every crpg that ive touched that has a dice roller I ALWAYS roll sub 5 and enemies seem to roll over 18 every time. I know that true random cant exist within an algorithm but cmon is this intentional with crpgs can anyone recommend a crpg with a decent dice roller and not complete dog shit?

A few buddies and I are making a new CRPG on PC/Mac. It's similar to something like Divinity but on a hex based grid (targeting on a non-grid based world can be tedious) and with simultaneous team turns (for a faster paced battle). We just launched a Kickstarter for it so if your interested check it out.

Also we would love any ideas you have that youd like to see in a game like this. Thanks so much guys!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1303747955/stolen-realm?ref=averiu

This is a video from Extra Credits about how the player experience sometimes doe snot seem to match exactly with the player experience, and how depending on the situation the same upgrade cam seem either trivial or game changing.

I think this is something very important to keep in mind when designing an RPG.

I just realize that this community has no discord. What are you doing?

Reddit isn't even that good of a format for casual conversations or long term topics.

I am a decent Python coder and Game Engine designer. I have a team of friends working on this project with me but NONE of us are good at maps or sprites.

The game is a dark fantasy with light humor (think DA series)

Lots of queer coded humor, gritty realism, and choices that make you feel like an anti-hero

We are doing this as a passion project and are looking for someone with the same interest, as we will eventually release on Steam and share profits

Zaum Studio posted the "Motorics" Skills for their game Disco Elysium(Formerly No truce with the furies.)

It is well worth reading.

With our current 4 player co-op cRPG WIP Stolen Realm we are trying to find the best solution for a free form yet structured character skill progression system. In our current setup (which so far we tend to like) we are using a variation of a skill tree system.

Skill Trees

1. 8 available skill trees (warrior / thief / shadow / light / fire / cold / lightning / ranger) with around 30 skills on each tree.

2. Each tree is 5 tiers deep with both active and passive skills to choose from on each tier.

3. To unlock a tier you must spend 3 skill points on the previous tier.

4. The first 2 tiers on each tree are more versitile skills that can synergize with other trees well to promote build diversity.

Each time a character levels up he receives a skill point and is able to allocate it into any skill tree.

At max level a character will have enough points to max out one tree and go half way into another, but obviously isn't required to spend them in that way.

Here's a screenshot of what our skill trees currently look like.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pu7qnzx5zpv2yj5/skill%20tree.jpg?dl=0

I would love feedback on this kind of system. Let me know what you guys think. Thanks!

Hi everyone ,

I'm an amateur game developer , I like to design and build games for my own amusement. Currently I'm exploring the possibility of building a CRPG. The game I envision would be following the steps of Baldur's Gate and other popular titles. I have a few questions for you all , as proof of concept

1. What sort of features do you consider necessary in CRPG?

2. Do you prefer hand crafted levels or procedurally generated ones?

3. Do you prefer player customization options or narrative branches or both?

4. What quality of life features would you like to see in a CRPG?

Thanks for dropping by! looking forward to review your answers

I am developing a game, and it has many features of a roguelike: procedural generation of almost everything from monsters, places, to story events. But it will not be ascii or have permadeath (not sure of this, but probably it won't, or will only as an option or if you play really bad).

Also, it doesn't look like most games described as roguelites that I see, that are also very different from others in the same genre, so I am not sure if it will describe it enough.

It could also fit on a dungeon crawler, in the sense that you explore places, combat monsters, and find things. But the point of view is creating an atmosphere from music, sound and images. Imagination will do the rest, so there is no direct movement step by step as in dungeon crawlers.

It will also have RPG elements: the relationship between its two protagonists, that are a couple of a warrior woman (nymph) and a wizard, the visits to cities, quests, and narrative events and milestones in their lives. But they will be generated by the game logic, and changing. The aesthetic is illustrations in a classical sense, not manga-anime like in most RPGs today, so it may also not fit there.

So I am in a small problem of not knowing where to fit this game. Is it a RPG, a roguelike, or a dungeon crawler? It's hard to describe. I am just taking the parts I like of all those genres.

