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/DrColossusOfRhodes]

I've been recently kind of obsessed with the Traits system in Pendragon.  If you don't know it, it's a set of these knightly virtues that are on a sliding scale with their opposite, so as one goes up, the other goes down simultaneously.  Because it's a game about Arthurian knights, these are things like Chaste/Lustful or Forgiving/Cruel (I might be misnaming these slightly, but you get the idea).

When you encounter a choice that plays on these Traits, you have to roll against the one you want your character to do.  So you want your knight to be forgiving, so you have to succeed on a roll for your forgiving trait, or the knight behaves cruelly.  

I'm fascinated by the idea, because I love the way it digs into the struggle between ones desire to make the world a better place, and their own nature.  

I had been thinking about some way to implement a similar system in my game for weeks, when I realized that it didn't fit, and then a whole other game suddenly spilled out into my brain.  A game about spies, who live in a world of betrayal and lies, a world in which the needs of the mission will push them towards doing things they don't want to do.

So I put in several sliders between different values (spy appropriate ones), more different priorities than good/bad like Pendragon has.  And then I gave the Agents a currency, Control, which both fuels a lot of their cool abilities and also allows them to overcome their own desires for how to behave and to do the thing they think they need to do.  

The more they fail the roll on the slider, the more Control they have to spend in order to overcome their inclination.  And doing so permanently moves the slider a bit in the direction they chose to go, so repeatedly making certain choices mechanically changes the character over time.  

[u/Hightower_March → u/DrColossusOfRhodes]

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/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/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/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/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/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.