Is it time to cut the war game roots of role-playing?

[Cluedrew]

I think the story of how Dungeons & Dragons started out as a mod to a war game. Which means the roots of the role-playing gene are very deep in the war game gene. Everything has to start from somewhere after all. But is time to cut those roots?

There seem to be a lot of issues that stem from the conventions of war games that just don't work as well in the role-playing context. I have decided to divide this up by the resulting issue. First because they are more tangible and second because they give more granularity. And hence more opportunities for fun titles.

Soldiers March to War
Combatants, everyone players someone who can fight. Why can't I play the comms. guy, who could fire a gun (is in the army) but probably couldn't hit a moving target with it? Well because being a PC automatically gives me an accuracy bonus for some reason. I can play a hundred variants of soldier, battle cyborg or battle mage, but I have to stretch it to play a wandering crafter, a corporate sponsor or an academic.

The Never-Ending Battle
Combat becoming so common has several problems for role-playing characters. But wait! "Role-playing doesn't stop when you pick up the dice." Yes, I get it, that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how when you calculate a modifier you are not thinking about the character's character. If you spend a lot of time working out the best move in this situation, even if it is because your character is a brilliant tactician and would do that. The level of detail is unnecessary for characterization, but in systems with detailed combat you have to slog through it anyways.

What's more is any single activity has a much narrower range of characterization opportunities than all of them. So focusing on any one can drain that range without exploring many other spaces, or doing so very sparsely.

Downtime
As much as combat gets detailed, other things are left vague and shallow. Meaning it is really hard to engage in many of those activities in a meaningful way. So even if you create a combatant with other skills important to their character, playing through those will likely be rather uninteresting.

This compounds the above issues by guiding the game towards the mechanically interesting sections and character concepts. It also means the system overall is less likely to be able to handle the non-combat sections of story that are likely to crop up eventually.

Front line & Special Units
A contributing factor to the whole caster/martial thing. Some units hold the line, others do cleaver and complex things to change the flow of battle. It works in war games where everyone is a swarm of front line soldiers and a couple of special units. However that completely breaks down when you focus that in on single character (not necessarily of the same type) for each player

Balance for the War God
Now there are several meanings of balance in this context. "Equal ability to contribute in a fight" is possibly the least interesting and yet it becomes one of the most important once combat becomes common. Otherwise you are disconnected from the game for large sections while the combat plays out.

The definition we are actually looking for might be better described in terms of spotlight time. But when the game is about half combat, those distinctions start to fall away and it becomes necessary for characters to be balanced in the combat sense to keep the game fun and active for all players.

Missed Who for the What
This may be just an order of operations thing but I still feel like character descriptions starting off with "Barbarian 2/Ranger 1" are kind of missing the point. Who is your character? A strong warrior who hunts to feed the members of her extended family. That gives me way more information.

More than the others this one is kind of a soft line, but it does mimic a war game's "West Folk got a new stealth sniper solo" that probably does have some flavour text, but you flip through that in the lore later after figuring out if the new unit makes in into your army.


So those are things that can be attributed to the war game roots of role-playing games. Most are dragging the hobby down to some degree. Or at least when unquestioned. I'm not going to say that every system with a separate combat role from a skill check is bad. Nor is it wrong to have a tactical game with some role-playing thrown on top.

But these things should probably not be considered the standard for role-playing games. The time has come for role-playing games to be stand on their own, without using the crutches of their early development.

[Yora]

This is simply a matter of picking the right game. D&D type fantasy games are about warriors fighting monsters, but there are already plenty of RPGs that are not designed on that basis and have been for many years now.

[Bohandas]

This is simply a matter of picking the right game. D&D type fantasy games are about warriors fighting monsters, but there are already plenty of RPGs that are not designed on that basis and have been for many years now.
Yeah. Maybe check out Toon

[Coventry]

Which means the roots of the role-playing gene are very deep in the war game gene.

Role-playing's roots go much farther back than just D&D. If you think about it, the profession of acting is nothing more than role-play. That thousands of years.

[oxybe]

D&D is a game about adventurers going out and fighting potential dragons that may or may not be in dungeons or dungeon-like areas.

Different tools, or systems in this case, for telling different stories.

When I sit down to play a game, sometimes I just want lighthearted and dumb fun:

-The party is yukking it up at a tavern
-Some old man bursts in yelling "Da boggarts are baggin' muh babies!"
-Party grabs their weapons, tosses a few gold at the bartender and pay for a round then go stop the boggarts from putting infants in burlap sacs
-Return to tavern successful with a new story to tell

Is my character Sol Fightman called that because he's the sole fighter in the group? Yes. Yes he is. Does he need a deeper characterization? For the theoretical game here? No. Sol is a guy with a sword who does things that are vaguely "right" because we're just here to have dumb fun and kick in goblin heads.

Not every TTRPG follows that trend. Ryuutama is Oregon Trail, if it was told by Miyazaki. You're a group of people going from A to B and you're not Badass adventurers, you're like... a farmer, a merchant, a bright-eyed youth looking for adventure and a country girl who's going to join a convent and the game is basically the stuff that happens between A and B.

Does that make Ryuutama the superior game because it lacks the wargaming roots? Well, it's a poor game if you're looking to tell a story about adventurers dungeon delving and kicking in faces, but that's not what the game is about. I'm sure you can make it work with some tinkering, but that's largely missing the point in my opinion. D&D is way better at telling that story out of the box.

But the point is: use the system that best fits the story you want to tell.

I like D&D because I like the stories it tells and the wargaming roots help tell them.

But to focus on your points:

Soldiers March to War: look three sentences up "use the system that best fits the story you want to tell". You have a square peg, you looked around, bought a board with a round hole and now you're complaining it's not fitting. Yes D&D is bad at telling stories about non-adventurers. That's because it's not supposed to be a game about a wandering crafter unless that crafter is also called Tony Stark/Iron Man.

The Never-Ending Battle: D&D tries to emulate the legends of knights and heroes that go out to kill monsters that threaten people: Hercules and his Hydra, Beowulf and Grendel, etc... Combat is kinda important to some of these stories. Where you say "I'm talking about how when you calculate a modifier you are not thinking about the character's character" I would say you're simply missing the big picture and trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. You're looking at the fight on a round by round basis, but in truth you should be looking at 2 things: "what does how my character fight say about him?" and "how does my character feel about this engagement?"

Do you focus on non-lethal takedowns? Do you use magic that incapacitates rather then hurt? Do you focus on ending the fight as soon as possible? Do you care about collateral damage?

When a fight starts or you see a fight incoming (either because you're hidden or the enemy is clearly in the open) do you try to avoid a fight if possible? Do you feel the fight is pointless and both parties should stop? Are you willing to fight to the death in this engagement, is it worth it?

This is the questions you should be asking: the context around the combat (or avoiding it or whatever), not the round-by-round.

Downtime: that's one part "what kind of story do you want to tell" and one part "is this really the right game for you?". D&D can do non-combat, it just depends on what kind of non-combat you're looking for and the depth of those mechanics. If you're looking to play the wandering craftsman, assume basic competence where the character has the training to succeed at tasks around his trade barring times of duress and use the existing systems to work around those times, basically turning the act of crafting into an adventure. If you want to make a fancy sword+shield or a tapestry to present to a local lord...

-History or Religion can be used to accurately convey a scene.
-Thievery if you're looking to add very fine details.
-Endurance if you're going to be burning the midnight oil or spending prolonged time by the forge.
-You may need to help someone with a task or try to persuade them so you can get first dibs high quality materials which can potentially require the full use of the social skills: Diplomacy, Intimidation, Insight & Streetwise.
-Worst case scenario, you may need to rough up a few punks.

"Downtime" doesn't necessarily mean "nothing happens", you can frame downtime as you would an adventure, it just requires the GM and other players to buy into it.

Front line & Special Units If you're going to play a class-based game, the classes should have something special about them. D&D is about a small squad of people who are good a thing and generally rely on each other cover the areas they're not good at. In D&D you're not just RandomFighter213547, You're Sol Fightman. You have cool things you can do that's different from 'ol Pious Pete because you're a fighter and not a cleric. If you want to a game with a more homogenous cast, many point-based games like GURPS can do this, but even then you'll likely end up with characters that have specialized roles within the team.

D&D is just really bad at defining what it wants casters/noncasters to be good at. that's less a problem with the "derived from wargames" and more "cruddy design".

Balance for the War God Yes, if your game has a high focus on "theme or trope X", all characters being able to contribute to "Theme or trope X" is a good thing. I... I don't see how that's a bad thing. I mean, if you want to go out of your way to be cruddy at X, that's your perogative, but the standard should be some amount of competence in the areas the game will focus on.

In D&D that's adventuring, thus the characters have a certain amount of basic competence in combat and the skillset required to go in a cave, find a special mushroom so you can use it to lure out the Fanged Claw-Beast and kill it for it's pineal gland and mix up a potion to cure the disease threatening the princess.

Missed Who for the What Ranger/Barbarian describes how your character will be working within the party. It tells you the skill set they bring that will help with the tasks the party will be facing within the context of "we're adventurers going on adventures". It doesn't tell me about their personality, sure, but "A strong warrior who hunts to feed the members of her extended family" doesn't tell my character why I should bring you along to go fight that Fanged Claw-Beast. Everyone has a story and they'll share it when and if they're ready. But until then, what do you bring to this adventuring party?

Because if I'm throwing myself into danger, I'm much more willing to do so with confidence knowing I've got skilled tracker, hunter and outdoorsman who can swing a battle axe like nobody's business then "guy with a starving family".

Characterization is fine and good, but a dead PC rarely tells anymore tales. Unless you do that whole "break into hades and drag them back to the living thing". Then you have an awesome story to tell.

[FreddyNoNose]

This is simply a matter of picking the right game. D&D type fantasy games are about warriors fighting monsters, but there are already plenty of RPGs that are not designed on that basis and have been for many years now.

You win the thread!

I was a war gamer before being a role player. Think SPI and Avalon Hill games, chainmail and the like. I still war game today and likely will til the day I die.

So, no it shouldn't and as Yora stated, you have plenty of other options.

[Lord Raziere]

Fate, Gumshoe, Ryuutama, Burning Wheel, Golden Sky stories, Whispering Road, Maid, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine would like to say "hi" and "we already did that."

[FreddyNoNose]

Fate, Gumshoe, Ryuutama, Burning Wheel, Golden Sky stories, Whispering Road, Maid, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine would like to say "hi" and "we already did that."

Name 8 more! :smallbiggrin:

[Knaight]

Name 8 more! :smallbiggrin:

Microscope, Kingdom, Follow, Fiasco, Eden, Downfall, Xxxtreme Street Luge!, Shock: Social Science Fiction.

As I've said before, the conceptual space RPGs cover hasn't really shifted so much as it has grown, and while this growth has moved the center everything that used to be there is still there.

[FreddyNoNose]

Microscope, Kingdom, Follow, Fiasco, Eden, Downfall, Xxxtreme Street Luge!, Shock: Social Science Fiction.

As I've said before, the conceptual space RPGs cover hasn't really shifted so much as it has grown, and while this growth has moved the center everything that used to be there is still there.

That reminds of the time when:

https://youtu.be/UjtiAkakogM

[MarkVIIIMarc]

Cluedrew, I think you are just playing with a group or DM that wants to play different than you.

Would it make you happy to roleplay more? Perhaps run a sleuthing campaign? Maybe a campaign where unlike TV cop shows shots are only fired every so often?

These require an above average DM and a good story.

Perhaps someone knows of a module with about a 10 to 1 combat ratio.

Personally I think "both ways" can be interesting.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Yeah. It turns out you were retroactively right! RPG designers listened to you, traveled back in time years (decades? Fate came out in 2003), and worked to spawn a staggering number of games that don't make combat a big thing.

Sooo... yeah. Pick up a copy of Fate (https://fate-srd.com/)-- it's well-known, it's free, and it's a quite good introduction to more narrative-focused games.

[Thrudd]

You're talking only about D&D and D&D-like games. There are lots of systems that can mechanically support a much wider range of things. Also, many of the issues you bring up are not really about the game but about habits of particular GM's. How much down-time role playing takes place and how relevant it is and whether it engages the players is something the GM is responsible for arranging.

There is room in the world for role playing games of every description, and they already exist. If you can think of it, someone else has probably thought of it first, published a system for it, and then went out of business. If you think there's a market for some new sort of RPG, something everyone is clamoring for but doesn't exist yet, then write it up and get it out there!

[BayardSPSR]

This is simply a matter of picking the right game. D&D type fantasy games are about warriors fighting monsters, but there are already plenty of RPGs that are not designed on that basis and have been for many years now.


Name 8 more! :smallbiggrin:

Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts... Continue naming PbtA games to heart's content. Except the Regiment, which I understand to be basically "PbtA, but what if it was a wargame?"

Even more revolutionary, believe it or not... there are a lot of RPGs (including these ones) that don't even have an action economy. :eek: :wink:

[Cluedrew]

I feel I should clarify it was a rhetorical question to set the stage for the conversation. In the original draft I had a spoiler with: The answer is no.

Still it seems to have sparked the conversation none the less. I don't have much to say beyond that right now, because I agree with almost everything said.

To MarkVIIIMarc: You will be glad to no my GM doesn't run war-game like systems. Actually that is part of what opened my eyes to it in the first place. However what do you mean by both ways.

[FreddyNoNose]

I feel I should clarify it was a rhetorical question to set the stage for the conversation.Sure it was....

[Yora]

Yeah. It turns out you were retroactively right! RPG designers listened to you, traveled back in time years (decades? Fate came out in 2003), and worked to spawn a staggering number of games that don't make combat a big thing.

I have not seen it myself, but I believe Fudge was released in 1994.

[RazorChain]

I have not seen it myself, but I believe Fudge was released in 1994.

Call of Cthulhu was released 1981 and is not a combat game

DnD is the most prevalent system and fosters the thought that combat has to be a big part of roleplaying

[Anonymouswizard]

Yeah. It turns out you were retroactively right! RPG designers listened to you, traveled back in time years (decades? Fate came out in 2003), and worked to spawn a staggering number of games that don't make combat a big thing.

Sooo... yeah. Pick up a copy of Fate (https://fate-srd.com/)-- it's well-known, it's free, and it's a quite good introduction to more narrative-focused games.

And it wasn't the first! But yeah, Fate is what I usually recommend to people staying out (specifically FAE), it focuses much more on emulating a story and uses the same mechanics for a heated argument as a series fight.

Out of the games I have on my shelf and not in storage, Rocket Age heavily pushes solving problems without violence by making attacks the last thing to resolve reach round. Savage Worlds focuses on combat, but it's attempting to allow you to simulate larger fights within a few hours (i.e. it's explicitly putting the wargame back in). Victoriana has more rules for combat than anything else, but most of the abilities and pets aren't combat related (the idea is that combat happens enough to need rules for resolving it and special circumstances in it, but nowhere as much as D&D has). Including the ones in storage that's Fate, the Mistborn game, Vampire the Requiem 2e (as well as most of my oWoD, but that's more borderline), potentially GURPS (where the core files have lots for combat, but there's also a lot of times for everything else). If we add my digital collection I've got no clue how many noncombat/nonwargame games I own. I've also got a few that try to be noncombat but don't have the required rules.

This sounds like more of an argument against D&D (which I'm all for) than roleplaying in general. I've played in a game with combat averaged so much we compulsively avoided it to get back to the GM's investigation bits (which the game should have supported more, potentially via failing forwards, seeing as it was homebrew).

[GreatWyrmGold]

I think it would be a good idea. There is little in the wargame vein which video games can't do better, and focusing on the wargame side of things weakens the aspects of TRPGs that video games simply can't emulate well. The question of whether it's possible/practical is a separate matter entirely.



What about these basically-unknown games?
"Ex Machina had a strong female character. Sexism isn't a problem in movies anymore! Never mind that it's clearly still an issue in most of the big movies, there's an example of a movie that doesn't have the problem, so it's solved!"
The only ones of those games that I'd heard of before are Toon and FATE. FATE is basically Roll to Dodge with an ego, while Toon is...a cartoon. And still focuses more on combat than it should need to.



Role-playing's roots go much farther back than just D&D. If you think about it, the profession of acting is nothing more than role-play. That thousands of years.
...No. Just no. Equivocation fallacy, big time.



Call of Cthulhu was released 1981 and is not a combat game
There are an awful lot of rules for shooting cultists, madmen, and even the "horrors" themselves for a non-combat game...

Which gets at a bigger problem with these arguments. The wargaming roots of the TRPG genre haven't just affected the games, though that's a big part of it. They've also affected the players. When I talk about New Gods of Mankind—one of the few TRPGs that I feel actually is properly focused on something other than combat—people automatically assume that it's something like Exalted. And why wouldn't they? Basically every TRPG on the market gives more focus to its combat rules than other types of conflict. And why wouldn't they? That's what the market clearly wants, based not only on market data but on playtests and observing player stories and basically everything else.
TRPGs have pigeonholed themselves, and it's going to take some serious work to dig them out. But hardly anyone cares enough to even start digging. If anything is going to kill this medium, it's apathy towards change.

[Frozen_Feet]

This is simply a matter of picking the right game. D&D type fantasy games are about warriors fighting monsters, but there are already plenty of RPGs that are not designed on that basis and have been for many years now.

It isn't even a matter of choosing a game, it's a matter of choosing the right metagame and scenario design principles. I primarily play LotFP as it's written and it's pretty straightforward D&D retroclone. I acknowledge and embrace wargame roots of the game. Yet at the table I still don't play it as a wargame.

Reverse is equally true. If I wanted to play wargames with Fate (etc.), I'd have no trouble doing it.

[Cluedrew]

To Anonymouswizard: If this is an argument against anything, it is an argument against the so called fantasy heart breakers (and maybe those who describe D&D as generic). Those that take the very particular assumptions of the D&D system and use those as the base line for all other role playing games. These are problems "when unquestioned" so using them isn't a problem, but I think it is problematic when people use them because they don't realize there are other options, or discount the other options for bad reasons.

[Yora]

TRPGs have pigeonholed themselves, and it's going to take some serious work to dig them out. But hardly anyone cares enough to even start digging. If anything is going to kill this medium, it's apathy towards change.

I don't think that's how it works. Adventure RPGs have comfortably found their niche and are good at doing what they do for people who want to do just that. As long as people like Adventure RPG, Adventure RPGs can continue just as they always did.
And heroic adventure is a genere with incredible staying power. It's the oldest known stories of human culture and they have never gone out of fashion in 4000 years. I don't see it disappearing anytime soon and leaving RPGs as a medium without a genre.

Nobody is stopping anyone from making RPGs that go in other directions, but there is no obligation to stop playing the games we enjoy for other games we don't enjoy for the sake of ideology.

[Anonymouswizard]

To Anonymouswizard: If this is an argument against anything, it is an argument against the so called fantasy heart breakers (and maybe those who describe D&D as generic). Those that take the very particular assumptions of the D&D system and use those as the base line for all other role playing games. These are problems "when unquestioned" so using them isn't a problem, but I think it is problematic when people use them because they don't realize there are other options, or discount the other options for bad reasons.

Maybe, I just don't tend to view the hobby from a D&D perspective that much because I own so many games, and so tend to forget that people assume D&D is the only option (which is why I never use it as an introduction anymore). So when I see people listing Description&D assumptions I just think 'hang on, most of the hobby isn't that'.

[Tanarii]

No. If anything, it's time to cut from the hobby the more modern and mistaken ideas that talky-time, funny accents, or method acting = roleplaying.

[Anonymouswizard]

No. If anything, it's time to cut from the hobby the more modern and mistaken ideas that talky-time, funny accents, or method acting = roleplaying.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. While combat doesn't stop roleplaying I find roleplaying itself to be incredibly close to method acting (I don't do accents when I can avoid them, just too difficult for me). Roleplaying is certainly easier when you're able to talk for your character (I suspect even easier when LARPing, although I don't have the experience to tell), which is why I've played in quite a few games where rounds were lengthened to 30+ seconds (allowing everyone a decent chance to speak in character each round).

At it's core roleplaying is literally what the name describes, playing a role. At least to me this is much more about how the character talks than how they fight, and I very much enjoy using method acting in this (although I know people who don't and are just as good or better roleplayers than I am). I'm a firm believer in more talk before the have starts, I'm much more likely to try and run a mystery campaign than an explorative one, and highly likely to include at least primitive firearms.

[Jay R]

A. No. I enjoy the hobby today, so it is not time to cut away things I like.

B. You will never succeed in cutting out what thousands or millions of people like anyway.

C. The hobby has grown to include many other things, as documented by several people above.

D. I have never had trouble role-playing during combat. If you know the mechanics of your character well enough, they are close to automatic, and you're the northern ranger fighting his favored enemies the Frost Giants.

Fundamentally, it's fine to add on what you want. It is not fine (and fortunately, not possible) to cut out what I want.

[FreddyNoNose]

A. No. I enjoy the hobby today, so it is not time to cut away things I like.

B. You will never succeed in cutting out what thousands or millions of people like anyway.

C. The hobby has grown to include many other things, as documented by several people above.

D. I have never had trouble role-playing during combat. If you know the mechanics of your character well enough, they are close to automatic, and you're the northern ranger fighting his favored enemies the Frost Giants.

Fundamentally, it's fine to add on what you want. It is not fine (and fortunately, not possible) to cut out what I want.

I wonder if the OP even likes DND. If he does love it, he shouldn't want to make a drastic change like this. If he doesn't like it the way it is, there are plenty of other options including making his own game.

[2D8HP]

Call of Cthulhu was released 1981 and is not a combat game

DnD is the most prevalent system and fosters the thought that combat has to be a big part of roleplaying


....There are an awful lot of rules for shooting cultists, madmen, and even the "horrors" themselves for a non-combat game...


I remember Call of Cthullu as mostly running away from the monsters rather than fighting them.

Incidentally I've long found CoC easier to gamemaster than all but the "Basic" (1977) or "Classic" (1994) versions of D&D .


It isn't even a matter of choosing a game, it's a matter of choosing the right metagame and scenario design principles. I primarily play LotFP as it's written and it's pretty straightforward D&D retroclone. I acknowledge and embrace wargame roots of the game. Yet at the table I still don't play it as a wargame.

