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EccentricOwl
2011-05-14, 08:34 PM
Do you ever use minigames in your RPGs? For example, when I ran a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic campaign in Star Wars: Saga Edition, I had Pazaak as an alternate way to get information several times.

Are there any other games out there that you would use, and if so, when and where? For example, I am thinking about including Fortune's Tower (http://fable.wikia.com/wiki/Fortune%27s_Tower) as a playable game in my upcoming run of the Pathfinder "Curse of the Crimson Throne" adventure path.

EccentricOwl
2011-05-14, 08:35 PM
http://www.capcom-unity.com/snow_infernus/blog/2009/12/05/my_hand_made_fable_fortunes_tower_set

For those of you who are interested, by the way, here is the link to the printable stuff on Fortune's Tower.

Old_Nemrod
2011-05-14, 11:17 PM
I used Senet in my Pathfinder game. Its a lot easier to learn and it finishes relatively quickly.

Croverus
2011-05-14, 11:23 PM
Some of the puzzles in dungeons I have made resemble simple puzzle games like sliding puzzles, patterns, and one time a Bop-a-Dwarf puzzle - It was a stone block with small dwarven statues that rose out of the hole. Easy Ac (like 5 AC or something) and the player standing infront of it could make an attack each round with a bludgeoning weapon. If they hit 5 in a row it opened a door, missing one caused the skeleton of a dwarven guard to burst from its coffin and required they hit 1 extra. This continued until they hit the 5 in a row or the coffins ran out of dwarves. There were 20 skeletons in all. And they were simple fights, but if the player kept missing then they ould have their hands full. Destroying the whole thing would have awakened all of the skeletons, so they were smart not to listen to the barbarian of the group/

EccentricOwl
2011-05-15, 12:10 AM
Senet - that's ingenious! In fact, I'm already enamoured with the idea of using it. Simple, short, impressive, and fun - it already feels elegant and vaguely like something out of the fantasy setting of Pathfinder. Hell, it's the oldest board game in the world - I'm sure that -someone- has a copy sitting an an ancient Thassilonian tomb.... thanks for the tip!

Meanwhile, although "Bop-a-dwarf" sounds hilarious, I was thinking more games and puzzles that don't involve too much in the way of die rolls - but that does sound awesome and fun for the players. :D

Ogremindes
2011-05-15, 01:15 AM
"Stuff that, I want to roll against my Gambling skill/Int score"

EccentricOwl
2011-05-15, 05:29 PM
That's fair. Some people just want to Roll-play minigames.


I guess I could let them use Gambling / Gamble / Int/Wis to get an extra turn or something, or have it represent them trying to cheat.

Firechanter
2011-05-15, 05:41 PM
We once had a minigame or two in our Conan campaign, during a period where we roamed the seas as pirates. For chases between ships, we had a relatively small grid. Make opposed Profession(Sailor) rolls to increase or reduce the distance (winner's choice).
At the same time, we could use onboard weapons (typically a ballista), aiming with Int bonus and using the grid distance to determine range penalties.
It wasn't very complex, but it worked well enough.

Old_Nemrod
2011-05-15, 07:38 PM
The Senet game I used involved teleporting three PCs/NPCs that trusted each player of the game into an alternate realm that was a spiraling dragon reaching out of the abyss. As each player rolled their dice, the pieces were given the chance to move. If the player/pieces tried to, they could influence their and their opponents movements with skill rolls or spells. Winners escaped the Abyss while the losers (the player and his allies) forfeited their souls and servitude to the winning player.

My Cleric used his channel energy to grant a piece an extra move. On of the characters used fly. The fighter moved back a space to attack an opponent piece, rolled nat 20, and kicked him to the bottom.

It wasn't how I meant the game to go, but the players loved it.

Lonely Tylenol
2011-05-15, 09:05 PM
In the campaign I'm working on, I have a sub-quest where you have to play against someone who cheats at dice to reveal him as a fraud. You don't necessarily have to win or be good, though.

