high player turnover. Random.org is a great tool to choose your next victim player.) If you look back through my games, I ran a couple LPs of the Sims and a couple of "Stranded on an island" games. Most of them died because running turns took too long. (One died due to data corruption, iirc.)

[Transcendant]

Nice.

I was also wondering about the social aspects of a game as well, relationships with NPCs even?

You see some "hermit" games and focus on social settings even in DF the game itself. Doesn't have to be completely isolated though.... Even an isolated settlement or even one house in stone might be nice. Metagame, lots of us aren't popular and could use a friend aspect to things (games do this with NPCs). Same may be done on a larger city scale, but that'd be harder and political (imaginary factions of dwarves).

[Truean]

There's the quantitative numbery (this is now a word) approach where you level up skills in social sutff to use on NPCs like combat skills on enemies, or the qualitative one where you describe things logically(?).

I'm not understanding what you're asking for. Can you rephrase the question please?

[TheBiggerFish]

Hi Truean!

[Transcendant]

I'd like a game that works and lets me pretend who I am and what I do matter. Not just a lot of generic locations with generic things and NPCs that dies off cause nobody cares.

[Truean]

You'll have to narrow that down, a lot.

Let's skip "works," & "matter" being relative. Focus, concrete goals.

Socially, imaginary friends worth caring and being cared about? (aka good NPCs). Identify who and how they would be, and how they'd sustain themselves while interacting in life. Imagine possible interactions you might take about this and factors that would increase or decrease success chance.

Those short sentences are vastly important. Tell me (correctly) why, and you'll be a step closer to duplicating the creation / maintenance process.


Look, people don't get it (anything, yes, anything, I'm not fighting about it, believe it or don't. I'm still not really here / listening). Isolate the issue. What might or might not someone (reasonably) consider success? How might you deliver it? Are there reasonable factors making delivery more or less likely? If things fail, knowing why is important to people; conversely, knowing why we win also matters. Victory feels hollow without reason, as does loss.

Would you like me to show you an example or two of what I mean using demonstration(s)?

[Transcendant]

Yeah.

[Truean]

Hey
____________________________________________

Social in games:

Numeric / Quantitative:
Any task takes something to accomplish it. A game enemy can be defeated with a certain number of hits, or a certain amount of skill (stealth/social, etc). Instead of defeating an enemy, consider influencing a friend, same idea. Switch the names of the mechanics and you have it.

Consider a math equation. There are certain things more likely to make you generally more successful (social stat), and specifically more successful towards a given NPC (NPC A likes strength and dislikes weakness; whereas NPC B likes intelligence, the stereotypical jock and nerd examples).

Descriptive / Qualitatively:
If _____, then _____ statements. Classically, video games had items you'd gain and apply (Zelda comes to mind) to do certain things. Same idea except with social, verbal, or acted ideas. Certain things that are said or done will influence certain NPCs. Consequently, real people are kind of like this, because certain hot button issues will set them off. On the other hand, certain interesting topics will do the opposite and make them happier. It's a statement based idea.

Reputation:
Many games have a certain score earned by deeds like experience points for how a given group of people react to your character. At a certain level they hate you, because your reputation is either too low and/or negative.

Combination: see all of the above.

Consider Urist McDwarf and his 6 other dwarven companions. Numerically, Urist has a social stat of 3, and 1 rank of conversation skill. Specifically, Dwarven companions 1-4 like beards, and Urist has a great one (+2), whereas Dwarven companion 5 doesn't like beards that aren't double braided (-1) thinking them sloppy. Finally Dwarven companion 6 is a strict militarist who thinks all body hair is a disadvantage and is generally grumpy anyhow (-2). Historically, Urist has had excellent relations with 1-4 (+3), and terrible relations with the others (-1). Of course, conversations and future interactions could change these, improving or decreasing them as the situation warrants. Think of it as keeping track of things in a game term with imaginary people.

Similarly, qualitative things/ could be required for constructive conversations, or for certain levels of interaction (good or bad, or exceptional, etc). This could even be used to control quest information in a more traditional computerized RPG. Same deal with reputation rewards /punishments.

Then of course, you have essentially a storytelling and psychological element. Certain NPCs fulfill certain roles, such as mentor, or friend, or foil. They provide different flavors of interaction the player may be interested in.... I am reminded of the legendary Baldur's Gate 2.... Take a look at that game sometime if you haven't. Misc the ranger was mechanically a versatile damage dealing tank with some stealth if you used leather (not metal) armor, and he was comic relief steering towards "good" actions. Jeriha was more a middle road leaning good compass, etc etc. Each NPC had its own personality traits and role to fill, not to mention NPCs had methods of interacting with one another....

Support, friendship, challenges, skill building, information, material, assistance, and other things are given and gotten from NPCs.

I do hope this helped somewhat? Any other questions / concerns?

[RoseHeart]

There's an important lesson in that first link(and I'm sorry if this is already been addressed, but laziness on that aspect is the price of this advice) an important lesson is that all the information that is important for you as a DM may not be or may not at least be immediately important to the player.

I hate keeping information tracked somewhere other than the game so of course I'll try to find a sneaky way of putting it in there but it's fairly responsible to just go ahead and keep track of that information and feed it to the player as they need it.

Also, see: Gamer's Block, literally designed for this type of question. I'm actually confused and surprised this thread has grown so long.

[Transcendant]

It's not such a bad thing that the thread is longer now. I mean, I think it doesn't hurt anything and may have helped a little bit?