Hey guys, so a lot of people have had a chance to play and enjoy the game now, so I thought I’d open up a thread for ideas and suggestions for how the game could be improved. This could be as simple as new perks and spells, to possible ideas for game mechanics. Not everything will obviously be implemented, but I’ll consider all of your ideas!
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I have some thoughts, and they’re mostly about honing/straightening out the rules as they currently exist to make the game a little easier to run.
Unifying Bonuses and Penalties to Stuffing Checks and Difficulties
I want to argue that you should take all of the mechanics that change the difficulties of stuffing checks and make them affect the stuffing rolls instead.
The difference between those two things is purely mechanical. There IS a mechanical difference, because there are sometimes percentile bonuses and penalties (which add a lot of math to the game, maybe unnecessarily?) that change the numbers if not all the bonuses are stacked to one side. But in-universe there’s not a big narrative difference between saying “I am good at eating, so I can eat this easily” and “I am good at eating, so this is easier to eat.” It seems like changing numbers on both sides of the equation adds a lot of mechanical work without adding much by way of fun gameplay.
It would be pretty easy, in a future edition, to just go down the list and standardize all of those bonuses-- probably just move them all over to the stuffing check side. Which is to say, look at all the things like the lizard racial ability to subtract -5 from stuffing check difficulty and change it to a +5 bonus to stuffing checks. The majority of the time this will be no different, but it puts stuffing-ability-tracking solely into the hands of the player and removes it from the GM’s list of responsibilities. Shifting all those things over will also make some rules-room, I think, for more interesting mechanics.
Metabolism, FFL, Exercise Level, Mana, Average FFL
Tracking all of these things seems pretty tough, and they’re kind of intertangled already. Particularly, “lowering the average food content level” of your food to cast spells means you have to track every pound you’ve eaten, maybe over multiple sessions of gameplay. And otherwise food-fat-level and exercise level only really serve as modifiers to a character’s metabolism.
I think maybe we can solve all these issues by rolling these game facets together:
Have each race grant a Base Metabolism and have players track a Fatigue. When you rest, your fatigue resets to its base metabolic level (or maybe even the base metabolism changes, if you’ve been nuking your diet for a week). But over the course of an adventuring period, we track fatigue. Eat some very fatty foods, and your fatigue drops dramatically. Eat some diet foods, it drops only a little. Cast a spell or use a biological ability like the dryad’s sap production, and it rises. Run around for a while swordfighting, it rises. Settle down for an hour and take a siesta, it drops a little. This way we’re tracking way fewer things and we make space for more abilities like the dryad’s-- maybe give cows a stampeding ability that spikes up fatigue each time they use it, or the dragon a breath weapon that does the same. Heck, maybe every race gets a fatigue-dependent ability (like flight?) that helps balance them out a little more. It’s another hook to hang mechanics from.
Cap metabolism at 100%
Even though it’s possible to need more food than you can possibly eat, I think metabolism (or fatigue) explicitly needs to be capped regardless of my previous suggestion, and here’s why: Above levels of 100%, you start seeing a situation where the more you eat, the more weight you lose, (IE, if you eat 10 more pounds of food at 110%, you lose one more pound than you would have) which is silly. Just cap it at 100%, make the character become too exhausted to do stuff at that point, and have them lose a flat amount of weight as they recover.
If you take both this and my previous suggestion, then you also have the fun element where after casting a bunch of spells or doing some very demanding labor, characters are chowing down on cupcakes to replenish their energy and keep from hitting 100% fatigue. Which provides some in-universe motivation for characters to overindulge other than hedonism, and having characters with different personalities helps keep a roleplaying game fresh.
…
I know that you mostly asked for more perks and spells and I’m coming at you with two thoughts for overhauls, but I think that some combination of these suggestions might give whoever is GMing some serious breathing room, which could also make space for more player-facing mechanics that improve the gameplay experience.
I’ll post again later with some smaller-scale ideas. Perks/spells and such.
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Hey Kos!
Unifying the bonuses has actually been on my list for a while. It was less intentional more I picked up the weird habit of doing it one way or the other as I wrote rules, and never really went around to straightening out what the bonuses say, but pointing out that lowering the difficulty can have different effects based on the more percentage based ones is a good point, and truth be told, due to the scaling power of perks like fluid gorger and the snake’s ability shown in higher end eating checks, I’m half in the mind to remove them completely, and think of another way to add bonuses that isn’t just a flat number.
As for the fatigue idea, I love the concept, and while it’ll be tough to squeeze it in, I agree it would make running the game a little easier. If we find some time, I’d love to sit down in a live room with some of the more experienced players and iron out the new system together.
