GDF: KFRP

[Username17]

Step 1: Name the PCs

Obviously, the PCs are collectively going to be a "party." This is in no small part because we are unimaginative. But also because that is simply what a band of adventurers in a fantasy world with swords is called.

Step 2: Write up a Six Person Party

• Adlin the Human Wizard
• Dahilah the Hob Hero
• Osa the Gnome Artificer
• Tadoc the Dwarf Paladin
• Weebo the Halfling Rogue
• Yathrinsti the Drow Necromancer.

Adlin is a "Wizard" which means that he is called upon to have various divination powers and shoot fire out of his frickin hands. Of all he characters, it is most important that Adlin be restricted, since he can pretty much do "stuff." But that's being limited to elementalism and divination - other things you can do with magic are either done by different characters or not at all.

Dahilah is a Hero. She fights "because she is the dopest" and has heavy armor and a big mace. That suggests an easy contribution to combat, but her contribution the rest of the time has to be pretty much forced in. Fantasy players are all too willing to accept such a character being a mook-in-a-can. So we're giving her diplomatic, leadership, and perceptive bonuses as well as default "soldiering" and "Carrying heavy objects.

Osa is an Artificer. She makes wind up spiders, hand grenades, medicine and possibly lightning guns. Artificers have usually been at one end or the other of the power pendulum in previous fantasy works - either requiring so much time and special equipment to do anything that they are basically not a PC, or being so ridiculously open in what they can make that the game breaks in half. The key I think is to leave her with a relatively short list of things she can make reliably and to have her bust those gadgets out as reliably a a wizard preparing his spells.

Tadoc is a Paladin. He chops things up with an ax and bathes his allies in a radiant glow that heals and protects them.

Weebo is a Rogue. He sneaks, he fast-talks, he shivs people in the kidneys. He can pick a lock or a pocket. Rogues have a long and hallowed tradition of being viable and balanced in a lot of fantasy settings.

Yathrinsti is a Necromancer, like in Diablo II. She can stab fools with a poison dagger I suppose, but her primary claim to fame is having a pack of grunts with their bones showing.

Here are major overlaps:

• Tadoc and Dahilah both have heavy armor, a melee weapon, and the ability to inspire their team mates.
• Weebo and Osa can both pick locks.
• Osa and Yathrinsti both have "pets" - Osa her robot spiders, and Yathrinisti her squad of skeleton commandos.
• Dahilah and Weebo are both specifically good at "talking."
• Adlin is a Wizard, and special care needs to be taken to prevent him from stepping on each other player's toes by saying "I have a spell for that."
• Tadoc and Osa both do healing - Osa makes medicine and Tadoc has healing auras.
• Every character does damage to enemies in combat to kill them.

But just to throw some things out there:

• Aldin is the only character who has an ice beam.
• Dahilah has some sort of unique tactician/leadership buff.
• Osa has a frickin crawling bomb.
• Tadoc has a protection ward.
• Weebo is teh stealthiest.
• Yathrinisti has completely expendable minions.

Seems like you could make that viable and have each of the characters feel like they are interesting.

Step 3: Write up a Three Person Party

OK, as usual, we're going to try to make this deliberately hard on ourselves.So group I is:

• Adlin
• Weebo
• Dahilah

And Group II is:

• Tadoc
• Osa
• Yathrinsti

Spot the agony? Well, both the characters identified as having healing powers are in Group II. So Adlin, Weebo, and Dahilah are going to be running with no special healing. So whatever you can do with water magic or battlefield bandages is pretty much all they get. That's potentially OK, if healing in battle is neither required nor broken. Tadoc's in-battle healing magic has to be considered a subset of defense.

