Tagged design

I've been recently working lightly on a FATE-based TTRPG that incorporates the general meta-structure of a Persona game, while also homebrewing in some other elements from other RPGs that I really like. You can find it here if you're interested, but it's in a very early stage - I'm more interested in talking through my decisions so far and what motivates it.

Why FATE?

FATE is a TTRPG system that revolves entirely around rolls of 4 Fudge Dice (Marked with 2 each +, -, and blank sides) that give a possible roll between -4 and +4. It's a system heavy on collaborative storytelling and the materials strongly encourage the Director (the GM analogue) to skip the numbers where they're not interesting. Combat is built around Zones the player characters can move within freely, rather than any kind of positional grid system.

I've been playing TTRPGs on and off for 15 years now, and I've tried a fair few systems. They all had their advantages, but FATE is a system that clicked for me day one. The binomially distributed diceroll results fit with my vision of "attempting an action", so much so that when I was in university and lacking dedicated fudge dice, I did my first ever self-motivated coding project making a dice-roller.

This is a bit weird because I'm a massive numbers nerd, and I love tactical RPG videogames, and I hate doing the theatre-kid style of TTRPG roleplay. But FATE is designed to be extremely adaptable. If you have an idea for a game/setting/story, you could get it implemented in FATE without much friction. It has a combat system that actively discourages "I hit it with my axe"-style play, and gives support (and even entirely non-combat) characters a powerful way to impact combat through Aspects.

The other advantage is that it's very easy to onboard new players. Lend them some fudge dice (or use D6 with caveats, or an online roller), give them a simple skill pyramid, some Aspects and Stunts, and walk them through the first couple of scenes and they very quickly start to get the idea - I can tell the Director what I want to do and if I've thought of it, it's probably doable. The real key is to get them invested in their character, and the character-creation framework is genuinely the most effective I've ever used at getting newbies excited for a game.

Why Clocks?

So my outline uses Clocks a lot. This is a system I first saw in Blades In The Dark (it may predate that game, but BitD is built around Clocks in a big way) and it completely revolutionised how I think about time in TTRPGs.

Essentially a Clock is just a set number of blocks of time that indicate how long something will take, or progress to a goal, or heightening drama. They pretty much always move forward, and they provide an extremely "fair" tool for moving things along when players inevitably get bogged down in some minutiae.

A heist might have a Clock to track an incoming police car, or an Alertness Clock to show how close security is to figuring out something's up. A clock could be ticking along in the background that causes extra trouble if the players aren't past a certain point by segment 6 of 8.

In BitD Clocks do a lot of heavy lifting, but in my game I'm intending to use them primarily as a means of corralling my players without taking all the blame for it. In most games, I am absolutely the player who storms through a security door when my party argues with the guard for 20 minutes without making progress.

Why Persona?

I played Persona 3 Reload this year.

Oh, you need more? Fine.

When you play any game for 80 hours straight and enjoy it start to finish, you start to think why other games aren't more like it. It's a natural instinct. So I started to think about what a social link system would add to a TTRPG, and I kept thinking of positives:

• It gives the opportunity to really flesh out the supporting cast of NPCs.
• It could open the sphere of interest of the players beyond their own circumstances.
• It lets the GM hand out rewards that aren't just level ups or magical artefacts.

This was good enough for me to talk about it with my partner, who immediately said "I saw someone write a thread about exactly that, would you like a link?" And I did.

"The Once And Maybe Queen" by tambuli is a creative/collaborative writing project on SpaceBattles that includes a really cool write up of a completely different project, but with a similar design goal - reconciling Social Links with FATE. It has a very different scope than the relatively breezy small-group TTRPG I have in mind, but it's always very fun to see someone else's answer to the same question, and you can see from my outline that I really liked their answers. I've trimmed it down and reworked it to my entirely different setting, but the bones are very much tambuli's work.

Once I saw this I knew the idea had legs, wrote my outline, then... left it sitting for 3 months. Now we're here!

What Next?

I've converted my Google Doc outline to Markdown and written this post, so I should probably think about finishing it and getting a campaign rolling. There are a few pieces that need nailed down before I can do a Session 0:

• The skill list is currently the basic FATE skills, and they don't really match the fairly silly game I'm making about economic disenfranchisement.
• I don't have much character in the Social Link levels - this might be sufficient, but every time I see "Confidant 4" I'm certain I could do better.
• I have this whole concept of players "Claiming" Social Links - I need to flesh that out a bit.
• I have only the barest idea about the actual practical structure of the Corporate Tartarus.

