Tell me about your Heartbreaker

[Dean]

Common wisdom says we're all working on our own version of the big RPG we want to see made. I'm really interested to hear the elevator pitch of the stuff everyone's working on in as much detail as you'd like. From full mechanical rundowns to just talking about the little weird cool thing your game does that no one else seems to do well.

I'm just a little drunk and it's like 3am here so I'll write out what I'm working on later but I'm really curious how much overlap there is in the various projects we're working on. There might be some real help in finding someone who's been trying to tackle the same problem as you and has their own hard won answers to parts of the same problems that you've been working on.

[phlapjackage]

I'm slowly building up a SR4 heartbreaker - it was mainly inspired by how crappy the matrix minigame is, discussions here on TGD, and a book where someone becomes kind of like a cyber-angelic being (dammit I can't remember which book though). I would like to include stealth minigames and chase minigames and social minigames and downtime investigation minigames, but that's for sure biting off more than I can chew on a first draft. I might "borrow" from the recent thread from Lago about the CK2 social stuff tho...

The thing that I really hope would see the light of day is my re-imagining of technomancers to be more like the cyber-angel from the book, where this kind of PC would have a distinct role from a hacker. The "technoadept" becomes sort of an amalgam of Neo and a cyborg.

The heartbreaker idea all started from this technoadept idea, which kind of meant I needed to rework the matrix rules, which meant I needed to rework general combat rules, which meant I needed to also look at skills, which meant...

I have 0 game dev experience so I'm sure it's going to turn out great

[Chamomile]

I have a heartbreaker slowly coming together. I already have most of my aspect classes written, and now I'm starting in on making some monster AI decks based on a conversation in a thread I can't seem to track down anymore. I have an inkling of a feat and crafting system that I may flesh out at some point. Eventually, there will be few enough gaps in these updated systems that I'll be able to weld them together into a complete RPG.

[MGuy]

I've been very sparsely creating something or other for years now. I don't have a lot of free time or rest so I tend to work on it only during vacations during the year. That being said part of the elevator pitch includes the fact that I intend on making use of downtime similarly to how it's done in some Japanese games, namely Persona. Hopefully it'll get to a point where it can work in pretty much any setting under any assumptions about what the characters are going to be up to.

Whether it be used as a Highschool simulator, the stuff the group gets up to between major heists, or for political maneuvering. Also hoping to fit taking time to craft, train, do research, maintain relationships, eliminate stress, etc into an easy to use, modular framework that will ideally tie into the rest of the system whatever it may be that you're up to.

[OgreBattle]

Working on mechanics that can deliver the feeling of a man knifing a chimpanzee or gorilla, all the things you can do as Snake in the MGS games... but not being bogged down in fiddly details and step after step after step.

Like... in a sword fight to the death you should be aiming to cleave the other fellow's skull. But then they parried your blow so now you're in a bind, you get in a pommel bash, you try to trip the fellow, you wrench their sword out of their hands... those kinds of actions should be flowing from the 'basic attack action'. The way most RPG's do melee combat is "I decide to push, prone, disarm, OR deal damage...", that's putting the cart before the horse. I figure a 'degrees of success' system can handle that.

Going with three broad categories of 'melee attacks' based on the footwork and posture involved

Power attack- Feet are planted to deliver a powerful blow, strong solid posture
Pressure attack- Moving forward with a flurry of strikes, going for a takedown, cutting off their avenue of movement
Feint Attack- Swift footwork to strike and dance around planted attacks


Double hits, two knights charging with couched lances...


...isn't supported in most RPG's where you move and attack then they attack and move and so on. So I'm moving towards a 'phases' kind of action order

"Mortally wounded but still getting in one last strike" is evocative...

...most games though treat that as a special ability, not baked into the system, you drop an enemy warrior when their HP reaches zero unless they're a high level samurai berserker or something.