Secondarily, we note that the first party is much more slanted towards "fast" combats, while the second party is more geared towards "slow" combats. The second party moves more pieces on the table, has warding fields and combat healing/repair and and so on and so forth. The first party has some damage boosting, some stealth assassination and magical fucking ice beams. This means that ultimately the game is going to have to accept characters who are geared towards fast kills and characters geared towards throwing mooks into meat grinders either all together or together in a mixed party. That's non-trivial, since a character who is "slow and steady" is just going to appear to contribute less than a hard and fragile character unless the glass cannon gets taken down on a regular basis.

Step 4: Outline an Adventure

Step 5: Write out a campaign


Step 6: Choose a Base System


Step 7: Do the Math

[Doom]

Durrrr...what's GDF: KFRP stand for?

Back in step 3: I see you're restricting the wizard to specifically divination/elemental magic. Many systems have the same magic for healing as damage (D&D, of course, considers the magic different). Heck, I seem to remember a game where Water magic WAS healing magic.

Granted, wizard-type healing magic can be inefficient relative to whatever is it the paladin or artificer do, but, depending on the magic system, that might be perfectly fine.

Even the rogue, with his fine motor skills, could have a surgery-style skill set. Warhammer 2nd edition actually had an adequate non-magic healing system, where the 'surgeon' could heal d6 of combat damage. It was a distant second-rate to the far more difficult to get magic healing, but it could be done.

You seem to be more class than race based in this discussion...but if Hobs have some sort of self-healing ability, one with a 'resistant to all magic' side effect, that could also make party 1 more viable. More conceptual: are we ruling out party deficiencies in class being made up somehow by racial choices?

[Username17]

Offense and Defense

Look, no one wins a fight against skeletons because the skeletons have a hard time hitting them. They win because the skeletons have a harder time than they do in inflicting murder on the other side. So practically speaking, no amount of defense will make you win, but as long as you have any offense at all, defense and offense are directly convertible in a balanced fashion one to the other.

But that's problematic, because most people think of offense as something that affects the enemy team generally, but defense as something that's personal. That's poor planning, since what it means is that a character who has a bigger defense investment will only notice their investment in the event that the rest of the team drops - and that's rare, hard to predict, and really frustrating when it happens.

The solution I think, is to give people with real defensive abilities the ability to protect the entire team. Tadoc is good example of this. It's not that he personally has more hit points than you, it's that he generates a healing aura that effectively gives extra hit points to whoever is taking damage. It's not that his defenses are higher, it's that he puts up Ward Seal that raises the defenses of everyone on the line. Similarly, Yathrinsti's skeleton mooks run interference for every member of the party, not just her.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Can we footnote the TLAs and such, please? At least if they're used in the first post, I usually try to scroll back to the first use if I don't recognize them and try to see a string of words that match it. But the title of this thread is all capital consonants, so I assume they mean something, but what that is, isn't defined in the thread.

-Crissa

[A Man In Black]

Heck, I seem to remember a game where Water magic WAS healing magic.

HeroQuest, yo.

And stealth is a terrible protected/specialty role, unless it's something you can share with the party. The ability to isolate yourself from the group in a group game is not only not useful, it's a trap. Nobody's toes are getting stepped on if Weebo and Dahilah are sneaky, Osa has a cloaking device, Adlin can cast Invisibility, and Yathwhatever can cast Cloak of Shadow, as long as you don't end up with a situation like D&D where one player's stealth schtick obsoletes all the others. Either give "make the group stealthy" to someone as part of their specialty, or leave it in the open pool of generalist abilities.

[Smeelbo]

Group Dynamic Functions: Kitchensink Fantasy Role Play?

Smeelbo

[Koumei]

Heck, I seem to remember a game where Water magic WAS healing magic.

HeroQuest, yo.

And for vidya: Grandia, Suikoden, almost every jRPG that isn't called Final Fantasy.

[Username17]

Also Heroes of Might and Magic III, but not the RPGs set in the same world (Might & Magic 6 & 7).

Group Dynamic Functions: Kitchensink Fantasy Role Play?

Close enough. It can even just be letters for all I care. Right now it's just a lolrandom tag, which may eventually be replaced with a real name.