This all feels fairly achievable.

I'm so glad random encounters are mostly dead. I know this is actually an extremely lukewarm take (misled you with the title, to be honest I feel terrible about it) but it bears reiterating how nice it is to be at least partially responsible for the decision to get into a fight in these games.

I'm sure SMT3 is very good, but trying to play it immediately after SMTV was utterly unbearable. I've been playing Tales of Arise and it also takes the "dodgeable overworld entities" approach and it's just so fucking nice. To be able to sprint through areas. I've already been through. Without losing my train of thought.

I'm not enough of an aficionado on JRPGs to know how much the ratio of random/non-random encounters in them has changed over the years, but it feels very much like a throwback stylistic choice for a modern game to do it, rather than a pure genre expectation like it was 20 years ago.

Sure, exceptions have always existed - been a hot minute but I'm pretty sure Chrono Trigger has non-random encounters - but I can't describe how unpleasant I find walking down an empty corridor and having 3 battles that all trigger with some loud noise and a movie-maker transition. It's a trope worth killing imo.

Sometimes I'm just grateful for the arrow of time, yknow?

I like:

• Poker
• Roguelikes
• Number-go-up

But I took one look at the gameplay loop and knew it wasn't for me. Not sure if it's the reset-heavy nature of the scaling, or the lack of look-ahead info, or the way it favours plays that feel bad over plays that feel good, or...

Well it's probably all of that, but odd that I could see that without playing it myself and was able to dodge buying it. A rare moment of self-restraint.

Lost momentum hard in ME3, but got back in the mood for it this week.

Incredible the degree to which I'm still mad about the ending, how studiously they fumbled a bag they had already caught.

There's no value relitigating this, you probably had to be there... but damn.

ME4 is going to have to cover a lot of ground to not piss a lot of people off in the first hour.

Razbuten has a lot to say here, and kind of comes to the "idk man there's no perfect answer" conclusion, entirely fair imo. I've never really bought into the "just add difficulty settings to Dark Souls" idea because like, cool, now you have 3 games to balance, that'll be fun to make.

I think it's fine and also good for some games to require more from the player than they initially want to give, and I also think it's fine for players to bounce off of that. "Not everything should be made for everyone" is a bit trite, but if games are on any level an artistic expression it should be acceptable to design them in a way that repels some portion of its potential audience.

What I really want to get into though is the way this always centres around real-time combat mechanics as difficulty - that makes sense, it's the most obvious thing that will stop a player continuing with a game they otherwise enjoy - but there are other barriers to entry that don't get the same kind of attention.

My brother is on his 3rd playthrough of Disco Elysium. I cannot play that game. I know it's a masterpiece, I love the aesthetic, and the writing is frankly delicious. But each of the 4 times I've tried to get into it, I've got an hour in and my brain is melting from all the text. There's just so much writing. And you have to read all of it or you're not really playing Disco Elysium. I'm enjoying what's written, but after a couple thousands words of text-on-screen I have a near-medical need to do something purely mechanical like play Rocket League before I'll even consider going back to read some more, and that could take days to recover.

This isn't a dyslexia thing, it's maybe something of an attention disorder thing, but it is nonetheless a barrier to entry that I could only overcome by playing the game in a way that's either not fun or antithetical to the design.

I wouldn't change a thing about Disco Elysium.

I'm glad you all enjoy it.

Responding to nex3's Wildfrost review on backloggd

That trinity of deckbuilder roguelikes is the three games that I've tried, enjoyed, and recommended to my partner with great success. Other games have been interesting to her, but those three have all racked up dozens or hundreds of hours for both of us. I really love these games.

I played Wildfrost a few months ago, so it's possible there were some changes, but while it's easily a top 3 of the genre, it sits in third for me because it's much harder to read than the other two. I posted about this on the other site when playing:

"Man I really enjoy Wildfrost but it really needs that Monster Train "you're gonna fucking die if you end your turn like this" UI element.

A game with this many interactions really needs to help the player out imo"

I found myself leaning heavily towards simple non-chaotic strategies in Wildfrost because of this, and that frankly made the game less fun. Monster Train is a much more complicated game at its core, but the UI gives incredible feedback on what different moves will do, and that really elevates it imo.

I'll be taking another look at it to see if this has improved, but if losing hour-long run to a third-iteration interaction you didn't see coming sounds like a bad time, I'd recommend you play this game pretty safe.

I'm always fascinated by "Guy who plays [GENRE] games for a living reviews [GENRE] game" stuff, because it offers an interesting window into why people might choose to do that for a living, but also why most people don't.

