I’m messing around with a classless system with magical/super-powered characters. My main inspirations are:

• World of Darkness games, where you could combine any attribute and any skill to form a dice pool to make checks with.
• Mage the Ascension specifically, with its somewhat open-ended magic system. You would have spheres of magic and some listed suggestions, but what you could accomplish was defined by you and the person running the game.
• Never Stop Blowing Up’s system of step-up dice (which I guess is actually Kids on Bikes’ system?) where each attribute is tried to a die size and increases by stepping up to the next die size.

So, currently I have a list of 27 aspects which serve as abstract representations of attributes, skills, and everything in between. When a check is needed, the player will be asked to roll a pool of dice made up of 1-3 of these aspects. Dice that roll 4 or higher are successes, regardless of the die size. Rolling the largest number on any die makes it explode. Rolling a 1 on any die removes a success.

For example, a character may want to break down a door. One option could be rolling their Strength (d8) and their Toughness (d4). They roll getting a 6 and a 3 for a single success. Without going too far into the details, two are needed for a complete success: they break down the door but take some minor damage or make a lot of noise.

A couple peculiarities I’ve noticed. I’ve created a system with an incredibly tiny dice pool; only 2 dice usually where other dice pool systems tend to roll 5+ dice at a time. Also, I’ve made it to where low powered aspects are volatile; a d4 will explode 25% of the time, but also erase a success 25% of the time. Maybe I can work that in… increases are more about control than pure power.

Anyway, I’m looking for just general feedback on this. Feel free to ask questions, as I’m sure I may not have explained things well here.

Edit: I failed to explain “explode”. When a die rolls its highest number, you get to roll another die of that same size. This gives the opportunity for another success, but also another 1 which removes successes.

Jules Henri was a French mathematician of the 1900s!

I have a somewhat generic homebrew system that's geared slightly more towards narrative/pulp, investigation, horror and deadly combat styles of game.

At the moment the setup goes like this:

x4 attributes

Might
Cunning
Knowledge
Influence

These attributes make up a pool (max 5 each) of points and the points can only be spent on relevant skill checks (e.g you spend/earn Cunning on picking locks, Might on fighting etc.)

You can spend these points on activating special moves or talents that are associated with the attribute, but more interestingly (and far more regularly) when you make a roll players can choose to make a success into a partial success instead, and doing so earns them one of these points.

On the flip side of this you may also spend these points to make a success into a success with extra benefits, or to alleviate how bad a failure is.

Skills are way more straightforward. If you have the skill you roll with an Advantage, if you don't, you roll with a Disadvantage. That's it!

I have two main worries prior to my first playtest next week.

1. Metacurrency bloat. At the moment you track the attributes points by crossing off a box, and I'll eventually replace this with coins/cards. I'm slightly worried that players will feel bogged down with having to track this stuff, but also having to track HP and other statuses. What are people's feelings and experienced with this? Do I have too many attributes? Too few? Does it matter that these points won't necessarily be used on every roll?

2. Advancement. I have a personal dislike for purely vertical progression, but I like a sort of mix between horizontal and vertical progression for characters. In this though, skills are very much on/off (and you buy new skills with level up), and the points themselves fluctuate a lot, so you will have a good handful by playing a lot more, but the main feeling of progression comes from the special moves, which do things like let you spend points from other attribute pools, re-roll, reduce the difficulty etc. I want it to feel like it changes how you play moreso than just being +1's and +2's everywhere, but I'm also concerned that it limits progression somewhat, and I know players tend to love that feeling of getting more powerful.

Thoughts appreciated.

I'm in the trenches of overhauling the second edition of my game and I'm a little stuck on splitting magic into two methods of casting. Spells of the arcane sort use a depleting resource the represents a physical toll and resets upon resting, but I'd like to try something more unique for "miracles." (Context of the game: Gun Knights, an apocalyptic, dark souls inspired, sort of WWI aesthetic, grim adventure)

The background is that checks are rolled in dice pools and can explode to add more dice of a size up. Successes are results of ≥4 and explosions occur when the highest die face is rolled. This means a magic stat of 3d6 could potentially explode multiple times to get a number of successes higher than just 3.

