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.
Absolutely, thank you for even making the big block of text. It's really bad ass to hear that someone not only enjoyed the old system (Sorry we haven't given a concrete update. quite a few problems got solved in the last update... that we never released yet. sorry ;w; ) but wants to keep using it. that's just... makes me and the original guy who kicked up this project fuzzy. Please send more, we want more. Also, we are more than happy to send you updated versions as you desire.
Also, feel free to keep making those tweaks. this is still a work in progress, and even though we're trying, there's only so much we can think between the two of us. If you come up with anything that flows or smoothes over well, we want to try it.
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:
- 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.
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.
YOUUUUMUUUU. IM LOOKING AT YOU.
- Took out Focus stance for simplicity's sake
I... 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.
Both of these got scrapped at the outset of the recreation. Ikari knows these reasons better than me, but otherwise, these rules don't exist. (Resilience has no effect on the hit box and was changed to a solid 1. You had to make a 2+ rule to land a hit... and well, THAT got heavily changed as well, but more on that later. Points where entirely removed.)
- 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.
Interesting way of tackling the problem. Spell break isn't fully implemented in the new system yet, but i'll pass this idea to Ikari when i see him next time.
- 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.)
Tackling these both in one shot. These both were the founding reasons we went all out for a new way to present the system and its rules. It got worse with the fact Ikari had taken out resolution. Within our first few sessions (I was an exception, making all my skills work around these stats and it was overwhelmingly powerful in the right situations), we realized how much you only needed Will and Finnese (Accuracy and Dodge) and how everything else was just dump stats. It got really bland and it sucked for people who were... say... skill monkeys like my ninja or a fighter who was somehow more magically potent then a mage who was more physically potent then the fighter. (What.)
To say the least, When we updated the game, we tackled the stat problem by making them generally have a direct use to skills and your ability to resist said skills in a logical manner. MAGES CAN BE MAGES AND WARRIORS CAN BE WARRIORS!~ YAY~
Aiming, Dodging and now Blocking where introduced to start everyone on the same page, then was able to be modified in order to give everyone their own edge in combat.
- 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.
The meta-game is entirely removed and we hated the concept from day one (LOOK AT ME IM QUIRKY NOW GIVE ME EXP). It is entirely GM based for when you want to throw those out. we keep these separate from leveling up due to the nature of building up a skill list (And where the real power comes from) that you can use whilst having your stats develop in a way that helps you get the most bang for your buck using your stick. given there isnt the two stats to dominate them all, this helps a crap ton.
Also, we threw out FP in favor of a new EXP system that was more clear in its usage.
- 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 )
How we currently handle invincibility (At least through spell cards. no enemy yet has had an invinca move.). When someone pops a spell card, they're invincible for that attack. Then it goes to the next in line. If the card was death bombed (If that isnt in the old system, BEFORE YOU MAKE YOUR DODGE ROLLS, you may pop your card and interrupt immediately, starting a flat attack action. nothing else as you're in the trance required to use the card. yes, you can DB a DB.), then it goes to the next person after the former attacker. If it was the person who dropped the card, skip it and move onto the next person. That person cannot land an attack yet (Which is a great time for things like self buffing spells or retreating to cover or even setting up a delay attack). THEN the spell card activates its next round in between the transitional period between turns. Note, if they don't have more than a Invincibility 1 that ALL cards come with, they become venerable and people can go to town. If they do, this repeats until they reach a round where they do not have a 'invincibility frame' or the card ends. Note, they CANNOT DO ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THEN SEE THE CARD THROUGH.
- 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.
Already taken care of. :3
- 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.
Trust us, we will find a way. Somehow, somewhere. we already got the stat problem fixed, so no doubt we can give spell cards some... er... win cards. or something. bad pun 8D
- 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).
Right, i can see that being a problem. Rule Zero Here. (Also, Stat clean up.) along with the fact that well... a system emphasizing RPing and free form characters having these 'forced directions' is kind of... hypocritically bad.
We do have a skill list (*Realizes he called other things skills up above... agh. call them ablities*) that people can dump points into that are generally not combat related... um... that could help. A lot. They also use the 'empty' stats as well.
Good things!
- 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.
Hell yes. That sounds awesome, i wish i could of seen that. You have a log of that? XD
The major thing about this system is that we're trying to be 'HERE! Have a bunch of things you can do and some points to do it with! talk with your GM and make something freaking awesome!' We're working on standardizing a few things, but yes. we want that shitckyness. In our current game, we have a ghost who didnt realize he was a dead pyromancer, A white wolf samurai who was once human, a french mage (Whos the oldest gensokyan here, yet only the body of a child), a Japanese fortune teller who reads tarrot and an Oni who thinks that rice are flesh eatting Parasites. Their ablities are nuts, going from Flaming death, danmaku that was bounced back by pure martial skill or just the oni going 'Screw you, i have a giant goddamn boulder' and throwing it. All fair game. :3 (Also, Rule Zero here for sure XD)
- 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:
- 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.
Focus is entirely gone as far as im aware of. Wasnt around when i joined up, never seen it.
- 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 ^^;
However, i do remember ikari updating this part and saying he added 'options' (As in, options from side scrolling shoot em ups where your in a plane and can shoot things one way or switch it to another depending on what power-up's you got.) when he repriced a few things, so maybe that could be a small taste of what's to come... Also, if you have ideas, throw us over a word. Because, maybe you already got like... 50 ideas and we could use some. XD
- 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.
Trust with the GM in this system becomes the corner-piece if it succeeds or fails. Even when we make a more official update that addresses problems and has more concrete numbers, we still want to leave the system open (Rule Zero) and let the GM's gauge the power scale.
I actually find the races being 'right there' more helpful in nature, but there does need to be a change- A section dedicated to the Youkai template. The last thing we want is "here's all the variety you get", this is still a system of 'PC and GM work out awesome so awesome happens', so us stifling creativity bad.
*Pulls out to do list*What we can do to try and reduce that feeling of 'oh god words words words/complexity complexity complexity' is to present the information better with the races that do exist from the book, and let people know before even heading to choose a race that the races themselves, whilst having great benifits, are not a mold that you must fit. Obviously, there are cultural differences and societical differences (A White wolf is very different than an Oni), but that white wolf could be a amazing body builder and the oni could be casting lighting bolt till the cows come home.
And of course, if none suit the fancy of the PC, The Youkai template could be used to help create a fitting race with helpful guidelines from the GM (Given that the youkai race is a raw custom and thus has to pass by the GM.)
Hope this sufficiently answers some questions. I apologize if i contradict or blundered up some answers, its kinda late here but, you know, surprise Reply, gotta respond. :V
Again, open to feed back, and hope we can clear up things. Because we beh a community, and we help each other out because thats what you do to be awesome. :V
Also, my block is twice the block of your block because i stole your block then made my own block! so hah! :3
i win! dont feel guilty!