Reverse is equally true. If I wanted to play wargames with Fate (etc.), I'd have no trouble doing it.


Despite being closer to Chainmail, and it's wargame roots, I found the pre 2e D&D I played, to be more about exploration (and running away from the monsters), and less about combat than the 5e D&D I now mostly play.

[Tanarii]

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. While combat doesn't stop roleplaying I find roleplaying itself to be incredibly close to method acting (I don't do accents when I can avoid them, just too difficult for me). Roleplaying is certainly easier when you're able to talk for your character (I suspect even easier when LARPing, although I don't have the experience to tell), which is why I've played in quite a few games where rounds were lengthened to 30+ seconds (allowing everyone a decent chance to speak in character each round).Partly. Also partly just posting controversial comments. :smallwink: But while method acting is one way to roleplaying, and in fact a version of it is one of my favorite ways to do it, it's not what makes it roleplaying.

I generally enjoy the 'you + PCs motivations' method of roleplaying. In other words, know where your PCs personality is distinct from you, what their motivations are, when making decisions relevant to it. But otherwise just make decisions you feel best.


At it's core roleplaying is literally what the name describes, playing a role. At least to me this is much more about how the character talks than how they fight, and I very much enjoy using method acting in this (although I know people who don't and are just as good or better roleplayers than I am). I'm a firm believer in more talk before the have starts, I'm much more likely to try and run a mystery campaign than an explorative one, and highly likely to include at least primitive firearms.
At its core, roleplaying is the player making decisions for the fictional character in the fictional environment. That's a form of playing the role, but it does not require a fictional personality. While I'm not a huge fan of it, a player is still roleplaying if they are merely playing their own personality with different capabilities in the fictional environment. (Most often called an 'player avatar' or the like.) As long as they are making decisions for their PC in the fictional environment, they are still roleplaying.

[FreddyNoNose]

I remember Call of Cthullu as mostly running away from the monsters rather than fighting them.

Incidentally I've long found CoC easier to gamemaster than all but the "Basic" (1977) or "Classic" (1994) versions of D&D .




Despite being closer to Chainmail, and it's wargame roots, I found the pre 2e D&D I played, to be more about exploration (and running away from the monsters), and less about combat than the 5e D&D I now mostly play.

There was lots of running away before 2nd edition. The whole moving ahead of the party stealth wasn't just for surprise, it was scouting so you could avoid. You had spells light dancing lights to lead the enemy away from you.

[Jay R]

I remember Call of Cthullu as mostly running away from the monsters rather than fighting them.

Incidentally I've long found CoC easier to gamemaster than all but the "Basic" (1977) or "Classic" (1994) versions of D&D .

Of course. Running away is easier to adjudicate than combat.

[Tanarii]

Of course. Running away is easier to adjudicate than combat.
All you have to do is determine who has the slowest speed, and they die. :smallamused:

[2D8HP]

Of course. Running away is easier to adjudicate than combat.


All you have to do is determine who has the slowest speed, and they die. :smallamused:


You don't want to run away?

Well follow only if ye be men of valor! For the entrance to this cave is guarded by a creature so foul, so cruel, that no man yet has fought with it... and lived! BONES of full fifty men lie strewn about its lair! So! Brave knights! If you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth....





....Warned you, but did you listen to me? Oh, no, you knew,, didn't you? Oh, it's just a harmless little bunny, isn't it?

[FreddyNoNose]

You don't want to run away?

Well follow only if ye be men of valor! For the entrance to this cave is guarded by a creature so foul, so cruel, that no man yet has fought with it... and lived! BONES of full fifty men lie strewn about its lair! So! Brave knights! If you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth....





....Warned you, but did you listen to me? Oh, no, you knew,, didn't you? Oh, it's just a harmless little bunny, isn't it?

Look at the bones.

[Coventry]

...No. Just no. Equivocation fallacy, big time.

We may have to agree to disagree, here. But I will make an effort to explain my thoughts, first:

As I understand the history of D&D, it sprang from some players looking for something different than making unit-level decisions in a war game. Instead, they wanted to act out the actions of individuals that were part of one of those units, and Gygax and friends basically saying "okay, let's try it and see how this goes."

None of that applied to me. Instead, the idea of acting out the actions of another person happened first in life. As a child, I variously played "house", "superhero", "cowboys and Indians" and other unstructured role-play games. Sometimes with others, sometimes alone. That is fairly common behavior - not every child does that, but many do.

I was introduced to D&D several years later. I had been exposed to some low-grade war gaming in the form of Chess and Stratego, but it while I was learning D&D that I discovered the kind of miniatures war game that spawned D&D.

So "acting" those scenarios as a child is a much stronger foundation of the game to me than war gaming is. If the OP wants to get away from the war game with D&D, I hinted that a broader scan of the options provided might show that what they want already exists without having the change D&D, itself.

Since I posted, others have chimed in with various options that I was unaware of, which may suit the OP preferred gaming style far better than this old game ever can. Being unaware of them does reinforce your "basically unknown games" swipe. But who cares if they are unknown today? There was a time when D&D was unknown - not that very long ago.

[MarkVIIIMarc]

I feel I should clarify it was a rhetorical question to set the stage for the conversation. In the original draft I had a spoiler with: The answer is no.

Still it seems to have sparked the conversation none the less. I don't have much to say beyond that right now, because I agree with almost everything said.

To MarkVIIIMarc: You will be glad to no my GM doesn't run war-game like systems. Actually that is part of what opened my eyes to it in the first place. However what do you mean by both ways.

Hello Cluedrew,

The way I read your OP I believed you to be upset with how much combat there is in D&D. So I assumed it was due to problems in games you are involved in.

By both ways I meant both COMBAT HEAVY and INTRIGUE/ROLE PLAYING sessions are entertaining. Sometimes the process of or wondering if it is time to fight or not to fight is the best of all.

[Knaight]

The only ones of those games that I'd heard of before are Toon and FATE. FATE is basically Roll to Dodge with an ego, while Toon is...a cartoon. And still focuses more on combat than it should need to.

That's more indicative of what you've heard of than the design space though - everything listed is pretty well known among the indie community, Fate is huge by non-D&D standards, and thus people familiar with RPGs in a broad sense tend to be aware of them. These games are getting designed, and they're reaching positions as high up in the industry as can reasonably be expected for a game that doesn't have the benefit of tracing back to the early 1980s where the games were sparse enough that keeping up with about all of them was doable. They're getting designed, and the failure is in marketing.

The problem is that better marketing them is a major challenge. WotC has more money than the rest of the industry put together, probably several times over. Once you remove the other bigger games with a combat focus (mostly White Wolf's work, which is frequently presented as not combat focused compliments of being slightly less combat focused than D&D) the entire rest of the industry has basically no resources. So we're faced not with changing the territory by cutting the war game roots, but by mapping the territory that is already there.

[Cluedrew]

I wonder if the OP even likes DND. If he does love it, he shouldn't want to make a drastic change like this. If he doesn't like it the way it is, there are plenty of other options including making his own game.Other that it plays really slowly I would probably be in a D&D campaign (player or GM). Although one of the goals for my homebrew system is faster resolution so there is that.


By both ways I meant both COMBAT HEAVY and INTRIGUE/ROLE PLAYING sessions are entertaining. Sometimes the process of or wondering if it is time to fight or not to fight is the best of all.That is true, and maybe some of my old D&D DM's played years ago did go to heavy on the combat side or something. In more recent (non-D&D campaigns) some of my favourite moments have been in or around combat, but they also approach combat in a different way. More "what does this mean for the story" and less "how many more spaces can you move", which also has the advantage of being faster. And they have more detailed mechanics for other parts of the game too.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I don't think that's how it works. Adventure RPGs have comfortably found their niche and are good at doing what they do for people who want to do just that. As long as people like Adventure RPG, Adventure RPGs can continue just as they always did.
And heroic adventure is a genere with incredible staying power. It's the oldest known stories of human culture and they have never gone out of fashion in 4000 years. I don't see it disappearing anytime soon and leaving RPGs as a medium without a genre.

Nobody is stopping anyone from making RPGs that go in other directions, but there is no obligation to stop playing the games we enjoy for other games we don't enjoy for the sake of ideology.
I've never heard "adventure RPG" used to describe any game played with physical dice, so you'll need to provide more explanation for that one. And your other points don't just miss the ball on this one—they're not even playing the same sport.

TRPGs can do that combat-focused stuff, but there is essentially nothing in that genre that video games can't do better. Leave that stuff to the video games and let TRPGs focus on what makes them unique. Think of it like video game cutscenes—they can add to a game when used well, but if you try to build all of your big games around them, you're hamstringing yourself.



-snip-
I didn't think I'd need to explain this point further, but here we are.
It's true that actors "play a role," but there are several critical differences between that and a role-playing game. They generally boil down to the role and identity of the author and audience. In theater, the actors are an "author" of the play, in the sense that they are one of the people who create the work and affect how it is perceived by the audience; the audience, in turn, is a third party who plays little to no role in the play. On the other hand, RPGs have a more muddled relationship between author and audience; the players (and arguably GM) are both author and audience. Both this dual role and how the audience can directly affect the course of the story are two of the defining traits of tabletop RPGs.
Saying that RPGs have their roots in Greek theater is like saying movies have their roots in medieval carpentry; some of the elements of the former are certainly helpful for properly engaging in the latter, but the two have little enough in common that there's nothing special about that particular comparison.



That's more indicative of what you've heard of than the design space though - everything listed is pretty well known among the indie community, Fate is huge by non-D&D standards, and thus people familiar with RPGs in a broad sense tend to be aware of them.
...You completely missed my point, didn't you?
Let's make another video game analogy. The indie video game community is full of story-focused games, with occasional games built around a single unique mechanic thrown into the mix. Franchises are rare, and often treated with disdain by the more "serious" indie gamers, who may see such efforts as "selling out". E3 happened recently; go look at the coverage and see if you can keep a straight face while you tell me the indie scene is representative of the entire industry. And it's even worse for TRPGs than video games, given the relative sizes of their indie scenes to the market as a whole (in part due to TRPGs' reliance on physical media*, in part due to their lack of a Steam/Itch.io/etc equivalent).
Of course, this isn't unique to interactive media. In every medium—film, theater, music, literature, visual art, everything—smaller, independent projects are always going to be different than the norm. That's why they're indie—or, at least, why they're the indie works which don't get overshadowed and crushed by the major ones.


The problem is that better marketing them is a major challenge. WotC has more money than the rest of the industry put together, probably several times over. Once you remove the other bigger games with a combat focus (mostly White Wolf's work, which is frequently presented as not combat focused compliments of being slightly less combat focused than D&D) the entire rest of the industry has basically no resources. So we're faced not with changing the territory by cutting the war game roots, but by mapping the territory that is already there.
Indie projects in other media have solved this problem easily. Whether we're talking about the Sundance festival or itch.io, Minecraft or One Punch Man, they have found ways to reach large enough audiences to be recognized, and sometimes even to rise out of the indie category and into "true professional" projects.
These games you mention not reaching their potential audience is a problem. Mind, I'm no casual D&D-playing pleb; I've heard of plenty of small, unrecognized RPGs—from New Gods of Mankind to Witch Girl Adventures, from Monsters and Other Childish Things to Pendragon, from Bleak World to Bunnies & Burrows, Ars Magica to Cthulhutech—just not the ones mentioned here. But that's the problem—they're small, unrecognized RPGs, not representative of the industry. And, again:

"Ex Machina had a strong female character. Sexism isn't a problem in movies anymore! Never mind that it's clearly still an issue in most of the big movies, there's an example of a movie that doesn't have the problem, so it's solved!"
I'm not sure it would be possible for there not to be scattered examples of RPGs that aren't combat-focused, or that lack any problem which might be affecting the medium. But giving examples of games which exist doesn't change the fact that those examples are not representative of the medium as a whole. The idea that individual counterexamples could be of use in a debate like this puzzles me; the idea that "too war-game-ey" is a problem that could exist on the level of an individual game doesn't make sense to me. Going back to a previous analogy: Even a video game based entirely on cutscenes can work. (Look at Her Story, for instance.) But if nearly every game was like Her Story, the industry would have a problem. The fact that the major TRPGs all fit into one niche—a niche the medium is not well-equipped to handle, no less—is definitely a problem.

(P.S. There's also how if I don't know the games, I can't make detailed arguments about them. I work with what I got. I'm willing to guess that at least some of the games mentioned are just nominally non-combat-focused or vague RtD-ish structures.)



*As with all of this post, I mean in practice, not in theory. I've seen

[Ninja-Radish]

D&D may not be the game for you, OP. Nothing wrong with that, there are plenty of other rpgs out there that have nothing to do with war games and that minimize combat. Might want to check some of those out.

[Acquaintance]

I think it would be a good idea. There is little in the wargame vein which video games can't do better, and focusing on the wargame side of things weakens the aspects of TRPGs that video games simply can't emulate well. The question of whether it's possible/practical is a separate matter entirely...

...Basically every TRPG on the market gives more focus to its combat rules than other types of conflict. And why wouldn't they? That's what the market clearly wants, based not only on market data but on playtests and observing player stories and basically everything else.

TRPGs have pigeonholed themselves, and it's going to take some serious work to dig them out. But hardly anyone cares enough to even start digging. If anything is going to kill this medium, it's apathy towards change.

I agree strongly with much of what you say. But I do think you are overly cynical in regards to tactical combat in RPGs in relation to computer games. A game like Divinity Original sin might emulate D&D quite well and even provides a multiplayer mode explicitly meant for that task, but is still forever unable to deliver the joy of sitting around a table with friends. And it requires a working computer while still threatening to become obsolete one day due to aging technology. I can't stick it on a shelf and hope my grandchildren will find it.

Physical RPGs will always have some benefit over computer versions, and I think they do have their place. D&D going the way of the dodo would be a great loss, even if it spawned a rennaisance of less violent games.


BUT! Combat in games is a great annoyance.




"Ex Machina had a strong female character. Sexism isn't a problem in movies anymore! Never mind that it's clearly still an issue in most of the big movies, there's an example of a movie that doesn't have the problem, so it's solved!"


This metaphor is quite apt. It might not be exactly as bad as you posit in regards to indies, but it is true that even a lot of them feature combat exessively. To my understanding FATE treats social encounters almost as combat! The way a stranger explained it to me, should you wish to woo someone you draw up a map of metaphorical zones and then attack them with arguments and posturing to get them where you want. It sounds completely unlike any social interaction in real life, but I often see indies who try to tackle social rules using combat interactions as their guideline.


Expanding on your point, I think the inequality of scale between D&D and indies does matter immensly. Most people who know about roleplaying know about exactly one game and that is D&D. They might have heard of others, but brand recognition will push them towards the dragon as their first game if they don't have any guides. D&D being a pretty niche game is really problematic in this regard, as many people either fail to get the experience they seek or are forced to houserule heavily or buy another system. (Although it can be argued that most people finding fault in the rules of D&D is part of the reason for the blooming indie sphere. DMs are essentially mini-designers)

I run a D&D game for a group of friends who told me they wanted this specific game. They had heard of it from youtube and were exited mostly to roleplay and have fun. The first session was essentially one long combat encounter as we learned the rules, and afterwards they asked to not have to fight as much. Since then I've pretty much avoided combat entirely and had much more fun in the process. They speak of their characters as "my strong overprotective barbarian" then "my lvl 4 BAR". I think another game might have fit us better, but now we have the books and are learning the system.

I'm of the opinion that D&D should profile itself as the dungeon crawling game rather then the big roleplaying game, that or try to develop more in the direction of not fighting stuff. This game probably shouldn't be everyone's or even a majority's first journey into tabletop roleplaying.

[woweedd]

I agree strongly with much of what you say. But I do think you are overly cynical in regards to tactical combat in RPGs in relation to computer games. A game like Divinity Original sin might emulate D&D quite well and even provides a multiplayer mode explicitly meant for that task, but is still forever unable to deliver the joy of sitting around a table with friends. And it requires a working computer while still threatening to become obsolete one day due to aging technology. I can't stick it on a shelf and hope my grandchildren will find it.

Physical RPGs will always have some benefit over computer versions, and I think they do have their place. D&D going the way of the dodo would be a great loss, even if it spawned a rennaisance of less violent games.


BUT! Combat in games is a great annoyance.





This metaphor is quite apt. It might not be exactly as bad as you posit in regards to indies, but it is true that even a lot of them feature combat exessively. To my understanding FATE treats social encounters almost as combat! The way a stranger explained it to me, should you wish to woo someone you draw up a map of metaphorical zones and then attack them with arguments and posturing to get them where you want. It sounds completely unlike any social interaction in real life, but I often see indies who try to tackle social rules using combat interactions as their guideline.


Expanding on your point, I think the inequality of scale between D&D and indies does matter immensly. Most people who know about roleplaying know about exactly one game and that is D&D. They might have heard of others, but brand recognition will push them towards the dragon as their first game if they don't have any guides. D&D being a pretty niche game is really problematic in this regard, as many people either fail to get the experience they seek or are forced to houserule heavily or buy another system. (Although it can be argued that most people finding fault in the rules of D&D is part of the reason for the blooming indie sphere. DMs are essentially mini-designers)

I run a D&D game for a group of friends who told me they wanted this specific game. They had heard of it from youtube and were exited mostly to roleplay and have fun. The first session was essentially one long combat encounter as we learned the rules, and afterwards they asked to not have to fight as much. Since then I've pretty much avoided combat entirely and had much more fun in the process. They speak of their characters as "my strong overprotective barbarian" then "my lvl 4 BAR". I think another game might have fit us better, but now we have the books and are learning the system.

I'm of the opinion that D&D should profile itself as the dungeon crawling game rather then the big roleplaying game, that or try to develop more in the direction of not fighting stuff. This game probably shouldn't be everyone's or even a majority's first journey into tabletop roleplaying.
Having the biggest brand recognition in the business isn't exactly their fault, is it?

[kyoryu]

To my understanding FATE treats social encounters almost as combat!

I would argue it's the inverse - Fate treats combat the way it treats everything else.


The way a stranger explained it to me, should you wish to woo someone you draw up a map of metaphorical zones and then attack them with arguments and posturing to get them where you want. It sounds completely unlike any social interaction in real life, but I often see indies who try to tackle social rules using combat interactions as their guideline.

I believe that's Diaspora (based on Fate). That's not how most Fate games deal with social encounters.


I'm of the opinion that D&D should profile itself as the dungeon crawling game rather then the big roleplaying game, that or try to develop more in the direction of not fighting stuff. This game probably shouldn't be everyone's or even a majority's first journey into tabletop roleplaying.

It *is* the big roleplaying game, regardless of its suitability for the task (which I am not placing any statement on, one way or the other).

As far as the OP goes - cut the wargame roots if you want to. Others won't if they don't want to.

[2D8HP]

I've never heard "adventure RPG" used to describe any game played with physical dice...


I don't remember "adventure RPG", but I do remember "Adventure Game", briefly being an alternative designation for games like D&D, and Traveller, mostly be Tim Kask's Adventure Gaming magazine in the early 1980's.


...I've heard of plenty of small, unrecognized RPGs—from New Gods of Mankind to Witch Girl Adventures, from Monsters and Other Childish Things to Pendragon, from Bleak World to Bunnies & Burrows, Ars Magica to Cthulhutech—just not the ones mentioned here. But that's the problem—they're small, unrecognized RPGs, not representative of the industry....


I've only heard of four of those games, but one of them is a favorite.
:smile:

[Anonymouswizard]

Having the biggest brand recognition in the business isn't exactly their fault, is it?

No, but it's arguably problematic for the industry. Not for D&D to have the biggest brand recognition, but for it to have essentially all the brand recognition.

To people outside the hobby the hobby is basically D&D and nothing else. So most people trying to get into the hobby, at least 95% of them, will buy a game and that game will be D&D. They'll spend over £100 on books and more on dice, get together a bunch of friends and play. If we assume half the people introduced like it enough to keep playing then we can have numbers.

Now, out of those who are still playing, most of then we'll likely not hear about other games, or only hear about one or two. I've previously presented games to groups that I find interesting, only to be turned down because they're not D&D (literally the reason). Only successes: Shadowrun and Dark Heresy with a bunch of 40k geeks.

The line that sticks out to me it's 'Starfinder will be to science fiction as D&D was to fantasy' or something along those lines. Paizo or whoever was doing their advertising could rely on the fact that most of the people who saw their adverts wouldn't think about Traveller or any of the other science fiction games already out (which is a shame, as looking into it later has got me genuinely interested in Starfinder as a more serious Spelljammer).

(Also I find D&D's model of the corebooks with no legal PDFs annoying, so I've switched to 2e in the he cases I run D&D. Almost everybody else has one book with all the core rules, even if you really want more books to play you don't need them, and offers legal PDFs).

[BayardSPSR]

No, but it's arguably problematic for the industry. Not for D&D to have the biggest brand recognition, but for it to have essentially all the brand recognition.

To people outside the hobby the hobby is basically D&D and nothing else. So most people trying to get into the hobby, at least 95% of them, will buy a game and that game will be D&D. They'll spend over £100 on books and more on dice, get together a bunch of friends and play. If we assume half the people introduced like it enough to keep playing then we can have numbers.

Now, out of those who are still playing, most of then we'll likely not hear about other games, or only hear about one or two. I've previously presented games to groups that I find interesting, only to be turned down because they're not D&D (literally the reason). Only successes: Shadowrun and Dark Heresy with a bunch of 40k geeks.

The line that sticks out to me it's 'Starfinder will be to science fiction as D&D was to fantasy' or something along those lines. Paizo or whoever was doing their advertising could rely on the fact that most of the people who saw their adverts wouldn't think about Traveller or any of the other science fiction games already out (which is a shame, as looking into it later has got me genuinely interested in Starfinder as a more serious Spelljammer).

(Also I find D&D's model of the corebooks with no legal PDFs annoying, so I've switched to 2e in the he cases I run D&D. Almost everybody else has one book with all the core rules, even if you really want more books to play you don't need them, and offers legal PDFs).