Flip that around, it's even 'more realistic' that way if you care about that, there's info out there of dudes charging through gunfire, dudes sworded through the head, not being dropped. This can be handled by rolling the effects of damage at the end of the round, after everyone's done their attack actions and so on. Still have a way to just drop a feller with the first strike (degrees of success, or fatality and stopping/stunning power are seperate rolls like toughness and saving throw).

So a turn order like...

1) Maneuver phase- slowest initiative moves first, faster initiative can intercept slower movement
2) Action phase- faster initiative acts first, when you target someone then their action phase happens simultaneously to see if you both go all in offense (so high chance of mutual hits).
3) Resolution phase- Resolve effects of damage, ongoing effects end or continue, etc.

'Team initiative' as the standard so you can have the heavily armored warrior take the first maneuver to charge in drawing enemy interceptions, or take the last maneuver to cover the robed ally from being charged. This organically covers a lot of teamwork stuff without writing exclusive off-turn activation abilities.

[Yesterday's Hero]

In my system "Aspects and Essence" you build your class by picking from a "Combat" aspect that gives you a couple of offensive options, a "Style" aspect that gives you a role option (Summoning, DPS, Tanking, etc) and a "Utility" aspect that gives you a mid-battle recover that also allows you to take a small self-buff.

The setting has morphed a little bit recently. Now I have what I call "The four zones". The innermost zone is a technomagical metropolis not unlike MTG's Ravnica, the next zone is a sprawling suburbs area filled with gangs (think Fast and Furious meets Sons of Anarchy but with elfs and orcs), next is a dangerous wilderness heartlands area populated with deadly monsters (Cadillacs and Dinosaurs but again with orcs and elves and dwarves and stuff) and finally a far out "exterior" of really dangerous reality warping magic and giant cyborg zombie armies (like the far north in GoT, but steeped in a Mad Max feel).

The main conflict of the setting used to be the extremely illegal and extremely profitable usage of magical creatures' blood to make permanent and powerful magic items. But the changes in the setting might make me want to change this somewhat.

[Kaelik]

Every couple years I spend 6 months slamming out Fiends and Fortress stuff.

Right now what are pretty complete general rules exist for the fortress parts and all the adventuring parts except PCs and opposition. I have a lot of monsters from level 1-6 or so in a word document, and I'm working on the Fiends and fiend rules which are for obvious reasons slightly more important than the comparable parts of D&D. I also have a few classes done from level 1-7.

Probably won't post any of that stuff until I have completed "everything" from 1-7, but I've been posting it to my inside gang of D&D group. Still you can check out the Fiends and Fortresses thread for the entire framework which includes my condition tracks, attack rules, stealth and detection rules, and fortress rules amongst others which are the most "unique" concepts.

[Blade]

I've made a system for Shadowrun. The goal was to have rules that support the way I want to run the game. It cuts down on dice rolls, has one unified system for all non-combat aspects of the game (matrix, social, magic, driving, etc.).
In general, the game considers that you're a professional, so you automatically succeed tasks that are easy enough for you. When facing stuff that is difficult, you can either spend points from a pool (which can mean spending some one-use tool, a specific trick you won't be able to pull twice, exhausting yourself, etc.), take a risk (1/2 chance of failure) or suffer stress damage (generalization of the drain concept).

It leads to run that start smoothly but increase in tension as runners start to exhaust their resources and need to take risks or cut corners.

[pragma]

I'm working on stealth mechanics for D&D 5e.

There are an assortment of wrinkles and follow-on implications to it:
* This needs to start with the question 'How many skill tests is it fair to roll,' which hopefully informs a lot of skill use in the game.
* I anticipate that I'll actually have to make two different systems for 'tactical' and 'strategic' sneaking with well defined interfaces between them.
* I hope the basic structure of the system will generalize to other RPGS, particularly Shadowrun & AS. Numbers will obviously have to be reworked to reflect the different dice systems.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Mine is a heartbreaker in that it will never be finished and I will be laying on my deathbed a heartbroken desiccated shell of a man, rambling about dice pools.

