Personally I think Death Spirals aren't necessarily a bad thing, especially outside heroic fantasy. What needs to be remembered is that those death spirals apply to enemies too. In D&D-likes, that Ancient Dragon is *just* as deadly at 1hp as they were at full, and remains just as likely to burn you to a crisp. In a wound-based system, you may be able to reduce its threat with targeted attacks, keeping you safer for the rest of the fight. It's all about what *feeling* you want to give the players.
I feel like the problem is more so that whoever is lucky enough to land the FIRST hit becomes exponentially more likely to win the fight, and if that’s okay with you then why is the fight still going on?
@@Duncster14 A fair concern! The "alpha strike" is a serious issue and something we've definitely grappled with. However, I will say, that's really the case in traditional ttrpgs too. In D&D 5e, for example, if all the players roll high on initiative, then the fight is often won anyway, as they can layer fireballs and such on top of all enemies and make it a cake-walk after that. TFE is designed around the assumption that all the players go before the enemies, or vice versa. So it's baked into how scenarios are constructed and how the combat engine works, with an emphasis on off-turn agency (Reactions) to allow characters to defend themselves even when it's not their turn. For all such games, the initial layout and structure of any combat scenario matters for creating an engaging and interesting fight, regardless of which side goes first! 🤠 Anyway, good comment and I appreciate the feedback!!
I’m unapologetically PRO Death Spiral. It applies to enemies too. I do agree many games aren’t fun with death spirals, but I think I’ve threaded that needle. Death Spirals for all!
The concept of this video feels like a great communication tool with the community. Some comments: 1) Injury System: I think I never experienced a middle ground between HP and Injuries with set backs systems; I think each is best for one genre or another. 2) Noting injuries: As you were explaining the first solution that came to mind was the Savage Worlds "wildcard/Extra dynamic, which eases the GM´s burden; But in my sessions I have experienced the players slowly recognizing in a meta-gamish way that this big bad had three wound points and all these others were cannon fodder. 3. 1) Shared Turns: The shared turn is a great ideia; It does feel to me like an evolution of the action & movement in D&D: once your weren´t able to break your movement between actions, now you do. The next step feels like what TfE is proposing 3.2) Challenges: Do you think that player facing challenges might take some of the tension and expectations away? 4) Attrition based: What I learned in my playing and GMing years is that anything more than plain HP countdown is usually better, but it can be anti-climax for the big boss to be one-shot (the same goes for the players) in a given scene. It is good to have an alternative to escape this situation, even in a form o option rulings. Congrats on the game and I hope to play it soon!
@@conceptarthur re challenges and tension: we've found that the tension comes not from the unknown target number, but from the knowledge of what the monsters will do to you should they fail. In many RPGs, the players deduce the AC or defense of the enemy after a turn or two, so that mystery is ephemeral at best. Thanks, as always, for the thoughtful and insightful feedback!
I managed to avoid the death spiral problem with my wound system by not making the penalty apply to defense. Plus you don't take extra penalties for being more wounded, it's an on or off condition.
Excellent video, still very excited to try out the beta/playtest/whatever you call it I find the point about TfE not necessarily playing slower, just differently very intriguing. It makes a lot of sense now that you point it out The fact that turns can be slower/more complex because the game encourages all players’ engagement by design is so cool. As a very amateur game designer, clean design like that gets me all hyped
I could see a deck of cards or tokens with different injuries written on them. So to track them you aren't writing and erasing stuff, just taking and returning cards. Also if you are using minis you could put the cards under the NPC minis to make it easier for the GM to track who's injured.