It doesn't help that unlike a lot of the smaller RPGs, D&D seems to make no effort whatsoever to connect people with the rest of the hobby at large. I've never seen a D&D-sponsored anything that said "for a different style, you might like Torchbearer" or something. It's always "here's how to do D&D, the only RPG that exists, slightly differently if you really want to."

[Jay R]

I don't remember "adventure RPG", but I do remember "Adventure Game", briefly being an alternative designation for games like D&D, and Traveller, mostly be Tim Kask's Adventure Gaming magazine in the early 1980's.

It was a PR stunt - an attempt to improve D&D's reputation with semantics, but without addressing any actual issues.

For awhile, I wore a button to conventions that said:


I'm not an
"adventure gamer"
I'm a
Wargamer.

[Anonymouswizard]

It doesn't help that unlike a lot of the smaller RPGs, D&D seems to make no effort whatsoever to connect people with the rest of the hobby at large. I've never seen a D&D-sponsored anything that said "for a different style, you might like Torchbearer" or something. It's always "here's how to do D&D, the only RPG that exists, slightly differently if you really want to."

It also doesn't help that D&D markets itself as a do anything fantasy RPG. I could run a fantasy game with steampunk elements and Victorian era technology with D&D, and many people do, but I have Victoriana which is built to do exactly that. Now I do own other RPGs that don't mention other systems or sponsor anything that suits, but they all say 'right, we do this. If you want this, use this book.' they don't ever say 'this is how to run hard science fiction with Rocket Age' or 'how to run
n a peasant life simulator with Exalted'.

Although D&D is owned by a different kind of company to must RPGs. Most RPG companies understand that if I want to play something else I won't play their game, but when I do want what their game offers I'll spend money on it (seriously, I've spent more on Cubicle 7 published games than almost any other company because they give me what I want). WotC seems to be in a situation where they need everybody (or at the very least 'lots of people' for the roleplaying industry) to be playing D&D in order to keep going, because D&D is unlikely to make anything near Hasbro money otherwise. I suspect that's part of the reason for continuing the three book core and suggesting that everyone owns the PhB (do other games even do that anymore? Because the idea of everyone owning the rulebook is a bit alien in the groups I play in, it's generally just the GM who has it. One book for the take functions well, especially if you have a session zero and a board/card game people can stop in and out of*).

* So that the mechanical part of character creation can be done one at a time, happened when I played Pathfinder in a one book group.

[Knaight]

To people outside the hobby the hobby is basically D&D and nothing else. So most people trying to get into the hobby, at least 95% of them, will buy a game and that game will be D&D. They'll spend over £100 on books and more on dice, get together a bunch of friends and play. If we assume half the people introduced like it enough to keep playing then we can have numbers.


More than that, most of them won't get into the hobby. They'll try, see that they need to shell out $100 on books and then read 960 pages, and decide that roleplaying games aren't for them, even though there's a good possibility that plenty of them are. There's an artificial winnowing to the point where almost everyone in the hobby either likes or liked D&D, and that's the marketing problem I was talking about. The games that have detached themselves from the wargame roots are out there, people just need to find them - a process far more difficult than it needs to be.

[kyoryu]

More than that, most of them won't get into the hobby. They'll try, see that they need to shell out $100 on books and then read 960 pages, and decide that roleplaying games aren't for them, even though there's a good possibility that plenty of them are. There's an artificial winnowing to the point where almost everyone in the hobby either likes or liked D&D, and that's the marketing problem I was talking about. The games that have detached themselves from the wargame roots are out there, people just need to find them - a process far more difficult than it needs to be.

D&D (and Pathfinder) are the games of first contact for the *vast* majority of players. People that like them stay in the hobby, people that don't, quit.

The problem with that is that D&D is a pretty specific beast that takes a high amount of learning before you can start playing. It is absolutely not "drop in" friendly, even compared to older versions of D&D.

What the hobby needs, if anything, is a mass-audience friendly party-game like version of an RPG that is easily learnable and doesn't have the stigma D&D does. The closest I know to this is Fiasco.

[Jama7301]

Just to chip in on how D&D's hold on the Marketplace is pretty all consuming, and even learning about new games can be a pain.

I first looked at a D&D book in 2004, bought my first PHB in '07. I didn't know there were non-D&D based fantasy games until 2015, when I learned about Dungeon World.

I have friends who are into the hobby, but none of them have heard about any non-D&D games, until I brought up Dungeon World.

Where I live now, there are 3 places where I can get RPG books, two gaming stores and a Barnes and Nobel. From the B&N, I can get D&D books, and Pathfinder books, and maybe one Shadowrun book.

Of the two game stores, only one of them has anything beyond that scope, and that's because they carry two or so World of Darkness books, and occasionally something like a GURPS book or Numenara. Otherwise, they only have D&D 5e, 3.5, or AD&D (I think. Not sure on the edition of the older stuff they have).

Not having the ability to even flip through a new game system is kinda rough. It makes finding anything pretty hard, if you're not involved in a community like this one. In the past year of lurking/lightly posting here, I learned about things like 13th Age, Burning Wheel, Exalted, which all sound different, but kinda neat in their own ways. Dungeon World is a game I would have loved to known about for longer than I already have.

D&D crushes everything that isn't Pathfinder in terms of shelf-space and advertising. it makes the argument of "There are games out there that do what you want" seem a little... not empty, but they don't feel great to me.

I just wanted to share some anecdotal stuff about this. I don't have a solution, because there's no easy fix to make D&D more 'inclusive' to different playstyles, and raising awareness for game systems that aren't D&D comes down to word of mouth, because they can't compete with Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast for shelf/advertising space.

[Knaight]

D&D (and Pathfinder) are the games of first contact for the *vast* majority of players. People that like them stay in the hobby, people that don't, quit.
Exactly, with the tiny caveat that once people are in it's not that uncommon for them to find something else, and realize that they don't actually like D&D anymore.


D&D crushes everything that isn't Pathfinder in terms of shelf-space and advertising. it makes the argument of "There are games out there that do what you want" seem a little... not empty, but they don't feel great to me.
That's why the argument is "the games are there; we need to vastly improve the marketing somehow so that people can find them".

[Tanarii]

The problem with that is that D&D is a pretty specific beast that takes a high amount of learning before you can start playing. It is absolutely not "drop in" friendly, even compared to older versions of D&D.Eh. I used to regularly drag brand new players to AL tables I was running. It's easy enough, they just need a little hand holding to make sure they don't choose a complicated class, and instead start off with something simple. In 5e, that usually means starting them off with any non-full caster, or with a Warlock.

All they really need to know is their ability score modifiers and their attack bonus and AC. They do tend to forget their skill proficiency, but that's not a big problem in 5e (unlike 3e), since everything is an ability check first and DMs are supposed to judge what DCs to set based on characters not being proficient anyway. It's easy enough to ask a more experienced player to nudge them to remember to add proficiency bonus when it applies.

Mainly though, this isn't the old days. A far larger portion of children are into science fiction, fantasy, and anime (science fantasy?). Many play card games, most play video games (including sometimes CRPGs). Although for some reason TRPGs are still considered the last bastion of the uncool & nerdy. /shrug

[Jama7301]

That's why the argument is "the games are there; we need to vastly improve the marketing somehow so that people can find them".

Gotcha.

Truthfully, trying to keep up with some of ya'll on here, and the threads is quite the task. Kinda intimidating at times, because it's easy to mix things up.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Eh. I used to regularly drag brand new players to AL tables I was running. It's easy enough, they just need a little hand holding to make sure they don't choose a complicated class, and instead start off with something simple. In 5e, that usually means starting them off with any non-full caster, or with a Warlock.

All they really need to know is their ability score modifiers and their attack bonus and AC. They do tend to forget their skill proficiency, but that's not a big problem in 5e (unlike 3e), since everything is an ability check first and DMs are supposed to judge what DCs to set based on characters not being proficient anyway. It's easy enough to ask a more experienced player to nudge them to remember to add proficiency bonus when it applies.

Mainly though, this isn't the old days. A far larger portion of children are into science fiction, fantasy, and anime (science fantasy?). Many play card games, most play video games (including sometimes CRPGs). Although for some reason TRPGs are still considered the last bastion of the uncool & nerdy. /shrug

Chiming in here, I teach about 10 teenagers a year how to play 5e and most have the basics down within the first real session. Yeah, if we were playing 3.P, there might be more problems. Even then, the basic rules are simple. It's the details that are complicated and you can ignore most of those most of the time.

[Cluedrew]

To Jama7301: I started this thread and I have trouble keeping up with it.

Anyways, one thing that just occurred to me is maybe I could rephrase my point as "is D&D being the iconic role-playing game a problem". Now don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed games of D&D, but I am also a war gamer as well as a role-player. D&D is a game that is really both a war game and a role-playing game and if come at it for one of those two things you aren't going to get as much out of it.

So for all those people who are just here for the RPG, D&D isn't great. And yet they often have to go through it to get and discover all the other games that would suit them so much better. And not everyone makes it that far, or just assume that it can't get any better.

[Anonymouswizard]

Gotcha.

Truthfully, trying to keep up with some of ya'll on here, and the threads is quite the task. Kinda intimidating at times, because it's easy to mix things up.

Let me think.

I first played D&D in the early 2000s (my dad running the red box).

First read a PhB about a year later. First owned one the year after that.

Bought my first have book in about 2006/2007, I think.

First really discovered non D&D games were a thing around 2011 (had played Savage Worlds earlier, but didn't realise how many there were) didn't yet into them seriously until 2014 when a friend invited me to get husband's campaign of Unknown Armies (most of the group hadn't played together before, became the best group I ever had).

From about 2014 to now my RPG collection has massively expanded to include the core rulebooks to a lot of systems, and I regularly get RPG books as presents. These days I'm one of the more widely played Anointed my RPG friends. I almost never ruin D&D anymore.

And there's still times I can get lost in the discussions here, especially when older games are brought up. Don't sweat it, you'll catch up with us eventually.

Also, if you ever want a non D&D system to ruin something people here will be certain to help you out (although it might be best to clarify 'not GURPS', otherwise it can take over the thread).

[Mordar]

I've only heard of four of those games, but one of them is a favorite.
:smile:

It's Bunnies & Burrows, right? Right?

- M

[pwykersotz]

Yeah, I have to agree with the others. A new system is a good idea. Try Dungeon World. I love what it does to combat. In fact, I'm currently hacking 5e to use the move resolution system instead. It's a lot of fun, whether it succeeds or not!

[Cluedrew]

Also, if you ever want a non D&D system to ruin something people here will be certain to help you out (although it might be best to clarify 'not GURPS', otherwise it can take over the thread).I try to ignore typos when I can but this one I feel should be clarified. That's run, not ruin right? There has been a spike of typos in your posts recently.

To PhoenixPhyre: I can get a group going with Roll for Shoes going in about 2 minutes. I think one should always go for the minimum complexity for the particular concept. Some concepts do have a higher minimum, Roll for Shoes doesn't have the infrastructure to run many kinds of games. Great for quick and silly games though.

To pwykersotz: But isn't Dungeon World just D&D ported to the move system anyways?

[Fach]

I have no opinion on the OP, but I thought it was really interesting reading about how big D&D is in other countries. In my country the two big TRPGs are Call of Cthulhu and Sword World 2.0. D&D is pretty small here.

[2D8HP]

...Where I live now, there are 3 places where I can get RPG books, two gaming stores and a Barnes and Nobel. From the B&N, I can get D&D books, and Pathfinder books, and maybe one Shadowrun book...

.....raising awareness for game systems that aren't D&D comes down to word of mouth, because they can't compete with Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast for shelf/advertising space.


In the 1990's I remember B&N had almost no shelf soace for D&D (if any), but lots of Vampire, and other WoD stuff.
One time they had some Castle Falkenstein books (a gonzo gaslamp fantasy/steampunk setting game. I think you'd love it Anonymouswizard).

Anyway, just because D&D, and Pathfinder are the big dogs now, they weren't always, and may not be again (I certainly remember a time when three other games were more popular).


It's Bunnies & Burrows, right? Right?

- M


:amused:

Well... I did pay the 25 cent fee to take the shinkwrap off and read the rules.

[FreddyNoNose]

It's Bunnies & Burrows, right? Right?

- M

Chortle! Just too funny

[Knaight]

Chiming in here, I teach about 10 teenagers a year how to play 5e and most have the basics down within the first real session. Yeah, if we were playing 3.P, there might be more problems. Even then, the basic rules are simple. It's the details that are complicated and you can ignore most of those most of the time.

This model depends on people being initiated in though. I taught myself how to play 3.5* by the book, then taught a bunch of players. It was tricky, and while I got through it pretty easily I was also twelve at the time and had the free time to get it right. Even then, it took moving from D&D early to really get anywhere.

*Ish, I had the 3.0 PHB

[pwykersotz]

To pwykersotz: But isn't Dungeon World just D&D ported to the move system anyways?

I suppose the answer to that depends on the framework you use to define the systems. Suffice to say there are a number of subtle and overt interactions that need to be addressed for my table to be happy.

[Anonymouswizard]

I try to ignore typos when I can but this one I feel should be clarified. That's run, not ruin right? There has been a spike of typos in your posts recently.

My phone's autocorrect used to be great, now it keeps getting half of what I type wrong and forgets everything it's learnt after a couple of weeks. And I happen to be sand computer.

So yes, meant to be run.

[Tanarii]

I taught myself how to play 3.5* by the book, then taught a bunch of players.You had it easy. Back in my day 12 year olds had to teach themselves how to play & run games using the AD&D 1e DMG. /shudder

[GreatWyrmGold]

I agree strongly with much of what you say. But I do think you are overly cynical in regards to tactical combat in RPGs in relation to computer games. A game like Divinity Original sin might emulate D&D quite well and even provides a multiplayer mode explicitly meant for that task, but is still forever unable to deliver the joy of sitting around a table with friends. And it requires a working computer while still threatening to become obsolete one day due to aging technology. I can't stick it on a shelf and hope my grandchildren will find it.
There are two points you argue here:
1. You can't play a VRPG with friends.
2. VRPGs will be invalidated some day by advancing technology.

To point 2 I simply say "DOSBox". There are enough games and programs for modern OSs that people will want to play that, even without any attempts at compatability made by GOG, Valve, etc, you'll still be able to play some form of a game you loved in 20-30 years. The odds of being able to find some way to play D:OS with your grandkids are at least as high as the odds of being able to find your old RPG books.

Point 1 is both factually incorrect and would be irrelevant if it was. Believe it or not, there are plenty of local co-op games still on the market—including ones focused on combat like D&D! Obviously, you can't play every game with friends, but that doesn't mean that video gaming as a whole doesn't support that kind of play. More importantly, though, most RPGs are utter failures at producing that kind of camaraderie-ey experience when compared to games designed for that kind of thing. Cards Against Humanity (and Apples to Apples, of course) is probably the archetypical example of the "social game" which has proved itself more than capable of filling that niche. Whenever I play, I share laughs and groans with my friends and family far more than when at the gaming table.
Moreover, in my experience combat is the worst part of an RPG for that kind of camaraderie. Sometimes you come up with neat strategies, but I've found that nearly all TRPG combat boils down to executing the same general tactics in new situations...with those tactics usually not even focusing on teamwork beyond "meat shields go in front to keep them from reaching our squishy guys". In my experience, combat usually works at least as well (and much, much quicker) if people focus on what they're going to do next turn and then pay just enough attention to make sure nothing critical changes, as they do if they treat it as a social experience. The game actively discourages using combat as a social experience if you're engaged in it!


The way a stranger explained it to me, should you wish to woo someone you draw up a map of metaphorical zones and then attack them with arguments and posturing to get them where you want. It sounds completely unlike any social interaction in real life, but I often see indies who try to tackle social rules using combat interactions as their guideline.
That is stupider than I could possibly have imagined. I mean, using mechanics analogous to "attacks" and "hit points" to represent anything but the most overt intimidation would be stupid enough in and of itself, but getting a battlemap for that kind of combat is just ridiculous.
I've yet to find a good system for social interaction; most generalize it to a single dice roll*, while a few others try to shoehorn mechanics that the designers are familiar with into something they weren't designed to represent. I think it's telling that the first place I look for specially-designed social mechanics is Steam, rather than RPG.net.

*Which at least makes sense for games where most everything is a single dice roll (insert New Gods of Mankind plug).



It doesn't help that unlike a lot of the smaller RPGs, D&D seems to make no effort whatsoever to connect people with the rest of the hobby at large. I've never seen a D&D-sponsored anything that said "for a different style, you might like Torchbearer" or something. It's always "here's how to do D&D, the only RPG that exists, slightly differently if you really want to."
Which makes sense from a business perspective—gotta maintain that monopoly—but I can't help but wonder if they'd do better in the long term by trying to cultivate that market instead of maintaining a stranglehold on it.



That's why the argument is "the games are there; we need to vastly improve the marketing somehow so that people can find them".
Might as well say Or "Getting rid of poverty is easy—the money is there, we just need to vastly improve our economy somehow so that people can earn it".



Since other people are bringing up their gaming history, I figure I might chime in with my two cents.
When I was in middle school, my brother and I were enamored with some free browser-based RPG, and talking about it was apparently a catalyst for my father to introduce us to TRPGs. He had some old 2nd-edition Shadowrun books from when he used to game with his friends in high school, but decided to buy a couple D&D 3.5 books instead. This was despite the fact that he had to learn the 3.5 rules, and wouldn't have had to learn the Shadowrun 2.0 rules. This probably says something about the prevalence of D&D that even an experienced gamer thought it would be a good first game.
D&D is still the RPG I've had the most practical experience with, though Shadowrun (old and new) and GURPS are also certainly contenders. I've also played a fair number of cobbled-together half-systems in forum-based games, as well as Roll to Dodge, which has fewer rules and more elegance than most of those. I'm also trying to get a New Gods of Mankind campaign together, because it seems like the writers of that game sat down and tried to think of something that a tabletop RPG would do better than any other kind of game, and (as you may have gathered) that matters to me.

[Knaight]

Might as well say Or "Getting rid of poverty is easy—the money is there, we just need to vastly improve our economy somehow so that people can earn it".

I never said it was easy, just that the defect was in the distribution chain and not the production chain. Poverty has analogs there - we grow more than enough food to feed the world, there's more than enough clean water for everyone, and yet lack of clean water kills people by the millions and over a billion go hungry. "Grow more food, clean more water" doesn't solve that, because the problem is in the distribution chain and said chain will still be broken when there's more resources to distribute.

[kyoryu]

Eh. I used to regularly drag brand new players to AL tables I was running. It's easy enough, they just need a little hand holding to make sure they don't choose a complicated class, and instead start off with something simple. In 5e, that usually means starting them off with any non-full caster, or with a Warlock.

Having an experienced player to guide them away from "bad" choices and to do a lot of the heavy lifting doesn't exactly refute my point.

[Tanarii]

Having an experienced player to guide them away from "bad" choices and to do a lot of the heavy lifting doesn't exactly refute my point.
Fair enough. I can't count the number of mistakes I made in the process of teaching myself to DM for my brother and cousins, using a mix of Classic/BECMi and AD&D. (Which I didn't even fully realize were different things for a long time.)

[ImNotTrevor]

As far as the games without their roots in the wargame, there is for now one solution:
Spread the word, introduce people to them.

I've spread these games, by current count by my best memory, to...
I wanna say 15 people.
All but 4 of which had no Tabletop RPG experience at all before I introduced it. I'm also trying to get involved at my FLGS as a GM for games people haven't heard of before and might like to play.

In short, I'm helping.

I can't help but not really care when people complain about a situation that exists and then do a combination of "Nothing," and complaining that none of the solutions fix everything fast enough for their tastes. Welp, Rome wasn't toppled overnight. Nations and Corporations have this in common. They also aren't built overnight, either.

Introducing competition into a near-monopoly is a monumental task. There's no point on pointing that out and saying there's no quick solution. There's no quick solution to removing a mountain, either. But it can be done, and has been done, and why not try?

I've personally bettered the hobby by 14 people and I'm planning on more. Not much, but with enough others like me (the Rollplay guys, for instance, 2nd largest tabletop roleplaying show on Twitch/Youtube and they play a wide variety of games, introducing them to thousands of people at a time) you start to get somewhere.

[Knaight]

As far as the games without their roots in the wargame, there is for now one solution:
Spread the word, introduce people to them.

I've spread these games, by current count by my best memory, to...
I wanna say 15 people.
All but 4 of which had no Tabletop RPG experience at all before I introduced it. I'm also trying to get involved at my FLGS as a GM for games people haven't heard of before and might like to play.
This has been my approach* - I've introduced somewhere in the vicinity of 25 people, a number greatly inflated by getting into these games younger when everyone had free time (by which I mean junior high for me and elementary school for the youngest players).

*Approach in this case is defined as "incidental side effect to doing nerd stuff with friends", I'm not doing this out of some sort of obligation to the hobby.


I can't help but not really care when people complain about a situation that exists and then do a combination of "Nothing," and complaining that none of the solutions fix everything fast enough for their tastes. Welp, Rome wasn't toppled overnight. Nations and Corporations have this in common. They also aren't built overnight, either.

Introducing competition into a near-monopoly is a monumental task. There's no point on pointing that out and saying there's no quick solution. There's no quick solution to removing a mountain, either. But it can be done, and has been done, and why not try?

I'm not sure if I'm intended to be in the group described as doing nothing and complaining about solutions being slow, but I will say that it's worth identifying the problem and the lack of quick solutions even without having a slow solution in place. The understanding is valuable on its own, and problems are easier to solve when they're understood.

[Spiryt]

Vast majority of video games in general are about combat, so it's not about role-playing only.

I think it's about general humanity's dreams and excitement about violence/hunting getting satisfied somehow.

In a safe manner, as a bonus, of course.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Vast majority of video games in general are about combat, so it's not about role-playing only.
In my experience—which I'll freely admit has a heavy weighting towards the indie game scene—TRPGs have a much stronger inclination towards combat focus than video games. Looking at the games I have currently installed on Steam (which is even more slanted away from fighting-ey games)...only about one in four are focused on direct combat, or about one in three if you count grand strategy games, and another one in three don't have so much as a single punch thrown. Even adjusting for how terrible I am at actiony games and how much I seek out novel games, that's a decent ratio. Out of the TRPG campaigns I've played in the past couple years...most are D&D, a couple were Shadowrun, one was in Monte Cook's World of Darkness, and I'm in the middle of trying to set up a New Gods of Mankind game. Most of the D&D campaigns (which generally follow published adventure paths) have felt at least as linear as your typical CoD campaign, and while the Shadowrun and WoD games had some room for investigation and subtlety, I have a feeling that combat would still be a central tool even if the other players hadn't been going at it like CoD.