Actual sort of pitch: Dark Souls meets Thundarr meets Marquez meets Battle Royale/Running Man. I've been trying to bake in a lot of weird legacy mechanics and procedural bits that would tie in MC fiat/player authorship/random tables to make things organic.

Unfortunately every time I think of some neat piece I realize another RPG has done it and done it better. And I just don't have the energy and brainpower to really put in the work to make it work.

[WiserOdin032402]

I'm tackling trying to make a working Call of Cthulhu game with actual working mechanics that doesn't use d% because d% is the bane of all existence.

It's uh....slow going.

[merxa]

Generic fantasy, 4 stats, resolution is 3d6 vs target number, 10 wounds, 10 levels, expected tiers are 1-2, 3-5, 6-7,8-10, mandatory subclass at level 6. Working through magic at the moment.

Plan on releasing it under an ogl or possibly gpl v2, v3.

[Grek]

For a long time, I've felt like D&D was held back by the 'dung ages stasis' part of the setting, where new technology never really takes off and trying to improve the life of the commoners is a waste of money because of the Homeric geopolitical reality that if you invest in infrastructure, the orcs are just going to burn it down and piss on the ashes. I also don't like the racism inherent in having mechanically distinctive 'races' in the first place, especially the traditional D&D races like orcs, drow and dwarves. The fact that high level characters can laugh off the police also annoys me, since it leads to some very stupid scenes whenever the PCs interact with an existing power structure. In light of all that, I'm working on a setting where none of the above is true.

I've always found Earthdawn's answer as to why there are dungeons around, but thought that they could have gone further with that idea and had more than one kind of ruin left. So in this setting, there's been several 'ages' each of which was marked by the rise of civilization and an inevitable crash due to outside forces, resource shortages or internal power struggles:

• The Age of Giants predated the existence of the human species; in this era the planet was dominated by macrofauna which drew upon ambient mana fields to ignore the cube-square law. While they required protein and other nutrients on par with their size, they could mostly ignore the caloric requirements provided that they remained within mana-rich regions. The most intelligent of these creatures was a massive humanoid which ranged from between four and nine meters in height. They built megalithic structures, discovered the laws of natural science and philosophy, invented the homunculus and even circumnavigated the globe during their golden age. Each of their cities was built atop a powerful locus in the world's manasphere and connected to the other cities through the early discovery of portal magic. Their civilization grew for nearly a thousand years before a fungal pandemic began to spread through the portal network, causing the abrupt collapse of the civilization and the near-complete extinction of the species over the coming centuries.
• The Age of Blood was the result of the last generation of Giants struggling to create a successor to their once-proud civilization, one able to survive and thrive even in a low mana environment. While the basic recipe for the homunculus and the fundamentals of genetic theory were already known for centuries at this point, creating a novel self-perpetuating intelligent species had never been accomplished at this point. Not wanting to have their creations ruined by a single disease or calamity as they themselves were, each colony of survivors created their own line of homunculus, granting it whatever adaptations they thought best. The result was several dozen distinct lineages of human life, all of them theoretically inter-fertile with one another, but incredibly varied in both appearance and personal capabilities. Some of the Giant colonies were destroyed by their own creations; others ruled over their progeny as gods or kings. Most simply dwindled, generation after generation, unable to maintain their population due to declining fertility. The Age of Blood was an era of strife and expansion, each fledgling human civilization testing its strength against its neighbors and fighting constant border skirmishes over territory or resources.
• The Age of Amber objectively lasted for about ten minutes and subjectively for three millennia. The only civilization to exist during this period was the Empire of Days, founded by a cabal of chronomantic researchers who discovered how to extend a time stop spell for long enough to cast a second time stop spell. This allowed the discoverers of the technology to live out years within the space between seconds, dropping into normal time only long enough to acquire more of the powdered amber required to fuel the reaction. Newly flush with wealth and hours, they completed centuries of research into chronomancy, ultimately discovering a way to exclude creatures and objects from the effect, making them available for use by the project. Children were born outside of time, entire lineages and villages blossoming into existence in the blink of an eye. The Empire of Days was born and waxed mighty, creating strange immutable monuments and paradox prisons. It was an age of glory and an age of hubris, all in the span of a lazy summer afternoon, between the discovery of the art and the consumption of the last trace of aged amber on the planet. Naturally, the Empire of Days decisively won the Blood Wars with their advantages and instituted the first global empire since the Age of the Giants.
• The Abyssal Age is the current one, where the marvels of the Age of Amber are implemented in the wider world. While Tel Avon has risen in the east, with spires of steel and glass, the startling discoveries and strange industries developed there are slow to spread in the wider world - it is difficult, to say the least, trying to teach a peasant of the Blood Wars what a mechanical loom is, let alone how to operate one. Rifles have become increasingly popular, as has the locomotive, but engineering is considered an esoteric profession on the same level as witchcraft, alchemy and chimera-sculpting. Expeditions into old Gigantic ruins have become increasingly popular, as has research into extra-dimensional travel. Although only the Abyss has been breached, the dimensional engineers are confident that another world will soon be uncovered and with it another Age worth of priceless Amber. "We need only navigate the empty air for 'a few trillion kilometers' to reach the nearest world", they say, as if the howling winds, poisonous air, razor snow and swooping monsters alone didn't make such a trip impossible even setting the absurd distance aside. But where the Queen commands, we must go.

