Incline One fell swoop or how to fix multiple fantasy cRPG problems...

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

i am not telling to make everything super clumsy i am telling about diversify a little the system to add depth... Divinity original sin 2 example but even avernum have actually a lovely thing for loot... you stumble in a rich room for nobles and you can gather gold cup,plates or even paintings that are valuable...

This is enrich the deph of a title and get rid of that gamey feel... like for example diversify the coins presented as solution for weight of coins...
To me help much more to immerse myself and roleplay in that world.. we are talking about roleplay games after all....A credible world is amazing in an rpg...

Kills the fun?: Not quite... fun is subjective and i usually don't find fun in the american meaning such as,,,Mindless fun.

I always disliked how adventurers in rpg are walking armories... Is a thing that can easily be solved implementing a nice safe house or cart mechanic....

But i guess i am too much complicated.

 

[Tavernking]

Everyone in this thread is fucking retarded and the autism is blowing me away here

aspiring game developer

So you want to make games but you think it is autistic to discuss game mechanics? ok.

Bitch you don't know how to make a game

None of this fluff in this thread is going to be used in any practical sense by anyone worth mentioning. It is cluttering my forum.

 

[Ismaul]

I propose that wizards have to prepare and study their (non-vanishing) spell tomes every time they change their spell loadout (which requires making camp) - individual spells may take different amount of "memory space" rather than having definite tiers and of course, unlike full Vancian silliness, they don't need to prepare fireball twice in order to cast it twice.

lul D&D 5E says hi

 

[DraQ]

It only stands to reason that if magic is fluffed to be some highly complex thing requiring pages of procedure and notes, and you're learning new ones in a relatively short time frame, you'd need to keep the tomes around as reference. Once the relevant spell book is lost, so is the spell. And if max capacity for castable spells is limited by your strength, more armour = less spellcasting versatility.

And it's all beautifully implicit as well as pretty much agnostic in regards to the setting, type of magic and type of armour (it's easy to handwave armour blocking the use of magic because reasons, but it's hard to do it in a way that can be applied to all kinds of arcane magic and work for all sorts of armour without at least stretching credibility - especially if you also don't want to force all your wizards to cast buttnaked).

To prevent fireball spam, cast off stamina as suggested above and tie stamina to END/CON. Regenerate stamina to full per combat encounter to ease better encounter design and to sidestep the rest spam circus.

Two points:

• Spamming something being worthwhile generally indicates some sort of systemic problem. Whatever means of offence you use should either be effective and achieve whatever was their purpose or ineffective in which case spam is not likely to help. If an attack is spammable because the effect is cumulative then you likely have badly designed ablative damage model (few things actually work in ablative manner, even fewer of those have any relevance to fantasy setting or personal combat), if an attack is spammable because it's probabilistic then you'd likely benefit from finer control or could tweak your effect model (like AoE fireball that just deals damage and vanishes VS AoE fireball that leaves fiery hellscape in its wake). Spamming sword against a knight shouldn't have much chance of success if it has proven ineffective because of armour, casting fireball once should either leave molten gobs of flesh that won't need second fireball even if they are still screaming, and enemies that are relatively unscathed because they have either found sufficient cover or for whatever reasons are not particularly inconvenienced by fireballs and against whom recasting would be suicidal (as the enemy will take time to respond in actually effective manner). Of course, you can still spam your fireball to suppress or to take out a large target with complex damage model (think ship), but the former isn't particularly OP, while the latter isn't really a spam and might benefit more from more focused attacks anyway.
• The problems with spamming rest are caused by it being easy and other mechanics being forgiving. If defensible spots are few and far in between while getting ambushed while camping in bad spot, especially when exhausted is disastrous, it's easy to stop any progress that would result from rest spam. If time isn't free (supplies, timed quests) that could be easily made into outright losing strategy.

To balance wizardry a bit in context of this, introduce a new resource: Study Points. Levelling up increases the study point cap, and allows you to select spells known from among equipped spell books by allocation of these points. An optional way to make this mechanic more fluffy and simulate study is if you select spells known upon next level up from currently available spell books instead. Different spells have different costs in Study Points, and if spells are lost either from selling/discarding the books - optionally giving tomes a durability that can be reduced by damage to caster, esp. fire damage - the Study Points thus freed up will slowly regenerate back up to Study Point cap. Edit: In case it wasn't clear, selected spells will in practice reduce remaining capacity, this capacity only being regained when these spells are no longer being studied, and thus no longer castable. This could actually be a supplemental way to learn fighting techniques as well, to study a manual of martial arts - of course keeping techniques learned even if the manual is lost.

I have mentioned memory capacity in the OP. If the learned spells are to not persist on their own, then casting them successfully should count as refresher as well. Memorized but non-refreshed spells could degrade by reducing in effectiveness or by adding progressively growing chance of failure.
For fighters and other physical I would in most cases not learn from books and not have training require any physical repositories of knowledge (they already have to lug arms and armour after all), but they could similarly allocate training to particular techniques they know.
Alternatively physical professionals could achieve familiarity with their tools and weapons without which they would suffer penalties (so picking enemy's awesome sword mid combat and fighting with it wouldn't necessarily be the best idea) - this familiarity could also use memory attribute for both duration and number of items to attune to (so a high memory warrior would benefit from switching between a number of weapons depending on circumstances).

