Set your Goals when designing a Game

The Pressure System's tenets

Pressure System State of the Union

Originally when I set out to create the Pressure System I had specific things I wanted in the game. These were my philosophies, or tenets. The game needed a certain feel to it. Ideas I always wanted out of a game.

• Intuitive Rules

• Interesting Mechanics

• Teamwork

• Fast Combat

• Tactical Combat

• Thematic Combat

• Press Your Luck

• Surprises in Play

Let's break these down, and give examples from other games. As an aside, there are a lot of concepts that exist in Tabletop Roleplaying games that I don’t go into full details explaining. If you have questions feel free to leave a comment!

Intuitive Rules

I think this is pretty intuitive actually. I don't want people constantly asking questions like "wait, how do I do that again?". A simple activity shouldn’t require 3-5 moving parts or steps. The rules should feel good.

An example of an intuitive rule for me is rolling a d20 and getting over a Difficulty Challenge. This is because I've been doing this since I was 10 years old. But it's also very simplistic.

Another example of an intuitive rule is that armor has X amount of uses. Instead of an Armor Class (AC) being this thing that changes the chances of monster’s ability to hit you. Games like The Black Hack will allow armor to only take X amount of hits. The player also gets to decide which hits to burn this precious resource on.

Things that were not intuitive to me? The FATE system's action choices. I eventually understood them, but the idea of Overcome and Create an Advantage were very hard to wrap my d20 brain around. I'd never seen a system like it, and the rhythm of play was so foreign. I will say that the resolution system of rolling FUDGE dice made perfect sense, and had a nice statistical spread to it. Rolling 4 dice and looking at +’s or -‘s is very fast.

Interesting Mechanics

This can sometimes be the antithesis of Intuitive Rules. Trying to find a happy marriage between Interesting Mechanics and Intuition has been my biggest challenge. What is the idea of interesting to me? Usually, its the idea that the mechanic itself feels like what its trying to simulate.

Going back to The Black Hack and their armor system. What happens when you run out of your Armor Value? Well, you need to fix it. This is such a cool system. In essence let's look at the different types of armor and their values

The leather has an AV of 2. This means that you can only ever take 2 hits with it before you fix it. These hits, are represented by actual d6s on your character sheet. In order to get them back on your character sheet you have to roll them while resting and get above a 2.

If you have platemail, you have an AV of 4. You can take FOUR hits, which is awesome. But to fix it you have to roll those four d6s and get 5s and 6s! This is so so so thematic. Heavy armor will help you more, but its also hard to just fix out on the road at a campfire. Wonderful mechanic. Also, its important to mention that in combat, this mechanic is just moving a d6 off your character sheet when you don’t want to take damage. That means its so FAST in play. You might just have to remind yourself how to get the d6s back out of combat when resting. Also wonderful.

Non interesting mechanic? Probably your Armor Class just moving up your DC to be hit. That's kind of boring, and it leads to more missed hits which is also not very dramatic. I'd rather armor be used to absorb the damage that does hit you.

Teamwork

This is paramount to the game system I want to create. I always loved those X-men and Avenger moments. When Wolverine gets tossed like a missile by Colossal, or when Captain America used his shield to reflect Ironman’s blasts into the vital bits of a bad guy. These are such badass moments, and the individuals couldn't of solved the problem alone. This is actually what the Create an Advantage mechanic in the FATE system was for. In FATE it just felt way too exploitable to me? Or it took me out of the game flow based solely on the way my table was playing that game (as newbies to the system). We probably failed as players, but I tip my hat to the system building that into the game.

In most games Teamwork is a part of the storytelling, and how people roleplay their characters. It might be a part of the design when you talk about healing or certain abjuration style magical buffs that you can put on friends. The Bardic Inspiration is probably a concept for Teamwork in the 5th Edition D&D game.

A short coming to the concept of Teamwork is the Help/Aid action. A lot of games will allow a player to sacrifice their whole turn to just give another player Advantage or +1 to their turn. This just never felt satisfying to me. It doesn’t feel like the person giving up their turn is actually doing anything.

I think one of my favorite forms of Teamwork was the 4th Edition D&D Warlord. The Leader Classes in that system truly felt like they manipulated the battlefield. The problem with this was that “teamwork” was designed for 1 person in the party to take it on as a role to help the others.

So how do you mechanically build in Teamwork into a system? That will be something that we will be discussing in follow up blogs.

Fast Combat

There is nothing worse than downtime. Especially in a Tabletop RPG. You are supposed to be engrossed in the story, and feeling the threat. Then your friend takes 15 minutes to look up a spell. They then have an argument with your GM on the use case. Then the fighter says they want to grapple someone and the whole table groans as the GM has to pull out their DMG. Its the absolute worst.

Turns need to be fast fast fast. I think that most games accomplish this by limiting optionality of the players. Shadowdark and Knave both are going to use highly familiar attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma. They will also just say "you get to attack, how are you going to attack?". The Optionality is limited with a lot of these OSR style games, meaning that you just attack. The emphasis is placed more on the description. The "HOW" they want to attack. This is where the roleplaying comes in, and the observation of the environment. The GM then has the option to grant a benefit to the attack or damage based on the narrative.

