[MADcorp / world gone weird] how to make a monster
Marshall Burns:
Yeah, feedback, definitely. "It doesn't work" isn't enough information. Let's say the monster is the Nemian Lion, with its impenetrable hide. We don't call it the Nemian Lion, of course, but as Ref I know that's what it really is. So, when somebody attacks it with an edged weapon, we skip the HIT roll and I go straight to describing how the blade just glances away from its hide with a clang (and probably have them roll for Wear & Tear). If the players know their mythology, then they'll figure out what the lion is, and remember that blunt force trauma can hurt it -- and if someone attacks with a blunt weapon, we'll roll to HIT and damage as normal. Other than that, there would be some clues somewhere -- tavern gossip, whatever. Barring even that, they can try other modes of attack. Some of these will require judgment calls on the Ref's part -- will dynamite hurt it? My call would be yes.
I gotta think about what mechanical constraints I have to keep in mind. I know for sure that I need to be able to classify monsters by type -- undead, mechanical, abomination, etc. -- because those terms matter for certain rules. I also need to be able to classify them by threat level, to have a way to determine how much THREAT it costs to bring a monster into play. And I have to be able to generate them randomly. I'll have to think of what else.
Marshall Burns:
Quote from: David Berg on January 14, 2012, 11:41:38 PM
Ye average videogame lets you fail, learn, and try again via multiple lives. Ye average tabletop RPG needs another method, such as multiple escapes. "Get near death, run away, heal" has been the interlude in most of my learning-and-experimenting monster battles. Despite multiple characters, I get the impression that the experiment-and-learn process in MADcorp is probably a better fit for multiple tries per character, right?
Oh, this: I can't parse that last sentence. Can you explain a little?
The standard operating procedure for MADcorp is to first observe if possible, then try something (ideally in a way that puts interns at risks instead of your main dudes), and if it doesn't work then make a choice between gettin' out while the gettin's good, or trying another possibility. (And, often, it's not about killing a monster so much as neutralizing it. If you can seal it off in a corridor where it can't get you, then that's just as good.) But as far as future re-tries, many times people don't even bother with it unless they're convinced they've got a working solution now. Otherwise, their attitude is generally one of, "fuck that giant haunted boiler that ate my dude and we could see him burning alive through the grate. We are staying the fuck out of that house." And I'm okay with that.
JoyWriter:
I am seriously interested in getting this sorted out, but I've got some ideas on other stuff first: I noticed your using one of my pet peeves; "margin of success". You can replace that with just reading the number on the dice as your success level and saying "sorry, that's too awesome for that guy to do" when they roll a 15 with a "hit 5" guy. Then busting over your score by 5 can always implicitly be being cocky in some way.
Downside of this? People will immediately realise that their guy is never going to be awesome straight off the bat. But more importantly this mucks up the way success interacts with the initiative system; at the mo you resolve actions from highest successful roll, meaning that crap actions by skilled people generally go first. I can see how this could be pretty awesome, although you could change it to doing them in ascending order "to finish with a bang"/"because maybe you were rushing it" and tiebreaking by stat size.
Anyway onto monsters:
It seems like the things your rules need to assure about monsters is that they are learnable; that they have signs to their weird behaviour. Secondly players have to be able to implement that knowledge to survive it. So you need to block off everything that puts them "out of reach" or unavoidable.
How to do this?
Well maybe start off with a creature type, and a rough starting role for it (eg pit lurker/dead end of doom, slow juggernaught pursuer, gatekeeper, long term harasser, custom enforcer(=act the right way and it will ignore you), straggler muncher, etc), the game dark souls is great for getting you into the mood for making these.Then you could have categories of questions to ask about it, that lead to suggesting powers, then you could compare those powers to a list of checks made from playtesting, to avoid making it too powerful etc.Then you could go from powers to signs of those powers, and build the environment and appearance of the creature from there. Also try and imagine it "in repose", which is the rule Ray Harryhausen used and Guillermo del Torro uses for making monsters seem more physically believable.Then you'd work backwards from any other distinctive features of the creature, removing red herrings by adjusting or adding powers to fit the appearance you've imagined.
That way you'd build creatures that are obvious, readable, that don't telegraph powers they don't have, and do show signs of the ones they do have. Hopefully that would help.. The roles would be there just to start you off making them something that players can orient too, even if they don't know precisely how to solve them. They could easily blur from the role over the course of development, but that could give you a starting point at least.
Your dungeon is not composed of encounter balance, but does have an intuitive sort of clock, that presumably players will get used to dealing with: They'll start to get a feel for it. So what you probably need for the threat side of things is a judgement system, so that after making a monster, a ref can reasonably accurately assign it the right threat rating, not for balance reasons, (because making it a coherent encounter is handled separately by the stuff above) but so that it fits the rhythm of the dungeon that your threat mechanic produces. Also I think judgements at the end is the only way you can produce a coherent picture; powers don't add arithmetically to each other, so having three powers of supposed threat 1 might lead to a very dangerous creature if they all work together, or to a not very dangerous one if they contradict each other. Actually producing threat values from specific components would be much heavier maths!
Perhaps you could look at what distinguishes the monster from the critters, what are the differences in how people are supposed to deal with them?
The bit then that players will need help with, but that I'm not sure how you can assure with the rules:
Is it focused/distinctive as a concept? Does it behave differently and unexpectedly? Is it unnerving or darkly funny?
Maybe just a really solid set of examples?
Marshall Burns:
Hey Josh,
The 'margin' *is* just the number on the die, at least until hit by blocking. And that other thing has me confused. I think you're confused about how modifiers work? Maybe? They're not like d20, they're basically re-rolls.
Now, as for this stuff about monsters, this is gold. I gotta spend some time thinking it over, but I think I'm on the verge of a methodology.
JoyWriter:
Ah for some unknown reason I thought you were subtracting the stat from the roll and comparing it to a table, which does have an interesting interaction with "highest roll goes first". Which is what I thought you were doing! Disregard the first bit.
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