HIYAAAAA!
Here I am! Well no. I'm at school, because I still don't have a computer.
I did a lot of progress on a LOT of stuff. Completed new campaign, about 15 sidequests that will be included in the game thanks to the new request board system, stuff like that. I'm constantly trying to find new ideas, and I'm currently working on a special gaiden game where it'll be about people from the human world (the players) stumbling in Gensokyo. Different gameplay, stats and whatnot, but it's not yet ready.
Edit: AAAAAAAAAAAARGH I MISS YOU ALL SO MUCH AAAAAAAAAH AAAAAH AAAAAAAH
WHYYYYY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHYYYYY. AAAAAAAAAARGH. IAAAAN, AAAAAL, VAAAAL, I MISS YOU ALL SO MUUUUCH AAAAAAAARGH AAAAARGH.
Okay I'm done.
I did a lot of progress on a LOT of stuff. Completed new campaign, about 15 sidequests that will be included in the game thanks to the new request board system, stuff like that. I'm constantly trying to find new ideas, and I'm currently working on a special gaiden game where it'll be about people from the human world (the players) stumbling in Gensokyo. Different gameplay, stats and whatnot, but it's not yet ready.
Holy crap, that's a lot. From what it sounds like, I'm thinking the request board system is going to be like the incident board from GoS, but done right and not involving boring repeatable and random shuffling quests, which is awesome. Also, the gaiden game seems interesting too. I'm amazed at everything you've done so far to overhaul ToPL.
I miss you too, Ikari. ;~;
Gaiden game eh? Consider my interest piqued once more. I look forward to it, and also hope things work out for you.
(And maybe I'll get my internet situation resolved by then too, so my schedule's not as wonky in comparison.)
Was actually planning to talk to you about a requests system for the game, but seems like I don't need to anymore. Though it's getting to be hard to make contact with you at all these days.
Meiling may be used as a personal towel device.
...What in the world is going on in there.
Hi!Hoooly crap, we got a response, and from someones who's tried out the game mechanics from awhile back! Sorry we didn't get to you sooner! :ohdear:
Sorry to interrupt your logs with this GIGANTIC WALL OF TEXT, but I've run a oneshot in a slightly tweaked version of your patched system, and I thought I'd comment here with my post-game assessment.
tl;dr The system was fun and good, we made some tweaks, your patches were really useful, and overall this is a cool but slightly broken system that we'd like to run again; read more if you want details.
First off, the changes that were made so that we could run a simple 4 hour game that anyone could quickly pick up, were the following:Classes (Technically, they're races, but im not going nazi here >.<) are up to you for what's available. whilst the original book had them and we didn't want to remove them FOR the sake of player choice, we full heartedly love rule 0. Rule Zero being that 'The rules of the GM and the rules of the book may conflict, and the GM will be right in all circumstances'. trust us, we break our own rules quite a few times, so feel free to take what's available as a guideline and not the de-facto final mark. Plus, i full heartly agree with some races being gimicky/akward to fit in as fuck.
- Took out most of the classes -- we went with Youkai (of a few schticky types but all with basically the same racial parameters), God, Human, and Ghost.
- Took out Focus stance for simplicity's sakeI... don't remember this being a thing. Sorry that this was left in and confused people.
- Removed Religion (was irrelevant to our scenario as a mechanic; any religiosity was a schtick thing we assumed players could do on their own)Religion was added by Ikari as an optional bit and is entirely cool to remove. Rule Zero is heavily in effect here, plus, if it doesn't fit the game then we aren't crying over the fact it wasn't included. XD
- Removed Fandom Points and anything that could be bought with them; gave players 15 extra spell card points at the start of game to make up for this.Interesting way of doings things. We scrapped the FP entirely ourselves to replace it with something else, but it's interesting to see someone take a different path then us on how to deal with this kind of (flawed) EXP system.
- Disallowed the use of any given spell card more than once a fight, for balance and schtick reasons; first, enemies in Touhou never clone their cards in a fight, and second, there is little reason to create more than one spell card if you can use it more than once. You guys did fix a lot of the spam-card problem when you changed Invincibility and made bombs no longer refresh when you lose a life. (I'd rather the PCs have lots of cool cards than have PC98-bombs for flavor.)Yeah, I agree with you here. Whilst the system in its current form hasn't evolved enough where we could easily fit such a thing in, I do find it kind of fishy that we can spam one kind of card and ride it to victory, when in the games and (Somewhat) the fighters, such spam was unheard of. The 15 spellcard points you gave everyone no doubt helped in this regard... actually, wait, we do have something in the new system that does help with this regard, but isn't to the extent you have it here.
- Doubled the effect of Resilience on hitbox; this was entirely necessary because otherwise hitbox never got high enough to be an effective defense stat.
