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Hello, I’m one of those people who love to take game systems apart, see how they work, then either mutate them horribly or else combine them with another system to get something that I think is enjoyable to play. As a result of this I am constantly making half-finished game systems and concepts that pretty much inevitably end up discarded when I learn that some other game already did what I’m thinking about doing (designing a unique and fun system is really dang hard!).

That said, there’s one game that has stuck around with me for a while and I’m thinking about fleshing it out some more. I have a basic concept for how I want the system to work and some kind of vague setting to put it in. What I want to know is if this sounds at all interesting or like something people would want to play. Keep this in mind as you read: my continual bane with this system has been putting the kinds of stuff I think would make a cool system in without making some monstrosity that is impossible to actually play for fun. I tend to like overcomplicated games and I want to build something that at least makes some passing nods at tactical play and realism, but on the other hand I don’t want this to turn into Advanced Squad Leader.

Here’s a brief overview of the game fluff. I know fluff is pretty secondary to mechanics in terms of game design, so I haven’t focused on this much. This is pretty much a cyberpunk flavored squad level combat game with a few RPG elements. You are a high ranking member of a megacorporation in charge of controlling specialized combat teams of cyborgs, mutants, or robots. Each of these team members has been fitted with a mental control link that lets you direct their movements and priorities while still leaving their basic reflexes free for combat (kind of like an old game called Syndicate). That’s pretty much an author fiat to remove any kind of uncertainty in orders or morale rules from the game.
As far as tone I’m thinking of a lot of dark humor. I want to project the image of “a serious game that doesn’t take itself too seriously”, i.e. a deep and somewhat complicated set of rules that is written in a conversational tone (except where it matters for exact rules definitions and such).

I kind of envision the game playing like combat in an RPG except each player controls an entire “party. An average force would probably be somewhere around 5 people; less if you want a couple hulking kill bots or genetic monstrosities and more if you want a flood of basic unmodified humans (so I guess D&D Miniatures is a good starting point for the kind of feel I want). Of course this means each character has to have a lot less specialization to them. I’m imagining they’d have a basic set of skills that determine how good they are at different things like melee combat, ranged combat, and a few non combat skills like medicine, stealth, or computer use (not every character would have all the skills); a set of equipment; and probably a special trait or two that represents cool stuff they can do.

The method of play would be miniature based on a hex grid. Hexes make the problem of diagonals go away so that’s good from my perspective. And I plan on making a one hex side facing change per hex entered be a free part of movement, so the whole “can’t move in this direction without running a serpentine” problem would go away too.

Now, for the actual turn structure. What I really want to do here is simultaneous impulse based stuff, but that kind of thing seems like it died during the 90s and it would probably be way too complicated for most people. I will compromise for a system where a player activates one model, performs everything it can do, then the other player activates a model, and the process repeats until all models have been activated. Each character would have an “action count” statistic that says how much stuff they can do in their activation. Everything a character can do would have a cost in action counts and you as the commander would use them however you wanted each activation.

As far as the system, the couple core concepts I was considering was to make it a dice pool system like White Wolf where the character’s rank in the given skill determines how many dice you roll (probably going to be d6 for ease of use, but really any dice works just as well if you balance the modifiers correctly), and you’re trying to get as many dice as possible to roll above a “target number”. I think I should aim for a target number that gives about a 50% success rate although there is wiggle room to create “advantage” or “disadvantage” rules that would raise or lower the target number. The more successes you get the more effective your action was.
Here’s where things get kind of weird. One thing that always annoyed me about games was two separate rolls for “to hit” and “damage”. I never liked how the amount you hit by doesn’t do anything to affect the damage. I was planning on combining to hit and damage into one roll. The target’s defense is subtracted from the number of successes you get on your combat roll. Obviously 0 or less means you miss entirely. Assuming you get a couple successes you then multiply the number you got by some number that’s determined by your weapon. This gives the total amount of damage you inflict. That damage will get modified by the target’s armor in some fashion, not sure if I want to make it subtract or use division at this point, although I’m leaning towards division because using multiplication on the weapon means damage numbers could get absurdly huge depending on what kind of power level I need to span.
Alright, now things get really weird. Another thing that annoys me is the concept of “hit points” or “wounds”. In this game I plan to remove the concept of an abstract hit point system, and give each limb a distinct amount of damage it can sustain. This requires that somehow I will need to work a hit location roll in there somewhere, I plan on integrating it with the success system by just saying “pick one of your success dice to also be the hit location dice. “ So, each hit will do a specific amount of damage to a given limb. The character in question will take penalties to their actions based on how much damage their limbs have taken.

