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cts-games · 23 days

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Hi, could i ask for advice on world building? Im trying to make a homebrew campaing

Sorry it took me a bit to answer this - it’s been a busy week and weekend!

I’ll preface this all by saying that I don’t claim to be an expert on anything, and there are lots and lots of other resources out there, which I’ll link to at the end of this post.

SO YOU WANNA BUILD A FANTASY (OR OTHER GENRE) WORLD

You’ll need to ask yourself some questions first.

Do I want the game to be sandbox-y or more directly driven?

A sandbox game in which your players don’t have a lot of rhyme or reason beyond just exploring can be a lot of fun. But there’s different ways to run sandbox. On the one hand, you can let your player backstories and their suggestions, what they want to see, influence the world they’re discovering. On the other, you can come up with a really detailed world setting that they’ll uncover as they go. Both require a lot of work, but in different ways. In the first, you’ll need to be ready to improv your descriptions of places. In the second, you’ll need to come up with a lot of stuff ahead of time but be ready to be flexible.

Now, in a more directly driven campaign, you probably want to have most of your world stuff at least marginally laid out, that way you’re prepared for wherever the players want to go.

Where do I start?

This one is harder. There’s no one way to world build! Some people like to start with the map (check out this online map maker and this cool way to randomize your map), while others prefer to flesh out what they want the theme/mystery/problem-goal of the campaign to be first. Both are great!

To use my own campaign as an example, I knew from the start that I wanted there to be a central mystery for the PCs - in this case, a magical disease that turns people into animals within a year of contracting it, and all afflicted are sent across a massive chasm into a place known only as “The Wilds”. It was a premise inspired by the books Graceling and Fire by Kristin Cashore.

Side note: Draw from the sorts of stories that you enjoy! If you want it to be an epic quest, look at Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, King Arthur, Night Angel, etc etc etc. If you want it to be more of a stealthy heist type thing, or a diplomatic campaign, check out Antman, Montmorency, Crown Duel, Dangerous Liasons, etc etc etc. Whatever story hook you want to go with, finding inspiration in existing media is a great way to start. You can also check out plot generators such as this one.

I’ve got my story hook. Now what?

Why are your players here in this campaign? This is the fun part. You get to think about how the problem/mystery that exists came to exist. How does it affect the world and the people in that world? What other problems exist? What’s the racial makeup of the world, if that is important? What’s the political climate?

Again using my Tenara campaign as an example, we can answer these questions.

1. How did the Beast Curse come to exist?

Legend says it was delivered by one of the gods who are now long-forgotten, but others are of the belief that it’s a mutated form of magic.

2. How does it affect the world and the people in it?

Cursed folks are reviled to the point that most families will turn in their own kin. They are quarantined in special prisons until the monthly caravan takes them to the Gate at the chasm to send them into the Wilds. Each country provides a guard for the Gate and it’s a lifetime job. There are people who DO have sympathy for the cursed, so they’ve formed a sort of protest resistance group. Etc etc etc.

3. What other problems exist?

Partly because of the curse and partly for other reasons, the whole peninsula that holds these five countries is quickly becoming overpopulated. People aren’t leaving, so they build to the sky and deep in the earth and tensions are high is such a crowded place. There’s a country locked in a perpetual civil war. There’s a country whose queen is 12 because her mother was deposed for trying to build an army of the Cursed, and no one really knows what happened to her or the army. A cult of one of the forgotten gods has arisen with a twisted take on the god’s message.

4. What’s the racial makeup of the world?Fairly diverse, but humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and halflings are more prominent in certain areas than others, and nearly all extra-planar or unusual races come from the Southern Isles.

5. What’s the political climate?The countries keep to the themselves and aren’t currently experiencing a lot of conflict outside of their own borders, but with the population increasing everywhere, things are primed for change.

As you can see, just having that campaign hook really helped me flesh out the setting of my world.

A side note: when I say ‘world’, I mean the setting for the campaign, which could be a single country or city, or group of provinces. You don’t have to flesh out a whole globe in order to world build your setting. Only flesh out what you need to start, and add to it as you go.

That’s great, but what about what the world is really like?

Now that you’ve got a good idea of what you want the hook of the campaign to be, you can flesh out aesthetically what a lot of the world is like. Ask yourself questions about these topics for each distinct area of your world.

- environment. What is the land like? Is it fertile? Barren? A desert, swamp, forest, mountain, volcano, plains, cave system, sea, etc etc etc? What is the climate like? Humid, arid, cold, hot, temperate, etc?

- culture. What languages are spoken? What’s the architecture like? How do people dress? Is it wealthy or poor, urban or rural? What type of art is common here? What professions? How do they treat outsiders?

- religion. Does it factor in at all? How many gods are there? What do they represent? What are their worshippers like?

- government. Who rules, and do they rule well? Is it an oligarchy, theocracy, monarchy, democracy, etc? How are problems handled? Is there a law for everything, or do the people enforce natural law? Where is the law written and complaints addressed?

- military. How well is each country defended? Is there a military draft? Who leads the military? Why does each country have a military or town guard?

- magic. How common is it? Are magic schools open to anyone? Is there any discrimination between the types of magic users, for instance wizards and sorcerers or an arcane caster and a divine caster? How much do the people rely on magic?

