The Gaming Den

Sometimes video games inspire tabletop ideas that are terribly clunky because there's only humans to run and memorize things

What are some mechanics in video games, RPG's in particular, multiplayer party ones in particular particular, you especially enjoy and figure they don't work int abletop?

I'd say a stamina bar is a matter of granularity, you can still make them work in tabletop if it's in small enough chunks with numbers that can be counted on one paw.

Fractional anything.

Tracking ammo counts is usually a pain as well. If you've got a 6-shot pistol that's trackable and potentially interesting (Dirty Harry). If you buy 100 arrows, you just have arrows.

Tracking the position of a large number of enemy agents. Invisible Inc has a really tight implementation of party-based turn-based stealth, but it partially relies on the computer tracking the position of every guard in a level, even when the party is nowhere near them.

More or less anything related to stacking modifiers onto modifiers after a certain point (you can debate where that point is - most seem fine with applying an enhancement bonus to an ability score, deriving the ability modifier from that, then adding that modifier to other things for instance), and especially so for multipliers and percentages.

From my excessive time playing NWN2, I'd also say providing too many (stacking) short-duration effects. Half the builds you see on the database are Buffy the Vampire Buffer where you stack 9 Cleric spells, Bardsong (itself boosted by a spell), Divine Might, Divine Power and probably another class feature as well, before unloading on the upcoming fight, then resting. (The other half are Hide in Plain Sight builds.) At a table, that's not just an issue of it generally pushing people off the RNG and also pissing people off with 5 minute work days, there's the fact that you have a whole bunch of modifiers to add together, and a whole bunch of "this will end in five rounds" and so on.

The ability to conveniently display to a player what their own character is intended to see and no more or no less is a big deal. The difficulty of efficiently communicating environmental details to a tabletop group is already onerous enough that people dare not split the party even when they believe it would be safe for their characters to do so. By contrast the entire FPS genre is built on the back of intuitive line-of-sight management.

Highly recurring percent chances. Things like "3% chance to deal double damage on every hit". Easy to just slap on and forget when the CPU is rolling for you, absolute ass when you have to roll those dice yourself.

Ability cooldowns.

JigokuBosatsu wrote:Ability cooldowns.

Yeah, anything involving really fiddly time counting.

Tunnels and Trolls had a mechanic where using magic temporarily drained your strength, but you'r strength also determined other things, such as how much you carry and (in part) how well you fight in hand to hand combat). In theory, you'd want to know the instant you recovered a single Strength point.

I think Warframe's mass use of RNG is a good example of this. With each pull of the trigger, there's like 4-7 die rolls to determine multishot/crit/status/status effect (oh shit that could be doubled/tripled depending on the multishot roll).

All this die rolling evens out because of the sheer number of enemies and whatnot (plus this is a determining factor in high rof vs low rof weapons since highs are more consistent over time).

Just finished playing Battle Chasers: Nightwar, and it does a couple things that would be neat, but unworkable in tabletop:

1. The mana/overcharge split. In the game, basic attacks generate "overcharge" which is effectively the temporary hitpoints of your mana points. Overcharge can refill your mana bar, and then go a few points higher -- but overcharge does not carry between battles. You generally start a fight with zero overcharge, and then gain overcharge by performing basic attacks. So if you are conserving mana on a dungeon run you will open up with each character doing 1 or 2 normal attacks and then using abilities which cost mana, so as to only use overcharge to power them. Where it gets interesting is that several abilities and perks get better if you specifically power them with overcharge instead of mana. This means that you can build a party that wants to stay very low on regular mana but kits out to gain overcharge extra fast and use the abilities that are better with overcharge than regular mana and the perks that trigger when overcharge is spent. In a JRPG on a computer this is tactically interesting, but in tabletop, just tracking mana point expenditure is problematic, so tracking whether those mana points came from the blue part or the red part of your mana bar is a nonstarter.

2. Scaling Levels via fractional Exponents. Character and monster abilities are a base number, which is raised the the ( Lvl * 1.15 ) power for PCs and to the ( Lvl * 1.155 ) power for monsters. This means that monsters gain stats faster than PCs and PCs need to equip level-appropriate gear and select perks to keep up.

Josh_Kablack wrote: 2. Scaling Levels via fractional Exponents. Character and monster abilities are a base number, which is raised the the ( Lvl * 1.15 ) power for PCs and to the ( Lvl * 1.155 ) power for monsters. This means that monsters gain stats faster than PCs and PCs need to equip level-appropriate gear and select perks to keep up.

Besides the fractional bit, isn't that how D&D characters work for most editions? The monster stats just scale up faster while PCs need magic gear to keep up.

