Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Parisbre56]

I'd be up for a game of junkyard wars with guns. Reminds me of AS-Junkyard in UT2004.

Also, the way stats work doesn't have to be completely realistic. As long as it's not extremely absurd, players should be able to properly RP their situation. Edit: Now that I think about it, even if it is extremely absurd, you could always call it magic, so even them there's no problem.

[piecewise]

I'd be up for a game of junkyard wars with guns. Reminds me of AS-Junkyard in UT2004.

Also, the way stats work doesn't have to be completely realistic. As long as it's not extremely absurd, players should be able to properly RP their situation. Edit: Now that I think about it, even if it is extremely absurd, you could always call it magic, so even them there's no problem.

I've been working on the crafting game because I'm still thinking about how to handle Oro's system (And because this stuff is all related to urban nightmare crap so anything I make here can be adapted and moved into ORO if I like it). The idea I have for it is sort of a closed system survival game: The area is basically a massive garbage dump where all manner of crap from old appliances to biomedical waste has been dropped. You, along with other criminals, have been exiled there, and your goal is to survive and eventually escape. Of course there are NPC factions sitting around, horrible predatory creatures, strange mutant flora and fauna and of course the military that keeps the island quarantined likes to strafe visible pockets of civilization every so often.

[DoctorMcTaalik]

I had an inkling of a game concept at one time, where you were a robot in a world populated by robots (think the Robots movie, basically), and instead of any kind of progression you would scavenge parts off of things you defeat or find (not all robots would be humanoid, by far) and try to graft them onto yourself. Kind of a bizarre version of being a merc in Battletech, you have to fight things that attack you in such a way as to not completely destroy them, otherwise you barely get any salvage to repair and re-arm (sometimes literally) yourself with.

(also the robots all have the central "processing core" that acts as their consciousness, a concept I lifted out of a game called "A.I.M.". You can't use one directly, but collecting them can be useful because you can basically sell these consciousness cores into slavery, until they "pay off" what you got paid for them, and the price of a basic body, with their acting as a cloud-computer, and then get jammed into that basic body and released back into the world. That's if who you've sold them to is a decent person. Sentient cores might have it easier if they have a bank account they can pay out of.)

I've been working on a game/system very similar to that, actually. The main difference being that it's set in a human-dominated world, with robots mechanical persons occupying the lowest class in most societies. Sort of like Robots meets R.U.R., with a a splash of Futurama for flavor.

[Parisbre56]

If we're talking about robot games, then I'd like something like that: https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Engine_Heart
I think it would be fun having players deal with being stuck on a completely alien body (that is mostly weaker than a human's and presents some unique challenges) and objectives that only make sense to a machine trying to do its job despite the world ending.
Plus, I like Romantically  Apocalyptic and the slightly humorous post  apocalyptic tone of that game kinda reminds me of that.
Although I guess in this forum it would probably work better as a suggestion game.

[Radio Controlled]

On way to help prevent a crafting system become Tinker 2.0 is to, as was said, not to have endless resources available. If all you can craft with is things you have to buy or even collect yourself on missions, and not answer people when they wanna combine things 'in theory' (aka VR-equivalent) that'll diminish it. Making resources more/less expensive/easy to gather can then allow for tweaking exactly how much crafting you want in any system (and it could encourage inter-player economy instead of a primarily npc-centered economy).

Of course, I personally still prefer some sort of sequel to ER, even if it's only loosely tied to it, but that's just me. But that doesn't mean we need to do that now, of course. It might even be better to first do something entirely different, let the creative juices refill for a while.

Also, I find it funny how, back when we determined the fate of what to do with Xan, I remember thinking "this is a bad idea, there is no way this won't end in more disaster". But then Xantalos was so adorable, we did it anyway, and now look at what happened! This is what you get when you put feels before reals!


Incidentally,

The wood-ant ‘colony’ described here – although superficially looking like a functioning colony with workers teeming on the surface of the mound – is rather an example of survival of a large amount of workers trapped within a hostile environment in total darkness, with constantly low temperatures and no ample supply of food. The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies.

This sounds like the kind of 'setting' pw could set a post-apocalyptic game in. Be sure to read the entire article, it really is something different.

Like most ant species, wood ants are tidy animals who remove waste from their colony. In the case of the bunker ants, most of this waste is composed of dead bodies. The researchers speculate that mortality in the "colony" is likely much higher than under normal circumstances. "Flat parts of the earthen mound [of the nest] and the floor of the adjacent spaces ... were carpeted with bodies of dead ants," write Czechowski and colleagues. This "ant cemetery" was a few centimeters thick in places, and "one cubic decimeter sample contained [roughly] 8,000 corpses," which led the researchers to suggest that there were likely 2 million dead ants piled around the nest mound. The sheer numbers of dead bodies suggest that this orphaned wood ant nest has been active for many years.

[piecewise]

Oh yeah, in this game system you can only craft with items you have. And Items can only be found in certain areas. And some are harder to get then others.

[piecewise]

If you guys would like to help me, you can post items to use for this.

