Tell me what your game doesn't do

[Rob Lang]

[kylesgames]

Street Rats, as it stands, doesn't really provide anything in the way of "balance". While I have a few design principles I work around while designing balance, people will get torn through like wet tissue paper in combat if they aren't 'roided up and augmented with half of their points going into Toughness and Speed.

It also has a rudimentary grasp of the rules of mathematics, including such joys as linear explosion falloff and calculating distance and altitude using a longest plus half-shortest method that made my math/physics friend cringe in terror.

If you're overwhelmed by choices, your character creation process will take eight hours, because we (will) have a total of about sixteen thousand options just in the character creation packages. While each combination leads to an interesting character, you might want to align it to one of our archetypes. Otherwise you will be saddled with skills that you probably can't use, because you let the GM roll your character for you and he is a petty and harsh man.

Speaking of archetypes, we don't have a whole lot of balance. Want to play a combat-oriented character? Pick one of the six duties that will give you marginally different abilities as you blow away everyone who didn't focus on combat. Play as one of our three hacking classes, two of which can actually get involved in hacking and one of whom is merely able to suppress outgoing phone calls. Pick one of the two social roles, which basically amount to lying and cheating people with planning, or lying and cheating people without planning, taking advantage of the fully robust but vague social skills system to convince your GM that yes, you can use Etiquette for that.

Alternatively, go to the miscellaneous section, where you too can play as one of the duties that hasn't seen love in a long time, like the Sleever, who can use one of the two drones currently available in play to do not very much to your enemies! Play as the Mechanic, a Street Doc who can't heal people, or as the Street Doc, who can heal people and cyborgs! Play as an Infiltrator to capitalize on the fact that rules regarding security equipment haven't been written yet, and wait to have your character build demolished as the character's abilities are rewritten to accommodate the system that exists as a vague concept in the designer's mind.

Random hit locations result in amusing and humiliating leg injuries! Watch as the GM gives some punk a .50-caliber sniper rifle and prepare to have your roll-roll-clatter left leg blown off in a single hit! Every single shot of combat will result in a magical result of 4, causing the target's left leg to become destroyed long before they face any serious danger, except when the die comes up with a 20 and results in your high-level character taking a shotgun blast in the face. At least they won't suffer long.

[Onix]

Okay, sounds interesting.

The Artifact
The system is not simple. There are lots of moving parts and there's boatloads of options. Players pick up the basics in a game or two, but only a few players internalize all the mechanisms for non-combat challenges. I'm not even sure that I use them right half the time.

Ammo, equipment tracking, encumbrance and other resources are all manually handled. There's no system other than raw math.

The game is, as I GM it (and thus the people that have GMed it for me) is grim and very dangerous. This makes it a tense game, so it's not really made for heroic romps until the characters have become very advanced.

For long time players, there's very little need for narration. The system is a simulation, it at times simulates along a story like star trek, but it's very specific. My players don't need me to describe what's happening, they know from the numbers on the dice.

It's hard for me to see more than that because I've played the game for so long, I breathe the game. If there's something it's not doing beyond that, I'm not sure I want a game that would. I don't say that to boost the game on a pedestal (who am I kidding, sure I am!) but because I've literally honed it to do what I want it to do for twenty years.

Steampunkfitters
I would like the system to do more with establishing the setting. I get a feel for the world when I start a game, but I find the players are often surprised by the world that springs out of my mind. If there was a way to make the world more predictable from the players standpoint, or more intuitive I'd like that.

There are points where a character is simply outclassed by an opponent. Usually the solution is to team up to defeat a challenge, but occasionally a character is just stuck by a challenge. I'm not uncomfortable with that but it's important to acknowledge or it can kill characters.

The system works like clockwork gears, I love that, but if you wanted it do something other than that you're out of luck. Basically the game is a machine, there are different buttons you can push, and you can shift to different gears but if you shift wrong, or press the wrong button at the wrong time, the results are exactly predictable after the fact.

The Energy System
Designed as a generic system to plug settings into, it doesn't by itself handle certain things well. For example, I'm working on a Supers game using this system and most powers work great, except healing powers. The problem is that if you heal someone, you can heal their bonus depleted dice and they can instantly advance. That's a bit problematic.

