RPG systems that are actually fun as games.

[OgreBattle]

I’m liking card deck based resolution as a “player’s want to shell out for this” gimmick” more than erotic roleplay dice

Like FFG X wing has a universal damage deck but they also sell ‘custom’ ones for popular units so you see the wing damage highlighted in red

Say if damage types, creature types or armor types had a deck and that replaces the die roll.

Could even be an opposed draw, like those battle books that became queens blade.
A Kaju game mentioned here then has an action deck as hit points.

It’s also more space for placing nice art. Then players can be encouraged to do furry commission decks and you’re players have a meta economy

[OgreBattle]

Been looking through "Physics for kids" info as it's the basic Mario Kick Shell type interactions that most RPG gamers are aware of

http://www.physics4kids.com/

https://www.ducksters.com/science/physics/


Motion
- Acceleration, momentum, gravity, fall damage
- Simple machines for approaching dungeoneering and so on


Thermodynamics
- Hot & Cold, energy transfer

Electricity & Magnetism
- Moving electron charges
- Miracles

Waves & Sound

Light & Optics


Gradeschool physics is fun and more conceptual than specific, I figure a versatile tabletop RPG should aim for those interactions

[Unity]

This is the most incoherent piece of game design theory I've read on this entire board. I think the reason you haven't liked any TTRPG you've played is that you don't seem to like them for the TT or RP or wargaming aspects of TTRPGs, leaving literally nothing left except "games". No wonder you don't like any of them. You should probably go back to playing video games or card games instead of theorycrafting a TTRPG that is fun "in the same way" as the Poker/Mario 64 crossover or whatever you're even trying to do here.

[Sigil]

This is the most incoherent piece of game design theory I've read on this entire board. I think the reason you haven't liked any TTRPG you've played is that you don't seem to like them for the TT or RP or wargaming aspects of TTRPGs, leaving literally nothing left except "games". No wonder you don't like any of them. You should probably go back to playing video games or card games instead of theorycrafting a TTRPG that is fun "in the same way" as the Poker/Mario 64 crossover or whatever you're even trying to do here.

Stupid of you to think you know what I like when you clearly cant read. I proposed looking at making a more fun resolution mechanic and gave examples of games that have ones that I think are good. I don't care if people disagree with me as long as they have something to contribute, but you clearly don't, so fuck off and don't come back to this thread.

[quote="OgreBattle]SimpleMachines.jpeg[/quote]
I'm going to be honest Ogre, I have no idea what you were trying to get across with the simple machines or how it relates to having either a different resolution mechanic or other mechanics that are actually fun to engage with.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The TT and RP parts are the easy ones, man. Anybody can shit out some RP prompts in a day or two, making the game is the hard part. Of course that's going to generate more discussion.

[Sigil]

It's also a long standing tradition on this forum to hate every game that comes out and constantly talk about how you could make better rules. That's almost all of what this forum is.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I assume you're shooting for something thematically fun like children exploring simple machines? Otherwise it's the same problem as making a shy person roleplay a gregarious bard. Simple machines may not be "simple" at all to a lot of players.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It's also a long standing tradition on this forum to hate every game that comes out and constantly talk about how you could make better rules. That's almost all of what this forum is.

Duh, if you want to actually see the better rules people make, then you go to It's My Own Invention or PM people for their rules. People here actually make shit.

[OgreBattle]

I'm going to be honest Ogre, I have no idea what you were trying to get across with the simple machines or how it relates to having either a different resolution mechanic or other mechanics that are actually fun to engage with.

I assume you're shooting for something thematically fun like children exploring simple machines? Otherwise it's the same problem as making a shy person roleplay a gregarious bard. Simple machines may not be "simple" at all to a lot of players.

Yeah

"I kick the barrel down the stairs at the count's guards", it shouldn't be hyper detailed perfect physics, but there should be some quick reference for that kind of fun physics interaction in a tabletop RPG.

So some quick reference for things rolling, pulled down by gravity.
Rules for breaking things, ogres batting halflings into the horizon.

various editions of D&D and other games kinda touch on that with castle building and siege engines, but that kind of interaction should be incorporated into the core mechanics as much as possble so you can load a berserker in a catapult and try to aim him through a tower window.

All this can be abstracted fine with FATE Core, but I figure something more crunchy is the point of this thread.

This thread from not too long ago covers magnets, electricity and so on:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57453

[deaddmwalking]

I think I get what Ogre's saying, but to make it explicit...

Doing something 'fun in the game' like swinging on a chandelier and knocking down a line of guards like dominoes as they charge into the room is fun.

Allowing something fun to be decided by a roll of the dice, or a draw of a card, or by spending a narrative ability - things that themselves are NOT inherently fun - doesn't detract from the fun that results from the in-game actions.