Definitely much more practical and streamlined. On my savage worlds campaign (we are playing with miniatures) I am using counters (small cubes of different colours) next to each miniature to represent the different conditions. Red cube next to your miniature? You are shaken. Purple cube? You are vulnerable etc.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames nice, I do think it's a win-win situation when you do it well so I'm happy that both the community and you will learn from it
I Can't wait for the play test. and I'm sure peoples opinions on things will vary and change once people get to start playing it. as you can read rules / concepts all day long, but they can feel wildly different when in actual play. So im excited to see how these mechanics play out in a live test =]
🥳🫂👍🏿 Something confuses me about the concern surrounding death spirals - players want their characters to survive, so anything that threatens their mortality feels bad, but we need potential consequences of failure, like PC death, for success to be meaningful - not all games require death, but many benefit from it - so, assuming death should be in a particular ttrpg, do people want their characters to operate at 100% strength right up to the point when the suddenly die? That doesn’t make sense to me - I think the push back against death spirals has more to do with not wanting your character to die under any circumstances rather than a desire for balance, realism, verisimilitude, speed of play or any of the other common goals of game design in this space
I definitely feel that, too. I think some games and some play styles have given rise to a feeling of heroic indomitability. That sort of experience is all well and good in some games, but for an action-horror one like TFE, I hope players understand that the intended evocation is one of desperate survival, of fighting against the horrors and not being certain of their survival. It has been great seeing so many people "get it", I must say. Overall, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I recently played an rpg that evoked the movie Alien to a T, and the stress and panic brought on by growing pressure definitely wore your character down in a way that made perfect sense for a horror game
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames really niche - getting no press at the moment - probably never heard of it - it’s called Mothership 😄 In all seriousness, a creator I follow asked for playtesters for an add on to Mothership, so it was that - the creator is worth a watch: Miles Away Games - his system is a great way to build connections between teammates quickly, so it sort of filled in a gap for the game that made it that much more like Alien in that the sort of interpersonal relationships we see at the beginning of the film can be generated as quickly as a character can be made in the base game
@@TwinSteel Haha I had a suspicion it was Mothership! That game is absolutely amazing. I'll definitely check out Miles Away Games, the channel looks right up my alley!
As a playtester, I can say it is very fun! It's such a fun dynamic working with your team to figure out the best strategy on each fight. It really feels like you are a scrappy team fighting together for your life.
Oh. I am glad the RPG is going well. Good luck with that. The death spiral thing is something I commented on before. I suggested replacing it with an abundance of status effects. This video does address that. Having injuries easier to avoid and recover from helps. If there is an abundance of status conditions, it would help to give the ability to remove them. It can be done by spell, item, rest or something. I don't have much issue with the rest of the system. Tales from Elsewhere is very unusual by overhauling the health (hit points) system in RPGs. There is a whole video explaining the problems with the health system and attempts to solve it. The effect is streamlining the game. It is weird, but I am open to it. I am all for streamlining RPGs in order to make it more fun. I do that a lot when game designing. Tales from Elsewhere does complicate things by specifying body parts. I am not usually a fan of this. However the complication of body parts can replace the complication of hit points. So the game doesn't seem too crunchy as a whole. Deciding which body parts to hit and what kind of injury to give is its own choice in battle. That has the potential to fun shenanigans. I do appreciate for this channel to bring the hit point issue to my attention. This has influenced my own game design. I don't get rid of hit points entirely. However I do simplify my math a lot. It is to the point where most numbers are single digits. Hit points tend to be about 100 or less. That is a lot lower than they were previously. DND can have the tankiest characters get hundreds of hit points. So having less than a hundred is still really small by comparison.
There is an issue of tracking. I like to use dice to track changeable things like current hit points. Percentile dice are great for tracking health. I used to use counters for tracking health. I especially like using flat marbles as counters. Whether by dice or counters, I start from the maximum hit points. Then I reduce the number in order to track damage. Tales From Elsewhere can be tracked with game pieces too. I think it would benefit from something like the Pokemon TCG. When a Pokemon receives damage, counters are placed on top of the card. Each counter represents ten hit points of damage. It is weird to add counters over time. Pokemon do get a higher a higher max hit points, when they evolve. The evolved form card can be placed between the previous form card and the counters. This process doesn't require adding extra counters, so it is deemed easier. Maybe it is easier? Status conditions are tracked too. Paralyzed, sleep and confuse cause the card to be turned around in different ways. That immobilizes the Pokemon some way. Poison and burn are damage over time effects. They are indicated by placing special tokens on the card. Tales From Elsewhere could gain special tokens to indicate injuries. These tokens can be by the player or on top of their character sheet. These tokens can accumulate over time in order to track injuries. The accumulation is like the damage counters in Pokemon. On top of that, these tokens can have a word or a symbol to indicate the type of injury. That is like the distinction Pokemon has for poison and burn tokens. With special tokens one can track injuries so much easier. There can even be special cards to use in place of token. These cards name the injury, and it explains how it works. I hope this tip helps.