Other than that, most of the minigame-esque stuff I have are puzzles--either word-based puzzles or logic puzzles. For instance, I'm trying to create a logic puzzle involving switches that open and close doors alternately, that are hidden in separate rooms between each of the nine respective doors. Each of the switches opens doors at a different pattern, and no two switches open/shut doors in the same pattern. I'm trying to create it such that it's also impossible to open the main door that they want to get through without closing the door they went in to get it, meaning that they have to split up to get the people who flipped the main switch through (by activating an alternate sequence to open the doors in such a way that the door they went through to flip the main switch is opened, but the door to get through the main door they want isn't closed).

I'm discovering that creating such a puzzle is really hard, though, and I imagine getting through it is also going to be really hard--which means I have to try even harder not to make it the type of thing that discourages people from continuing.

EccentricOwl
2011-05-16, 01:48 AM
Puzzles are a different bag of worms altogether, and I've compiled a few dozen in my day that I'd love to share - thanks for the idea about the levers, though.

I do like the idea of using dice. Liar's Dice isn't too hard, is it?

Senet as a battlefield sounds far more exotic and interesting.

mint
2011-05-16, 04:02 AM
My group plays 3.5 mostly. I like to try make failure and success less binary. Failing is often death. Which is sort of bad since that's where the story ends. So I try to model the condition of the group as a whole and have it determine if the narrative is good or bad to them.
Anyway this modelling took on a life of its own with tokens and stuff. It got sort of over-complicated and maybe mundane.
So we scrapped that and I started to model the state of the group using Jenga instead.

Earthwalker
2011-05-16, 05:28 AM
Oddly my last Pathfinder session was a poker game.

Each player gets two cards. At this stage they can use profession (gambling) to get more cards.

For makeing DC10 you get one 1, DC15 gets you 2, DC 20 gets 3 and so on.

Then you place three cards face up, with a round of betting. Then two more cards and more betting.

Added onto this was more complications.

Bluff skill of character, After the final reveal you can bluff someone off a good hand (once per draw, only one hand) the DC based on hand score and sense motive on the character with the hand.

One NPC had x-ray vision so once a draw he could look at others hands.
Another was using slieght of hand to draw more cards.

It all worked out well for me and my players. Of course the session only had one PC playing the people players helped me handle the NPCs.

Old_Nemrod
2011-05-16, 12:43 PM
You could always use chess, like the second Harry Potter movie. Only instead of strict rules, the pieces actually care what happens to them. Picture a pawn knocking the hell out of a bishop when he attempts a legitimate capture. Or the rook moving one diagonal to dodge the queen.

Archpaladin Zousha
2011-05-18, 10:51 AM
I suppose mini-games requires a definition, doesn't it? For several Pathfinder Adventure Paths, unique rules are brought into play either for singular adventures or over the course of the whole Path that add flavor or represent something important to the campaign.

For example, in the Council of Thieves Adventure Path, the PCs collect Fame Points for achieving certain quest objectives, and at the end of the campaign, the number of Fame Points they have contributes to what the city thinks of them. Certain adventures in that path also have Popularity Points that indicate how well the PCs are doing something, and the more Popularity Points you have at the end of the activity, the higher the Fame Point reward.

The Carrion Crown Adventure Path has an optional system for using Harrow Cards to provide benefits to the players.

Judging by what you're saying though, this seems more like playing a side-game, pausing the action to play something else, which is intriguing. The only flaw I see in it is that it might take too long, especially if you utilize strategy-based games like Senet as opposed to games of chance.

Nerd-o-rama
2011-05-18, 03:53 PM
The Senet game I used involved teleporting three PCs/NPCs that trusted each player of the game into an alternate realm that was a spiraling dragon reaching out of the abyss. As each player rolled their dice, the pieces were given the chance to move. If the player/pieces tried to, they could influence their and their opponents movements with skill rolls or spells. Winners escaped the Abyss while the losers (the player and his allies) forfeited their souls and servitude to the winning player.

My Cleric used his channel energy to grant a piece an extra move. On of the characters used fly. The fighter moved back a space to attack an opponent piece, rolled nat 20, and kicked him to the bottom.

It wasn't how I meant the game to go, but the players loved it.

This sounds exactly like something from the Yu-Gi-Oh manga, only interesting and comparatively sensible.