Not big, complex or multipart things, just basic items. For instance:
Metal ball Bearings
Spring
Glass lens
Metal Blade
Spark Wheel
Air Filter
Spark Plug
Fuel Tank
Fan Blade

[Harry Baldman]

Chair leg
Cooking pot
Coinage
Old newspaper
Bricks
Pantyhose
Mirror
Doorknob
Earring
Thumbtacks
Candle holders
Lego bricks
Plastic bags
Bottles
Hair
Sinew
Cartilage
Vertebra
Pelvis
Skull
Femur
Rib
Teeth
Tin can
Cymbal
Tractor tire
Bicycle chain
Triangle
Mystery meat
Droppings
Blood
Salt
Sand
Crushed glass
Lead pipe
Thyme

[spazyak]

Guitar string,
G string
piano key
Copper wire
a bar magnet
fork
keyboard keys
fishing line
Toe shoes
fingernails
hearing aid
co2 canister
burnable cd's
Broken burnable cd's
Sodering iron

[Ozarck]

sand.
spaghetti noodles, partially cooked.
altimeter
shoe insole
spool of carpet fiber
a ram's horn
mercury
cassette tape (just the tape, not the cover or spools or anything)
radial tire
matches
water

[syvarris]

Spoiler: Fasteners (click to show/hide)

tape
nails
screws
glue
rivets
spikes
straps
ties
rope
magnets
vices
welders
mortar
staples
rubber bands

I suppose this list is mostly useless if we're using minecraft's crafting system.

[MidnightJaguar]

cheese wire.
a textbook.
raw sugar
chlorine in a metal container.
gas mask.
Potassium

[piecewise]

So I dunno If I ever explained the basics of the system beyond the short thing in the pdf.

In terms of crafting there's aren't gonna be preset recipes. Because, really, there would be no way to create all the recipes needed to handle everything everyone would want. Instead you're gonna be able to gather up some stuff and then say "I wanna make this, with this, does that work?" and either it does, and it becomes a recipe that can be followed and used from then on, or it doesn't and I'll say something like "you should try adding this thing" or "You're missing something that does this."

For instance, if someone came to me with 3 circuit boards, an electrical cord, a capacitor, an antenna, 4 scrap plastic and a Cathode Ray Tube and wanted to make a TV. I'd tell them that they should probably add a keyboard circuit or a button panel or something else that will let them actually change the channels and such.  Then, once they got that part and make the thing, that combination becomes the recipe to make a TV.

Of course, you can't do that if you don't have the parts, and depending on the parts you'll need tools. There are specific tools for working with metal, mechanical, wood, circuitry, etc. So you need those for working too. The combination of needing items to craft along with establishing recipes as we move along should prevent tinker syndrome. You could probably make some pretty op shit, but doing it would take a hell of a lot of work.

[syvarris]

The combination of needing items to craft along with establishing recipes as we move along should prevent tinker syndrome.

I don't think this quite addresses the issue with Tinker.  Yes, scarcity would help some, if only because we can only tinker at a tenth the rate due to needing to find stuff, but open recipes are exactly why Tinker created OP items.  Tinker created OP stuff because you'd give us some material or items and state that they have certain abilities, but then have those abilities be poorly engineered or utilized.  The PSL, for instance, was a really stupid weapon from an engineering perspective, and was only balanced because it had significant engineering flaws.  Forcefields were rather clearly intended exclusively for being armor, and were balanced in that role, but not at all when we started getting creative with them.  Tesla sabers were a stupid rule-of-cool design which were greatly improved by being stuck on a laser, but were balanced for the stupid design, and therefore not the bayonet design.

Another issue which could easily come to the fore in this system is stupid questions.  For instance, asking how well a gun works against an armor that it's terrible against, or how well a deliberately flawed design works.  This tends to result in the stuff from the first paragraph--balanced items which have engineering flaws as a key part of their balance.  Fix the flaw, and suddenly you have an OP weapon.  Generally this has been accidental in the past, but it's easy to do intentionally, and will result in OP stuff.

You're not gonna prevent tinker with nothing more than an open crafting system.  Slow it, sure.  But to stop it?  You need something more, be it harsher retroactive balancing, more competent people, or just not having an open system to begin with.

...Oh, and making a list of a thousand random parts is stupid.  "Cathode Ray Tube" type stuff is just gonna be worthless bloat the vast majority of the time.  If you're gonna collect a parts list, collect of general "component types" list.  Like the big spoiler I posted before?  It should boil down to two or three different categories of item.  When things are being added to the inventory, you can be more specific, and maybe limit their use in crafting recipes more, but it would be much better to roll for what type of item is found, rather than the specific form that item takes.

[Nikitian]

It makes me sad that people want to "prevent Tinker". 

...balanced items which have engineering flaws as a key part of their balance.  Fix the flaw, and suddenly you have an OP weapon.

Don't want to bog down with the rest of the discussion (since I'm in the minority here, apparently), but - why allow "flawed" items to be considered "balanced" in the first place? If something is a glaring engineering flaw, then it cannot be "average" or "good" by design at all - at best, it can be "marginally viable" (which is actually a pretty fine thing, half the original ER Armory was made of such items), but - if you intend to balance right in the middle of Tinkering (instead of, say, beforehand and then letting the design be simulated within those constraints), don't make barely viable items set the bar for "balanced" equipment, and you'll avoid OP things altogether - some might be "okay", some might be "good", some might even be "revolutionary", but on its own it is still not "game-ruining OPness" - only if compared to obviously bad choices like those with in-built engineering flaws. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man should not be seen as the king, in truth he is at best a ruling regent.

(E.g. I recall that gunpowder came to Europe around XIIIth century, whereas earliest massed personal handguns are dated late XVth century - and yet still they would truly shine only hundreds of years later, with all the development and innovation. Was gunpowder useless before it could be reliably used in personal weapons? Hell no, cannons for the win! Were cannons of that age still clearly niche use of this technology? Absolutely, and thinking that the early cannons were the only balanced way of utilizing gunpowder would be a great disservice to the history of modern firearms.)

My 0.2 tokens to the topic, anyway.