I love your injury system idea. Ive been trying to implement something like this in my game for a while. I first got the inspiration from Fear & Hunger. The smaller die for better weapons was very innovative. Cant wait for the play test.
16:20 a cybernetic undead (say a skeleton?) monstrosity with a chainsaw limb, a grabby hand limb, why not replace that syringe with a cannon and add an extra limb with a laser beam. Now that sounds like a boss fight.
@@matthewparker9276 I dunno, the current version can hold down its victims and saw off their limbs, then paralyze them to take them away to their lair. They're meant to be like a Terminator mixed with Jason 😂
Speaking of "standing and talking endlessly" and related to "defeated isn't necessarily dead", do you have any thoughts on persuasion mechanics? I could definitely see TfE having a social combat engine similar to the physical combat engine (target Gut/Heart/Soul instead of Bulk/Brim/Ace, inflict conditions like Baffled/Hesitant/Demoralized).
I actually do have a (secret) additional social/interrogation style system in super early draft for TFE. However, it likely won't be in the first book (Clockworld), as it's more of a rootin' tootin' shootin' weird west game rather than an investigative one. I don't want to scope creep the first book into oblivion and never get a chance to release, it ya know? (I actually plan on doing several books, each with a different setting and each introduction more sub-systems and mechanics over time!) 🤠
Another way to avoid death spirals is for the penalties to do things like limit their options or force consequences for pushing through them. That helps give players agency via what tradeoffs they choose to make, even when both paths are Not Great. Just so long ss thry can Do That Thing with full effectiveness. Examples include: losing access to a secondary weapon instead of receiving an attack penalty, a greater chance of bleeding another turn if you don't stop attacking, or reducing your number / choose of targets instead of a full "blinded" condition. You could limit injuries to one per "slot" of severity. If you get hit with another condition, it just doesn't apply. Instead it causes the damage itself to increase by one tier. It's based on a more narrative sort of logic, true, but putting a cap on the complexity of tracking injuries can be more then worth the loss of realism. ...I typed this in the middle of listening to the video, and now I'm less sure how your injuries work to begin with. Oh well. My points still stand strong upon their contextual ignorance.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I am a nearly endless barrel of ideas! Some of them are even good! The trick is to burn though all the bad ideas until only good ones are left.
For sure it's "attrition based" in the sense that it's representing violent conflict resolution and usually attrition is a step toward finishing fights. In some ways I'd say your system expand on attrition by giving it teeth and making it less abstract. Attrition based combat is only bad if it means combat is filled with abstract trading of numbers like you're saying. So yeah I can see how that's mostly semantic as it wouldn't necessarily be ideal to really have no attrition.
Personally I think Death Spirals aren't necessarily a bad thing, especially outside heroic fantasy. What needs to be remembered is that those death spirals apply to enemies too. In D&D-likes, that Ancient Dragon is *just* as deadly at 1hp as they were at full, and remains just as likely to burn you to a crisp. In a wound-based system, you may be able to reduce its threat with targeted attacks, keeping you safer for the rest of the fight. It's all about what *feeling* you want to give the players.
@@patrickardagh-walter6609 Agreed!
I feel like the problem is more so that whoever is lucky enough to land the FIRST hit becomes exponentially more likely to win the fight, and if that’s okay with you then why is the fight still going on?
@@Duncster14 A fair concern! The "alpha strike" is a serious issue and something we've definitely grappled with.
However, I will say, that's really the case in traditional ttrpgs too. In D&D 5e, for example, if all the players roll high on initiative, then the fight is often won anyway, as they can layer fireballs and such on top of all enemies and make it a cake-walk after that.
