cass

assigned catgirl at birth

white, early twenties, disabled, lesbian, plural. a cat that just so happens to be a person. sister of @yrgirlkv. makes things, sometimes.


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yrgirlkv
@yrgirlkv

hi. i'm tired; this one's off the cuff. for a while now i've been working on an expansion to Songs for the Dusk called Daybreak, which is the high-octane expac that leans into the more combat-oriented sci-fi that inspired the game. to that end i have been thinking a lot about how to integrate more video game-esque mechanics into FITD-style games.

buffs and debuffs: the timing problem

this is, all told, a surprisingly tough challenge! one of the main things i've been struggling with (and this applies to narrative games more broadly) is the question of dealing with time. in a video game you have a computer clock to manage timings, but even for something like dnd, combat is a weird separate subsystem that functions by its own timing rules which can anchor things like buffs, debuffs, damage-over-time effects, and more. narrative games, generally speaking, don't have that; forged in the dark games explicitly call out that rolls can expand and contract in scope specifically according to what the table thinks is interesting and nothing else. you can roll COMPEL to see how a single sentence in a deeply emotional conversation lands, or you can do the same to see how a series of interviews lasting days or weeks go. how do you time buffs and debuffs when this is the case?

i haven't found a single answer, honestly, but here's some examples i've come up with that i can talk about.

(note for daybreakheads: ability names and functions may not be final, and will probably be slightly edited anyway either for clarity or because i like keeping secrets.)

example abilities

Call the Haunted: You can spend 2 stress to conjure a shadowy copy of an item from an adversary's past. Anybody using the item has +1 impact against the adversary. You can only maintain one copy at a time, and if you take harm, you lose focus and the copy dissipates into smoke.

this one's kind of weird because it's tied to equipment, but i think it still serves as a decent example of the technique i've largely settled on: tying timing to mechanical triggers. in this case it's harm, obviously, but you can develop similar approaches both through the use of chance-based triggers:

This effect fades if you overload stress or [apply it to] a new target.

or by triggers under the player's control:

You cannot push yourself or spend harmony while maintaining [this effect].

triggers also don't have to be active; here's another example:

Feathers of a Fading Time: When you have a light load, you can generate a pair of flight-capable wings. Your flight speed is about the same as your ground speed.

this sort of passive, state-based trigger is also a solid choice. load isn't always the best lever for these types of abilities (the playbook this ability is from happens to be able to change load mid-mission, but of course not every playbook will), but i think the principle works.

potential pitfalls

the main thing with regards to these triggers is that you have to be careful about locking off resources because having resources available is one of the key factors that encourages a player to act. the example i cited above, about players not being able to push themselves while holding on an effect, is risky as-is, and i've already reworked an ability which relied on failed rolls to deactivate the effect. after all, if failing a roll could stop your cool debuff, then the pressure's on not to risk failing the roll in the first place.

or, for another example, consider the following ability, which i made up off the dome while writing this post:

While you still have your melody(/special armor/etc.), take +1d to [one action]. Once you've spent it, take +1d to [a different action].

it's a fun idea, and the different bonuses allows for some level of control over the above problem -- there's incentive both to keep and to spend the melody. but, of course, the skills have to be chosen well, because if one action is flat-out more useful than another, then this ability falls flat. +1d is probably far too strong for an ability like this, honestly, but the principle applies regardless of what the benefits are: if they're not balanced, the ability doesn't work. i'm actually curious if people have takes on a design like this; how would you like to play with it?

damage and defense

video games focus very heavily on combat; i try to make games that don't treat combat in a hugely different way than other parts of the game. this can make translating certain other aspects of games to tabletop systems difficult.

damage, or at the very least direct damage, is one of the easier ones to translate: increased effect in fitd. i struggled with the idea of elemental damage or elemental resistances for a bit, but TRPGs have a human interpreter, so you can just integrate that stuff directly into the ability text:

Your magic is associated with the element of water. Take +1 effect when wielding any of your magic against salamanders.

this one's a little vague because water's "elemental" benefits are obvious, but you can work it out for more esoteric systems too:

Your magic is cursed. Take +1 effect when wielding any of your magic against industrial systems or magic developed in urban environments.

apply similar effects to resistances (+1d, -1 stress to resist, etc.) if you're looking to build something defensive instead. it took me a minute to remember these because i'm used to these sort of contextual benefits arising from fictional circumstances rather than something innate to the ability or its wielder (when you face a small gang in melee, when you're working alongside a teammate, when you're using a signature piece of equipment, etc.), but they're essentially the same, mechanically speaking.

damage over time and debuffs have both been tougher to figure out. the way i've solved buffs and offensive debuffs before has been by tying them to player actions, so they can fade based on those same actions or states. defensive debuffs (aka those which reduce an enemy's effectiveness at acting on you) and damage over time effects both struggle with the same problem, which is present in a lot of indie games: the asymmetry between player and NPC rules. forged in the dark games don't have NPC attacks or NPC stats; they're driven by consequences, which sometimes are a direct result of acting on an NPC and sometimes not. this slippage is useful, especially to explain dice randomness and bad outcomes which aren't explained by skill, but it also means that you can struggle with abilities like the following:

