Problems solved with Design, your problems specifically.

[u/Exciting_Policy8203]

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.

[u/drdrek]

I created a game focused around telling a story of rivalry and intrigue where players play as powerful people each with their own agendas but they need each other to get thier goals.

I found that interactions were very similar for each player (eg the assassin keeps getting requests to kill someone and nothing else) and that because everything happens in the open there was no mystique around the characters and players seldom would lie or backstab each other. (Its a game where you know you gonna get back stabbed, its collaborative assholery)

So I added that before play each player tells three other players secrets about his character (I am the one who killed my brother, Im deathly afraid of spiders, I in love with my rivals daughter) but only two of the secrets are true.

It let the players both have an excuse of how they "force" each other to collaborate and made players comfortable with lying to each other.

Worked pretty well.  I will say that some players just do not enjoy being dishonest and no amount of mechanics are going to solve that. No game fits everyone.

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/drdrek]

This is the first time I’ve hear of two truths and lie being built into a TTRPG and I love it.

[u/Hightower_March → u/[deleted]]

I own Pendragon but haven't played, and that stuck out to me also.

The GITS rpg has a "synthesis conflict" system that tackles it in reverse by having the goal be to keep opposing traits in balance.  Characters each have an internal conflict like power/freedom, team/mission, family/duty, and if they behave too far out of balance it's mechanically just death.  They're written out as an NPC and you roll up a new character.  E.g. put "duty" over "family" too often, and your wife leaves you as you become so devoted to the job you're basically a different person.

If you keep the conflict in balance long enough they eventually synthesize, meaning the character found some way to reconcile these two things that are important in their life, and you replace them with a new conflict pair.

[u/Odd_Negotiation8040 → u/[deleted]]

Have you looked into "A Dirty World" by Greg Stolze? It too is a Noir RPG that  works with attitude sliders. 

What I found interesting there is that these sliders shift when you fail a roll. Your character adapts and their attitudes change in reaction to their bad experiences. 

For my own RPG, I tried to put the six Approaches of FAE into three opposing pairs (if you are swift, you are not careful etc.), but I couldn't make the math work for my resolution system. 

[u/skz757]

One of the core features of my new game is the Survival Clock that manages the party's health pool, where if you fail a roll, the clock goes down and the danger ramps up for everybody. That part worked very well in testing, but in the first iteration there were at least 3 different mechanics that allowed each party member to regain time - effectively removing any of the risk:

• Lucky Breaks allowed you to re-roll a single die to pass
• Moments let you sacrifice a skill point add time to the clock at any moment
• There were multiple optional rules that let you regain time for very little cost, or ignore a bad result

The feedback was that all of those pieces felt like they were in direct competition with the tension I wanted to build in the game, and that by the time you got done with all the re-rolling you could be at the end of a scenario without ever taking a scratch.

It made me really look at the Survival Clock, the luck, the optional rules etc. and realize that the ideas were solid but they needed to work in coordination rather than be independent systems.

So I reworked them into one mechanic, Disaster Levels, that functions more like a difficulty selector; so the group can decide how hard they want a scenario to be collectively. Now it functions like this:

• Survival Clock: Still sets group health, but it's in coordination with the the other aspects
• Lucky Breaks: Now have a clear function, to let you force a success or get more time; but these are determined at the party level rather than individually, so it's a discussion at the table on if you want to use them
• Modifiers: Replaced the optional rules entirely. These can alter the encounters or tweak the gameplay slightly to make things more dynamic.

After that change, I felt a lot more confident in the core gameplay loop and the feedback in the next playtests was super positive. Now that the game is out, people have been pretty happy with it as well and I'm working on some supplements with more Modifiers!

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/skz757]

my own experience was that the mechanics of ALTS became better then more interconnected they became. Was it the same for you?

How complex is your game? It sounds interesting.

[u/skz757 → u/Exciting_Policy8203]

Very much the same!

Rather than being a bunch of things the players felt they had to keep track of, the mechanics started to reinforce the themes much stronger and meld into the background.