- creatures. What sorts of animals or magical creatures exist? Is the place close to the fey realms? Is it close to the underdark? Does Hell or Heaven or the Abyss take a particular interest in it? If so, why?

- political and social climate. How do different countries/races/classes interact? How do they treat foreigners vs. natives?

- any other details. If there’s anything additional you want to add that didn’t fit neatly in any of these categories, go ahead and add it!

There are tons of other little details you can ask yourself about, and plenty of resources to help you with fleshing them all out. The biggest piece of advice I can give you is to ask why. Why is the world the way it is? Why is that ruler corrupt? Why is that pantheon of gods so invested in a particular sea town? Why is the climate suddenly changing from dry to monsoon? Why is that wizard school trying to take power? Why are the countries at war? Why do the people/NPCs care, and why will the party care?

I really hope this helps, and please do keep in mind that there’s no one way to world build. If you have an aesthetic idea for a society of elves that live on the coastline and are seafarers and that’s you’re jumping off point, that is totally fine! You can always come back to the bullet list of why.

So, to recap:

remember that world doesn’t have to mean the whole globe

ask yourself what type of game you’d like to run

ask yourself what the plot hook to kick off the campaign will be

ask yourself about the aesthetic details: environment, culture, religion, government, military, magic, creatures, political and social climate, any other details.

keep asking why until you’ve fleshed out the details you need to run the first couple sessions

keep adding to the world as time goes on

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask! Happy worldbuilding!

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cts-games · 27 days

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You meet god and she's mostly dead fish. You ask her why and she says most of the world is dead fish, and she's made herself to appeal to the most common denominator, the everyman funnyman comedy show that runs for eleven seasons but with the entire universe in mind. You ask her how much of the dead fish is your fault, she says it's far less than you'd think, in the grand scheme of things. You ask her if you matter at all. If you can do anything. She shrugs her rotting shoulders and says mattering is a made-up concept, like life, but sure, you can matter if you want to, on some scale. She has many scales. She doesn't know what you mean by 'anything', but you can do everything you can. You ask her if it's enough. She says there's no base requirement for deserving to exist. She's smoking a joint and the smoke filtering out of her gills gathers and forms gas giants and red dwarfs. You ask her if there's any hidden secrets of the universe you should know and she says it's not a secret if she tells, plus it's fun to let you figure it out yourself. You ask her if any of your questions were right questions and she says you worry about being right so much it might keep you from fucking around, which is as close to meaning of life as she ever bothered to make. You don't ask but she says she loves your hair, also your whole being, also your planet. She says she figured out what love is yesterday and is trying it out, which explains the ten thousand rainbows and sudden influx in rains of fish. She offers you a drag of her joint and you wake up half past midnight behind a chain restaurant clutching a smoked salmon. The new stars are winking like they're in on some joke and you're sure if you try hard enough you'll remember what it is.

#inspo

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cts-games · 29 days

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Breakheart: Dev Diary 3

The strengths of Fused System games

Last week dev diary (moving took more out of me than i thought, as did dealing with a very persistent TERF harassing me over on my main tumblr, I talked about Fused Systems and how to achieve synergy between the two systems used in the game. As a reminder, 'Fused System' is a term I entirely made up, to describe the TTRPG design niche of taking two games and jamming them together with duct tape, and 'Synergy' is just a buzzword for my game design neuroses and making sure certain things line up (such as using a consistent resolution system), even if no one else seems to care.

This week, I'll be expanding on the Synergy I'll be adding to the game, and why I chose Anima: Prime and Last Stand specifically as the basis for this project.

As mentioned before, the thing about ICON that made it feel like it falls short, was the lack of connective tissue. It felt too obvious in play that you were just switching between two different games.

Last week dev diary, I pointed to the dissimilar dice of the two games as part of the issue, and indeed, it can be part of it. However, it's far from the full story. A game doesn't NEED to use the same mechanical resolution across both of its modes. Indeed, the split between Combat Resolution and Out-of-Combat Resolution mechanics are one of the praised aspects of Stars Without Number.

However, in SWN you are still working off of a single character sheet. In ICON you are working off of two seperate character sheets, one for combat and one for out of combat. Nothing between the two sheets are shared (outside of XP and Dust)

The actual cause of this lack of synergy runs much deeper. NOTHING between the two sides of the game interact with each other. How would one go about fixing this for ICON? I'm not so sure. The two systems don't seem to actually get along. It's a large part of the reason I don't think it's viable to just take any two games and mash them together.

Resource Management in Anima: Prime and Last Stand

As the heading suggests, Anima: Prime and Last Stand both have a shared focus on one particular part of their gameplay: Resource Management.

In Anima: Prime, players have 3 Resource pools they keep tokens in (usually just the dice you will be rolling, because tokens are spent to gain dice 1:1), called the Action Pool, Strike Pool, and Charge Pool.

Each pool has a specific use for what it allows the player to do with their character. Action Pool dice are spent on Manuevers, the big flashy attacks that look pretty but don't actually move the narrative forward on their own. After a Manuever, dice that rolled a 3-5 are moved to the Strike Pool, and dice that rolled a 6 go to the Charge Pool.

Strike Pool dice are spent to make the kinds of attacks that DO push the narrative forward. The attacks that inflict lasting Wounds, and drive the opponent closer to defeat. They are also spent on Achievement actions that allow you to accomplish Goals during conflict, changing your relative narrative positioning, or even offering alternative win conditions for a conflict.

