So you may be wondering what is going on with these vaguely fantasy short stories is. Well I have been working on a role playing game of my own for some time now. I was working up some short in game fiction to give some of the feel. It is a combination of the fantasy genre with elements of biotechnology. I am hoping these elements to come out more in the stories as I proceed.
The system I am working on tries to take the ambiguity out of multiple success systems. I have always found games like those from white wolf as vague when it came down how two or three successes differed.
I also want to move away from auto failure. I saw a comic where a player stacked up a huge number of bonuses only to fail when rolling a one. It got me thinking how the random nature of games can destroy players when there is no need for it. In reality any time the players role they are screwed. If you botch an unimportant fight you often derail a game, and if you win well who cares. Its only when you are doing something important that it valuably affects the game by adding drama.
I really have been liking the Hero wars system of characters just having a success in certain skills, I think this solves problems. But when you dig into that system it is very much about vague character descriptions being applied to the situation at hand to give some even more vague bonus. Here I am back to what I disliked with white wolf. I am trying to figure out a system where maybe players can spend their extra successes on concrete effects sort of like Earthdawn's armor defeating hits. Give them some crunch and fiddly bits so they can tell me how their results differ on two and three success roles.
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