And stealth is a terrible protected/specialty role, unless it's something you can share with the party.

Definitely. Very frequently stealth is modeled in games as the team with the highest value of their lowest stealth result getting to pick range or go first. That's intuitive, but it's not good for a game where one of your allies could seriously be a guy in golden armor on a flaming horse, and you have no control over that. Instead, sneakiness should be a series of abilities that do things, rather than a passive number that your team is stuck with using if everyone else's number is better.

Scouting, for example, can be modeled by having the PCs have some control over where terrain features are relative to starting positions. Get a better scouting result than the enemy, and you can attack them when the cliff is at their back rather than when they are at the top of the cliff relative to you. And so on.

If you play with some of the underlying assumptions, rogues can contribute more than just being DPS machines that trigger increased loot drops.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Frank, in the first post, you mentioned that Adlin can be "restricted". What do you mean by this? That his spells are a limited resource, more so than the other party member's abilities?

Heck, I seem to remember a game where Water magic WAS healing magic.

HeroQuest, yo.

Magic: the Gathering implies it a bit with some of the green cards (Stream of Life, for example), and the Shugenja from 3.5 Complete Divine has healing spells in the Water list.

You certainly could include healing in Adlin's elemental list of powers if you wanted to, but I don't know if you want to or not if you think it risks making his list of abilities too broad.

[Doom]

well, to continue the M:TG example, green's slow, mana-intensive healing is inefficient compared to white's vast array of generally faster, with less mana cost, healing abilities.

[Ice9]

I think you could give him out-of-combat healing without stepping on too many toes. That ability seems like it should be widely available instead of a shtick anyway, given that the alternative is "Someone has to play a [Healer] or we'll spend several days resting between each fight".

[Username17]

I think you could give him out-of-combat healing without stepping on too many toes. That ability seems like it should be widely available instead of a shtick anyway, given that the alternative is "Someone has to play a [Healer] or we'll spend several days resting between each fight".

Oh definitely. 4e D&D had an intriguing idea with the Healing Surges. The idea being that the amount of healing and reset you could have was finite and there regardless of whether you had a healer or not - with the healer there to cash in those healing surges during major confrontations rather than waiting between battles. But then they took a dump on it by having Healers actually provide healing in substantial excess of healing surge limits, thus making them necessary anyway. I don't even regard that as being "broken by expansion" since Healing Word made itself mandatory long before anyone printed the gaze into absolute fucking insanity that was Astral Seal.

Anyway, combat healing is really a lot like any other defensive buff, save that you use the action after the wound is inflicted rather than before. We can thus have optional in-combat healing simultaneously with having day-limited healing between battle healing. The key is the "golden hour" concept. Firs Aid is more effective when applied quickly after an injury, so if we throw in a time limit to heal injuries with super first aid, then first aid abilities can be optional and directly replaceable with other defensive abilities such as protective wards or expendable summons.

After the First Aid time limit expires, the wounds need medicine and expenditures of healing surge to cure. And if you give first aid powers the same cool down time as the First Aid time limit, you can give 4e style Encounter Powers of very large healing that's totally in addition to the normal haling you'd have without a Paladin, and have that be totally OK and not mandatory.

-Username17

[spasheridan]

I think setting ideas might be helpful here as well. A power for a D&D 4th ed character might be overpowered for a WFRP character - but that's because you're supposed to stab balrogs in the face in D&D and run for your life from Bloodthirsters in WFRP. Maybe a general lethality toggle as well between Savage Worlds (mooks can kill you with good rolls) vs D&D (it takes a party wipe to really kill a PC).

Also - there's a sliding scale between for tactical combat (positional powers) and handwaving combat. There's also a sliding scale for skills - if we have artificers we need some crafting skills, can an artificer make anything from spoons to catapults? Do we want a nice skill challenge system? A planning component similar to Shadowrun (get the map of the dungeon and the names of the monsters in it before we get inside with divinations and streetwise) or do we just run into the dungeon and start face stabbing?