In this game I’m pretty much going to ignore rules like going into shock. I’ll just assume the implants your soldiers have can pump enough adrenaline and dopamine into them to keep them conscious and fighting no matter what. Characters will be disabled either through the destruction of their brain (or control system in the case of robots, which doesn’t have to be in the head) or once they lose enough blood. Blood loss rules are going to be a pain in the butt to write, but basically each limb will lose blood each turn based on how damaged it is and whether it’s had medical aid applied to it, and once the total blood loss reaches a specified number the character is down.

Alright. That is the very basic skeleton I’ve been working on lately. I’m curious what people think of it. I would say it has the potential for a great game, but of course I’m incredibly biased and what I like to play doesn’t line up with what a lot of other people like to play.

I'd give it a shot!

I loved Syndicate as a kid, the pixel are was phenomenal in that game and slowly taking over the world was great fun.

The latest X-Com: Enemy Unknown computer game might also interest you, as it's squad based tactical combat.

I'm a big fan of resolution mechanics that do something beyond boring percentile dice or bland D6s, so all your mumbo jumbo about to-hit+damage in one roll interests me. Like you were saying if you could somehow fit hit location in there too it'd be even sweeter.
The rest of the rules brainstorm seems pretty standard (not in a bad way) with talents differentiating characters, hex movement, etc.
So really if you can flesh out the dice system into a playable and enjoyable experience I think you'd be onto something.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Haha random thought, but what you could do is mix in some physical dexterity, where each unit has a hit location chart on their sheet that is quite large. Then when the opponent rolls they physically try to roll their dice inside the location they want to hit.
Or you could just do some combination of successes to determine the hit location. Like if 2 duplicate numbers were rolled it hits the chest, 3 duplicate numbers the head. Or odds/evens. Or something that can be extracted from the roll, instead of needing a separate roll or separate dice.

Thanks for giving me some feedback. I do appreciate it.

To be honest I think the idea of rolling to hit on a character silhouette would be absolutely hilarious, but it might not set the right tone for the game, and it would require me to actually make some kind of art assets for testing...I'll give it consideration.

What I meant for hit location was to take 2 of the dice you're rolling for the attack roll anyway and have them be different colors, so you could roll a d66 for hit location while you're rolling successes for damage.

I will think about it. I'm sure there's some reasonably simple way of extracting a hit location from rolling multiple d6s that can give me a decent probability distribution to work with.

I actually really like the concept. It reminds me of BattleTech a bit, which was one of my favorite games, and I'm also a fan of White Wolf's RPGs.

 dementedwombat wrote:

Spoiler:

Hello, I’m one of those people who love to take game systems apart, see how they work, then either mutate them horribly or else combine them with another system to get something that I think is enjoyable to play. As a result of this I am constantly making half-finished game systems and concepts that pretty much inevitably end up discarded when I learn that some other game already did what I’m thinking about doing (designing a unique and fun system is really dang hard!).

That said, there’s one game that has stuck around with me for a while and I’m thinking about fleshing it out some more. I have a basic concept for how I want the system to work and some kind of vague setting to put it in. What I want to know is if this sounds at all interesting or like something people would want to play. Keep this in mind as you read: my continual bane with this system has been putting the kinds of stuff I think would make a cool system in without making some monstrosity that is impossible to actually play for fun. I tend to like overcomplicated games and I want to build something that at least makes some passing nods at tactical play and realism, but on the other hand I don’t want this to turn into Advanced Squad Leader.

Here’s a brief overview of the game fluff. I know fluff is pretty secondary to mechanics in terms of game design, so I haven’t focused on this much. This is pretty much a cyberpunk flavored squad level combat game with a few RPG elements. You are a high ranking member of a megacorporation in charge of controlling specialized combat teams of cyborgs, mutants, or robots. Each of these team members has been fitted with a mental control link that lets you direct their movements and priorities while still leaving their basic reflexes free for combat (kind of like an old game called Syndicate). That’s pretty much an author fiat to remove any kind of uncertainty in orders or morale rules from the game.
As far as tone I’m thinking of a lot of dark humor. I want to project the image of “a serious game that doesn’t take itself too seriously”, i.e. a deep and somewhat complicated set of rules that is written in a conversational tone (except where it matters for exact rules definitions and such).

