Author Topic: RPPR Gamedesign Workshop - To grog or not to grog.  (Read 43729 times)

Kamen

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Re: RPPR Gamedesign Workshop - To grog or not to grog.
« Reply #30 on: January 24, 2014, 04:10:00 PM »
So, Tadanori Oyama's bleed out system has reminded me of a set of alternative, fan-made critical hit tables for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd ed. which, anybody here who has played that or the more recent Fantasy Flight 40k games knows can be ridiculously brutal. The neat things about these is that they're made by a pair of physicians and thus even more cringe worthy. Give 'em a look at: http://www.windsofchaos.com/?page_id=19. They might provide some inspiration.

Tadanori Oyama

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Re: RPPR Gamedesign Workshop - To grog or not to grog.
« Reply #31 on: January 24, 2014, 05:43:49 PM »
So, Tadanori Oyama's bleed out system has reminded me of a set of alternative, fan-made critical hit tables for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd ed. ...

Please, Tadanori Oyama is my father. Call me Tad. Glad people go some nostalgia out of my bleeding rules but it's time I get on track with the actual game I want to do instead of just posting mechanics I think of.

Inspired by Thesauradon I've decided to post a listing of goals and such for my game idea. Be gentle, internet, I am a delicate flower:


Inspiration
Epic fantasy stories: Gilgamesh, The Journey West, and Conan among others.
Ross talking about self-motivated individuals in the Base Raider planning stages.

Concept
Tomorrow morning, while you make coffee and curse the rising sun, an impossibly massive figure, filling the sky with golden light, appears with the first light of day and speaks words understood by every individual the world over: “The Earth’s 3,000 year prohibition against magic is now completed. Do not let it happen again.” And with that, the figure vanishes, leaving only drifting lines of golden light in the morning sky.

This is modern day fantasy. Magic is back. Anyone who has the will to go out and seize it can get anything they want.

Thematic Goals
People seize power. Magic and strength of will do not fall upon individuals by chance. The power must be found and taken. Become a Tolkienian wizard. Become a Harry Potter wizard. Hell, be a Marvel comics wizard. Magic is what you make it.

Magic is a force of will and obeys intent. Nothing magic exists without someone having made it.

Your magic cannot change you unless you want it to. Want to be an elf? Done. Orc? Easy. Vampire? All it takes is the force of will to change your core being. Create creatures of myth or things never dreamed of. Cure disease. Trap souls in private hells. Magic knows no morality.

Design Goals
Change the world is different ways each time the game is played.

Players design their own origin quest and play it out, as individuals or as a party.

Allow for large scale combat with focus on timing and allocating resources.

Players design their own goals and the road marks they must pass along the way or randomly create blockages in their path.

Present a grand mystery that can either be the focus of a campaign or completely ignored (why was magic taken in the first place? Who took it?)

System
As I mentioned before I’m currently in a struggle between using modified Fate CORE or creating my own system for this.

Fate CORE can easily meet most of my design needs but I would need to add more mechanics to cover others. So, partly original or entirely?

Conclusion & Personal Conviction
I love modern fantasy. Present day with magical abilities and off the wall possibility. It’s my steampunk. I want this game to be a modern-fantasy in the classical sense of the fantasy genre: strange impossible journeys but through a modern world.


Claive

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Re: RPPR Gamedesign Workshop - To grog or not to grog.
« Reply #32 on: January 24, 2014, 06:27:23 PM »
Hey Tad,

Your ideas remind me of Hero Quests ((note: the activity in the game rather than the game itself) I.E. http://www.nikkeffingham.com/runequest/hnotes.htm )

If done in modified fate, someone (me) is going to have "Mythic (Final Fantasy) Blue Mage" as an aspect...

Edit: In retrospect that is a horrible aspect.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2014, 07:22:18 PM by Claive »
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Jae.

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Re: RPPR Gamedesign Workshop - To grog or not to grog.
« Reply #33 on: April 29, 2014, 03:56:22 AM »
Hello, I made a post over in "Introductions" but GDW is the thing that made me finally post after years so I thought "Damnit, just get on with it!" and decided to put the idea out there beyond my little circle.

I've strong-armed my sister who works in art direction and general computer graphic thingamabobs into doing a bit of a NaNoWriMo in Game Design. Except, our deadline is Sept. 1st. I started work March 10th.

