This Thread Helped Me Design My First Game. Thanks Guys!

This thread helped me design my first game. Thanks guys!

I'm working on a Wild West/Horror fusion RPG that uses playing cards instead of dice. The main conflict resolution system has The Dealer (GM) lay out 2 or more cards face-up and the final card face-down to represent the difficulty of the action. This is a Challenge Hand!

The Player then must choose cards from their hand to beat the Challenge Hand. Only there are a few obstacles in their way:

1. How many cards the Player can choose is restricted by how they're handling the situation. Are they bashing down a door? That's Strength, aka Clubs. Say the Player's Character has a Clubs of 3. They can only play up to 3 cards to beat the Challenge Hand!

2. The suit of the highest card the Player chooses must match how they're handling thr Challenge Hand. In the aforementioned example, that would mean the highest card the Player chooses from their hand would have to be a Clubs card. Spades are wild-cards in this system so those can be used in place of the required suit if necessary.

3. Because the last card in the Challenge Hand is face-down, the Player only has partial information of the score they need to beat the Challenge Hand. It could be anywhere from +2 to +11 more than the face-up cards show!

4. Players don't get to refill their hand of cards back to 6 until their hand is empty! This means the Player will occasionally have to face a Challenge Hand with very few cards in hand. This creates intense situations where players really have to cross their fingers and pray that the face-down card in a Challenge Hand is low.

So Challenge Hands use both the partial information from face-up vs face-down cards, as well as the extra values a card can have instead of dice, namely the suit.

I've also got additional mechanics that tie into other points mentioned in this post, like using the cards in character creation to determine what personality traits a Character has through a large random table, but I've gone on long enough for one post.

Just wanted to say thanks to the people I'm rebloging and share what I've done with their ideas!

Ultimately an RPG that uses playing cards as a randomizer but doesn't actually utilize the cards for. You know. The things that cards can do. Is just using them as a fancy, weirdly shaped die.

A few things that cards can do that dice can't:

You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.

You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.

You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.

There's suits as an added bit of information that can be utilized for some mechanics. Maybe matching suit with an action type results in an extra benefit?

I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.

Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.

Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.

Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.

And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.

All good points here, but I also wanted to add on that there has been some flanderization of this nugget of advice. I remember when this hack was first being passed around, it was a much more nuanced take. It was something along the lines of "if you have a riddle or puzzle and if the Players devise a reasonable solution that was not your intended answer, reward their problem solving and let them pass".

Somewhere along the dreaded content creation chain it was warped into the subject of your post. But it wasn't always that way. At one point, it was just applying the rule of cool to puzzles.

My least favourite GMing "hack" that gets passed around is "make puzzles/riddles with no fixed answer, and then whatever answer the players guess, make that the right answer."

If the game I'm running is going to have riddles, it's because I have players at the table who... like riddles? And for those players, the fun of a riddle is the moment where it clicks and you get the satisfaction of figuring it out. Which just isn't likely to happen if the riddle is just some vague, evocative nonsense that validates whatever guess they make.

So, presumably, this hack is for making riddles for a table full of only people who do not like riddles. Which invites the question, "why are you making riddles for a table full of only people who do not like riddles?" Do you just feel obligated to?

I guess if so, then here is my hack for you: I absolve you. You are no longer obligated to include riddles in your game of people who don't like them. Go forth, my child, and riddle no more.

Finally playing Elden Ring and wow it has exceeded my expectations as a designer. From the ways the game handles difficulty scaling with summoning ashes, its diverse methods of player expression via a more comprehensive magic system, and the map design all have me impressed.

But I've got one (singular) thorn in my side about Elden Ring that has made me think about the pros and cons of... prose and cons.

So, From Software games have a reputation for cryptic lore veiled behind equally cryptic prose, usually squirreled away in item descriptions. In past From Software games, this has mostly been an opt-in experience for Players. Want to dive into analyzing that prose to find some interesting world building nuggets? Knock yourself out. Think that's too much work? That's fine too! Since past From Software titles are linear experiences with minimal narrative player choice, one could ignore the prose-veiled lore and just enjoy the game from a mechanical and power fantasy perspective.

But just like Elden Ring is different from past From Software games in a myriad of other ways, Elden Ring is different in this regard too. On one hand, the open world nature of the game helps couch this prose in a more intense sense of discovery. Instead of walking down a fairly narrow exploration space and then being delivered these nuggets of lore, you (the player) are actively venturing out to a location because it looks interesting to you. Therefore, there's a sense of personal investment in what you find there and what you learn! And that's really cool!

But on the other hand, From Software's tendency to veil its lore in this way can sometimes work against Elden Ring's nareative design. Specifically when what you find is a who and not a what. Sometimes those NPCs you meet will want something of you that requires you to make a choice between people, factions, or even cosmic powers in the world. Now of course in any story there is bound to be hidden information to the Player, but due to how From Software lore is presented, it can be difficult for a Player to make an informed choice about the actions their character is taking.

This can lead to situations where an NPC attempts to con a Player or undermine their belief in a faction in the lands between. But due to the cryptic nature of Elden Ring's prose, these important decisions can go right over a Player's head! And if the Player doesn't know what they're getting themselves into, they might feel confused or even cheated when their character does something that doesn't match the Player's expectation of how their Character has acted thus far.

For some Players, this could manifest as the Player being ambivalent and not particularly invested in the Characters within the story. But overall this is a minor bump in an otherwise pretty fantastic game, and I wouldn't be surprised if I received comments saying that this Player experience absolutely didn't happen to others.

The easiest way to fix this would simply to be a modicum more transparent to the Player about the choice they are about to make once said choice is in front of them. That way, Elden Ring could throw as much cryptic prose as they wanted at the Player, and then when it becomes decision time, the curtain could be pulled back juuuust a little bit to give the Players key context to what their deciding to do with their character.

Hell, doing this could even expand the design space From Software has to work with regarding their quest lines! It could allow for more meaningful and interesting narrative choices on the Player's part to foster further replayability.

i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back

Solving this exact design problem is why I've been toying with the idea of a GM-less horror game where the details of the monster are revealed via playing cards as the players encounter the monster in increasingly dire situations.

The card system would be inspired by Sleepaway's Lindworm events, but each encounter would then be logged into a Monster Sheet that documents what the players have learned about the monster so far.

if you want to make your players roleplay out the process of trying things on the monster to learn its weaknesses in a challenge game, it behooves you to invent a monster they don't know about.

them playing dumb until you arbitrarily decide they've experimented enough to be allowed to try what everyone knew was the correct answer going in is not a satisfying play experience for anyone