I kind of envision the game playing like combat in an RPG except each player controls an entire “party. An average force would probably be somewhere around 5 people; less if you want a couple hulking kill bots or genetic monstrosities and more if you want a flood of basic unmodified humans (so I guess D&D Miniatures is a good starting point for the kind of feel I want). Of course this means each character has to have a lot less specialization to them. I’m imagining they’d have a basic set of skills that determine how good they are at different things like melee combat, ranged combat, and a few non combat skills like medicine, stealth, or computer use (not every character would have all the skills); a set of equipment; and probably a special trait or two that represents cool stuff they can do.

The method of play would be miniature based on a hex grid. Hexes make the problem of diagonals go away so that’s good from my perspective. And I plan on making a one hex side facing change per hex entered be a free part of movement, so the whole “can’t move in this direction without running a serpentine” problem would go away too.

Now, for the actual turn structure. What I really want to do here is simultaneous impulse based stuff, but that kind of thing seems like it died during the 90s and it would probably be way too complicated for most people. I will compromise for a system where a player activates one model, performs everything it can do, then the other player activates a model, and the process repeats until all models have been activated. Each character would have an “action count” statistic that says how much stuff they can do in their activation. Everything a character can do would have a cost in action counts and you as the commander would use them however you wanted each activation.

As far as the system, the couple core concepts I was considering was to make it a dice pool system like White Wolf where the character’s rank in the given skill determines how many dice you roll (probably going to be d6 for ease of use, but really any dice works just as well if you balance the modifiers correctly), and you’re trying to get as many dice as possible to roll above a “target number”. I think I should aim for a target number that gives about a 50% success rate although there is wiggle room to create “advantage” or “disadvantage” rules that would raise or lower the target number. The more successes you get the more effective your action was.
Here’s where things get kind of weird. One thing that always annoyed me about games was two separate rolls for “to hit” and “damage”. I never liked how the amount you hit by doesn’t do anything to affect the damage. I was planning on combining to hit and damage into one roll. The target’s defense is subtracted from the number of successes you get on your combat roll. Obviously 0 or less means you miss entirely. Assuming you get a couple successes you then multiply the number you got by some number that’s determined by your weapon. This gives the total amount of damage you inflict. That damage will get modified by the target’s armor in some fashion, not sure if I want to make it subtract or use division at this point, although I’m leaning towards division because using multiplication on the weapon means damage numbers could get absurdly huge depending on what kind of power level I need to span.
Alright, now things get really weird. Another thing that annoys me is the concept of “hit points” or “wounds”. In this game I plan to remove the concept of an abstract hit point system, and give each limb a distinct amount of damage it can sustain. This requires that somehow I will need to work a hit location roll in there somewhere, I plan on integrating it with the success system by just saying “pick one of your success dice to also be the hit location dice. “ So, each hit will do a specific amount of damage to a given limb. The character in question will take penalties to their actions based on how much damage their limbs have taken.

In this game I’m pretty much going to ignore rules like going into shock. I’ll just assume the implants your soldiers have can pump enough adrenaline and dopamine into them to keep them conscious and fighting no matter what. Characters will be disabled either through the destruction of their brain (or control system in the case of robots, which doesn’t have to be in the head) or once they lose enough blood. Blood loss rules are going to be a pain in the butt to write, but basically each limb will lose blood each turn based on how damaged it is and whether it’s had medical aid applied to it, and once the total blood loss reaches a specified number the character is down.

Alright. That is the very basic skeleton I’ve been working on lately. I’m curious what people think of it. I would say it has the potential for a great game, but of course I’m incredibly biased and what I like to play doesn’t line up with what a lot of other people like to play.

Let me say first of all that I absolutely love the setting/premise of your game. However, I have a few suggestions/points that I recommend you think about when designing this. I'll just put them in bullet points.

- IMHO, one of the best ways to make your game fun is by echoing the setting/theme of the game in its rules. I would suggest you come up with some key central mechanic that reflects your game's premise. This will do two things: 1) it will give flavour by helping to tie the bakground to the rules, 2) it will help to differentiate your game and make it unique. You mentioned one of the core concepts of the background being that these soldiers are cybernetically enhanced by their corporation controllers to follow orders without question. Why not work this into your activation mechanic? Off the top of my head, you could introduce a simple resource system that allows the player to break the core alternate activation turn and pull off a string of actions, or enhance a model's basic actions (adding dice to their pool when attacking or whatever) by spending resources and taking risks. This could represent the controller attempting to execute more complex orders in the heat of combat. So say you start each turn with a set number of some kind of tokens (named appropriately), and you can discard these during your turn to boost a cyborg merc's basic actions, or allow them to execute more complex special things based on their abilities (computer, medic, etc). Just an idea. But basically I think the background/theme/setting gives you chance to really add flavor and tactics to the game without feeling hamfisted.

