Hot answers tagged design
25
Betrayal is achieved through imperfect information, possibly conflicting goals, and the ability for orders to be miscommunicated.
(Caution, game theory ahead)
Literature Review
I'm going to assume that you're familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma, the iterated prisoner's dilemma, the stag hunt, (Kuhn 2009) and the problems with resource availability on ...
22
An interesting villain has:
Motivations for doing what he does. There's this cliche, "nobody thinks of themselves as evil." That's not true for all settings, but I think it is fair to say that very few villains are just evil for the sake of cackling. So you should figure out what's driving your bad guys.
Shades of grey. The degree depends, again, on the ...
20
The player problem that rules changes seem to handle really well is boredom. If combat drags on and on, or if you have two players who are really interested in setting up elaborate tactics on the battemap and one who just wants to roll the dice and move on, then changing the rules to better suit the group as a whole can help.
Another thing rules can have a ...
15
I think your instincts are good on this one -- using the name "gypsy," while evocative, harkens to stereotypes about real-world groups that it's not helpful to promote. If you want to promote the idea of wandering performers with magical skill and some combat ability, you could go with "vagabond" or "mountebank" or something even more sinister like ...
14
What you are looking for resembles the Castrum Ferrariae, which triggered the city of Ferrara, in Italy. Its first installment is from the 12th century, to be developed later until the 16th century.
Link to the image source
12
Adam, I designed three new 4E clases for Goodman's Forgotten Heroes and helped develop and playtest nine of my co-authors'. Here's what worked for us:
Decide what the key appeal of the class will be. How will playing this class be different from other classes with the same role? (It helps to answer this for all the existing classes within that role: how ...
12
I laid out the Heralds of Hell playbooks using Scribus, which is a cantankerous piece of software but does the trick and is free. (Other layout options are described here at RPG.SE in the question "What free software can I use for laying out my own RPG?".) I did them in the original booklet format, not the new tri-fold, so I can only speak to that form ...
11
No.
You should be playing these games with your friends or at the very least friendly strangers (at a con) or people who you'd want to share a beverage with.
Mechanics cannot solve assholery.
Mechanics can make assholery worse or easier. A game with piss-poor mechanics can turn an otherwise friendly table into a lame place to be.
11
Clues and Map scraps.
First they need a clue to point them in the right general direction. That's fairly easily accomplished by the usual methods, whatever works in your game.
Next: if the party finds, buys, is given a partial map (mapscrap), that gives them the essential tool to go find the objective (macguffin).
But don't think in terms of classic maps, ...
10
The closest is probably Richard Graves’ The Mad Demigod’s Castle, available on Dragonsfoot. It doesn’t write up the ruins, but it does write up level 1, and contains connections to the various Castle of the Mad Archmage levels.
10
Ultimately, the word gypsy has a pretty cloudy history. For a long time, it was very much meant to be derogatory and pejorative, and used primarily by people who were racist. More than a few groups have embraced it, but plenty have not and still take offense to it.
It seems to me that most fantasy settings that want to evoke the traits associated with the ...
9
You can also encourage everyone at the table to follow guidelines established by improv practitioners; these become less "rules of the game" and more "rules of play" (i.e. they don't really answer "what can I do next" as much as they address "whatever I'm going to do next, how do I do it?"):
Accept every offer. During the course of play, other players will ...
8
Give them a map or turn-by-turn directions, but make them slightly unreliable. Maybe an old adventurer tells them the story of the tome he dropped in the pit in the lower level:
"If you go down to the crossroads--you know the one I'm talking about, right?--it's the right passage, which you take for a while till it hits the kobold warrens. On the other side ...
8
Things I look for as a player:
Common slang used in the world that is not common to the players.
Common social etiquette that is not common to the players.
Common race, culture, and place stereotypes.
What the dice mechanic is.
How you gain and spend experience.
How a typical combat phase works.
The first three allow for quick immersion in the game ...
8
My answer would be to not use "Gypsy" for your game.
Roma are fighting for basic human rights all over the world. Why do anything to negate our struggles to rise above stereotypes?
If someone says that the use of that word is offensive, I think we should listen.
It hurts me as a politically active Romani.