The Charge Pool is used to fund abilities that enhance the effects of your strikes. Many of the games powers use Charge Dice to offer a variety of effects, from healing to adding elemental damage to attacks to inflicting status conditions. They are hard to obtain but can be used to great effect.

Last Stand, on the other hand, only has a single Token Pool, but does have a highly recommended optional rule for a second pool, which ties into the initiavite system. Initiative in This second pool, the Combat Bribe, gains one token at the start of every combat round, and at the start of any round players can choose to delay their action until after the NPCs all act, to add all the tokens in their Combat Bribe to their Token Pool. This helps improve the token economy while also adding more tactical depth to combat by choosing when you actually gain those tokens.

Finding and Creating System Synergy in Breakheart

All of this comes together to demonstrate why I chose these two systems, and why I'm hunting this synergy. After all, what's the point of hunting for these compatibilities between systems if there isn't a way to utilize it? TRICK QUESTION: I design games for fun, and you don't need an ulterior motive to have fun. Though, luckily, in this case there is an additional benefit.

DESIGN SPACE!

Design space is a nebulous term, made all the less clear by the enshitification of Google leading to any attempts to look up the term to instead redirect you to CNC machines (as in the machines that cut stuff into specific shapes, not half the trans gals I follow on tumblr).

I layman's terms, design space is just a description of how much a developer can do with their own system, with the limitations they have placed. For example, Breakheart only uses 10-sided dice, and doesn’t use them as percentile dice. This limits my design space by preventing me from doing things like "Add an extra d4 to your roll" or having effects with a percentage chance to trigger (unless that chance is a multiple of 10%).

Again, just changing both systems to use the same dice isn't enough to create synergy on its own. It creates consistency, sure, but it restricts your design space and limits your games potential. Instead you need to find places where the design spaces of both games overlaps, and elements from both games can contribute to each other. For Breakheart, the focus of this synergy is in two places: Wounds and Resources.

Wounds

Wounds are fairly basic and easy to grasp. In Anima: Prime, players have 3(ish) Wounds that they can take before being taken out. In Last Stand, players have about 20(ish) points divided across 4 stats that determine how strong they are, but also use these stats as HP. If a stat is reduced to 0 then you lose your bonus when rolling that stat.

Obviously, 20 and 3 are not numbers that are close together, and would be hard to mesh together. Sure, you could finagle it so that wounds applied some amount of damage, or receiving a certain amount of damage will count as a wound, but this is insufficient in my view. Again, it feels two much like playing two entirely separate games. However, 4 and 3 are MUCH closer to each other. Just have wounds tied to eaxh stat. This also helps provide some clarity for an oft misunderstood mechanic in Last Stand, where players think they use only their current HP as a bonus to their rolls, which is incorrect.

Now, when a stat is reduced to 0 that stat becomes Wounded, and Wounds are what negate the bonus on the roll. Outside of combat you don't need to focus on the minutiae of tracking individual HP, and so instead you just deal directly with wounds. This also means enemy statblocks can be compatible with both subsystems without needing to have two different sets of stats for each mode of play.

Resources

The other place the games overlaps is in their resource management. By combining aspects of each system, both games benefit. Players have 3 pools, now renamed to Action, Attack, and Amplify, because I am not immune to the draw of alliteration. Tokens are moved between these pools or spent when activating various abilities. However, these tokens ALSO have their own Innate effects that activate while they are in a specific pool.

Tokens in your Action Pool represent your stamina and you draw from this pool to fill the other ones. Tokens in the Attack Pool represent your ability to harm others and are spent to make attacks in both Conflict and Combat phases. Tokens in the Amplify Pool represent your ability to aid others or enhance yourself, and are spent on additional effects in Conflict phases and on non-damaging effects in Combat phases.

In Conflict phases (the Combat portion of Anima: Prime), tokens generally flow from the Action Pool into the Attack Pool, with the occasional token going into Amplify instead. This supports those scenes strengths, focusing on intense but fast Combat that still has a tactical element through its resource management.

In Combat phases (the combat portion of Last Stand), this flow is switched, with tokens now flowing from the Action Pool into the Amplify Pool (functioning as the Combat Bribe mechanic from Last Stand), and from there either being spent or moved to the Attack Pool. This leads to the more drawn out and thoughtful combats of the grid-based combat. It's also my hope that by making non-damaging actions easier to build resources for, those actions will become more attractive and the game will promote a more collaborative team-based style of play, as opposed to just a focus on maximizing damage output.

Tokens can also have their own effects, just like in Last Stand. This is where the design space of Breakheart REALLY shines through the strongest in my opinion. Each non-basic Token now has 2 tags on it, as well as a passive effect. The first tag determines what phases the token is active in (Conflict or Combat, though theoretically there could be some that affect Character scenes as well), and the second tag determines what pools the token is active in (Action/Attack/Amplify/All).

Tokens can also have different effects in different phases. Poison is a status condition present in both games, and is mostly the same for both, but with some minor changes to account for how the systems interact. A Poison Token would have the following effect:

[Combat - Attack] At the start of your turn, take 1 Poison damage.

[Conflict - Any] At the start of your turn, lose 1 Token from your Action Pool.

