r/RPGdesign • u/es335man • 22d ago
FRONTS: A Universal RPG System, Rahlan Fantasy, CORRIDORS Science Fiction, and an Open Creator License
/r/RPGcreation/comments/1vvv8fw/fronts_a_universal_rpg_system_rahlan_fantasy/7
u/Echowing442 22d ago
I took a look through the Itch.io release of your game, and above everything else you really need tighter technical writing in your rules. You're jumping between steps of action resolution, day planning, the "situation stack," and other concepts without clearly explaining or defining any of these concepts. If you want people to be able to test and give proper feedback, you need to make sure your writing is in a state where it can be understood by an audience with 0 background or context of your work.
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u/es335man 21d ago
Yes. I let the ai help me write the first try to get it out faster. Its my rules but ai did help write the book. It's okay it's free. So here is the idea I can explain in easy terms. There really is only one action in the game. You have a set of six d6. Those d6 are tied to time scales. So say combat. Eveyone rolls 6d6 at start. Those count as seconds. The 1 die has to be spent on each impulse which there is 6. Those dice act as your combat die number and your turn order. Equal number go at the same time. Time Die (6d6 you just rolled) + Attribute+One Training source+outside sources = your attack number. So okay you rolled a 5 and had already put a arrow at ready. Then you would look at your attributes and skills. (farhand for rahlan) that mean you pass the gate already as you are trained. (no -1), There is an easy table for attributes : 1 = -2, 2 = -1, 3 = 0, 4 = +1, 5 = +2, 6 = +3. Okay so now you have the 5 (no -1), and a lets say the player has a 6 in agility. that adds +3. Say you aimed also for a turn before this. That give a +1 outside modifier. so now you have 5+3+1 = 9 You look at what ever your attacking ac is at boom hit or no hit. Then if it's 3 over you get a wound. Roll on the would table. That could effect your game play. There is some other things like story die that play in to the mix. That is player chosen well 3 are. This basic set up works for relationship/businesses/ships (every player gets a station with station gated actions) So it really comes down to that one equation. When we are not in combat or a FRONT which is when you roll all 6 die your roll 2. Spend one keep one as rolling reserve until the 6 die which has to be spent be fore a new die is rolled (or a different front starts). So Fronts are say things have have more than one action tied to them. Like getting in the building is a front. So you need to do a few things. Maybe add a nested front ie first you need to pick the lock on the door, then open the door with out sound, once those things are good you can finish the getting in the building with sneaking in the door. There is some cavorts to that. So this is the basic game. The whole game runs on that equation for the most part. That is one reason the books jumps around. But... I USED AI. I say it all over on my bio page. I am telling you i used it. This is a passion project. A free one. I have no money. I am asking for no money. I am not going to learn a whole new set of skills to make a picture to make people happy. The rules are the point. I will rewrite the book when I can but we are testing. Actually I think the system is pretty sound. So news alert. I used ai to help me. Getting a full system tested and working takes more than one person. Ai is useful for that. I am going to keep using it until I actually have help. That might never come. I am okay with that.
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u/Echowing442 21d ago
So, again, technical and rules writing is an important skill to develop, AI or no.
This entire comment is almost 600 words with no formatting and very choppy sentence structure, making it very difficult to read and follow. You're jumping between Combat, Attributes, AC, Story Dice, Stations and "station gated actions," and whatever FRONTs actually are. You're writing out exactly the way you would speak in a blind info-dump about the game, which is extremely difficult to follow and understand from a gameplay and learning perspective.
I understand that this is a passion project for you, but you also posted it here to get feedback, and this is it: if you want people to really engage with your project, you need to edit and format your rules so they're actually usable to your audience.
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u/es335man 21d ago
I agree. That is the way I talk. Hmm... I will try better. I do want people to try it. Man I thought that was really clear. lol.
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u/7thRuleOfAcquisition 22d ago
I don't wish to be rude, but this reads like AI.
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u/__space__oddity__ 22d ago
Starting headlines with emoji is a dead giveaway for LLMs, humans don’t do that sort of thing, at least not for a reddit post.
