Action Economy Design Flowsheet

[OgreBattle]

So this old thread about game design as a whole got me thinking about the particulars of action economy

This is in reference to the perplexing morass that the 40k design thread got to. Here's a step by step of designing a game.

Name the PCs

In D&D the characters are called a "party", which stands for "war party" and it colors the entire system. In Shadowrun it's a "Team", in Vampire it's a "coterie". If you name the PCs a "squad", a "pack", or whatever, it matters.

Step 2: Write up a Six Person Party

Seriously. Using words, not numbers, write up a six person party. Think about what each character contributes to the story, to the action, to completion of mission objectives.

• Does everyone have something to do? If not, start over.

Remember that it is entirely possible that you'll have 6 players or more at the table. If there is a structural impediment to the way you've designed the character "classes" such that you can't fit six players into a whole where each contributes, it's not going to work as an RPG.

Step 3: Write up a Three Person Party

Again, using words not numbers outline a group of potential player characters. Only now you've only got three characters to work with. Think about how the group can respond to challenges and complete mission objectives.

• Is there a talent critical to the group's success that that is missing from the group you've outlined? If so, start over.

Remember that people don't show up sometimes. Also, some games are small. If the game can't survive without a full team, it can't survive.

Step Four: Outline an Adventure

Using words, not numbers or mechanics, outline an adventure. Block it out in terms of time. Figure that you have somewhere between 2 and 6 hours. Any discussions that happen "in character" are resolved slower than real time. Any tactical combat is likewise resolved in much less than real time. Travel is handled almost instantly unless you make players describe in detail that they are "looking for traps/ambushes/their ass with both hands" - in which case it takes practically forever.

• Are there substantial blocks of time that one or more characters have nothing to add to the situation? If so, start over.
  
• If you use major "mini-games" such as puzzle solving or tactical combat, is every character able to contribute significantly to these mini-games? If not, are these mini-games extremely short? If the answer to both questions is no, start over.

If you have a tactical combat mini-game (or the equivalent) that takes up a significant amount of the overall game it will inevitably become the benchmark by which a character's worth is measured. Characters who don't measure up... don't measure up.

Players who don't have anything meaningful or valued for their characters to do will wander off and play computer games.

Step Five: Write out a campaign

It doesn't have to span years of epic tales or any of that crap, but it does need to have a story arc and outline a potential advancement scheme as you envision it.

• Does everyone have a roughly equivalent available advancement scheme? It's OK if noone advances during the campaign or even if negative advancement accumulates as people run out of ammunition and get injured. But if you envision some players going on to become a world dominating sorcerer lord and the other characters becoming better dog trainer - start over.

It's really frustrating when one player is flying around fighting gods and other characters are not. It really isn't better if the game ends up that way than if the players start off with that kind of disparity.

Step Six: Choose a Base System

Based on your previous work, consider what base system would best correspond to what it is that you're doing. There are a lot of game systems that you just plug numbers into (d20, HERO, SAME, BESM, etc. and whatever); there are a number of other systems which work fine for what they do and can be adapted to whatever it is that you want to do (Shadowrun, Feng Shui, WFRP, Paranoia, etc.). Consider the play dynamics and character distinctions that you want and the limitations of the system in question. If you want some characters picking up and throwing cars, d20 doesn't work. If you want all the characters at roughly human strength, HERO doesn't work.

• If you intend the game to have a high and permanent lethality rate? If so, start over if your system takes a long time to generate characters.
  
• Can you figure out how to model all the abilities that characters need to fulfill your concept in your system? If not, start over.

Step Seven: Do the Math

Once you've got this going, you can do the laborious, but not difficult task of actually plugging numbers in to generate the abilities you've concepted.

• Run the numbers. Have the numbers you've generated actually provided you with a reasonable chance of producing the story arcs you're looking for? If not, start over.
  
• Check yourself against the Random Number Generator. If high values that are achievable within the campaign can't lose to the low numbers also available in the campaign, you don't actually have a "game" at that point you just have "I win" - is that OK for the situations it comes up in? If not...

-Username17

Say....