Well, that's maybe sort of what they wanted to do, but it really depends on the edition.

5e has that whole "bounded accuracy" talking point which tries to keep everybody on the same RNG at all levels. So that kinda limits scaling.

1e was all about reading Gygax's mind and gear was 100% arbitrary. It was just assumed that nobody ever sold any magic weapons or armor every no matter what.

These ideas carried over into 2e, but now you had to read the mind of someone who was two or three degrees of separation from Gygax and you weren't sure if they were fans of Tolkien or the Slayers Anime - so gear was not only 100% arbitrary, but it also varied to a greater degree from table to table. If you told someone at a con about the adventure where your level 9 character got their +2 sword you were equally likely to be dismissed as a munchkin playing Monty Haul or to be pitied for how tight your DM was with loot.

3e actually had rules for buying and selling magic items, and rules about roughly how many PCs of any given level should have. Frank has ranted about the conceptual failings of this system, but my own issues were more that the math was all over the place for items that did very similar things. Character gear progression in actual games was all about wacky stacking of another +1 bonus with a different tag. Also, stats for PCs of the same level started to diverge by more than the whole RNG at like level 3.

4e actually tightened up the math, but that edition had strictly linear bonuses additions that you needed absolutely all of to stay on the RNG. However since 4e largely ditched the rules for making items while significantly worsening the rules about buying or selling them. Since core 4e did not bother present strong guidelines for their obviously intended item bonus progression PCs were just usually behind in actual games. This was something else that works way better in a CRPG than tabletop. In something like Torchlight or Diablo, when you find your gear getting behind the curve....you can just go back and farm previous boards/bosses to try to get class-relevant bright colored loot drops of the correct level and that works pretty well in a solo game with a quicksave option.

Josh_Kablack wrote:1e was all about reading Gygax's mind and gear was 100% arbitrary. It was just assumed that nobody ever sold any magic weapons or armor every no matter what.

They did give everything a price tag, though.

Thaluikhain wrote:

Josh_Kablack wrote:1e was all about reading Gygax's mind and gear was 100% arbitrary. It was just assumed that nobody ever sold any magic weapons or armor every no matter what.

They did give everything a price tag, though.

I believe that was necessary, because in (some) early versions of D&D you got xp based on the value of loot you rolled.

Iduno wrote:

Thaluikhain wrote:

Josh_Kablack wrote:1e was all about reading Gygax's mind and gear was 100% arbitrary. It was just assumed that nobody ever sold any magic weapons or armor every no matter what.

They did give everything a price tag, though.

I believe that was necessary, because in (some) early versions of D&D you got xp based on the value of loot you rolled.

They did also give everything an XP tag as well, IIRC. I believe it was stated somewhere that if you sell the things you get XP for the gold, not XP for the item, which would necessitate being able to sell stuff.

Yeah, I even recall some groups that simply aimed at bypassing any monsters , grabbing the treasure and running away to cash in the gold/exp.

2e meanwhile had several "You need a weapon of at least +X to hurt this" monsters, being clear proof that the designers expected PCs to upgrade their bling to keep up. Also in 3.0 there was still DR/+X where such DR values were so high that martials couldn't really hope to hurt the monster if they didn't have a magic weapon upgraded enough.

Somebody mentioned Warframe, which inspired me to report a page from Path of Exile: layered conditional bonuses. Your character can have an attack with

10-20 physical damage
5-10 cold damage

Then, from passive skills, support gems, and magical equipment, you can tack on

5-10 added physical damage
50% increased physical damage
20% more physical damage

50% physical damage converted to cold damage

65% increased cold damage

For your convenience, I've sorted them more-or-less in the order they apply. You take your base physical damage (10-20), add the flat damage (15-30), add the increased damage (22.5-45), add the more damage (27-54), convert half of it to cold (13-27 phys, 13.5-27 cold), add the increased cold damage (13.5-27 phys, 22-44 cold)

Figuring that out yourself is a nightmare. I've got a tool that does all that for me and just reading it is a fair amount of effort. But, USING the tool makes solving the puzzle FUN.

ohh yeah Warframe has something along those lines and it's hilarious

There's like 17 kinds of damage players can do (3 physical, 4 primary elemental, 8 secondary elemental, 2 random ones that don't apply much). Each one of them has different multipliers for different kinds of health (there's like four per enemy faction?), and they all proc different status effects (if you succeed a status roll, you roll to determine the effect (each damage type has a chance to proc equal to its percentage of the total weapon damage, except for physical types which have an effective x4 multiplier).

I don't think there are any modifiers that work like PoE, though, since there's already so much leeway when modding your weapons.