Though speaking of Steam...maybe what we need is some kind of Steam equivalent for RPGs, some way to easily find and play interesting-sounding RPGs. But that's a topic for another thread...

[ngilop]

I think the story of how Dungeons & Dragons started out as a mod to a war game. Which means the roots of the role-playing gene are very deep in the war game gene. Everything has to start from somewhere after all. But is time to cut those roots?

There seem to be a lot of issues that stem from the conventions of war games that just don't work as well in the role-playing context. I have decided to divide this up by the resulting issue. First because they are more tangible and second because they give more granularity. And hence more opportunities for fun titles.

Soldiers March to War
Combatants, everyone players someone who can fight. Why can't I play the comms. guy, who could fire a gun (is in the army) but probably couldn't hit a moving target with it? Well because being a PC automatically gives me an accuracy bonus for some reason. I can play a hundred variants of soldier, battle cyborg or battle mage, but I have to stretch it to play a wandering crafter, a corporate sponsor or an academic.

The Never-Ending Battle
Combat becoming so common has several problems for role-playing characters. But wait! "Role-playing doesn't stop when you pick up the dice." Yes, I get it, that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how when you calculate a modifier you are not thinking about the character's character. If you spend a lot of time working out the best move in this situation, even if it is because your character is a brilliant tactician and would do that. The level of detail is unnecessary for characterization, but in systems with detailed combat you have to slog through it anyways.

What's more is any single activity has a much narrower range of characterization opportunities than all of them. So focusing on any one can drain that range without exploring many other spaces, or doing so very sparsely.

Downtime
As much as combat gets detailed, other things are left vague and shallow. Meaning it is really hard to engage in many of those activities in a meaningful way. So even if you create a combatant with other skills important to their character, playing through those will likely be rather uninteresting.

This compounds the above issues by guiding the game towards the mechanically interesting sections and character concepts. It also means the system overall is less likely to be able to handle the non-combat sections of story that are likely to crop up eventually.

Front line & Special Units
A contributing factor to the whole caster/martial thing. Some units hold the line, others do cleaver and complex things to change the flow of battle. It works in war games where everyone is a swarm of front line soldiers and a couple of special units. However that completely breaks down when you focus that in on single character (not necessarily of the same type) for each player

Balance for the War God
Now there are several meanings of balance in this context. "Equal ability to contribute in a fight" is possibly the least interesting and yet it becomes one of the most important once combat becomes common. Otherwise you are disconnected from the game for large sections while the combat plays out.

The definition we are actually looking for might be better described in terms of spotlight time. But when the game is about half combat, those distinctions start to fall away and it becomes necessary for characters to be balanced in the combat sense to keep the game fun and active for all players.

Missed Who for the What
This may be just an order of operations thing but I still feel like character descriptions starting off with "Barbarian 2/Ranger 1" are kind of missing the point. Who is your character? A strong warrior who hunts to feed the members of her extended family. That gives me way more information.

More than the others this one is kind of a soft line, but it does mimic a war game's "West Folk got a new stealth sniper solo" that probably does have some flavour text, but you flip through that in the lore later after figuring out if the new unit makes in into your army.


So those are things that can be attributed to the war game roots of role-playing games. Most are dragging the hobby down to some degree. Or at least when unquestioned. I'm not going to say that every system with a separate combat role from a skill check is bad. Nor is it wrong to have a tactical game with some role-playing thrown on top.

But these things should probably not be considered the standard for role-playing games. The time has come for role-playing games to be stand on their own, without using the crutches of their early development.



.....what? I have played several different RPGs and its pretty easy to completely ignore your above gripes pretty easily. Yes and in D&D as well.

its called roleplaying. I recommend you actually get into it and enjoy it before bashing a style of game.

Let me go into each individually
Soldiers marching to War. Been there and done that, how hard is it to again just RP the diplomat going to the various baronies trying to get an economic trade agreement that screws your own country over cuz you wanna get rich? NOT VERY HARD AT ALL.

The Never-Ending Battle. Uhm? Have you ever played an RPG? most people I know do not just say herp-a-derp let me do all the adds. They actually take time into their character's thoughts and style in regard to ANY sort of conflict.

Downtime. this is where RP shines. you can go and do what you want and have a blast. Or you can be a bore and say 'over it, wanna do the kills nao plox'

Front line & Special Units. this makes no sense to me on what your complaint is. so I am going to pass over it.

Balance for the War God. Balance is wrong..? I do not get your argument.. Oh yeah hey I get it you want a game where X, Y, and Z class are all completely and utterly worthless but W class is super awesome and kewl. Most people do not want that they have a concept in mind when they start a game and are going to be miffed if they find out the game honestly only supports 1 very specific type of concept and the others mechanically just do not even work. akin to in D&D.. but then the fighter as sucky as he is in game mechanics also is not allowed to do attacks by the rules themselves.

Missed Who for the What. Never in my life have I seen this argument... ive been RPG-ing since 87... people have always described their character as a rugged huntsman survivalist who is alone due to his anger issues or when asked 'what does that mean' a ranger2/barbican 1 or 15 points in forestry 20 points in combat and 5 points in the combat rage ability.


I think all of your complaints are invalid completely and you just need to either a) start roleplaying when you play a roleplaying game or b) play with others who roleplay when playing roleplaying games instead fo whatever kinda group you are playing with now.

[Darth Ultron]

You had it easy. Back in my day 12 year olds had to teach themselves how to play & run games using the AD&D 1e DMG. /shudder

Ah....memories. As kids we needed one of the old Really Big Dictionaries to play D&D. The rules were full of so many words we did not know, especially all the medieval ones. And we had no internet....

[Acquaintance]

There are two points you argue here:
1. You can't play a VRPG with friends.
2. VRPGs will be invalidated some day by advancing technology.

To point 2 I simply say "DOSBox". There are enough games and programs for modern OSs that people will want to play that, even without any attempts at compatability made by GOG, Valve, etc, you'll still be able to play some form of a game you loved in 20-30 years. The odds of being able to find some way to play D:OS with your grandkids are at least as high as the odds of being able to find your old RPG books.

I hope it'll work that well. It'd suck if many of the amazing games we have today dissapear due to something like windows Microsoft deciding to not allow such things. But I prefer to be on the safe side; physical media is more resistant to the touch of time. It's very difficult to predict what will happen in the future tech market. Plus, I'm certain my descendents won't go through my steam library, same as I haven't listened to my parents' LPs. Hiding a rulebook somewhere curious relativs would find it seems a safer method of exposure. But I'm with you on combat not being very good in TTRPGs, so this is a moot point.



Point 1 is both factually incorrect and would be irrelevant if it was. Believe it or not, there are plenty of local co-op games still on the market—including ones focused on combat like D&D! Obviously, you can't play every game with friends, but that doesn't mean that video gaming as a whole doesn't support that kind of play. More importantly, though, most RPGs are utter failures at producing that kind of camaraderie-ey experience when compared to games designed for that kind of thing. Cards Against Humanity (and Apples to Apples, of course) is probably the archetypical example of the "social game" which has proved itself more than capable of filling that niche. Whenever I play, I share laughs and groans with my friends and family far more than when at the gaming table.

I had completely forgotten about Co-op games! Really, I was only thinking about multiplayer. They really are underrepresented though. I wish game devs would realize that there might indeed be a market for a TV-based roleplaying game. But I don't know of any such games.

And I do think it really is a different experience to be analog; maybe I'm just a romantic in this manner.



Moreover, in my experience combat is the worst part of an RPG for that kind of camaraderie. Sometimes you come up with neat strategies, but I've found that nearly all TRPG combat boils down to executing the same general tactics in new situations...with those tactics usually not even focusing on teamwork beyond "meat shields go in front to keep them from reaching our squishy guys". In my experience, combat usually works at least as well (and much, much quicker) if people focus on what they're going to do next turn and then pay just enough attention to make sure nothing critical changes, as they do if they treat it as a social experience. The game actively discourages using combat as a social experience if you're engaged in it!

Thinking back to the fights I've been in I can nothing but agree with the lack of camraderie. Characters don't really develop in battle, most likely because the only characteristics they call upon are their physical stats and combat abilities. Never have any player at my tables roleplayed in combat; the stakes are too high. I understand that games like The Riddle of Steel, where your ability to fight is enchanced by your beliefs and motivations, might help with that particular problem.

As for tactics, my thoughts is that it has something to do with the limiting nature of a battle grid. It might allow for detailed movement to have an accurate measure of ground covered, but without giving fear, perception and cover prominence in the combat system tactical choices will be very limited. Maybe it can be said that the recent editions of D&D have in this respect moved quite far from their wargame origins.

[Cluedrew]

Front line & Special Units. this makes no sense to me on what your complaint is. so I am going to pass over it.Considering it has to do with caster/martial disparity and a thread on that topic had just gotten locked I was a little vague here. Characters seem to be designed with different (and unequal) dynamics in mind. And by different dynamics I mean active and passive, the "front line" often is geared towards only holding the line while the "special" ones have a lot of tools to suddenly change the flow of the entire fight.


Balance for the War God. Balance is wrong..? I do not get your argument..More that I don't think you should balance around one thing, and then do whatever elsewhere. This is one in particular I haven't really seen outside of D&D. Almost everyone has a role to play in a fight, but some have almost none to play (besides what the player brings in on their own of course) outside of it.


Missed Who for the What. Never in my life have I seen this argument...Maybe that was just some of my groups. I know we had one person in particular with whom you had to work at to get any more information on their character than their attack rating. But even the lesser versions seem to happen less and less the farther I get from D&D which is why I said that. Although I suppose it could just be chance.

[Tanarii]

Ah....memories. As kids we needed one of the old Really Big Dictionaries to play D&D. The rules were full of so many words we did not know, especially all the medieval ones. And we had no internet....
I pronounced Alcove as Aclove for years. At least I had some idea that it was a dent in a wall with things in it. Most of the time I just figured out the meaning by osmosis of context. I know there were a few I got horribly wrong, but details don't leap to mind. But I sure remember Aclove's pronunciation, because I still remember the confusion on everyone's faces when they finally had to call me out on it. :)

[goto124]

I pronounced Alcove as Aclove for years.

I'm still pronouncing it Aclove...

[2D8HP]

Ah....memories. As kids we needed one of the old Really Big Dictionaries to play D&D. The rules were full of so many words we did not know, especially all the medieval ones. And we had no internet....


Reading Gygax certainly expanded my vocabulary (http://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/03/05/the-random-harlot-table-from-the-original-dungeon-masters-guide/)!


I pronounced Alcove as Aclove for years.


I'm still pronouncing it Aclove...


If AC love is wrong I don't want to be right!

[ImNotTrevor]

More that I don't think you should balance around one thing, and then do whatever elsewhere. This is one in particular I haven't really seen outside of D&D. Almost everyone has a role to play in a fight, but some have almost none to play (besides what the player brings in on their own of course) outside of it.


Look into Apocalypse World playbooks.

Brainers are worthless in combat 99% of the time.
So are Skinners, Maestro'd, Savvyheads, Angels, Waterbearers, News, and any playbook that isn't the Gunlugger, Battlebabe, Faceless, Chopper, or Hardholder. (And the last two only sorta.)

But every playbook has the potential to entirely change the nature of the game world simply by being chosen for play, let alone all the other things they do.

I would recommend it.

[ImNotTrevor]

I'm not sure if I'm intended to be in the group described as doing nothing and complaining about solutions being slow, but I will say that it's worth identifying the problem and the lack of quick solutions even without having a slow solution in place. The understanding is valuable on its own, and problems are easier to solve when they're understood.

If you were part of the group I'd have made that more explicit.

There is an important difference, I feel, between discussion the nature of a problem in hopes of locating a solution, and bemoaning the current status as the only possible status/decrying all solutions as insufficiently perfect.

I have no problem with the former. I roll my eyes heavily and repeatedly at the latter.

[RazorChain]

I don't think the wargaming roots are a problem. Some roleplayers like combat and DnD is very combat focused, then we have the others that don't like that combat focus. The problem is that DnD is often the gateway for people to start roleplaying and therefore many new players think RPG's are about combat.


DnD has always encouraged 2 things, loot and combat.

You get XP for killing things. Through XP your character grows stronger.
You get loot for killing things. Through loot your character grows stronger.

If you look at the DnD parts of these forums there are always plenty of posts about character builds. Character build is a term I use in computer games where I like to min/max, when I'm roleplaying I use the term character concept. Those builds always focus on combat and classes are even rated for their combat viability.

The entire ruleset when I started was about combat, exploring and loot. I don't have my 2nd ed. PHB anymore but I vaguely recall non weapon proficiencies as a skillset....If you were lucky you would start with 4 of them. In the redbox which I started with, there was no mention of skills IIRC. It was only mentioned in Mystara supplements.

This colored my early games which were about killing and looting. It wasn't until I got in contact with other systems that weren't all about killing and looting that I started to get into the noncombat aspects of roleplaying.

[Cluedrew]

Look into Apocalypse World playbooks.My favourite system is a Powered by the Apocalypse system, and I have read many of the Apocalypse World playbooks as well. So yeah, I think I get what you are going for.

And honestly, my favourite warrior character was in that Apocalypse World Hack. Because she was the only combatant in the whole group and had to fight where everyone else couldn't. Not they didn't pitch in, but she still had to hold the line while they improvised. Not having to be able to fight made being a fighter meaningful again.

[1337 b4k4]

"Ex Machina had a strong female character. Sexism isn't a problem in movies anymore! Never mind that it's clearly still an issue in most of the big movies, there's an example of a movie that doesn't have the problem, so it's solved!"
The only ones of those games that I'd heard of before are Toon and FATE. FATE is basically Roll to Dodge with an ego, while Toon is...a cartoon. And still focuses more on combat than it should need to.

As stated, this says more about your personal experiences than it does about the RPG industry. Further, no one is claiming that the issues that exist with D&D aren't issues, but they are saying that the fundamental change in the industry has or is in the process of happening, and that the primary list of complains in the OP are really complaints about D&D, and even further, very specific forms of D&D. A more apt analogy is that the OP is complaining that the movie industry needs to cut its action movie baseline in favor of other things because action movies make up the summer block busters, and this thread is pointing out that if action movies aren't your bag, there's a lot of movies out there that do other things, even if they're not summer block busters.



Basically every TRPG on the market gives more focus to its combat rules than other types of conflict. And why wouldn't they? That's what the market clearly wants, based not only on market data but on playtests and observing player stories and basically everything else.
TRPGs have pigeonholed themselves, and it's going to take some serious work to dig them out. But hardly anyone cares enough to even start digging. If anything is going to kill this medium, it's apathy towards change.

Some of this is because combat is also one of the harder things to adjudicate without rules, in part because acting things out for combat is difficult, but also because most people don't have experience with combat, where as things like suspicion, argument, debate, trading, haggling, begging, and leading are things that many or most people have at least passing familiarity with and its general effects. Now we can argue over whether more rule space should be dedicated to these things, but most game makers are approaching this from the "I don't need to give you rules on how to adjudicate an argument, because most people already know how to do that". Still there are plenty of games that dole out rules on plenty of other things. Heck going all the way back to the beginning, Traveller delegates 15 pages of the 129 page rule book (The Traveller Book) to personal combat, and another 7 pages to starship combat. That's 17% of the rules, and it's actually less than that because those sections include things like general information about being wounded and how the gravity wells of planets affect ship movement. An equal 22 pages are dedicated just to the building and running of starships outside of combat.

Some of this is because simple combat is the most basic and easiest to develop conflict. Of the 3 main conflicts, "man vs self", "man vs nature" and "man vs man", MvM is the most common one to start stories with because it's simple to develop. It requires very little setup, it requires very little plotting and it's easy to understand. Even basic fairy tales tend to focus on this, because it's simple for children to grasp the concept of one person harming another. See also comic book super heroes. The deeper concepts of self destruction and societal pressures are harder to grasp and take more legwork to produce a workable story from. As a result, those themes are explored in more "advanced" versions of media, and in RPGs that publish more than their core books, a lot of that additional material is covered in later books.

But from a new player (and new GM if you have a game that requires a GM) it's much easier to start with a "these people over here are bad, stop them with force" scenario than a "this dystopian society has created all these subtle insidious pressures on you and your loved ones, vive la revolution!" MvM scenarios are (or can be) small, compact and isolated. If a scenario doesn't work, get rid of those people, bring in new ones. MvN scenarios are sprawling things, and if they don't work, you have to change the whole setting. And MvS scenarios are usually introspective, they can be done in a group TTRPG (something like Monster Hearts), but they can also wind up being dangerously personal. Think about how uncomfortable it is when that one guy won't stop acting out his sexual or power fantasies in D&D. Now imagine new players trying to role play out an introspective Man vs Self conflict, that could get uncomfortable or offensive really quick.


A. No. I enjoy the hobby today, so it is not time to cut away things I like.

B. You will never succeed in cutting out what thousands or millions of people like anyway.

C. The hobby has grown to include many other things, as documented by several people above.

D. I have never had trouble role-playing during combat. If you know the mechanics of your character well enough, they are close to automatic, and you're the northern ranger fighting his favored enemies the Frost Giants.

Fundamentally, it's fine to add on what you want. It is not fine (and fortunately, not possible) to cut out what I want.

Nothing to add here, just really quoting for emphasis because this is the truth.



I'm not sure it would be possible for there not to be scattered examples of RPGs that aren't combat-focused, or that lack any problem which might be affecting the medium. But giving examples of games which exist doesn't change the fact that those examples are not representative of the medium as a whole. The idea that individual counterexamples could be of use in a debate like this puzzles me; the idea that "too war-game-ey" is a problem that could exist on the level of an individual game doesn't make sense to me.

But what is the RPG medium as a whole if not the combination of all the pieces of that industry. D&D does not an industry make. It's one part of the industry, and yes it's a big part, but to go back to my previous analogy, summer blockbuster action movies are a big (if not the biggest) part of the movie industry. But I don't think anyone would take you seriously if you came into a forum and said "the movie industry needs to drop its action oriented roots, and the small smatterings of films that aren't action oriented don't change the fact that the medium is all about action movies"


It doesn't help that unlike a lot of the smaller RPGs, D&D seems to make no effort whatsoever to connect people with the rest of the hobby at large. I've never seen a D&D-sponsored anything that said "for a different style, you might like Torchbearer" or something. It's always "here's how to do D&D, the only RPG that exists, slightly differently if you really want to."

Frankly this isn't D&D's responsibility and it's not really something you see other mediums do. Yes, movie theaters run trailers, and books will often have ads for other books by the publisher, but those are often done by the publishing houses or the sellers, not by the individual films and studios. Jason Bourne movies don't have end credit sequences that say "hey, if you didn't like this film, check out Life of Pi or The King's Speech"

But you have hit on something here, which is that the RPG industry, unlike many other industries doesn't seem to have a central "industry hub". TTRPGs are all over the web, blogs and forums and all sorts of things, but they're also very niche. Blogs are dedicated to one game, or one or two similar games, forums are dedicated to either one genre, or often one game. Even general forums tend to consolidate. Look at GitP here. We have an RPG forum, a D&D5 sub, a D&D4 sub, a D&D3 sub and then an "everything else" sub, and the top level RPG forum tends to be about 80% general D&D.

Where it's the TTRPG's Gamespot.com? Its Gamestop? Where is its polygon? Where is the TTRPG's movie reviewer column in the NYT? The closest things we might have are rpgnow.com and maybe EnWorld. And let's face it, even as generic as the EnWorld front page might be, look at the forum, in the general TTRPG section, we have the following sections: D&D5, RPG General, D&D AL, Pathfinder/Starfinder (more or less D&D3), Older D&D, Star Wars, Character Builds and Opt. (almost entirely D&D), EnWorld Publishing, and RPG Ratings. So 5/9 sections are pretty much D&D.

I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that unlike almost any other medium or hobby, TTRPGs requires heavy personal investment in a single system. Let's face it, ours is a nerd hobby, which means to get the most out of it, you have to learn the little details, and people only have so much time to devote. Switching movies, video games and books is easy by comparison. But switching systems means learning completely new rules, new assumptions and often finding completely new players. So rather than go wide, TTRPG fans like to go deep. That's why character build forums exist, because it lets people invested in a particular game dig deeper.

But for the new person getting into TTRPGs, it means they're often faced with deciding on one thing they want to get deep with. D&D is the "lingua franca" for TTRPGs, so that's what most new people get or are brought to first. Not because it's the best, but because if you're only going to be able to invest in one, it's the most likely to pay off for you as a player.


More than that, most of them won't get into the hobby. They'll try, see that they need to shell out $100 on books and then read 960 pages, and decide that roleplaying games aren't for them, even though there's a good possibility that plenty of them are. There's an artificial winnowing to the point where almost everyone in the hobby either likes or liked D&D, and that's the marketing problem I was talking about. The games that have detached themselves from the wargame roots are out there, people just need to find them - a process far more difficult than it needs to be.

I'd say our FLGS's can go a long way towards that. They've done really well bringing board games into the public eye with open gaming areas with a big library of games players can just come and sit and play. We need something sort of equivalent for TTRPGs. The problem is, unlike a board game, TTRPGs take a lot of specialized knowledge to run, and a lot of upfront planning. Which means your FLGS really needs essentially "pro" DMs to have enough breadth, and to do that, means they need to charge money, which in turn raises the barrier of entry again. The other strike is that a lot of the "non-D&D" rpgs out there aren't always set up for simple drop in and drop out play. Some are (Fiasco comes to mind), but others work best over long time periods (even D&D, at least the newer versions to a large extent) which makes coming up with "samples" for players much harder. It's easy to hook a player on some basic "boff-an-orc" playing. It's a bit harder to rope them into the complexities of say Vampire in a single shot.



