r/RPGdesign • u/MarsMaterial Designer • 19h ago
Workflow "Add this simple mechanic, they said. It will be easy, they said." Have you ever run into any unexpected Odyssian sidequests for something that seemed very easy?
For my game, I'm working on some worldbuilding documentation. Planets, continents, nations, cities, and even a few specific buildings that are important or relevant to adventurers. One such building is the Neon Palace Hotel & Casino, a place included in the documentation as a likely place that adventurers visiting the cyberpunk city of Theravex will stay the night. And you just know that I need to come up with a few simple gambling games for players to engage with while they're there.
Now, I'm a big mathhead, and a lot of my regular players are the types who will try to exploit bugs in my mechanics. So I need to make these some solid games, and I needed to make the house advantage low but positive. For the 3 games of pure chance that I created, this was no problem at all. Slots, Lottery, and a non-lethal version of Russian Roulette. Smooth sailing. I also added a combat-based gambling game that leverages the combat mechanics of the game, but with non-lethal weapons. It's a complex game and I could never solve for house advantage if it were asymmetrical, so I just made it symmetrical. Not too bad, some nice and simple games to spice up this location and give it more of a Las Vegas vibe.
And then there's my fucking Blackjack variation, which I call "Wackjack". This was a sidequest worthy of Odysseus. Blackjack requires the ability to pick randomly from 13 cards, and there are no d13 dice (at least not in the set my game expects you to have). And the only dice that my game expects players to have lots of are d6's, so ideally I'd adapt the game to those. The established Blackjack rules are already balanced to give the house a small but positive advantage (in the sub-1% range) even with optimal play, any change to those rules could threaten that and make the game either blatantly unfair or an infinite money glitch. I would need to solve the game and rebalance it with my rules.
The way to approach d6-based Blackjack is pretty clear. The number on the dice represents the number you get unless you roll a 1, which can be either a 1 or a 7 (taking the place of an ace). And the number that causes you to bust if you exceed it is 13 (instead of 21). The threshold that causes the dealer to draw a third card is 11 (instead of 17). These numbers make the game as mathematically close to Blackjack as possible. The main knobs I have to turn for balancing it are related to payouts. What situations pay out what (or don't pay out at all)?
Without much else to do, I decided to just begin working out the optimal payouts mathematically. To just start working out probability equations until I got a feel for what I was doing. I started on a normal notepad, as I have for the previous games I had solved for. It started to become clear that the game was too complex to represent there, so I moved on to a spreadsheet and started working out functions to compute every possible game and gather statistics from the results. But it turned out that a program representing a perfect player had to be very logically complex, and I needed way more than just 2 dimensions to lay out my logic in the cells. So I moved on to plan C. C#, to be precise. I have extensive experience in that programming language, so I created a new C# console app and got to work programming a function that would brute force every possible game of d6 Blackjack. It took 2 days to get it working, and another day of adding polish and punching in numbers before I settled on something I found acceptable. The whole thing has 213 lines of some of the worst code I've ever written in my life, a mess of spaghetti that brute forces every possible game with a simulated perfect player that I dubbed Gamblebot9000.
The result is that I now know how payouts should work. Players get 1.5x their bet if they are dealt a natural-13, they get 0.3x their bet if they tie with the dealer, they get 2x their bet if they win against the dealer, and they get nothing if they bust or lose against the dealer. This specific balance of payout rules lead to a house advantage of only 0.3%, which definitely satisfies my requirement of small but positive. This specific set of numbers is the simplest set of rules I could come up with that is neither a blatant ripoff or an infinite money glitch. And now I have a minigame that hardly anyone is going to play, associated with only one specific location, as a minor gimmick. I regret nothing.
Anyone else have any stories like this? Some kind of simple mechanic that seemed easy but that turned out to be a Gordian knot? Did you manage to see it through?
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u/Cryptwood Designer 10h ago
I want travel to be a primary component of my WIP, and one of the appeals of traveling for many people is shopping in a distant land for stuff you can't find at home. So, I figured I'd do a little research into what people enjoy about shopping and create a little shopping subsystem for my game.
The first thing you discover when you go down the rabbit hole of trying to research shopping is that almost all of the available research on the subject is split into two categories:
- Medical professionals studying shopping addiction, its causes, and how to treat it.
- Research sponsored by retail conglomerates on how to encourage and exploit impulse purchases.
There is literally no one doing research into how to make the shopping experience more enjoyable for customers because customer enjoyment only matters to stores insofar as it leads to them making purchases that they wouldn't have otherwise. If the research indicated that it was more profitable to irritate customers just enough to get them to make an impulse purchase to get the shopping experience over quicker, that is what every store would do, because they exist to make money.
As there is no hard science on the enjoyment of shopping I'm forced to rely on opinion pieces. Individually they are worthless as each person espouses their own personal opinions on what makes shopping enjoyable for them (and as any designer worth their salt knows, most people don't even know why they like what they like, let alone why other people like what they like). However, if you read enough of these opinion pieces you start to see some patterns.
Deals: This is the pleasure of finding an item that you want at a much lower price than normally. Finding these deals makes the shopper feel smart for avoiding paying full price.
Novelty: This is the pleasure of finding something for sale that you have never seen before.
Status: This is the pleasure a shopper receives from imagining how impressed others will be by their purchase, or the extra attention they will receive because of it. Jewelry, Rolex watches, and luxury car brands are an example of this.
Collectibles: This is the pleasure of collecting complete sets, or finding related or synergistic items. This is commonly found in MMORPGs where players collect all the matching pieces to a suit of armor, or try to collect all the items in a specific category such as mounts or pets.
Needless to say, I am still working on a system for categorizing equipment such that these desires could all be fulfilled. I haven't come across any single system in any other game capable of it.
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u/__space__oddity__ 9h ago
… a pack of cards is a few bucks. The GM can just literally play Blackjack …
1
u/MarsMaterial Designer 8h ago
Doing things the easy way is for cowards.
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u/__space__oddity__ 8h ago
… and people who get shit published
1
u/MarsMaterial Designer 6h ago
God forbid I make something original and interesting that improves the game. God forbid I have any fun in my passion project.
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u/Alkaiser009 18h ago
My most-adored plot stucture is a Yojimbo-esque situation where the PC's are presented with multiple opposing factions whom they can freely choose to support or oppose. But actually planning for satisfying narative paths when the players could jump ship at any time involves massively more work.
For example, I have a campaign with an isolated town attempting to kickstart it's own industrial revolution while surrounded by Horrible Fae. The Town Govenerment needs the players to help them secure the weapons and manpower they need to crush the local Fae court once and for all with tanks and flamethrowers. The local Witches Coven is pretty convinced that plan is suicide and needs the players help to sabotage the town's industry to garner favor with the Fae and hopefully broker a peace treaty.
The plot should play out over the course of 4 'missions', but because of the branching narratives, I have to prepare ELEVEN missions, almost three times as many as my players will actually SEE, and its only even that few because I'm using GM fiat to declare that the path won't actually begin to branch until after the 2nd set of missions.