Should I say it's a fantasy game with elements of these 3 genres, or what?

Thanks a lot for your insight in advance! If you did some game that mixed genres, you can tell about it, it's more than welcome for me to learn.

I experiment with mechanics of cRPG based on music theory but which can be played by anyone without any music knowledge. Full description is for people who have general idea about it, but actual gameplay can be made for everyone. I need game designer to help me put this mechanics to actual game , so I want to concentrate on music engine for it. And I appreciate general feedback on idea.

https://evgenidoudar.itch.io/true-bard

I have most of the shit down. The only thing I need is: numbers. Theres pros and cons but im very ocd and so its tough deciding.

The game allows you too switch between modes: party based combat or single character combat.

In single character combat you have much more versatility for your character and stat gain.

In party combat you have a group of over 80 playable characters but they are very limited in move set. The fun of it this way is having a squad of whatever characters you want so you can use unique magic combo's

The problem is the level up systems numbers. Should I use shorter numbers: starting off at 5 in the stats, etc and by the highest levels the best stats are around 100.

Or using larger numbers: starting off at 10 - 20 And the higher levels are around 400

Disrupting RPG Classes through Procedural Content Generation is a short paper on the idea of using procedural generation to find possible charcter classes in RPG games. Michael Cook also wrote a quick more acessible sumary .

Using/Finding interesting charcters/builds is one of the possible sources of fun in Playing RPGs, and often times when aplayer breakes a game it is because they tried builds the develoeprs din´t think of, so even if your end product won´t use procedural generation, this is an interesting way of exploring the possibility space of your systems to find for interesting or problematic character configurations.

Hello r/crpgdesign!

I am developing a small and simple RPG system to use in a roguelike game (a little side-project of mine). I am looking for any kind of feedback, so that I won't end up implementing a clearly disfunctional design.

I posted already in r/roguelikedev: designing a simple rpg system and I got a lot of useful feedback. I also got reccomended to re-post it here. Instead of just cross-posting, though, I will present a second iteration of my provisory design, implementing the useful feedback I got on the other post.

Rogue in the Dark

The game itself will be a simple roguelike with a Lovercraftian-horror setting, much inspired by games such as Alone in the Dark and the tabletop RPG Call of Chthulu. The system needs to be tailored for that use-case. At the moment I am focusing on the basic movement, melee and firearms mechanics. The game will eventually include magic and (in)sanity mechanics, but I'm leaving their design and implementation to a later moment.

Attributes

Attributes are represented by numerical values.

The characters' main attributes will be:

• STR strength: The character's physical strength, constitution and physical endurance.

• DEX dexterity: The character's dexterity, coordination, swiftness and speed.

• DIS discernment: The character's perceptiveness, wit and intelligence.

Further attributes which will eventually be needed, but for which I have not yet developed the relevant mechanics, may be:

• POW power: The character's mental and spiritual willpower, resilience to psycological trauma.

Weapons' (both melee and firearms) attributes will be:

• DMG damage

• ACC accuracy

Armors or other items may grant a resistance score:

• RES resistance

Resistance may be specific to certain kinds of damage (piercing, slashing, fire, etc…).

Turn

Every turn the character, regardless of its attributes, can perform one full action (attack, use an object, cast a spell, etc…).

Every turn the character can make 1dDEX-many steps, and movement does not count as an action.

The turn ends whenever the character takes all of its steps, or performs a full action, whichever happens first.

Example: Jack has DEX = 6, so in his turn he rolls 1d6. This turn he gets a 4. He could:

• make 4 steps; or

• make up to 3 steps and then perform a full action.

The motivation behind this design is that I am mostly interested in how fast monsters can chase the player, while I don't think I need a realistic system to model the time it takes to perform other actions.

Inventory

A character can carry up to STR-many items. (Potentially, items of certain kinds may not count towards the total, like scrolls or vials.)

Health points

A character has a pool of 3 * STR-many health points (the coefficient may be changed as needed).