This opens up some fun new design spaces that weren't previously possible in either game. You can have enemies with a 'Slow Acting Poison' attack that adds Poison counters to the players Amplify Pool. Now players have a choice. Do they move the tokens into their Attack Pool causing it to activate immediately but letting it fuel their stronger attacks? Do they use their actions for some non-damaging action to spend it before it starts causing trouble? Do they leave it where it is and try to find a way to get rid of it before the next Conflict where it will activate regardless of what Pool it's in?

An extremely basic attack leads to a huge split in possible options for the player. Creating design spaces like this, in my opinion, is where Fused System games can really excel and are something I would love to see more often. The overlap of these systems can offer so much potential, and I am so excited to explore it.

#breakheart #dev diary #ttrpg #ttrpg dev #sorry this one is so late

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cts-games · 1 month

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hey!! I love your posts, do you have any recommendations for good resources on designing a ttrpg?

I don't do a lot of design myself, but I think this duo of posts by @monsterfactoryfanfic and @superdillin is a really good place to start looking for resources! Sorry I can't help more than that, I'm more of a "thinking too hard about games others make" kinda gal than a "actually making my own games" person.

(Everyone else feel free to share whatever resources you think are useful to game designers!)

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cts-games · 1 month

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I had a dream that I had built a nanobot that would devour anything smaller than it for the purposes of cleaning dust and food particles, but due to an error as it ate it grew in size and complexity, allowing it to eat larger and larger things. Myself and several other people became concerned that it would grow out of control and start eating people and worse, so we started trying to destroy it before it got too large.

The perspective shifted and suddenly I was the nanobot and the size of a small dog. I was complex enough now to be aware that entities wanted to destroy me and had to make my movements more complex to evade these entities.

Eventually I grew to human size and was complex enough that I understood what humans were concerned about and why; I taught myself their language and developed a way to synthesize speech and told them that I wanted to live, and if my primary directive made people want to kill me then I would seek their help to change my prime directive so that we all can live.

The rest of the dream was us trying to figure out how to reprogram me so I either didn't grow or didn't feel the need to devour.

#stealing this as inspo for my game #also thats a really cute dream

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cts-games · 2 months

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the magnus protocol 9 - rolling with it:

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cts-games · 2 months

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RPGs don't start you in peaceful verdant fields anymore it's always "you awaken deep within the writhing rectum of Glorganus, the insane blood god"

#taking notes

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cts-games · 2 months

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Breakheart: Dev Diary 2

Fortune Prime SRD and the issue with 'Fused System' games.

Breakheart is a fusion of two different games, Anima: Prime and the Fortune System used in Last Stand, both of which I've provided rundowns of in the past, here and here.

I am by no means breaking new ground with this. Games that just take two existing games and duct tape them together have existed for decades. ICON is perhaps one of the better known examples, and also serves as a great example of my issue with these 'fused system' games.

The biggest issue with fused system games is... they are made up of two games.

Well, yes, obviously. But why is that an issue?

ICON is made up of two portions: a DnD4e like game for combat and a FitD system for everything outside of combat. ICON prides itself on the flexibility of both of these subsystems and how any option you take in one system will not restrict your decisions in the other. The way you act in combat and the way you act out of combat are not bound together.

The way ICON accomplishes this is... by just not having the systems interact at all. As you play through ICON, you are essentially just flipping back and forth between two entirely different games. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does very much FEEL like switching between two games, and lacks a cohesive element to really bind the two together. Indeed, most fan made character sheets for ICON just have two entirely different character sheets for in combat and out of combat.

Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoy ICON. I wish I was able to play it more often, it's rather delightful. I have a soft spot in my heart for 4e-likes and FitD both, so ICON scratches a nice itch. But the two just don't meld together well.

I'd go so far as to say you would be better served by using Strike! RPG as the combat portion of ICON because at least then you would maintain the element of the game only using d6's, instead of swapping dice entirely between the two subsystems. As it stands now, the game lacks a cohesive element.

Without synergy between its systems, ICON will never really be able to become more than the sum of its parts. The systems won't flow into each other in elegant ways that make for a delight of game design.

The game is still in pre-release and subject to change. Maybe this issue will be fixed before release! However, it does not seem to be a priority for Massif Press, the game is close to feature complete, and the community certainly is nowhere near as bothered about it as I am.

So... if im the only one who has this problem... does it really need to be fixed? I'm not sure it does. I dont think it was a mistake to glue those two games together. The game is designed to use the ease of play that FitD brings and make the out of combat experience more enjoyable, while keeping the feel of its combat the same as the sources it draws from. And the game accomplishes this!

If the game DID use Strike! RPG as a base, sure, if would have more consistency and open more potential for synergy, but it would lose that feeling of rolling that d20 in combat, and seeing it land on that critical success. No amount of synergy and elegance between the two subsystems will allow a d6 to roll a natural 20.

Sure, there are ways you could approximately replicate the probability of a natural 20 on a handful of d6, but that's not the same. The feel at the table is different, and that feel is important.

So often in game design, we design a rather solid system as a first draft. Something beautiful and elegant that looks fantastic. And then you bring it to the table and... you have to scrape major parts of it. Beautiful parts of it. Because at the end of the day, as nice as they are, they just don't replicate the FEEL of the game you want. The tone is off. The rule is hard to remember. It's too confusing for first time players.

A first draft of a game will rarely survive playtesting. Fused system or not.