Unlike my other games, this system is intentionally "squishy". The stats and their meaning are fluid. How to use them is pretty simple, but why they give you the result they do is up to the players to retcon along the way. If a player does a poor job narrating, it can leave a big hole in everyone's understanding of what just happened.

Equipment is somewhat problematic in that it's directly tied to the character's abilities. In character creation, equipment costs from the character's total energy pool. But what if it's lost, sold or destroyed? Now that character is out the energy they put into the equipment and they're at a large disadvantage compared to a character with only skill based abilities.

[R-Cat]

Mad Dogs with Guns is a game that can last one turn or a million turns, simply because its objective is to "Kill the Boss". Enough poor placement on the target's behalf and good dice rolls with the right models could (in theory) achieve this all in the first turn. Then again, distance a Boss from the main fighting and the game could end up being an eternal wild goose chase between the Boss and the enemy's most powerful models.

Of course, this game has a "Sacrifice Points" system to decide who wins if the game is forced to end prematurely, but it really discourages players from having a "Modern UK"-accurate gang, where you're likely to have more teenagers armed with knives and metal poles instead of a small amount of smartly-dressed older men with guns, simply because of the way it objectively penalises players for having an objective number of deaths.

Which brings me to my next point, and a complaint from a friend of mine when he read it over: 'You can't play this game with large armies'. This isn't completely true, but any game that exceeds 250 Army Points will take a very long time to play.

The reasoning behind this is that there is so many things that you are supposed to keep track of per individual model (how many AP they have, how much they've moved before etc.), and so every individual model must have a turn where they 'Move 6 spaces, gain 2 speed for moving 6 spaces, save the remaining 4 AP for later'. You can see how boring this will become when you have to do this for, let's say, 50 models, rather than the 5-20 you're expected with a regular game of MDWG.

Also, it's thematically lazy. Overall, I designed the game to be possible to play with my favourite fictional gangs (be they the Gerhardts from Fargo in 1979 or the Peaky Blinders from the 1920s), but I also decided to try and keep things universal by giving the weapons generic names and letting players fill the gaps, depending on what sort of gang they want.

So I made three units, and those three units were extremely customisable to fit any theme, as long as it's Gangsters. But compare this to a game like WFB, where every species had its own units and themes and backstories. What this game doesn't do is provide lore. You can be any gang you want, but that means working hard to think of your gang's backstory (or just taking it from pop culture) and ways of making up as you go along why Marcellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction has such a large vendetta against Two-Face from Batman.

I know that's what made us all love tabletop games in the first place - it's make-believe with rules - but I think the fact that I left a lot of blanks to fill will make a few players disinterested in playing.

[Kensan_Oni]

Right now, my pet project (Working Title Monitor) doesn't do character creation. Not in the cards, not what the game is about. Characters are chosen from a list of heroes, like in the old FASERIP basic set. While there is a structure to the characters (Borrowed from other OGL titles and ideas), the characters are based more on the concepts of MOBA's, and there is no planned advancement for the characters. There are a few customization options on the sheet, I am entertaining a player advancement system, but if you are looking to build your own Superhero, you're going to have to look somewhere else.

[madunkieg]

I'll start with the first game I've uploaded here, Terribly Beautiful. Looking back, this was a terrible game, but it came close to winning that year's Game Chef because most of its competitors were worse.

1. It doesn't do non-heroic characters, which is strange for a game that's about characters who are supposedly oppressed.
2. It doesn't handle group efforts. Yes, I seem to remember a mechanic for playing a card on someone else's behalf, but single cards don't matter much in the overall scheme of things. This would have been important for facing down angry mobs.
3. It doesn't do equipment. Does your opponent have a gun, while you're fighting empty handed? Doesn't matter.
4. It took way, way, waaay too long to resolve situations. This was fixed with Metropole Luxury Coffin, but having to go around the table multiple times, both before and after calling for resolution took too long.

Do I need to go on? Probably, but I'll leave it there for now. I plan on doing this for my current project, Rascals, and every other game I make in the future.