TFE is designed around the assumption that all the players go before the enemies, or vice versa. So it's baked into how scenarios are constructed and how the combat engine works, with an emphasis on off-turn agency (Reactions) to allow characters to defend themselves even when it's not their turn.
For all such games, the initial layout and structure of any combat scenario matters for creating an engaging and interesting fight, regardless of which side goes first! 🤠
Anyway, good comment and I appreciate the feedback!!
I’m unapologetically PRO Death Spiral. It applies to enemies too. I do agree many games aren’t fun with death spirals, but I think I’ve threaded that needle.
Death Spirals for all!
Spot on about HP, people are used to it, but it is a lot of work.
Congrats on demo, that’s huge!
@@davewilson13 Right? The DM scratch pad can fill up fast with annotations for HP changes!
The concept of this video feels like a great communication tool with the community.
Some comments:
1) Injury System: I think I never experienced a middle ground between HP and Injuries with set backs systems; I think each is best for one genre or another.
2) Noting injuries: As you were explaining the first solution that came to mind was the Savage Worlds "wildcard/Extra dynamic, which eases the GM´s burden; But in my sessions I have experienced the players slowly recognizing in a meta-gamish way that this big bad had three wound points and all these others were cannon fodder.
3. 1) Shared Turns: The shared turn is a great ideia; It does feel to me like an evolution of the action & movement in D&D: once your weren´t able to break your movement between actions, now you do. The next step feels like what TfE is proposing
3.2) Challenges: Do you think that player facing challenges might take some of the tension and expectations away?
4) Attrition based: What I learned in my playing and GMing years is that anything more than plain HP countdown is usually better, but it can be anti-climax for the big boss to be one-shot (the same goes for the players) in a given scene. It is good to have an alternative to escape this situation, even in a form o option rulings.
Congrats on the game and I hope to play it soon!
@@conceptarthur re challenges and tension: we've found that the tension comes not from the unknown target number, but from the knowledge of what the monsters will do to you should they fail. In many RPGs, the players deduce the AC or defense of the enemy after a turn or two, so that mystery is ephemeral at best.
Thanks, as always, for the thoughtful and insightful feedback!
I managed to avoid the death spiral problem with my wound system by not making the penalty apply to defense. Plus you don't take extra penalties for being more wounded, it's an on or off condition.
That's good! That'd help avoid that death spiral situation.
Excellent video, still very excited to try out the beta/playtest/whatever you call it
I find the point about TfE not necessarily playing slower, just differently very intriguing. It makes a lot of sense now that you point it out
The fact that turns can be slower/more complex because the game encourages all players’ engagement by design is so cool. As a very amateur game designer, clean design like that gets me all hyped
@@psychone8064 I really appreciate that! Glad it's getting your designer juices flowing! 🤠
I could see a deck of cards or tokens with different injuries written on them. So to track them you aren't writing and erasing stuff, just taking and returning cards.
Also if you are using minis you could put the cards under the NPC minis to make it easier for the GM to track who's injured.
@@zachb3757 That's a super cool idea! Sounds like a fun stretch goal for a Kickstarter or something. 🤔
Definitely much more practical and streamlined. On my savage worlds campaign (we are playing with miniatures) I am using counters (small cubes of different colours) next to each miniature to represent the different conditions. Red cube next to your miniature? You are shaken. Purple cube? You are vulnerable etc.
Great video! It's always good to address concerns!
Loving how communicative you've been!
@@juauke My pleasure! I'm having a lot of fun engaging with the community - y'all have been super cool and insightful with your feedback!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames nice, I do think it's a win-win situation when you do it well so I'm happy that both the community and you will learn from it
I Can't wait for the play test. and I'm sure peoples opinions on things will vary and change once people get to start playing it. as you can read rules / concepts all day long, but they can feel wildly different when in actual play. So im excited to see how these mechanics play out in a live test =]
@@Zertryx A very good point! We'll have the demo materials in your hands soon!!