The problem with metabolism is a known one, and I’m hoping the new fatigue system you suggested will make that easier too. It was mostly just a hashed together threat of losing weight that was never corrected from early design, and I’d never managed to think of another way to track it, but losing more weight was basically supposed to be linked to the fact that your higher stomach capacity means you’re digesting more food on the regular, and your body is using up as much energy, so if you ate low fat food or exercised too much, it’d burn through all your food too fast and start rapidly burning your fat, but I agree that eating too much low fat food making you actually lose more weight is a bit dumb 
So we’ll try and address that in the future versions and see if we can iron out a more solid base for 0.4.
Thanks for your suggestions!
[quote=“Kostromama, post:2, topic:1069”]I have some thoughts, and they’re mostly about honing/straightening out the rules as they currently exist to make the game a little easier to run.
Unifying Bonuses and Penalties to Stuffing Checks and Difficulties
I want to argue that you should take all of the mechanics that change the difficulties of stuffing checks and make them affect the stuffing rolls instead.
The difference between those two things is purely mechanical. There IS a mechanical difference, because there are sometimes percentile bonuses and penalties (which add a lot of math to the game, maybe unnecessarily?) that change the numbers if not all the bonuses are stacked to one side. But in-universe there’s not a big narrative difference between saying “I am good at eating, so I can eat this easily” and “I am good at eating, so this is easier to eat.” It seems like changing numbers on both sides of the equation adds a lot of mechanical work without adding much by way of fun gameplay.
It would be pretty easy, in a future edition, to just go down the list and standardize all of those bonuses-- probably just move them all over to the stuffing check side. Which is to say, look at all the things like the lizard racial ability to subtract -5 from stuffing check difficulty and change it to a +5 bonus to stuffing checks. The majority of the time this will be no different, but it puts stuffing-ability-tracking solely into the hands of the player and removes it from the GM’s list of responsibilities. Shifting all those things over will also make some rules-room, I think, for more interesting mechanics.
Metabolism, FFL, Exercise Level, Mana, Average FFL
Tracking all of these things seems pretty tough, and they’re kind of intertangled already. Particularly, “lowering the average food content level” of your food to cast spells means you have to track every pound you’ve eaten, maybe over multiple sessions of gameplay. And otherwise food-fat-level and exercise level only really serve as modifiers to a character’s metabolism.
I think maybe we can solve all these issues by rolling these game facets together:
Have each race grant a Base Metabolism and have players track a Fatigue. When you rest, your fatigue resets to its base metabolic level (or maybe even the base metabolism changes, if you’ve been nuking your diet for a week). But over the course of an adventuring period, we track fatigue. Eat some very fatty foods, and your fatigue drops dramatically. Eat some diet foods, it drops only a little. Cast a spell or use a biological ability like the dryad’s sap production, and it rises. Run around for a while swordfighting, it rises. Settle down for an hour and take a siesta, it drops a little. This way we’re tracking way fewer things and we make space for more abilities like the dryad’s-- maybe give cows a stampeding ability that spikes up fatigue each time they use it, or the dragon a breath weapon that does the same. Heck, maybe every race gets a fatigue-dependent ability (like flight?) that helps balance them out a little more. It’s another hook to hang mechanics from.
Cap metabolism at 100%
Even though it’s possible to need more food than you can possibly eat, I think metabolism (or fatigue) explicitly needs to be capped regardless of my previous suggestion, and here’s why: Above levels of 100%, you start seeing a situation where the more you eat, the more weight you lose, (IE, if you eat 10 more pounds of food at 110%, you lose one more pound than you would have) which is silly. Just cap it at 100%, make the character become too exhausted to do stuff at that point, and have them lose a flat amount of weight as they recover.
If you take both this and my previous suggestion, then you also have the fun element where after casting a bunch of spells or doing some very demanding labor, characters are chowing down on cupcakes to replenish their energy and keep from hitting 100% fatigue. Which provides some in-universe motivation for characters to overindulge other than hedonism, and having characters with different personalities helps keep a roleplaying game fresh.
…
I know that you mostly asked for more perks and spells and I’m coming at you with two thoughts for overhauls, but I think that some combination of these suggestions might give whoever is GMing some serious breathing room, which could also make space for more player-facing mechanics that improve the gameplay experience.
I’ll post again later with some smaller-scale ideas. Perks/spells and such.[/quote]
[i][font=times new roman]Now, this guy knows what he’s talkin’ about! And, fat food level is quite a tough thing to track, like we’d almost have to resort to a wiki for each individual food item we’re considering eating! If we bring exercise level and fat food level into one, it not only makes calculations easier on both ends, it makes things a little more realistic, even if realism isn’t what we’re going for(and I know it isn’t.)