[Seerow]

I have a Heartbreaker I spent a bunch of time on a few years ago but has been laying untouched since I got to the point where I've got 60+ hours a week of work+travel.

Basic elevator pitch: Merge D&D3 and Shadowrun mechanics while drawing inspiration from some of the nicer ideas of 4e.


Mechanically what I was looking at was basically Shadowrun where instead of advancing skills at a glacial pace, you have classes and actually level up. Each time you level you get some points to put towards stats/skills, and most importantly gain Essence/Mana/whatever. But ultimately still using the dice pool system to make skill-ups feel more relevant while keeping the RNG a bit tighter.

Most classes would have class features to use Mana on. So your Wizard casting spells? He invests his Mana into his spellcasting ability to gain the ability to prepare spells. Your Monk wants the ability to turn invisible and fly? He can invest Mana to gain those abilities. The general idea was to have different 'power source' classes having a different resource system, with differing levels of mana investment required to activate those class abilities. High magic classes are using most of their mana on their features, lower magic classes blow their mana on effects picked up from other sources.

The general idea for those other sources would include magic items of course, but also things like Divine Blessings (worship Sun Deity, gain fire super powers), Companion Bonds (get a magical fairy or animal sidekick!) and Bloodlines (ie play a werewolf or vampire as a Fighter using your mana to power those racial abilities).

The idea here being that by having a shared resource pool for these effects serves as a counterbalance to powerful spellcasting. A spellcasting class can choose to invest less than their maximum mana into the casting if they want some of the other features, but other classes still serve a purpose because while their class features aren't as powerful, these other options basically become supplemental to their class features.

[deaddmwalking]

So my friends and I played 3.x extensively, but we knew their were problems. We were pretty excited about Pathfinder; Paizo had a lot of goodwill from me based on how they lost the license to Dragon and Dungeon, so we participated in the Alpha and the Beta.

It quickly became clear that it wasn't moving in the direction we had hoped it would be. My personal feeling is that they didn't have any interest in feedback' the playtest was nothing more than a marketing stunt designed to claim a 'mark of approval' for the changes they made.

At that point my friends and I worked on a version of D&D that we WISH they had made - a Pathfinder 1 or D&D 4th edition that would have appealed to us. And since we were free to do whatever we wanted, we've been tinkering constantly. We regularly make additions, updates, and experiment, so it may never be FINISHED, but it is certainly playable and we use it exclusively for our regular gaming.

