I've been trying to develop my own TTRPG system for a long while now, but im getting jammed trying to put together how damage works. At the moment an attack has a dX damage and dX armour penetration property, which together can degrade a target's armour value for that hit zone. The exact specifics dont really matter because TLDR: Its too much to track in any fight with more than three or four combatants since each guy was 7 hit zones each with multiple values that were constantly changing. I need to simplify it and might just roll back to a previous version, but i wanted to ask first. Are there any existing systems that handle armour with a reasonable level of depth and dynamism but still work efficiently for large group fights?And more generally, how do you model armour narratively?
>>94216818You just wanted an excuse to post "subtle" gay porn.
>>94216911No, i had an opportunity to post gay porn. Its different. Now do you know of any systems that handle multiple pieces of armour across multiple hit zones? Dark heresy does it but flat DR is a flawed and solved system, so id like something more nuanced
>>94216818>>94216993>I want an armor system that is nuanced and tactical>but also quick to resolve and without too much mathAnon, here is the kicker: You can only have one, not both. If you want an autistic armor system, then go all out, but design combat so that it doesn't take too many rounds to be resolved.
>>94217891Yeah, you're probably right. I was hoping it would be possible since battletech does it but i cant have a seperate sheet for each of my 16 goblins on the field, its already too much just to track which token is which. If i need to choose between autism and playability then it sadly isnt a choice at all...
>>94216993Cyberpunk 2020, but also see:>>94217891Because this has been my experience. I ended up taking the Cyberpunk Red aimed shot system and tossing it into my own game, it works, it's not perfect, but it's better than having to track multiple limbs with their own health and armour.
>>94216818The standard method for armor is simple damage resistance which is negated by Armor Penetration either point for point or entirely as long as the weapon has the Armor Piercing tag. It's good enough and doesn't get bogged down with every attack roll.
>>94216818To what end?
>>94219528I'll look into cyberpunk, thanks!>>94220067>thats essentially what i had, just without hit zones or armour degrading with damage. Its a valid model but its too cumbersome for what i want it to do>>94220255To make narrative decisions like not wearing a helmet or stealing someone's hauberk be represented mechanically rather than just being flavour for your arbitrary defence number
>>94216818>I've been trying to develop my own TTRPG systemWhy lying on an anonymous Tibetan thanka weaving forum?>Rest of the postBloat for the sake of bloat, while trying to reinvent the wheel. If you need to make more than a single dice roll for attack and more than single dice to defend, your system is by default shit-tier, on the simple logic that a single turn of combat is going to take 20 minutes for no actual gain in any field other than "time wasted per turn"
>>94220512>To make narrative decisions like not wearing a helmet or stealing someone's hauberk be represented mechanically rather than just being flavour for your arbitrary defence numberThen make those a simple +1/-1, you dumb fucking shit.>b-but scaleThen re-scale your game to the point where this is a flavour, rather than big-ass difference.Fucking 85...
>>94220512>To make narrative decisions like not wearing a helmet1) How's that narrative decision2) Not wearing a helmet is already covered by wide plethora of games by not providing the related protection, whichever way the armour works in that specific game>stealing someone's hauberk3) Meaningless, it's self-fitting by gravity - if you fit in, it fits you.In short: you don't play anything, you are clueless about the most basic pre-existing solutions and also the thing you want to represent and this thread is superfluous attempt to fill the catalog with something, anything, but not actual discussion about the games or the hobby. Effectively, a malicious bot thread
>>94220512Oh, and you had shit. Your "system" is overcomplicated mess that tries to represent randomly selected details of a "realistic" situation, without first presenting the frame of the system itself or how it looks at the core, making it just a random idea thrown around, without anything concrete behind it
>>94220542I am bored by systems that can be solved by a child maximizing a single modifier. My goal is a game where each new turn presents a new optimization problem with different constraints to the one before, and where each subsystem is just complex enough to do the same thing for someone who wants to hyperspecialize in that specific interest. That cannot be done without a minimum level of complexityYou're right that its too much as it is now though>>94220562If its that simple all flavour dies at the altar of big number. Changing the size of the modifier will never make it any different, just more or less important>>94220621If your shield breaks in minos it should have some weight that you can only replace it with a minoan shield. People should want to import babylonian iron or celtic wine, and it should tell you something about them if they do.>>94220629Given that it was designed by modeling first then fitting mechanics to the model, yes, it was designed piecemeal. To be fair though this is the thing i did first and is also the thing that is explicitly not working. The rest of the system is homogenized and runs great, hence why im asking about the problem areas and not bragging about my successes. If it makes any difference its a D6 system tracking skills and stats from -6 to 15. Since each +1 is a compounding 16% then each 5pt increase represents a doubling in capacity for that skill or stat. Its actually very neat, its just that attack rolls and armour dont fit the format
>>94223769>My goal is a game where each new turn presents a new optimization problemAre you sure that is what you want? Go out and get yourself a book (do they still make these?) of algebra equations, a brain teaser book. Solve those equations for as long you feel like and imagine that each of them had a little narrative blurb.X + Y = Z>X is the Celtic warlord>Y is the fat pig>Z is the warlord with a fat pigReflect on whether or not the book would have been improved with it being fantasy themed, reflect on whether the story of the Celtic warlord having a fat pig to feast on was improved by algebra. Reflect on whether you are looking to make a roleplaying game, or some other kind of game. Because 'optimization problems' is not what most people would associate with a roleplaying game, but might be what someone looks for in a management game, a puzzle game, or a board game.