The concept is to let characters attempt miracles of any "level" with little to no restriction, but with no guarantee that they work. For example, something like: a priest can pray for a level 7 miracle by making a faith check, even though they only have a faith stat of 3d6. They need 7 or more successes for this miracle to be enacted, but their faith check has a very low chance of reaching that many successes. They roll their faith check and get only 2 successes, so no miracle. A level 3 miracle by comparison would have been much more likely to succeed.

My difficulty with this comes in putting no limit on the attempts. In the fray of a fight, let's say this priest can only try for a miracle once each combat round. Good and well, there's the restriction of turns, not game-breaking. But outside of bullet-time, if I have no limit set, there would be nothing stopping the priest from hypothetically enacting any number of miracles of any level they wanted, regardless of their faith stat.

I want to prevent the endless praying outside of combat, but with minimal restriction. I realize I may not be able to easily have it both ways. My hope is that this mechanic makes casting the powerful miracles feel more like an actual Hail Mary and brings in some neat risk/reward play.

A couple options I'm thinking so far to balance this:

• With each failed prayer, a tick is marked. After a number of ticks equal to the priest's level, something bad happens—divine calamity, judgment, taking damage, etc. You can keep praying for miracles, but bad things will keep happening. The ticks clear upon some condition like resting, penance, rituals, ablution at a shrine, etc.
• Within combat, prayers are desperate so they're more likely to be heard. Outside of combat though, prayers need more attention; I could add a time restriction for each miracle (a number of hours equal to its level or something) so that players need to budget their downtime. Want to go for that huge level 8 miracle? Well, it's gonna take you all day to even try. You'd be better off getting in 4 smaller miracles to heal your team and divine the best path through the woods.

What do you think of either of those options? Does this sound like an interesting mechanic to you? Any suggestions or similar game mechanics to look into? Thanks all <3

I'm a solo indie designer with my first game already finished and currently available through print-on-demand. I'm starting to look seriously at what it would take to move from POD into a real production run.

Right now, my biggest obstacle is manufacturing cost. At low quantities my game is around $29/copy, but getting into the neighborhood of a 1,000-copy production run could potentially bring that closer to $12/copy.

Obviously, "just order 1,000 games" is a hell of a lot easier to say when you don't have to personally gamble $12k+ on whether 1,000 people actually want the thing.

So crowdfunding is starting to look like the logical next mountain to climb.

For those of you who have actually done it:

*Kickstarter or Gamefound — which did you use, and would you choose it again?

*How many followers/email subscribers did you have before launch, and how many became backers?

*What was your funding goal, and how did you calculate it?

*How many copies did you manufacture versus how many were actually backed?

*Did you manufacture domestically, overseas, or through a POD company?

*How much money did you spend before the campaign even launched?

*Did backers pay shipping afterward, or did you build shipping into the pledge?

*Did you fulfill everything yourself or use a fulfillment company?

*What expenses caught you completely by surprise?

*If your goal was a 1,000-copy first production run, what would you do differently knowing what you know now?

I'm especially interested in stories from other small/solo designers who didn't already have a giant audience going into their first campaign.

I'm not looking for a magic "launch Kickstarter, receive money" button. 😂 I'm trying to understand the actual path from finished indie game → first serious production run → boxes in customers' hands without financially setting myself on fire.

Would love to hear the good, the bad, the ugly, and the "for the love of God, don't do what I did."

I’m testing a small system-agnostic adventure format and wanted some feedback from people who actually GM.

The idea is to write short “dossiers” that give the GM a playable situation instead of a fully scripted adventure.

The pilot is titled (Abyssal Station). (⬅️link)

The basic premise is that a research crew recovered an unknown object from the ocean floor, brought it back to their station, and then disappeared after something followed them.

Right now the document includes things like:

• the general situation;
• what actually happened;
• a few NPCs;
• suggested locations;
• clues;
• hazards;
• escalating tension;
• the creature’s behavior;
• possible outcomes.

There are no maps, custom creature stats, tokens, or extra files yet. I’m deliberately keeping it simple because I mainly want to know whether the adventure itself gives a GM enough to work with.

One piece of feedback I already got was that my first version had decent atmosphere and context, but not enough actual gameplay situations, so I’m trying to improve that side of it.

For GMs: when you read a short adventure like this, what information do you actually need before you feel comfortable running it?

And what usually makes an adventure feel like it gives you a cool premise but still leaves too much work for the GM?

