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Jack of Spades
2013-12-23, 01:51 AM
Lately I've been talking to a friend of mine about the designs of various RPG's a lot, and we each keep coming back to specific games when we're looking for an example of what we like to see in a game. For my friend, he's found a near-perfect fit for his GMing style in Turn of the Card (http://www.turnofthecard.com/), and I must agree that his sessions of ToTC are always a great time. For me, Burning Wheel Gold is feeling more and more like the game I've been searching for my entire life.

So I wonder, is it possible that for every GM there's a game out there that's a perfect fit for him/her? Maybe in the massive piles of indies somewhere there's a game that will settle into a permanent place in your life with an audible click, and you've just yet to find it? Or maybe good ol' DnD fits your style like a well-loved baseball glove in a 1950's coming-of-age tale?

Also, has anyone else found their "The Game"? If so, please tell me what it is so that I may take it into my being like a great tabletop whale eating paper-and-plastic krill.

If you haven't found yours, let's hear your musings! Tell us all what you really want to see in a game, whether that's a melding of some existing bits or your own crazy-awesome ideas of how things should work. Who knows, maybe someone will vomit your perfect game up from the electronic waters!

Damon896
2013-12-23, 01:58 AM
I have been meaning to write something like this on my website and you have given me an idea. Your post will be rather good.

NichG
2013-12-23, 02:14 AM
Lately I've been talking to a friend of mine about the designs of various RPG's a lot, and we each keep coming back to specific games when we're looking for an example of what we like to see in a game. For my friend, he's found a near-perfect fit for his GMing style in Turn of the Card (http://www.turnofthecard.com/), and I must agree that his sessions of ToTC are always a great time. For me, Burning Wheel Gold is feeling more and more like the game I've been searching for my entire life.

So I wonder, is it possible that for every GM there's a game out there that's a perfect fit for him/her? Maybe in the massive piles of indies somewhere there's a game that will settle into a permanent place in your life with an audible click, and you've just yet to find it? Or maybe good ol' DnD fits your style like a well-loved baseball glove in a 1950's coming-of-age tale?

Also, has anyone else found their "The Game"? If so, please tell me what it is so that I may take it into my being like a great tabletop whale eating paper-and-plastic krill.

If you haven't found yours, let's hear your musings! Tell us all what you really want to see in a game, whether that's a melding of some existing bits or your own crazy-awesome ideas of how things should work. Who knows, maybe someone will vomit your perfect game up from the electronic waters!

I don't think this is true in general. I know that at least in terms of my own GMing style, its constantly changing. The ideas that I like playing with now are different than what I was messing around with a few years ago.

These days I like the idea of 'no opposed rolls' systems - things where every 'point' of investment in something gives you a distinct 'always successful' ability, and the game arises from interactions between those abilities. But that's a pretty new idea for me.

I've also found that its good to switch back and forth between different kinds of systems every other campaign.

Nightgaun7
2013-12-23, 02:17 AM
I don't know if it's "The Game" but 4E is really working for me. I'm a combat junkie and it scratches my itch as a player and as a GM.

If I could only play one game for the rest of my life, though, I would have to pick HERO

Jack of Spades
2013-12-23, 02:24 AM
These days I like the idea of 'no opposed rolls' systems - things where every 'point' of investment in something gives you a distinct 'always successful' ability, and the game arises from interactions between those abilities. But that's a pretty new idea for me.
This sounds like a fascinating sort of system, and it's certainly a new idea for me as well. Do you know of any particularly good examples?

Speaking to the rest of your post: you don't see yourself ever settling into a certain spot on the RPG spectrum, then? Rules-lite, rules-heavy, all-combat or all-RP, a season for all things?

Do you have a system or type of system that you find yourself coming back to like a much-beloved book, in between your ventures into the weird new mechanical frontiers?

andresrhoodie
2013-12-23, 03:23 AM
For me its the white wolf humans or hunters systems. Theres other ones I like a lot that I could play for a long time and be happy but those really fast, make decisions on the fly and roll with it, regular joes versus really scary beasts who win anyway does it for me.

I houseruled it where you add your brawl or weaponry skill to defense against hand to hand and its all opposed rolls and I love it.

We can go through an entire combat in the time it takes to do a round or two in any recent edition of D&D and its fluid and rules light enough that I can just ask people what they want to do and quickly tell them what to roll and we all roll with it.

I do have a better then average group of players right now though. Which would help any system.

NichG
2013-12-23, 05:06 AM
This sounds like a fascinating sort of system, and it's certainly a new idea for me as well. Do you know of any particularly good examples?


No I don't, thats why I'm so interested in them. It strikes me as a new direction for RPG systems to move in that hasn't been explored all that much.



Speaking to the rest of your post: you don't see yourself ever settling into a certain spot on the RPG spectrum, then? Rules-lite, rules-heavy, all-combat or all-RP, a season for all things?


Not really. There are certain themes that I need from a system - it must preserve the ability to have mystery, discovery, and the unknown. I don't want to get too bogged down in minutiae/rules-lawyering, nor do I want the system to be so rules-lite that there is no strategy or interesting tactics.

I prefer systems that preserve the ability to challenge the players, not the characters, and which focus on in-play decision making rather than character generation choices. I also tend to dislike canned systems that dominate the plot too much (e.g. Tippyverse interpretations of D&D), but its fine when its homebrew that I've made because I can tune the system to allow the plots I want to include to still make sense and be coherent.



Do you have a system or type of system that you find yourself coming back to like a much-beloved book, in between your ventures into the weird new mechanical frontiers?

The last several campaigns I've run have been so homebrewed from their base systems as to possibly defy categorization as part of that system. Specifically:

The current campaign uses a system written completely from the ground up, designed to allow the variance of checks to remain relatively constant with respect to the mean, to allow 'lethal things' to remain lethal at all levels (but instead has a mechanic where you can spend from pools of points to allow players to choose which attacks/effects hit them and which don't).

Last campaign was heavily modified D&D 3.5 - when I say heavily modified, I mean a 200 page document of new mechanics that included completely replacing spells above 3rd level and all PrCs, as well as creating new functionality for feats in the entire Complete series, both PHBs, and a couple other sources (have to thank my players for all contributing to that massive endeavor).

Before that it was a very heavily modified version of 7th Sea/L5R.

Before that it was D&D but instead of gaining levels, characters were frozen at Lv5, the level they died at, and instead used a completely different point-buy based subsystem to become ancestral gods in a system heavily inspired by Vodun.

Before that it was D&D E6 in space. Before that it was Planescape using heavily modified 7th Sea rules. Before that it was regular D&D, and there was nothing before that - if I'm counting correctly. Obviously I got started in D&D and then branched out as I played more games and became aware of more systems (7th Sea and L5R were the next two systems I played, so you can see the effect of early influence; since then I've also played in a WoD-based campaign, Exalted, BESM, FATE, and a few other things). Currently I'm interested in giving Numenera a shot.

Glimbur
2013-12-23, 10:11 AM
I find that I have the most fun running one-shots of Wuthering Heights (http://www.unseelie.org/rpg/wh/index.html). Possibly it is because I enjoy thinking on my feet, maybe I like seeing just what shenanigans ordinary gamers can get up to when deprived of a clear objective, and maybe I just like the problem table.

I also really enjoyed running a two-group game of D&D 3.5 (with a few house rules) with several other DM's. At the end of it, we had the Good party and the Evil party fight. Good paid Evil to throw the fight, which was much funnier than anything I could have planned. I got to explore two rather different styles: Good was pretty reactive, so we laid a trail to lead them to the flying city of Good. Said city happened to be flying thanks to the presence of mind flayers and a machine that fed on people's life force. The Evil party, on the other hand, was more self-motivated so we set up an Evil city with various power players and an election. How they won the election was kind of up to them; also they wandered off to fight a dragon and learned just how bad of an idea that was.

So, it seems like what I really want is the ability for players to surprise me, as well as a system that provides options. Wuthering Heights provides options by being rules-light, and D&D 3.5 provides options by having like 60 source books.

Jay R
2013-12-23, 10:44 AM
Depending on what I want to do, it's either original D&D, D&D 2E, Champions (or Hero Systems in general), Flashing Blades, or TOON.

But none of them can replace any of the others.

Ironically, GURPS is probably the second best for any of the above. For that reason, GURPS is probably the best overall system, but since it's always in second place, I haven't played it in 20 years.

Edit: And I have to give an honorable mention to Chivalry and Sorcery. In the early days of role-playing, it was the most lush, complete, exciting, and realistic unplayable mess I have ever seen.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-12-23, 11:37 AM
I think there's a very good reason for that: we can talk and talk about the sorts of things we'd like to see in our gaming "match", but it isn't until we find a game that seems to encapsulate everything we knew we wanted (and everything we didn't know we wanted) that we can point to something like that.

(It's Burning Wheel Gold for a friend of mine, too.)

I'm not sure that I have a committed game, though. I like to explore games and see what different ones have to say, because every game is one person's perspective and philosophy on roleplaying games: what they put in, what they leave out, and what they highlight. I love seeing all of those perspectives, and experimenting with them.

Frozen_Feet
2013-12-23, 11:44 AM
Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Praedor are as close as it has gotten so far. Still, I periodically go back to other systems to scavenge for ideas, particularly older versions of D&D for LotFP.

I do not believe "the game" just for me exists out there just yet. In fact, I'm pretty convinced I'll have to do make it myself one day. I've given it many attempts to date, but have not yet succeeded.

valadil
2013-12-23, 12:04 PM
I don't think this is true in general. I know that at least in terms of my own GMing style, its constantly changing. The ideas that I like playing with now are different than what I was messing around with a few years ago.


Word. I like variety too much. If you ask me my favorite food, right now I'd tell you filet mignon. If I have filet mignon for dinner tonight and you asked me tomorrow morning, I'd still probably say filet mignon (seriously, my mouth is watering from typing out this example). But after a week or so I'd probably tell you chili.


No I don't, thats why I'm so interested in them. It strikes me as a new direction for RPG systems to move in that hasn't been explored all that much.


I actually thought 3.5 had a bit of that and what I saw didn't please me. Take Tumble. If you have enough ranks, you automatically succeed. Barring a few exceptions there's no way around it. Or fighting a wizard. Grapple completely disables him. Unless he has freedom of movement up. Then it's useless against him. I haven't played the game in about 5 years so I can't remember more examples, but I remember a bunch of our high level games coming down to a series of wins and counters, none of which were opposable. It was like magical rock paper scissor, and I mean that in a bad way.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-12-23, 12:56 PM
Upon reflection: this is probably the same core motivation that spurs on fantasy heartbreakers (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/9/)--a desire to create "The One".

Frozen_Feet
2013-12-23, 01:00 PM
It is. It definitely is. At least I've been there - looking at some version of D&D, thinking it's almost what I want but something is just missing. Hey, that's one reason why I rewrote all the feats and the baseclasses in SRD.

NichG
2013-12-23, 01:35 PM
I actually thought 3.5 had a bit of that and what I saw didn't please me. Take Tumble. If you have enough ranks, you automatically succeed. Barring a few exceptions there's no way around it. Or fighting a wizard. Grapple completely disables him. Unless he has freedom of movement up. Then it's useless against him. I haven't played the game in about 5 years so I can't remember more examples, but I remember a bunch of our high level games coming down to a series of wins and counters, none of which were opposable. It was like magical rock paper scissor, and I mean that in a bad way.

Well one way you can think about it is, D&D wasn't designed to have it, but the emergent game from people who got very good at knowing what works well and what doesn't in D&D tends to focus on pushing D&D in that direction.

In my mind though its less about rock/paper/scissors, and more about 'combining incomparable qualitative effects creates in-game strategy'.

For example, is an ability that lets you teleport your movement range when you move instead of walking 'better' or 'worse' than an ability that lets you prevent an enemy from moving through a set of up to 10 protected 5ft squares? They're 'incomparable' at least in principle, whereas something like +2 to hit vs +4 to hit are pretty obviously directly comparable.

If the entire game is made of incomparables like that, then it puts a lot of focus not just on selecting the right abilities, but also knowing how to deploy them to maximum effect. It also tends to de-emphasize the 'brute force' aspects of optimization where you're trying to get bigger numbers than the next guy so you can win all the opposed checks, and puts more emphasis on picking abilities that are intuitive to you and work together well.

Also I think this gets really neat when you apply it to out-of-combat stuff. I've been thinking that a system like this would be perfect for something like a heist game, because if each ability 'just does something' it makes it easier to create long, convoluted plans without compounding chances of failure due to a sequence of dice rolls.

A concrete example for a heist game might be something like:

Knowledge: For each rank of this, you can ask the GM one question about a given scenario before it begins and receive a truthful answer.

Rush: For each rank of this, you can complete one multi-round task in a single round (per scenario).