A system of rolling that is itself FUN but doesn't yield interesting results IN GAME is not worth pursuing.

You can play dice games (like roll 5d6, re-roll up to 3 [or 4 with a 6] to make the best 'hand' you can; pair, 2-pair, 3-of-a-kind, straight, full-house, 4-of-a-kind, or five of a kind) and that's kinda fun and involves some decision/strategy/luck, but if you want to do something like that, making it directly relevant to the setting/fluff would be important.

Digression on poker dice

I rolled 1, 2, 2, 4, 5 as an example hand. I could re-roll a 2, which might give me a 3 for a straight, which would be better than 3 of a kind, but with a 1/6 chance, I'll probably end up with a pair (and a low pair, if that matters). Re-rolling the 3 dice that are not a 2 give me a good chance of getting 3 of a kind.

In reality, that's what I opted to do, ending with 1, 2, 2, 2, 2 (4 of a kind).

That said, unless 'better hands' are somehow worth more than 'meeting a threshold', that's a lot of table time for not much benefit. A system of this kind (using cards) was used in Deadlands when summoning/commanding spirits. A better hand allowed you to pull a more powerful creature (if I remember correctly).

[OgreBattle]

How about "Fun for the dungeon master"?

I do like seeing players have fun when I run a game, but most of the time there's no 'surprise' for me. It can also be tiring to put together content, or run the same content multiple times for different groups.

Now rolling on random charts for random happenings can be done, but that can also go wrong.

So what makes an RPG fun or not fun to run as game master?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Passion.
Mechanically, though? GMs are as varied as players, that's way harder to answer.

[Foxwarrior]

I have the most fun as DM when the players surprise me with actions I didn't expect. If anything, I get more 'surprise' fun out of DMing than out of playing, but it's variably difficult to create situations that coax interesting actions out of the players. In a way, adventure modules help, since they're designed to give the DM expectations about what will happen, but the time spent prepping a module can make me a bit resentful of really effective knot cuts.

[deaddmwalking]

I like it when players really end up involved with an aspect of the game... In some sense everything is an offer - an NPC, an villain, a plot thread, a bit of history - whatever. When they take a cause and make it their own or care what happens to an NPC, I like that.

Though to be fair, I sort of lost interest in my last campaign before we fully resolved everything.

[Pedantic]

Yeah, Foxwarrior has it right. Ideally, the players have a broad enough palette of actions to be able to pick options that are surprising, and result in more interesting emergent situations. The better the rules, the more GM fun you can extract as you have to do less adjustment/adjudication to keep the game running.

That's a balancing act more delicate than just setting the base mechanisms of the game though, because it touches on adventure design and worldbuilding and all that. There's a significant chunk of GM work even in an excellent system to bring those situations about.

Ideally, the game system should have support materials to help with that kind of adventure design, by demonstrating the kinds of obstacles players can overcome at various power levels (probably mapped against resource/time expenditure, necessary prep, and with a "reach factor" to include stuff like buying consumable items to push past what PCs can natively accomplish).

[Blicero]

Would you ever play just d20? Where you stripped all the names of creatures and abilities away and you were just running combats where it was "Unit number 32 moves to square A12 and activates ability 4c"? I sure wouldn't, I'd rather play tetris or connect 4.

This is pretty close to what the 2003 Temple of Elemental Evil PC game is, and that game is definitely at least a cult classic. It does a pretty good job at exposing the fairly rich tactical minigame of 3e combat.

[hyzmarca]

The only advantage that tabletop RPGs offer over other games is the magical tea party and Calvinball aspects, generally called Rule 0. The RPG makes up for the inability to model all actions by just letting the GM make shit up. And that works great when the GM is good.


Rule 0 is a complete game on its own. It's also a bad game on it's own because it has infinite possibilities and no structure, which is why it's necessary to build upon it. But, in the end, it's the infinite possibilities that make tabletop RPGs more fun than other, more rigidly structured, games.

So you want rules that provide opportunities, rather than rules that imprison.

[Dean]

How about "Fun for the dungeon master"?

Now rolling on random charts for random happenings can be done, but that can also go wrong.

If you want fun you can't also have control. Total control can make you feel a lot of pleasant things, but fun isn't one of them. To have fun as the DM you would need one of two things: Random elements that you improvisationally incorporate (in many ways the players could be seen as this), or the expectation that players are allowed to be mini DM's and create some content of their own.

You don't have to go full munchausen for the latter. Spycraft plays with giving players various limited pools of narrative agency. Whether they can declare they've known the Bartender you just introduced for years or can describe a flashback that allows them to introduce a character of their own into a scene.