- Took out "points" from battle effects and instead made Graze give you 1/5 of a life every time you succeed at Grazing. This was a reasonable concept that we did not balance well, but it has potential and flavors like the games. Gaining lives from Graze means that someone with low Strike actually harms the party against a high-hitbox target because they end up healing the enemy. We're thinking of changing this to +(fraction) Bombs for every successful Graze.
- Capped chargen stats at 7....Uh... confused on what you meant here. sorry ^^:
- Re-flavored hitbox to be "you are hit but not damaged" -- for example, bullets simply passing through the ghost, or missing the object-body of our tsukumogami.
Fluff/Rule Zero stuff, but yeah, Hitbox definately needed something little more then 'dead on hit'.
- Said that you can "break" spell cards by hitting someone during their card in battle; this causes spell cards to have a cooldown requiring a full night's sleep. This wasn't relevant to our oneshot, but it was a change, so we're posting here.
- Lives refreshed after a night's sleep rather than at the end of an Incident, because this allowed for more difficult fights and makes multi-day Incidents not so punishing as a result.Couldnt agree more. We've already made this change (9+ hours of sleep with proper care to oneself.)
- Took out almost all mechanical benefit for every race. Humans got +1 to a non-combat stat; the prism youkai threw out random elements for standard attacks; the ghost got to phase through things. This was mostly used for flavor and interesting interactions; we had few enemy elemental weaknesses, and larger benefits showed up in the types of non-combat magic they could use.We actually tackled quite a few things regarding the races, but im curious as to what races you DID use and their benefits. Prism Youkai? Could you please post up crunch on how they operated and/or sheets?
- I know it's a little deviant from the universe, but we dictated that if spell card fights have no rules, you are knocked out at the end of losing all your lives, and you can die if you are coup-de-grace-d at the end of the fight after being rendered unconscious. (I like darker universes.)Rule Zero, once again. Gensokyo is a bit darker then portrayed, and it is entirely up to you on how hard or soft the spell card rules are. after all, the rules are rather loose and easily have loopholes. its simply up to you how you want to run your boat. :3
Problems we still saw with your current system as is we ran it:
- Strike is essential. You can't sacrifice Strike and actually do much in battle. This means that the correct option for any player who wants to have an actual effect on battle should pump their Strike as much as possible. We had someone who decided to go with a low-Strike character who had some hindrances to work around it, but she still never really hit anything.
- Cunning is effectively useless. Initiative matters only in the first round of combat, and if you don't oneshot the foe, it's as far as we can tell irrelevant. If the battle goes on a long time, one extra turn doesn't matter. Also, all my characters had Cunning 2 and nothing bad happened to them. (Because of this problem, they put nothing into that stat.)
- There is no way to gain CP. I assume you meant for the GM to hand it out, but there are way too many point types in this game, and there were no rules for when to give CP. Originally, Fandom Points gave you this, but we didn't like the meta-game schtick of Fandom Points. We'd rather this be rolled into level-ups like stat gains were.
- Invincibility was awkward, though not clearly flawed, but it might want to change because the solution to invincibility was to have people delay their turns so that they didn't have to take potshots at invincible enemies. Not allowing delaying turns, locks players out of the fight. This might be the one time initiative matters, but if you can't ever change initiative order in battle by delaying, this turns initiative into a really punishing stat that prevents slow (compared to their team) people from ever fighting due to spell cards providing invincibility. Being slow compared to the enemy is one thing, but having initiative relative to your team matter results in some people feeling useless while other people carry the fight.We haven't had a real issue with invincibility surprisingly. But i remember it being done differently than this. (Also, No delay turns? wha? I thought that was a thing. weird. Guess that wasnt in old system. KNOW THAT DELAY IS OKAY :I )
- Your die Sets (+ and - D6 dice) are clunky and awkward and equivalent to 2D6 - 7 as a formula. This isn't an incredibly annoying problem, but maybe plunk it in the rules for folks who don't like distinguishing dice and just want to add dice.They can be, and we're going to stick with it sadly. One of the old things we can't exactly get rid of without breaking the back of the system, given the ENTIRE game is built around it. Thankfully, the Formula is only 2d6 now. (Positive Die - Negative die + Stat (Or Aim/Defense if it is an attack roll)). The most extreme the system gets with raw dice is +5 to -5.
Other potential problems (like things not covered in oneshots)
- Growth. There are two clearly superior stats if you follow growth upwards; these are Strike and your choice of Hitbox or Evasion. Pick one of those and throw all your points in it, or if it's rate-limited as to how many points you can put into these, pick Strike and one defense stat and jack them both up as high as you can. Doing anything else results in enemies and allies rapidly becoming much stronger than you. Possible solution: decrease growth rate to less than a point per level and cap stats with a cap that increases more slowly than you gain points. This prevents players from focusing on the two aforementioned stats.
- Small changes in stats massively affect hit chance, especially if stats are all close to each other, such as near game start.
- Spell cards don't grow well, even with our patch. It's fairly easy to optimize spell cards even with the one-per-bomb flavor. It's fine at chargen, but in late game cards will start looking a lot like each other. We're still musing on how to fix this.I have to agree here. Surprisingly, its a lot harder to make the spell card rules... 'work', per say. We haven't changed them much for new system, other than rebalance costs a littttle bit, but we ARE moving towards a way how we can make these little suckers truly special. Fluffwise, we got them down, but we cant give them the proper crunching we want them to be.
- It is my associate here's opinion (he played and is helping me write this, as the resident Mechanics Nerd) that having combat and non-combat stats be the same thing, is problematic. Anyone who wants to do a specific optimization for combat suddenly finds their character's personality changing to fit a certain pattern that may not actually be related to what they want their character to be like. Personality and battle should be relatively independent (although feel free to line them up, but mechanically enforcing this is a problem).
Good things!Hell yes. That sounds awesome, i wish i could of seen that. You have a log of that? XD
- The battle system is amazingly Touhou schticky. We had all kinds of insane collisions between spell cards and had so much fun with this. At one point we had 3 spell cards going off in the same turn. This is basically how actual multi-way danmaku fights would actually go. :P
- With our patch, hitbox and evade both were valid and useful defensive stats on their own, and it was reasonable to have characters pick one or the other. We couldn't tell which one was clearly better, although this does discourage people from splitting between both -- you had to choose one. We consider this fine and even a good thing. (We didn't want hitbox being a dump stat.)Whilst i cant really comment too well, given we redesigned the system in a different way, hearing that you were able to make the system work for you in a way that we didnt is again, kick ass and i applogize ahead of time if we steal a few of these. :3
- The battle system is easy to pick up, although we did dump Focus to make this easier. We were able to introduce new players to the system, chargen, and run an entire oneshot in 6 hours.Good call. Focus, again, i dont know why that was in there, but it's awesome to hear that the battle system isn't too complicated at all. In fact, now looking at it, it's really set up that seems to hurt the most for time and not the actual session. Still, a 6 hour game with your first go? your hella faster then us.
- Battles were fast-paced. No one got bogged down in die-rolling or number crunching.I have a fear in the back of my mind we might of screwed this one up in the new system, but i seriously doubt it. (We only reassigned a few things and the ability to hit/get hit is fairly equal.). A goal is fast paced combat with meaning and badass fluffier to make it awesome. If we have achieved that, we can go get the hookers and blackjack prepared.
Further questions:Focus is entirely gone as far as im aware of. Wasnt around when i joined up, never seen it.
- You did mean to eliminate spell card use during Focus, right? This is what I assumed, because otherwise there is no good reason whatsoever to be not in Focus all the time.
- What can you do to make late-game spell cards interesting, besides World Effects? We understand that Last Words and Survival Cards are cool, but we want normal spell cards to get cooler as well.To be 100% honest, the current model only really support 'cool cards' for the normal cards in fluff and not crunch.... We do need to address this, and we will, given that it has now presented itself as a problem ^^;
- Depending on how much you trust the GM, it may be good to dramatically reduce the number of classes and allow player creativity, not to mention having tons of classes both feels like you're telling the players "here's all the variety you get" as well as providing lots of complexity for newcomers. Also, if there are set large benefits for being a certain class, then some players feel compelled to choose classes based on benefit, not on personal preference. If some GMs want to play around with the complexity of your fine-grained classes, that's fine, but note that it can be simplified so long as the GM and players have a good working relationship.Actually, we were toying with the Races in that we wanted to expand on them. Give them more meaning. This kind of does go 180 to the suggestion though... eep.
Also, I would really like whatever updated versions you have! HP for enemies would be a fun variant to try, and you've apparently made some changes that Ikari didn't write up in the old thread. (Also, forgive me, I didn't see that status effects had been addressed because that topic didn't make it into the intro table of contents post in the old thread. Mechanics Friend plowed through the whole rest of the thread after the final ToC topic and told me that status actually existed. Whoops.
The whole system kinda changed the lives to HP due to the painful problem that "Being hit, remove a life" prevents a lot of different effects (Damage over time, traps, getting hit multiple times, etc) and generally is unforgiving.
"Capped stats at 7 for chargen" means "when you create a character, no stat can start above 7." We did this to prevent anyone from being hugely skewed at the start.