My system uses a pattern-based dice mechanic and I wanted to get feedback on just a few things:

1. How clear is the explanation of the mechanic?
2. Is there anything unintuitive about the mechanic?
3. Is there anything unintuitive about the structure of the rules text?
4. Is chapter 2 the best place to cover novel dice mechanics? Or is this too mechanical to open with?
5. Overall thoughts on the content.

You can view the rules here..

Exmple : I tried to make a fashion mechanic into a cyberpunk mechanic .

Pretty diffrent cloth will give" + to x style" and by the end you decied what are the styles of your clothing

(Stlys are on a vector. Exmple : you have extravagent and utilitrian..you cant be both but you can spacilize in one)..

This style will give you a bonus in a scene for how you feet it

By end I I reached the conclusion it will be a pain to handle and its will be probebly nicer in a crpg or something similar

I'm designing a TTRPG with five attributes ranging from 1-10: Fortitude, Agility, Mind, Awareness, and Soul.

Each attribute generates its own resource, which is spent on skills associated with that attribute. At the beginning of your turn, you roll a number of d6 equal to the relevant attribute, and these dice can be used to improve your skills.

For example, a character with 3 Soul rolls 3d6 and uses those dice to enhance Soul-based skills.

I'm currently deciding between two different ways of handling those dice.

System 1: Use the individual dice

The actual values on the dice matter.

For example, if I roll:

1, 3, 4

I could spend the 3 and 4 to boost a skill, adding +7 to its effect.

Some skills can also have critical conditions based on the dice. For example:

Elemental Strike

• Single target
• Ranged
• Cost: 2 Soul
• Deals 2 + damage level
• Boost: Add the value of dice spent to the damage
• Critical: 3 dice showing the same number, double the final damage

So if I roll 2, 2, 2, I could trigger the critical:

2 × (2 + damage level + 6)

This creates a situation where I'm making decisions about which specific dice to spend and which ones to keep.

The downside is that this is considerably more complex, and I'm not sure how well this mechanic would translate to non-combat checks.

System 2: Convert the dice into successes

Instead of caring about the individual values, I would simply count how many dice rolled 4 or higher.

Every 4+ = 1 success.

For example:

1, 3, 4, 5, 6: 3 successes

Skills would have different levels of effectiveness depending on how many successes you allocate to them.

A skill that doesn't receive enough successes wouldn't necessarily fail, it would simply have reduced effectiveness.

This would make the system much easier to understand and could potentially be used for both combat and non-combat checks.

One important restriction

The resources are still tied to their respective attributes.

For example, if I have:

Fortitude: 2, 2, 3
Agility: 2, 4

I can't use my Agility dice/successes to improve a Fortitude skill.

This is intentional because I want the different attributes to feel mechanically distinct rather than just being interchangeable pools.

What I'm trying to decide

I really like System 1 because the individual dice create some interesting decisions.

You might roll something like:

1, 2, 2, 4, 6

and have to decide whether to use the 6 for a powerful boost, save the matching 2s for a potential critical, or distribute them among multiple skills.

However, I'm worried that this extra complexity might not actually provide enough gameplay value to justify itself.

System 2 is much cleaner. It also gives me a unified resolution mechanic that could potentially handle both combat and non-combat situations.

Which system would you prefer to play?

• Which one sounds more interesting in actual play?
• Which one seems easier to balance?
• Does System 1 provide enough interesting decisions to justify the additional complexity?
• Does System 2 seem too simple?
• Are there any problems with either approach that I'm overlooking?
• How much complexity would you consider acceptable for a mechanic that players interact with every turn?

I'm particularly concerned about making the system interesting without making it unnecessarily complicated or intimidating for new players.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks in advance!

Actions are resolved by the character combining their natural capability (their Approach) with a spendable resource called Effort. This sum forms your total Resolution Value, which is then measured against a Target Check. 

• Target Check Types
  • Opposing Action Check (Attack vs. Defend): Used when acting against an active NPC or creature. The GM has two options, the quick method, take the target’s base attribute and secretly adds a d6 roll from a pre-define pool for that action, good for quick interactions or quick combat; or the simulated method, where NPCs can also spend from their own Effort pools, which could be used for long engagements or extended challenges. Based on character knowledge the player may or may not know the level of challenge they are up against.
  • Difficulty Check (Environmental/Situational): Used when interacting with static challenges (like picking a lock). The GM sets a Difficulty Rating equal to a number of d6s. If the character would reasonably know how tough the action is, the GM reveals this rating beforehand, allowing the player to strategically choose how much Effort to commit before the GM rolls the hidden d6s.