I don't like the idea of tying spell failure chance to DEX. Firstly, because I don't like gesture casting for fluff reasons. This is just a personal preference. More importantly, though, I think the whole concept of spell failure chance is unnecessary. Magic is supposed to be a little different. Wizards shouldn't be fumbling their casts all the time like some idiot until they've pumped up their attributes. So why would a mage want to drop points in DEX? Well, if spell book degradation by damage is a thing, you're certain to want to avoid getting hit to keep your spells as long as possible.

I wouldn't tie casting failure to DEX either, at least in normal circumstances - DEX could well reduce certain kinds of situational penalties. However DEX should definitely affect casting speed. Somatic components have a lot value, though - they naturally introduce spell/weapon/shield tradeoffs and it's kind of expected that wizard will have to wave their hands around when casting (it helps against stealth casting as well). Not ALL spells should require somatic components, but most should.

As for avoiding tomes being loaded on a pack horse character it could always be fluffed as mages jealously guarding their secrets. Maybe they will only share them with other adherents of the same magic school? But as has been pointed out, dumping all the literature on another character represents tradeoffs for that character as well, so it doesn't really have to be a problem.

Why not allow loading tomes wherever player wants? They still won't have them at hand during dungeon crawls and even if you account for spell tomes being both risky to steal and difficult to pawn off you still have the possibility of something attacking or stealing the horses or an unscrupulous rival specifically after the knowledge.

 

[DraQ]

Everyone in this thread is fucking retarded and the autism is blowing me away here

aspiring game developer

So you want to make games but you think it is autistic to discuss game mechanics? ok.

Bitch you don't know how to make a game

None of this fluff in this thread is going to be used in any practical sense by anyone worth mentioning. It is cluttering my forum.

Since when it is your forum?

Joined:
Sep 1, 2017

 

[DraQ]

hand slot equipped scrolls/books are required to cast spell during combat. it would be something like weapons (can be also equivalent of unarmed spell-fighting).

That doesn't sound practical (try reading even a small scrap of paper, let alone a whole book while people are actively trying to kill you) at all and IMO would conflate wizards and warriors mechanically too much, while the point is only to make attributes generally useful, and the whole setup sensible.
There could be casting from book, but it should take massive speed penalty, so it would be limited to situations where wizard can take their time or spells that are too complex and powerful to be humanely memorizable, but those would be rare in adventuring context (note - partial memorization could be interesting).

there could be different quality of papers: better give faster casting time, more spell available, books can be limited in amount of spells to include.
there could be skill [paper maker] to create new, repair, expand with pages spell-books. and skill [ literacy?] to just nicely write new magic signs on papers.

I think it would be nice to move away from boos that do weird shit (like disappearing) and I'm not sure we really need calligraphy skill either (literacy should be pretty much required for any serious caster - whether it's sufficiently rare in the setting to justify its existence as skill is another matter - it could be interesting, but might also make quest design harder to account for players not being able to follow all kinds of paper trails).

wizard could be mechanical forced to study their spells during rests, to not went out of practice - forget how to cast particular spells. This would prevent from servant carry.

It wouldn't, unless you got out of your way to prevent it. There is nothing preventing Bob the barbarian from just dropping the sack of Willy the wizard's books at owner's feet the moment they setup camp and go about his own business. Any mechanics forcing the player to do it manually is just asinine.

 

[Excommunicator]

All the theory is good but the talk of spell tomes and different quality papers seems like complication for the sake of realism. Increased itemisation can't possibly be the answer. Whatever concerns you have about intelligence not being fully consistent would be dwarfed by the sorts of inconsistencies you'll end up with in an item-centric casting system

 

[AdolfSatan]

I disagree with Intelligence being a lost cause, it could be used to control the other stats.
My idea, is that first and foremost, it should always affect the amount of experience points the character gains, since no matter the class or profession, a smarter person will be faster to learn.

That aside, it should also put a cap on how many levels can be gained on a skillset. Say, a bard with insufficient int could be kept from learning some last level songs. Justify it either because he lacks the grey matter to comprehend the intricacies of such spells, or simply because he doesn't have the discipline to sit down and stay focused for a couple of hours to study. Same for the use of items of varying complexities.

Answers or options that imply cunning in dialog/choices of action might also be forbidden under certain levels of intelligence.

Naturally, as the OP pointed, that doesn't stop the player from behaving like a master strategist, but in any case, that's up to him whether he decides to actually roleplay his decisions made when creating the character.

 

[nettleflap]

I think stats and other mechanical things are means for player to role-play, not the core. First of all, no one wants to play a dumb character making mistakes intentionally so Intelligence is just a stat to change the path you want to take in the game. No path is (should be) a bad path, every has its own challenges.

And semantically there are many more mistakes in these games but in my opinion the words are only used to simplify things.

I see a lot of ignorance here regarding making game fun instead of making it a chore. Games are made to evoke a feeling, if a limit or clutter in inventory or a spell preparing mechanic breaks the immersion then I don't care if it's the most realistic system of all, it just doesn't evoke the aimed feeling in me and not fun at that point.

For me biggest problems of RPGs are:
- still insisting on using heavy RNG, lazy game design
- useless crafting systems, always cool in theory but doesn't work in practice
- lack of meaningful decision-making, which make most of what makes great RPGs great.

 

[Excommunicator]

wtf

 

[Ninjerk]

I was really looking forward to a Final Solution thread.