So is that the trade off? You have to simplify actions to their complete basics so that people don't have cognitive load during their turns? I'm not sure on that. Dragonbane adds in a few more actions, and I found that their system was still quite fast. This could be because all of those actions are quite intuitive also.

Tactical Combat

Let me describe to you my least favorite encounters. Player goes. They swing. They hit or miss. Next player does the same. Monster goes. They swing. They hit or miss. Damage is happening on both sides. The End.

This is misery. So what starts to make combat tactical? Is it completely on the Game Master to be able to design interesting encounters? I don't think so. That would be a huge disservice to a lot of aspiring new GMs out there. They would never try the hobby if every encounter was relying on them to tap into some depth of creativity to make it fun.

In my opinion, Fourth Edition D&D was high level tactical combat. Characters were given powers at 1st level that had tactical decisions baked into them. You had an attack that slid someone away from you. You had an attack that would do more if you were near an ally. These sorts of things forced tactical decisions to occur. But, is that the only way to create a tactical feel? Causing the battlefield to become a chess board that is about maximizing efficiency on your turn? I also don't think this is the case.

Let’s look at a game like Band of Blades. This is a more narrative game, but the focus of an action was on the concepts of Position and Effect. In Band of Blades whenever you take any action there are 3 positions you could be in: Controlled, Risky, and Desperate. These positions would determine the threat or damage you would take if you failed your action. Its the risk of your action. The Effect came in three states as well: Great, Standard, Limited. This would let you know how much damage or change you made in what you were trying to do. You combine this with the ability to take group actions, or use your stats appropriately and you have a highly tactical feel to the way you are narrating your actions.

Thematic Combat

After reading the last section on Tactical Combat, you can probably already see what happens. It tends to be that the more narrative combat can be, the more thematic it becomes. This is not always the case, but in my experience the more you are thinking like chess the less the theme is going to come through. Now, the big ingredient that can be added in to improve this? Drama. If you are in a chess match and the stakes are high enough, death is practically immanent, then the theme starts to pop.

In my opinion, theme is going to come from monster design. I feel like the way a monster is acting, moving, the powers that it has, the vulnerabilities/resistances that it has are going to bring out theme in the combat. Especially if you are trying to keep the game tactical in nature.

The other thing that can really bring out theme is environment. The environment needs to take a role. Either actual things that exist, or Aspects that can be tapped into like FATE uses.

Press Your Luck

This is one of my favorite game mechanics in board gaming. I think that its important that as you increase your risk you increase your potential payoff. I think that games that have a static game state get too repetitive in nature. Worse, they also get solvable. If that is the game you like then play board games more.

I remember that in 3rd Edition D&D it was really fun to customize your character with all sorts of feats as you leveled, but I found that the further you got away from 1st level, the more specialized you were in doing 1 specific thing. This led to you doing that same thing, over and over. There was no incentive in the game mechanics to do anything else. Other actions would of been suboptimal, so why perform them? Also, those actions were high value. So high value reliable actions led me to feel very bored.

If I'm going to take a risk and do something out of my gameplay loop there needs to be an incentive. Forbidden Lands starts to add this into their gameplay in an interesting way. Its a d6 dice pool game, where the dice you are rolling might represent your skill, your weapons, or your gear. If need to roll 6s. The more 6s the better. Well, if you roll your pool the first time the 1s you roll mean nothing. BUT, you can push your self and re-roll any of the dice that are not 6s or 1s. However, once you do this all the 1s count as damage to your weapons or gear. This is fun little risk/reward mechanic! That is also thematic in nature.

There are probably lots of different ways to build this into a system, but to me the questions are:

• Is this built into the core resolution system?

• Is this built into the character design / specific actions?

• Is this built into the monster design?

• D: all of the above?

Surprises in Play

I don’t want to see a Troll anymore and immediately start lighting my torch. There are certain tropes in fantasy games that are still fun. Its always fun to see familiar things and have a sense that you “know what to do”. But sometimes these days in games it doesn’t feel earned. Look at games like Dark Souls. I believe they became popular because they brought about a new level of challenge, and satisfaction from figuring out what was needed to accomplish the goal. It just feels better to earn the victory.

Surprises to me are mostly in the design of monsters. I want there to be different effects, actions, vulnerabilities, etc. I think that Dragonbane does a great job with it’s Monster design. Not only are monsters crazy tough (they always hit and can’t be parried), but they also have these random action tables with very powerful abilities. It makes them more interesting, and even the GM doesn’t necessarily know what is going to happen next.

Fourth Edition and PF2 do a great job with their monster design as well. Lots of things just happen. No saving throw, you just take X damage or you get X condition. I think that makes things more real and scary. So I’ll take a lot of notes from those sorts of games for designing my scary baddies.

Let’s get to designing

At this point hopefully we have a good shared idea of the tenets of the Pressure System. It’s time to analyze some math and resolution systems for TTRPGs in our next blog.