Manipulate: For each rank of this, you can trick one one NPC/enemy squad to be at a certain place at one particular point in time during the scenario.

Airk
2013-12-23, 01:51 PM
I definitely think that SOME people have an 'ideal game'. And then there are people who crave variety, or who like several different experiences. I think both sets of people should explore as many games as possible though, because you never know what interesting things you'll find.

SimonMoon6
2013-12-23, 01:54 PM
For me, the ideal game system is Mayfair's DC Heroes Role-Playing Game.

Because of its exponential mechanics, it is effortless to make characters who can juggle planets or characters who are ordinary people. I've played through every so-called generic game system I could get my hands on, but no other system does everything as well.

Other games either get bogged down by trying to over-emphasize the worthless abilities of ordinary humans (so that by the time you get to SUPER humans, the game gets crazy complicated) or they take out all the rules so that you have to judge everything yourself. The few exceptions (like TSR's Marvel Super-Heroes RPG) end up with weird game mechanics that aren't always satisfying (high agility characters aren't hard to hit, for example, in MSHRPG). And while DCH does have its quirks (what game doesn't?), most of them are easily house-ruled away (like saying that damage powers don't use their damage values as the value for hitting people too).

My main complaint is that you can't let an actual player anywhere near the character creation system.

Airk
2013-12-23, 02:05 PM
My main complaint is that you can't let an actual player anywhere near the character creation system.

That sounds like a pretty serious flaw. o.o

valadil
2013-12-23, 02:09 PM
Well one way you can think about it is, D&D wasn't designed to have it, but the emergent game from people who got very good at knowing what works well and what doesn't in D&D tends to focus on pushing D&D in that direction.


That's definitely a fair point. It's not fair for me to compare some gameplay that happened by accident versus something that was designed to work in a particular way. It's also a different scenario when you've got a whole system that uses that versus 3.5's system of 10-20 abilities you have to check off when buying gear.

Flickerdart
2013-12-23, 02:28 PM
Nitpick: This isn't what a theory is. This is conjecture, or at best a hypothesis.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-12-23, 02:35 PM
Nitpick: This isn't what a theory is. This is conjecture, or at best a hypothesis.
Well...

...I finally decided to do some digging on what this word means. And here, it's correct. Because it's not being used in an empirical scientific context, "theory" is actually relevant here. It's terribly confusing, but it's being used legitimately in this post. (In the same sense that we talk about "theoretical optimization" versus "practical optimization", for instance, in the context of CharOp.)

NichG: Are you familiar with any of the GUMSHOE system games? They don't go all the way in the direction that you're interested in, but they incorporate a lot of that. Player abilities act as pools of points (which refresh during gameplay) that you can spend to do things like gain clues from an interrogation. In addition, some GUMSHOE games (like Night's Black Agents) give you a special ability when the max pool for an ability is 8.

NichG
2013-12-23, 03:01 PM
NichG: Are you familiar with any of the GUMSHOE system games? They don't go all the way in the direction that you're interested in, but they incorporate a lot of that. Player abilities act as pools of points (which refresh during gameplay) that you can spend to do things like gain clues from an interrogation. In addition, some GUMSHOE games (like Night's Black Agents) give you a special ability when the max pool for an ability is 8.

I'm not familiar with GUMSHOE in particular. If anything, I'm kind of basing this on a mix of how World of Darkness handles non-mundane 'skills' (each dot of something gets you a distinct 'ability' or class of things you can do) and some stuff I've seen in computer RPG design.

Arcanum, for example, had a special ability associated with maxing out each of the basic stats; furthermore, you had stuff like stats letting you unlock new schematics or spells, giving you new slots for maintaining multiple spells up at the same time, etc. The skills also had a 0-5 system where you got very special things at 3 and 5. Another good example would be the various powers you can purchase in Dishonored - each rank of each ability gives you a distinctive new 'thing' you can do.

Airk
2013-12-23, 04:49 PM
Arcanum, for example, had a special ability associated with maxing out each of the basic stats; furthermore, you had stuff like stats letting you unlock new schematics or spells, giving you new slots for maintaining multiple spells up at the same time, etc. The skills also had a 0-5 system where you got very special things at 3 and 5. Another good example would be the various powers you can purchase in Dishonored - each rank of each ability gives you a distinctive new 'thing' you can do.

There's some of this embedded in a number of games systems (I think including the one I wrote myself a while ago and then threw away because it was basically pointless.). The one that springs to mind immediately is that this is exactly how Arts of War work in Tenra Bansho zero.

That said, I don't think that this is a good, widely applicable system. While it works well for some "cool and special" things, it's really dumb if you apply it to everything. "Okay, so I only have two dots in Drive, so I can't drive stick - that's a level 3 ability!" is not something that should happen. Indeed, neither is "I only have two dots in Drive, so I can't even attempt <fancy driving maneuver X>" Most of the time, you should let people TRY to do things, even if it's likely that they fail. Gating the ability to do things behind a skill threshold has all kinds of weird implications that are best kept limited, IMHO.

veti
2013-12-23, 05:03 PM
This sounds like a fascinating sort of system, and it's certainly a new idea for me as well. Do you know of any particularly good examples?

Munchkin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchkin_%28card_game%29).

OK, tongue in cheek. But it's a lovely example of a game with no opposing rolls. Once your group has got a couple of sessions under your belt and understood the rules, such as they are - it's a fun game.

NichG
2013-12-23, 05:24 PM
There's some of this embedded in a number of games systems (I think including the one I wrote myself a while ago and then threw away because it was basically pointless.). The one that springs to mind immediately is that this is exactly how Arts of War work in Tenra Bansho zero.

That said, I don't think that this is a good, widely applicable system. While it works well for some "cool and special" things, it's really dumb if you apply it to everything. "Okay, so I only have two dots in Drive, so I can't drive stick - that's a level 3 ability!" is not something that should happen. Indeed, neither is "I only have two dots in Drive, so I can't even attempt <fancy driving maneuver X>" Most of the time, you should let people TRY to do things, even if it's likely that they fail. Gating the ability to do things behind a skill threshold has all kinds of weird implications that are best kept limited, IMHO.

So in 'my ideal system' I would say that having even one dot in Drive is enough to drive any kind of vehicle - cars, tanks, etc with no meaningful chance of failure (someone with zero dots attempting to drive a vehicle might be subject to a 'free GM Intrusion' during the operation, in the vein of Numenera's GM intrusions; or they might be forced to spend a Fate point to be temporarily skilled enough to succeed). The second dot in Drive allows you to overdrive a vehicle, operating it at +25% of its normal safe maximum speed. The third dot in Drive allows you to do a hand-brake spin, reversing direction at high speed in a single round. The fourth dot in Drive allows you to jump the vehicle over/through obstacles. The fifth dot in Drive allows you to drive along the walls.

I prefer this kind of thing because, most of the time, failure just isn't interesting. Much of the time in systems like D&D or World of Darkness, the question being asked by a skill roll is 'did you waste your turn this round?', which I think is bad game design. Its even worse in the case of 'gateway skill checks' like Lockpicking or Search for Clues, where either you succeed or the plot comes to a screeching halt.

Edit: In fact, you can even salvage something harsh like 'it takes 3 dots to drive a stick shift' by combining it with a mechanic of 'you have 10 Fate Points per session, and you can spend to temporarily raise your effective skill level'. It means that now the question isn't 'did you waste your turn?' but instead is 'how much is it going to cost you?', which at least corresponds to an interesting resource management subgame.

Airk
2013-12-23, 06:17 PM
So in 'my ideal system' I would say that having even one dot in Drive is enough to drive any kind of vehicle - cars, tanks, etc with no meaningful chance of failure (someone with zero dots attempting to drive a vehicle might be subject to a 'free GM Intrusion' during the operation, in the vein of Numenera's GM intrusions; or they might be forced to spend a Fate point to be temporarily skilled enough to succeed). The second dot in Drive allows you to overdrive a vehicle, operating it at +25% of its normal safe maximum speed. The third dot in Drive allows you to do a hand-brake spin, reversing direction at high speed in a single round. The fourth dot in Drive allows you to jump the vehicle over/through obstacles. The fifth dot in Drive allows you to drive along the walls.

Except for the last of those, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to attempt those at lower levels.


I prefer this kind of thing because, most of the time, failure just isn't interesting. Much of the time in systems like D&D or World of Darkness, the question being asked by a skill roll is 'did you waste your turn this round?', which I think is bad game design. Its even worse in the case of 'gateway skill checks' like Lockpicking or Search for Clues, where either you succeed or the plot comes to a screeching halt.

IMHO this is actually the GM's fault (well, the GM and the system). Even in a system like D&D it's possible to apply the "you succeed but..." concept from Burning Wheel - essentially, you make failure interesting by either creating interesting consequences "You accelerate hard into the turn, pull the handbrake, and spin out into a fruit stand. Your car is still operational, once you turn the windshield wipers on to clear the mango off, but you've now got an angry fruit vendor in pursuit." or "While you are puttering with the lock, the guards arrive!". Or you allow success at a cost - "Just as you finally pop open the secret compartment, the Grand Duke returns from the council!" is a perfectly legitimate "you failed your search roll" result. If there is NO interesting fail case, then you don't roll. Never roll the dice if the fail case cannot be made interesting. If the party MUST find a piece of evidence to succeed, you have A) crafted a bad adventure and B) Made the mistake of not just having the player with the best search roll find it.



Edit: In fact, you can even salvage something harsh like 'it takes 3 dots to drive a stick shift' by combining it with a mechanic of 'you have 10 Fate Points per session, and you can spend to temporarily raise your effective skill level'. It means that now the question isn't 'did you waste your turn?' but instead is 'how much is it going to cost you?', which at least corresponds to an interesting resource management subgame.

Used by itself, this is a bandaid for fundamentally poor GMing, IMHO. Used WITH the solutions above, it makes for a more interesting game, but still does not justify locking people out of being able to attempt actions. Why not allow the player to roll their crummy drive skill and then spend points later to improve their result to what they need if they don't want a complication, instead of just saying "No, sorry, you're not allowed."

NichG
2013-12-23, 06:46 PM
Except for the last of those, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to attempt those at lower levels.


Well, if you have Fate points to spend, you can boost things up.

Personally I'm well past the point where I care about 'realism' in a system, and I don't much care about a system being able to model 'everything' or to model anything 'accurately'. I'm okay with a system saying 'Anything an average person might be able to do? You can do it. Lets focus on the exceptional stuff'.



IMHO this is actually the GM's fault (well, the GM and the system). Even in a system like D&D it's possible to apply the "you succeed but..." concept from Burning Wheel - essentially, you make failure interesting by either creating interesting consequences "You accelerate hard into the turn, pull the handbrake, and spin out into a fruit stand. Your car is still operational, once you turn the windshield wipers on to clear the mango off, but you've now got an angry fruit vendor in pursuit." or "While you are puttering with the lock, the guards arrive!". Or you allow success at a cost - "Just as you finally pop open the secret compartment, the Grand Duke returns from the council!" is a perfectly legitimate "you failed your search roll" result. If there is NO interesting fail case, then you don't roll. Never roll the dice if the fail case cannot be made interesting. If the party MUST find a piece of evidence to succeed, you have A) crafted a bad adventure and B) Made the mistake of not just having the player with the best search roll find it.


These GM sandtraps are part of why I like the idea of deterministic abilities so much. There's no issue of 'is it fair if I just let this go without a roll?' or 'does the player need to guess whether or not a skill will ever actually be used where failure is interesting, or if it will be glossed over?' or even 'by giving the enemy this many ranks, am I guaranteeing success/failure?'.

Your example B, for example, is a classic problem you can find in many systems - the devaluation of resource investment due to 'relative' challenges.
My ranks in Search are devalued by other party members taking ranks in Search; if none of us take Search, however, the necessary clues will still be found, so the true optimal behavior is that no one should take any ranks in any skill that is dominated by plot-mandated applications.

This can happen to a lesser extent in any system based on comparative-numerical advancement as well (e.g. when the party levels up, the CR of their opponents goes up too).



Used by itself, this is a bandaid for fundamentally poor GMing, IMHO. Used WITH the solutions above, it makes for a more interesting game, but still does not justify locking people out of being able to attempt actions. Why not allow the player to roll their crummy drive skill and then spend points later to improve their result to what they need if they don't want a complication, instead of just saying "No, sorry, you're not allowed."

Well, let me turn it around. Why make the roll the central part of the game? It's just an assumption about how games have been in the past, but its clearly not necessary for interesting games (Chess, Go, many other board games, card games, etc do not have 'triggered randomness').

Just because tabletop games have used dice isn't any reason to me that we should be restricted to that part of the design space. There are a lot of other interesting ideas to explore, and personally I don't find the 'try something - random pass/fail' mechanic very compelling after having used it for years.

Airk
2013-12-23, 07:19 PM
Personally I'm well past the point where I care about 'realism' in a system, and I don't much care about a system being able to model 'everything' or to model anything 'accurately'. I'm okay with a system saying 'Anything an average person might be able to do? You can do it. Lets focus on the exceptional stuff'.

So am I, but that doesn't mean I appreciate abitrarily locking people out of being able to attempt cool things.


These GM sandtraps are part of why I like the idea of deterministic abilities so much. There's no issue of 'is it fair if I just let this go without a roll?' or 'does the player need to guess whether or not a skill will ever actually be used where failure is interesting, or if it will be glossed over?' or even 'by giving the enemy this many ranks, am I guaranteeing success/failure?'.

I'm afraid I'm not following you here at all.



Your example B, for example, is a classic problem you can find in many systems - the devaluation of resource investment due to 'relative' challenges.
My ranks in Search are devalued by other party members taking ranks in Search; if none of us take Search, however, the necessary clues will still be found, so the true optimal behavior is that no one should take any ranks in any skill that is dominated by plot-mandated applications.

Absolutely not. If the players don't take Search, then the GM shouldn't be designing an 'adventure' that REQUIRES Search to proceed. He can still design tasks that are made EASIER by search even if no one has any because maybe someone could roll well, but if there is no way to make failure acceptable, a roll SHOULD NOT occur.



Well, let me turn it around. Why make the roll the central part of the game? It's just an assumption about how games have been in the past, but its clearly not necessary for interesting games (Chess, Go, many other board games, card games, etc do not have 'triggered randomness').

That's fine, yes, but I'm not sure where you're going with this.



Just because tabletop games have used dice isn't any reason to me that we should be restricted to that part of the design space. There are a lot of other interesting ideas to explore, and personally I don't find the 'try something - random pass/fail' mechanic very compelling after having used it for years.

Then maybe you shouldn't be playing a game with skill ranks and whatnot at all, because really, all those are for is for ranking how "good" you are at something when rolling dice. Arbitrarily giving people a few things they are "allowed" to succeed at is going to mean that you've either:

A) Forced people into an extremely limited list of "cool things" (In your drive skill example above, what level of drive do I need in order to pull a wheelie that allows me to fit my car through an alley more narrow than the vehicle? Does the GM decide? Now we're back in "arbitary GM decision land", so why bother with the lists of stuff?)
OR
B) just put a useless little bandaid on the issue, because most things are still covered by rolls - in the example above, if the GM goes back to making the player make a roll, what have you really accomplished with your system?

Maybe you should instead completely rejigger your 'fate points' option above. What if having 5 dots in drive meant you could do five completely outrageous driving stunts per session? It doesn't matter what they are, but you get to do more of them than a character with fewer points. And a character who is better at fencing gets more outrageous fencing tricks. This seems closer to your intent, to me, although this is, at this point, coming down into a sort of weird valley between "traditional (albiet relatively modern) roleplaying games" and "story games" here.

NichG
2013-12-23, 08:15 PM
So am I, but that doesn't mean I appreciate abitrarily locking people out of being able to attempt cool things.


I think this is a double standard. Take something like D&D. If the DC is 20 higher than my skill modifier, I'm just as locked out of it as if there were a hard cutoff for me to get the ability. And on top of that, there are a whole host of things that require buy-in to get access to. I can cast spells or I can't. I can sneak attack someone or I can't. I can take no damage on being hit by a fireball and making the save or I can't.

I can't decide 'I'm Joe Fighter, but this round I'm going to try casting Disjunction even though I've never seen it cast nor heard of it before'. As a Wizard, I can't decide 'okay, I'm going to try to pull off White Raven Tactics this round'.

Those 'buy-in' abilities are, IMO, the best parts of D&D. Having +7 in Tumble is not interesting. Having Evasion or Spiderclimb or Speak with Dead or Robilar's Gambit is interesting. I've found the same thing to be true in other systems as well - in 7th Sea, for example, I'm far more interested in the idea that at Master level of El Fuego Adentro I can summon a huge bird made of fire and ride it around than the idea that 'I have a higher probability of successfully hitting someone with a sword' or 'I have a higher chance of being able to swing from a chandelier'. In Exalted I'm more interested in 'I have this charm that lets me see what something is truly worth to a person' than 'My average number of successes when haggling with a merchant is one higher'.



I'm afraid I'm not following you here at all.


Lets say someone puts a lot of ranks into Empathy, to use an example from my current campaign. Enough that I know that against a given NPC they'll basically succeed. If I say 'okay, here is what the NPC is feeling' without having them roll, I lessen their feeling that they got something of value for that investment. There's a suspicion that I would have let that information go anyhow, or that I'm doing it because 'their thing is that they're the empathic character'.

Another example, someone puts a lot of ranks into Athletics (which in my system contains tasks like climbing walls). They want to climb to the rooftop of a building so they can keep an eye out. There is no time constraint and no real penalty for failure worth mentioning (they fall a few feet and at worst suffer an irrelevant amount of damage). In this situation, I could just say 'okay, failure is uninteresting, so you climb up to the rooftops'. But in that case, the person with 10 ranks of Athletics has no actual advantage over the guy with no Athletics, despite the task in question being specifically about climbing (which, again, is Athletics in this system).

If I had designed the system so that each rank of Athletics gave you a certain 'thing' you could do and you could spend Body Points to temporarily boost your rank, then even in a situation like that, investment in Athletics would pay off for the player - the guy with ranks could climb for free, while the person without ranks would have to spend out of a per-day resource in order to do it.



Absolutely not. If the players don't take Search, then the GM shouldn't be designing an 'adventure' that REQUIRES Search to proceed. He can still design tasks that are made EASIER by search even if no one has any because maybe someone could roll well, but if there is no way to make failure acceptable, a roll SHOULD NOT occur.


This is exactly why this is a problem. If the players don't take Search, the GM then designs adventures so that it was never necessary. So why take Search? Compared to a group where no one took Search, a player taking it has actually bought themselves a disadvantage.

Lets compare with the 'point pool, fixed skill requirements' case. To proceed with the adventure, the party needs to find a DC 3 clue. If no one has Search, that means that someone needs to spend 3 fate points. If someone has 3 dots of Search, that means that the party saves those 3 fate points. There is now a concrete benefit to taking Search, even if it gets homogenized to 'saving fate points'.



That's fine, yes, but I'm not sure where you're going with this.


What I'm saying is that you're operating under the assumption 'the game must have random rolls, how can I modify my GM-ing style so that those rolls are not harmful?'. I'm saying 'I would like to disregard the premise that the game must have random rolls. It seems like you can have a perfectly interesting game without them, and it has the benefit that a lot of these cases of bad GM-ing are suppressed.'



Then maybe you shouldn't be playing a game with skill ranks and whatnot at all, because really, all those are for is for ranking how "good" you are at something when rolling dice. Arbitrarily giving people a few things they are "allowed" to succeed at is going to mean that you've either:


This is an assumption that is predicated on 'well other systems seem to do it this way'. A 5 dot system, for example, can describe the acquisition of abilities just fine. It can still be a skill system; there's nothing intrinsic to it about rolling dice or comparing results between opponents.

As I said, its a new design space - there are very few games that take this view, and that makes it particularly exciting to me.



A) Forced people into an extremely limited list of "cool things" (In your drive skill example above, what level of drive do I need in order to pull a wheelie that allows me to fit my car through an alley more narrow than the vehicle? Does the GM decide? Now we're back in "arbitary GM decision land", so why bother with the lists of stuff?)


Well I'm not explicitly trying to avoid GM decisions with this sort of system. Obviously GM decisions are a tool that can be used as part of system design, and all systems make use of them to greater or lesser degree.

So, pulling a wheelie like that could easily be described as 'driving up the walls', the 5 dot ability. However, given that you're doing this in a narrow space that supports both sides of your vehicle in order to pass a narrow alley, lets classify it as 'jumping through an obstacle' instead, which makes it only require 4 dots. Which means if you have 2 dots in Drive, spend 2 points and you're good to go.

I mean, look at something like Mage for a good example of this kind of system and how it works with GM arbitration. There isn't a short list of '3 dots of Life lets you do these spells and only these spells' - instead its described based on classes of things.



OR
B) just put a useless little bandaid on the issue, because most things are still covered by rolls - in the example above, if the GM goes back to making the player make a roll, what have you really accomplished with your system?


Who said anything about making the player make a roll? I'm suggesting a system with no rolls anywhere involved in the process.



Maybe you should instead completely rejigger your 'fate points' option above. What if having 5 dots in drive meant you could do five completely outrageous driving stunts per session? It doesn't matter what they are, but you get to do more of them than a character with fewer points. And a character who is better at fencing gets more outrageous fencing tricks. This seems closer to your intent, to me, although this is, at this point, coming down into a sort of weird valley between "traditional (albiet relatively modern) roleplaying games" and "story games" here.

Okay, now I think you're getting the idea. This system would in fact be in the same design space as the system I was talking about. It is, as you point out, a more narrative and less 'tactical' system as a result, but there is certainly room for that sort of game.

I like the tactical aspects, so I'd probably lean away from this sort of thing. I don't really like how in FATE, for example, all Aspects basically do the same thing and only vary based on what situation they apply to.

CombatOwl
2013-12-23, 08:30 PM
Lately I've been talking to a friend of mine about the designs of various RPG's a lot, and we each keep coming back to specific games when we're looking for an example of what we like to see in a game. For my friend, he's found a near-perfect fit for his GMing style in Turn of the Card (http://www.turnofthecard.com/), and I must agree that his sessions of ToTC are always a great time. For me, Burning Wheel Gold is feeling more and more like the game I've been searching for my entire life.

So I wonder, is it possible that for every GM there's a game out there that's a perfect fit for him/her? Maybe in the massive piles of indies somewhere there's a game that will settle into a permanent place in your life with an audible click, and you've just yet to find it? Or maybe good ol' DnD fits your style like a well-loved baseball glove in a 1950's coming-of-age tale?

Also, has anyone else found their "The Game"? If so, please tell me what it is so that I may take it into my being like a great tabletop whale eating paper-and-plastic krill.

If you haven't found yours, let's hear your musings! Tell us all what you really want to see in a game, whether that's a melding of some existing bits or your own crazy-awesome ideas of how things should work. Who knows, maybe someone will vomit your perfect game up from the electronic waters!

Eh, there's some I like more than others, but I'm just as happy running Fate as I am running Mage, or Shadowrun.

Airk
2013-12-23, 08:57 PM
I think this is a double standard. Take something like D&D. If the DC is 20 higher than my skill modifier, I'm just as locked out of it as if there were a hard cutoff for me to get the ability.

I disagree; Especially in game systems like d20 where you can always hope to "roll a 20." And there is absolutely a difference between "My skill is 19, and I can't do thing X at all, but if my skill is 20, then I can automatically succeed at it."


And on top of that, there are a whole host of things that require buy-in to get access to. I can cast spells or I can't. I can sneak attack someone or I can't. I can take no damage on being hit by a fireball and making the save or I can't.

I can't decide 'I'm Joe Fighter, but this round I'm going to try casting Disjunction even though I've never seen it cast nor heard of it before'. As a Wizard, I can't decide 'okay, I'm going to try to pull off White Raven Tactics this round'.

This is true. But under a skill based system, they would have a zero or essentially zero chance of doing those things anyway. AND none of those things are tied to an ability that they have. The real point here is not "A character with skill 0 should be able to try whatever" - many games already prevent this for many types of skills. If you know nothing about locks, you can't try to pick a lock by jamming a paperclip in it and wiggling it around. You don't get to roll lockpicking unless you have some skill in lockpicking. But a character with skill 1 should at least be allowed to TRY.



Those 'buy-in' abilities are, IMO, the best parts of D&D. Having +7 in Tumble is not interesting. Having Evasion or Spiderclimb or Speak with Dead or Robilar's Gambit is interesting. I've found the same thing to be true in other systems as well - in 7th Sea, for example, I'm far more interested in the idea that at Master level of El Fuego Adentro I can summon a huge bird made of fire and ride it around than the idea that 'I have a higher probability of successfully hitting someone with a sword' or 'I have a higher chance of being able to swing from a chandelier'. In Exalted I'm more interested in 'I have this charm that lets me see what something is truly worth to a person' than 'My average number of successes when haggling with a merchant is one higher'.

So why are those abilities tied to skills at all? For example, in Tenra Bansho Zero (referenced earlier as a game that has some things like this) the skills that "give you new abilities" ONLY give you new abilities. You buy a rank in a war art, it gives you a new ability. But it doesn't make you any better at hitting people with your sword. If you want to be better at hitting people with your sword, you buy Melee Weapons.

IMHO it's foolish to conflate the two. You remove the specialness from the 'special things'.



Lets say someone puts a lot of ranks into Empathy, to use an example from my current campaign. Enough that I know that against a given NPC they'll basically succeed. If I say 'okay, here is what the NPC is feeling' without having them roll, I lessen their feeling that they got something of value for that investment.

Why not say "Because your empathy is so high, you can tell that...."?



There's a suspicion that I would have let that information go anyhow,

Fixed by the above.



or that I'm doing it because 'their thing is that they're the empathic character'.

So what? When they put a bunch of points into empathy, they said "I want to be able to read people" so why should it be a problem when you let them?



Another example, someone puts a lot of ranks into Athletics (which in my system contains tasks like climbing walls). They want to climb to the rooftop of a building so they can keep an eye out. There is no time constraint and no real penalty for failure worth mentioning (they fall a few feet and at worst suffer an irrelevant amount of damage). In this situation, I could just say 'okay, failure is uninteresting, so you climb up to the rooftops'. But in that case, the person with 10 ranks of Athletics has no actual advantage over the guy with no Athletics, despite the task in question being specifically about climbing (which, again, is Athletics in this system).

Incorrect. There are multiple ways failure could be interesting in this situation - you just haven't thought of them. Failure can be interesting here if there is a time constraint on getting onto the rooftops. Failure could be interesting in the sense that the character with no ranks can't climb up there, and therefore can't ambush from up there. Presumably there is a reason they want to be up there. That's a consequence of failure, and it is interesting.

If you do have a TRULY trivial task, say, the only reason they want to climb up the roof is to take in the view, then yes, there's no reason for there to be a difference between these characters in this situation, because the task that is being accomplished isn't cool or interesting. You said yourself that this isn't about realism, this is about doing cool stuff.



If I had designed the system so that each rank of Athletics gave you a certain 'thing' you could do and you could spend Body Points to temporarily boost your rank, then even in a situation like that, investment in Athletics would pay off for the player - the guy with ranks could climb for free, while the person without ranks would have to spend out of a per-day resource in order to do it.

I don't see how this is different from "the character with 10 in the skill can climb it because they can't fail the roll, while the other character has to find some different approach like possibly spending an expendable resource." There's still no argument here for 'gating' the ability to do things.


This is exactly why this is a problem. If the players don't take Search, the GM then designs adventures so that it was never necessary. So why take Search? Compared to a group where no one took Search, a player taking it has actually bought themselves a disadvantage.

No. Perhaps I'm not being clear here, but I don't know how I could spell it out any more clearly. The adventure should not REQUIRE search. By which I mean "there should be no circumstance where the adventure cannot proceed unless the PCs pass a search check." That doesn't mean that having search won't make the adventure EASIER. There are multiple ways to do this. Either:

#1) You make it so some clues which are helpful but not critical (additional evidence for the court, or to help move an investigation along) can only be found with search, and a party that can't find them will have to soldier along without. Search has value here.
#2) You make it so that a clue that requires search exists, and introduce a complication when they fail. The PCs -find- the document in the Count's study, but barely have time to hide it in their purse before the guards show up and evict them from the palace. Now they're not allowed to return to the palace unless they can evade the guards. If they'd had search, they could have found the document and made it out unnoticed. Search has value here too.

Neither of the above is a situation that REQUIRES search. And adventure that REQUIRES search would be something like: "Welp, you can't find the document in the Count's quarters. Now you'll never find out where the cult headquarters is."

Which, incidentally, seems entirely likely to happen in a game where you don't design to avoid it and rely on the party having enough magic banana points to spend because they will have somehow intuited that THIS challenge ABSOLUTELY MUST SUCCEED for the plot to move forward. And assuming they haven't spent all their MBPs already on other stuff that they thought was important but turned out not to be.



Lets compare with the 'point pool, fixed skill requirements' case. To proceed with the adventure, the party needs to find a DC 3 clue. If no one has Search, that means that someone needs to spend 3 fate points. If someone has 3 dots of Search, that means that the party saves those 3 fate points. There is now a concrete benefit to taking Search, even if it gets homogenized to 'saving fate points'.

How is this preferable to good adventure design as described above? I don't see how the party is to know that they will need X banana points to proceed past this hard stop. What if they've already spent them already? What if the player with 2 search is out of points, and the rest of the players have zero search and 2 points or less?


What I'm saying is that you're operating under the assumption 'the game must have random rolls, how can I modify my GM-ing style so that those rolls are not harmful?'. I'm saying 'I would like to disregard the premise that the game must have random rolls. It seems like you can have a perfectly interesting game without them, and it has the benefit that a lot of these cases of bad GM-ing are suppressed.'

Because it eliminates the value of marginal skills unless you give it an arbitrary bandaid option like your 'fate points'. What happens if the PCs hit a required challenge and don't have enough points left? Are you now a bad GM because the players are completely incapable of proceeding through your adventure? Yes, yes you are. You've just exchanged one type of failure for another. Better to design intelligently in the first place, rather than try to fix bad adventure design with rules.



This is an assumption that is predicated on 'well other systems seem to do it this way'. A 5 dot system, for example, can describe the acquisition of abilities just fine. It can still be a skill system; there's nothing intrinsic to it about rolling dice or comparing results between opponents.

I am not sure what you are trying to convey here, since this doesn't seem to connect with the rest of the discussion.



As I said, its a new design space - there are very few games that take this view, and that makes it particularly exciting to me.

This is not really true, as you are pointing out by using Mage as an example.



Well I'm not explicitly trying to avoid GM decisions with this sort of system. Obviously GM decisions are a tool that can be used as part of system design, and all systems make use of them to greater or lesser degree.

So, pulling a wheelie like that could easily be described as 'driving up the walls', the 5 dot ability. However, given that you're doing this in a narrow space that supports both sides of your vehicle in order to pass a narrow alley, lets classify it as 'jumping through an obstacle' instead, which makes it only require 4 dots. Which means if you have 2 dots in Drive, spend 2 points and you're good to go.

So these aren't really specific things you can do, but just vague explanations of the sorts of things you should be able to do with that skill? This seems to suck the specialness right out of the mechanic, IMHO.


Who said anything about making the player make a roll? I'm suggesting a system with no rolls anywhere involved in the process.

Honestly? I don't think this would work well at all. My gut is that these points would get burned on the "wrong" things, and then the PCs would be completely screwed.



Okay, now I think you're getting the idea. This system would in fact be in the same design space as the system I was talking about. It is, as you point out, a more narrative and less 'tactical' system as a result, but there is certainly room for that sort of game.

Believe me when I say that narrative vs tactical is the absolute least of my concerns with this resolution system.



I like the tactical aspects, so I'd probably lean away from this sort of thing. I don't really like how in FATE, for example, all Aspects basically do the same thing and only vary based on what situation they apply to.

But isn't this basically true of everything? Drive skill only applies to situations in which you are driving a car(/boat/plane/motorscooter/whatever). And since all you're doing is giving vague guidelines about what you can do with skill level X, you're not actually enabling anything "special" with this, you're just giving the player more leverage to convince the GM that "no really, I don't have to spend points to do that." all your "skills" are really doing the same thing too, just in different circumstances.

I mean, in FATE, you wouldn't expect someone with the Aspect "Like a goddamn ninja." to be able to drive a car at high speeds and make handbrake turns. And you wouldn't expect a character with "getaway driver" to be able to hide in the only shadow in a room undetected. How is this different from "I put five dots in stealth" and "I put five dots in drive."? They both determine what the character is allowed to do in the fiction, but in doing so restrict the situations in which they can do it.

AMFV
2013-12-23, 08:59 PM
I disagree; Especially in game systems like d20 where you can always hope to "roll a 20." And there is absolutely a difference between "My skill is 19, and I can't do thing X at all, but if my skill is 20, then I can automatically succeed at it."

Minor nitpick, but D&D doesn't allow automatic successes on skill rolls in that incarnation. Only attack roles and saves.

Zavoniki
2013-12-23, 09:09 PM
To get in on the perfect roleplaying game I would like to put the following link up to an article Mark Rosewater(Head Designer of Magic the Gathering) wrote about game design:

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/174

It was titled ten things every game needs. They don't exactly apply to roleplaying systems but they do apply to roleplaying games that people run. So for me to find that one game... well it would be just that, one game. And that would suck because then no other game could come close. But these ten things do describe what I look for in games I want to play or run in.

#1) A Goal or Goals:
This is probably the part that is most different between a normal game(say Magic) and a roleplaying game. In Magic the goal is to win. In a roleplaying the game the goal is exploration. You are exploring a setting and a conflict within that setting. It can be as simple as generic brand fantasy world has evil and we kick it in the face but it needs to be there. For example in my PbP Eclipse Phase game the setting is Eclipse Phase and the conflict is Why did the Proxy get Exploded. But the goal is a little more complicated than that for the gamemaster and the players. For the Game Master you want to explore this world and story you have created(or taken) through the players and their characters while the players want to explore their character through the setting(or vice versa or both).

#2) Rules
There is a reason people tend not to play freeform roleplaying games, and even when they do their are a lot of unstated social rules. People can't just do whatever it doesn't make for a good experience.

#3) Interaction
This is why we play the game with other people. Its part of the fun and challenge of games, but roleplaying games especially. When we do something other things might happen and other people might do things and thats interesting. It's how we achieve the goal of exploration. By interacting with the GM or the other players to see what happens, using the rules.

#4) A Catch-Up Feature
This is more for the players than the GM, but if a player falls behind in power level relative to the other players, the game should allow for them to still be able to contribute and shine. This is some what of a subset of interaction, but also some what different. A lot of games have this by rewarding more experience to lower level characters and most games naturally have this by not allowing one character to cover every role so that even if one character is better than the others, they are only better at the stuff they are doing, and other players still get to meaningfully interact.

#5) Inertia
This is something that is very system independent and some people may disagree but this represents the game, either as a one shot or a campaign, having a story arc. It should have a beginning, middle, and end, and it should be clear that the players are moving along it and affecting things. No one wants to have their actions mean nothing and they at least want rewards for what they do, even if its just experience and gold.

#6) Surprise
This is why I'm not a fan of diceless systems. Their is something about not being certain about a role that's fun. When things have gone wrong and the bullets are flying and you need to jump off the building, I like not knowing whether or not I will succeed before I do so. If you know the result of every action before you take it, or can easily extrapolate the result, it reduces the interaction inherent in the game and makes for a less fun experience than their would be otherwise.

#7) Strategy
This represents system mastery. As the game goes on longer you should get better, practice should mean something. If a game is too random or too static its hard to get an edge and its hard to try new things. As opposed to inertia, which is almost entirely story based, strategy for roleplaying games is almost all system based. Putting time in with a system should have a reward, though unlike a lot of games you tend to share that reward with others, as being skilled in a system lets you help others be skilled in that system.

#8) Fun
This one is pretty self explanatory. I would not play a game if it wasn't fun. I hope no one plays not fun games. That seems rather silly.

#9) Flavor
I'll just quote Rosewater here because... well:
"Besides having mechanics, a game wants to have a trapping. It wants to be about something. Sometimes this comes first and the game is built around it. Sometimes the mechanics come first and a flavor is found to match it. Either way, games are more fun if the elements of the game refer a story or an environment or a theme."

#10) A Hook
This is what makes people want to play your game/system. For example, for Eclipse Phase, an easy hook is that you can play an Octopus in a top hat who wields katanas in each tentacle. For individual games this is how you would sell your game to your players. Something like: Dark and Gritty superheroes in a dystopian future OR Low Magic heroes try to slay an ancient evil.

In terms of actual systems... it depends on what I want to play. A lot of it comes to down to what I'm feeling. I don't go out aiming to play systems and I don't really try to stretch systems to fit games. I'll figure out what setting and themes I want to explore and then find the system that does that. Sometimes that comes by reading a setting in a system and wanting to play that(Eclipse Phase, Shadowrun) but not always.

NichG
2013-12-23, 10:21 PM
So why are those abilities tied to skills at all? For example, in Tenra Bansho Zero (referenced earlier as a game that has some things like this) the skills that "give you new abilities" ONLY give you new abilities. You buy a rank in a war art, it gives you a new ability. But it doesn't make you any better at hitting people with your sword. If you want to be better at hitting people with your sword, you buy Melee Weapons.

IMHO it's foolish to conflate the two. You remove the specialness from the 'special things'.


What I'm proposing is to say that 'the only thing in the system is abilities; there is nothing in the system that alters your probability of success, because there are no die rolls'. Skills, in this system, are abilities. Furthermore, anything you can do that is outside of the human norm is considered an ability, and anything within the human norm would be considered a given.

So, swordfighting might look like a collection of skills (condensed to save space, but ideally each rank would have a distinctive and unique benefit):


Fencing: For each rank of Fencing, you can parry one strike per game.

Iaijutsu: Your rank in Iaijutsu adds to damage dealt in the first strike against a given foe.

Lichtenauer: Once you have observed your opponent use the benefit of a particular combat skill, you can figure out the proper counter. The result is that it is treated as one rank lower for every two ranks you possess in Lichtenauer (rounded up). This does not apply against Lichtenauer.

Swashbuckling: Whenever you make an attack with your sword or are attacked, you can move a number of squares equal to your rank in Swashbuckling.

School of a Thousand Kicks: When making an attack, you can make additional attacks up to your rank in this skill at the cost of 1 Fate Point for each additional strike.


Now, you might ask how attacks resolve in this system. And the answer is, I don't know quite yet. Ostensibly though you could run them using the same buy-off mechanic as spending Fate Points/Body Points/whatever to raise your skills temporarily. There are other pseudo-random ways you could resolve it as well. For example, everyone draws a number of cards equal to the number of participants at the start of each round; during an attack the attacker and defender can play up to two of those cards, and that determines the outcome.

You could also abstract away combat and literally have a 'Fighting' skill that lets you disable a number of NPCs per session equal to your rank in it. Lots of options, and its really a matter of taste.




Why not say "Because your empathy is so high, you can tell that...."?

Fixed by the above.

So what? When they put a bunch of points into empathy, they said "I want to be able to read people" so why should it be a problem when you let them?


This doesn't actually fix it. So the character in question put max ranks in Empathy (20, plus they bought a special power that raised the cap by 5 so they could get 25) and spent 4 of 10 possible Advantage Points (a one-time, chargen resource) to get a magic item that let them boost their Empathy checks even further.

You could also make an effective empathic character just by putting, say, 15 points into Empathy and not having the magic item. And, since my system does use opposed rolls, this is pretty easy to see when most NPCs are hitting results of around 15-20 on their Trickery checks.

By far, the most satisfying moment for the player was when I threw in an NPC who was basically Puck personified, who literally cannot give a straight answer to a question due to the type of creature they are, and the player beat the NPC's 80 (the result of exploding dice) with an 84 Empathy check. The player saw direct confirmation that all the trouble they went to in order to boost their Empathy check was rewarded with concrete, in-game results - a check they would have failed if they had done anything less.

So now what I've done in that campaign is that I've made tables of outcomes for most of the skills in the game. They list what a 15 gets you, what a 25 gets you, what a 35 gets you, and they're also salted with a few 'epic skill checks' in the 60-80 range. So if someone wants to go through the trouble to optimize their Acrobatics skill to those levels they know outright: doing this will get me the ability to walk on clouds.

Considering I've had players bugging me to finish the last 4-5 skills since I introduced the tables, I'm going to call that a success.



Incorrect. There are multiple ways failure could be interesting in this situation - you just haven't thought of them. Failure can be interesting here if there is a time constraint on getting onto the rooftops. Failure could be interesting in the sense that the character with no ranks can't climb up there, and therefore can't ambush from up there. Presumably there is a reason they want to be up there. That's a consequence of failure, and it is interesting.


And when its just 'I want to see where we are in the forest' or 'I want to see what the cityscape looks like because I haven't seen it yet' (the actual reason, since the character had woken up in a strange city and needed to get the lay of the land). Failure in this case isn't interesting. Failure means they go and do it again and again until they succeed. Or failure means they can never climb that particular roof, which is just kind of silly.

A GM can correct for many deficiencies in the system. A GM can contrive situations so they're always meaningful. That doesn't mean we should design systems with lots of deficiencies in them, or design systems that put all of the responsibility for the game on the GM's shoulders.



If you do have a TRULY trivial task, say, the only reason they want to climb up the roof is to take in the view, then yes, there's no reason for there to be a difference between these characters in this situation, because the task that is being accomplished isn't cool or interesting. You said yourself that this isn't about realism, this is about doing cool stuff.


Realism aside, there's a much more important factor here. A player who invests resources in something should feel that their investment is meaningful.

'Ability'-focused design means that the player can proactively seek to make their abilities meaningful. It takes a lot of pressure off of the GM if they don't have to constantly contrive situations to make each PC meaningful.



I don't see how this is different from "the character with 10 in the skill can climb it because they can't fail the roll, while the other character has to find some different approach like possibly spending an expendable resource." There's still no argument here for 'gating' the ability to do things.


The argument is that the system, with Fate Points or the like, is no longer gating. You're complaining that the system doesn't let people do things above their skill level, but thats now false.



No. Perhaps I'm not being clear here, but I don't know how I could spell it out any more clearly. The adventure should not REQUIRE search. By which I mean "there should be no circumstance where the adventure cannot proceed unless the PCs pass a search check." That doesn't mean that having search won't make the adventure EASIER. There are multiple ways to do this. Either:

#1) You make it so some clues which are helpful but not critical (additional evidence for the court, or to help move an investigation along) can only be found with search, and a party that can't find them will have to soldier along without. Search has value here.
#2) You make it so that a clue that requires search exists, and introduce a complication when they fail. The PCs -find- the document in the Count's study, but barely have time to hide it in their purse before the guards show up and evict them from the palace. Now they're not allowed to return to the palace unless they can evade the guards. If they'd had search, they could have found the document and made it out unnoticed. Search has value here too.

Neither of the above is a situation that REQUIRES search. And adventure that REQUIRES search would be something like: "Welp, you can't find the document in the Count's quarters. Now you'll never find out where the cult headquarters is."

Which, incidentally, seems entirely likely to happen in a game where you don't design to avoid it and rely on the party having enough magic banana points to spend because they will have somehow intuited that THIS challenge ABSOLUTELY MUST SUCCEED for the plot to move forward. And assuming they haven't spent all their MBPs already on other stuff that they thought was important but turned out not to be.


If Magic Banana Points are a renewable resource (say, per session or even per-day) then there is no 'this is impossible forevermore' situation. There may be setbacks and consequences and even failure, but the party can always return later to that locked door they couldn't pick before or whatever the chokepoint was and deal with it then.

Plus, I'm not saying 'now go, go and make everything a chokepoint'. I'm saying 'if you happen to have a chokepoint for whatever reason - it slipped in, you couldn't see a way around it, whatever - you have far better odds that the players can pass it in this system'

'Ability-based' design tends to alleviate choke points, because it gives players things they can do proactively to pursue a resolution. If the players have the ability to '1/session as the GM a question and receive the answer in character' then suddenly it doesn't really matter if they didn't find the clue, because they can just burn their question on it. Of course it might mean that they can't use the question to ask 'where can I obtain ultimate power?' or some other thing they wanted to know.

And the more abilities there are in the system, the greater the chance that someone in the group has something that could resolve the impasse.



How is this preferable to good adventure design as described above? I don't see how the party is to know that they will need X banana points to proceed past this hard stop. What if they've already spent them already? What if the player with 2 search is out of points, and the rest of the players have zero search and 2 points or less?


Answered by above. I'm not saying choke-points are good adventure design. I'm saying that they're less problematic in this system than they would otherwise be.



Because it eliminates the value of marginal skills unless you give it an arbitrary bandaid option like your 'fate points'. What happens if the PCs hit a required challenge and don't have enough points left? Are you now a bad GM because the players are completely incapable of proceeding through your adventure? Yes, yes you are. You've just exchanged one type of failure for another. Better to design intelligently in the first place, rather than try to fix bad adventure design with rules.


Again, I'm not arguing in favor of bad adventure design, but I am arguing in favor of the system lending a helping hand in giving players the flexibility to move past choke-points. The idea isn't 'now I can run an adventure where everything is a choke-point!'. The idea is, sometimes choke-points will work their way into an adventure, maybe even without the GM being aware of it at first; with a flexible system like the Fate Points, there's a certain amount of give.

And on top of that, it means failure, if it does happen, is causal. The players didn't fail because they messed up a guessing game when building their characters about what skills would or would not be important. They failed because they mismanaged their resources. Now its not 'I didn't buy Knowledge: Royalty, and there was a critical Royalty check in the adventure!'; its 'I spent too many of my points when I didn't need to, so when it came down to the wire I didn't have enough'.



I am not sure what you are trying to convey here, since this doesn't seem to connect with the rest of the discussion.


You said 'the point of skill systems is to compare numbers with dice'. I'm saying 'no, it isn't, thats just a property of many skill systems in games that have been published'. Just because D&D or World of Darkness or 7th Sea uses skill numbers to compare to DCs using dice does not mean that it is an intrinsic and immutable property of skill systems.



This is not really true, as you are pointing out by using Mage as an example.


The games that do it tend to do it half-assed and incoherently. Mage uses it for magic, but not for mundane skills. D&D has it emerge implicitly because its possible to pump skills so high that you auto-succeed on anything you want to, and the increase of the mean against the d20's variance dominates skill checks at high level so it tends to render things into 'did I invest in this? then I succeed; otherwise I fail' apart from fixed DC challenges.

The pieces are there, but I haven't seen them put together into a single, coherent whole that uses the idea 'render all scenarios tactical via a focus on abilities, not numerical comparisons' as its core principle.



So these aren't really specific things you can do, but just vague explanations of the sorts of things you should be able to do with that skill? This seems to suck the specialness right out of the mechanic, IMHO.


Specific would be better when it makes sense and can be done readily. The practical case would probably be specific things with a halo of generality around them. Or 'specific and say yes' sort of principles - if its not on the list and it could conceivably be done, you can just do it.



Honestly? I don't think this would work well at all. My gut is that these points would get burned on the "wrong" things, and then the PCs would be completely screwed.


I think you're focusing too much on the points and chokepoint-based adventure design honestly. Lets look at combat.

In combat, success or failure is the result of a combination of what abilities the players and enemies use. Each ability changes the (reasonably complex) game state, and there are 'victory conditions' and 'loss conditions' and the possibility for partial victory and loss (because of e.g. resource consumption, having a PC die but winning the fight, etc).

You can have all sorts of interesting combats without having a chokepoint-style enemy (e.g. a flier - did you all remember to bring bows?) - because abilities interact in nontrivial ways - because they change the game state rather than 'decide outcomes'.

So now, lets use a heist game as a model case. A heist feels like it should be capable of supporting the same tactical depth as combat, maybe even more. The locations of guards, the status of monitoring devices, the emotional state of the mark, all of these things could factor in to the 'game state' which is transformed by character abilities.

The problems with a heist game are usually:

1. Information. You need accurate information about the scenario to plan meaningfully.

2. Too many points of failure. A heist scenario generally falls apart if it fails at any individual point along the way. If failure is probabilistic, any sufficiently complex plan is certain to fail.

These two factors combine to create an inability to plan, which means that simple plans like 'bust in and kill all the guards' end up being preferable to the sort of intricate machinations that are characteristic of the genre.

So, how do we alleviate those? Well, the proposed system mostly works to alleviate point #2. If an ability 'just works' then you do not have to worry about planning too many moves in advance. The game is kept interesting via the GM throwing curve-balls, changing little details of the scenario as it plays out, etc - but those occur in specific places and are independent of the complexity of the plan, so the failure rate of the plan as a whole is normalized.

Furthermore, a fate-point system acts like hitpoints in combat. Even if you somehow fail your part of the plan, you can respond by forcing success with fate-points and the plan goes on. The entire thing only fails if you have enough individual failures over the course of the scenario.

Alleviating point #1 is where ability design comes in. If I were building this for a heist game, I would make sure to put in many abilities that let you acquire foreknowledge of the scenario or even author elements of it.



Believe me when I say that narrative vs tactical is the absolute least of my concerns with this resolution system.

But isn't this basically true of everything? Drive skill only applies to situations in which you are driving a car(/boat/plane/motorscooter/whatever). And since all you're doing is giving vague guidelines about what you can do with skill level X, you're not actually enabling anything "special" with this, you're just giving the player more leverage to convince the GM that "no really, I don't have to spend points to do that." all your "skills" are really doing the same thing too, just in different circumstances.

Okay, so I think you don't understand the point of this after all. Lets do the Heist skills, maybe that will make it clearer.


Planning: For each point of Planning, you may ask the GM one question about the scenario and receive a truthful answer.

Recon: For each point of Recon, you can find out about the details of a single room in the target location.

Surveilance: For each point of Surveilance, you can set up a realtime audio/video feed that covers one room during the heist. Alternately, you can tie these feeds to individual PCs/NPCs instead of specific rooms.

Manipulation: For each point of Manipulation, you can make a single NPC go to a specific place at a specific time during the heist. You must be seen in order to use this.

Disguise: For each point of Disguise, you can spend 3 minutes to don a new identity - this resets the attention of guards and the like who previously observed/suspected you.

Security: For each point of Security you can disable a single security device - this includes video feeds, locks, etc. One safe is one device. The video monitoring equipment for an entire building is one device.

Defense: For each point of Defense, you can avoid one attack per session without being harmed/captured. An attack that is not avoided is assumed to neutralize you, barring some other advantage that would render it inert.

Attack: For each point of Attack, you can knock out/kill one NPC per session. This tends to make noise.

Cover: For each point of cover, you can hide the noise/commotion from a single activity that would normally draw attention.

Gadget: For each point of Gadget, you can obtain a special device before the heist that can mimic a point of one other skill, but only in a very specific circumstance. For instance, a device that will disable this particular safe, or a device that will knock out this particular guard.


Hopefully its pretty obvious that these skills are not 'all the same thing'.



I mean, in FATE, you wouldn't expect someone with the Aspect "Like a goddamn ninja." to be able to drive a car at high speeds and make handbrake turns. And you wouldn't expect a character with "getaway driver" to be able to hide in the only shadow in a room undetected. How is this different from "I put five dots in stealth" and "I put five dots in drive."? They both determine what the character is allowed to do in the fiction, but in doing so restrict the situations in which they can do it.

The problem is, in FATE, if I have an Aspect 'Owns a Doomsday Machine' then that doesn't actually let me blow up the world if I want to. It lets me reroll a skill roll when it applies, or add +1, or do the various other things that tagging an aspect can do. If my Aspect is 'I can breath underwater' then, well, I can't. I can get +1 to rolls to avoid drowning I suppose. If I have the Aspect 'Telepathic and Dangerous' that doesn't actually let me attack someone from across the world with telepathy or read someone's mind or journey to their dreams.

Obviously these things are kind of inappropriate for Aspects, but I'm using them to make a point about the difference between cosmetic differences and things that are actually qualitatively different. 'Telepathy' should not be the same as 'I'm a ninja' or 'I am one with the machines' or 'Shapechanger Incorporated' or 'I have a paperclip'.

Basically, my problem with FATE is it strips off everything that's actually interesting about evocative abilities and descriptions and renders them down into '+1 to a roll'.

The_Tentacle
2013-12-23, 10:37 PM
I haven't really played very many systems, but I do have somewhat of an idea of what my ideal system would be:

I want something that is combat- and skill challenge-oriented, but with roleplaying as well. Something rules-light, with guidelines that allow each GM to customize the game into something that makes sense. Definitely not a system that has rules and tables for everything.

As I'm not very familiar with many systems, I don't really know what would fit this bill, but this seems like something that I would love to play and GM.

Airk
2013-12-23, 11:16 PM
What I'm proposing is to say that 'the only thing in the system is abilities; there is nothing in the system that alters your probability of success, because there are no die rolls'. Skills, in this system, are abilities. Furthermore, anything you can do that is outside of the human norm is considered an ability, and anything within the human norm would be considered a given.

So you've shifted the skill range upwards, whatever. That's pretty much irrelevant.




Now, you might ask how attacks resolve in this system. And the answer is, I don't know quite yet. Ostensibly though you could run them using the same buy-off mechanic as spending Fate Points/Body Points/whatever to raise your skills temporarily. There are other pseudo-random ways you could resolve it as well. For example, everyone draws a number of cards equal to the number of participants at the start of each round; during an attack the attacker and defender can play up to two of those cards, and that determines the outcome.

Why bother coming down with a hard line "I'm going to remove all randomness from this game!" stance if you're just going to bring it back? Either stick to bidding, or find some other non-random mechanism.


You could also abstract away combat and literally have a 'Fighting' skill that lets you disable a number of NPCs per session equal to your rank in it.

Sounds.. not good. I think you see the reasons why this wouldn't work well.



This doesn't actually fix it. So the character in question put max ranks in Empathy (20, plus they bought a special power that raised the cap by 5 so they could get 25) and spent 4 of 10 possible Advantage Points (a one-time, chargen resource) to get a magic item that let them boost their Empathy checks even further.

So what? If the player overbuilds for the situation, it DOESN'T MATTER what resolution system you are using.



By far, the most satisfying moment for the player was when I threw in an NPC who was basically Puck personified, who literally cannot give a straight answer to a question due to the type of creature they are, and the player beat the NPC's 80 (the result of exploding dice) with an 84 Empathy check. The player saw direct confirmation that all the trouble they went to in order to boost their Empathy check was rewarded with concrete, in-game results - a check they would have failed if they had done anything less.

So the best moment you've ever had in a game is one that you CANNOT have in this new system?



So now what I've done in that campaign is that I've made tables of outcomes for most of the skills in the game. They list what a 15 gets you, what a 25 gets you, what a 35 gets you, and they're also salted with a few 'epic skill checks' in the 60-80 range. So if someone wants to go through the trouble to optimize their Acrobatics skill to those levels they know outright: doing this will get me the ability to walk on clouds.

Considering I've had players bugging me to finish the last 4-5 skills since I introduced the tables, I'm going to call that a success.

I don't see what this has to do with anything we are discussing. It is equally relevant to any type of system.


And when its just 'I want to see where we are in the forest' or 'I want to see what the cityscape looks like because I haven't seen it yet' (the actual reason, since the character had woken up in a strange city and needed to get the lay of the land). Failure in this case isn't interesting. Failure means they go and do it again and again until they succeed. Or failure means they can never climb that particular roof, which is just kind of silly.

Right. So there is no reason that a character will skill zero shouldn't be able to climb that tree, therefore, we let them. They don't need to have 10 ranks in athletics, because all they are doing is climbing a tree to see what's around. There is no reason to require a roll here. Even if I have athletics 20, there's no reason to roll, because this is a lame, easy task. I don't see what you're arguing for here?



A GM can correct for many deficiencies in the system. A GM can contrive situations so they're always meaningful. That doesn't mean we should design systems with lots of deficiencies in them, or design systems that put all of the responsibility for the game on the GM's shoulders.

Yes, great. Good idea. However, you have yet to convince me that you've actually prevented any of these GM mistakes.



Realism aside, there's a much more important factor here. A player who invests resources in something should feel that their investment is meaningful.

And regardless of what system you use, they won't feel it's meaningful because they climbed a tree to look around.



'Ability'-focused design means that the player can proactively seek to make their abilities meaningful. It takes a lot of pressure off of the GM if they don't have to constantly contrive situations to make each PC meaningful.

I disagree. If there are no situations that are relevant to a skill, then it doesn't matter how you resolve actions using that skill, and players who invested in that skill will feel slighted. Your system does not change this fundamental truth.


The argument is that the system, with Fate Points or the like, is no longer gating. You're complaining that the system doesn't let people do things above their skill level, but thats now false.

If Magic Banana Points are a renewable resource (say, per session or even per-day) then there is no 'this is impossible forevermore' situation. There may be setbacks and consequences and even failure, but the party can always return later to that locked door they couldn't pick before or whatever the chokepoint was and deal with it then.

Plus, I'm not saying 'now go, go and make everything a chokepoint'. I'm saying 'if you happen to have a chokepoint for whatever reason - it slipped in, you couldn't see a way around it, whatever - you have far better odds that the players can pass it in this system'

So basically, you are saying that you should just design a system where the players succeed all the time? Because that is the only alternative to gating the way you have written. Either:

A) The characters have the skill to get past the obstacle. They get past it. They expend nothing, and there is no chance of failure.
B) The characters do not have the skill to get past the obstacle, but they spend magic points, and there is no chance of failure.
C) The characters do not have the skill or the points to get past the obstacle, they are now stuck until some magical refresh point occurs.

At this point, you literally should give up having a system, because the expectation is that the PCs succeed at everything.



'Ability-based' design tends to alleviate choke points, because it gives players things they can do proactively to pursue a resolution. If the players have the ability to '1/session as the GM a question and receive the answer in character' then suddenly it doesn't really matter if they didn't find the clue, because they can just burn their question on it. Of course it might mean that they can't use the question to ask 'where can I obtain ultimate power?' or some other thing they wanted to know.

Or their ability might be completely irrelevant. Players can find creative approaches to situations under any system. It is not an advantage of your system. In fact, your system seems to -restrict- options by enumerating them as "here is the special thing you can do as a result of this number."


And the more abilities there are in the system, the greater the chance that someone in the group has something that could resolve the impasse.

But you're solving a problem you created for yourself.



Again, I'm not arguing in favor of bad adventure design, but I am arguing in favor of the system lending a helping hand in giving players the flexibility to move past choke-points. The idea isn't 'now I can run an adventure where everything is a choke-point!'. The idea is, sometimes choke-points will work their way into an adventure, maybe even without the GM being aware of it at first; with a flexible system like the Fate Points, there's a certain amount of give.

But if you DON'T design your system with 'choke points' at this point, there is no use for your resolution mechanic at all and the PCs are just allowed to succeed. Which is fine, but sortof defeats the purpose of this kind of system.



And on top of that, it means failure, if it does happen, is causal. The players didn't fail because they messed up a guessing game when building their characters about what skills would or would not be important. They failed because they mismanaged their resources.

Actually, it's both. Now you can f- up by any combination of chargen failure or mismanaged resources.



Now its not 'I didn't buy Knowledge: Royalty, and there was a critical Royalty check in the adventure!'; its 'I spent too many of my points when I didn't need to, so when it came down to the wire I didn't have enough'.

But if you'd just taken Knowledge: Royalty, you wouldn't be in that situation.



You said 'the point of skill systems is to compare numbers with dice'. I'm saying 'no, it isn't, thats just a property of many skill systems in games that have been published'. Just because D&D or World of Darkness or 7th Sea uses skill numbers to compare to DCs using dice does not mean that it is an intrinsic and immutable property of skill systems.

My point is ACTUALLY that you shouldn't need to rank things if the expectation is that that number doesn't mean anything except giving you an item out of a list.



The pieces are there, but I haven't seen them put together into a single, coherent whole that uses the idea 'render all scenarios tactical via a focus on abilities, not numerical comparisons' as its core principle.

As we discuss this, I think I start to understand why.



I think you're focusing too much on the points and chokepoint-based adventure design honestly. Lets look at combat.

You mean the part of your system that you admit doesn't really work well? Okay?




You can have all sorts of interesting combats without having a chokepoint-style enemy (e.g. a flier - did you all remember to bring bows?) - because abilities interact in nontrivial ways - because they change the game state rather than 'decide outcomes'.

But none of this ties directly to your case for non-skill-test based system. I think everyone agrees that cool abilities are cool.



The problems with a heist game are usually:

1. Information. You need accurate information about the scenario to plan meaningfully.

2. Too many points of failure. A heist scenario generally falls apart if it fails at any individual point along the way. If failure is probabilistic, any sufficiently complex plan is certain to fail.

These two factors combine to create an inability to plan, which means that simple plans like 'bust in and kill all the guards' end up being preferable to the sort of intricate machinations that are characteristic of the genre.

So, how do we alleviate those? Well, the proposed system mostly works to alleviate point #2. If an ability 'just works' then you do not have to worry about planning too many moves in advance.

But you can't, because all you need to do is run into too many points where you needed better skill than you have and now you autofail. Otherwise, you autosuceed, which doesn't fill anyone with much of sense of accomplishment.




Alleviating point #1 is where ability design comes in. If I were building this for a heist game, I would make sure to put in many abilities that let you acquire foreknowledge of the scenario or even author elements of it.

Why not just give up on all this and play a game that allows players active input in the fiction in the first place? That REALLY seems what you want.



Okay, so I think you don't understand the point of this after all. Lets do the Heist skills, maybe that will make it clearer.

How WOULD I have figured it out, since you have gone from hard "game world" actions in your examples with Drive to these "fictional input" actions now with your heist skills?

Though at this point, it is ABUNDANTLY clear to me that you really should stop trying to modify a skill system and just start working on a system whose actual point is to give the players input into the fiction instead of pretending to model skills - which it has no intention of actually doing. Those abilities don't even come close to trying to model what the character can do with the skill, even at "supernatural" levels of competence. What you are doing is instead kludging those skills into a means of restricting which ways the players are allowed to interact with the fiction.



Obviously these things are kind of inappropriate for Aspects, but I'm using them to make a point about the difference between cosmetic differences and things that are actually qualitatively different.

I'm sorry, but you've basically used an invalid example to try to make a point. I don't have enough familiarity with FATE to tell you why it's wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the rules aren't INTENDED to let you do those things, so it's not a 'design flaw' here. Your rules won't let you blow up the world or breathe underwater either.



'Telepathy' should not be the same as 'I'm a ninja' or 'I am one with the machines' or 'Shapechanger Incorporated' or 'I have a paperclip'.

Nor are they, by my understanding.



Basically, my problem with FATE is it strips off everything that's actually interesting about evocative abilities and descriptions and renders them down into '+1 to a roll'.

Fair enough. I haven't played the game in years.

@The_Tentacle: Consider looking into Mouse Guard (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/60496/Mouse-Guard-Roleplaying-Game). Alas, the physical book is out of print, but the PDF is available via that link. I believe it meets your requirements as written.

Airk
2013-12-23, 11:43 PM
On a further note, I was just reading TBZ and found this in a little sidebar. I think it's worth reflecting on:



CONCEPT: WHY USE A GAME SYSTEM?
For many people used to online chat-based roleplaying games where people make up results onthe fly, or computer-based role-playing gamesw here the results are decided by the computer,it’s probably a good idea to understand why this game uses dice and “challenge ratings” and the like.

First, not knowing the outcome of a conflict,where both winning and losing could result in interesting results, is entertaining.

Second, it’s a way for tasks to have their outcome decided in a non-arbitrary way. Sure, the GM decides a difficulty rating, but from that point on it’s up to the player whether they succeed or fail.

Third, it interjects some chaos into play: Watch as skilled people fail, or unskilled people succeed, and decide how that came to be. This chaos creates some interesting story twists!


I feel that your game system, as suggested with, essentially, auto-successes as the expectation, removes all three of the benefits enumerated here.

I would have serious concerns about your game, as suggested, but I think we've taken up enough space discussing it in this thread. If you ever get it full written up, I'd be very interested to read it.

NichG
2013-12-24, 12:38 AM
Sounds.. not good. I think you see the reasons why this wouldn't work well.

Depends on the game. If I'm trying to model the TV show Leverage, why would I ever want something with more combat complexity than that? They have a character whose power is basically 'I win fights'. And when it comes down to a fight, he wins the fight. And there isn't really more to be said about it - its generally not the focus of the episode.



So what? If the player overbuilds for the situation, it DOESN'T MATTER what resolution system you are using.


If I have the ability to Attack Three Times a Round, Move Double Normal Speed, and Dodge Bullets, its true that it may be overkill for defeating an unarmed peasant in fisticuffs. But its more like winning chess against a player who is offering you a handicap at that point.

What's more, because I can Dodge Bullets I might decide that bits of debris raining down in a collapsing cavern are basically bullets, and say 'I can deal with this!'. That kind of ability to employ lateral thinking comes from the ability being 'about something' rather than just a numerical value.

'What I can do' means something concrete. I can move 500 feet in 6 seconds. I can shoot a crow's eye at 2 miles away. 'I got a 34' does not. Is an 34 good? Bad? Its all based on the relative numbers. It has no intrinsic meaning or value.



So the best moment you've ever had in a game is one that you CANNOT have in this new system?


The best moment I've ever had in a game? You're severely misreading my post.

First of all, this was one of my players. Second of all, the example is specifically with regards to the Empathy skill. Third of all, this is also with regards to a specific campaign.

Thats a far distance from 'the best moment I've ever had in a game'. I'd say the best moment I've ever had in a game was when I realized that I could do a few small things and fulfill a self-consistent time loop where I was the villain that had been hounding and hunting my character in particular for the entire campaign. By accepting the moral weight of horrendous atrocities and taking credit for that which had already been done but which I had yet to do, I could stop them with but a decision that I would do no more evil.



I don't see what this has to do with anything we are discussing. It is equally relevant to any type of system.


The list of fixed DCs is effectively a list of concrete abilities that buying the skill gets you. You know that if you have 35 ranks in Tactics you can double your Leverage pool once per fight; things like that.



Right. So there is no reason that a character will skill zero shouldn't be able to climb that tree, therefore, we let them. They don't need to have 10 ranks in athletics, because all they are doing is climbing a tree to see what's around. There is no reason to require a roll here. Even if I have athletics 20, there's no reason to roll, because this is a lame, easy task. I don't see what you're arguing for here?


I'm saying, even moments without tension are opportunities for a player to feel that their build choices are being reaffirmed. Imagine for a moment that there was no tree, no forest, no building. Just an open plain where the character wakes up. The character has the power of flight, and uses it to fly up into the sky and sees a city in the distance. This says to them 'my power was useful!'.

Now put the trees back in. Someone with one rank in Climb (or Athletics or whatever) sees on their sheet '1 rank = climb surfaces without frequent holds, such as a tree trunk'. They say 'aha, I can climb a tree and see where we are!'. Someone without Climb might also say 'hey, can I climb a tree and look around?' and the answer is 'spend a Body Point and you're good to go'.

The person with Climb knows 'if I didn't have that, it would have cost a point'. The person without Climb meanwhile isn't left feeling 'man my character is incompetent, I can't even climb a tree'.



Yes, great. Good idea. However, you have yet to convince me that you've actually prevented any of these GM mistakes.


Why do I have to convince you of that? I just have to know, as a GM, what works for me and what doesn't. I know as a GM that coming up with by-the-book optimized NPCs/monsters in D&D 3.5ed is more time than I can afford and more time than its worth. If I go ask Tippy the same thing, he'll say 'oh, I just have 300 of those already statted out, I'll just pull one off the stack'.

This isn't just an arbitrary decision on my part to favor one system over another. I've been running systems with skill-based pass/fail mechanics for something like 7 years now. The reason I suggest these things is because after writing four custom systems for my campaigns, they answer problems I've seen in previous things I've tried.

Will they work for you? Well, heck if I know. Maybe you'd end up fighting the system all the time and it would interfere with your adventure design, the same way 'everyone uses the same character-building rules' in D&D 3.5ed messes with my adventure design.

But I know for me at least, the best games I've been in and the best games I've run have focused on systems where 'you have a power that does X' rather than 'roll to see if you succeed at doing X'. To the extent that when I make a D&D character, I'll unconsciously design the character to avoid rolls whenever possible. And I know from reading these forums and from playing with others that that tendency is fairly common in experienced players.



I disagree. If there are no situations that are relevant to a skill, then it doesn't matter how you resolve actions using that skill, and players who invested in that skill will feel slighted. Your system does not change this fundamental truth.


Instead of thinking 'there is a situation relevant to the skill' think 'the skill lets you do a thing'. It is then the player's responsibility in part to make their skills work for them.

Obviously you can create skills where this is hard to do. How do I take 'Drive' and make it useful for someone stranded on a deserted isle? Well, obviously there's a limit. But one logical conclusion that could be reached from that is - don't design a system with throwaway skills. Make sure everything has a good shot at being relevant to the genre you're emulating. Don't put 'Pilot Spaceship' in a game that isn't going to have any chance for it to come up.

BESM actually formalizes this - each of the skills in BESM cost a different amount depending on the 'campaign genre'. 'Cooking' is a potent skill in a highschool slice of life campaign, but not so powerful in a shonen campaign, so it costs 6 points in the one and 1 point in the other.



So basically, you are saying that you should just design a system where the players succeed all the time? Because that is the only alternative to gating the way you have written. Either:


Actually, yes. That is exactly what I'm suggesting, just at the micro-scale. I'm suggesting that 'success' is equivalent to 'moving your chess pieces according to the rules of the game'. In chess, if I move a bishop, I don't roll to see if it actually moved along the diagonal this time. Yet the game isn't trivial. The overall success or failure is a result of the combination of the moves chosen on each side.

The chess equivalent of a 'choke-point' then would be getting caught in a fork between your king and another piece - you are going to lose a piece (Magic Banana Points) but the game goes on. Obviously, if the entire game is made of forks, its going to feel really railroady, so you don't do that.



A) The characters have the skill to get past the obstacle. They get past it. They expend nothing, and there is no chance of failure.
B) The characters do not have the skill to get past the obstacle, but they spend magic points, and there is no chance of failure.
C) The characters do not have the skill or the points to get past the obstacle, they are now stuck until some magical refresh point occurs.

At this point, you literally should give up having a system, because the expectation is that the PCs succeed at everything.


It's only this simple if 'do the players win?' is the question you're asking with the game. Thats never actually the question you're asking with the game. Almost all RPGs are strongly weighted towards the players succeeding at their eventual goals. The interesting question is generally 'how do they succeed?' or in some cases 'what is the price they pay along the way?' or even 'what do they choose to succeed at?'.



Or their ability might be completely irrelevant. Players can find creative approaches to situations under any system. It is not an advantage of your system. In fact, your system seems to -restrict- options by enumerating them as "here is the special thing you can do as a result of this number."


If I have a system which is just 'you can do whatever a human could conceivably do' then thats a basic game, where players can find creative approaches to situations. Now take that game and add 'also, you have one first level spell from D&D that you can use at will'. I haven't restricted options, I've expanded them.

In some campaigns, that phrase will be 'also, you can control fire'. In other campaigns, that phrase will be 'also you can write music that will cause those who hear it to feel any emotion you desire'. In yet other campaigns, that phrase will be 'also, you can rewrite time once'.



But you're solving a problem you created for yourself.


If I build an adventure with choke-points, sure. But, in that case I'd much rather have the problem be solved than say 'yep, I sure created a problem guys, oh well I guess you have to stop having fun now'.

Robustness is an attractive feature for a system to have. I'm not going to make 'The Dungeon of 30 Choke-Points' but from time to time, a choke point might creep into the game - "There's something cool in this technological lockbox; oh, you don't understand tech or have anyone in the party who understands tech? ... crap."

In that case I'd much rather the system respond gracefully.



But if you DON'T design your system with 'choke points' at this point, there is no use for your resolution mechanic at all and the PCs are just allowed to succeed. Which is fine, but sortof defeats the purpose of this kind of system.


Lets go back to chess. Each piece 'does something'. Success is not guaranteed on the scale of the overall game. Success at 'moving a piece by the rules' is absolutely guaranteed.

My skills all 'do something' - thats the point. The 'Hide' skill is the bishop, the 'Sword' skill is the knight, etc. Its not about choke-points and checking to see if the right skills were purchased.



Actually, it's both. Now you can f- up by any combination of chargen failure or mismanaged resources.

But if you'd just taken Knowledge: Royalty, you wouldn't be in that situation.


Lets say you utterly failed at chargen - you put all your skill points into the skill called 'actually this skill doesn't do anything'. Its possible to still design interesting adventures, because:

1. You can do anything a human can do. If a mundane human could solve the problem, then its possible for you to do so as well, without spending any points. You just have to figure out how.

2. And if you get stuck, hey, you have 10 temporary skill ranks to put anywhere you want in the form of a Fate Point pool. When you just can't figure out how to get across that gap without a super-olympic leap, you've got something to fall back on.

But,

3. If even with those boons, you can't figure out how to succeed, then you fail - time passes, consequences occur, and maybe you can try again tomorrow, but it may be that the hostage was killed or the treasure was absconded with or whatever.



My point is ACTUALLY that you shouldn't need to rank things if the expectation is that that number doesn't mean anything except giving you an item out of a list.


'Rank' is a vertical prerequisite system. Prerequisite systems are useful for controlling certain aspects of depth-vs-breadth of a character and generally tend to be more stable than raw point-buy. For example, if I have some ability 'you can win one fight per game, no questions asked' then what do I do? I could make it really expensive, or I could put it at the end of a chain of prerequisites - the result being, I can give the player who is 'building towards' it a bunch of lesser abilities that I want them to have, even if on their own those abilities would not be very attractive.

Also conceptually sometimes it just makes sense for things to have vertical dependencies. It would be a little weird if I could drive a car up the walls and jump it over obstacles just fine, but I couldn't drive it safely at 25mph above the speed limit.



As we discuss this, I think I start to understand why.

You mean the part of your system that you admit doesn't really work well? Okay?


Now you're just being snarky. Tell me, why is it so important that you come into a thread about 'discuss the system you'd really like to run' and say 'no, you're wrong about what you would like to run'?

Do I have a system here? No. Everything I've posted on this thread was generated on the spot for the purpose of discussion. I hardly expect that the results would be something as clean and polished as a game with hundreds of thousands of hours of playtime behind it.

But aside from the snark and complaining about my personal taste, can you see my point about how combat is different in most systems? And can you see what I'm trying to get at - the idea that the tactical richness that combat receives in many systems could apply to other scenarios too?



But none of this ties directly to your case for non-skill-test based system. I think everyone agrees that cool abilities are cool.


This is answered in the next paragraph in my previous post. I was making a connection between the structure of combat in a game like D&D and the structure of a heist game using these design principles.



But you can't, because all you need to do is run into too many points where you needed better skill than you have and now you autofail. Otherwise, you autosuceed, which doesn't fill anyone with much of sense of accomplishment.


I feel like a broken record. Get 'success' and 'failure' out of your mind. If I manage to cast Invisibility without being interrupted, do I win the combat? No. If I capture a pawn in chess, do I win the game? No.



Why not just give up on all this and play a game that allows players active input in the fiction in the first place? That REALLY seems what you want.


Uh, no, and I resent the 'I know what you want better than you do'. Until you actually understand my points, you have no basis to claim 'what I really want'.



How WOULD I have figured it out, since you have gone from hard "game world" actions in your examples with Drive to these "fictional input" actions now with your heist skills?


'Fictional input' actions are just another tool in the game design toolkit. They are well suited here, because its really easy to see the game that results.

I can give you a scenario 'You have a team of three people with 8 skill points each to spend and 4 Fate Points each; you have to knock off the Alonsyious Casino in Vegas, run by Pico Alonsyious, a mafia don and the guy who had your last team killed. He has a wedding in four days which he's holding on the casino grounds. Go!' and you can start figuring out how to solve the scenario.

You burn 3 Fate Points on Planning and put the others in various other skills. Then you ask me 'What's the layout of the building?', 'Where is the money?', 'Who can access the vault?'. You get information, now you have to figure out how to make those 9 fate points and 8 skill points get you from the outside to the vault and out with the money.



Though at this point, it is ABUNDANTLY clear to me that you really should stop trying to modify a skill system and just start working on a system whose actual point is to give the players input into the fiction instead of pretending to model skills - which it has no intention of actually doing. Those abilities don't even come close to trying to model what the character can do with the skill, even at "supernatural" levels of competence. What you are doing is instead kludging those skills into a means of restricting which ways the players are allowed to interact with the fiction.


All of the stuff in the Heist skills is the sort of thing that's pretty common in the genre. Watch White Collar or Leverage or Ocean's Eleven. It's pretty much a given that the main characters (PCs) will have some knowledge of the building layout. Its pretty much a given that they can manipulate someone to be in the right place at the right time. Its pretty much a given that, if they need to win a fight, they can win a fight.

What they can't do is manipulate all the people, win all the fights, know everything. The twist in the plan is almost always from something they didn't know, something from within their own team, something that changed shortly before the heist, or another force with similar skill working against them. Its rarely something like 'oh, the guy who is really good at hacking messed up the hack, so you don't have video feeds after all'.

If I'm writing a game to capture a genre, I'm going to use the best tools for the job. In this case, that is skills that 'abstract away' details of how some tasks are done. We don't need to know how the crooks got their hands on the building blueprint - we can assume that it was simply much easier to do than the thing of interest, the actual heist itself. We don't need to know exactly what virus the team's hacker used to disable the security systems, or if he just pretended to be a father with uppity kids who got gum on the CCTV lens.



I'm sorry, but you've basically used an invalid example to try to make a point. I don't have enough familiarity with FATE to tell you why it's wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the rules aren't INTENDED to let you do those things, so it's not a 'design flaw' here. Your rules won't let you blow up the world or breathe underwater either.


I will try to be less specific then, since it seems like the examples are getting in the way of understanding:

I do not like FATE, because as a system it does not encourage qualitatively different abilities. Instead, it encourages cosmetically different abilities that are mechanically the same. Cosmetic difference is unimportant to me in a system - I can do that just fine on my own.

NichG
2013-12-24, 12:44 AM
Sorry for the double post, but I missed this in the last novel and its pretty easily addressed, so I wanted to at least comment.


On a further note, I was just reading TBZ and found this in a little sidebar. I think it's worth reflecting on:


First, not knowing the outcome of a conflict,where both winning and losing could result in interesting results, is entertaining.

Second, it’s a way for tasks to have their outcome decided in a non-arbitrary way. Sure, the GM decides a difficulty rating, but from that point on it’s up to the player whether they succeed or fail.

Third, it interjects some chaos into play: Watch as skilled people fail, or unskilled people succeed, and decide how that came to be. This chaos creates some interesting story twists!



Of those three, the only thing that requires a change or clarification of the system is the third.

For the first two, I'm just going to repeat my analogy to chess. It has rules, but not stochasticity. Yet the outcomes are both not known ahead of time (due to the combinatoric depth of the game) and non-arbitrary.

For the third, you can make use of GM Intrusions from Numenera and achieve roughly the same effect, though ideally you'd give players a way to reciprocate.

Gamgee
2013-12-24, 12:52 AM
Nope. I juggle from system to system. My friends claim Star Wars Saga was "My GAME". I would have to agree. So far out of all the systems the games I run in it are just outstanding. Being talked about to this day.

However that is not to say my games in other games are crappy. Just that I can work best in that system.

Tengu_temp
2013-12-24, 01:15 AM
For me, The Game is Mutants and Masterminds 2e/3e. Such an amazingly versatile system which lets you build pretty much any character you want, and run any kind of game you want, as long as it's more cinematic and less gritty! It's crunch-heavily but not absurdly so, and the gameplay is fast and smooth. And, for such an open game, it's reasonably well balanced! There are other games that I like a lot, but this is my default system when it comes to starting a new campaign.

Jack of Spades
2013-12-24, 11:38 AM
I guess I should clarify that I definitely don't mean "What is the one game you can survive on forever in exclusion." I mean, the sneaky reason I made this thread was because I felt like adding more RPGs to my library and the Playground is where I go for recommendations. Despite the fact that I love BWG, I think we can all agree that variety is the spice of life.

I think it may be an issue of finding a game whose designer thinks like you do [has the same GMing style at least], at least as nearly as possible. Which would make sense, since we have several people here who either homebrew their own systems already or have that idea in their "Things I'll Do" bin.


I haven't really played very many systems, but I do have somewhat of an idea of what my ideal system would be:

I want something that is combat- and skill challenge-oriented, but with roleplaying as well. Something rules-light, with guidelines that allow each GM to customize the game into something that makes sense. Definitely not a system that has rules and tables for everything.

As I'm not very familiar with many systems, I don't really know what would fit this bill, but this seems like something that I would love to play and GM.
Have you tried (new) World of Darkness? It actually sounds pretty close to what you're looking for. People also praise Savage Worlds for similar flexibility.


Nitpick: This isn't what a theory is. This is conjecture, or at best a hypothesis.
When reviewing the thread post-submission, I had the same thought directed at myself. :smallredface:
Luckily, the colloquial definition is just as valid and correct in this situation.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-12-24, 12:14 PM
I think a system with a single Bananas rating should be sufficient for everything. You have X number of Bananas. When you attempt to beat someone or something that is more Bananas than you, give it a Banana to succeed. Or give it two Bananas if it's way more Bananas than you.

Proceed to go Bananas.

:smallbiggrin:

AMFV
2013-12-24, 01:33 PM
I think a system with a single Bananas rating should be sufficient for everything. You have X number of Bananas. When you attempt to beat someone or something that is more Bananas than you, give it a Banana to succeed. Or give it two Bananas if it's way more Bananas than you.

Proceed to go Bananas.

:smallbiggrin:

Cause that **** is bananas. B - A -N - A - N - A - S. Bananas.

Airk
2013-12-24, 03:32 PM
I'm basically done with this derail, but I think I should say that regardless of what I think of the system as a whole, I'm pretty sure it's awful idea for some skills to be "fiction altering" and some skills to be "fiction constrained"

NichG
2013-12-24, 07:02 PM
I'm basically done with this derail, but I think I should say that regardless of what I think of the system as a whole, I'm pretty sure it's awful idea for some skills to be "fiction altering" and some skills to be "fiction constrained"

Well even if I didn't convince you to use these non-existent systems, having to actually construct examples of it was a useful exercise for me, so thanks for that. I sorta feel like making a separate thread for it, but it really would be important 'what specific thing is the system trying to model' since its clear that e.g. Heist has different genre requirements than medieval European fantasy or Gaiman-esque fantasmagoria.

Airk
2013-12-24, 08:01 PM
Well even if I didn't convince you to use these non-existent systems, having to actually construct examples of it was a useful exercise for me, so thanks for that. I sorta feel like making a separate thread for it, but it really would be important 'what specific thing is the system trying to model' since its clear that e.g. Heist has different genre requirements than medieval European fantasy or Gaiman-esque fantasmagoria.

I agree that a separate thread is probably appropriate, but you'll probably want to take some time to codify some stuff first, because I think the discussion has gone about as far as it can go in hypotheticals.

I'm not actually sure that the difference is the genre though - it's absolutely possible to play a heist game with in-fiction powers or a medieval fantasy game with fiction altering powers. You have to decide what you want the players to be able to do, because right now your expectations seem to be all over the board.

NichG
2013-12-24, 09:14 PM
I agree that a separate thread is probably appropriate, but you'll probably want to take some time to codify some stuff first, because I think the discussion has gone about as far as it can go in hypotheticals.

I'm not actually sure that the difference is the genre though - it's absolutely possible to play a heist game with in-fiction powers or a medieval fantasy game with fiction altering powers. You have to decide what you want the players to be able to do, because right now your expectations seem to be all over the board.

Okay, I've created a new thread to continue this conversation, since there are a few things that I don't understand about your comments. It's 'Skills as Moves - Design ideas for tactics-beyond-combat'

Oracle_Hunter
2013-12-25, 08:49 AM
Like all matters of taste, different people have different desires.
Some (perhaps many within the RPG Community) have one "favorite food" that they'd be happy having 24/7 and never get bored. These are the folks who order the same thing off the menu every time they go to a restaurant, have exactly one style of clothing they wear, and only watch one style of movie.

Others are like the above but have yet to find that one taste they desire. They may not even know what it is they want, due to lack of exposure. As a rule they act like the above but are always vaguely dissatisfied by their current choice for reasons they can't articulate.

A third group like variety, but only so far. They may not order the same thing every time they go to a restaurant but they have a short list of things they'll eat. In RPG parlance, they tend to pick several "one true system" across genres/playstyles -- for example, Pathfinder for Serious Gaming, nWoD for Dramatic Roleplaying and Shadowrun for Hijinks.

The final group doesn't just like variety, but they crave it. They never go to the same restaurant twice and if they do, won't order the same thing. They may not have a favorite type of film but they always want to see something "new" or "different." In case you haven't noticed, this is the group I put myself in :smalltongue:
There is absolutely nothing wrong with one style of taste preference or another, but it is important to learn (1) what your preference style is and (2) that other people may have different styles from your own :smallsmile:

Geostationary
2013-12-27, 01:56 AM
I enjoy variety! I have a pile of systems that I want to try and/or read through. But I also have some systems I love to an unhealthy degree! Namely Nobilis and Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.

DigoDragon
2013-12-27, 07:59 AM
The campaigns my players had enjoyed the most were under either D&D3.5 or GURPS 4e, so I suppose those were my best systems. I didn't get enough time experimenting with SR4 to get a good groove on it.

KiCowboy
2013-12-27, 09:05 AM
My crew and I love games like Deadlands, L5R, and 7th Sea. I think the common theme we love is the idea of skill based systems with "exploding dice" (if you roll the max value on a die, roll that one again and add it to the result.) The players like customizing their characters beyond their "classes" and sometimes the exploding dice provide unexpected epic moments. But mostly, we like almost anything with a healthy dose of pulp action. BADASS has become one of our favorite one-shot systems - the sessions typically stray from focusing on the rolls to story-telling oneupsmanship of who can come up with the most ridiculous action sequence. A player once fought a mutated baboon that was dual-wielding chainsaws while trying to protect a box of kittens in a moving roller coaster. I can hardly explain how things got to that point... But it was awesome.

Angel Bob
2013-12-27, 11:12 AM
My group plays D&D 4E exclusively, but that's just because it was the current edition when we started playing and thus its supplies are easiest to acquire. We playtested D&D Next once, didn't much care for it (characters had too little HP for comfort), and are probably going to continue with 4E for the foreseeable future.

allonym
2013-12-27, 11:23 AM
My "The Game"? Call of Cthulhu.

It's a flawed system (but that's beside the point). I can and do enjoy playing and running, with what seems to be a good rate of success, the 40k RPGs, D&D 4e, WFRP, In Nomine, and others besides.

But there's something about Cthulhu. I have so many ideas for it; I can run it pulpy or not, Modern (Delta Green), 1920s, or Gaslight; I can use and adapt pre-written oneshots and campaigns (at least, the good ones. There are a lot of awful supplements), or use my own; I have dozens of stories, such as my elderly Investigator in Masks of Nyarlathotep who went all Jack Bauer, or my triumphantly successful Innsmouth Campaign which may well be the highlight of my GMing so far; I've run Cthulhu LARPs, specialist Convention-style games; I have planned and written out extensive campaign settings, but I'm just as comfortable running it almost entirely improvised; I love the challenge of setting up the atmosphere, and the payoff when succeeding.

So yeah, at least from my experience, the theory has weight.

KiCowboy
2013-12-27, 12:35 PM
I confess there's something I really liked about Call of Cthulhu - the skill growth, or at least how our DM handled it. At the end of a session you had a chance to improve any skill where you had used successfully under its percentage. In order to do so you had to roll over its percentage. It created a nice balance of the difficulties of learning new things and improving things that were largely mastered already. And since we couldn't just spend XP to make our characters suddenly be better at something - we had to find ways to actually roleplay performing those actions we wanted to show our characters were trying to improve. And sometimes if the dice were particularly unmerciful over several sessions but the character was really trying, the DM would allow a chance to improve.

Endarire
2013-12-28, 06:37 PM
Nobilis: Invest points in things and you'll always succeed against a challenge or opponent of lesser (or perhaps equal) investment. For example, 5 ranks in X means you pretty much always succeed at X.