What the hobby needs, if anything, is a mass-audience friendly party-game like version of an RPG that is easily learnable and doesn't have the stigma D&D does. The closest I know to this is Fiasco.

Frankly, rather than the wargame roots, the hobby really needs to shed it's "nerd" roots. Don't get me wrong, I'm not disparaging anyone's love for the details, or for the character building mini-games or anything like that. But it's truly ridiculous that most TTRPG core books are in the near 200 page plus range. Compare the average board game rule set. And yes, TTRPGs do more, but even something like Fate Core is 20 PAGES of stuff just to build your character, not even to understand the rules. (for reference, Traveller (84) is 13 pages, by Mongoose 1e, you're up to 43(!) pages, not counting skills. FAE is a mercifully short 5 pages, which compares well to 4e D&D's ridiculous 163 pages)

My point here is that whatever game we come up with to supplant D&D as the gateway drug has to acknowledge, and be ok with the fact that 90% of the people who ever touch it will never sweat the details and that's OK. It's ok for the folks that want to dig deep to be able to nerd out (I love me some GURPS) but that has to come AFTER we've hooked them, not before. Personally, I think maybe what we could use is something similar to the D&D AL / Pathfinder Adventure Paths sponsored gaming thing, but for PbtA games. There's enough PbtA hacks to cover almost every genre, the playbooks tend to be almost as good as a pre-gen while still giving the players some choice, and the whole action/reaction flow of the game, with the common language moves (as opposed to specialized terms) tends to (with a good GM) keep it flowing without needing to get bogged into the details. I envision a sort of week schedule at FLGS locations where each night is a different genre in a PbtA game, rather than a different "game" as it were, with an eye towards pushing the converts either to that nights' PbtA game, or the other games that seek to specifically (and nerdily) emulate that genre better.


There are two points you argue here:
Moreover, in my experience combat is the worst part of an RPG for that kind of camaraderie. Sometimes you come up with neat strategies, but I've found that nearly all TRPG combat boils down to executing the same general tactics in new situations...with those tactics usually not even focusing on teamwork beyond "meat shields go in front to keep them from reaching our squishy guys". In my experience, combat usually works at least as well (and much, much quicker) if people focus on what they're going to do next turn and then pay just enough attention to make sure nothing critical changes, as they do if they treat it as a social experience. The game actively discourages using combat as a social experience if you're engaged in it!

You're experience is very different from mine. I've found (even in D&D combat heavy games) that camaraderie and teamwork is in plenty of abundance. Then again, it probably depends largely on whether one is gaming to play RPGs, or gaming to socialize. I tend to game to socialize.


Fair enough. I can't count the number of mistakes I made in the process of teaching myself to DM for my brother and cousins, using a mix of Classic/BECMi and AD&D. (Which I didn't even fully realize were different things for a long time.)

I think another thing we have to break away from as an industry (and again, this is largely an issue because we're a nerd hobby) is this idea that we can't make mistakes. Don't get me wrong, if you find you're making a mistake, and it could make things better to correct it, then by all means correct it. But if you're having fun, and you're playing your games and everything is going swimmingly, mistakes or no, it doesn't matter. What matters is you're gaming. Mistakes are house rules, nothing more, nothing less.


In my experience—which I'll freely admit has a heavy weighting towards the indie game scene—TRPGs have a much stronger inclination towards combat focus than video games. Looking at the games I have currently installed on Steam (which is even more slanted away from fighting-ey games)...only about one in four are focused on direct combat, or about one in three if you count grand strategy games, and another one in three don't have so much as a single punch thrown. Even adjusting for how terrible I am at actiony games and how much I seek out novel games, that's a decent ratio. Out of the TRPG campaigns I've played in the past couple years...most are D&D, a couple were Shadowrun, one was in Monte Cook's World of Darkness, and I'm in the middle of trying to set up a New Gods of Mankind game. Most of the D&D campaigns (which generally follow published adventure paths) have felt at least as linear as your typical CoD campaign, and while the Shadowrun and WoD games had some room for investigation and subtlety, I have a feeling that combat would still be a central tool even if the other players hadn't been going at it like CoD.

It seems rather unfair to state on the one hand that one can't use the indie RPG scene to describe the state of RPGs and the RPG industry, but then on the other hand use the indie video game scene to describe the state of video games and the VG industry. Either indie's count or they don't. I'm of the opinion they do. The question is, what can we come up with for the TTRPG industry that makes finding the indie stuff easier too? We already sort of have a "steam", it's rpgnow.com.

I think rather than a "steam" we need the TTRPG equivalent of mobile apps, and of Nintendo. First thing, we need the "mobile apps" equivalent to pick up the casuals. Something small, simple, that you can get people playing without them having to commit to being a TTRPG player (how many mobile game players call themselves "gamers"?). We need the Nintendo of the TTRPG world to. The company that's not concerned with what the industry as a whole is doing, they're concerned with making their own fun, first party off the wall stuff, but with the clout and exposure to get shelf space next to the dinosaurs (yes I know technically Nintendo is older than the Sony and Microsoft and (modern) PC gaming scene, but in this context dinosaur is referring to the size and pondering slowness)

A last thought, I think we need to put some serious effort into stamping out gate-keeping in the industry. Edition flamewars are not just internally destructive, when they leak into the public they're off-putting to those looking to get in. Fate, or PbtA, or Mouseguard, or GURPS or D&D, or Dread or CoC, it shouldn't matter. By the book, or a comedy of errors and mistakes, it shouldn't matter. Causal and silly or deep and introspective, it shouldn't matter. And yes, heavy combat focus, or investigation or politics, it shouldn't matter. What should matter is that you're playing, that they're playing, and that we're doing everything we can to make it easier for them to play. Even if that means sometimes we go out of our way to learn something new and play it. We're the old guard, and we're the computer, we have a responsibility to help give new players the steps to get into the community. I'm not saying if you love D&D, or you love FATE and someone comes along and wants to do Hero that you have to give up FATE and D&D. But I'm saying maybe invest in some HERO, learn it, give the player a chance to play (and be honest that you're learning too) and then help give them the resources the community and the industry has to let them find more and let them fly.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I hope it'll work that well. It'd suck if many of the amazing games we have today dissapear due to something like windows Microsoft deciding to not allow such things. But I prefer to be on the safe side; physical media is more resistant to the touch of time. It's very difficult to predict what will happen in the future tech market.
I've seen too many books ruined by mistakes or misfortune to think for a moment that physical media is particularly resistant to the touch of time. And, again, there's the possibility of the books simply being lost.


Plus, I'm certain my descendents won't go through my steam library, same as I haven't listened to my parents' LPs. Hiding a rulebook somewhere curious relativs would find it seems a safer method of exposure.
I'm a bit more optimistic about the possibilities of being able to go through an older relative's Steam library in the future, given the direction that digital property legislation seems to be going.


And I do think it really is a different experience to be analog; maybe I'm just a romantic in this manner.
It's different, of course, but is it meaningfully different?


As for tactics, my thoughts is that it has something to do with the limiting nature of a battle grid. It might allow for detailed movement to have an accurate measure of ground covered, but without giving fear, perception and cover prominence in the combat system tactical choices will be very limited. Maybe it can be said that the recent editions of D&D have in this respect moved quite far from their wargame origins.
I strongly disagree. Fire Emblem: Heroes has a battle grid and an extremely simple combat system, one designed to fit on a phone and have battles that only last a few minutes each. Yet I still find myself making interesting tactical decisions. Looking for games which aim for a deeper tactical/strategic experience (including XCOM, Civilization, and the main Fire Emblem games) reveals an even greater depth of potential tactics.
The problem isn't the UI, it's the CPU. People can only grok so many possibilities, and can only be bothered to roll so many dice and check so many numbers.




Look into Apocalypse World playbooks.
Brainers are worthless in combat 99% of the time.
So are Skinners, Maestro'd, Savvyheads, Angels, Waterbearers, News, and any playbook that isn't the Gunlugger, Battlebabe, Faceless, Chopper, or Hardholder. (And the last two only sorta.)
But every playbook has the potential to entirely change the nature of the game world simply by being chosen for play, let alone all the other things they do.
I would recommend it.
This brief descriptions makes it sound like Apocalypse World has the "decker problem" on steroids, with every PC having things they're good at which don't overlap in any way, leading to the Waterbearer getting a chance to shine in water-bearing challenges while the rest of the party plays on their phones and waits for the challenges their characters can help with.




-snip-
Pure Appeal to Antiquity.
I started with that kind of experience, too. There's nothing wrong with it! But RPGs can be so much more than that, and right now the games which support that are being hidden by the ones which don't.



b4k4:


Further, no one is claiming that the issues that exist with D&D aren't issues, but they are saying that the fundamental change in the industry has or is in the process of happening, and that the primary list of complains in the OP are really complaints about D&D, and even further, very specific forms of D&D. A more apt analogy is that the OP is complaining that the movie industry needs to cut its action movie baseline in favor of other things because action movies make up the summer block busters, and this thread is pointing out that if action movies aren't your bag, there's a lot of movies out there that do other things, even if they're not summer block busters.
I'm not convinced that this is true, but there's not much I can do to explain why beyond pointing to my previous argument in confusion. Though I will note that, in the real world, there are plenty of non-action-blockbuster movies which make it big in movie theaters (rom-coms and anything by Disney*, for instance).
*You know what I mean, don't drag Star Wars and Marvel into this.


Some of this is because combat is also one of the harder things to adjudicate without rules, in part because acting things out for combat is difficult, but also because most people don't have experience with combat, where as things like suspicion, argument, debate, trading, haggling, begging, and leading are things that many or most people have at least passing familiarity with and its general effects. Now we can argue over whether more rule space should be dedicated to these things, but most game makers are approaching this from the "I don't need to give you rules on how to adjudicate an argument, because most people already know how to do that".
Then why are Persuasion, Bluff, and Diplomacy skills? Your argument would only make sense if the game told players to act out conversations and left it 100% up to the DM to decide how everything played out...but there are rules, which means that your argument is invalid. The rules are bare-bones, of course, just like the rules for appraisal, riding outside of combat, and most everything else the designers didn't think was worth the effort. The rules make perfect sense if they were constructed out of such a view, if they thought "This isn't important enough to be worth bogging down a game with," but absolutely no sense if they were thinking "We don't need rules for this".
But even without that, your analysis is flawed. It relies on two separate assumptions, each with its own flaws:
1. People playing RPGs have sufficient experience with the kinds of non-combat challenges their characters would come across, but not combat.

On the surface, this makes sense, but it kinda falls apart on closer examination. I mean, anyone with rough friends, football experience, siblings, etc has some familiarity with the gist of fighting. Obviously it's not the same thing as fighting dragons with swords, but non-combat challenges don't much resemble our real-world experiences, either. A typical gamer may have negotiated a compromise between friends disagreeing about where to go for lunch, but that's not quite the same as negotiating a compromise between rebel factions disagreeing about how to overthrow the evil emperor. A gamer may have convinced a friend to upgrade his gaming console, but that's not the same as convincing your captain to upgrade his ship's weapons. A gamer may have asked someone join them at prom, but that's not the same as asking someone to join them in the fight against evil. In fact, the differences in both cases are much the same; similar actions, but with less at stake.

2. The combat rules of typical RPGs are intended to help gamers get a feel for/properly simulate what combat is actually like.

Ah ha ha no. If this were the case, simulationist combat would be the norm, if not the only game in town. Go find some super-detailed, ultra-realistic combat system and try it out; it's probably going to play quite differently than what your group is used to, and chances are it won't be as popular. (Some groups like that, most don't.) The complaints that they have will hint at the real reason the combat mechanics are what they are—it's fun. Tabletop RPGs are based off of war games (as the title of this thread points out), and most of those made gross oversimplifications for the purpose of having a more fun experience.

And it's not as if you simply can't make more interesting mechanics for non-combat things. Look at Last Word, for instance. Its conversation system is a bit bare-bones, but entirely functional and (in my opinion) fun to play. I've thought of several possible ways to take those concepts and tweak them for various types of games. Or if you're into something more mainstream, you could probably take some of Phoenix Wright's mechanics, or look into the more sim-ey dating sims. Those mechanics are out there; tabletop RPGs just have to be willing to learn from electronic ones.
(Yes, I know the games I listed aren't all RPGs.)


Still there are plenty of games that dole out rules on plenty of other things. Heck going all the way back to the beginning, Traveller delegates 15 pages of the 129 page rule book (The Traveller Book) to personal combat, and another 7 pages to starship combat. That's 17% of the rules, and it's actually less than that because those sections include things like general information about being wounded and how the gravity wells of planets affect ship movement. An equal 22 pages are dedicated just to the building and running of starships outside of combat.
Alright, first off, I'd like to point to my "counter-examples don't actually counter the argument" argument in confusion again. You keep seeming to think you've responded to it adequately, but you haven't really addressed it at all. Don't get me wrong—it would be a good argument if the OP was complaining about not being able to find a non-wargamey RPG, but he wasn't.

Second off, your analysis is incomplete. Weapons get five and a half pages in the equipment section, armor gets two and a half, but computers and communicators get one each. Two of the nine drugs are explicitly combat-oriented, as are two of the three available modifications to drones. (Not to mention that about two and a half of the ship-design pages—one-quarter of the entire section!—are for combat equipment, and that the "running of starships outside of combat" section brings up things like pirate encounter rates, hostile boarding actions.) But this kind of raw content count isn't a good source of analysis on its own. The D&D 3.5 player's handbook spends three pages describing attributes, and three or four each describing gods and alignments. (I'm counting from memory, so I might be a page or so off. Doesn't affect my point that much.) This makes it sound like attributes, patron deity, and alignment are more or less equally important, which they obviously aren't; one is among the core mechanics of the whole game, while the others have limited to minimal effect on a character. So let's do a more detailed analysis of Traveler to see if it's really so non-combat-oriented.

Take the Encounters and Dangers section, for instance. Nearly five pages about wild animals (which you'd think would be a nonissue for space-age folks, given how rarely wild animals have been able to harm prepared humans for the past millennium or two), roughly one page about other survival difficulties like weather and disease...which also includes information directly relevant to combat, like how venom works and how many times you can attack in combat without getting fatigued. Then you have a page on healing, which can go either way, and information on NPCs and potential encounters or missions. Those should be an excellent way to determine how the designers expect the game to be played—it's a list of suggested adventures and obstacles, for crying out loud! Let's start with the patrons. Out of the seven patrons described, three initially appear to be intelligence-oriented (surveying planets, investigating murders, tracking smugglers), two are openly combat-focused, one is based around trade, and one is incredibly vague without any of the twists. But those twists are key, especially considering how at least half of the adventures would be boring without them. ("You deliver the cargo safely. Mission complete.")
Twist Analysis:

Half of the Planetologist's twists directly lead into violent dangers—two have hostile bugs, one has active sabotage. Two others have heightened tensions between the Scouts and the patron, which presumably blossoms into some kind of conflict, and while this isn't necessarily violent, I have trouble seeing how the players could care about or get involved in bureaucratic disputes or whatever.
Two of the Spy's twists refer to pirate attacks, one casually (as though saying "of course there are pirate attacks"). Not to mention that, despite me classifying it as an intelligence-oriented mission, it directly pits the players against a criminal organization, and the way everything is written heavily suggests that the designers expect some kind of violent confrontation—especially since the mission is explicitly described as "a lot more dangerous than Kemble initially suggests".
The Eccentric Noble is three separate missions—one with two variations, one with three. One is simply entertaining a bunch of nobles and one is just spiriting him away without anyone noticing, but one revolves around getting the characters to protect him from an assassin without their knowledge and three are based around a hunting expedition.
The Miner's mission is explicitly combat-oriented, unless you expect the PCs to try and negotiate with the people blowing up their own people's ships for political reasons.
The Merchant's mission is pretty terrible, if you're trying to argue that combat isn't a focus of Traveler. A smuggling mission can go so many directions, and yet...two involve the spawn of "a savage alien predator" escaping their mother's cage; two involve being tracked down by an Aslan "hunting party" (who are presumably not going to broker a deal for it, given that they're called a hunting party...and the twist specifically mentions that the buyer will be pissed if the party gives it away, giving an easy out); and out of the last two, one has the party lead to an "ancient automated defence system".
The Starport Administrator's mission is a murder mystery...yet rather than focus on little details like what clues the PCs can use to find the killer, it focuses on who the killer is and what he'll do next. Which, you know, fair play, but that makes it seem like the adventure is less about gathering clues and putting the murderer behind bars than it is stopping the assassin/serial killer/pirates/psion from completing their nefarious plans. The one which really stands out as maybe not being this is the "crime of passion," but that's so vague that I literally can't think of anywhere to go from there. Like, what evidence would the PCs be able to find that points to this cleaning lady above anyone else, and why wouldn't onsite security have seen it first?
The Desperate Peasant's mission is literally "help me with this coup".

And let's not forget the encounters!

Starport encounters: Seventeen mundane. Three potential combats. One environmental danger. Two combat adventure hooks. Two trade adventure hooks. One smuggling adventure hook. Five vague/potential adventure hooks. Three security encounters. One bureaucratic obstacle. Three random guys bothering the PCs.
Rural encounters: Wild Animal x6. Nineteen mundane. One potential combat scenario. Two environmental dangers. Two vague/potential adventure hooks, one implying physical danger (ie, combat). One security encounter. One hunting party. One escort quest. One technological irritation. One set of unfriendly locals.
Urban encounters: Twenty-three mundane. Four potential combats. One vehicular crash involving PCs. One environmental danger. Three vague/potential adventure hooks. Two security encounters. Two random guys bothering the PCs.

Oh, and roughly a third of the given NPC statistics are for thugs, guards, and security officers. Moreover, they comprise most of the NPC types with multiple "levels". Now, you might argue that of course combat-focused NPCs are going to get more statistics; statistics are for combat, you don't need to know how hard it is to kill someone you're just bartering with. But that's another point entirely—why are so many of Traveler's core rules focused on combat, if it's so focused on out-of-combat ship maintenance? (Three of six Characteristics have primary combat applications, while only one has a primary social application.) And why are so many of those latter rules so simple, with so few player choices to make? I mean, you can choose to skip maintenance or mortgage payments, but the game makes it clear that these are bad ideas. The same goes for the fairly extensive trade rules; for all their detail, they basically cover if a given trade is available and how much the purchase price will be, with the only player input being what they want to try and die rolls. Yawn.

TL;DR: While Traveler is not focused on violent conflict to the same extent as D&D, it receives more attention and mechanical depth than any other type of conflict.


Some of this is because simple combat is the most basic and easiest to develop conflict. Of the 3 main conflicts, "man vs self", "man vs nature" and "man vs man", MvM is the most common one to start stories with because it's simple to develop. It requires very little setup, it requires very little plotting and it's easy to understand. Even basic fairy tales tend to focus on this, because it's simple for children to grasp the concept of one person harming another. See also comic book super heroes. The deeper concepts of self destruction and societal pressures are harder to grasp and take more legwork to produce a workable story from. As a result, those themes are explored in more "advanced" versions of media, and in RPGs that publish more than their core books, a lot of that additional material is covered in later books.
1. I disagree with the "advanced/not-advanced" dichotomy you're suggesting quite heartily.
2. "Man versus Man" does not automatically mean "man beats up man". It can also refer to ideological conflicts between different factions which result in bickering and blackmail but not actual violence, or to people on the same team arguing about the best way to handle their mutual goals, or even to antagonistic haggling.
3. Your example fails on a deeper level; while it's certainly true that low-quality comic books, literature, etc, often focus on physically violent conflicts, you hardly have to look to find counterexamples. Violence is the lazy author's solution to a lack of conflict; most manage to work other kinds of conflict in there.
4. I have never seen any such "additional material" covered in a way which detracts from the combat focus of a game. Which isn't surprising, since that would require rewriting many core systems for an experience (one which most people playing RPGs aren't in the market for).


But what is the RPG medium as a whole if not the combination of all the pieces of that industry. D&D does not an industry make. It's one part of the industry, and yes it's a big part, but to go back to my previous analogy, summer blockbuster action movies are a big (if not the biggest) part of the movie industry. But I don't think anyone would take you seriously if you came into a forum and said "the movie industry needs to drop its action oriented roots, and the small smatterings of films that aren't action oriented don't change the fact that the medium is all about action movies"
...
You are...you're serious?
First off, it's not just D&D, it's all the second-tier titles and most of the minor ones. Shadowrun, Mutants & Masterminds, even GURPS all have an unhealthy fixation on one type of conflict to the exclusion of all others. Second...well...I've already effing covered it, and your only response is "Here's an analogy which totally fits better, makes sense, and isn't basically the same!" So stop asserting that you've explained away the existence of systemic problems.


I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that unlike almost any other medium or hobby, TTRPGs requires heavy personal investment in a single system. Let's face it, ours is a nerd hobby, which means to get the most out of it, you have to learn the little details, and people only have so much time to devote. Switching movies, video games and books is easy by comparison. But switching systems means learning completely new rules, new assumptions and often finding completely new players. So rather than go wide, TTRPG fans like to go deep. That's why character build forums exist, because it lets people invested in a particular game dig deeper.
You're kinda completely wrong. This is most obvious in the case of video games, where system mastery is considered a core engagement for many games (varying from Dwarf Fortress to Dark Souls), but it applies to everything. You can just read A Song of Ice and Fire and put it down, but if you are willing to put some thought into it, you'll notice connections and details which enrich the work as a whole. (This can clearly be seen if you read essays on the subject (https://meereeneseblot.wordpress.com/essays/) [the most clearly-relevant for this discussion is probably the "Untangling the Meereenese Knot" series], but that's like reading a walkthrough for literary comprehension; you should at least take a shot on your own first.)
Sure, you need to spend time learning mechanics and whatnot whenever you pick up an RPG, but isn't the same true of everything? It's just that tutorials and exposition are considered part of the experience, while learning RPG rules isn't.


You're experience is very different from mine. I've found (even in D&D combat heavy games) that camaraderie and teamwork is in plenty of abundance. Then again, it probably depends largely on whether one is gaming to play RPGs, or gaming to socialize. I tend to game to socialize.
I also game to socialize. It's just that my social circles realize that D&D is kind of a terrible game to do that with, since the game gets in the way of the socializing too often. Something simpler and more elegant, designed for a social experience instead of being a retooled wargame, works better.
Which is a problem in and of itself, I guess. If RPGs can't figure out what role they want to play, and decide on one that fits the medium, they're gonna have a bad time.