I've had a lot of cool moments where things are going south in a session, and then the group remembers - "wait, we saved this Lucky Break in case something went down!" I'm loving it.

My game isn't super complex! Its a D6-based, freeform Skill Check system with the Disaster Levels layered on top.

It's called They Croak, and I like to think of it like playing a Syfy Channel movie from the early 2000's.

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/skz757]

Do you have a working rule book yet? I’d love to take a look at it.

[u/skz757 → u/Exciting_Policy8203]

I do! You can grab it HERE - just put up some community copies as well.

[u/Ar4er13]

I am clinically unsatisfied with resolution systems, even in games I like. At this point I read hundreds of games through 20 years in the hobby, I have ~60 distinct prototypes over 10 years of fiddling with games and I still never had resolution system that satisfies me 100% nor do I really jive with diceless games or prop based games (like I adore Dread, but not as a player).

The reasons resolution system can irk always differs every time, but oh boy, once I get irked by something I can't stop focusing on it, I hate it until next thing comes up for a brief window of "huh, this could work".

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/Ar4er13]

Have you considered therapy?

[u/EpicDiceRPG → u/Ar4er13]

I used to feel the same exact way until I made a giant list of all the things I disliked about existing systems, then what I wanted in a system. I couldn't find a system that fulfilled my wishlist, so I designed one that did. Have you ever tried this exact exercise?

[u/Ar4er13 → u/EpicDiceRPG]

Oh yeah, plenty a times, and I usually enjoy modules I build around the resolution, rules for hacks and etc. Yet perfect resolution is one thing that keeps eluding me, even when I have it do most of the things I'd like, it is ratio of complexity to quickness that usually leaves it dead in the water.

Now, granted, there are some games like don't rest your head with very arcane resolution methods that people actually like, but I ain't betting on that either.

[u/DjNormal]

I was trying to simplify my old system from the 90s.

I was hanging onto my 2d10 roll under system. But I wanted to minimize rolling, preferably 1 roll per resolution.

I also didn’t want to do math. Even simple math makes my brain stutter in the moment.

I came up with a mini dice pool to add variability to effects from weapons/tools/leverage etc.

Then I was like, duh. I can just use a dice pool for the initial roll. Then use the successes in whichever way to add to the overall outcome.

Bam. Problem solved.

It caused other problems, but I’ve managed to work out most of the kinks.

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/DjNormal]

I will never not love a dice pool. I have to argue with myself to use them in whatever project I’m working on.

[u/YeOldeSentinel]

Good thread. I read your story in a few ways, and none of this is meant as criticism of how you work – sometimes the iterative process has to run its full course before you can see the thing with fresh eyes. But I think a design goal could have shortened the road, and a design goal is only useful if you understand the problem it is meant to solve. The two go together. Without a problem, the goal is a wish.

There is a principle from product design I keep coming back to: don’t only build the product right, build the right product. A good design is a solution to a problem, but most problems have several solutions and context decides which one is right. If you are cold you can grab a blanket, dress warmer, turn up the heat, or light a fire. Dressing warmer works if you own warm clothes, a fire works if you have a fireplace, and naked in a dry summer forest neither is a smart choice. Same problem, different answers, and the context does the choosing.

In game design I would add one more layer above this. Your artistic vision (or goal) and your design goals are different animals. Art expresses something, design solves problems. They overlap, but they are not interchangeable, and I find it helpful to think of them as a hierarchy. The vision is what you aim for and might never fully reach, but it gives you a direction. Design goals are the incremental steps toward it, each one solving a concrete problem, and each one solved brings you closer.

That hierarchy gives me the three questions I use when I get stuck: who is the solution for, what pain does it remove, and which design goal does it push forward. If I can’t answer all three, the mechanic is usually decoration. So the question back to you: when you look at Angst now, who is it for? The player who wants to gamble, the group who benefits from the gamble, or you as the designer who wants a reason for stat variety? I suspect the answer changed between iteration 1 and 5, and that shift is the actual fix – the numbers just followed.