It could also be accomplished by supporting the idea of players using mechanics away from the table. If the domain mini-game was explicitly something you were supposed to do at home then your player could come to the next session taking place 3 months after your last one and tell you all sorts of things they had built or made or laws they've passed in the land and so on.

All of these are fun ideas but do require giving up the idea that the story is yours and the players are experiencing it.

[K]

I've recently come to the opinion that an RPG ruleset works best when its a randomizer of the narrative.

So rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice is actively harmful. The people who want to roll Dodge dice to counter Attack dice and then have rerolls or exploding dice... I don't know what to tell those people because the thing they want doesn't make a better RPG, but it will make a better dice game. The problem is that the more time spent on the dice game, the less you are doing the RPG.

Randomizing narrative improves the narrative improv. Failing some trap checks a few times in a roll might turn a story of amazing success into a comedy of errors, a few failed attack rolls might inspire desperate action like a fighting retreat, an amazing success on a few rolls might change a whole adventure because the BBEG dies in the first encounter while he's still threatening the PCs and now the narrative is about looting the tower while the BBEG's minions are doing their own looting.

Some of the charm of oldschool RPGs was that things happened that you didn't plan on. Sometimes, the lightning bolt bounces back on you and then the adventure is about dealing with that. This is why people have such love for such objectively bad systems with bad mechanics (fucking THAC0); the mechanics accidentally created memorable adventures.

The reason I can't seem to get behind rules-lite games is that they aren't great at the randomizing. The narrative is too much in the control of the GM because the rules don't force unintended results, so it never has the ability to surprise anyone and it feels railroady if the GM tries to force surprise.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, I've made the comparison to Dwarf Fortress before since that game is one of the finest examples of the way people can mind caulk their way to a story even when all they are given is ascii art and insanity. I mean, yeah, a scenario where the invading elephants get past the battlements because a dead monarch butterfly jammed the fortress gate is really kind of stupid. Only a computer or a particular kind of grognard would sign off on that. But it sure is memorable.

[Blade]

I've been thinking about that random narrative concept recently.

I think there's a difficult trade-off between player agency, random narrative (and, less importantly GM agency).

Having the story go in a completely unexpected way because of a failure can lead to something interesting. However, there are too many cases of supposedly epic games turning into comedy of errors because of a game system in which an expert thief is far too likely to fail at disarming a trap.

That's also the Bear World approach: every roll is more likely to randomize the story than to have the expected outcome, leading to games where players have virtually no agency. (It also has the problem that either a lot of the randomizing is up to the GM, which means Bears).

Recently, I've been thinking about this in the case of Shadowrun. Shadowrun is a game where players play specialists who are encouraged to plan their missions. Having the plan fail because one of the specialists failed at a task he's supposed to be able to do isn't very interesting. It adds randomness, but it doesn't fit the overall narrative. On the other hand missions that go as planned are pretty uninteresting, unless players love to come up with plans and are really satisfied with their plan.

Then there's the common approach of GM intervention, where something unexpected throws a wrench in the player's plans. First there's the problem of destroying hours of planning as soon as the mission starts, which is frustrating for everyone. Second, there's the problem of players feeling "cheated", a bit like these video games where you'll have a cutscene to force you character to fail. Most of the time, they'll be ok with it because they trust the GM to be fair and make things interesting, but I feel like it would be better if it was something that could be the product of the game than a GM decision.

That's why I've been thinking about a mechanism where players can decide to "raise the ante". They can do it from the beginning or even during the mission (if they feel like everything is going too smoothly). In game mechanics this gives the GM one colored die. When this die rolls a 6, it means there's an unexpected complication related to that roll. In exchange, players get something like a a karma bonus, Edge refresh or something similar.

[OgreBattle]

I've recently come to the opinion that an RPG ruleset works best when its a randomizer of the narrative.

So rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice is actively harmful. The people who want to roll Dodge dice to counter Attack dice and then have rerolls or exploding dice... I don't know what to tell those people because the thing they want doesn't make a better RPG, but it will make a better dice game. The problem is that the more time spent on the dice game, the less you are doing the RPG.

Randomizing narrative improves the narrative improv. Failing some trap checks a few times in a roll might turn a story of amazing success into a comedy of errors, a few failed attack rolls might inspire desperate action like a fighting retreat, an amazing success on a few rolls might change a whole adventure because the BBEG dies in the first encounter while he's still threatening the PCs and now the narrative is about looting the tower while the BBEG's minions are doing their own looting.

Some of the charm of oldschool RPGs was that things happened that you didn't plan on. Sometimes, the lightning bolt bounces back on you and then the adventure is about dealing with that. This is why people have such love for such objectively bad systems with bad mechanics (fucking THAC0); the mechanics accidentally created memorable adventures.