- Regarding the attack/damage system. I would suggest keeping it simple, e.g. give each weapon a "Light" and "Heavy" damage number. Then when you attack someone with a weapon, after subtracting the defense from the successes, you compare the number of remaining successes scored to the target's armor: if the successes are less than the armor, the target suffers a number of damage equal to the weapon's "Light" grade. If the successes beat the armor, the target suffers damage equal to the weapon's "Heavy" grade. So say you shoot at an enemy and roll 8d6, and score 5 hits. Target has a defence of 4 so you're left with 1 hit. Their armor is 3, so because this is greater than the hits you caused, they suffer the weapon's "Light" damage (which would be some other number depending on how you handle wounds/injuries).

- I would also ask you to relaly think about the necessity of having a bodypart/anatomical injury system. Yes it is conceptually cool, but if you are doing this with every/most models, that is quite a bit of bookkeeping. Also, how much depth is this really adding to the game? Warmachine has a similar system but it is only with warjacks, and has a tangible gameplay effect by affecting a 'jack's ability to make special attacks and spend focus. I'm not saying having such an injury system in your game wouldn't work, I just think it's important for you to keep in mind the cost/benefit ratio of actually having this as a core feature. If you you keept it straightforward but flavorful it could be great. It's the same thing with the bloodloss mechanic. How long do you plan on having one game go on for? If you are somehow tracking specific limb injuries AND bloodloss on every model, the game could really end up dragging on. It might also not feel like a dynamic firefight (which I am assuming is how the engagements are thematically supposed to be like, being cyberpunk deathmatches).

- I think it is very important that you allow players the chance to make fun and meaningful choices during the game. That is something that a lot of contemporary skirmish games (Warmahordes, Malifaux, Infinity etc) have going for them and it is very attractive. Some kind of resource mechanic, orders system, etc are all ways of adding tactical and thematic depth to the game in an uncomplicated way. The thing that worries me is that you will add these detailed injury and bloodloss systems that thematically sound cool, but will end up slowing the game down and will lead to battles being an exercise in bookkeeping more than anything else. The "cybernetically enhanced and governed by a shadowy megacorps" theme is cool and is begging to have some kind of mechanic to represent itself in-game.

I do like the token system. It would add some depth to the game and help with the feeling that the player is actually remotely controlling these warriors instead of it being "just another skirmish game". That is a problem I had envisioned before but didn't really know what to do about. At the moment I'm leaning towards calling them "overclock tokens". Here's a preliminary rundown on how I feel like implementing them.

At the start of each turn a player (I need some cool name to refer to a player, something that makes them sound like a shadowy corporate operative) gets a certain number of overclock tokens to distribute. They can be used for different things, and only need to be declared when used, so you don't need to assign them right off. One overclock token can:
1. Give a +1 bonus to defense for a turn (this one might be too good, but I want to let them boost defense somehow)
2. Add 2 dice to an attack roll
3. Get bonus action counts, doing more stuff during their activation
4. Use an advanced skill (like hacking or medicine) during their activation

One mechanic I'm thinking about is that you're allowed to spend one token per soldier for free, but if you spend more than one that soldier takes some damage for each token used (using some scale that ramps up so that after ~3 tokens you're pretty much crippling that soldier for the rest of the game) .

I don't know how familiar you are with a game called Battletech, but it's whole deal is pretty much hit location based damage. It plays pretty well and I imagine that system will be much more complicated than what I plan to implement (for damage tracking at least). I've been doing some really rough blocking out of a "character sheet" and I think that if I build them similar to Battletech I should be able to make the idea pretty digestible.

I have no objection to a "light" and "heavy" damage type system. That does make things lots simpler and it can help me from a design standpoint.

Lastly, there was something I was thinking of to make the players feel more invested. I'd like to include a career or campaign system based very closely in the rules, but that doesn't work so well if the soldiers are basically disposable, so I need some way to make the player's character unique. I was thinking of having different corporations with special rules (either list building like "all robot type soldiers are one point cheaper" or gameplay related.), and you could get "promotions" that have other benefits. This could also affect how many overclock tokens you get at the start of your turn

I know this thread's been quiet for a couple months, but I'll add my two cents. On it's face, I really like the idea of the overclock token. It's name fits thematically, and it reinforces the idea that the units are just machines under the will of the player, while having a mechanic that fits this theme.