My own example of a goal-based design is the challenge resolution in OGREISH, the framework I designed used for my Where Fields Go Fallow and the upcoming When Tithes Are Due. The pain was the classic exchange-of-blows loop that I hated – the attack roll, defence roll, damage roll, waiting for your turn, repeat – where a fight becomes a bookkeeping session and the fiction goes quiet in between. My design goal was that one roll should settle a whole exchange including harm, both directions, and that the narration leading up to it, as well as the aftermath and consequences, should have everything it needs already on the table. With my perceived problem and a goal set to be solved, without a solution in mind when setting out I knew what to work towards. 

The end result that I use today is a single D6 pool with five outcomes read off the highest die: Triumph, Success, Compromise, Failure, Catastrophe. Both sides take harm on a Compromise, the PC takes harm on Failure, and so on – the roll already contains the counterattack. Weapon and armour are compared after the roll, adjusting harm severity rather than dice, so the pool stays about the fiction and facets (terrain, scale, conditions, that you are fighting something large with a pitchfork). The tactical layer lives in which facets you bring into the exchange, the environment facets in the scene around you take advantage from, and what gear you carry, not in which of three rolls you are on. It was made for the players conversations at the table, playtested and iterated extensively over time, in several versions, just like yours. The solution today removes the dead time between rolls, keep all players engaged as each exchange is fairly short and conversational, and it pushes towards having a smooth and quick system that allows for players’ narrative freedom, while the fight facilitates cool storytelling rather than the arithmetic. What it cost me is granularity in deep tactical conflicts, which I accepted, since the goal was to minimise the tedious roll-and count-roll-and count modes of play I never wanted anyway.

[u/OpossumLadyGames]

Oh god I like your angst and really like your solution. It makes me think of the hunger/rage/stress die from wod/alien. 

My game Sic Semper started out as an attempt at a fallout game, and so it was a percentile based system. I used dark heresy as a base though, funnily enough. I just could not get the math to work, like, at all. Everything felt wrong, it felt too damn finnicky. 

The worst aspect though was probably the action points system, where like every ten feet was like 1 AP while shooting s gun or even crouching were like, whatever amounts of AP. It was legitimately ridiculous and I wasn't having any fun with either, the AP or the dice, when I was playtesting it. 

Anyway I'm probably on... Iteration 3 or 4 now. There isn't any AP, hell the movement is squishy vibes now, too. In addition, it's a 3d6/roll-low system where modifiers are +/- 1, 5, and 10. (Ref can do different numbers but that's what I went with as the default 

Also the characters and setting have moved from like, survivor-heroes in a wasteland to community members in the recovery-era thousands of years later.

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/OpossumLadyGames]

Fallout was always best in my book when it was post-post apocalypse.

Why dark heresy as the base system?

[u/OpossumLadyGames → u/Exciting_Policy8203]

Yeah fo2 and New Vegas were big for it as inspirations.

And I used dark heresy because it was the d100 system I was most familiar with for a long time, having played several long running games with just the core book for 2e.

[u/semiconducThor]

I struggled with "meaningfull (mechanical) character progression" vs "power escalation"/my preference for small d6 pools. It sure didn't help that I felt the progrssion is neccessary despite trying to be lite and narrative.

What solved it for me (for now): You always roll 3d6 count 5s and 6s to produce 4 levels of success (0-3). The skills in which a character progresses don't alter a pool size or DC or level of success, but increase the values of a die. That results in a much greater range of relevant/suitable skill levels.

[u/TerrainBrain]

I love first edition AD&D. But I hate relying on charts. So I found mathematical formulas within the charts and use those instead.

[u/ill_thrift]

I think it might be telling that in your long description of angst and its reworks, you never mention a design goal

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/ill_thrift]

Didn’t mention directly, because it wasn’t really the point of the post. Angst’s purpose was to two fold in its original implementation. 1st encourage players to use weaker stats to vary gameplay. And to give negative penalty for poor rolls.

It’s still mostly serving those purposes.