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I would also like to add this

When you "kill your favorites" keep the rules somewhere, shifting through "failed" rules may give you the "piece you needed" in a future unrelated project.

From my experience of running a small tabletop game company that produced a space combat game(shamless plug...you can check out the game in my signature link), here are some of my suggestions.

Have a good answer to the question "How is my game different?". There really are not any wrong answers to this question, but it is important to have one. People are going to want to know how your rules compare and contrast with similar systems.

Start building up a community as soon as you have some cool eye candy to show off and keep promoting as much as possible. Local conventions are not a bad way to get some basic experience, but you will usually get diminishing returns as much of the audience is the same from convention to convention. Large conventions, like Origins, are expensive and you are going head to head with the big boys in the gaming industry. These types of shows fall into the larger risk for a chance for a larger reward category

Definitely spend some money to get some good art assets made. This can be miniatures or artwork, depending on your game, but you need something to catch people's eye. If I could start things over, this is one area where I would have spent more money.

When promoting your game at a convention, work in pairs. People are much more likely to walk up and ask questions about a game that is being played vs. one that is just sitting on a table.

The tabletop game industry does not have much in the way of government regulation in the US, but if you want run your own company, you will have to deal with sales tax and other weird state laws.

Finally, when you run a game where you are playing against a potential customer, keep the scenario simple and make sure they win.

 RockoRobotics wrote:

Finally, when you run a game where you are playing against a potential customer, keep the scenario simple and make sure they win.

I have heard it a lot, but is it correct? wouldn't the (potential) players feel cheated? how many would feel that this game is so hard they allowed me to win to not deter me?

 Strombones wrote:


Of course the primary requisite in having your own rule set is having some friends willing to go down the rabbit hole with you. I think most people will be hard pressed in showing up to the FLGS, pulling a crumpled piece of paper out of their pocket, and asking people to play their house rules because trust me it's really fun and not complicated at all....

Maybe we should start an official "play test my house rules" thread on Dakka. Kinda a swap shop for testing rules. Could lead to something fun.

This. The hardest thing when making rules is getting players to try them out. And the more overreaching your rules are the harder it is to get players to give them a try. I've been searching for a group to try my rules for many months now. Well, its actually a completely new game. so, yeah, I'm on my second group. I got them to try out the vehicles rules several months ago. Everyone seemed to like them but things stalled a bit after that. You can't be too pushy. And I missed a lot of group-time because of stuff in my private life. I finally got a commitment to do some serious playtesting tonight but I had to cancel. The wife insists I go to our friend's birthday party instead. So, maybe next week?

So yeah, a "try these new rules" thread would be a great thing.

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

 RockoRobotics wrote:

Finally, when you run a game where you are playing against a potential customer, keep the scenario simple and make sure they win.

I have heard it a lot, but is it correct? wouldn't the (potential) players feel cheated? how many would feel that this game is so hard they allowed me to win to not deter me?

Well, when it comes to GM'd games, my mantra is "The players always win." This doesn't exactly follow with respect to a demo for a non-GM'd game, but my guess is that the situations are similar.

The players are the heroes. The heroes win. That's the long and the short of it. The heroes might not win easily. The heroes might suffer along the way. The heroes might have setbacks. But the heroes always win in the end. Period.

In fact, when designing GM'd games, one of my design philosophies is to supply the GM with a toolkit of options with which to scale the difficulty of the game on the fly, preferably without looking like punches are being pulled. For example, if an enemy only has one method of attacking, and the enemy is in a position in which anything other than an attack would look odd, how do you pull that punch without being blatant about it?

Give the enemy two methods of attacking, both reasonable, both effective, both strategic options, but which have a different type of impact on the players and you have some inbuilt flexibility, e.g. the Smash attack might easily kill character X at this point, but the enemy also has a Paralyze attack that won't kill character X, but imposes a debilitating game effect. Bonus if other characters can use their skills/abilities/etc. to remove said effect. Double bonus if doing so costs valuable finite resources.

Instead of having a dead character, you can give the other characters something to do and impose a resource penalty for getting their kicked in.

Losing can also be frustrating, and I think that in a demo you want prospective customers to walk away with a positive experience, especially if the demo is quick or not very in depth. In that situation, I also don't think that people are looking to dig too deeply into the game mechanics.