It seems rather unfair to state on the one hand that one can't use the indie RPG scene to describe the state of RPGs and the RPG industry, but then on the other hand use the indie video game scene to describe the state of video games and the VG industry. Either indie's count or they don't. I'm of the opinion they do.
Where's the reading comprehension?
First, I was describing all of my TRPG experience and all of my video gaming experience. I wasn't excluding all the indie TRPGs I've played, because I've never even had a chance to play any indie RPGs (aside from some D&D knockoffs).
Second, and more importantly, equating the indie scenes of TRPGs and video games is deeply fallacious. D&D is an industry titan whom everyone else gets the scraps from, and even the second tier of TRPGs is chock-full of long-running franchises (GURPS, Shadowrun, World of Darkness...the only newcomer of comparable scale which I can think of comparably easily is FATE, and I still argue that it's more like a set of make-believe guidelines than typical RPG systems). A world with Minecraft, or even with Undertale, is a world whose indie video game scene is far more vibrant, healthy, and relevant than our indie TRPG scene.


The question is, what can we come up with for the TTRPG industry that makes finding the indie stuff easier too? We already sort of have a "steam", it's rpgnow.com.
There are a lot of "TRPG Steam" services. The problem is that most don't offer the same quality of service as Steam (which is partly because that level of service is much harder to achieve with RPGs, but I've yet to see anything that even tries to go beyond "Here are your PDFs, good luck finding someone to play with").


We need the Nintendo of the TTRPG world to. The company that's not concerned with what the industry as a whole is doing, they're concerned with making their own fun, first party off the wall stuff, but with the clout and exposure to get shelf space next to the dinosaurs (yes I know technically Nintendo is older than the Sony and Microsoft and (modern) PC gaming scene, but in this context dinosaur is referring to the size and pondering slowness)
Nintendo has a different strategy than Microsoft or Sony, but it's not different in that way. In particular, I don't think it's accurate to say that they don't care about what the industry is doing as a whole; that would be suicidal (not to mention all but disproved by things like Splatoon and Breath of the Wild, which are pretty clearly inspired by non-Nintendo sources). They are just more likely to come up with big gameplay innovations these days (motion controls, DS, etc), which wasn't always the case and has more to do with necessity than anything (see here (http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/140693418105/i-see-a-lot-of-videos-on-nintendo-that-express) for more information).


A last thought, I think we need to put some serious effort into stamping out gate-keeping in the industry. Edition flamewars are not just internally destructive, when they leak into the public they're off-putting to those looking to get in. Fate, or PbtA, or Mouseguard, or GURPS or D&D, or Dread or CoC, it shouldn't matter. By the book, or a comedy of errors and mistakes, it shouldn't matter. Causal and silly or deep and introspective, it shouldn't matter. And yes, heavy combat focus, or investigation or politics, it shouldn't matter. What should matter is that you're playing, that they're playing, and that we're doing everything we can to make it easier for them to play. Even if that means sometimes we go out of our way to learn something new and play it. We're the old guard, and we're the computer, we have a responsibility to help give new players the steps to get into the community. I'm not saying if you love D&D, or you love FATE and someone comes along and wants to do Hero that you have to give up FATE and D&D. But I'm saying maybe invest in some HERO, learn it, give the player a chance to play (and be honest that you're learning too) and then help give them the resources the community and the industry has to let them find more and let them fly.
A noble sentiment, but given the context it sounds a lot like "Stop complaining, I'm happy so there's nothing wrong with the industry."

[Knaight]

Frankly this isn't D&D's responsibility and it's not really something you see other mediums do. Yes, movie theaters run trailers, and books will often have ads for other books by the publisher, but those are often done by the publishing houses or the sellers, not by the individual films and studios. Jason Bourne movies don't have end credit sequences that say "hey, if you didn't like this film, check out Life of Pi or The King's Speech"
Who put the trailers and book ads there isn't really the main point though - they're there, and we could absolutely use something similar in tabletop RGPs.


Frankly, rather than the wargame roots, the hobby really needs to shed it's "nerd" roots. Don't get me wrong, I'm not disparaging anyone's love for the details, or for the character building mini-games or anything like that. But it's truly ridiculous that most TTRPG core books are in the near 200 page plus range. Compare the average board game rule set. And yes, TTRPGs do more, but even something like Fate Core is 20 PAGES of stuff just to build your character, not even to understand the rules. (for reference, Traveller (84) is 13 pages, by Mongoose 1e, you're up to 43(!) pages, not counting skills. FAE is a mercifully short 5 pages, which compares well to 4e D&D's ridiculous 163 pages).
On the other hand, plenty of much smaller games exist. Nemesis is pretty rules heavy but still only clocks in at 50 odd pages, and you've got your Wushus and RISUSes. It's a visibility problem, and while it would really help to have a company like WotC do this (and it's not like WotC wouldn't benefit) the games are there.

Heck, at this point it would be nice to bring it back. D&D and Advanced D&D coexisted for a while, and at this point only Advanced D&D is still around, renamed to just D&D. WotC releases nominally "Basic" stuff every so often, but a "Basic" D&D that's still something like 300 pages isn't even remotely in the needed niche. A slim paperback book of about 30 pages would probably do wonders for both the hobby as a whole and WotC's D&D finances (while still a drop in the bucket compared to the money printing license that is MtG).

[Cluedrew]

This brief descriptions makes it sound like Apocalypse World has the "decker problem" on steroids, with every PC having things they're good at which don't overlap in any way, leading to the Waterbearer getting a chance to shine in water-bearing challenges while the rest of the party plays on their phones and waits for the challenges their characters can help with.You would think so but there are a couple of things that, in my experience, keep that from happening:
Things move a lot faster, so even if you did nothing for a scene, that's not that long. Not nearly as long as the decker's hacking battles can be.
You can get creative with your skills. Things are generally not sliced in such a way that there is nothing a character can do. Challenges are much more loosely defined and so using odd skills to solve the problem seems to happen more often.
Even if you are not good at it, almost any character can attempt almost all actions (some particular ones exist, but then they are usually special cases) and have a chance of success. A small chance of success maybe, but often enough it is worth trying over doing nothing.
When all else fails, you just fail. The system* goes fail forward, so people seem to accept the possibility of failure much more readily than in the similar D&D game. Or maybe my group is just crazy.


* Powered by the Apocalypse systems I have played.

[1337 b4k4]

Then why are Persuasion, Bluff, and Diplomacy skills? Your argument would only make sense if the game told players to act out conversations and left it 100% up to the DM to decide how everything played out...but there are rules, which means that your argument is invalid.

A) They weren't originally. The only rule that was remotely related to those in early D&D was the reaction tables. I

B) Because of the general rules inflation that accompanied the AD&D -> 4e era. As more and more system geeks wanted rules for everything and as there was more pressure to ensure the game was the same at every table, those rules were added. And rules were added and detailed to the degree that there was demand. Hence a proliferation of magic rules, and a relative dearth of empire/stronghold rules (despite that being a whole book worth of rules in BECMI D&D).




1. People playing RPGs have sufficient experience with the kinds of non-combat challenges their characters would come across, but not combat.

On the surface, this makes sense, but it kinda falls apart on closer examination. I mean, anyone with rough friends, football experience, siblings, etc has some familiarity with the gist of fighting.

Even a person with rough a tumble friends and siblings has vastly more experience with social interactions than they do with combat, and certainly combat that involves actual weaponry. Those that don't tend to be the sorts of players no one want to play with because violence is their go to answer for in and out of character difficulties.



2. The combat rules of typical RPGs are intended to help gamers get a feel for/properly simulate what combat is actually like.


No, that is not necessary for the rules to exist for the purpose of making adjudication easier. It is only necessary that they provide more grounds for resolving the issue than the expected experience of the players. For example, if I make a set of rules for mechanical repair of automobiles for a GURPS game, those rules doe not need to be an accurate simulation of the process of repairing a car to justify the statement that I did not also create rules for haggling over the repair bill other than a basic opposed roll system because I assumed my players could handle the social "haggling" on their own.



And it's not as if you simply can't make more interesting mechanics for non-combat things. Look at Last Word, for instance. Its conversation system is a bit bare-bones, but entirely functional and (in my opinion) fun to play. I've thought of several possible ways to take those concepts and tweak them for various types of games. Or if you're into something more mainstream, you could probably take some of Phoenix Wright's mechanics, or look into the more sim-ey dating sims. Those mechanics are out there; tabletop RPGs just have to be willing to learn from electronic ones.

And some do, and some don't. D&D does not, because the D&D fan base apparently does not desire them (or doesn't trust WotC to do them properly). I'd also point out that Phoenix Wright and date sim games are extremely niche games in the VG market, just like a lot of the TTRPGs that use highly complex social mechanics.



Alright, first off, I'd like to point to my "counter-examples don't actually counter the argument" argument in confusion again. You keep seeming to think you've responded to it adequately, but you haven't really addressed it at all. Don't get me wrong—it would be a good argument if the OP was complaining about not being able to find a non-wargamey RPG, but he wasn't.

But the OP was arguing that the INDUSTRY was beset by this problem. Pointing out the proliferation of options within the INDUSTRY which is not beset by these problems is a valid response.


... snip traveller ...

And for all of that, the vast majority of traveller games I've played / seen / read about are not focused primarily on combat. This is in large part because traveller combat is extremely deadly. Engaging in combat is a good way to lose your character, so alternate behaviors are highly encouraged. That amount of mechanics devoted to something in a rule book does not imply that is what the game is about. In fact, allow me to use an example from the CRPG world. What is the game Final Fantasy VII about? 99% of the mechanics in the game, 99% of the screens and probably 80% of the game is spent in combat with various random monsters, but I would argue that the game is not about combat with random monsters. That isn't the focus of the game, nor the purpose of the game despite the massive amounts of mechanics and resources devoted to it. In FF VII, the combat mechanics are a means for progressing the story and the parts that are important. When someone is looking for a game where they get to do interesting combat and battle royales with monsters and kick some serious butt, no one is recommending FF VII. Compare and contrast this to something like Devil May Cry which is very much about combat, and the DMC story is a means for presenting combat.



2. "Man versus Man" does not automatically mean "man beats up man". It can also refer to ideological conflicts between different factions which result in bickering and blackmail but not actual violence, or to people on the same team arguing about the best way to handle their mutual goals, or even to antagonistic haggling.

I would argue that ideological struggle tends to fall under the MvN category, but where it doesn't it again requires quite a bit of up front work before you can get there (hence why it's not as common as straight up combat struggle). As for arguing how to handle goals or antagonistic haggling, again refer to my argument WRT how easy such things are to adjudicate at the table without rules.


Your example fails on a deeper level; while it's certainly true that low-quality comic books, literature, etc, often focus on physically violent conflicts, you hardly have to look to find counterexamples. Violence is the lazy author's solution to a lack of conflict; most manage to work other kinds of conflict in there.

I never argued otherwise. In fact, my whole point here was that individual physical conflict was an easy source of conflict for games which is why it is often the first item encountered, and why it's something that shoes up early in the rules for new GMs and players alike. It requires less work on the GM's part, and less deeper understandings on the player's part, meaning it's easier to start playing sooner.


I have never seen any such "additional material" covered in a way which detracts from the combat focus of a game. Which isn't surprising, since that would require rewriting many core systems for an experience (one which most people playing RPGs aren't in the market for).

I never argued that such additional material detracts from the other parts of the game (and again, I dispute that mechanical mass of rules is not equivalent to focus). But as a perfect example of what I'm talking about, let's look at BECMI D&D. Early books do indeed spend time at the individual combat and conflict levels (but even here I would argue the game was about adventure and treasure hunting more than combat, Indiana Jones vs Die Hard). Later books though delve into realm building rules, including taxation, natural disasters and even changing rulers. Later still we get into immortals, which focuses more on intrigue conflict of the greek gods style and literal world building. These were designed, written and introduced the way they were intentionally in part as a way of going deeper and getting into more complex topics as you went along. An evolution of the game, not to detract from the prior parts, but to build on them.



So stop asserting that you've explained away the existence of systemic problems.

I'm not, I'm arguing that said problems are not systemic in the TTRPG industry.



You're kinda completely wrong. This is most obvious in the case of video games, where system mastery is considered a core engagement for many games (varying from Dwarf Fortress to Dark Souls), but it applies to everything. You can just read A Song of Ice and Fire and put it down, but if you are willing to put some thought into it, you'll notice connections and details which enrich the work as a whole.

You've completely misunderstood. It isn't that other media doesn't have depth for those that want it. It's that understanding that depth isn't required to engage with the media, and most people who do engage with that media don't go for depth of engagement. One can pick up Dark Souls and play the game without any system mastery and still have a relatively fun time (at least until the first boss). Likewise, one can read ASIF and enjoy it without dedicating any effort to the connections and details the enrich the work. The same is not true of TTRPGs. Unless you have a GM and other players already playing the game, getting into any given TTRPG requires investing large amounts of time (and money in the case of dead tree versions) of not only yourself but of other people in order to even begin playing on a surface level, let alone delve into the depths of system mastery. As a result, TTRPGs are "sticky" like computer platforms, once invested, players will tend to stay invested in that one game until something compelling entices them and multiple people they know to switch away.



I also game to socialize. It's just that my social circles realize that D&D is kind of a terrible game to do that with, since the game gets in the way of the socializing too often. Something simpler and more elegant, designed for a social experience instead of being a retooled wargame, works better.

For your group. This clearly isn't a universal experience, or TTRPGs would have died out long ago, or at the very least D&D would have been supplanted in the same way that Monopoly is not the reigning champ of board games, despite being a juggernaut.



I wasn't excluding all the indie TRPGs I've played, because I've never even had a chance to play any indie RPGs (aside from some D&D knockoffs). ... A world with Minecraft, or even with Undertale, is a world whose indie video game scene is far more vibrant, healthy, and relevant than our indie TRPG scene.

I would argue that someone who hasn't participated in the indie TTRPG scene does not have sufficient data to determine whether or not that scene is vibrant, healthy and or relevant to the industry. I'm not saying you have to have played a lot of the indie scene, but I think if the entirely of your experience with the TTRPG indie scene is "D&D knockoffs" you have a very skewed view of the TTRPG indie scene.


A noble sentiment, but given the context it sounds a lot like "Stop complaining, I'm happy so there's nothing wrong with the industry."

It's more a reminder that telling a bunch of people that they're having bad wrong fun, and then going on about how their particular form of fun is ruining the industry as a whole is not a good way to win people to your cause, nor to entice outsiders into the fold.

[1337 b4k4]

Who put the trailers and book ads there isn't really the main point though - they're there, and we could absolutely use something similar in tabletop RGPs.

I guess my point was that this would have to come from the FLGS or from online hubs and forums losing their specializations and going broad market rather than expecting WotC (and especially WotC who pretty much has one and only one RPG being published) to include ads for their competitors in their sponsored events.



Heck, at this point it would be nice to bring it back. D&D and Advanced D&D coexisted for a while, and at this point only Advanced D&D is still around, renamed to just D&D. WotC releases nominally "Basic" stuff every so often, but a "Basic" D&D that's still something like 300 pages isn't even remotely in the needed niche. A slim paperback book of about 30 pages would probably do wonders for both the hobby as a whole and WotC's D&D finances (while still a drop in the bucket compared to the money printing license that is MtG).

Honestly, I think WotC's problem at this point is the idea of D&D is so tied up in levels 1-20 that a basic D&D (in the original 1-3 level, or even 1-5 level) format would feel like a watered down game and be rejected as such, especially if they don't publish material for it. FAE clocks in around the 50 page mark and essentially WotC needs to somehow come up with a D&D AE, something that is both simple and complete, and then they need to actually publish for it. I don't even mind if they had a complete "upgrade" path and really drove home the "basic / advanced" dichotomy again, but in exchange, I would want MOST of their sponsored FLGS events to be using the AE version of D&D for EVERYTHING.

Unfortunately, I don't know that they can do that now that 5e is out, until 6e rolls around. I worry if they tried that now, it would go over like 4e essentials did. A "too little too late" for the folks that are turned off by the size of D&D, and a "all your stuff is now not really supported" kick in the teeth to the folks that bought in. I'm just not sure WotC is nimble enough (or free enough under Hasbro) to be the industry leader, rather than the dominator. WotC is essentially the Microsoft of the TTRPG world, to consumed by the weight of their own success to do anything other than give their fans what they want.

[ImNotTrevor]

This brief descriptions makes it sound like Apocalypse World has the "decker problem" on steroids, with every PC having things they're good at which don't overlap in any way, leading to the Waterbearer getting a chance to shine in water-bearing challenges while the rest of the party plays on their phones and waits for the challenges their characters can help with.

Then it's a good thing Apocalypse World is a fully fleshed out game system and not a generalized summary paragraph about how classes are structured in vague terms with no deeper descriptions.

Since I've played 6 campaigns of Apocalypse World as of this writing, GMing 5 of them, I believe I'm qualified to say that this diagnosis is inaccurate.

Yes, the Gunlugger is better at killing things than basically anyone else.
Yes, the Brainer can violate your braincase in a way no other class could hope to.

But since Apocalypse World is not structured as "a group of adventurers completes a checklist of tasks until the badguy dies," this is not a problem.

The players have a wide and wild variety of problems barreling down at them at any given time. Things start off dicey and get worse from there. (It's the post-apocalypse. When was the last time Mad Max got progressively LESS chaotic and desperate through the movie?) The characters have unique toolkits and will find themselves in strange combinations as they deal with (or join!) these threats. Splitting the party isn't death, it's the norm.

Errant is gathering a gang to put down the oppression he sees going on in Sandhell.

Fen is guarding The Source and reluctantly providing a backbone to Errant's efforts.

Blue is reconsidering his alliances and wondering if he should ally with Sandhell or let his sister's hold burn while he gets his gang outta dodge.

Em is trying to keep her men from going full despot over Sandhell but is also kinda enabling their behavior.

Raven and Bob just escaped being turned into robot slaves by a psychotic Amazon Prime Data Analysis AI gone rogue, and are now headed back south to get help.

All the while (below this point is non-PC stuff):

Dizzy Dave, son of Len, is preparing to attack Sandhell with all his hell and fury.

Rassmuss, aforementioned AI, is preparing to observe the chaos and record the data because, basically, it's bored.

Felix, Em's second in command, is eroding her authority out from under her and soon will be the De Facto leader if she doesn't stop him.

Smart, one of Blue's guys, is getting ready to take over as Alpha Wolf of the gang.

People are getting addicted to the Source water and Porter is being a huge dillweed and not allowing people access to the water.

And that's maybe half of the things going on in this campaign that the players are dealing with.

Trust me, Apocalypse World is very good at what it does. I understand this very well and have lots of experience. Nobody is left with twiddling thumbs. If anything, what you lack is time to rest. (This is not universally appealing, obviously, but nothing is.)

But hey. Guiding your perception of a system based on 20-30 words seems like the way to get an accurate read on it.

[Cluedrew]

But the OP was arguing that the INDUSTRY was beset by this problem. Pointing out the proliferation of options within the INDUSTRY which is not beset by these problems is a valid response.Well, sort of, the "outwards facing" section certainly seems to... but that is because the outwards facing section consists almost entirely of D&D. With maybe Vampire and Shadowrun thrown in there as well.

Of course if you get to the lesser known games, which here means things like FATE and Apocalypse World, it starts to fall away.

[1337 b4k4]

Well, sort of, the "outwards facing" section certainly seems to... but that is because the outwards facing section consists almost entirely of D&D. With maybe Vampire and Shadowrun thrown in there as well.

Of course if you get to the lesser known games, which here means things like FATE and Apocalypse World, it starts to fall away.

And this I can agree with. But then I would say the solution isn't to change D&D or any other game or ditch any roots, I would argue that we need to change how the industry markets and how we introduce new players. That's going to require changing our FLGS to give a bit more love to other games, and that's going to require the GMs of other games to either open up their own tables or run open tables on a volunteer basis at their FLGS and elsewhere. Because as I said, even if you know about those other games, the hard part is getting other people to play them.

[Max_Killjoy]

A. No. I enjoy the hobby today, so it is not time to cut away things I like.

B. You will never succeed in cutting out what thousands or millions of people like anyway.

C. The hobby has grown to include many other things, as documented by several people above.

D. I have never had trouble role-playing during combat. If you know the mechanics of your character well enough, they are close to automatic, and you're the northern ranger fighting his favored enemies the Frost Giants.

Fundamentally, it's fine to add on what you want. It is not fine (and fortunately, not possible) to cut out what I want.



All true.

On point D, I'm really not sure where or when first arose the idea that combat and role-playing are mutually exclusive contexts in RPG play. I know it gained a lot of currency in the Vampire "community" at one point, but it probably goes back farther than that by a ways. Maybe it got started when one player insisted that RP = sit around and talk at each other time, and another player assumed that meant combat != RP.

I do know that it's not just an entirely untrue idea -- it's an actively pernicious and counter-productive idea.

[Acquaintance]

Is the analog experience different from a digitalized roleplaying game in a significant way? (Assuming stuff like combat can be handled better by a game engine, loading players with only the intresting choices)
To me roleplaying games are, like board games, something I can play when the power is out. I enjoy computer games and would love to see a stronger merger between them and roleplaying, but I will always want to have some game I can play anywhere I have friends.

But this debate is very tangential to the topic. The actual content of the games is more interesting then my preferences.



I strongly disagree. Fire Emblem: Heroes has a battle grid and an extremely simple combat system, one designed to fit on a phone and have battles that only last a few minutes each. Yet I still find myself making interesting tactical decisions. Looking for games which aim for a deeper tactical/strategic experience (including XCOM, Civilization, and the main Fire Emblem games) reveals an even greater depth of potential tactics.
The problem isn't the UI, it's the CPU. People can only grok so many possibilities, and can only be bothered to roll so many dice and check so many numbers.