7
Tone In my reading the Shadowfell isn't evil nearly as much as it is dark and a tad corrupt. As such I'd draw upon imagery from writers like Poe or Yeats for my flavor. Perhaps the English graveyard poets. The Shadowfell is the goth part of the new D&D cosmology.
Inhabitants The inhabitants of the Shadowfell don't have to be non-human or humanoid. ...
6
The simplest method is the in media res mode: "You finally arrived at the rubble pile beneath the opening, rubble which is relatively fresh. This seems to be the place the patrol mentioned. Now, it falls to you to explore and pacify it. As you look, you notice that the air inside is fresh..."
The second is to have a map of the major central area, the "safe" ...
6
Hit Points, in general
Hit point systems abstract survivability, not damage. Though most pure HP systems call reducing HP "damage," they take the analogy no further: there's no pain, no bloody wounds, no foul effects. Let's face it, most real fights aren't about inflicting numerous wounds on your opponent until they bleed out. Most real fights are about one ...
6
My personal favorites are:
Rolling for determination of outcome choice
defining truths
spending fate or experience to define some setting truth
Using skill rolls to define setting truths
cooperative setting building.
To detail these better....
Rolling for Determination of Outcome Choice
You don't roll for success nor failure; you roll to take control ...
6
To get what is useful on a cheat-sheet for a specific game is going to revolve around playtesting. You've said in the comments that you have a 50/50 split between veterans and new players, which is actually pretty good. Your veterans will remember all of the basic rules, and the new players will have insights into the toughest things to remember as new ...
6
Hit points are more than just a nod to old-school D&D, but yes, that heritage is the only reason they're in the game. The Harm Clock would have worked equally well from a mechanical point of view. It just wouldn't have had the right "feel". For darker fantasy the Harm Clock would be very well-suited.
Dungeon World was made to play D&D-style ...
5
The only way to playtest it is not only threw play, (not to say that you shouldn't use play, but no need to reinvent the horse everytime you want to take a buggy ride)
one can use all that playtesting already done by looking at the powers that are already out there mechanically and extrapolating from that. Its not perfect but it goes a long way to ensuring ...
5
In some rare cases, rules tweaks can bring borderline cases back to participation. For example, streamlining combat or task systems can take a game that has an issue and make it more playable.
But in general, problems with individuals tend to be deeper than rules; setting is often far more important to individual players than the rules.
Going through your ...
5
My personal preference goes to villains that have a personal grudge against players. It's more intimate if the enemy hates the players for something they directly did to him, and not for some devious plan of world-conquering. A setup I used was the following: to defend against an attempt at mugging, the PC killed the son of a local, powerful illegal goods ...
5
First, I would ask you this:
When you created that campaign, how did you know it was something your players wanted to play? Without their buy-in, any campaign can fall flat. And you created a very narrow sort of game. A lot of groups might balk at milder constraints, let alone, "You all play sociopaths! Isn't that fun?" If you didn't get a lot of enthusiasm ...
5
Framing
There's about a hundred mechanics like this; this is the main thing the indie games movement is into nowadays. On the far side where the players take on so much of the storytelling responsibilities that you don't even need a GM, you have examples like The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries and Fiasco. There's a large spectrum of options with ...
5
I don't think you can do this without some legwork on your part. All life-path systems I've experienced so far (Fading Suns, Blue Planet) broke the mechanical choices down into background requirements rather than just providing a justification why a character has ability X/Y/Z. Basically, live-path systems as I know and understand them work best with ...
4
TSR has a "Villains Lorebook" on their website here that I think has some good example villains that can be mined for your use. AD&D had a book called the "Complete Book of Villains" that had good advice. A post about it here. Wolfgang Baur has a series about villains that I liked a lot. Click here.
Here's more of the Baur stuff -- Wizards doesn't ...
4
There are two easy ways, one narrative and one dungeon-structural.
The easy narrative method is to skip the "finding the interesting place" part of the game with a quick narration. Something like:
You enter the Grey Portal and quickly make your way through the echoing, dripping tunnels. Cries of surprised terror and threatening growls pierce the silence ...
4
Consider creating non hostile encounters that act as information brokers in the dungeon. (There's a very good example in Dungeonscape for D&D3.5 of a roper that controls a crossroads in the dungeon, but instead of just attacking people moving through he actas a sort of information broker).
A "goblin guide", an NPC-monster, or something like a talking ...
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