In addition to what weeble1000 said, the other card you play is that you perform an action in order to demonstrate some cool mechanic about your game. This is a great trick if you are acting as a salesman for a particular game.

The best strategy I have found is to come up with a simple scenario that makes your potential customer feel like they're in a tactically dangerous situation, but it only seems this way because that particular person does not know the details of your game's mechanics. It may take a while to create a scenario like this, but after a few tries, you will figure it out.

For my game, the quick demo I run at vendor tables has about a 95% win ratio for the player. As each turn passes, my squadron gets reinforcements. Despite this seemingly increase in danger each turn for the player, it is stacked against me such that I can only win the scenario if I play very aggressively and dice rolls go heavily in my favor.

Yep.

I have helped on game development since my teens, where AI was a play tester for Heritage, Yaquinto, Metagaming, Steve Jackson Games (I was the first person to do OGRE miniatures, running a game just a week after Martian Metals produced the first miniatures), GDW, GW, Genesis, and others I can't even recall.

And I wrote a few early Computer Games that were essentially miniatures games on a computer (For the Apple ][, //e, and Macintosh) that were based upon concepts I liked from GDW'S Command Decision and Tactics.

Most recently, I have helped write rules for Field of Glory-Fantasy, which would be nice to see published. Currently all we have are rules for Middle-earth, Hyboria, and Gloranthan styled fantasy worlds.

I have done the same thing for Hoplon, an ancients game that is similar to DBA/DBM(M), yet it puts back into the game things like actual morale, units, and missile combat (the things that Phil Barker "abstracted' out of DBx, which really only need to be abstracted out of DBA. DBM's scale really still needs these things). I also helped to develop the second and third editions of the game.

And the one I have spent most of my time on is an update of Ashanti High Lightning, Striker and Striker II.

Ashanti High Lightning is/was the skirmish level rules for Traveller miniatures, in 15mm.

Striker is/was the platoon - Company level rules for Traveller miniatures combat, and included rules for vehicle combat which are pretty good, but have a few flaws in the armor penetration rules (this has been the case with ALL of GDW's games).

And Striker II is/was the rules for Company to Brigade level miniatures for the Traveller TNE era.

But due to the fact that Traveller is/was primarily a generic Sci-Fi system (which only tangentially has "fluff" for a universe) the rules can be used for any genre or period (given the Tech Level system) where firearms exist.

My goal has been to update them for Traveller 5 and to both repair many of the flaws, as well as to create an adaptation that allows for the scale to be altered so that the rules can be used for the Skirmish, Platoon-Company, and Company-Brigade (Skirmish, Tactical, Unit-Tactical) as well as for Division level (Grand-Tactical) of play.

The Skirmish level of play needed very little work, as it is rather easy to incorporate the Command Rules from the other games into a Skirmish level, when the commander is pretty much directly leading his men.

But for the Tactical to Grand-Tactical levels, some significant work needed to be done, because once you get past the Unit Tactical (where it is no longer individual men firing, but whole squads/platoons at other squads/platoons) the rules for resolving fire differ greatly. This is especially true for the vehicle weapons.

But otherwise, the game presents a radically different approach to miniatures. From my past experience, it is also an approach that many players find frustrating, because the rules do not allow them omniscient control of their miniatures.

The Orders system constrains many figures/units such that they have no options for their movement, or combat unless an officer or NCO either leads them personally, or issues them new orders (which in the case of the lower TLs - TL5 to TL7/TL8 - can take several turns to issue).

But I found those constraints to be exciting and to better reflect what it would be like to command forces in the field, where there is a fog of war.

MB

BeAfraid wrote:
From my past experience, it is also an approach that many players find frustrating, because the rules do not allow them omniscient control of their miniatures.

That is indeed true and something I subscribe too myself as a school of thought, the more realistic the representation is the less need is there for the player and that is frustrating, for example in 5150 you do not really need to pay, just let the units do their work, ok technically you must decide if the unit will react or fire, but then you just roll to see if they can and if they will ectr.

I prefer the player to have more interaction and more control over their units than to count on "luck" on how his army will perform, the more towards a realistic simulation a game system moves the worse it gets in my eyes, I prefer a game that feels realistic, but remains a game.

