Intro: Keep it interesting! RPGs evolve. New games don’t just invent snazzy new mechanics; they poke deep into questions of what game-table play is about. MERC stems from author Ben Finney’s interest in the innovations of recent games, and ways to strengthen those concepts in the now-classic RPG GURPS. Broadly speaking, MERC is a set of guidelines for placing story first and making the most of gamers’ time at the table. More narrowly, it homes in on a key question at the heart of all RPGs: When should the dice be used at all, and toward what end? From the GURPS perspective, that often equates to “When should we make success checks?” The general answer…
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Game design musing: Pricing breadth in skills
If fluency in a foreign tongue costs your character 5 points, how much should fluency in ten languages cost? In the midst of recent email correspondence about ESCARGO, I’ve dredged up a game design topic long of interest to me: a decreasing cost scale for multiple instances of traits. Wait – is there some reason why ten 5-point languages should cost the PC less than 50 points? And isn’t ESCARGO all about increasing the cost for more stuff? Let me explain: Depth vs breadth Many a game designer (or just dedicated hacker) has pondered the topic of breadth vs depth in character skills. (Some of the below could be adapted…
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Game rules aren’t protected by law
Jeff Dee, RPG author and awesome gaming artist (T Bone makes Will roll, squelches further fan gushing), is also a host of The Non Prophets podcast (together with none other than fellow gaming art god Denis Loubet!) and a past semi-regular host of The Atheist Experience broadcast and podcast. Episode #616 of the latter (embedded below), titled nothing less than “The Argument from Game Design”, let Jeff put his game-design cred to work in discussing certain arcane religious arguments that compare existence to “a game”. Straying a bit from that purely religious discussion, he also made some comments of broader relevance to gaming itself, including thoughts on what makes for a…
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Dice pools vs dice plus mods
Following up on my post about The Riddle of Steel RPG, here’s a broad question for readers at large, touching on many games: What, exactly, is the appeal of the “dice pool” method of generating outcomes? I know it has a two-dimensional aspect to it, in that you can modify checks in two ways: you can both modify the “target number” that determines whether a die counts as a success, and you can modify the number of dice rolled. That sounds like it offers something richer than the classic one-dimensional, dice-roll-plus-summed-modifiers method, and I don’t yet see anything wrong with the dice pool method. But I’m curious: Do dice-pool systems establish a clear, easily-followed…
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An interesting look at The Riddle of Steel
A friendly correspondent and I were recently discussing some finer points of my Edge Protection rules for armor in GURPS, which led to a tangent about combat rules in general under another system, The Riddle of Steel. Unfortunately, I’ve only looked at that system’s “Quickstart Rules” overview and glanced through its core rule book; I haven’t played it or read it in detail, though I’ve heard many good things about it, especially the realistic feel of its signature combat system. My correspondent, Christian Rosenkjaer Andersen, was good enough to give me a sense of its flavor via a detailed description, which I thought readers in general might find interesting. With his permission, here’s one…
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Design notes: Implementing “log ST” in a game
A friendly correspondent (who, like me, is working on a home-brew game system but isn’t ready to release) asks me about ideal implementation of “log ST” in a system. Log ST is the name commonly given to a game feature that sets levels of character Strength to an exponential progression, so that every extra +1 Strength mutliplies the previous level of power by some amount. Typically, that’ll be expressed as every additional X levels of Strength multiplying lifting power by some easy-to-grasp multiple Y. An example is in the HERO System, in which every +5 Strength multiplies lifting power by 2. My reply to my correspondent largely mirrors this post,…
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Gaming notes: Playing giants in any game system
Introduction Ogres. Hulking Trolls. Tree-sized giants. Mountain-sized Jotun. If they’re defined by a size bigger than us, then for this article, they’re all giants. Because whatever the specifics, they all share one thing in common: “TARG SMASH PUNY HUMAN!” I’m liberating the Big Games notes on gaming giants from my old GULLIVER rules for GURPS, to give them a proper new home within the Diner (with a little freshening-up too, including a pinch or two of content from other sections). Although I’ve got some GURPS 4e-specific notes at the end, the general overview is useful with any game system. Yet it’s all pretty brief; sorry, I haven’t witten The Complete…
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Game design musing: Point-cost scale for stats
A post on the SJG forums: Originally Posted by DouglasCole The value of that extra level of stat/skill very much depends on what kind of challenges the PC will be facing. I don’t have any comment on attribute cost vs skill cost (not here and now, anyway), but on flat vs rising costs, DC’s wise remark above inspires the following note: Point and counterpoint I have an oddball article online that asks what would happen if skills and attributes (stats below) both used perpetually-rising costs: ESCARGO. Doing so offers all kinds of potential benefits. Yet as noted somewhere in the text, it’s only a theoretical “what if” discussion, and I’ve…
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GURPS Metric
Article by Ben Finney This document presents many of the rules in GURPS Fourth Edition that refer to measurements, and converts them to the world-standard SI (modern metric system) measurements. Article notes Attached to this page are three files: XHTML and RST (reStructuredText, given .txt extension here) files with the article content, and the license file. [Note: As of this writing, the XHTML file is unavailable; the redesigned site will not allow its upload. It will be added later if the issue is fixed.] The article is copyright Ben Finney, and is licensed to all recipients under the GNU General Public License. If you’d like to publicly comment on this…
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T Bone’s rules of dilettante game design, Part II
More navel-gazing, following an earlier inward journey of pretentious self-discovery (aka Part I). Back in the days of GURPS 3e, there were quite a few areas of rules that were “broken” – or at least problematic – in a wide range of ways. (4e is much improved in this regard!) Many gamers worked up house rules and patches to address these. I placed a big collection of my re-workings (developed with the aid of many helpful folk, especially a fellow going by the handle Dataweaver) into a big “3e overhaul” I named GULLIVER. While moving old site and GULLIVER FAQs to a new FAQ page, I extracted some “GULLIVER game…