🥳🫂👍🏿
Something confuses me about the concern surrounding death spirals - players want their characters to survive, so anything that threatens their mortality feels bad, but we need potential consequences of failure, like PC death, for success to be meaningful - not all games require death, but many benefit from it - so, assuming death should be in a particular ttrpg, do people want their characters to operate at 100% strength right up to the point when the suddenly die? That doesn’t make sense to me - I think the push back against death spirals has more to do with not wanting your character to die under any circumstances rather than a desire for balance, realism, verisimilitude, speed of play or any of the other common goals of game design in this space
I definitely feel that, too. I think some games and some play styles have given rise to a feeling of heroic indomitability.
That sort of experience is all well and good in some games, but for an action-horror one like TFE, I hope players understand that the intended evocation is one of desperate survival, of fighting against the horrors and not being certain of their survival.
It has been great seeing so many people "get it", I must say. Overall, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I recently played an rpg that evoked the movie Alien to a T, and the stress and panic brought on by growing pressure definitely wore your character down in a way that made perfect sense for a horror game
@@TwinSteel Nice! What was the title?
I actually enjoy ttrpgs that explore de-empowerment fantasies, so to speak.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames really niche - getting no press at the moment - probably never heard of it - it’s called Mothership 😄
In all seriousness, a creator I follow asked for playtesters for an add on to Mothership, so it was that - the creator is worth a watch: Miles Away Games - his system is a great way to build connections between teammates quickly, so it sort of filled in a gap for the game that made it that much more like Alien in that the sort of interpersonal relationships we see at the beginning of the film can be generated as quickly as a character can be made in the base game
@@TwinSteel Haha I had a suspicion it was Mothership! That game is absolutely amazing.
I'll definitely check out Miles Away Games, the channel looks right up my alley!
Shared turn sounds fun!
As a playtester, I can say it is very fun! It's such a fun dynamic working with your team to figure out the best strategy on each fight. It really feels like you are a scrappy team fighting together for your life.
Another informative video, my good sir 👍🏻
@@matthewwinans3068 Thanks as always, brother!
Thank you for answering John Elsewhere
That's Mister John Elsewhere to you! 🤠 (jk)
Oh. I am glad the RPG is going well. Good luck with that. The death spiral thing is something I commented on before. I suggested replacing it with an abundance of status effects. This video does address that. Having injuries easier to avoid and recover from helps. If there is an abundance of status conditions, it would help to give the ability to remove them. It can be done by spell, item, rest or something.
I don't have much issue with the rest of the system. Tales from Elsewhere is very unusual by overhauling the health (hit points) system in RPGs. There is a whole video explaining the problems with the health system and attempts to solve it. The effect is streamlining the game. It is weird, but I am open to it. I am all for streamlining RPGs in order to make it more fun. I do that a lot when game designing. Tales from Elsewhere does complicate things by specifying body parts. I am not usually a fan of this. However the complication of body parts can replace the complication of hit points. So the game doesn't seem too crunchy as a whole. Deciding which body parts to hit and what kind of injury to give is its own choice in battle. That has the potential to fun shenanigans. I do appreciate for this channel to bring the hit point issue to my attention. This has influenced my own game design. I don't get rid of hit points entirely. However I do simplify my math a lot. It is to the point where most numbers are single digits. Hit points tend to be about 100 or less. That is a lot lower than they were previously. DND can have the tankiest characters get hundreds of hit points. So having less than a hundred is still really small by comparison.
There is an issue of tracking. I like to use dice to track changeable things like current hit points. Percentile dice are great for tracking health. I used to use counters for tracking health. I especially like using flat marbles as counters. Whether by dice or counters, I start from the maximum hit points. Then I reduce the number in order to track damage.
