Thoughts from today’s D&D session. I’ve observed from running and playing the game that there’s a sweet spot in encounter balance. Enemy level/HP is important, but the number of enemies seems to have more of an impact. If I throw 1 wildly overpowered enemy at my players, they’ll simply surround it and beat it to death in a couple rounds of combat. Conversely, if I send in a large number of underpowered minions, they stand a reasonable chance of wiping the party or at least severely inconveniencing them.
With the eventual goal of implementing multiplayer into SRPG, I’ve been paying attention to what makes multi-combatant encounters fun or interesting. Cannon fodder (where the players can mow down multiple enemies per round) can be fun (if there’s a reasonable challenge), bullet sponge encounters or overpowered enemies tend to be tedious. Additionally, real-world logic dictates that a large number of enemies will easily overpower a small number of heroes. This is validated by D&D, in which a dozen skeletons will pose a significant challenge to a few heroes who could trivially defeat 2-3 skeletons.
More broadly, the fun factor is related to player agency. If the players make significant mistakes, overstep their bounds and all die, they’ll probably accept the loss. If the odds felt overwhelming (they never had a chance), they’ll be frustrated and dissatisfied. It matters that the choices made by the players have a direct relationship with the outcomes of the game.
Warning: this post is going to get real weird real quick. It will make more sense if you’ve ever played Numenera, where things like this happen all the time.
The egg machine is a massive cylindrical machine, made of an unknown transparent material and filled with vaguely egg-shaped containers (translucent). In front of the machine are three empty containers. A button on the front of the machine will raise the tops of the containers, allowing a person-sized person to get inside. Pressing the button again will close them. The containers block sound and prevent anything but a fuzzy glimpse of the creature inside.
Nearby is a giant bowl filled with oversized tokens (maybe a couple feet in diameter). These can be fed into a coin slot on the front of the machine, which when turned… Combines traits of the egged characters and releases a new egg, from which emerges… One of those foam blob toys that turns into a dinosaur or whatever when it gets wet. Roughly human-sized, it will grow to much larger proportions when soaked. Movement and head are controlled by one character, while each arm is controlled by one of the remaining two.
This is where it gets weird. On top of the egg machine is a platform, and on that platform is a giant claw machine. The newly-spawned foam golem (controlled by the 3 characters trapped in their egg pods) can climb up to that platform and operate the machine.
This is where it gets weirder. On the 2nd platform there are two oversized stuffed rabbits into which the remaining two characters can climb. Once sealed inside, they will spawn as a new creature within the claw machine. They are unable to move until the foam golem rescues them with the claw.
Lastly, the foam golem (about 50’ tall) and the stuffed golem (about 12’ tall) have to team up to reach a hatch in the ceiling (about 100’ above the claw machine). The preferred method is for the foam golem to throw the stuffed golem. Once the hatch is opened, a ladder will descend and the pair can climb out.
Each combination (of 3 and 2 characters respectively) results in unique traits for the spawned golems. This gives 10 outcomes for the first creature and 10 corresponding outcomes for the second creature. Something like:
ABC + DE, ABD + CE, ABE + CD, ACD + BE, ACE + BD, ADE + BC, BCD + AE, BCE + AD, BDE + AC, CDE + AB.
In the interest of not completely baffling the players, I’m leaning toward these combos being largely cosmetic.
Continuing the previous post. Here’s an incomplete list of things the players (characters) can do in the game:
Of those, the mechanics my players seem to enjoy the most are: stealing, fighting, interrogating, and lighting things on fire. The rest are mostly available to a single character. So, here’s what I have in mind:
Put the players in an plastic egg prize machine.
Continuing yesterday’s thoughts about numeric puzzles. I don’t think it will be a fun puzzle at all, because not everyone in the group is interested in writing down a bunch of numbers and then doing an addition/subtraction graph to get a move solution. Honestly, even most people who like math probably wouldn’t find that fun.
Additionally, this puzzle doesn’t involve the characters, only the players. The specific skills and strengths of each character are irrelevant to the solution, as the only in-world interaction is pressing buttons. So it’s not fun, and it has no mechanical connection to the game. In SRPG terms, it’s like a puzzle that requires the player to interpolate RBG values. It’s not fun, it can be solved by rote, and it doesn’t leverage the text-based format of the game.
It’s easier to tell what’s bad than what’s good, unfortunately. As a first step, I’m going through the abilities of each character (and the general mechanics of the system) to see which ones are good candidates for interacting with the puzzle.
Ran a Numenera on Sunday, which included a pure puzzle section (the first time I’ve done that, IIRC). It went reasonably well; I messed up on a couple details and had to quietly rework the puzzle logic in my head to make sure it was consistent. The altered version was a bit less intuitive than what I had originally planned. I think in the future I should find someone to help playtest puzzles before I give them to the players. It would be very frustrating to spend an hour in a session on what’s supposed to be a quick puzzle.
I’m rethinking the second puzzle, which involves some numeric manipulation that probably won’t be very interesting/accessible to some members of the group. One of the things I think the first puzzle did an OK job at was involving everyone in the party.
SRPG, of course, already has playtesting in the works, but this experience has gotten me thinking about the different types of minds that will be approaching the game, and how I can expose aspects of the puzzle to make the experience satisfying for them.
There are, of course, people out there who just hate puzzles, but I don’t think they’re my target demographic.
Changes & Updates:
PAY TAXES command.Finished the Dum-Dums & Dragons Character Creator. It’s for a friend’s RPG project and was a lot of fun to make.
It’s responsive, mobile friendly (only tested on Android since that’s what I have) and supports saving/loading characters via Web Storage (the first time I’ve used that, actually).
For the most part it pulls from simple lists of options with direct effects on the character’s stats and abilities, but there were a few edge cases to deal with as well. Simple enough project that I was able to spare the time for presentation and added features, which is nice because I learned a couple new things about media/print queries and local storage.
Changes & Updates:
Changes & Updates: