[Systems/Mechanics] When your preconceived prejudices were proven wrong

[Kiero]

Sometimes you have a set of preconceived notions about a system without even playing it. Often this can come about through reading, but not actually playing, them. However, there are systems that prove to be much better in play than on the page, but unless you try them you never find this out.

I had this experience a while back with D&D4e; the books are really dull but in play it comes alive. It's pretty much the epitome of "plays better than it reads". I'm glad I did give it a go.

More recently, I've had the same thing happen with nWoD. I was thoroughly soured on anything White Wolf by the craptacular oWoD mechanics (Exalted didn't help either), and was leery of anything involving dice pools of d10s. But with a few inspired tweaks (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Mass:_the_Effecting/The_Way_The_Galaxy_Works), I've found that in play it works really well, giving exactly the right balance between flexibility and structure.

A solid rules-medium system without all the crap of oWoD (like fumbles, rolling for damage, etc). It also neatly hits one of the things I really like in a system - one roll to resolve everything in a round of combat. No defense rolls, no damage rolls, just a to-hit roll that factors those things in. In our case, we've ditched the business of better weapons adding dice, instead damage is an after-the-roll calculation.

I haven't reached a point where I can gauge the likelihood of success based on the size of a dice pool yet, but nor have I been hit with inexplicable inconsistencies in competence. Competent characters feel competent, which is always a good thing. I guess that's the bell curve normalising effect of a dice pool.

So when have your preconceptions turned out to be wrong when exposed to actually playing something?

[dsmiles]

At my age, and having been playing RPGs for 28 years, the only thing I look at when reading a RPG I haven't played before is: Does it look interesting?

I used to have preconceived notions about games, but you get over that as you get older. :smalltongue:

[Kaun]

I used to have preconceived notions about games, but you get over that as you get older. :smalltongue:

Yeah +1 to that.

I usually wait till i have played a game a time or two before i make my mind up on if i like the mechanics or not.

As for fluff tho. :smallwink:

[Saph]

Fate/Dresden Files has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would be.

I was a bit leery of the Fate system due to . . . well, due to its advocates here on this board, to be honest. There's a small minority of GitPers who keep telling everyone that they should be playing Fate/Fudge/SotC/whatever instead of 3.5/PF, and they have a bad habit of doing it in a really patronising way, usually implying that the only way anybody could like 3.5/PF is if they're ignorant of all the really good systems. (Free tip: if you want to get people to try your game, insulting something that they enjoy is not a good way to do it.)

So when one of the members of our group finally talked us into trying it, it was a nice surprise to find that the system is actually pretty fun. I love the Fate Points/Aspects mechanics, especially the compel system, and the fact that you can do mental or social conflicts as easily as physical ones is cool too. Combat rounds go very fast, and the zone system is a great approach to movement.

That said, the game's got its drawbacks too. Combat doesn't feel anywhere near as dangerous as it should - a .38 revolver does less damage than a baseball bat, and the damage from either gets shrugged off in minutes - and the magic system is horrendously clunky. It takes ages to learn how it works and spells zig-zag from "completely useless" to "horrifyingly overpowered" without much in between.

So, mixed bag, but I'm enjoying the campaign and I think some of the mechanics are really worth learning from.

[Kiero]

At my age, and having been playing RPGs for 28 years, the only thing I look at when reading a RPG I haven't played before is: Does it look interesting?

I used to have preconceived notions about games, but you get over that as you get older. :smalltongue:

I've been playing for 21 years now; I've found the opposite, that my tastes get more specific and less flexible over time. Most of the time my preconceptions are right, but occasionally I get a pleasant surprise like this.

I thought WFRP would be crap in play, and it was (mechanically), for example.

[eggs]

I was introduced to RPGs through D&D 3e. Throughout its run, I did the same homebrew system fixing that everybody else did. When 4e was announced, and it followed the same design goals and ideas as my incomprehensible mass of houserules, I was stoked. I followed all the updates and previews, and was practically ecstatic knowing I'd get my hands on he book on my birthday, the day it was released.

And when I finally got it and got to run a couple sessions, I realized tha we'd spent two sessions pushing our little figurines around, but that I hadn't gotten to deliver the sweet speech I had planned, or to force the confrontation with an NPC that I'd wanted to kick off my character's story - basically I realized that the game had been focusing on the things that I could hardly care about less. And that that was true of D&D in all its incarnations.

I'd tried some other big-name games at that point, and been completely unimpressed - GURPs had given me enough fiddliness to last a lifetime, Rifts didn't make any sense to me, I'm still not sure how Villains and Vigilantes works and despite Lovecraft's popularity, Call of Cthulu left my eyeroll muscles with a chronic sprain. By then I figured that D&D was the big name because everything else on the market was fiddly junk with niche appeal.

But then I went on a limb and checked out Spirit of the Century. I'd expected it to be another second-rate knockoff with a whole new set of charts to dig through and rules to memorize, but it absolutely blew me away how well it ran and how extensively describing the disrepair of my character's trusty battered Sopwith Camel was exactly how the game was played. That had me looking at other RPGs with different design goals in a new and exciting light.

One of the other big, positive, surprises was nWoD. I was really ready to hate it, given its crowd of enthusiasts and its default vampire/werewolf/magic dude uses. But when I half-reluctantly gave it a shot for a game that I would have normally stripped the zombies from AFMBE for, and it worked even more smoothly, and without players expecting zombies, I was really jazzed.

And the last would have been Apocalypse World. It had me skeptical. I thought players would just grab the thing they were good at, and spam it until the game stopped being fun. Then I played it, and grabbed the thing my character was good at and spammed it - which incidentally meant I was playing exactly into the archetype that the fiction assumed, all while the fiction progressed as it was supposed to. I was pretty impressed.

One that's surprised me before getting to the table was Burning Empires. Its flavor sounded neat, and it shares mechanics with games that other people seem to be into. Basically, I was way jazzed to get into the system. But I keep telling myself I'll care enough to get through the first 20 out of 650 pages... some day. :smalltongue:

[Jerthanis]

For me, Anima was like this. Reading it, I saw Initiative rolls each turn, attack versus defense rolls and referencing a chart to track your damage as a percentage of your base damage based on how much you beat your opponent's defense roll by. I went into the game assured it would be an absolutely awful kludge but...

In play, it actually kinda works. You get used to the chart, and with a few easy shortcuts combat actually flows pretty much as well as any system.

[Calanon]

4th edition. played it. hated it. realized it was more balanced then a 3.5 wizard. has trouble looking at himself in the mirror. :smallfrown:

[Oracle_Hunter]

Eh, I'll play anything once.

I mean, I guess I'm still leery of nWoD and SR4 but if anyone was throwing a game of it together I'd give it a crack. nWoD has a solid mechanical backbone (much of which I stole for my oWoD Mage Rebuild) but my glances at the nWoD Vampire & Mage stuff has made my inner grognard roll its eyes. Ditto with SR4 -- I simply can't accept that a paranoid pager-only Runner would be willing to run his bodyware on wireless that can be hijacked. But the rules do fix the Decker Problem and seem to rationalize the old-school system well. So yeah, I guess I have prejudices there built upon my love of the old fluff.

Still, I wouldn't have been able to have as much fun as I have if I was always turning down games based on hearsay.

[potatocubed]

Once I'd read the Burning Wheel rules I wanted nothing more than to play a game of it. Then I did, and it was (mechanically) terrible.

We had a good time playing nonetheless, but I think that's more of a testament that when it comes to fun a good group is more important than a good system.

[Kurald Galain]

Reading through its (brief) rulebook I thought that Toon would be an awesome game. Actually playing it, I found that it gets old quickly. It's still decent, but only for an hour or so, and then I find you need to wrap it up.


An old friend hyped the Babylon 5 RPG to me and it sounded really cool until we ended up playing it. Of course, it may have been his DMing style, but I found the setting incomprehensible if you're not familiar with B5, and the mechanics needlessly clunky.


Incidentally, I find it very enlightening to read back on forum posts discussing 4E when it was first previewed and not released yet. Predictably there are lots of preconceptions there, but it's fun to see how much of it came true or not.

[valadil]

I had this experience a while back with D&D4e; the books are really dull but in play it comes alive. It's pretty much the epitome of "plays better than it reads". I'm glad I did give it a go.


This is what I came in here for. When I read the book I jumped straight to the wizard since that's what I was playing in 3.5 at the time. Almost all the spells were the same damage and a status effect. It seemed boring as hell. I had to play it to realize that picking the status effect to inflict on someone is actually pretty entertaining. Yes, the gap between powers is more narrow, but that's not a bad thing.

[Tengu_temp]

Before I played Fading Suns, I thought it's a pretty neat system that offers a wide range of character options and interesting mechanics. When I actually played it, though, it turned out that it's pretty generic, and the mechanics are heavily skewed towards specialization rather than versatility, something that's very bad for a game with no classes or levels. Setting's still cool though.

I was much happier with Exalted before I realized that combat at higher Essences is pretty much Perfect Defense spam. The system received some heavy errata lately though, with more coming soon, so maybe that'll help a bit.


Incidentally, I find it very enlightening to read back on forum posts discussing 4E when it was first previewed and not released yet. Predictably there are lots of preconceptions there, but it's fun to see how much of it came true or not.

On the other hand, the amount of people who still believe in some of these false preconceptions is much less fun.

[Kiero]

This is what I came in here for. When I read the book I jumped straight to the wizard since that's what I was playing in 3.5 at the time. Almost all the spells were the same damage and a status effect. It seemed boring as hell. I had to play it to realize that picking the status effect to inflict on someone is actually pretty entertaining. Yes, the gap between powers is more narrow, but that's not a bad thing.

Well, I hadn't played 3.x and don't like casters, the book was just boring. Dry and dusty like a technical manual.

[Krazzman]

Oh this is an aggravating topic... my old group had that a lot. On the topic of psionics, on ToB (until recently but they switched to PF anyway) and so on.

I looked into the ExPH and wanted to try out a Psion and later a Soulknife. I got to do that but they calles psions broken etc. after one of that bunch read through the ExPH he said it's not that OP... same goes for ToB where it was just said that if the DM has this options also that it won't go OP...

The same goes for a folk a few days ago that asked for advice on handling DMing in 3.5 on the topic of pirated pdfs. He actually thought that rogues were pretty over powered(broken) and that the Tempest PrC was over the top or something like that.

My first contact with 4th edition was awful. It felt generic, unfair and too deadly. But as I asked that on the 4e board here it was resolved after nearly 2 years of hatred for the system.

[Solaris]

I thought I might like 4E. I was wrong. It's not just the "Hey, spend another few hundred dollars to get these new books just a couple of years after you bought the 3.5 books", either. It just doesn't feel like D&D.

[DigoDragon]

Reading through its (brief) rulebook I thought that Toon would be an awesome game. Actually playing it, I found that it gets old quickly. It's still decent, but only for an hour or so, and then I find you need to wrap it up.

That can be true. Toon is good for a one-night play session, and I didn't think it could be anything more than that for the longest time.

However, one friend figured out that it can last multiple sessions if one designs a compelling storyline and sets up the game world to be a bit more serious, like akin to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" where the threat that toons could be killed for real means trying not to fall down constantly.
And it actually worked out. So it is possible to make a longer running adventure. It just needs more effort than the game assumes.

[Jay R]

When Chivalry and Sorcery first came out, I fell in love with its realism - just like everybody else. Then I played it. The level of detail is so full that you never stop thinking about die rolls and mechanics of play. I eventually figured out that realism in the sense of my ability to feel like I'm in the situation requires quick mechanics, not authentic ones.

[Darth Stabber]

I hated 4e at first. I realize now that the reason I don't like it is because it has D&D on it, and pathfinder doesn't. It doesn't play like D&D to me, but it is good if you want a quicker more combat focused game with an emphasis balance. Was really surprised about nWoD when it first came out, figured that it would be great, wasunpleasantly shocked when the charming old flavor was bleached out and replaced with generic crap. This soured me for D&D 4e, though I still prefer 3.5 even though I have given 4e a try and I have some spot for it on my shelf.

Pathfinder was not what I hoped either, it's not bad, but I was expecting more from it, namely fixing more things. I was hoping for them to take more lessons learned from late 3.5, as opposed to the simpler matter of corrections, refits, minor balance tweaks and a couple simplifications. PF aimed at core, when core was the most unbalanced part of 3.5. If you look at late 3.5 there are a much higher concentration teir3 classes, and it is generally (if not universally) agreed that t3 is the best balance point. Though I do like that pathfinder took ACFs to heart when designing classes and includes them in classes.

L5R 3e was the first game I played out side of D&D and oWoD, and I wasn't really too thrilled to play the first time, since I thought it would be like the TCG (orders of magnitude more complicated and convoluted than it has to be), and I thought it would be to anime. Luckily, aside from the horribly organized book, it plays pretty well, and is probably my favorite system in a vacuum and second favorite over all. And it's really not anime-esque at all, more seven samurai.

[Mastikator]

When I first saw Exalted I thought "this is WAY too anime for me", turns out that it doesn't have to be anime-esque just because the art is drawn that way. I felt it was more like ancient Greek mythology with us as demi-gods, but with more medieval technology. The mechanics are great, the fluff is pretty good too, some of it I don't love, most of if I do like.