Tales From Elsewhere can be tracked with game pieces too. I think it would benefit from something like the Pokemon TCG. When a Pokemon receives damage, counters are placed on top of the card. Each counter represents ten hit points of damage. It is weird to add counters over time. Pokemon do get a higher a higher max hit points, when they evolve. The evolved form card can be placed between the previous form card and the counters. This process doesn't require adding extra counters, so it is deemed easier. Maybe it is easier? Status conditions are tracked too. Paralyzed, sleep and confuse cause the card to be turned around in different ways. That immobilizes the Pokemon some way. Poison and burn are damage over time effects. They are indicated by placing special tokens on the card. Tales From Elsewhere could gain special tokens to indicate injuries. These tokens can be by the player or on top of their character sheet. These tokens can accumulate over time in order to track injuries. The accumulation is like the damage counters in Pokemon. On top of that, these tokens can have a word or a symbol to indicate the type of injury. That is like the distinction Pokemon has for poison and burn tokens. With special tokens one can track injuries so much easier. There can even be special cards to use in place of token. These cards name the injury, and it explains how it works. I hope this tip helps.
Always appreciate your well-thought out comments!
@@c.d.dailey8013 Yeah the user experience side of injury tracking is definitely something we're still refining! Appreciate your feedback, as always!
I love your injury system idea. Ive been trying to implement something like this in my game for a while. I first got the inspiration from Fear & Hunger.
The smaller die for better weapons was very innovative. Cant wait for the play test.
@@WilliamSmith-ty5wp Thanks so much for your interest!!
16:20 a cybernetic undead (say a skeleton?) monstrosity with a chainsaw limb, a grabby hand limb, why not replace that syringe with a cannon and add an extra limb with a laser beam. Now that sounds like a boss fight.
@@matthewparker9276 I dunno, the current version can hold down its victims and saw off their limbs, then paralyze them to take them away to their lair.
They're meant to be like a Terminator mixed with Jason 😂
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I wasn't being super serious, it just reminded me of a boss fight from a video game.
@@matthewparker9276 Oh haha for sure. To be honest though, your idea got me thinking about OTHER monsters... 😂
Speaking of "standing and talking endlessly" and related to "defeated isn't necessarily dead", do you have any thoughts on persuasion mechanics? I could definitely see TfE having a social combat engine similar to the physical combat engine (target Gut/Heart/Soul instead of Bulk/Brim/Ace, inflict conditions like Baffled/Hesitant/Demoralized).
I actually do have a (secret) additional social/interrogation style system in super early draft for TFE. However, it likely won't be in the first book (Clockworld), as it's more of a rootin' tootin' shootin' weird west game rather than an investigative one.
I don't want to scope creep the first book into oblivion and never get a chance to release, it ya know? (I actually plan on doing several books, each with a different setting and each introduction more sub-systems and mechanics over time!)
🤠
Another way to avoid death spirals is for the penalties to do things like limit their options or force consequences for pushing through them. That helps give players agency via what tradeoffs they choose to make, even when both paths are Not Great. Just so long ss thry can Do That Thing with full effectiveness.
Examples include: losing access to a secondary weapon instead of receiving an attack penalty, a greater chance of bleeding another turn if you don't stop attacking, or reducing your number / choose of targets instead of a full "blinded" condition.
You could limit injuries to one per "slot" of severity. If you get hit with another condition, it just doesn't apply. Instead it causes the damage itself to increase by one tier.
It's based on a more narrative sort of logic, true, but putting a cap on the complexity of tracking injuries can be more then worth the loss of realism.
...I typed this in the middle of listening to the video, and now I'm less sure how your injuries work to begin with.
Oh well.
My points still stand strong upon their contextual ignorance.
@@3X3NTR1K Dig these ideas!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I am a nearly endless barrel of ideas! Some of them are even good!
The trick is to burn though all the bad ideas until only good ones are left.
For sure it's "attrition based" in the sense that it's representing violent conflict resolution and usually attrition is a step toward finishing fights. In some ways I'd say your system expand on attrition by giving it teeth and making it less abstract. Attrition based combat is only bad if it means combat is filled with abstract trading of numbers like you're saying.
So yeah I can see how that's mostly semantic as it wouldn't necessarily be ideal to really have no attrition.
@@JeanPhilippeBoucher Good analysis!
So flensing defenestration's or no?
@@jaykaye594 Always!