But, ask yourself this: After a lot of hard work, doesn’t a quick snack just make you feel energized again?
Also, for an idea: Perhaps a perk that could make fat like a second form of armor, like increasing your armor/defensive number by 1 per 10% bodyfat percentage, but it only helps on STR defenses, like
“Thick Fat?” Not sure if that could work though, just throwing it out there.[/font][/i]
Man, I wish I had things to suggest, but the others have put in such good points. I guess I need a few more sessions before I can really start making suggestions.
Definitely agree on how unifying how bonuses are written, although that doesn’t matter much if it’s already on your list of things to fix.
As far as perks go, it could be interesting to have more perks that aren’t quite so focused on eating or feeding. It can be argued that most of the mod perks are really about eating more effectively, so really the only non gaining-related perks are the profession ones. On the other hand, there are flaws that can affect almost every aspect of your character. When designing a character in my head, this makes the flaws almost seem to be a reflection of them as a person while the perks are a reflection of them as a set of mechanics. Dunno if that makes sense or not to anybody besides me.
I haven’t really looked at spellcasting enough to make any suggestions there, but if you’d like examples of specific perks that might fit what I was saying above then I can probably think some up.
Hmm. I remember Nuumi was talking about something related to the perk system, adding a talent tree for combat skills involving different fighting styles (mage, archery, one / two handed, shields etc.) I assume this is why the mage-perks aren’t in the new 0.3 rules, since that stuff was probably intended to be in the talent tree.
I think maybe a separate category of perks could be created, something like ‘background’ perks where instead of 10 perk points, we got X generic perk points (to be spend on any perks) as well as Y ‘background’ perk points (to be spent only on ‘background’ perks). Things like the City perks and Profession perks could be rolled together into that system, although I think these would need to be fleshed out more, and I don’t think that’s an immediate priority, so maybe just an idea to keep in mind somewhere down the line.
The stuff about fatigue makes me wonder if I’ve been thinking about magic wrong? With all my mages I’d kept track of what I’d eaten, and rather than using the average fat level I converted specific consumed foods into MP and used their fat level.
I also like the idea that the fatigue system could simplify a lot of things, but I’m not sure if I’d put the magic system in there. Games with a class system or similar, I tend to prefer the different play styles to be very differentiated, I’m not as big a fan of games with the general mechanical feel ‘everyone has a resource-point that they cast spells/do special sword moves from’. For those of you who like Wizards of the Coast, I prefer the 3.5 / Pathfinder style to the 4e power system.
Edit: I will also post again later with some small scale stuff like perk / spell ideas! In some ways, sort of broad rules systems are easier than the specific smaller stuff, as the specifics are what have to be balanced. It can’t be too impactful mechanically for obvious reasons, but if it comes up to rarely / has little impact, even if players like the theme they might feel like they’re playing badly if they take it.
I actually definitely hear you on this! And as the game becomes more fleshed out and more combat rules start appearing, that’s a great thing to keep in mind.
Something I draw a lot of inspiration from is the roguelike CRPG “Tales of Maj’Eyal,” which has a lot of amazingly different kinds of energy that result in very different playstyles: Warriors and such use “stamina,” that regenerates at a set rate. traditional wizardly mages use “mana,” which only regenerates in spurts with the aid of cool runic tattoos. Nature mages uses “equilibrium” that represents them drawing too much on nature’s power, and when it gets too high their spells start to fail until they meditate. Chronomancers use “paradox” that climbs until they repair the damage they’ve done to the timestream, and instead of failing their spells start having random effects. Some evil mages cast spells with life force that only regenerates when they score kills, others use their hatred which builds while dealing and receiving damage but fades away out of combat. They did an amazing job of making different classes play very differently.
Currently, all the systems in the game a very closely tied to the weight gain system. So I guess the question for Nuumi is whether everything should keep that tight focus on eating and getting fat, or whether future mechanics will branch away a bit?
Ok, I just thought of this, but what about summoning spells, such as minions you can summon for limited periods of time for aid, more powerful minions cost more calories and you have the option, if they rebel, to fight, and if you have enough room in your gut, eat them. Also this brings up something of prisoners, just saying, would there be a prisoner option if you knock a humanoid unconscious? They could be used to get money and a free meal, but that would most likely be late game. Just saying, hope these go through
Well, it is rather core to the game, but I imagine that some of the more combat-focused stuff will branch away from it, although I sure some paths/perks/ however it’s done will tie back into the weight system. Ideally, with the tech tree system that I believe was being considered, players could choose between more typical rpg perks (some form of power attack for two-handed weapons, a multi-shot with a bow, etc.) or the occasional fat-related perk.
