Oh yeah btw getting set up for Lancer has led me to the conclusion that “Grid-Based tactical combat tabletop roleplaying games are the fighting games of ttrpgs”
- He/Him + They/Them
One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.
Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
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in reply to @Scampir's post:
i wanna hear more about this conclusion because I feel similarly, at least in regards to the mastery aspect on both sides of it, GM and players.
also what would you say separates them from say, the srpgs of ttrpgs
There are three points that lead me to this conclusion:
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The game has an incredible amount of choice that analysis and white-rooming does not perfectly prepare you for. There is a difference between understanding what a build can do and knowing how to “Pilot” it.
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The gulf between players who are engaged (reading the book, doing “extra-curricular reading) and players who want to be taught how to play the game is huge and either experience gives a totally different impression of the game.
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The community and engaging with the information it generates is an incredibly important resource for the game.
How do you get the equivalent of an Arc System Works game like Guilty Gear's "Stylish Mode" versus "Technical Mode" without limiting player agency?
It's an interesting question. I assume you mean you want both to coexist in the same game?
Yeah, guilty gear does it in a way that I found super approachable as someone who doesn't really play fighting games, where I could play with stylish against someone using technical controls and have it work nicely (I won a few rounds and maybe one game)
Yeah I had to look it up to get what you mean, haha. It's a really cool idea! Love to see that in games.
I think the question resides in which parts you want to "automate" - like in a fighting game like GG the "hard" part that a stylish mode is trying to replicate is execution (button combos, auto-block, etc).
In a Big Grid Based Tactics Game™️ I would imagine it would be something that sands down all of the big picklist-stuff into "you pick the easy version and go". Not just pre-selected feats/traits/merits/benefits/whatever the fuck, like replacing things entirely with something else semi-asymmetrically, like you have Stylish Wizard vs Technical Wizard balanced against each other, where TW is technically a touch more powerful but in a way that requires more setup and thought.
I think this is what 5E was aiming for by making feats optional and sanding down a lot of the math but it didn't have the conviction behind that decision to carry it anywhere useful.
Yeah, I definitely agree that the technical one has to be slightly advantaged (even 60-40 over the stylish alternative) so that the min-maxing number crunchers won't just go for the easier to consider option all the time
One thing I had seen previously on here was a basketball tactics game where the mechanics of reaching the goals (passing, shooting, etc) were represented geometrically instead of arithmetically. It really reframed how I think about game mechanics because my history is in tactics and numbers like you mentioned.
Being able to rely on geometries and pattern recognition seems like a potential way to simplify the solution space without necessarily sanding off too many of the edges. To some extent, we're already doing this by playing in quantized grids rather than just using strict measurements for everything
Pretty much. I mean I have Many Thoughts about simplifying the tactical space in general (most of which involve "get rid of 90% of the numbers", which is what I try to do in most of my games). A technical/stylish split without making stylish feel like the 5E fighter or something is the really tough part.
https://cohost.org/eaves/post/1200356-hmm-i-seem-to-be-de here's the cool geometric game I was talking about
Thinking back on this, if you could play a tactics game in plain language (without specifying amounts of squares, range, or without keywords) but still retain all the outputs, that might be comparable in terms of design. No clue on the outcome.
Yeah this almost feels like "what if you applied FitD or PbtA rules to combat in DnD or Pathfinder," if I understand you correctly. If so, that would probably work at some tables, but might feel like the impact gets a bit glossed over depending on the players and GM
Yeah I think that the board game state “I move up 5 spaces” stuff is still intuitive but when you have to get caught up in explicit action limits and options it’s overwhelming. It’s like, giving everyone bulrush or grappling at level 1 is going to overload them. If you clarify that being untrained in those things delimits them to some kind of upgrade, I wonder how that would go over at the table.
I mean if you ignore the range bit this is almost basically LUMEN (and it's good)
Pilot turns on their mech, this music sting plays.
https://youtu.be/lsfhADiaP5E