[Jacob_Orlove]

Group Dynamic Functions: Kitchensink Fantasy Role Play?
Smeelbo

I would have guessed "Gaming Den Forum" for the first part, but I think you're right for the latter letters.

[koz]

Group Dynamic Functions: Kitchensink Fantasy Role Play?
Smeelbo

I would have guessed "Gaming Den Forum" for the first part, but I think you're right for the latter letters.

Game Design Flowsheet: Kitchensink Fantasy Roleplay, actually.

[MGuy]

I think you could give him out-of-combat healing without stepping on too many toes. That ability seems like it should be widely available instead of a shtick anyway, given that the alternative is "Someone has to play a [Healer] or we'll spend several days resting between each fight".

Oh definitely. 4e D&D had an intriguing idea with the Healing Surges. The idea being that the amount of healing and reset you could have was finite and there regardless of whether you had a healer or not - with the healer there to cash in those healing surges during major confrontations rather than waiting between battles. But then they took a dump on it by having Healers actually provide healing in substantial excess of healing surge limits, thus making them necessary anyway. I don't even regard that as being "broken by expansion" since Healing Word made itself mandatory long before anyone printed the gaze into absolute fucking insanity that was Astral Seal.

Anyway, combat healing is really a lot like any other defensive buff, save that you use the action after the wound is inflicted rather than before. We can thus have optional in-combat healing simultaneously with having day-limited healing between battle healing. The key is the "golden hour" concept. Firs Aid is more effective when applied quickly after an injury, so if we throw in a time limit to heal injuries with super first aid, then first aid abilities can be optional and directly replaceable with other defensive abilities such as protective wards or expendable summons.

After the First Aid time limit expires, the wounds need medicine and expenditures of healing surge to cure. And if you give first aid powers the same cool down time as the First Aid time limit, you can give 4e style Encounter Powers of very large healing that's totally in addition to the normal haling you'd have without a Paladin, and have that be totally OK and not mandatory.

-Username17

This is relevant to my interests: Are you saying that it is good to have a per day limit to healing and have unlimited healing in battle as long as the in battle healing has a time limit (possibly 1 round or so)?

[Username17]

This is relevant to my interests: Are you saying that it is good to have a per day limit to healing and have unlimited healing in battle as long as the in battle healing has a time limit (possibly 1 round or so)?

I am saying that At-will and Encounter healing powers don't have to undermine your between-combat development healing paradigms. In 4e D&D they do, and having Astral Seal literally makes any limited healing you attempted to enforce meaningless. But if those fast healing abilities have time limits they can be used in, then that's no longer the case. Healing then removes a certain amount of damage per battle - like an AC buff would (although in absolute numbers and post facto rather than ahead of time ad statistically).

-Username17

[Username17]

Also - there's a sliding scale between for tactical combat (positional powers) and handwaving combat. There's also a sliding scale for skills - if we have artificers we need some crafting skills, can an artificer make anything from spoons to catapults? Do we want a nice skill challenge system? A planning component similar to Shadowrun (get the map of the dungeon and the names of the monsters in it before we get inside with divinations and streetwise) or do we just run into the dungeon and start face stabbing?

These are all good questions. The Skill Challenge system I can answer for: people seem to want one, so in it goes. Despite what Mike Mearles would have us believe, it's not really very hard. A skill challenge system requires several variables:

• Duration - A "short" challenge has everyone declare one action. A "long" challenge has everyone declare 3.
• Degree of Success - the number of hits generated by the entire team.
• Task Difficulty - the target number for each individual player action to try to generate a hit.

So how does it work? First, you declare a round. Each player announces what they are going to do, you hand them each a Target Number based on that, they roll their skill, and everyone who gets a hit on their roll adds to the team degree of success, and everyone who does not doesn't. For a 5 man party, this generates 6 different possible degree of success for a short challenge.

