There are lots of ways to make a stunt system. The standard of course is the "no frills" approach, where it is up tot the player to decide that they want to use a stunt and up to the player to propose what their stunt should be, and up to Mister Cavern to decide what action checks need to be made and what bonuses accrue if it is successful. The advantage of this system is that I just described the entire flow chart of how it works in a game system that I know nothing about because I didn't even specify. Literally, you could cut and paste the center of this paragraph into a game you were writing and you would have a functional stunt system for it regardless of what that system was.sigma999 wrote:So. How would you make a stunt system, then?
Of course, the no frills has problems. Many players are too shy to use it at all. Other players are so pushy that they just sort of inherently abuse it. Mister Cavern is being put on the spot to make up difficulties and bonuses off the top of his head, so you're quite likely to run into unbalancing maneuvers or clear unfairnesses, where the mechanical representation of, or example: throwing a table cloth on someone simply ends up so good that you'd be crazy to not fight Matador style, and the result is that either the players spend the rest of the campaign listening to Flamenco or Mister Cavern does a blatant 180 and refuses to let one player do something he allowed another player to do earlier in the campaign.
So it's not surprising that people would want something more formalized. And usually this involves getting yourself a list of stunt effects that you can do with costs listed for them. Costs can be action costs, or stunt point costs, or endurance costs, or action resolution difficulty costs, or attack penalty costs, or whatever. The way to make these more formalized systems not feel shitty is to worry extensively about balance. That is, if one stunt option is better or worse than another in a specific situation (or all situations), it is reasonable to expect that players will at least eventually figure that out and start spamming the same things over and over again. Indeed, even if your options are fairly balanced, players are going to find specific maneuvers that they like better than others. And that's going to get dull.
So for example, Dragon Age gives you a variable number of stunt points to spend each turn. But the stunts are nothing like balanced, meaning that in reality there is a very short list of stunts you actually use, and you just use the most expensive one you can afford each turn. It gets pretty boring fairly fast. In the "pick a condition from a list" systems, there is usually one condition that is better than the others, and players use that one to the exclusion of others. By making stunt potentialities more balanced, you would get players to use more of them, which in turn would cause each one to come up less and feel more special when it did.
-Username17
