Game Design - RollPlay: Court of Swords ~ MicroRPG (Session One)
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
- A game is best when its mechanisms serve the narrative the designer intends. I'm not entirely satisfied with telling stories just using 5e D&D so I'm hacking together something new.
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Adam, this is great stuff. A transition from hacking to standalone. Cool.
I make the same stop at the pole part.
Great show Adam!
This was so fun and useful. Thanx Adam
I am stealing those Wellness statements, with slight alteration, I dig it.
Man I really thought that adam's shadow was cast behind him for a while, then i realised he has edited a opaque copy of himself behind him lol
Now I miss Steven again. Sigh.
For stat gen, four different arrays with equal sums. Players choose how their fated array is assigned. Characters are fated to have extreme strengths and weaknesses or a balanced spread...and you arrived at the same conclusion as I type this.
:-D
nvader6 had that happen a bunch of time during this vod. Had an idea, typed it, sent it. Deleted it, bcs by that time it wasn't needed anymore. :D
While watching: To choose stat block, draw min. 3. If there's a draw, keep drawing until there isn't. If you ever have 3 "face cards" (?) you choose void.
I'm not sure if you've heard of a system called Castle Falkenstein, but that uses playing cards instead of dice to determine rolls. A system similar to that could work well for the tarot too :)
I'm only 10 minutes in, but it seems like you want something akin to corruption. The sanity stat in the optional 5e D&D rule is a good base for what something could be
Nah. Adam will find a flaw with that and want to make his own thing, kind of his bread and butter. Always hacking.
Adam, what do you think about making the lowest number you draw from the tarot determine your attunement? In this case you don't have to explicitly write that you ignore the major arcana if you only draw one or two of them, and you can spin the void case as "if the lowest number you draw is a major arcana, your attunement is void". I don't know if it makes sense in the game, but it seems a bit more elegant this way.
Getting hung up on nomenclature here, but vagabonds have friends. Which of course is a positive term; perhaps "unsavoury friends", "friends in all the wrong places", something like that?
I was watching this and I wondered on your choice of core mechanic. The 6 or less fail and 7-9 partial success works in games like apocalypse world and sprawl; where you want to engineer a feeling of futility and quick character burn out. The reason being that the balance of the rolls will tend to create some type of friction or character stink that grows over time. If you want your game to have a death spiral for the characters that will lead them to need to retire or replace their characters frequently, then it will be fine. If you want the characters to have more growth and attachment then you should consider changing the odds to reduce total failure and success with consequence.
+David Rowe that is exactly why I chose it!
I've never liked that system. It's interesting from a design point of view but overall it feels too abstract and artificial for me. More than that, it really homogenises every action. You may as well say "I attempt to succeed" when triggering a move. Obviously you won't _say_ that if you're playing in good faith but it really feels like that's what you're doing. It's more the kind of system I'd enjoy for downtime rolls than moment-to-moment gameplay. In fact, it more or less eliminates moment-to-moment gameplay.
So three MA in a row is about 2% of instances of three random tarot without replacement. The rest should be a roughly even split. Don't know if that's what you're looking for but there you go.
major arcana for void
It's a shame you guys didn't start CoS as a hack of some better suited game, especially considering Hack Attack ended up being a thing and "play a better suited game" was also one of the solutions... x)
+ZaxProxy this is maybe less “play a better game” and more “design a game that can tell a broader range of stories” I really love CoS and 5e is working for it, but there is always work to be done and expanding to do!
Is an explanation of the elemental alignment system available anywhere?
They definately have briefly seen a Zawaz Wazaz, which i think was a firbolg
+Sstargamer close! He was an earth genasi!
How can I acess this document? :P
Adam just wants to make SWN in DND just say it
I really don’t.
While I dig the theme of being tied in fate, I never want to play a system in which I can't decide my stats or attunement or hair colour or birth sign or stuff. It always turns me off. I want to create a storied character, and sometimes an attunement doesn't fit a specific story. Ofc you can write around the rolls / draws. But maybe I don't want to play a fire +3 body, hence warrior, but a mage. Rolls limit decisions. And that fits nicely to the deterministic theme, but definitely not my playtsyle. :D
I'm a designer and writer of games by trade, typically of the fantasy-novel (and soem sci-fi) variety. I play and run a lot of different tabletops as well, with a preference for systems that utilize the Storyteller system (such as world of darkness, FATE, xWorlds, etc)
There is a lot to learn about how best to build a game or world, and about 90% of my inspiration-and knowledge-comes from cribbing off of tabletops and books over the years (the rest is probably whisky). In particular, paying attention to how the system supports your ability to push a narrative...and being at least roughly sure it's the correct narrative you're pushing.
Hearing you break down the construction of an RPG into its base components is kind of eye-opening from the outside, because I usually begin the creation of a story/game by asking and answering these questions:
What is the world, what's going on in it, and who are the characters you give a shit about?
How do you interact with this world and its characters?
In what way is success rewarded, and how is failure punished in a way that still feels engaging?
From there the rest is just make a book and cram it full of smut, which sounds far less impressive.
Adam should've never DMed DnD. I think he's a great GM and did a great job of it, but he obviously didn't want to, and he should've taken his own advice and played a game that did what he wanted it to do.
Im getting so many Avatar the last Airbender vibes.... My favorite animated story ever....