You're right, the grid by itself can't be blamed. But maybe the reason for you finding combat in D&D uninteresting can be tied to its use. At least in 5e most abilities are useful only in relation to killing enemies and affecting the grid. You can slide monsters and entangle them and stuff. But for a group of players engaging with a group of monsters with the intent of killing each other there exists optimal tactics. Once you figure out a good way to do more damage to them then they do to you, the game ceases to be fun; you're just rolling the dice. With most abilities being designed to at best affect position on a grid, any static battle will be reducable to some best tactic.

So maybe the grid isn't to be blamed. Rather it is the fault of abilities being boring that a straight battle feels uninspired.

I've read blogs that explain ways to make the battlefield more dynamic, resulting in more significant choices for players to make (and thus more fun). XCOM battles are interesting when the maps features many unknowns and you don't know if your choice of positioning will be the right one; the final map was actually boring because you only had to make it past a series of static defences. Positioning turned into maximizing cover and and then luring out the enemies.

Dynamic battlefields kinda fixes the problem, but doesn't excuse the game for not explaining such things in the core book.

I think roleplaying games could survive with much simpler combat systems then D&D and still feature interesting engagements if they focused more on how creatures behave and less on minutae of statistics. (It really doesn't change the feel of the battle much if the enemy has 12 or 16 strength). Bigger choices and less worrying about optimizing dps.

But then again combat doesn't need to be detailed at all. The only necessary function is for players to have a say in if they die or not.

[Frozen_Feet]

I find the idea that roleplaying is incompatible with combat is founded on following ideas:

1) in combat, you may lose (=bad things happen to your character)
2) players don't want to lose (=they don't want bad things to happen to their characters)
3) players don't want other players to lose. (Because them losing can make them lose, "break the story" etc.)

This creates pressure to focus on victory (=survival, aversion of consequences) over whatever would actually make sense for a character. (See ten thousand threads identifying "That's what my character would've done" as excuse for bad play.) This is naturally mutually exclusive with a huge number of different character roles and actions. The ultimate manifestation of this is the attitude that every player must optimize or else they are somehow ruining the game for others.

Now, it's possible to dodge the issue by deliberately choosing roles which would be geared towards survival and optimal play. But waving such characters around as proof of how "you can totally roleplay in combat" is solving the wrong problem. What you actually want to do is get across the idea that Losing is Fun; to teach players that deliberately playing a bad character isn't synonymous with being a bad player and how to enjoy playing such characters, and others playing such characters.

Again: this is a metagame issue more than a game issue. I have seen myriad attempts to use rules to enforce suboptimal play. (See for example: Flaws in pretty much any game.) And as often I've seen them fail because they don't really address motives of players playing the characters, or assume they fall in line with above three points. Hence, you get players playing Vampire like it's D&D, or Fate like it's D&D.

[Max_Killjoy]

I think the story of how Dungeons & Dragons started out as a mod to a war game. Which means the roots of the role-playing gene are very deep in the war game gene. Everything has to start from somewhere after all. But is time to cut those roots?

There seem to be a lot of issues that stem from the conventions of war games that just don't work as well in the role-playing context. I have decided to divide this up by the resulting issue. First because they are more tangible and second because they give more granularity. And hence more opportunities for fun titles.


You made the title of your thread about RP in general, but went straight to D&D.

"D&D" and "RPG" are not synonyms -- I'm confident you know that, based on past conversations.




Soldiers March to War
Combatants, everyone players someone who can fight. Why can't I play the comms. guy, who could fire a gun (is in the army) but probably couldn't hit a moving target with it? Well because being a PC automatically gives me an accuracy bonus for some reason. I can play a hundred variants of soldier, battle cyborg or battle mage, but I have to stretch it to play a wandering crafter, a corporate sponsor or an academic.


Whether you get any sort of accuracy bonus for "being a PC" depends entirely on the system.

And even in D&D, that has more to do with having a class and levels, than it does with specifically being a PC -- NPCs can have classes and levels too. D&D PCs also tend to be characters who are going out to do dangerous things and face dangerous foes in the hinterland or the halls of power... of course they tend to be more combat-capable than the average farmer, banker, crafter, business sponsor, or academic.

If I'm going into a game where combat is going to be a regular part of what happens (at least every other session on average), I really do not appreciate special-snowflake deadweight characters who can't even defend themselves or present any sort of threat to the enemy, and whose players refuse to allow their character to grow and adapt to being in life-threatening situations repeatedly... because it would "violate the concept" or some such.

It's unfair to the other players to repeatedly have to defend someone who refuses to defend themselves. If I were in a typical RPG, and a character repeatedly showed incompetence and lack of contribution in a part of the game like combat, my character would eventually confront that character about it. "You left us hanging again! This time they almost killed the horses while we were saving you, next time it could be one of us actually getting killed trying to save your ass! Here's a spare staff, you're learning to use it, or we're leaving you in the next town."

If one really wants to explore characters who aren't at least competent at some particular aspect / thing, one should find people who want to do the same and get a game going where that thing will be a minor or non-existent part of the game. There are games out there for which combat unimportant or of minimal importance, or is handled in such a way that it doesn't take a huge investment of character build-stuff.




The Never-Ending Battle
Combat becoming so common has several problems for role-playing characters. But wait! "Role-playing doesn't stop when you pick up the dice." Yes, I get it, that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how when you calculate a modifier you are not thinking about the character's character. If you spend a lot of time working out the best move in this situation, even if it is because your character is a brilliant tactician and would do that. The level of detail is unnecessary for characterization, but in systems with detailed combat you have to slog through it anyways.

What's more is any single activity has a much narrower range of characterization opportunities than all of them. So focusing on any one can drain that range without exploring many other spaces, or doing so very sparsely.


Really? Because I'm pretty sure that it's in-character for most people to do what they think will get them through a fight less-dead than the other guy.




Downtime
As much as combat gets detailed, other things are left vague and shallow. Meaning it is really hard to engage in many of those activities in a meaningful way. So even if you create a combatant with other skills important to their character, playing through those will likely be rather uninteresting.

This compounds the above issues by guiding the game towards the mechanically interesting sections and character concepts. It also means the system overall is less likely to be able to handle the non-combat sections of story that are likely to crop up eventually.


Why is it hard to engage those things? Because the rules are less detailed? Does it take detailed rules to engage with something the character is up to?

And if it's detailed rules that make something engaging, that would seem to run counter to your claim above that too-detailed rules in combat supposedly push players out-of-character.




Front line & Special Units
A contributing factor to the whole caster/martial thing. Some units hold the line, others do cleaver and complex things to change the flow of battle. It works in war games where everyone is a swarm of front line soldiers and a couple of special units. However that completely breaks down when you focus that in on single character (not necessarily of the same type) for each player


This presumes that characters have to be either/or, which is based on an assumption of class-based or other role-based character build rules.

Plus, see above -- if pre-campaign discussion by the group has determined that combat will be part of the game, don't make a character that is (and will remain) a liability in combat. Don't bring a pencil to a swordfight.




Balance for the War God
Now there are several meanings of balance in this context. "Equal ability to contribute in a fight" is possibly the least interesting and yet it becomes one of the most important once combat becomes common. Otherwise you are disconnected from the game for large sections while the combat plays out.

The definition we are actually looking for might be better described in terms of spotlight time. But when the game is about half combat, those distinctions start to fall away and it becomes necessary for characters to be balanced in the combat sense to keep the game fun and active for all players.


They don't need to be balanced around combat, they need to be competent enough in combat to not be dead weight or a liability. Again, if combat is going to be a regular thing.




Missed Who for the What
This may be just an order of operations thing but I still feel like character descriptions starting off with "Barbarian 2/Ranger 1" are kind of missing the point. Who is your character? A strong warrior who hunts to feed the members of her extended family. That gives me way more information.

More than the others this one is kind of a soft line, but it does mimic a war game's "West Folk got a new stealth sniper solo" that probably does have some flavour text, but you flip through that in the lore later after figuring out if the new unit makes in into your army.


This is more an artifact of race/class/level character build rules (see, presuming D&D-like rules), and gaming priorities that treat characters as playing pieces ( "gamist" in one parlance ) than it is an inherent part of RPGs or some "war gaming roots" showing through.

There are plenty of games and plenty of gamers who don't do this.




So those are things that can be attributed to the war game roots of role-playing games. Most are dragging the hobby down to some degree. Or at least when unquestioned. I'm not going to say that every system with a separate combat role from a skill check is bad. Nor is it wrong to have a tactical game with some role-playing thrown on top.

But these things should probably not be considered the standard for role-playing games. The time has come for role-playing games to be stand on their own, without using the crutches of their early development.


They're already not the standard, especially not in the way you're describing them here.

[Lord Raziere]

I find the idea that roleplaying is incompatible with combat is founded on following ideas:

1) in combat, you may lose (=bad things happen to your character)
2) players don't want to lose (=they don't want bad things to happen to their characters)
3) players don't want other players to lose. (Because them losing can make them lose, "break the story" etc.)

This creates pressure to focus on victory (=survival, aversion of consequences) over whatever would actually make sense for a character. (See ten thousand threads identifying "That's what my character would've done" as excuse for bad play.) This is naturally mutually exclusive with a huge number of different character roles and actions. The ultimate manifestation of this is the attitude that every player must optimize or else they are somehow ruining the game for others.

Now, it's possible to dodge the issue by deliberately choosing roles which would be geared towards survival and optimal play. But waving such characters around as proof of how "you can totally roleplay in combat" is solving the wrong problem. What you actually want to do is get across the idea that Losing is Fun; to teach players that deliberately playing a bad character isn't synonymous with being a bad player and how to enjoy playing such characters, and others playing such characters.

Again: this is a metagame issue more than a game issue. I have seen myriad attempts to use rules to enforce suboptimal play. (See for example: Flaws in pretty much any game.) And as often I've seen them fail because they don't really address motives of players playing the characters, or assume they fall in line with above three points. Hence, you get players playing Vampire like it's D&D, or Fate like it's D&D.

I disagree with both the idea of Optimizing Combat and Losing Is Fun. I think there is a middle ground between two such extremes, as I invest in my characters and losing that investment is just wasting my time really. While optimization is just ignoring that the world is inherently sub-optimal and therefore optimal characters are unrealistic and not worth playing.

[Max_Killjoy]

I find the idea that roleplaying is incompatible with combat is founded on following ideas:

1) in combat, you may lose (=bad things happen to your character)
2) players don't want to lose (=they don't want bad things to happen to their characters)
3) players don't want other players to lose. (Because them losing can make them lose, "break the story" etc.)

This creates pressure to focus on victory (=survival, aversion of consequences) over whatever would actually make sense for a character. (See ten thousand threads identifying "That's what my character would've done" as excuse for bad play.) This is naturally mutually exclusive with a huge number of different character roles and actions. The ultimate manifestation of this is the attitude that every player must optimize or else they are somehow ruining the game for others.

Now, it's possible to dodge the issue by deliberately choosing roles which would be geared towards survival and optimal play. But waving such characters around as proof of how "you can totally roleplay in combat" is solving the wrong problem. What you actually want to do is get across the idea that Losing is Fun; to teach players that deliberately playing a bad character isn't synonymous with being a bad player and how to enjoy playing such characters, and others playing such characters.

Again: this is a metagame issue more than a game issue. I have seen myriad attempts to use rules to enforce suboptimal play. (See for example: Flaws in pretty much any game.) And as often I've seen them fail because they don't really address motives of players playing the characters, or assume they fall in line with above three points. Hence, you get players playing Vampire like it's D&D, or Fate like it's D&D.


Here's the thing -- Losing Isn't Fun. At least, for me, it isn't, and it never will be. So I don't play characters who set themselves up to lose -- that doesn't mean I play "perfect" characters, I've had some pretty intense flaws on some characters that caused them a lot of trouble, but that's NOT the same as characters setting themselves up to lose. A character can be determined to win on their own terms, in spite of their flaws or without compromising their morals/ethics/beliefs, and again, that's not the same as a character who is set up to lose.

And I do think that playing deliberately and stubbornly inept characters without pre-campaign explicit discussion with the other players is being a bad fellow gamer. Whether that's making the utterly asocial character in a game heavy on social intrigue, or the bumbling stumbler in a game heavy with stealth and covert action, or character who refuses to fight with weapons in modern tactical warfare game, or... whatever. Sometimes a character and a campaign or setting or rules-set are just a bad match, and it's not fair to the other players to cram that square peg into that round hole.

And no, that doesn't make my play of Vampire or any other game "like D&D".




I disagree with both the idea of Optimizing Combat and Losing Is Fun. I think there is a middle ground between two such extremes, as I invest in my characters and losing that investment is just wasting my time really. While optimization is just ignoring that the world is inherently sub-optimal and therefore optimal characters are unrealistic and not worth playing.


My character is someone I want to explore, and also someone I want to explore their world "alongside". I'm invested in that character, not in "telling a story" or "exploring themes".

In terms of "optimizing", it depends on what one means by "optimizing". I'm certainly looking to be as efficient as I can with a build, but the goal isn't raw power, it's having as much room to make the in-system character as much like the in-my-head character as possible, to make the map of the character as accurate to the actual terrain of the character as possible.

[Cluedrew]

You made the title of your thread about RP in general, but went straight to D&D.That is because of the "roots" part, you can trace a lot of history through D&D so ignoring that seemed inappropriate.

In fact I think a general reply to what you have said is: I realize games that don't conform to this exist, I'm just not talking about them right now. Of course if you want to argue that most of role-playing no longer conforms to this... well, depending on how you define most, yeah maybe (probably?), I don't have any numbers on it. A few others are "yes, I think that is a solution to the problem".


It's unfair to the other players to repeatedly have to defend someone who refuses to defend themselves. If I were in a typical RPG, and a character repeatedly showed incompetence and lack of contribution in a part of the game like combat, my character would eventually confront that character about it.Um... this is kind of the point, you can't play those characters because they become dead-weights. Lessening the focus means you can be someone who doesn't know how to defend themselves without that being a problem. Sometimes you defend them anyways, but I have found it to be much less of an issue then. One of my favourite characters was the only combatant in the group and spent a lot of time defending people and it was fun.


Really? Because I'm pretty sure that it's in-character for most people to do what they think will get them through a fight less-dead than the other guy.Yeah, and the fact it is in-character for so many characters makes it a bit less interesting when it is also in character for this character.


Why is it hard to engage those things? Because the rules are less detailed? Does it take detailed rules to engage with something the character is up to?

And if it's detailed rules that make something engaging, that would seem to run counter to your claim above that too-detailed rules in combat supposedly push players out-of-character.It can go too far either way. Where the lines are is contextual. I've played lots of freeform games and never missed rules, but once I have sat down and started using rules to represent my character, suddenly switching back to freeform feels weird and kind of unsatisfying. I could try to explain exactly why, but last time we went ~40 pages without making it clear. So short answer is yes, there aren't enough rules there. Double Swordsage.

[Max_Killjoy]

Um... this is kind of the point, you can't play those characters because they become dead-weights. Lessening the focus means you can be someone who doesn't know how to defend themselves without that being a problem. Sometimes you defend them anyways, but I have found it to be much less of an issue then. One of my favourite characters was the only combatant in the group and spent a lot of time defending people and it was fun.


Pick something besides combat.

The character who is deeply isolated and socially inept in a game heavy on social interaction and intrigue, so that he always needs someone else to do his talking for him.

The character who has neither formal nor self education, and is largely ignorant, and not observant, in a game heavy on academic sloothing and conspiracies, so that most of the time he's just along for the ride until the once-every-four-plus-sessions combat encounter.

The character who can't cook and refuses to learn in a game focused on cooking contests, so that for an hour or more out of every game session they're a spectator.

The problem remains the same.

[Pex]

Find players who share your taste of non-combat games. Find a game system that facilitates it. Have fun. Let those of us who enjoy the combats in addition to our roleplay enjoy our games.

[Cluedrew]

To Max_Killjoy: Sure, any system that has exactly one way to express a character will fail to express characters who can't be expressed in that way. So combat isn't special in that regard.

To Pex: And I will too.

[Max_Killjoy]

To Max_Killjoy: Sure, any system that has exactly one way to express a character will fail to express characters who can't be expressed in that way. So combat isn't special in that regard.


Does "expressing a character" require extensive system mechanics for whatever thing you're trying to express?

I'd argue that some things need mechanical support more than others, for reasons unrelated to "expressing a character".

[CharonsHelper]

Now, it's possible to dodge the issue by deliberately choosing roles which would be geared towards survival and optimal play. But waving such characters around as proof of how "you can totally roleplay in combat" is solving the wrong problem. What you actually want to do is get across the idea that Losing is Fun; to teach players that deliberately playing a bad character isn't synonymous with being a bad player and how to enjoy playing such characters, and others playing such characters.


I would argue that the idea of "Losing is Fun" is the exact opposite of roleplaying. Roleplaying is taking things from the character's perspective, and to the character losing is never fun. Losing is bad. That's why it's called losing and not 'the other winning'.

I think a lot of that idea is looking at the game from the GM perspective where losing will change the game more and they'll have to improvise. A lot of GMs like to do that, so they push that idea.

A player who is roleplaying a character shouldn't want to lose. And they shouldn't play an incompetent character. Perfection isn't required, but if a player sat at my homegame with a totally incompetent character (in whatever system - not necessarily combat) it would annoy me - and I won't apologise for that. If I were GM, I'd probably tell them that they retire as a turnip farmer and that the player should roll up an actual adventurer. (or shadowrunner or whatever)

If a character is totally incompetent, this wouldn't be their line of work.

[Frozen_Feet]

The problem remains the same.

Yes, and the problem is that you're a big believer in 3): that another player's character losing is somehow ruining the game for you.

But if that player is fine with being a spectator, why is it skin off your nose?

If I show up at a social game with an asocial buffoon, or a combat game with a non-combatant etc., the presumption should be that I as a player am willing to bite the bullet for whatever trouble this causes me.

This isn't the same as a character setting themselves up for failure. Let me give a fairly simple example: a scenario is about a school shooting. The players are playing students who are victims of the attack. We know, from reality, that most people fail to do anything about an attacker in a situation like this, due to fear that they'll get shot first. This despite the fact that in nearly all such scenarios it would be more beneficial for all the victims to stand up and rush the attacker.

So Player A, playing a student, knows this. They have a choice: to act on the rational knowledge that staying down is practically suicide and stand up, or to follow the role of someone who is deeply afraid of being shot first and stay down.

Neither choice is synonymous with the character setting themselves up for failure, because both options can be considered informed by the character's in-universe will to avoid harm. It's the player's decision whether to weigh reason or emotion and the player's motives which ultimately inform it.

So Player A falls on the side of emotional realism and opts for their character to stay down. Enter Player B. Player B does not want their character to die and this motive causes them to weigh rational decision making over emotion. Hence, Player B opts for their character to stand up and attack.

However, the success of Player B's character is directly influenced by decision of Player A. Let's suppose that in this case, Player A's decision for their character to stay down leads to both characters being killed.

Player B cannot fairly argue Player A's character set themselves up for failure. But he may argue Player A set themselves and other players up for failure. Player A could've been fine with the outcome itself, but now they are made to regret their decision due to reaction by other players. This creates a atmosphere where role of the afraid student is implicitly banned, regardless of how much sense it would make or how fun it would be to the player playing that character.

This example is such mostly to underline that the problem has very little to do with whether you're playing to "explore the world", or to "explore a character", or to "explore a theme" or "create a story" etc.. The metagame phenomenom where some roles are disincentivized or implicitly cut out doesn't hinge on any of those. So please don't waste virtual ink on those tangents. They're not relevant.

The only thing that's relevant is that somewhere along the line you decide that another character infringing on your character is the same as another player infringing on you.

---

@CharonsHelper:

No, "Losing is Fun" is not opposite of roleplaying. Roleplaying is fundamentally acting, you and your character are distinct, and this holds true regardless of whether you like or not. A metagame level of player interest always exists. It's very basic to acting to be able to think at these two levels at once; to act as if you are afraid even when you are not. To make a poor decision as your character because it makes sense for the character, even if you as an actor realize it would be a poor decision.

[oxybe]

I would argue that Player A, who chooses the "stay down and do nothing" option is refusing to engage the core situation and would be better served to be replaced by Potential Player C who would make a character that does engage the idea of "there is a school shooting".

That doesn't mean a direct assault on the shooter like player B, but it could mean hiding out and calling the cops while livestreaming the whole thing. It could mean trying to escape and help others do so safely. Maybe making a distraction like pulling a fire alarm so Player B could get the jump on the shooter as the player isn't sure if he could manage a takedown, etc...

"I lie down and do nothing", while realistic from a character point of view, is still IMO a bad player choice because you made the active decision to not engage with the scenario. As a GM, I would much rather a player that tries to engage the situation along with the others at the table then one who just sits down and does nothing because "realism". We're largely playing these games for the escapism factor of being someone different in a largely safe environment. It's ok to eshew a bit of realism and try to engage with the fantasy I presented, be it a college campus or an adventurer's guild.

Yes, Player A taking action could've helped or hindered Player B, but in the end I would say you're there as a player to be engaged with the situation. "Coming to the table with a character that refuses to engage with the situation at hand" should be implicitly banned. I would go so far to say should be actively banned even, right from the starting gate: "I'm writing a scenario where you're going to be students on a campus and there is a shooting, please make characters that would actively engage this situation".

Yes lying down and doing nothing is a realistic depiction of what a student would do, but you're first and foremost a player here to play a game with the people around the table.

Why did you bother making a character for a school shooting scenario if all you were going to do is "I lie down and do nothing until the situation is resolved"?

It's still the same "I'm just doing what my character would do" argument that guy makes, only focusing on inaction and refusing to engage the core idea of the scenario rather then doing an actively disruptive action. In my eyes you're still a bad player. Not as egregious as someone who's went out of their way to ruin someone else's fun, but you're eating our chips, drinking our pop and taking up a seat that could be filled by someone who could be doing something to move the session along.

Player A isn't losing. He's not even engaging. He saw there was a foot race and instead of trying he just buggered off to get a cinnabun and play pokemon.


If I show up at a social game with an asocial buffoon, or a combat game with a non-combatant etc., the presumption should be that I as a player am willing to bite the bullet for whatever trouble this causes me

And what about the other people at the table though? why should they, who made characters who want to engage have to suffer through your troubles? It may be selfish, but "I made a character who wants to engage with the group, the scenario the GM presented to us. Could you maybe do the same and try to help us?" is definitely justified in my eyes.