I've stolen the same format Mr. Tad used to try and condense things without mechanics.

Inspiration
"Fantastic" Media: Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa: Valley Of The Wind, Spirited Away (Pretty much everything Miyazaki).
Video Games: Shadow Of The Colossus, Ico, & Majora's Mask
Bits of: Neil Gaiman, Tim Powers, Patrick Rothfuss
TTRPGs: Annalise, Polaris, 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars, Apocalypse World, Fate, Misspent Youth.

The Pitch
You are Chosen. You are young and impressionable. You are inextricably tied to Forces that shape destiny and reality. This relationship with things you cannot understand marks you to undertake the Quest. You and those like you are to encounter the Beasts. You are the only ones who can, the only ones who meet the fantastic head on. You can sink yourself into the overwhelming ocean that is the Force that branded you and ask for power. Ask for the gifts you need to survive another encounter, to twist and bend the laws of the universe, but every time you come back, there is a little less of you and a little more of It, until maybe none of you comes back at all.

Concept
No setting. Instead, there are a "Things That Are Always True". It's a collaborative game, where the first session is character and world creation. A brief outline of these things are:

The World
  • Is besieged by the Beasts and in peril.
  • Is a place where the mundane is intruded upon by the Fantastic.
  • Is worked and shaped by the unseen Forces.
  • Cannot truly comprehend the Chosen's Quest.

The Chosen
  • Are the only thing that can stand between the Beasts and the World.
  • Know that their quest is lifelong and inescapable.
  • Are inextricably bound to the Forces of the world.
  • Are sometimes welcome, sometimes hated, and sometimes tolerated by the World, but never allowed to settle down with them

Thematic Goals
I think it was Caleb that said that the goal of his game was in some ways "to rescue the dungeon crawl from DnD". I could be wrong, but whoever it was, it got me to understand what it is that I wanted my game to really focus on. The game is about rescuing the Hero's Journey from, well, the Hero's Journey.

I want to skip loot, it's not interesting. I want to mostly skip the fights with mooks, it's not interesting. I want to mostly fast forward the trudge down the road to the dragon's den. I want to get to the Dragon. In between there, the only thing that is important is whether a Scene matters enough to discover something about your character or change them. It's about whether facing things that no one understands, is willing to face, or sometimes even believes in is worth it, and whether you are willing to lose control over your identity to overcome them.

Thematically, the game is a Bildungsroman. Secretly, it's about being a teenager and growing up. This amounts to the same thing, but people are likely not to notice the latter.

Design Goals

Enforce the sense that your party, and in turn, only other Chosen like you can be relied on and trusted to understand you. Through Bond Scenes, Flashbacks, etc.

Breathe life into "Myth Creation" where it is fun to take turns crafting and inserting surreal and fantastic elements into a mundane world.

Make the game tell the same thematic story in every world people can come up with.
       I've attempted so far playstests with a "Where The Wild Things Are" type of setting, a Tribal Hero's Journey a la Zelda and Shadow of the Colossus, and a Victorian Urban Fantasy with Demons & Angels with some success.

Make people care about their characters enough that they are interested in developing them from "Guy with Sword" like every Game Protagonist ever to find out why they would do this and who they would do this for.

Make players okay with not necessarily character death, but losing control of their character (mechanically the same thing) so long as the closure to the character's story is satisfying.

System

I'm not making a system, because I'm not a masochist (mostly just cowardly) and because mechanics make my head hurt. My system is a version of Fate Accelerated Edition + Mechanics Structures The Narrative via Apocalypse World with my own bits of system thrown in to handle tapping into Forces, generating Beasts and Myths, and the Journey.

Conclusion & Personal Conviction
This is a focused game, there is no place for someone who wants to play a Skyrim-type Sandbox. Like in Polaris, it is very likely that your character will lose control or die unrecognized and with little fanfare. Make that okay, make it that if they survive and walk into the sunset at the end of the game that their story is told. Make encounters with the Beasts about characters. Make the party not just a group that stays together, but one that wants to.

Now that I've dipped my toes in, there's no reason to not make this an actual thing. I'll be coming back and giving my thoughts on other people's ideas (if that's okay), and will try my best with mechanics (mostly on the side of LESS MATH!). From reading the thread, everyone's really thoughtful so I look forward to getting your ideas as well.
« Last Edit: April 29, 2014, 04:00:16 AM by Jae. »
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