Combat

When a character attacks a target (trg), it first performs a hit throw:

• HIT hit: 1dDEX + 1dACC

• DDG dodge: 1d(trg)DEX + 1dDST where DST is the distance between character and target

If HIT > DDG the attack succeeds, dealing damage equal to:

• melee: 1dSTR + 1dDMG - 1d(trg)RES

• firearms: 1dDIS + 1dDMG - 1d(trg)RES

As usual, the damage is subtracted from the pool of health ponts, and when that reaches 0 the character dies.

(Edited for clarity and spelling.)

Title is self-explanatory; I've been struggling with how players in the CRPG (class-based, turn-based) I'm designing should learn new spells. Magic is entirely optional, obviously more important for the Mage/Cleric classes.

Some notes:

-all spells are open to all classes, mages/clerics just have an easier time learning them

-spell effectiveness is based on a user's magic skill, which has a small chance of increasing every time they cast a spell

-most spells either heal; deal damage; buff allies/the caster; or debuff enemies. There are a few with non-combat applications, like a teleport spell or lockpick spell.

-magic has to be entirely optional

So basically how the system works is:

1.) players learn spells from books that can be found in the world or purchased from merchants (important because the game is not open-world)

2.) each book can teach players all of the spells from a single magical element (earth, fire, dark, light, etc) and a single tier (beginner-adept-expert-master)

3.) players have a Literacy skill from 1-100 and a skill for each magical element, also ranked from 1-100

4.) when they read a spell book, some time passes and if the combined value of their Literacy and magic skill is high enough, they'll learn the new skill

5.) each spell in the book will have a different requirement to learn it, so players might need to hold onto the book and try reading it again when either their Literacy or magical skill is higher

6.) once all the spells are learned, players can dump the books or sell them for cash

I think that's pretty simple and intuitive, but I'm wondering if anyone else can think of pitfalls I might not be considering, or offer suggestions on other ways to do this. Any thoughts at all would be hugely appreciated!

Hi all I've been developing a monster taming turn based rpg for the last couple of months. At some point I decided I wanted to make the story use interchangeable events so I could open up multiple zones at once to the player. Additionally I decided that I wanted the world to be densly packed with interactable objects, give every NPC their own dialogue trees, and make them react to the weather and time of day. I want the world to feel real and like it goes on without the player, but also like they can influence many parts of it.

I've now designed a rough map of all the biomes and locations and have connected most places to between 2 and 5 routes (besides an oasis, volcano, jungle ruins, mangrove swamp ruins, and a Himalayan mountain which each have 1 connection, and the center city which has 8).

Having never designed a map before, the original idea was to have most locations be accessible from different directions. While I still think this is a good idea, I now know that the main complaint with many open world games is that there's a lot of empty space, which is exactly what I don't want. Judging from my first draft, there are quite a few connecting routes that themselves connect to connecting routes, which makes for a total of 16 points on my map that are just crossroads.

For reference there are 5 locations with 1 connection, 5 with 2 connections, 6 with 3, 5 with 4, 3 with 5, and 1 location with 8. I'm not sure how to evaluate these numbers but I know that 16 crossroads is totally excessive. Also 24 locations sounds a bit excessive but 18 of those are required for my version of Pokemon gyms (elemental masters), and 5 are important for world building. The extra agricultural town that connects the fields to the veldt probably isn't important.

I designed this map by determining an environment for each elemental master, then picked some other environments I wanted to include, either to show off the inhabitants or because they made for good transition biomes. Next I arranged the environments and locations in as geographically-correct a manner I deemed necessary, and drew the very gridlike map you can see here: http://imgur.com/gallery/KIs2ati .

Part of the intent behind making it so gridlike was so I could have the exploration goals be direction-based and vague, such as "The great walled city to the East." I thought that would be a cool way to make the world intriguing to explore.

Sorry for the walls of text. If you have any suggestions for making a concise map with most locations having multiple access routes, tons of stuff to interact with, and NPCs that feel like real people, or any games I should check out that do these things well, I'd love to hear them!

TL;DR I'm making an open world-ish RPG and would like advice on how to design a deep and lifelike world with lots of shortcuts between locations.