I'm having some trouble with my sci-fi horror RPG.
If anybody wants to offer suggestions, it'd be greatly appreciated.
How can I go about emphasizing the need for stealth-over-combat other than making the enemies so powerful that they'll wreck the PCs in a fair fight?
The game uses a system similar to Only War's fate points (players can burn a finite amount (1d3) of fate points to bring themselves back from the brink of death) It makes the game slightly more forgiving, allowing PCs to experience how strong their enemies are without a TPK ruining the fun.
My fear is that PCs won't learn their lesson after just one run in with the baddies, run headlong into another fight and get wiped out without anymore 'fate points' to burn.
Any ideas?

 Squidmanlolz wrote:
I'm having some trouble with my sci-fi horror RPG.
If anybody wants to offer suggestions, it'd be greatly appreciated.
How can I go about emphasizing the need for stealth-over-combat other than making the enemies so powerful that they'll wreck the PCs in a fair fight?
The game uses a system similar to Only War's fate points (players can burn a finite amount (1d3) of fate points to bring themselves back from the brink of death) It makes the game slightly more forgiving, allowing PCs to experience how strong their enemies are without a TPK ruining the fun.
My fear is that PCs won't learn their lesson after just one run in with the baddies, run headlong into another fight and get wiped out without anymore 'fate points' to burn.
Any ideas?

It depends a great deal on the overall context of the system. How game-y is the system, for example? Is it typically played out on a hex/grid map with templates and AOEs and whatnot, or is it a more fluid, narrative system like World of Darkness?

Obviously, one way to emphasize something in the game is for the GM to emphasize it through storytelling. But in terms of mechanics, if you want to emphasize something, devote more of the mechanics to it. You can be tracking things like noise, light, scent, vibrations, camouflage, mental emanations, etc. How do we avoid being found by that giant spider demon that can sense our footfalls? There's a mechanic for that. Billy Bob was trained as a ninja and can move quickly without making sounds, but Betty Jean can hover with her magic powers. She's a heck of a lot better at not causing vibrations.

If stealth is important, there should be a boat-load of game effects and skill/ability progression related to it. You should be able to be stealthy in a lot of different ways, and your system should emphasize cooperation between players in being stealthy. Maybe you even have a fundamental mechanic related to it such as some kind of stealth meter that gets modified throughout a game/encounter.

If you want stealth to be important in the mechanics, devote more of the mechanics to it, and spread the love around. Everyone should have access to various means of being stealthy if it is going to be a big part of the game, otherwise certain character types will far outshine others.

You can also make your bad guys cause crappy effects instead of just murderfacing people. Maybe encountering the bad guys slowly drives you insane or makes you corrupted. So even if you walk away from a 'fight' you are on a slippery slope if you take the direct path too often.

I was thinking the last suggestion by Weeble1000

But the question is what is the horror? is it supernatural, zombies of some variety? technological horror?

The source of the horror greatly dictates what the solution around it should be, for example the moment you give hit points to Cthulhu, he stops been the ancient horror and becomes an unsolvable math puzzle.

Stealth games like metal gear emphasize on how easy it is to use the stealth mechanics instead of going into combat, other games (I know I am speaking about digital games but design principles remain mainly the same) outright end the game if stealth is lost in all cases they make the player get penalized heavily by not doing what the game designer wanted, in one side giving a chance for the player to recover on the other killing the game outright.

I would assume that making stealth the easier choice and making combat the almost impossible you could force the players using stealth, but by emphasizing on how easy or varied stealth is you can make the players naturally chose it.

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:
From my past experience, it is also an approach that many players find frustrating, because the rules do not allow them omniscient control of their miniatures.

That is indeed true and something I subscribe too myself as a school of thought, the more realistic the representation is the less need is there for the player and that is frustrating, for example in 5150 you do not really need to pay, just let the units do their work, ok technically you must decide if the unit will react or fire, but then you just roll to see if they can and if they will ectr.

I prefer the player to have more interaction and more control over their units than to count on "luck" on how his army will perform, the more towards a realistic simulation a game system moves the worse it gets in my eyes, I prefer a game that feels realistic, but remains a game.