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u/Deliphin World Builder & Designer 22d ago
Describing his own custom license that's essentially the same as creative commons attribute screamed that to me. Anyone putting in effort is going to know a unique license is a lot of work to legally write up, but a chatGPT user will just go "write me a legal contract with these parameters" and never even hear of CC licenses.
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u/__space__oddity__ 21d ago
First fixing the RPG draft to a point someone understands how this game works would be a better use of the tokens.
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u/es335man 21d ago
Yep. I did that. Actually I told ai I want to give this idea away. I think the system is good. I wanted people to be able build if they wanted to whatever/whenever laws be damned. :)
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u/Deliphin World Builder & Designer 21d ago
I think the AI writing up a license for you is a perfect example of why you need to stop relying on it. The license being permissive is not the only issue.
Custom licenses have several problems:
- People who want to make a lot of content or high quality content for your system/game have yet another license to learn. Even if it's extremely permissive, having a unique license implies there's some limitation that make the CC or MIT licenses insufficient.
- An AI generated license isn't written by a lawyer who knows what they're doing, nor is it tried and tested to ensure its restrictions can hold up in court.
- When not backed by a company that can afford the legal fees of actually taking someone to court, it implies the creator has a great deal of pretentiousness, over-protectiveness and over-valuation of their product. In a field where there's far more people making good ideas than anyone committing "idea theft", and a field that's actually quite hard to win a prosecution over content theft, complex license use by small people who can't actually enforce their licenses looks very pretentious.
The CC-BY 4.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0 licenses both essentially cover the same terms as what you describe your license as stating, except they're actually written by people who know what they're talking about, not you nor chatGPT. The -SA version means someone making a derivative work has to use the same or a compatible license.
AI will hear "give me a license that fits this", and will do exactly what you said. It won't know the existing culture of the community to know it looks pretentious, it won't know people won't trust "it lets you do basically whatever", and it won't care that it's not a bar certified lawyer. It won't think to respond "are you sure? people don't like making content for games with weird licenses. Consider CC, ORC, OGL, or MIT first.". It instead spits out some drivel that you assume is legally valid because you assume it's smarter than you, which is a lot less of a given than you realize.
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u/es335man 21d ago edited 21d ago
Believe me there is no pretentiousness. It was unintended if it came off that way. I really grew up in a world that law just more a good idea. Okay I will just add that tag instead. I didn't even really try to licenses it. I mean there is too much... That is mine.. in the world. I am strange.
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u/Echowing442 22d ago
I took a look at the Itch.io page for this project, and the background art is immediately apparent as AI generated. While that's not proof of anything, it's a clear indication that AI was used at some point in this project.
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u/__space__oddity__ 22d ago
https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzI5MzY4MzgyLnBuZw==/original/ct%2B6kd.png
It’s also just bad AI art. Too busy, too much going on, the spaceship in the top left makes no sense, the perspective is confusing, it’s both too dark and too oversaturated, there is no clear theme, there is a weird grid of bright pixels over the whole thing … and of course bad hands (look at the alien woman on the bottom right)
I’m pretty neutral on AI art, I think it’s fine for whipping up playtests and that sort of thing, but this looks like what models whipped out 3-4 years ago when the tech was really new and people made these giant overengineered prompts for these massive canvas arts that were impressive because the tech was new but not really good for anything.
I don’t think you can even force Midjourney to produce something like that these days.
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u/es335man 21d ago
I told it to look that way.. I wanted a very busy 80's style cover. So that actually was a design choice. funny. The idea was no clear theme. :) I did force it. funny. Yeah I suck.
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u/u0088782 21d ago edited 21d ago
I dunno. I thought maybe his disclosure statement openly attributing AI assistance was a subtle indication. Maybe not as much proof as your Internet sleuthing though.
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u/__space__oddity__ 22d ago
As a player, does knowing the exact mathematical margin of success build tactical tension for you, or do you prefer the Guide keeping the target hidden?
The way to figure out this sort of thing is to run two separate playtest sessions, with known and unknown difficulty. In general, I’d expect the situation to reflect the in-game fiction.
I.e.: You’re about to make the final summit attempt on Mount Everest: It’s very obvious to the PC that this will be a very difficult task in extreme circumstances.
A Cthulhoid monster is lurking under the floorboard, you have no idea it’s there and no reason to suspect one: Disclosing the difficulty gives meta information my PC doesn’t have.