Gain +1d to resistance rolls against the adversary affected by this ability.

this might seem straightforward, but can get confusing quick. if an adversary shoots a magic beam at you, then this obviously applies. what if the adversary picks up a rock and throws it at you? what if they manage to trick a third party into dealing with you for them, or use malicious rumors and social consequences to hurt you? what if they have an automated defense system that tries to hurt you without the adversary's knowledge that it's you specifically? these sort of interpretive ambiguities make huge differences in the power of these abilities. there are ways to solve for them, usually by establishing greater specificity:

Render a poisonous curse upon this adversary; gain +1d to resistance direct physical consequences they inflict on you.

or

Gain +1d to resist any social consequences this adversary attempts to inflict upon you.

but i can imagine situations where even these become ambiguous. damage over time effects struggle with a similar version of this problem, following on from our timing issue up above. how often should a damage over time effect fire? you can't rely on time in and of itself, because time is fluid in a narrative; you can't rely on "whenever this character takes an action" triggers, because what counts as "taking an action" is ambiguous when a character has no mechanics. even the question of damage is ambiguous; most of the buffs i've set up earlier don't operate directly on something like an HP bar, so what's a debuff going to operate on?

tell me yr thoughts

unlike my last tabletalk post, i have only the seeds of ideas here, rather than tips or guidelines. these are tricks that've worked for my drafts so far, but i haven't had the chance to test them out myself. i'd love to hear new ideas or suggestions, so if you have 'em, share 'em!


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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

I'm much more of a player of TTRPGs than I'm making them (but I do make videogames), so I might be just completely off here.

I think you're right in that there's a big problem with how the elements you want to include in your expansion mesh with the basic premise of Forged in the Dark Games. What I'm curious about though, is why you want to add these specific elements and what you, in your eyes, the ideal playing experience would be in the end.

I have some thoughts about this topic in general, because I've been fiddling around with ideas on how to translate some parts of Fitd games into a videogame, but I don't want to go on a whole rant about that, without really understanding what your own goals are.

i'm mostly just trying to see what's possible in terms of player empowerment, and video games are the best point of reference i have for an empowering fantasy. this is especially true of my game, which is first and foremost inspired by the pokemon mystery dungeon games and destiny; these particular playbooks are an attempt to capture some of the good feelings associated with rewarding gameplay loops and energetic combat you feel with a good destiny build or a well-built pokemon team

(Just noticed that I missed the read more part, so apologies for that). Again, feel free to tell me if I'm just way off, since I don't have a ton of experience with building TTRPGs, also apologies should I just say completely obvious things:

A thing that came to my mind when I thought about the problems with dealing timed effects is to use something like "hold" resources that you see in Pbta games? This obviously is fairly easy to do with boosting a player's actions, but could also be used to weaken enemies?

Something like "You apply a weakening poison to an enemy, hold X. You can spend hold to reduce the severity of harm/physical consequences coming from that enemy"?

I think part of the problem here (and you mentioned that) is that consequences aren't always just harm, but more fictional, which makes phrasing these things a bit rough.

As for the part in your last paragraph, I don't know if Songs for the Dusk uses the same big three stat blocks that other Fitd games do, but if so, doing something like "for the duration of the scene (insert time), gain +1 Die on resistance rolls using Resolve"

I enjoyed reading this, and I appreciate the time that went into formatting it nicely :host-joy:

Could damage over time be abstracted as clocks that count down to some sort of bigger problem (for you, or for the enemy)? For example, if you're set on fire or poisoned (eg common damage over time effects in video games) then not dealing with it in a timely manner could lead to some more annoying consequences. This would turn damage over time effects into a "challenge of balancing the action economy" on the player's part, since they can either deal with this new clock or agree to suffer the consequences later on

that's a great idea for consequences that apply to a player, but it is tough to wield against an enemy because the final consequence is the real issue here. suppose you have an enemy with an 8-tick "health" clock. you could try to fill up a 4-tick poison clock to inflict some consequence on the enemy...or you could just push yourself for improved effect and bring some good gear and inflict 4 ticks of damage in a single move. the main advantage of DOT effects is that you can hold still for a second and know your enemy can't; to reference my video game inspiration directly, if i DOT an enemy with a shield in destiny, i know that shield can't regenerate while the DOT still ticks, so i can hide in cover for a few seconds without worrying that a ton of my work is going to be undone when i pop out. if the poison is tied to your actions anyway, it does take away from that to some degree...i could see a version of this like "if you fill a 4-step clock you can make 6 steps of progress against an enemy's health" but it doesn't strike me as a super intuitive mechanic at first read.

I agree that consequences for enemies are tricky here.

To borrow from Pokémon for a sec: damage over time tends to occur alongside status effects, so when a mon is burned, their attack properly is reduced. Perhaps there could be a way to add a similar debuff, and/or otherwise change the position or effect of future rolls against their health clock?

This maybe would allow a sort of "evading their attacks becomes easier" benefit, so you can hold still and wait for DOT