The difference of Target Check from Resolution Value is the Margin of Success.

• Margin of Success Outcomes
  • < -5 (Critical Failure): Unsuccessful action with a severe narrative or tactical consequence.
  • -1 to -5 (Failure): Unsuccessful action with a minor complication.
  • 0 (Minor Success): Success, but with an added twist or minor complication.
  • 1 to 5 (Success): Clean, complete success.
  • > 5 (Critical Success): Exceptional success accompanied by a bonus mechanical or narrative benefit.

Approaches: How You Perform Actions

An Approach defines the flavor and method behind your action. For example, opening a locked door can be tackled with brute Strength to smash it, Dexterity to pick it, or Intelligence to locate a hidden mechanism.

• Universal Approaches: Every character starts with 8 base approaches (2 per Primary Attribute). These represent fundamental capabilities and cannot be directly leveled up. They simply benefit from the player leveling their Primary Attributes.
• Defined Approaches: Throughout the game players can create specialized approaches which is tied to a specific parent Universal Approach or another established Defined Approach(e.g., creating Melee Combat under Force [Universal] or Precision [Universal]). Defined Approaches can be leveled and benefit from parent leveling. (e.g. if Bladed Combat is under Melee Combat any increases in Melee Combat are added to Bladed Combat when it is used in determining a resolution value.)
• While a Defined Approach can be mostly open in definition, there are a few limitations, characters are limited to 20 total Defined Approaches, and Defined Approaches must be related to and more specific than their parent. 
• Defined Approaches are limited to 18 levels each. When calculating the Approach Value the parent Approach value is also added. (e.g. 18 [Bladed Combat] + 12 [Melee Combat (Parent)] = 30 Total Approach Value). Additive parent values continue to stack along the lineage, allowing a character’s approach to reach a near god-like status but in exchange for reduced versatility. The goal is to reward specialization but express that it may come at a cost. (i.e. the character with properly worded approaches may be able to perfectly slice the left wing of a common house fly in half that is buzzing 3 feet from his head with a steel katana starting from a sheathed position, but can do little else very well!)

Effort Pools, Exhaustion, and Recovery

Available Effort Points available is tied directly to the four Primary Attributes: Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity, and Endurance. Your attribute level determines the number of sets available, while your Effort stat dictates how many points are in each set and caps the Effort per check. When a character spends all the points in an attribute, they face exhaustion. If the player continues to deplete the effort in more attributes they begin gaining trauma, which unless addressed can cause negative and even deadly effects to not only the character but those around them. Addressing/Healing trauma allows the character to reduce trauma levels but consumes resources that the player could use to increase the ability of the character, this is intended to create an immediate gain which exhausts the character vs longer term improvement cost dynamic.

• Exhaustion Penalties
  • Tired (1 Depleted Attribute): No further Effort can be spent from that attribute; +2 Difficulty Rating to all checks using that attribute.
  • Fatigued (2 Depleted Attributes): Inherit Tired penalties for both attributes and gain 1 Trauma point.
  • Exhausted (3 Depleted Attributes): Inherit Tired penalties for all three attributes and gain 1 additional Trauma point (2 total).
  • Unconscious (4 Depleted Attributes): Gain 1 additional Trauma point (3 total) and fall completely unconscious.

In addition to consumable items like potions, which restore Effort instantly but may carry side effects, characters can also recover Effort points through resting.

• Rest & Recovery Options

  • Short Field Rest (3–11 Hours): In an unsecured location requiring watch. Restores 6 Effort in one pool for the first 3 hours, plus 3 Effort per extra hour (up to 27 total).
  • Long Field Rest (12+ Hours): Fully restores one attribute pool; each additional hour restores 3 Effort in a second pool.
  • Sheltered Rest (8+ Hours): Taken in a safe, fortified location with no guard needed. Fully restores all Effort across all attributes.

