Ok, so how *do* you make a robust tactical minigame?

[Chamomile]

So far as I'm concerned, there are only two tables worth having: lol tables and indecision tables. The former for when the result is supposed to be chaotic to the point of comedy and the latter when you could just pick whichever result you want but it's been five minutes and you're still waffling so just roll a die already.

[Username17]

There's also a place for "not my fault" tables. Where you could pick something, but whatever you pick is going to favor one player or another or might be good or bad for one of the characters. These choices are arbitrary and can easily feel unfair if they are chosen arbitrarily. But if they are chosen randomly instead, it doesn't feel like the MC is screwing over a specific person.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

Yeah, attack rolls are primarily (very short) "not my fault" tables.

[Chamomile]

This is true. Things like treasure tables are also a good thing, provided they're competently designed.

[Hiram McDaniels]

Kicking around another RPG idea, kinda looking at a Storyteller hack, but I'm back on the western/1800s America ideal, which means that the game wants a detailed positioning minigame for when everyone whips out their pistols.

But... I have no fucking clue how to accomplish that, and my main design examples are Storyteller (had no clue what they were doing) and After Sundown (not a heavy combat game).

Wat do?

What's your inspiration for this? I'm wondering because the first thing that comes to my mind is spaghetti westerns, where combat is more about style than tactics and positioning. Then again there is the Wild Bunch...

Anyway, the one idea I have for this off the top of my head is instead of doing straight up STAT + SKILL dice pools like traditional Storyteller, maybe players build their dice pools from tactical advantages.

I'm thinking of something kind of like FATE where characters don't have basic stats like Body, Mind, Whatever but are instead made up of skill ranks and aspects.

Example: Rocky Raccoon wants to shoot the Man Who Calls Himself Dan. Rocky has a shoot skill of 4 which forms the basis for his dice pool. To this he adds +1 Die for superior positioning, +1 Die for surprise, and +1 Die for point blank range, giving him a total dice pool of 7.

Well that's pretty much the gist of it - couple things though:

Resolution can take a while if players are auditing their dice pools every turn; to help this along I'd suggest that players either have an advantage or they dont; 1 or 0. Penalties should just be added to the opposition's pool as advantages rather than subtracting from the player's pool.

Advantages act almost like scene aspects in FATE. Maybe avoid character aspects though, unless you can find a way to integrate them meaningfully into the gameplay. Otherwise, you've got a scenario where every aspect is equally applicable to every situation, so essentially players get a free die just for writing some arbitrary bullshit on their sheet.

[Prak]

Honestly, I can't fucking remember what my original inspiration was. I had initially planned on using D&D to run a Weird West game, but between telling my players that and ever actually getting a first adventure put together, I decided to make my own system that's closer to what I wanted anyway, since using D&D always pushes things towards high fantasy.

I'm just trying to figure out how to handle gunplay, really.