Any system so chaotic that every turn will drastically change to the point of being unable to optimize is also likely an unapproachable game due to the amount of rules to keep track of for something like that to happen. Every system can be optimized to a certain degree, and it's not some cardinal sin that you can make a character who is good at doing the thing they're doing or learning the best reactions to take after the enemy makes a move. All this system will likely do is make characters pick rounded options or build their characters in diverse ways to each be good in the various presented scenarios. Which really lands us back on balanced party design discussions that go back to the very first RPGs.
>>94223970Optimization problems are the basis of multiple entire genres of games. In videogames everything from starcraft to city skylines to polybridge is built around optimization puzzles. Magic and yugioh are about optimizing the utility from your constantly changing hand field and deck. Huge numbers of board games are built around optimizing where to spend your resources to ensure noone else wins before you do. Even wargames are most often won by the army able to flex to objectives. So why are TTRPGS content to be two blocks of hitpoints trading damage until one of them falls over? Im not asking players to bring a programmable calculator for every turn, just a system where every turn you take for the entire campaign isnt predetermined at character generation>>94224148Im hoping that just two or three resources changing at different rates will have enough emergent complexity to make each turn worth thinking about. As for optimiation, ive already tested that. there's consistently significant but diminishing returns, which is the intended outcome
Do any TTRPGs do armor save systems like wargames? Like weapons deal flat damage and the defender rolls saves to reduce or prevent damage, and the save /amount of saves can be modified by their armor value or the penetration of the weapon?
>>94224413>So why are TTRPGS content to be two blocks of hitpoints trading damage until one of them falls over?Most RPGs aren't like that, but let me flip the question on you:>Why are flower arranging games content with simply arranging flowersIf you want to play a system that isn't pretedermined then I'd suggest you just play pretty much any of the larger names. Cyberpunk any edition, Call of Cthulhu any edition, Traveller most editions, Shadowrun most editions, basically anything that's PbtA. Expand your horizons and I am sure you will find that what you want already exists. Though I reiterate that you should reflect on whether or not what you want is an RPG or not, because maybe you'd enjoy wargames more if traditional games is specifically the type of game you want to play.Not trying to knock you, if you and your group have a system you enjoy but you want to create more simulationist combat with more depth then go ahead. Just hope you are open to the idea that you are going through a lot of effort to walk a path that is already well travelled.
>>94216818>>94216993>>94219492Queer homo seaman demons will not let anything cool alone. We can't even have knights anymore thy have to queerified for Tumblr Twitter trannys
>>94224507Some do, but usually its only for stuff like energy shields. People like having their armour penetration be a function of their own attack rather than a function of the enemy's defence>>94224511Most are, just hidden behind a thin layer of buffs and control spells. I'll look into those games, i cant say ive tried them yet, but my exprience is that game dev is either legacy jank or minimalist and gamey. It seems that very few people tread the simulationist path, and even fewer ever see the end of it>>94224534Sorry anon, war is gay now. You breeders will just have to go marry women and raise families since you like them so much
>>94224671The funny part about that image is that Smoug's eye holes are still on the neck.
>>94225010So you mean smien? Or ough?
>>94216818Cyberpunk 2020's system is both straightforward, simple and make perfect sense. I don't know why it's not the standard. It's exactly what you want >>94216993>Armour is damage reduction.>Armour-piercing weapons divide the damage reduction of armour by 2.>Damage is localised by limbs, if you get too much damage on one limb, you can straight lose it.>You also have a general level of damage, which defines your chances of either losing consciousness and/or dying>Past a certain threshold of damage, you roll to stay conscious. Past another threshold, you ALSO roll to stay alive. The higher the damage, the lower your chances to pass.That's it. That's the system. Obviously it's made for gunfight, but the game also has a (pretty solid) melee combat system, it wouldn't be too hard to create stats for medieval or fantasy setting.It's lethal, though.
>>94226243Interesting, it sounds quite similar to what i had. How does it stay manageable in large gunfights where 20+ people are trying to take eachother's arms off at the same time?
>>94226419No.I mean... I remember playing in larger firefights, so it is *doable*. But if you stick to RAW, you would roll between one (if you shoot a one-shot weapon and you miss) to four times (roll to hit, roll damage, roll to stay conscious, roll to stay alive) each turn. Not to mention that most weapons shoot more than once.But you could streamline that a fuckload, if you just take the mooks out instead of having them roll to stay conscious. You could cut that even further, to only one roll, by using the max damage for each weapon when hitting mooks.
>>94226999I hate when games give minions 1hp or handwave their resources. I want to fuck a guy up because the gm couldnt stop me, not because would have given me the free win no matter what i did. Whatever i use has to run in large fights. Ideally it would be scalable to small skirmish wargames, but that might be too ambitious
>>94227137Well, then just use the average.But rolling for everything is going to be very fastidious, very fast, if you have a lot of opponents. Plus, in lots of cases you'll roll three times just to find out that, yes, he actually is out of action in one shot.
>>94220512Have armor be additive. Each component adds something but you don't get anything more for overlapping armor. For example, an armored coat adds 1 and a chesplate adds 2 but wear them together and you get 2. However, a chestplate and sabatons adds up to 3 because the Sabatons don't overlap with the Chestplate. A full suit of armor without the helmet is 5 but with the helmet is 6. At the same time, each piece of armor has it's own penalties and requirements (Usually just strength, stamina, and proficiency) so if you recieve status effects and debuffs you might want to remove armor to recover from them.
>thread about something game-designYes, it will receive a bump.