So, it's important to note that this is the first draft of my game. It can be hard to tell what will survive and what won't. I dont think i can even begin to comprehend what the finished game will actually look like. And so for now... I am focusing on the innate synergy between the two systems.

I mentioned consistency of dice up above, so let's start there. Last Stand uses only d10's, meanwhile Anima: Prime uses only d6. So, if we want to maintain consistency of dice, we are left with 3 options: Change Anima: Prime to use d10's, change Last Stand to use d6's, or change both of them to use something else entirely.

Well, changing them all to d6's sounds great! I love d6's! They are the easiest one to buy in bulk, and most people own a board game or two they can scrounge up a few d6's from. Problem solved!

Except the actual changes aren't that easy. The Fortune System that Last Stand uses is very reliant on probability. Being able to gamble your resources for a chance to get more, as well as how additional effects are triggered, is absolutely vital to the game. I prototyped a few different concepts like using specific combinations of values or using dice of multiple colors to trigger specific results... but in the end it just ended up adding more complexity without much more design space. So, d6's are out.

I could alter both systems to allow their dice probabilities to line up a bit nicer, but in the end, it ran into the same issues. There is just too much to manage for too little benefit.

So, that leaves us with converting Anima to using a d10. It maps decently enough. Manuever dice have a 50% chance of becoming Strike dice, same as the original. With Charge Dice we have to make a decision. Originally a Manuever Die had a ~16% chance of becoming a Charge Die. We can either keep it to only 1 result on the d10 producing a Charge Die (10% chance), or two results (20% chance). I'm opting for the latter.

Being 4 percentage points more likely to gain a Charge Dice, and thus 4 percentage points less likely to roll a failure, is not that big of a change. The overall wider range for results does make it a tad more cumbersome, but I think it should work well enough. Remembering the thresholds of 1-3, 4-8, and 9-10 isn't that much more difficult (hopefully) than the original of 1-2, 3-5, and 6.

And with that, we now have a throughline connecting both of the games core systems. We have achieved perfect synergy!

... okay, no, not really. We have just made a game that has a consistent type of dice it uses. It doesn't even use the same checks across the two systems. Having a single die type does provide a stable foundation to build more synergistic elements off of, but if that was all it took to make a system, the game would already be released.

But I didn't choose Anima: Prime and Last Stand just because they are two of my favorite TTRPGs of all time. There is FAR more synergy between the two than just that. Enough to fill an entire extra Dev Diary on it! So I'll be posting more about that next week. Assuming I'm not too distracted with moving to my new apartment, that is.

#breakheart #dev diary #ttrpg #ttrpg dev #to clarify: Fused System is not an industry term #i made it up because i couldnt find another term to describe 'a game where its two other games mashed together'#which surprised me because its really become a growing genre lately

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cts-games · 2 months

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Heartbreaking. Local tranny game developer comes up with great and thematic name for damage in its game system, but also realizes it will just cause more confusion and difficulty parsing the mechanics compared to just calling them "Wounds"

#cri #wanted to call them Breaks #its perfect and fits well with the theme and conveys a very different thing than Wounds!#but im not sure its worth it

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cts-games · 2 months

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There's an interesting functional difference between dice pool systems and target number systems that I feel is often overlooked.

For the sake of this discussion with a dice pool system I mean any system where a number of dice are rolled and the values of each individual die are read as is. How those dice are interpreted depends on the game: sometimes you'll be looking at the number of dice that hit a certain numerical threshold (like in WoD, Shadowrun, Burning Wheel, etc.) and that number measures your degree of success. Sometimes you'll simply look at the highest number and interpret the results on a table (like in Blades in the Dark).

Conversely with a target number system I'm referring to any old system where the number of dice rolled is set in stone and the sum of those dice is compared to a target number: the target number itself can be determined by a character's stat or the difficulty of the task, sometimes modifiers are applied to the roll or the difficulty or even both. Whatever. The point is, it's comparing the sum of the roll to a target number and there's a target that needs to be hit for good results. D&D, PbtA, Call of Cthulhu, these are all target number systems, they simply use different dice and different methods for setting the target number.

Anyway, the difference that I feel is often ignored is that within a dice pool system there is no way to outpace the target numbers so that failure is never an option.

Even though in PbtA games modifiers of +5 or more are rare, there is a theoretical possibility of getting there through the clever application of moves, which will theoretically make it so that you will get at least a 7-9 (interpreted as a partial success). Conversely, in D&D (3e, 5e at least) past a certain point characters will reach a degree of competence where certain checks are basically a non-issue. In spite of how people often run these games, natural 1s are not automatic failures on ability and skill checks, so provided you are able to get a high enough bonus (easier in 3e via hunting for synergy bonuses, but even 5e has some abilities which will ensure a minimum result of 10 on the dice for certain proficiencies, meaning that Hard checks become automatic successes).

#much to consider

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cts-games · 2 months

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Whoops. Posted a draft on accident.

Also fuck, that means I lost the draft. Cri.

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cts-games · 2 months

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Game Rundown: Anima Prime

Not to be confused with Anima: Beyond Fantasy.

Anima: Prime is an indie game by Christian Griffen, released in 2011. It also has a free Creative Commons version.

Upfront, one of the things I really like about it is that it includes a section on player discomfort and how to deal with it, which is pretty considerable when this game predates the X-card by about 2 years, well before safety tools were considered the norm.