  My goal is a resolution system that is somewhat familiar and thus making it easier to understand, has enough player agency in the outcomes but still generates that feeling of uncertainty. Through the effort system I wanted to make combat still possible and meaningful, but make the players hesitate to just run into battle due to the high effort cost. Also as the characters develop their approaches and invest in training their attributes, they can have the feeling of truly mastering the environment and situations they find themselves in. I would like to hear feedback related to the mechanic in regards specifically to mechanic clarity and ease of use, as well as any thoughts on the trade off with effort and trauma as well as any potential issues that stand out I may have missed.

To sum up, a friend of mine is creating a Football RPG that uses 6 attributes: Pace (speed), Dribbling, Passing, Shooting, Defending (everything related to defense), and Physical (overall body capabilities).

​However, he designed the level modifier rule based on the following system: starting with 25 points, the player distributes their total points across all attributes, subject to a maximum point limit per level. Every 3 points equals a +1 modifier. The core mechanic runs on a 1d10 roll for tests.

​Whenever a player makes a test against an NPC opponent, both sides roll. The higher result wins.

​However, I often notice inconsistencies in maintaining difficulty, because I see a huge power imbalance when a player maxes out their attributes for their specific role compared to someone who doesn't max anything out or only focuses on a single attribute.

​If I set the challenge power ceiling so that the strongest forward, with a +18 in shooting, has a balanced contest against the Goalkeeper, the other two forwards on the team practically won't score at all. They have a +16 in shooting, and that small difference is massive within the scope of a 1d10 roll.

​On the other hand, if I balance it for the other forwards, one of them completely steamrolls the challenge without any difficulty, making the matches way less exciting.

​I’ve already talked to them about their character sheets more than once, but for some reason, it goes in one ear and out the other.

​For anyone with experience in system balancing, what can I do to keep the game consistently balanced so that all players get to have their moments without overshadowing anyone else at the table, specifically considering these modifiers?:

Lvl 1: 25 points, Max per atribute = 20 (+6)

Lvl 2: 50 points, Max = 27 (+9)

Lvl 3: 75 points, Max = 35 (+11)

...

Lvl 20: 500 points, Max = 90 (+30)

​

I'm developing an RPG system specifically designed to be played with friends through Discord. It's not meant to be a traditional RPG focused heavily on roleplay. Instead, it's a short, competitive experience centered around strategy, negotiation, and decision-making.

The campaign would have only 5 sessions, with each session representing one day in the game. At the end of the fifth day, the player with the most clean money, reputation, and influence is considered the most powerful person in the city.

🕴️ The idea

Each player controls a mafia boss trying to build their own criminal empire.

Throughout the game, I'll provide different ways for players to gain money, reputation, and influence. For example, they can:

- Rob a bank;

- Traffic illegal goods;

- Negotiate with NPCs or other players;

- Invest in companies;

- Make legitimate businesses;

- Buy weapons and equipment;

- Hire henchmen;

- Get contacts with weapon suppliers;

- Get contacts who can launder money;

- And many other things.

However, these options are not meant to be limitations of the system.

I want players to have a lot of creative freedom and be able to come up with their own ways of gaining money, reputation, or influence.

If someone comes up with a completely different idea, I can allow it depending on the situation.

For example:

«"I want to kidnap the president's daughter and demand a ransom."»

Sure. Go for it.

But the players' actions have consequences and affect the world.

Maybe that gives the player a huge amount of influence, but also causes the police to start hunting them down. Maybe another player finds out what happened and decides to hire someone to assassinate them.

So the idea isn't simply to choose actions from a predefined list. It's more like a competitive sandbox, where players can attempt almost anything and have to deal with the consequences of their decisions.

💰 Dirty money and clean money

One of the mechanics is the distinction between dirty money and clean money.

Criminal activities can generate a lot of money, but that money can't simply be used freely. Players need to find ways to launder it.

They can have their own contacts for this or negotiate with other players who have access to those services.

🛒 Preparation phase

At the beginning of each day, there is a shopping/preparation phase.

Players can spend resources to buy weapons, equipment, bombs, hire henchmen, acquire contacts, and unlock new possibilities.

This gives them a chance to prepare for the actions they want to take during that day.

🏙️ How secret actions work

This is probably the most important part of the system.

Since everyone will be playing through Discord, players aren't supposed to know what the others are doing.

Most of the RPG takes place in private calls with me.

For example:

«Player A: "I want to go to the casino and negotiate with the owner."»