The reason I can't seem to get behind rules-lite games is that they aren't great at the randomizing. The narrative is too much in the control of the GM because the rules don't force unintended results, so it never has the ability to surprise anyone and it feels railroady if the GM tries to force surprise.

So how to focus on "bouncing lightning" type mechanics, hitting the right balance so it's not just a snuff story generator?

I think most people like the explanation of "the rules for bouncing lightning cause this unexpected result" more than "You rolled Surprise, the GM says the lightning uh... bounces off the bear back at you!"

I figure having some simple to roll universal 'physics' rules goes a long way, like Breath of the Wild setting things on fire in a way that you can sorta predict.

Maybe an adventure module with a bunch of 'roll on this table when' could be a way to do this... if it's like a more interactive Choose Your Own Adventure book does that still count as rules lite?

[K]

I've recently come to the opinion that an RPG ruleset works best when its a randomizer of the narrative.

So rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice is actively harmful. The people who want to roll Dodge dice to counter Attack dice and then have rerolls or exploding dice... I don't know what to tell those people because the thing they want doesn't make a better RPG, but it will make a better dice game. The problem is that the more time spent on the dice game, the less you are doing the RPG.

Randomizing narrative improves the narrative improv. Failing some trap checks a few times in a roll might turn a story of amazing success into a comedy of errors, a few failed attack rolls might inspire desperate action like a fighting retreat, an amazing success on a few rolls might change a whole adventure because the BBEG dies in the first encounter while he's still threatening the PCs and now the narrative is about looting the tower while the BBEG's minions are doing their own looting.

Some of the charm of oldschool RPGs was that things happened that you didn't plan on. Sometimes, the lightning bolt bounces back on you and then the adventure is about dealing with that. This is why people have such love for such objectively bad systems with bad mechanics (fucking THAC0); the mechanics accidentally created memorable adventures.

The reason I can't seem to get behind rules-lite games is that they aren't great at the randomizing. The narrative is too much in the control of the GM because the rules don't force unintended results, so it never has the ability to surprise anyone and it feels railroady if the GM tries to force surprise.

So how to focus on "bouncing lightning" type mechanics, hitting the right balance so it's not just a snuff story generator?

I think most people like the explanation of "the rules for bouncing lightning cause this unexpected result" more than "You rolled Surprise, the GM says the lightning uh... bounces off the bear back at you!"

I figure having some simple to roll universal 'physics' rules goes a long way, like Breath of the Wild setting things on fire in a way that you can sorta predict.

Maybe an adventure module with a bunch of 'roll on this table when' could be a way to do this... if it's like a more interactive Choose Your Own Adventure book does that still count as rules lite?

I think anything where the results are based on DM improvisation is doomed to feel like there is no agency. See Bearworld.

That being said, "Yes, and..." is the rule of improv, and RPGs are a form of improv. That is why old-school DnD had so many tables. Tables were the original procedural generators, and rolling on those is a lot more fun than "you fail, game stops."

Imagine failing a roll to unlock a lock, but rather than just failing, you roll on a failed lockpicking chart and get the result "Pick breaks loudly, alerting anyone inside that the door was tampered with. They investigate."

So the PCs lose the chance for surprise, but the game continues because the guards come boiling out of the room. It's a randomizing event, but at no point on the chart is "Bears attack from nearby bushes."

If the adventure didn't list NPCs in that room, the breaking pick gives the party information that tells them that no one is in the room and the PCs can engage the physics engine to kick down the door without fear (game continues).

Basically, you build a narrative engine that forces the PCs to adapt to new circumstances. The only rules are that the results can't end the adventure, there have to be enough to keep PCs from getting bored, and they have to be memorable.

[Blade]

Imagine failing a roll to unlock a lock, but rather than just failing, you roll on a failed lockpicking chart and get the result "Pick breaks loudly, alerting anyone inside that the door was tampered with. They investigate."

So the PCs lose the chance for surprise, but the game continues because the guards come boiling out of the room. It's a randomizing event, but at no point on the chart is "Bears attack from nearby bushes."

The problem I have with this is that some players will feel like the failure is not the way their characters would have handled things. For example if you have a "you break all your picks trying to open that lock" result, some players will complain that their character would have stopped before being out of picks.

So something that I like to do to have this kind of mechanism without robbing players of their agency is to let the player decide: either the attempt is failed or he can choose (either from the table or something he makes up) what to trade for the success or he can decide to take his chance and roll a die with a 50% chance of critical failure and a 50% chance of success.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

This sort of sounds like PCs going from random table to random table, though. Maybe buttressed by an encounter with a statblock. I really enjoy random tables, but this sounds excessive. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.