Step 1- Name your party members
Step 2- Make a 3 person party
Step 3- Make a 6 person party

Step 4- Outline an entry level encounter
Step 5- Outline an 'end game' encounter

So if you want gunfights and hacking consider how much table time each takes vs how much fiction time it occupies during a gunfight.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Assuming you mean simultaneous gunfights and hacking, I think the desire to emulate that is what drives people to make all the "cinematic" RPGs. I guess generally speaking that's also a movement to action economies that are more abstract and narrative?

[OgreBattle]

Yeah, deciding if you want "this is exactly six seconds" or something more abstract.

I figure real time video games and various combat sports being a thing now means "blow by blow" simulation isn't as novel as it would be in the 70's and early 80's.

Abstracting the time of a turn goes hand in hand with how space is specified or abstracted.
This is more apparent in skirmish games where there's suppose to be fair odds between players

[Ice9]

At least with hacking you can just decide it happens very fast - "pro-level hackers all use brain implants, so 6-18 seconds is typical." Things like walking a few blocks or even getting from one floor to another are glacial in combat terms. In fiction, it's solved by the other action having started earlier, which is an option if your RPG is narrative enough that retroactive coincidences like that don't feel weird.

IME, the less real-time something takes, the more acceptable it is for it to be a specialist activity that only one PC can participate in. Like, probably only the Ranger is charting a course, but that's fine because it's one roll and some results, done with in under a minute. But as long as combat is multiple hours of the session in aggregate, having a "non-combat" character is probably going to suck. So if hacking is a thing that only the hacker does, it should probably be resolved in a few rolls.

[Mechalich]

At least with hacking you can just decide it happens very fast - "pro-level hackers all use brain implants, so 6-18 seconds is typical." Things like walking a few blocks or even getting from one floor to another are glacial in combat terms. In fiction, it's solved by the other action having started earlier, which is an option if your RPG is narrative enough that retroactive coincidences like that don't feel weird.

I think, to extrapolate a bit more broadly, you game is going to have some sort of unit of combat time, whether it happens to be specifically defined or not, and any action that takes more than 3-4 of those units ceases to be viable as an in-combat action.

This sort of thing is going to depend heavily on the type of combats you're modeling and how abstracted a unit is intended to be. Person vs. person combat is generally extremely fast, while giant robot or starship combat is potentially much slower (there are some science fiction universes where space combats take many hours or even days to unfold and 'feed the crew' becomes an in-combat action).

Highly abstracted combats tend to also have larger time units than blow-by-blow modeling. If an 'attack' is assumed to be some complex and nebulously described set of maneuvers, countermoves, and feints that lasts quite some time, then other actions in combat become more reasonable. In some ways this is actually better suited for 'modern' games where a 'round' might include firing a huge chunk of a mag and could correspond with mine-sweeping, wire-cutting, medical care, and other actions that simply aren't happening on a six-second timescale.

You probably can have 'hacking' of a relatively simple nature - like getting doors to open or turrets to shut down - happen in-combat assuming some moderate level of abstraction where characters are assumed to be ducking and shooting a lot more or less constantly even if they aren't actually 'acting' at the moment.

[deaddmwalking]

Hacking in Combat Time is good - powering down some number of droids is just as good as hacking them with a lightsaber - but resolving the actions in combat time is only a part of that battle; resolving the hacking success/failure needs to be done without any more rolls/description than rolling attack and damage.

Ie, doing things that you have line of sight to directly, rather than going to a Matrix to interact with things there that nobody else can see is important - fluff-wise maybe they're doing it that way, but they shouldn't be exploring the matrix world during combat to find out what options they have - they should see an enemy and figure out what type of debuff they can use (just like the Street Samurai can determine what type of armor they're wearing and choose an appropriate weapon).

[Foxwarrior]

Hacking in Combat Time is good - powering down some number of droids is just as good as hacking them with a lightsaber - but resolving the actions in combat time is only a part of that battle; resolving the hacking success/failure needs to be done without any more rolls/description than rolling attack and damage.

Wayyyy ahead of you there.