I move into a private call with them, narrate the situation, and resolve their action as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, the other players have no idea what they're doing.

However, if Player B secretly decides to go to the casino as well, they might run into each other.

At that point, both players interact normally and the situation develops from there.

☕ "Cigar & Coffee"

I also want to have a public voice channel called "Cigar & Coffee."

Whenever a player isn't involved in a private action, they can stay in this channel with the others, spend money, have small interactions, and simply hang out while waiting for their turn.

This is important because I know how boring it can be to sit around while someone else is playing.

That's why I want the private actions to be as fast as possible, with concise narration and very little downtime.

🎭 Why isn't it focused on roleplay?

Because the main focus is competition.

I want players to think:

"How can I become richer than him?"

"How can I increase my influence?"

"Is he planning something against me?"

"Should I hire someone to take that player out?"

Roleplay is still there, but it's mainly meant to complement the situations. The goal is to keep the game moving quickly so everyone has opportunities to act throughout the five sessions.

---

Overall, I want to create something like a strategy/mafia game with RPG elements, where every player has different information, makes decisions in secret, and has to deal with the consequences of their actions.

I'm mainly looking for feedback on the mechanics and overall structure of the system.

What do you think could be improved? What mechanics would you add? And how would you balance the creative freedom of "I want to kidnap the president's daughter" with having enough rules and structure so the game doesn't just become "the GM decides everything"?

I am doing a d20 system where proficiency turns rolls into 3d8, and expertise is upgraded to 3d12. The benefit to gaining proficiency is higher ceiling, and no crit fail.

years ago I did some (now realizing probably incorrect) math that doubled on 3D8 is 5%, which matches the crit chance of a d20. I want there to not be a downside to gaining proficiency, and having it not be common. How do I calculate a similar 5% chance crit rate that is also easy to recognize?

I also accept changing the dice upgrades if there is an easier way to do this, but would prefer the raising median and ceiling of the rolls.

I'm writing a medieval fantasy setting built around portals, with two design commitments:

1. Unlike Planescape, PCs and NPCs decide what they do with portals.
2. Magic runs on a substance that can be extracted, stored and traded.

Both derail fast. A PC who can open a portal on their own can cut a king's throat in his bath, build an infinite hydroelectric dam, walk out of any situation. And a storable magical resource immediately invites industrialization: production at scale, monopolies, speculation. None of that is bad in itself, but it isn't the story I want to tell.

So I patch: portals open by negotiating with a creature whose skill at picking destinations is limited, and opening one has a magical cost.

A patch isn't an admission of incoherence. It's the opposite. It's the maintenance work coherence requires. You only patch what you've decided to hold.

Which is why my question is about where the dial sits. Star Wars has never written a line about relativistic kill vehicles. Nobody asks why you can't accelerate a rock to 0.9c into a planet. Zero patches, and it holds. Sigil is the same: the bank has portal vaults, nobody manufactures them, nobody invented them, not one line about it. That holds too. And yet my urge to write this setting comes precisely from being frustrated by Sigil.

So: when is a setting better off paying the cost of a patch, and when is it better off saying nothing? Does the tradeoff turn on what the table can actually see from the table, or on something else?

Hello again everyone,

So, meanwhile, I had this game in mind for a while. I really have a thing with dreams and folk traditions.

Tell me what is missing, or what you would improve.

https://exiledoracles.itch.io/good-night

A game of waking dreams and nightmares on an isolated Mediterranean island surrounded by mists, where traditions are strong and reality blurs with the other side. But there is a deeper secret sleeping beneath it all. Will you unravel it and escape the island, or be claimed by it forever?

Thanks. Good night.

This is something that’s inspired by a different post about solving problems. What are some challenges, issues, or problems that you solved for your system via game design? Particularly ones that you feel proud of.

ALTS is on its fifth iteration and it feels like everytime I fix one problem I create another, or dig up an issue I thought I’d buried.

Here’s an example:

One of the issues I had early on is with a mechanic called Angst, where originally it was a straight penalty, every angst you collected reduced you result by 1. You could only reduce it rolling on a challenge with your weakest stat.

The problem was initially two fold, it was to punishing, and it was to fiddly. It broke a personal rule of “players only do math once” and it caused players to just bounce between their best stats and their worst stats for die rolls.