Striker got the balance of this aspect much better than did 5150.

I had looked at it, because someone compared it to Striker, but what I found was not really at all similar.

Striker really needs to be played with a GM, and when this is done properly, the players tend to forget that they do not have omniscient control of their troops.

The game is really a Role Playing Game, which happens to have you playing the role of the force Commander either on the table, or the most immediate off-table ranking officer.

The players who have come to understand this have all been immediately hooked on the game.

Striker II has mechanisms that allow easier play without a GM, and I have found that 40k players had an easier time adjusting to it.

In Striker II you have a set of order chits for each officer, and sometimes for each NCO as well, which each can be placed on the table in the line of command (So the Off-Table force commander can place an order chit anywhere within his force, and a Battalion or Company CO or XO or NCO could place their order chit within the battalion/company, and so on, down to squad leaders).

This constrains the actions and movement of the troops without having to do like in Striker which requires actual written orders, and some people tend to have difficulty with writing explicit orders that conform to the rules (and some excell so extraordinarily that it can create play imbalances).

But overall, if you have a GM, and he works with the players to get them to understand their role, then the games tend to be really exciting.

Something I tried to include was a movement system that was more interleaved, so that reaction movement was better represented (they have adequate rules for reaction fire, but not for reaction movement, such as immediately running for cover when under fire).

But I won't have a chance to try out the rules for some time.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Squidmanlolz wrote:
I'm having some trouble with my sci-fi horror RPG.
If anybody wants to offer suggestions, it'd be greatly appreciated.
How can I go about emphasizing the need for stealth-over-combat other than making the enemies so powerful that they'll wreck the PCs in a fair fight?
The game uses a system similar to Only War's fate points (players can burn a finite amount (1d3) of fate points to bring themselves back from the brink of death) It makes the game slightly more forgiving, allowing PCs to experience how strong their enemies are without a TPK ruining the fun.
My fear is that PCs won't learn their lesson after just one run in with the baddies, run headlong into another fight and get wiped out without anymore 'fate points' to burn.
Any ideas?

You might want to take a look at Hero Wars/Hero Quest.

It offers a system that allows more fluid play where players simply have no ability to get caught up in the mechanics, because then tats are qualitative, and not quantitative.

In other words....

You don't have things like:

• You are a Third Level Wood Crafter, or Third Level Magic User.
• You have six points of Longbow skill.
• You have a Strength of 10, a Charisma or 12, Dexterity of 13, and Health of 7
• You hit with a broassword on a seven or less on a d10
• You are Armor Class Six/Your armor protects against eight points of damage.

And instead, you have things like:

• You have a minor skill in knot tying.
• You are considered to be a very attractive person by others, but yourself think you are too skinny, and your nose too long.
• You are extremely wirey build, quick, and seem to never get sick.
• You have used a Longbow since you were strong enough to draw one; used a smaller bow before that, and have studied with a master archer, who considers you to be an expert.
• You have been taught by a local mercenary how to use a longsword, and are good enough to look pretty threatening.

The GM will have only slightly more quantified skill levels and characteristics for the players, but the whole point of the game is that quantification isn't necessary.

This tends to allow GMs to give hints to players that they are less likely to try to test via the game mechanics.

And, lacking rigid mechanics, you can just use a narrative explanation for getting players out of trouble they have got themselves into.

MB

 Squidmanlolz wrote:
I'm having some trouble with my sci-fi horror RPG.
If anybody wants to offer suggestions, it'd be greatly appreciated.
How can I go about emphasizing the need for stealth-over-combat other than making the enemies so powerful that they'll wreck the PCs in a fair fight?
The game uses a system similar to Only War's fate points (players can burn a finite amount (1d3) of fate points to bring themselves back from the brink of death) It makes the game slightly more forgiving, allowing PCs to experience how strong their enemies are without a TPK ruining the fun.
My fear is that PCs won't learn their lesson after just one run in with the baddies, run headlong into another fight and get wiped out without anymore 'fate points' to burn.
Any ideas?

Well, if you want to emphasise stealth over combat, I'd say your Stealth system needs to be complex as combat is in other games.