Compared to 3.x, players have more options in combat; skills are streamlined; feats are issued more frequently and cover more ground. As an example, we just combined all of the benefits of mounted archery into Precise Shot; if you want to shoot people in combat you take 1 feat (called a talent) and you're competent in that field. Most importantly, everyone has access to magic relatively easily - being a rogue who learns invisibility is easy and no class is completely shut out from learning magic. We run with a smaller number of base classes; every primary spellcaster is a 'wizard' - it's up to them whether they focus on necromancy or elemental magic, etc.

Of course, we hope that while we find it satisfying today, in a year it will be even better.

[jt]

I had one in progress for a long while but some recent design conclusions have left it sort of structureless and in pieces.

I had planned on using an "everything is feat chains" style of advancement, instead of class and level. The "feats" here (just called levels in-game) are large, roughly as big as a particularly meaty level advancement in D&D. Each level is supposed to provide some sort of benefit for combat, adventuring, and social situations. And it's expected that these are pretty cliche - the brute force smashy fighter is always good at intimidation and breaking things, the finesse fighter is always good at quipping and swinging from objects.

Open-ended advancement only really works if your power curve is asymptotically approaching some point. But I like that, and I designed around it.

I broke combat into a fixed sequence of phases - ambush, ranged, melee, close. Everyone gets one action in the phase (modulo the phase-specific rules you expect), then it goes to the next one by default (with exceptions that make sense). People should start dropping in melee, and close is super deadly and repeats if it has to, so combats should average 4 rounds or else. I liked the bounded combat length this generated, and the tension worked well. It also fills in several levels of asymptotic power curve, as you need to build up a library of situationally-better actions four times for the four phases.

I wrote a skill system based on free-form skill names that become generic most of the time. So you'd take "lion taming" or "climbing to my lover's balcony," and that'd be understood to be "animal handling" and "climbing" most of the time, but if you actually need to specifically tame a tiger or climb to the dark wizard's balcony, you get a bonus. This is fun when it comes up, and it lets me hand out unique skills with every level advancement.

I came up with an awesome dice mechanic that keeps everyone on the same RNG (3-18) and gives diminishing returns if you stack bonuses. Which helps tame bonus-stacking that can happen in open ended advancement.

Aaaand it turns out that trying to build every level out of thematically linked combat/social/adventuring packages is too hard. You just run out of cliches that link character traits to interesting ways to do combat, even with cheats like that skill system.

I could replace the advancement system (that "pillars and character options" thread was about this), but I'll need to reevaluate the rest of the choices in light of whether they're still optimal. And it's just kind of tiring trying to chat about this thing on design forums, when it's so many layers removed from D&D. So I'm tempted to ice it for a while and do a simpler project.

[erik]

This mostly.

Shadowrunish engine with a post apocalyptic high tech magic gonzo setting.
(DEFINITELY NOT RIFTS, don’t sue me yo)

Every 6-12 months i go back n tweak it, and add rule subsystems. Haven’t uploaded the latest pdf version in a while. I really just need to learn how to do a real page layout and buckle down and produce art.

[Mord]

I'm tackling trying to make a working Call of Cthulhu game with actual working mechanics that doesn't use d% because d% is the bane of all existence.

It's uh....slow going.

I feel you. I'm half-heartedly working on what is effectively a fatsplat/setting hack for After Sundown that I'm tentatively calling Cultist: The Summoning, but I've run into the foundational issue that I can't figure out how to make cosmic horror work in a collaborative storytelling context.

[WiserOdin032402]

Oh I just skipped over that sort of and went right into ripping off Condemned and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Where the monsters might be in your head but you sure as hell can stab most of them.

[Iduno]

Cyberpunk games (and a lot of other games) like the idea of keeping PCs poor so they have to keep doing jobs and playing the game, despite having enough loot/treasure/tools that they should be able to buy an island somewhere and retire.