You can make things more complicated by letting people add more than one hit to the degree of success for beating the TN like it owed you money and give out genuine abilities that let players influence the skill challenge mechanics in any of several dozen ways.

You can work that into a post war negotiation mechanic, where objectives gained during the war increased the degree of success before the actual skill challenge started. You can work that into an exploration mechanic by having enhanced movement or scouting abilities provide bonus hits towards degree of success. But the point is: making a skill challenge system that encourages everyone to participate, doesn't take too much time, and provides non-binary results is not very hard. And since people want Skill Challenges (as evidenced by how many people deluded themselves into believing the non-functional pathos in the 4e DMG was functional in the slightest), in it goes.

-Username17

[TavishArtair]

Best way to limit the skill challenge system meaningfully seems to be to make a limit of a certain number of "rounds" to screw around. Whether those rounds represent numbers of hours or even days, or are a couple of minutes or even seconds apiece.

[IGTN]

Skill challenges need to have abilities that change the course of the challenge. Otherwise, you've degenerated it into a variable TN dicepool system, where the TN depends on your skill and your dicepool depends on how long the challenge is.

That's not a "You can make things more complicated by. . .giv[ing] out genuine abilities that let players influence the skill challenge mechanics". That's "You absolutely must have these abilities.

[Ice9]

That's not a "You can make things more complicated by. . .giv[ing] out genuine abilities that let players influence the skill challenge mechanics". That's "You absolutely must have these abilities.

Depends how much time/importance the skill challenge is supposed to have in gameplay. For something that only takes a minute or less (real time, not game-world time), then "everyone pick an arguably relevant skill, say how you're using it, and roll it" is actually fine. It doesn't need tactics, it's just an upgraded version of a single roll.

For something that's supposed to be "an encounter", that takes several minutes and people get excited about - then yeah, you want some options/tactics. I think both forms can be useful for different circumstances.

[Username17]

Depends how much time/importance the skill challenge is supposed to have in gameplay. For something that only takes a minute or less (real time, not game-world time), then "everyone pick an arguably relevant skill, say how you're using it, and roll it" is actually fine. It doesn't need tactics, it's just an upgraded version of a single roll.

For something that's supposed to be "an encounter", that takes several minutes and people get excited about - then yeah, you want some options/tactics. I think both forms can be useful for different circumstances.

Definitely. I could see a rule where all or almost all of the Skill Challenge Powers were used between rounds, meaning that you did not get to use them on Short Challenges, but that everyone had things to do on Long Challenges.

Seems to cover both ideas.

-Username17

[Username17]

Anyway: Objectives.

For a war, each objective achieved counts towards the ultimate victory, which in turn gives you a bonus in the post-war negotiation by which your war actually accomplishes something. But you can do that or battles as well. That is, you declare some objectives at the beginning of the battle, and accomplishing them (as well as incapacitating foes) counts towards ultimate victory in the battle.

This way you have large numbers of enemies or enemies who are really hard to put down, and have the game not drag on too long during those combat sequences.

I suspect that you could have a victory points versus battle duration comparison that would make it so that the victors would be willing to call the battle at some point. That's important, because spending an extra 18 turns to climb up the back end of a cliff face to face stab a lone kobold scout after the necrolord has been vanquished is anti-climactic.

-Username17

[Endovior]

That's important, because spending an extra 18 turns to climb up the back end of a cliff face to face stab a lone kobold scout after the necrolord has been vanquished is anti-climactic.

-Username17

What, seriously? Has that actually ever happened before ever, or is that just an example you made up off the top of your head?

[the_taken]

That's called hentai logic. Go to Starcraft, Terran Campaign one, mission 9. The objective is to destroy all of the Protoss Structues. Even if the protoss has no resources, no unit producers, no resources gatherers, as long as there is a single structure standing, you have not met the victory condition, and therefore can not win.

Frank proposes to do away with hentai logic. That's a good thing.