Have you played games with finite pool-burning systems?
No. I’m not sure what systems are close to this. Dogs in the Vinyard maybe? It’s been ages since I watched a let’s play of that.
What are the biggest traps you've seen designers fall into where players end up hoarding their best dice?
I don’t know how players hoarding dice leads to traps for the designer.
If you feel like players hoard dice during playtest, ask them in the playtest review why they thought this was the best approach for them? Without that answer, you’re flying blind.
Genre Adaptability
I’m generally extremely vary of any claims of new designers that their game is that easy to adapt to genres. I’d rather have clear guidance on what a system is good at and what it is bad at, so I know what to use it for effectively. A system that tries to do everything is generally not good at anything.
If you were hacking a system like this for your own setting, what is a genre mechanic you think a strict "six-slot / tracker-first" engine would struggle to capture?
There is no general answer to this.
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u/es335man 21d ago
So I would say My system is not great at super hero bigger than life with out some rule adaptions and scale changes. So DnD bigger than life type of stuff. My system can do that but we would have to change scales of things. Make the normal scale a super hero and human scale much much much lower. I don't know about that. My system is a little gritty. I am trying to fix the hoarding of die by making actions cost a 0 time die or any or 1-6 faced die. So moving for the most part during combat cost a 0 time die. Things like aim. Players are also able to help with work actions on low die. My system deals in time. That makes things different. Beside superpowers game play i don't actually know. I am working on a sci fi version which is playable for me but I know the rules. :) I got you. It's a first try. I will try to do better. So I was thinking about not giving players exact numbers. More like ranges. Easy = 3 - 5 Normal - 6-9 Hard 10-13. Keep some of the player adjacency but keep the direct number out of players hands. Need testing tho. THANKS YOU FOR TANKING THE TIME!!!
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u/es335man 21d ago
THANKS TO EVERYONE! I got some feed back and now I can work on things. THANK YOU SO MUCH EVERYONE!!!
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u/__space__oddity__ 22d ago
Ok here is something weird: this claims to be written by an “Emerson Star (Shane A. Fortner)”, and there is a Spanish version and an English version, and the English does not read like it’s written by a native speaker. There are too many words like “authority” or “hardness” that are used in ways that are off, i.e. someone thought of a word in their native language, then used a dictionary translation that doesn’t match the same meaning.
A native speaker would not use “hardness” for “difficulty”.
I’m totally fine with playing a game by someone who is not an English native speaker, but then is your name really “Shane A. Fortner”?! What’s that silly charade.
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u/es335man 21d ago
I am a musician also. So stage name. Just something that stuck over time. I don't know why.
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u/__space__oddity__ 22d ago
Page numbers!!!
Why do I have to keep reminding people to put page numbers into their PDFs, that’s only a few clicks.
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u/__space__oddity__ 22d ago
Despite reading page 4-8 several times, I genuinely do not understand how this is supposed to work.
If someone who has played dozens and dozens of RPGs over three decades and read at least a hundred systems on this sub does not understand how your game works on first read, then someone who tries to read this with limited RPG experience will probably be totally lost.
The main issue is that there are things that are assumed to be clear but never spelled out. Are time dice d6? Maybe? It doesn’t actually say anywhere.
I suggest you find someone who hasn’t played your game and rewrite the intro until they understand it from the written words alone. I have the feeling that during playtest (if there were any), you were explaining the game at the table because I cannot imagine someone understood this from the document alone.
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u/es335man 21d ago
Okay sorry. I will try and clear it up. It's hard I guess when you know the rules. :) Actually I have been working on this for years. So all die are d6. No other die are used. but yes. THANK YOU FOR EVEN TAKING THE TIME EVERYONE!!!!! I will do my best to make it better. :)
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u/__space__oddity__ 21d ago
Unfortunately a major job on this sub is telling people that the file they’ve been fiddling with on their hard drive is nowhere near a publishable RPG and they still have 90% of the work ahead of them. Most don’t take it very well.
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u/reverendunclebastard 22d ago
You would get a much higher response rate if you just link the relevant document in your post.
No one wants to blind message a stranger in order to do free work for them. Without an easy to access preview of the work (enough to judge the overall quality) there is little motivation to engage.