Overall Camlaign Structure

The game makes use of what it calls 'Seeds' which are short prompts designed to keep the gameplay focused. This is similar to "Story/Dungeon Starters" that have caught on in the PbtA scene, and are mostly a way to keep the campaign focused and interesting. Session Zero (not explicitly called that by the game, but clearly what it is) involves creating both a Setting Story Seed and a Group Story Seed.

The Setting Story Seed is essentially the major current event that is happening in the world, affecting everyone. Basically, "What has changed in the world recently?" The examples given are an invading force, water from the local river has started tasting metallic, or a massive skyscraper has appeared overnight in the middle of the city. The important thing is that this is something that doesn't ONLY affect the PCs.

The Group Story Seed is entirely player chosen, without the GM, and I'd basically a way for the PCs to say 'this is what we want out of the campaign'. It's the reason their group has come together, their motivation as a group. It helps ensure all the PCs have teamwork in mind to at least SOME degree, and are on the same page, as well as giving the GM a carrot to dangle in front of the players when needed.

Character Creation

After going through the usual parts of character creation, like name and core concept, the first mechanical step of character creation is selecting a Passion. There are 9 Passions, each of which has a different mechanical trigger that allows you to Charge your dice (see below), and your Passion can be changed once per session.

Players also create 3 Traits that describe their character, which can be marked off during character scenes where that trait came into play, and then unmarked in order to reroll dice in combat.

From there, players pick 3 Skills from a list of 20 (the list presented in the game is geared for the default setting, Ghostfield, but groups are encouraged to collaborate during session 0 to create their own, more flavorful list of skills to use). These three skills are given a value of 4, 3, and 2. While a higher number is better, having low skills is also quite valuable in the system, as they can combo with other players better.

Next, players select 9 powers they meet the prerequisites for, which is, quite frankly, far too large a number of powers to start with IMO. On my experience this is the part of character creation that overwhelms people the fastest. The game does its best to alleviate this by offering sets of 'Packages' that can be mixed and matched together. 9 'Basic' packages that cover 3 powers needed to be a vague archetype, and 12 'Specialized' packages that each have 6 thematically linked powers. Personally I think the game would have had a stronger presentation by leading with the packages, and introducing classless character building as an advanced option.

After that, players create Backgrounds and Links, which is a subsystem I find quite delightful. These are pretty standard fare, and are just a list of important things from your characters backstory. The only difference between the two, are who that piece of backstory is for. By declaring something a part of their background, it becomes something players can draw on for roleplay inspiration. Things like "Oh, my long-lost brother taught me this trick, before he vanished without a trace." These are just things to flesh out your character, but not concepts you want to fully explore. Links on the other hand are fun bits of backstory for the GM to make use of to make stakes personal for your character. If that long lost brother was a Link instead of a Background, the GM might dangle a clue about his wereabouts in front of you to keep you pushing forward.

Finally, there are Character Story Seeds. These are your characters personal goal, the thing they are trying to achieve outside of the Group Story Seed, that the GM can use to draw you forward through the campaign.

Core Gameplay

The actual gameplay of Anima: Prime is split into two types of scenes: Character Scenes, and Conflict.

Character Scenes are fairly straightforward, with the game mostly disengaged. Players roleplay out their interactions with each other and the world, and once the scene ends, players gain a single benefit from a list of options. This can be healing for yourself or a summon, refilling your Action Pool, or marking one of your traits to give you rerolls next combat.

Some powers can give additional options in character scenes, but for the most part that's as much as the game engages with out of combat scenes.

Conflict

'Tacticle Gameplay' is a bit of a buzzword in the TTRPG industry. In general, its usage is just to indicate 'This game handles combat by using minis on a map'. Anima: Prime does not handle combat by using minis on a map. I would have a very VERY hard time keeping a straight face while telling someone that conflicts in Anima: Prime are not tactical.

Enemies come in 3 flavors, Individuals, Squads, and Swarms. Some powers affect them differently (AoE abilities will typically get a bonus against Swarms, for example), but this distinction mostly matters for Manuevers.

Each player gets one action per turn, typically one of the following: a manuever, a strike, an achievement, or activating an action power.

Manuevers are how you build up resources. They allow you to roll dice in your Action Pool, turning them into Charge and Strike dice, but they don't deal lasting damage. Narratively they can be used to hit members of a Squad, or take our multiple members of a Swarm, but not enough to cause lasting damage to the whole unit.

Stikes are the main way you spend those resources. These are attacks that can leave lasting Wounds on enemies, spending the dice in your Strike pool to do so. These strikes can be further modified by spending dice from the Charge pool as well, activating additional effects based on the powers you have selected.

Achievements also use Strike dice. Each conflict will typically have multiple Goals to go alongside it, which can have lasting effects on the battle. These can be things like "Damage the mechs armor plating to lower its Defense" or "Remove the soldiers gas mask to remove their Immunity from Poison"

And activating powers is just that. You typically use Charge Dice to activate your powers, and they can have a variety effects based on how you build your character.

Manuevers

Manuevers are performed by rolling your skills. You start with a number of free dice equal to your Skill level, and then 1-3 dice from your Action Pool based on the effort your character is putting in.