One way this cold work would be scaling the perks benefit with body fat/fullness/other related stats, like +X HP per Y% bodyfat, or being able to store MP in fat. Another method, that could avoid scaling certain perks for balance reasons, would be perquisites to take a particular tech, for example a fatigue-spending body slam attack that required a minimum weight to use. One could also make these checks enemy-dependent, such as a crush attack that requires the user must be at least 2x as big as the target.
All in all, I’m greatly in favor of a combat tech tree, although we need to keep in mind that as all of these will be buffs, we may have to revamp attack / defense bonus’s or make enemies tougher in general to compensate for the players perks. And in general, we should be sure not to hand out big bonus’s to hit, damage, and defense, to avoid combat tech’s being overwhelming. Rather, offering attacks that increase versatility (by using or targeting unusual stats, for example). A few ideas:
-Point blank shot, no penalty for using ranged weapons on melee targets
-Multi-Shot / Cleave, gain the ability to attack multiple foes at a penalty
-Trip / Disarm / Knockback - take some penalty (accuracy, damage, etc) in order to inflict extra effects on attack
-Defensive fighting - take a penalty to attack to gain a defensive bonus until next turn
And a few fats 
-Cushioning / Mana Reserves, gain +1 HP/MP for each 10% Body Fat
-Sumo, Make an unarmed melee attack. If you are at least 2x the size of the target, you may also spend hits from this attack for grapple actions.
In most of the these as well, ‘take a penalty’ could be replaced with ‘gain fatigue’ for a more resource-based system. My preference would be that fatigue attacks be reserved for slightly-supernatural / superhuman style attacks, allowing room for both resource based classes and more consistent builds. More powerful abilities would be further on the tree - for example, ‘Sumo’ could require a player to take ‘Cushioning’ first.
Opening up a discussion room
Swing by if you’re in either of the current games, I’m discussing a new idea I had
I do like the idea of having some number of perk points only usable for background stuff. It encourages development of a character beyond how much they can eat and whether they can cast magic or not.
I’m torn on the idea of building perk trees, though. With how few perks you tend to pick, having to go through a tree would start to move the system towards having classes in a sense. Either you take the whole tree or you don’t. Things right now are nicely unstructured with how you can mix and match whatever you want.
Also, building too many combat perks as giving bonuses based on weight might get dangerous. From what I’ve seen of vore so far, it can be insanely powerful (basically was multiple one-shots in Sundays session). Having a lot of perks giving bonuses scaling by size/weight might result in there being a tipping point where characters on the smaller side of it are drastically less powerful than characters on the larger side. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done at all, it’ll just require crazy balance to not turn into linear fighter, quadratic glutton.
Offhand flaw thought after today’s session:
Roguelike (-5?): Permadeath mode! If you’re eaten or killed, you don’t respawn at the chapel. Make a new character, buh-byeee!
That’s definitely one that the whole group needs to discuss and agree on, even if it does only affect one person. If I wanted to feel pain at being screwed in every way by RNG, I’d just play FTL.
With the permadeath deal, perhaps acid proof would be good for that, so one could try and cut their way out, if such a method would be possible. Maybe have ‘Rougelike’ be excluded from the prey species, since their thing is that being eaten is only half costly to them? Or, for prey, being eaten would take full death-cost, yet can respawn, but any other methods of death are perminant, like a fatal blow, or poisening?
Question: “but an equal number of points in Flaws must also be taken.”
Does taking a flaw cost perk points, or is it something that must be done because of spending perk points? Is it possible for the player to not spend these points and save them for later, or are they lost after character creation?
Also, can perks be taken more than once to stack the benefits, and are there limits to this madness?
Bee Tee Dubs: The system looks pretty sturdy. Way to be!
Flaws must be taken equal to the amount of perk points you take, but they themselves do not take up points. Think of it as evening out the cost with negatives so to speak. As for taking the same perk more than once, no, you aren’t allowed to do that, it’d be a little bit too broken with some perks. ^^;
I skimmed through the rule book and it looks great! But, I’m not great at role playing. Would it be possible to join as a spectator or get some logs, if you play through text?
If you want to view the game in action, I can request if you can spectate the game on either the friday or Sunday games, just send me a PM on one of those days and I’ll ask the group. It’s really up to them if I allow others to watch them play.
I am generally okay with spectators as long as questions are kept to whispers so as not to break immersion.