Verter said:
In an RPG that has dice as the main way to determine a lot of what happens, I’d say dice are in fact an integral part of the progression system, so I agree with you. Which dice are used, how many of them can be rolled, how many times, what the threshold for success is… These are all things that directly affect how the game and the character(s) progress. And they also naturally add randomness, which should be included to a certain degree in all RPGs one way or another, because it reduces predictability. Determining which aspects of the core loop are affected by randomness, and to what extent, plays a very important role in how the whole progression is carried through and how interesting it is for the player(s): too little randomness and the game can feel dull; too much and it can become arbitrary and frustrating. And non-binary resolution adds a nice extra layer of depth to that randomness when done well. =) For the OP: I focused on video games in my previous post, but designing a tabletop game is a really nice way to start making a playable experience, specially (but not only) if your primary interest is just designing gameplay mechanics (I have a chess-like game "created" this way): no coding, no worrying about sound and music, no need for fancy graphics if you’re just casually testing with friends or family… Just pure, raw game design (and at most narrative if you wish). And this actually makes it a lot more viable to create an RPG game without/before all the fuss that comes from developing it. So a tabletop RPG may not fit perfectly with the idea that you have in mind, but, at the very least, you could extrapolate a lot of the stuff you'd learn. |
Yeah, going with tabletop design is probably easiest way to test and develop everything, if it's classic dice based RPG and, especially if it's narrative based, actually make a story through gameplay (Disco Elysium came out of tabletop campaign, for example).
Personally, I see action-RPGs as quite different genre. Let's say bow skill - chance to hit in RPG is based on your character skill and various modifiers (range, cover, wind, target speed, target size...). In Action-RPG, your chance to hit should rely in large part on player skill, while still being sufficiently influenced by character skill (i.e., the higher the skill the less swinging of bow, or shot spread being smaller, or something like that). Action-adventures with pseudo RPG mechanisms of modern era wouldn't have skill influence directly accuracy of your shot, instead giving you some equivalent of feat as you progress (and as such are more of a feat trees than skill trees), AC:Odyssey being good example of this.
So I 'd say, choosing which type of RPG one wants to make is quite important early decision as well.