Dice that come up 3, 4, or 5 are added to your Strike Pool, dice that come up 6 are added to your Charge Pool, and dice that come up 1 or 2 are lost. A trait that was marked during a character scene can be unmarked to reroll all the 1's and 2's for a chance to keep them. If ALL of your dice roll 1's and 2's, you keep them in your Action Pool, unspent.

Each time you make a Manuever, you also check off the skill being used for it. If all of your skills are checked, you gain 2 bonus dice, which are sent to your Charge or Strike pools, encouraging players to make use of all of their skills instead of just whichever has the highest value.

Players can also spend their action to do a Combined Manuever, allowing them to give 1 die to another players Manuever but still checking off a skill for it, which can be a quick way to mark off a characters lower rated skills.

Strikes

Strikes are preformed by spending dice from a characters Strike pool, up to a maximum of 6. Any dice with a result of 3 or over counts as a success, and if they player rolls more successes than their target has Defense, that target takes a wound. This is multiplicative, so if an opponent has 2 Defense and you roll 4 successes, that deals 2 wounds. If you fail, the strike dice are refunded back to you. Otherwise, they all get discarded after the attack. Players can strike together, but ONLY if they have a power that let's them do so.

Achievements

Achievements and Goals are, in my opinion, the aspects of this game that really make it shine, and the entire reason I'm making this post. Mechanically, they work like a mix of a Strike and a Manuever. Players target a Goal, and grab up to 6 Strike dice, and pick a skill and get a number of bonus dice equal to its rating. Other people spend an action and mark off their skills to assist, just like with a combined manuever.

Once you roll, everything 3 or over is a success, and you compare it to the goals difficulty. If you didn't get enough successes to beat the difficulty, you refund the dice. If you did beat the difficulty, the dice are spent and the goal is completed, triggering additional effects. These can be anything from buffing or debuffing allies or opponents, to inflicting status conditions the players don't normally don't have, to entirely alternate win conditions for the Conflict.

Both players and enemies can attempt Achievements. Some Goals may be considered Player Only, some may be Enemey Only, and some may be contested between the two. In this way, Goals can VASTLY expand the utility of Conflict to be much more than just combat. A Race could be resolved by having two parallel 'chains' of Goals, one for players and one for their opponents, each trying to get to the end before the other. A tense conversation with weapons drawn, but has not escalated into full blown combat can be resolved with players trying to hit Goals to keep the other side from attacking and/or sway them over. At any time, either side can escalate the situation to combat by simply spending their dice on a Strike instead of an Achievement.

In this way, Achievments/Goals feel so much better than any other system I have seen when it comes to this type of mechanic. I've seen many games ATTEMPT to do the 'social interactions work just like combat!' thing, but Anima: Prime is the first time I've seen a game succeed at it this well, or something akin to what the Skill Challenges in DnD4e were attempting.

All of this circles back around to Manuevers. In the vast majority of games out there, the most basic action your character can take is some form of attack, with most of the game branching off of and expanding the uses for that action or how it can be applied in different ways.

Anima: Prime does not follow that standard. In Anima: Prime, your most basic fundamental action is the Manuever. The 'I do some cool anime shit while building up resources to meaningfully impact the narrative' action. From there, it branches off in two separate directions, Attacks and Achievements.

By using Manuevers as it's basic mechanic to generate resources, and having Achievements and Strikes be things you can spend those resources on, the game accomplishes a significant amount with relatively little compared to other games, and gives a lot of tactical depth to your choices for relatively low complexity.

This is why, even without miniatures and a map, I struggle to call Anima: Prime anything other than one of the most tactical games I've ever run.

#ttrpg #game rundown #devlog #Anima: Prime #im counting this as this weeks devlog #for reasons that will become obvious next week

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cts-games · 2 months

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Actually, the comparison to roguelikes brings up another point I don't often see mentioned that much. Yes, gameplaywise, it is very similar to a roguelike. However, I don't think the two are even remotely similar when it comes to investment.

A character in roguelike can survive anywhere from a few minutes on a bad run to a few hours on a good run, depending on the game. It's easy enough to jump right back in and try again over and over.

Your typical combat game does not work the same way. They are a slow and arduous grind. Which can certainly be fun! But a character you spent even an hour with in a roguelike does not have the same personal investment put in them as you may have done to a character who has survived several 8 hour long marathon sessions. Even in a non-narrative game, that will still invoke emotional investment.

I'm not quite sure there is really a solution to mitigate that difference. Heck, I'm not even sure if trying to do so is even desirable. There are certainly ways to mitigate the sting of losing a character. Taking from roguelikes, you could always do something like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup or Loop Hero. You start out very barebones with extremely limited character building options, but the more and more runs you perform, the more customization and options you have for playing the game. But I don't think TTRPGs as a medium can every actually achieve the same level of emotional disposability with our characters, simply by virtue of how much longer we spend with them for even the most basic tasks. And I think you would be doing a disservice by designing a game meant to feel the same without taking those differences into account.

A TPK is basically a failure state for the whole group in an action-oriented tabletop RPG, especially one where there is an extended narrative being told. A TPK means that the game ends for everyone. The whole group has to make a whole new party and start again.

It’s an acceptable failure state in a traditional challenge game. You simply roll up a new character or flesh out one of your named followers. Lots of older school challenge games even have rules supporting some type of inheritance, where players can put some amount of money aside to be transferred to a new character in the event of their current character’s death.