A few months ago when Age of Wonders 4 launched this happened - I follow a lot of strategy game youtubers so I saw a lot of talk about it, but when I came to play it myself I found I just don't have the depth of experience in the genre to really access what they were talking about as a new pinnacle. It's very good, but I'm just not getting why it's amazing - I need to sink a few thousand more hours into strategy games before I can really appreciate the multitude of choices without massive decision fatigue.

Lies of P looks like it might be a similar sort of deal. IronPineapple is concerned that the wider gaming press may be engaging with it poorly, giving it praise while still approaching it as just another soulslike a la Mortal Shell, and attempting to squeeze it into the boxes they already understand - playing it like Sekiro and getting frustrated with parry timing, or like Bloodborne and getting frustrated at how punishing health-loss is. He makes the case that it's a synthesis of the two that requires the player to really engage with all the game's mechanics and consider options at all times and, well...

That's a really "Guy who plays [GENRE] games for a living" kind of thing to praise.

But also, maybe major outlets should recognise this limitation when reviewing niche genre pieces like Lies of P? Elden Ring might have sold 10s of millions of copies, but it's wildly accessible compared to the rest of the Soulslike genre, and a big evolution in something From has been doing well since Dark Souls - it lets you fuck around. Elden Ring is happy for you to become an expert on one stupid game mechanic and just ride that mechanic through to the ending, just having fun in the various glass-filled sandboxes they lay out for you. Sure, it's hard, and learning attack patterns helps, but you can also just go grab one of the dozens of massively OP weapons and adjust your build to fit if you want to cruise for a bit. Or call in some help. Or spam jars, or aromatics, or...

Anyway Lies of P isn't that game. This is the best justification for dropping the Soulslike genre tag I've seen to date, because it's mechanically similar, but the design is totally different. It doesn't want you to perfect the one mechanic it's built around - it wants you to learn every one of the dozen mechanics they put into it, and they've designed the boss encounters to keep exploiting any potential weaknesses you might have in that knowledge. It's 80% parry 20% dodge/roll, and you need to fucking study if you want to pass that test. You will need to be aggressive to recover health, you will need to understand how blocking aids health recovery, you will need to learn charge attack timing, boss attack windows, item exploitation...

The whole Soulslike genre is built on ideas like this, and it's just not very like Dark Souls. If you love From games there's just no guarantee this is going to appeal, because you probably cheese your way through them, and these genre games are made for the freaks who don't. A normal person who sunk a hundred hours into DS3 isn't going to suddenly click into a non-From Soulslike game like they did Elden Ring.

I think reviewing them in the same breath is just the wrong approach - the audience just isn't the same. Lies of P outwardly appeals to people who loved Elden Ring and just assumed a high-quality Soulslike would be a similar experience, and while the coverage is probably better than they could have expected if they hadn't leaned on that reference, it's not going to do wonders for their review metrics.

From what I can tell Lies of P is really good, but only if you're that particular kind of freak.

I've been happy to give Starfield a fair shake so far - it's a Bethesda game, and people expecting some kind of Red Dead Redemption Man's Sky ultra-game were deluding themselves into disappointment.

I had clear expectations - some chunky combat, interesting systems, make-your-own-fun, and mostly terrible companions. And it delivered on that nicely in the first 20 or so hours.

But since then it's been a bunch of roadblocks. Mostly mechanical stuff and systems nonsense that I've been able to trudge through and find my own fun (nailed the third tenet there, Todd!)

But I just did a mission that actually made me put down the controller, lean back in my seat, and sigh "dude this game suuuuuuucks"

So the top-level summary here (this is how I make you go back and read that screed, because there's just no way this is true, right?):

1. They set up and demonstrate the idea of multiple paths through.
2. They set up multiple avenues of attack beyond simple brute force.
3. None of those options work.
4. You have to fight.
5. The pacifist solution is to shoot the boss in the face without speaking to him.

dude this game suuuuuuucks

I had a feeling after watching a youtuber play it that I wouldnt like it much, and was pretty sure of the reasons why - I've played a lot of different idle games over the years, and the was VS manages progression is just pure idle game mobile design.

That doesn't make it bad by my standards, it's just kind of an uninteresting puzzle to me these days. That is, there's basically no puzzle, the numbers will be going up, and we have a schedule to keep to.

This relates to my "managed progression in roguelites" thing but honestly is so much more distilled - there's really not much game outside the progression here.

I get the appeal of that, but I'm worn out on it.