Going back to the idea of a 'stealth meter' that weeble suggested, something like this could work:
For each [unit of distance] moved within X[distance] of the creature, add 1 to the meter
For each action taken that causes a loud noise, add 1 to the meter
For each [unit of distance] moved within LoS of the creature, add 1
so on and so forth. If the meter gets full, the Creature immediately attacks the PC that caused the meter to fill, resulting in serious injury or death.

Then, for certain types of creature add standing mods to the meter or conditions:
Heat-sensitive vision: always count as within LoS
Vibration-sensing: movement adds double the normal amount to the meter
Blind: never count as in LoS

ect ect.

It would need some testing mostly to determine a suitable 'cap' on the meter (too low and it becomes impossible, too high or resets too often and the PCs just have to go slow). Throw in time/turn limits so they have to make tough choices about speeds and routes, or multiple creatures (even ones that effect each other's meters, with the hapless PCs caught in the middle). I think it would work best on a grid jsut to help with distance, but the idea's there.

 Squidmanlolz wrote:
I'm having some trouble with my sci-fi horror RPG.
If anybody wants to offer suggestions, it'd be greatly appreciated.
How can I go about emphasizing the need for stealth-over-combat other than making the enemies so powerful that they'll wreck the PCs in a fair fight?
The game uses a system similar to Only War's fate points (players can burn a finite amount (1d3) of fate points to bring themselves back from the brink of death) It makes the game slightly more forgiving, allowing PCs to experience how strong their enemies are without a TPK ruining the fun.
My fear is that PCs won't learn their lesson after just one run in with the baddies, run headlong into another fight and get wiped out without anymore 'fate points' to burn.
Any ideas?

Well first up you can always emphasise to them that combat is unlikely to go in their favour. And any player worth their salt will instantly see an in depth system as a game play element- why else would it be there if we didn't need it? Another way to emphasise stealth is to limit combat capability. If it's sci fi they almost certainly use some sort of ranged weapon- limit ammo. Are they wandering around in sealed, powered suits? Limit air supply (which combat drains faster) or the power supply of said suit. In short make combat possible but expensive. Then you don't have to make the monsters total killers. They'll win one fight and immediately tally up the cost, not just in health but remaining resources and measure it against how far they have to go in the game.

Of course if this is an RPG with a GM you can always just use an expendable to show how terrifying the beasties are or make some research on them available. Talk about how they're believed to have wiped out some reseach facility. Paint the walls with blood and body parts (in the form of runes or glyphs if this is indeed horror) that make the characters nauseated if they look at or try to study.

As for a stealth system, is this being played on a tabletop? I always liked the idea of stealth (with squares/hexes anyway) being a D10 check vs the distance from the beastie (so roll a D10 and get less than the distance). Add appropriate modifiers- well lit square +2 to the roll. Debris littered +1. Not in the monsters LOS -1, in the dark -2, hiding behind a desk -1 etc. Give them some mechanism to boost these temporarily, like power draining thermoptic camouflage or similar.

 Kojiro wrote:

Well first up you can always emphasise to them that combat is unlikely to go in their favour. And any player worth their salt will instantly see an in depth system as a game play element- why else would it be there if we didn't need it? Another way to emphasise stealth is to limit combat capability. If it's sci fi they almost certainly use some sort of ranged weapon- limit ammo. Are they wandering around in sealed, powered suits? Limit air supply (which combat drains faster) or the power supply of said suit. In short make combat possible but expensive. Then you don't have to make the monsters total killers. They'll win one fight and immediately tally up the cost, not just in health but remaining resources and measure it against how far they have to go in the game.

That's a great suggestion. Resource management mechanics can definitely be used to make combat undesirable. In fact, in terms of game rules, that's probably the easiest way to go. And it is a very thematic way to handle it. You can work the justifications for the system into the fluff and make a really characterful game.

This thread actualy has me designing a ruleset myself! Here it is down in the Misc Minis Games section, just the very basics at first but I'll be blogging the whole process down there if anyone is interested in following along.
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/639322.page

You guys have given me a lot of ideas, so I've decided to overhaul my stealth system into something unique. I'm hoping to release a rules document by the end of the month, and maybe GM an online session if anyone's interested after I reveal everything.
EDIT: note to self: tweak psychological horrors and hallucinations systems. Nerf the Engineer class.