That completely makes sense. No one went higher than 6 in our group because 6 is already a lot. (Especially since we removed the dumpstats)
My thoughts on the large number of races you guys have: it's quite fine, but I think if/when I run a campaign, I won't be doing it. Not throwing off on you! I just like to keep the GM overhead low, and thinking about all the individual race mechanics is a bit intense. I do have a weird improv GMing style, though -- I like light systems and heavy stories. Rule 0 and all that. So actually, it does boil down to how "words words words complexity complexity complexity" are really not some GMs' style, and it overwhelms players who aren't into that, and that I think that having a system that does not require races to have the specific mechanical benefits you're giving them is good. (I am not saying this *doesn't* exist; I'm just stating the point. Not being Mechanics Friend, I can't intuit balance from a glance, but I guess nuking your race system for our oneshot didn't break everything. I actually don't know how independent your system is of the race traits.)
Actually, I agree that many races are currently completely useless. I'll be making a race overhaul soon that will basically bring those changes;
- Removal of useless classes like Nue (too much like Tanuki and in-game wise, makes no sense. Nue is a rare unique creature) and Poltergeist (Really, just make a ghost)
- All races gain one active and one passive with a playstyle in mind, and once you're at level 10, you can have a race advancement depending on two different playstyle. Think class change like in MMORPGs.
Apologies for all the Rule 0 variants. I just wanted to post a comprehensive "what we changed," even if it didn't matter much.
Oh no, it's fine! We like hearing about how people do things differently; Who know, it might inspire ideas or show that we've been taking the hard route.
I can already tell you that Mechanics Friend is going to want Ikari's variants that solved the problems you mentioned were fixed ("two godstats" problem especially, but also any other changes you've made). He'll crunch at them then.
Oh my, that could take a while to explain. Basically, Might/Spirit respectively define physical/magical strength, thus damage and general use (Breaking down a door / Burning down a forest). Finesse is basically agility with sneaking and other devious activities, and charm is charisma, as well as the strength of illusion magic. Cunning defines detection, intelligence and knowledge. All stats now have a use in battle, in some way or another. It's hard to explain in a short way.
Regarding Focus: huh, I didn't know it had been removed. Okay then.
I vaguely remember that and thinking the same as you all did; "wow let's remove that".
The Prism Youkai was a tsukumogami. "Prism" was just what its object body was, like Kogasa is an umbrella. I divided Youkai into four categories due to personal world schtick; if you don't want more Rule 0 fluff, I won't elaborate much, but they're Object, Plant, Animal, Concept, each with their own individual but mostly non-mechanical race benefits.
Mwaha, I actually understood what you meant. It sounds similar to our trait system, which allows you to get a new passive every 5 levels (1 5 10 15) to fluff your character a bit. Every attack being random and such are great ideas.
So you say you scrapped things, but I'm not finding in the old thread where that happened. Can you summarize the new changes? I didn't see changes to Hitbox, or that Graze was removed. Also, I don't think Graze is a massive abomination. :/ It has fun dynamics, at least the way we did it, and prevented the godstat problem to some extent (not really, but having two different defense possibilities was cool).
Pfooey, ask Ian. As for Graze, I actually liked it back when I RPed in real life with friends, but online like this, my god, it makes battles very very long and tedious if you weren't careful. Plus, I didn't like the idea of someone getting owned out of sheer back luck.
How do skills actually work now? All we got was that you guys were overhauling them.
I think I got a post about it in the old thread, or something. Ian collected the info, so I think he could give 'em to you all.
Last, I have to ask...what the heck is going on in your metagame here? ;) From your partial log with the fight with Yamame, so far Mechanics Friend and I have the following conclusion: you have two characters, and everyone else including the GM is hanging out in a sort of meta-universe where you can, say, pull PCs out of game to bring you sandwiches. I have no idea what's going on there. :P Granted, I am *really* bad at silly humor, it is one of my failings, so I expect I just am not capable of the kind of humor you guys are doing, heh.
Hanzo understood perfectly. That's an unedited log, so lots and lots of OCCness and the in-game context is hard to get. It's a tournament thing.
....and your forum captchas are incredibly hard to read...
Aren't they?
Edit: Oh yeah, one more thing: we have no logs, because we do everything live. Sorry :( It's me and my local friends IRL.
Lucky you all ;~;
Hi, guys! Apparently I'm not allowed to send PMs for some weird reason (I also can't change my birthday, which is weird, since I didn't enter one but it looks like everyone else did so I wanted to actually add it).
About skills -- somewhere in your replies to me on this thread, it was mentioned that there were skills that made characters particularly different in battle and that made stats less strictly important -- what were those? I know there are skills as in "art" or "performing," but what are the combat skills? Can you elaborate on those?
I swear I'll respond to PMs as soon as your forum lets me. I'm glad so many of you are interested in talking!
As far as I know it is dead, it kind of fell apart during the tournament and never truly recovered. Although I might be able to salvage some stuff if anyone is still interested.
Looking into this, it looks quite interesting, and I always got discouraged when people just straight up tell me Danmaku Yuugi is not a good system.
Just a quick question, how mechanically dependent is this on unit positioning? As in, how friendly is this to tokens repesenting players on a grid?
Another one I thought up, is friendly fire a thing?