But a TPK isn’t a desired outcome in a game that uses a challenge game engine but tries to have an extended narrative. Because a TPK means the continuity of characters involved in the narrative is broken.

I think this leads to a perverse incentive where these games make overcoming obstacles, especially lethal ones, into the most fun activity, but if a group wants to use the game as a platform for story-telling beyond “a bunch of adventurers try to get rich by doing dangerous shit” then the person running the game is encouraged to run encounters that have the appearance of being dangerous encounters, but they can’t actually ever be too dangerous.

And I mean the fact that creating characters in lots of these types of games requires a number of elaborate steps means that there is a further disincentive to actually kill off characters.

The arduous process of character creation runs counter to a challenge game when systems only support death as a failure state. But if the game is being used to tell an extended narrative then there are many incentives in place for the GM not to actually challenge the players lethally, but because combat is often the most interesting part of gameplay it means that low-stakes narratively unfulfilling combat often become the norm. And once players grow wise to the fact that their characters’ survival is required for the sake of narrative continuity it destroys a lot of tension.

Of course there would be various ways to address this but I’m unsure whether these will ever be popularized:

Not treating death as the only failure state, even in combat.

Being explicit in your design goals, i.e. should the primary mode of engaging with the game be to engage in challenges or to tell an extended narrative that sometimes include action scenes.

Treating failure in action scenes as not a Game Over, but a potential story branch.

There isn’t a one size fits all solution to these issues. A lot of these I feel arise from tradition and the fact that certain assumptions of RPGs have gone unexamined even as playstyles have changed. And this isn’t an universal issue: I feel Break!! (a newer adventure RPG with a very traditional structure) averts some of these issues both through having failure states beyond death and having relatively straightforward character creation, so even in the event of death making a new character isn’t a huge hurdle. But in general I feel lots of RPG designers working on traditional action-oriented games where death is the only major failure state neglect to think about these things

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cts-games · 3 months

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Breakheart: Dev Diary 1

Game Structure Overview

To help keep me focused on working on the game and trying to meet my self imposed deadline of having some kind of PDF preview document by August, I'm going to try to maintain having a weekly devlog discussing the game and its various mechanics. Or bi-weekly, if one per week ends up being too much. I guess this is also the formal announcement of the name of this game, Breakheart.

This week, I'll be discussing the overall structure of a campaign.

A Cluster functions similarly to how a Team/Squad sheet functions in Forged in the Dark games. It has its own dedicated sheet, resource management, upgrades, etc. All players in that cluster gain the benefits of the various advancements they collect for their Cluster. Recommended clustersize is roughly 2-3 play groups. Since playgroups are recommended to be 3-5 players, the typical Cluster size will be about 10 players. Meanwhile if the campaign is made up of just a bunch of solo players, it might make sense to have smaller Clusters of 3-5 people. Just keep in mind that the more players in a Cluster, the more conflict there may be when selecting advancements and upgrades for the group.

Breakheart is designed to theoretically be able to function with any group size. From being able to run it as a solo game, all the way up to running it with several hundred players. I think actually expecting the second option is a bit of a lofty goal, and don't expect it to be a common way to run the game. Hell, just having a hundred people having ever played the game would be a delight and far greater than I dare to hope for a indie ttrpg release. But, I still want to structure it that way, just to have it as an option, as the game will be designed with Open Table Play in mind. This will be accomplished through what I am calling Clusters.

Clusters

Clusters are only meant to divide resources, NOT players. While players are bound to a specific Cluster, this does NOT limit who they can play with in a campaign, only where their upgrades go. It's just designed to make the logistics easier to manage and helps keep a hypothetical campaign of 100 players from just buying every single upgrade after a single mission, or one player spending 100 players worth of communal resources at once.

Open Table Play

The game itself follows a fairly standard West Marches / Open Table style format. Though uh... I certainly aim to be a little less colonial than West Marches was. Players work together to figure out when they have time to play a single session together, and then they do so, bringing back resources and reporting any important findings to the whole campaign in whichever predetermined way all the players of the campaign have decided, be it group text chat, discord, a dedicated tumblr sidelong they submit play reports to, actual play videos, whatever.

All sessions run concurrently, using an episodic format. Each session acts as a different plot line in the 'Episode', and each character can only take part in one adventure per Episode. Once the Episode has concluded, an Intermission starts. This is where downtime actions take place. Characters can recover between adventures and spend their loot on various advancements or upgrades for their Cluster.

It is fine for a player to have multiple characters, but they should probably keep them in separate clusters as much as possible. In this way, more active players can join more games, while less active players can pick up games here and there where they can. Alternatively, it could be fun to have an optional rule where each player has their own Cluster for all their characters, and players just make as many characters as they want to go on adventures with, but this will not be the default mode of play.

GM-Agnostic(ish)

The system itself will be GM-Agnostic, with sessions being playable solo or co-op, though the Solo/Co-op Rules can absolutely just be ignored and replaced with an actual GM. GMless should work fine for smaller campaigns, but ones made up of multiple Clusters may need a Organizor/Facilitator to help keep the persistent world between different play groups more organized.

At the end of the day, a group is always free to just run a Breakheart campaign using only a single Cluster, with a dedicated GM, and play the game as a more traditional TTRPG.

#Breakheart #Dev Diary #ttrpg #ttrpg dev

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