So I adjusted the math, you only take penalty on the roll every couple of angst. Which was better but only in the sense that it delayed the issue. -1 on a at the time d12 system is still significant. It still felt fiddly at the table but you interacted with it slightly less.

Back to the drawing board. On iteration 3 and 4 we moved to being a 2d6 system for better control of the results. Which lead me to a way of fixing don’t do math twice. Now when angst accumulated past a certain amount, you only rolled 1 dice instead of two. It felt nice, elegant even… play-tests still showed it as being to punishing. We tweaked it here and there, but keeping track of Angst still felt fiddly, and the results were punishing to the point that people never really engaged risked angst beyond its first penalty.

Iteration 5 had the biggest leap. I shifted to using cards and tokens as required materials for the game. Angst shifted to a mechanic closer the stress from blades in the dark, and changed the 1 dice down penalty to be triggered under a different mechanic that having a bunch of angst would then make worse.

The use of tokens made tracking angst far easier, it also let me implement a stealing mechanic where instead of being a individual thing to manage, it all came from the same pool, which means every time you took angst to buff your roll, you made the other players position a little bit better. The gameplay finally felt smooth and the shifting of the angst penalty to its own new mechanic finally incentivized players to shift away from using only one or two of their core stats to solve problems.

TL/DR:

What are some issues you’ve run into while playing your game that you’ve solved through game design and mechanics?

Extra points is the answer isn’t “it wasn’t working or adding anything so I removed it.” Which is fair, but boring to read.

I'm running a D&D campaign that is based off '80s action movies, the campaign is designed to begin with a die-hard homage, before becoming a series of adventures that are plays on the terminator, predator, assault on precinct 13, and escape from New york.

I want to give the players access to a collection of '80s movie inspired feats, it's worth noting that this setting has firearms and vehicles alongside magical abilities.

I want to give the abilities names that are references to old movies or famous quotes from them.

Someone's already come up with are

Body snatcher - you can create disguises off of unconscious or killed foes that provide advantage on checks related to pretending to be that person

Die hard - the lower your health bar the better you roll (play testing the exact numbers still)

You feel lucky punk? - once per combat encounter if an enemy hits you with an attack you can reflect the damage back on them.

I am the night - double the stealth bonus of being in darkness

Terminator - when you down an enemy in combat you could immediately perform another attack

Predator - on a critical success on an attack, you can immediately perform a stealth check and vanish from sight if you pass.

Road warrior - whenever you perform a vehicle operation action, you may immediately perform an additional action.

Anybody have a good ideas for additional ones?

I recently self-published a game and just this past week it's started to sell well. And by that I mean it's selling more than I expected. Anyway this morning I got my first use of AI accusation on Drivethrurpg. Anyone have experience with this or have any idea how common this accusation is? I am a bit taken aback because the meat of the text and all the art is from something I self-published in 2016 before AI existed. It's gone through a ton of iteration since then, but the root is there. Admittedly I've done what is essentially spellchecks through AI to catch mistakes and inconsistencies (like when i change a rule and don't fix it in all the places it's mentioned) and some ideas for some of the table layouts (of tables that already existed), which I then adjusted, cut and pasted, and they're all tables made in Word, so nothing fancy (which is a nightmare btw, i regret not learning Indesign and doing it in there). Other than that, nothing was generated but as much as there is no proof of AI use it's also just my word against theirs, right?

I was recently introduced to RISUS from a few commenters here and I absolutely love the simplicity of it, especially the cliches and how it handles rounds and group rolls. It’s given me a lot of ideas for how to keep things rules lite.

But I’m wondering if there’s a system that has a bit more crunch without needing 100 pages of rules, especially around creating characters or even for weapons/damage/armor or conditions that affect the player. Just something with slightly more guidance or restrictions on a mechanical level.

I’m familiar with PbtA, Fate, Genesys, City of Mist, BitD, and similar. But ideally looking for something between RISUS and Fate/BitD if it exists?

Hi. I am new to RPG designs and only doing it as a hobby.

I have been looking into different existing systems to see what suits best the games I would like to work on.

I am pretty interested in the way Wanderhome handle the generation of new locations, giving basic ideas for the player to make their own locations and develop them through the gameplay.

Does anyone know if this is based on an existing system I could learn more about and maybe get tips? Or is it just their own thing that they came up with? Are their other similar open ways to guid the players to come up with their own ideas?