I've had an idea that you get paid in money (buy food, pay rent, buy a gun) and a more abstract favors. It doesn't matter how much money you have, you can't just go down to the corner store and buy a tac nuke. But you do have a crate of weapons, some sensitive corporate information, and a friend who owes you a favor for saving them. Someone could trade those to the fight people to get what you want.

It would probably look a lot like wish economy in systems without the Wish spell. You just can't buy certain things outright, but you can get them. Divorcing money and favors also means that you might have access to a tank, but you're going to sleep on the floor of your leaky apartment with rolling power blackouts.

It should fit in well enough with the world, because your employers want you geared up well enough to complete whatever job they hired you for, but also don't want to give you the money to buy the gear if you can just use the money to quit working for them.

I'd probably avoid doing the Leon the Professional/Barry thing of having someone who buys stuff for you and just holds your money, because players would definitely shoot that person in the face and take the money.

[Dean]

Cyberpunk games (and a lot of other games) like the idea of keeping PCs poor so they have to keep doing jobs and playing the game, despite having enough loot/treasure/tools that they should be able to buy an island somewhere and retire.

A fix for that is that Shadowrunners should work like Mike from Breaking Bad. Basically you should get paid a small amount of money that's easy to use cause it's nice clean money the IRS has no problems with and a large amount of money it's very hard and dangerous to use because a drug dealer withdrawing millions is just going to get arrested.

So you work in minimally functional conditions for your entire criminal career, eating ramen and watching your tiny television, working for the day you can retire and leave the country with 16 million dollars.

In this model you rely mostly on contacts for traditionally expensive items like assault rifles and grenades. So your team puts 4 grand together between them and can buy an RPG from a black market dealer because he's also a part of your community and coming by military grade weapons is actually easier for him than coming by a clean 4 grand.

[Foxwarrior]

Aren't you fixing the opposite problem, by making people get bonus money that's only for their retirement account? How does that help with the "people get paid so much they can retire" problem? Shouldn't you be looking for a reason to let the PCs eventually get rich enough to afford the best, shiniest cyberware in the world, while still being unable to retire?

[Mask_De_H]

That's pretty cool and kind of sounds like the Stash/Lifestyle stuff in AT.

I don't have a heartbreaker, but I've been working on tweaking systems for friends. That's close enough, right?

E: the retirement money sweetens the pot for their contacts, I would assume.

[Foxwarrior]

Mine is past-tense now sort of... actually it's two games that share a system, one fantasy and one cyberpunk. There's actually nothing particularly wrong with it design-wise (there are things I'd do differently if I made a new TTRPG of course, but only because I'd have different design goals). However, I seem to have made several large yet grievous missteps in the marketability and approachability department which I will probably not fix all of, for those games. Krusk et al have been very helpful in pointing them out to me though.

[Dean]

Aren't you fixing the opposite problem, by making people get bonus money that's only for their retirement account? How does that help with the "people get paid so much they can retire" problem? Shouldn't you be looking for a reason to let the PCs eventually get rich enough to afford the best, shiniest cyberware in the world, while still being unable to retire?

I guess my flavor of cool cyberware is more Riddick, where you pay a doctor in a basement 20 menthol Kools to do a surgical shinejob on your eyeballs. My assumption is that cyberware is the same as those assault rifles and RPG's. You're not having your operations done in a surgical theater in a Manhattan hospital for 2 million dollars, you're having a weapons rig installed into your arm by a disgraced German surgeon for 18 grand and a promise to get rid of a problem for him.

The millions in peoples swiss bank account is a way of squaring the fact that thematically Shadowrun always wants you to look deeply poor but no one would get shot at for a living if you could live just as well working for the local wal-mart. So your character is technically worth millions but still eats take out chinese in a shitty apartment and that only stops being true when the player decides their character goes off into the sun to spend the rest of their life on a beach in Tahiti.

I will now stop threadshitting my own thread.