[CharonsHelper]

No, "Losing is Fun" is not opposite of roleplaying. Roleplaying is fundamentally acting, you and your character are distinct, and this holds true regardless of whether you like or not. A metagame level of player interest always exists. It's very basic to acting to be able to think at these two levels at once; to act as if you are afraid even when you are not. To make a poor decision as your character because it makes sense for the character, even if you as an actor realize it would be a poor decision.

What does that have to do with "Losing is Fun"?

I never said that a character might not make a poor decision, but from their perspective it isn't fun to lose. They will do their best to always win.

Now - in a one-off CoC session where the characters are thrust into craziness it might make sense to have a level of incompetence, but that isn't the premise of 98% of TTRPGs. The vast majority assume that the PCs chose to do this job. An incompetent character isn't going to choose to adventure, and if he did the other characters would dump them ASAP.

I mean sure, it's totally in character for your stereotypical 1950's style housewife character to not know any breaking balls and only pitch at around 50-60mph, but it doesn't make sense for the Yankees to put them on the mound in the first place, and they certainly wouldn't let them pitch several innings and give up homer after homer (or walk after walk). But even that character is going to TRY to get batters out - they're just going to suck at it. (And again I disagree - giving up those homers wouldn't be fun for anyone at the table even if that character could make everyone chicken soup to feel better after the game. Being challenged but getting outs with a competent character could be.)

[PhoenixPhyre]

And what about the other people at the table though? why should they, who made characters who want to engage have to suffer through your troubles? It may be selfish, but "I made a character who wants to engage with the group, the scenario the GM presented to us. Could you maybe do the same and try to help us?" is definitely justified in my eyes.

I'd say that the one being selfish is the one refusing to create a character that can engage with the scenario. I can understand if there was miss-communication (or none at all) so the player believed he was creating an appropriate character but ended up not succeeding. Willingly refusing to engage with the premise of the campaign[1] would result in either a compelled re-roll or being asked to find another game. Willingly wasting other people's time at the table (even in the name of "playing a character") is a flaw I will not allow at my tables. If a mid-game story hook doesn't catch you, oh well. There will be others. But you have to be willing (and have created a character that would be willing) to go along with the rest of the group. I'm not going to run two disconnected sessions simultaneously. That's rude to the other characters and selfish of the ego-absorbed dude who can't play well with others.

[1] game, reason you're creating characters, etc. I use campaign because I mostly play D&D. Other games use other terms.

[Max_Killjoy]

I would argue that the idea of "Losing is Fun" is the exact opposite of roleplaying. Roleplaying is taking things from the character's perspective, and to the character losing is never fun. Losing is bad. That's why it's called losing and not 'the other winning'.

I think a lot of that idea is looking at the game from the GM perspective where losing will change the game more and they'll have to improvise. A lot of GMs like to do that, so they push that idea.

A player who is roleplaying a character shouldn't want to lose. And they shouldn't play an incompetent character. Perfection isn't required, but if a player sat at my homegame with a totally incompetent character (in whatever system - not necessarily combat) it would annoy me - and I won't apologise for that. If I were GM, I'd probably tell them that they retire as a turnip farmer and that the player should roll up an actual adventurer. (or shadowrunner or whatever)

If a character is totally incompetent, this wouldn't be their line of work.


In agreement here. If I could expound...

I'm willing to deal with such a character if they (or their player?) show a willingness to overcome their suck. The ones I can't stand are the ones that are evidently defined by their suck, and will always suck (not just in gaming, also in fiction). If X is a recurring feature of the game, and the character is really bad at X, then they should either be willing to and working to improve at X, or they should not be a PC in that game. I don't mean they that every character has to be awesome at X -- I mean that they shouldn't stubbornly cling to being dead weight and a liability every time X happens.

And for cripe's sake, even if one's character is bad at X to start out with, at least have the character offer something concretely useful to the party. Things like "the power of friendship" or "source of inspiration" or "comic relief" or "walking McGuffin" do not count as a character's something useful.

Those sorts of characters can work, if handled correctly, in a story told via conventional fictional media (from oral stories to novels to cinema), but RPGs are not -- are not -- an interchangeable medium of fiction. They are not simply a vehicle for collective storytelling, they have a different dynamic and structure, and taking out the elements that make them different also makes the resulting thing into a not-RPG. Those sorts of characters have a place in an RPG, and that's as an NPC -- a supporting character. Those sorts of characters can work in actual fiction because they're protected (both literally and in terms of their role in the story) by the author's absolute control over events, but even then it can become transparent that they're bubble-wrapped.

I suggest to people that they think about the character's life as they think of their own -- while someone could tell a story about your life 100 years from now, do you really care whether your actions "make the most interesting story" to someone 100 years from now? Or are you driven by your own motives and concerns and needs and fears? It "makes the most interesting story" if you lose your job tomorrow and have to travel cross-country and meet a bunch of new people to get a new job... so is that what you want to happen to you? It "makes the most interesting story" if you're in danger, at risk, on the edge, facing hardship, under stress, barely getting by, part of a conflict... how does that sound to you? Is that what you're after, or are you after "winning"? I suspect that most people would be viewed as "bad roleplayers" and "power gamers" and such, if their real-life decisions were judged by the standards that some have for "roleplaying".

Do you find losing -- actually losing, in real life, for real -- "fun"? Do you find not getting the job, having people you love taken out of your life, having your car break down when you're going somewhere important, etc, "fun"? If not, then why would your character find it fun? If your character doesn't find it fun, then how is it "good roleplaying" to embrace rather than avoid those sorts of bad moments?

"Losing Is Fun" is not a roleplaying notion, it's a storytelling notion.

Judging character balance by their role in the story, rather than by their competence in dealing with events that occur in the game/campaign, is not a roleplaying metric, it's a storytelling metric.





I'd say that the one being selfish is the one refusing to create a character that can engage with the scenario. I can understand if there was miss-communication (or none at all) so the player believed he was creating an appropriate character but ended up not succeeding. Willingly refusing to engage with the premise of the campaign[1] would result in either a compelled re-roll or being asked to find another game. Willingly wasting other people's time at the table (even in the name of "playing a character") is a flaw I will not allow at my tables. If a mid-game story hook doesn't catch you, oh well. There will be others. But you have to be willing (and have created a character that would be willing) to go along with the rest of the group. I'm not going to run two disconnected sessions simultaneously. That's rude to the other characters and selfish of the ego-absorbed dude who can't play well with others.

[1] game, reason you're creating characters, etc. I use campaign because I mostly play D&D. Other games use other terms.


"Campaign" is fine -- it's a generic term of the hobby, long used by multiple games.

[CharonsHelper]

I suggest to people that they think about the character's life as they think of their own -- while someone could tell a story about your life 100 years from now, do you really care whether your actions "make the most interesting story" to someone 100 years from now? Or are you driven by your own motives and concerns and needs and fears?

I will say - there are some historical figures who worried greatly about such things (most notably Alexander the Great), but they did so from the perspective of seeming awesome/morally right etc. rather than 'interesting', so that only proves your point.

[BWR]

"Losing Is Fun" is not a roleplaying notion, it's a storytelling notion.



So when I've had characters who have lost and been fine with it, I've been deluding myself. Good to know.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yes, and the problem is that you're a big believer in 3): that another player's character losing is somehow ruining the game for you.

But if that player is fine with being a spectator, why is it skin off your nose?

If I show up at a social game with an asocial buffoon, or a combat game with a non-combatant etc., the presumption should be that I as a player am willing to bite the bullet for whatever trouble this causes me.


The problem is that they're dead weight, that other characters have to carry.

See previous example of character who has no combat abilities and refuses to learn any even though they keep finding themselves in combat -- that character is putting the other characters' lives in danger unnecessary every time they need to be protected or saved. Every time they go hide by the horses and then can't even protect the horses when an enemy sneaks around to where they are, they're putting the party and its goals in added jeopardy.

To many gamers, their character is not simply a plastic gaming piece, or a narrative element. They're invested in their characters, and want their character to live and eventually succeed. They've put a lot of thought into their character, and a lot of time, and have plans for that character that go beyond getting stabbed in the back while keeping Bob The Useless from getting killed because Bob the Useless is a pacifist flower arranger in a dangerous quasi-medieval world full of people who view pacifists as easy victims and monsters who don't understand the notion of pacifism at all.




This isn't the same as a character setting themselves up for failure. Let me give a fairly simple example: a scenario is about a school shooting. The players are playing students who are victims of the attack. We know, from reality, that most people fail to do anything about an attacker in a situation like this, due to fear that they'll get shot first. This despite the fact that in nearly all such scenarios it would be more beneficial for all the victims to stand up and rush the attacker.

So Player A, playing a student, knows this. They have a choice: to act on the rational knowledge that staying down is practically suicide and stand up, or to follow the role of someone who is deeply afraid of being shot first and stay down.

Neither choice is synonymous with the character setting themselves up for failure, because both options can be considered informed by the character's in-universe will to avoid harm. It's the player's decision whether to weigh reason or emotion and the player's motives which ultimately inform it.

So Player A falls on the side of emotional realism and opts for their character to stay down. Enter Player B. Player B does not want their character to die and this motive causes them to weigh rational decision making over emotion. Hence, Player B opts for their character to stand up and attack.

However, the success of Player B's character is directly influenced by decision of Player A. Let's suppose that in this case, Player A's decision for their character to stay down leads to both characters being killed.

Player B cannot fairly argue Player A's character set themselves up for failure. But he may argue Player A set themselves and other players up for failure. Player A could've been fine with the outcome itself, but now they are made to regret their decision due to reaction by other players. This creates a atmosphere where role of the afraid student is implicitly banned, regardless of how much sense it would make or how fun it would be to the player playing that character.

This example is such mostly to underline that the problem has very little to do with whether you're playing to "explore the world", or to "explore a character", or to "explore a theme" or "create a story" etc.. The metagame phenomenom where some roles are disincentivized or implicitly cut out doesn't hinge on any of those. So please don't waste virtual ink on those tangents. They're not relevant.

The only thing that's relevant is that somewhere along the line you decide that another character infringing on your character is the same as another player infringing on you.


Player B's character could also have been through training or a seminar on how to react in those situations -- or just have some damn sense -- and realize that curling up in a ball and doing nothing is the LAST thing to do and the MOST likely to get them killed. And thus it would be entirely in character for them to find a way to get out, bunker down somewhere secure, or take the fight to the attackers. But before we go down that rabbit-hole, we might want to find an example scenario that has something to do with Roleplaying Games, rather than "roleplaying exercises".

And the thing is, at some point, a player who does the sort of thing we're talking about here, eventually IS infringing on the other players.

An RPG is a group activity, not X number of players independently interacting with the GM, and there's a line beyond which a player is just being a detriment to the enjoyment of the rest of the players.


---


@CharonsHelper:

No, "Losing is Fun" is not opposite of roleplaying. Roleplaying is fundamentally acting, you and your character are distinct, and this holds true regardless of whether you like or not. A metagame level of player interest always exists. It's very basic to acting to be able to think at these two levels at once; to act as if you are afraid even when you are not. To make a poor decision as your character because it makes sense for the character, even if you as an actor realize it would be a poor decision.


RPGs are not amateur theater hour, any more than they are amateur group storytelling hour.

[Max_Killjoy]

So when I've had characters who have lost and been fine with it, I've been deluding myself. Good to know.


Not even remotely what I said, or what "Losing Is Fun" is about as a concept -- it has nothing to do with whether your character is "fine with losing".

[Frozen_Feet]

@Lord Raziere: "Losing is Fun" is the middle option.

The actual other end of the spectrum from "everyone must optimize" is "everyone must NOT optimize", which is a different beast entirely. I don't see it much in tabletop games, but it is widespread in creative writing and freeform circles. It manifest as the idea that every character must have flaws and every character must suffer setbacks to be valid.

Again: "Losing is Fun" means accepting that deliberately bad character decisions don't make a person a bad player, and that a player can enjoy this, and you can enjoy when another player does this. "Losing is Fun" doesn't say optimal play is wrong, it says it's not necessary. The ends of the spectrum try to say this or that is necessary or else you are a bad player and ruining everyone else's fun.

---

@Oxybe: I disagree with your argument starting with your premise. You found your reasoning on the idea that Player A is somehow not engaging the scenario. But they are: they looked at the facts of the situation and facts of their character and decided on a course of action. They are tangibly acting in character. It is just as valid game decision as Player B's or hypothetical Player C's. It's bad character decision, but that should not make it a bad player decision.

As far as the realism tangent goes, no-one has to play RPGs for escapism. They can do that, but they're not for that. Using reality as a guideline for roleplaying is wrongly maligned, especially in this example scenario when you accept Player A was aware of both options being valid and made the choice of their own volition.

---

@CharonsHelper: "What does it have to do with Losing is Fun?" Simple, a player can have fun even when they are acting miserable as their character. Other players can find the miserable character to be appealing even when they are acting as if they hate them as their characters. All the actual people around the actual table can have a fun night even when all their characters lost horribly, once it is acknowledged that this is possible.

---

@Max_Killjoy: "Losing is Fun is a storytelling notion, not a roleplaying notion."

You can keep telling yourself that if you like but it does not actually pan out. In every roleplaying game there is a step where the player has to decide what role they are going to play. The idea that choosing the role which they deem likely to create interesting outcomes is somehow contrary to playing that role does not follow. What is even the alternative? Choosing a role which they deem likely to create uninteresting outcomes? Outcomes they're indifferent to?

I'd rather they pick a role that's interesting to them. And nothing precludes losing outcomes from being interesting. If a player wants to wallow in misery, I'm fine with it. Nothing about that precludes playing a character as if they're a real person. The player can still act as their character as if losing is exactly as awfull as it is.

---

As for selfishness? Let's be clear here: I find all games work better when everyone at the table is there for healthily selfish reasons. Consider the Abilene Paradox. If you have not heard it before, here's an explanation: it's a hot summer day. A family is lazing about. Suddenly, Granpa suggests they go on a roadtrip to Abilene. Granma, not wanting to offend Granpa, agrees with him. A man, not wanting to upset his parents, agrees with them. His wife, not wanting to upset his husband and in-laws, agrees. So on and so forth. So the entire family takes a trip to Abilene. Its hot in the car and the trip is awful. No-one likes it. But when they get home, everybody claims to have liked it, because they don't want to appear impolite... untill the Granpa reveals he only suggested the trip because he thought everyone else was bored and didn't really want to take the trip himself either.

Everyone would've been better off lazing in the sun, but no-one managed to say it because they were busy thinking of what everyone else wanted.

The three point list I made has potential for similar phenomena: everyone shows up to play characters they thought others would like, instead of characters they would actually enjoy playing. The danger just increases if you go and say "it's selfish of you to have made that character and that makes you a bad player". People don't want to be called "bad", so once their desires have been marked as such they will cease to communicate them openly.

None of this means selfishness can't cause trouble. Of course it can. But selflessness is not automagic solution. Especially not when you're demanding selflessness from one person to satisfy your selfish desire. Every time another player's character is losing and they're fine with it, but it's bothering you, you should ask yourself the same question I asked Max: why is it skin off your nose?

[Mordar]

Who put the trailers and book ads there isn't really the main point though - they're there, and we could absolutely use something similar in tabletop RGPs.

On the other hand, plenty of much smaller games exist. Nemesis is pretty rules heavy but still only clocks in at 50 odd pages, and you've got your Wushus and RISUSes. It's a visibility problem, and while it would really help to have a company like WotC do this (and it's not like WotC wouldn't benefit) the games are there.

Heck, at this point it would be nice to bring it back. D&D and Advanced D&D coexisted for a while, and at this point only Advanced D&D is still around, renamed to just D&D. WotC releases nominally "Basic" stuff every so often, but a "Basic" D&D that's still something like 300 pages isn't even remotely in the needed niche. A slim paperback book of about 30 pages would probably do wonders for both the hobby as a whole and WotC's D&D finances (while still a drop in the bucket compared to the money printing license that is MtG).

When I first started playing both Dragon Magazine and White Dwarf were "industry wide" publications. Sure, Dragon still skewed heavily TSR...but that was the era when TSR had a dozen distinct RPGs, and other companies, none of which would be considered big time, were at least able to get some advertising and reviewing content out there. White Dwarf was even more even-handed and, IIRC, including a bunch of non-RPG stuff too (yes, I still want the original Chainsaw Warrior because of that magazine!!). It's a small thing, I think, but indicative of the lack of a professional platform for genre-wide promotion. I wonder if it would do any good now...

Aside: I've always wondered if the exclusion of ads in comic books contributed to the long term decline in sales. Based strictly on recollection, the primary lines of books dropped paid ads as the big comic boom was taking off...they hype and boom made it so revenue from Hostess, Atlas strength training programs, Megaforce and the cool "army in a box" vendors wasn't necessary for the companies to rake in money...so they stopped using them. Not only that, they got to spike prices and people still bought and bought and bought. Then the crash...book prices remained high, sales dropped, compaies couldn't maintain revenue streams, publication numbers went way down, and sales dropped even more. Was outside advertising ever considered? It still does wonders for sports and fashion magazines.

- M

[Max_Killjoy]

@Lord Raziere: "Losing is Fun" is the middle option.

The actual other end of the spectrum from "everyone must optimize" is "everyone must NOT optimize", which is a different beast entirely. I don't see it much in tabletop games, but it is widespread in creative writing and freeform circles. It manifest as the idea that every character must have flaws and every character must suffer setbacks to be valid.

Again: "Losing is Fun" means accepting that deliberately bad character decisions don't make a person a bad player, and that a player can enjoy this, and you can enjoy when another player does this. "Losing is Fun" doesn't say optimal play is wrong, it says it's not necessary. The ends of the spectrum try to say this or that is necessary or else you are a bad player and ruining everyone else's fun.

@CharonsHelper: "What does it have to do with Losing is Fun?" Simple, a player can have fun even when they are acting miserable as their character. Other players can find the miserable character to be appealing even when they are acting as if they hate them as their characters. All the actual people around the actual table can have a fun night even when all their characters lost horribly, once it is acknowledged that this is possible.


"Losing is fun" is as-worded an absolute statement that losing is fun -- not an assertion that it can be fun, for some players, some of the time.

And maybe it is possible to have fun that way for some players, in some games, some of the time.

For others, sub-optimal outcomes (including outright failure/losing) are a possible consequence, the potential price, of making the character's decisions true to the character. The character may even know that they're choosing the hard road but have their reasons. But for those players, the sub-optimal outcome will never be fun. For us, it's not fun watching our characters fail, it's not fun watching anyone we don't actively feel deserves it fail.

"Losing IS Fun" doesn't sound like the middle option, it sounds exactly like "the idea that every character must have flaws and every character must suffer setbacks to be valid" that infests creative writing and literature circles, which often comes across more as an assertion that "character competence" and "literary quality" are mutually exclusive ends of a single axis.




@Max_Killjoy: "Losing is Fun is a storytelling notion, not a roleplaying notion."

You can keep telling yourself that if you like but it does not actually pan out. In every roleplaying game there is a step where the player has to decide what role they are going to play. The idea that choosing the role which they deem likely to create interesting outcomes is somehow contrary to playing that role does not follow. What is even the alternative? Choosing a role which they deem likely to create uninteresting outcomes? Outcomes they're indifferent to?

I'd rather they pick a role that's interesting to them. And nothing precludes losing outcomes from being interesting. If a player wants to wallow in misery, I'm fine with it. Nothing about that precludes playing a character as if they're a real person. The player can still act as their character as if losing is exactly as awfull as it is.


What does "Losing is fun" have to do with choosing a character role? What character would want to lose? It would appear to be about the player's priorities completely separated from the character's motives and involve the player undertaking a form of metagaming; for "story" purposes rather than "winning the game" purposes in this instance... "what would produce the most interesting outcome" sounds like a story / narrative metric. For most characters, getting what they want is obviously the "most interesting" outcome, which from all the things I've seen is not what people who say "losing is fun" are talking about.




As for selfishness? Let's be clear here: I find all games work better when everyone at the table is there for healthily selfish reasons. Consider the Abilene Paradox. If you have not heard it before, here's an explanation: it's a hot summer day. A family is lazing about. Suddenly, Granpa suggests they go on a roadtrip to Abilene. Granma, not wanting to offend Granpa, agrees with him. A man, not wanting to upset his parents, agrees with them. His wife, not wanting to upset his husband and in-laws, agrees. So on and so forth. So the entire family takes a trip to Abilene. Its hot in the car and the trip is awful. No-one likes it. But when they get home, everybody claims to have liked it, because they don't want to appear impolite... untill the Granpa reveals he only suggested the trip because he thought everyone else was bored and didn't really want to take the trip himself either.

Everyone would've been better off lazing in the sun, but no-one managed to say it because they were busy thinking of what everyone else wanted.

The three point list I made has potential for similar phenomena: everyone shows up to play characters they thought others would like, instead of characters they would actually enjoy playing. The danger just increases if you go and say "it's selfish of you to have made that character and that makes you a bad player". People don't want to be called "bad", so once their desires have been marked as such they will cease to communicate them openly.


That's an example of lack of pre-campaign communication and agreement -- and could just as easily happen with unspoken "selfishness" as it did with the unspoken "selflessness" of the example.




None of this means selfishness can't cause trouble. Of course it can. But selflessness is not automagic solution. Especially not when you're demanding selflessness from one person to satisfy your selfish desire. Every time another player's character is losing and they're fine with it, but it's bothering you, you should ask yourself the same question I asked Max: why is it skin off your nose?


Asked and answered -- multiple times, in detail. And not just by me, IIRC.

[Lord Raziere]

No. no. no.

a character losing is a tragedy. I'm not interested in tragedies. I would only feel sad that my character did not get to achieve their goal this game, and wouldn't have fun knowing that if I were in their shoes, that they failed, and that the entire game leading up this failure was a waste of time and effort. With no way to continue to make an effort to achieve the goal.

Losing is not fun, for I have played Dark Souls 3 where you lose over again and over again, and the fun I had was when I finally won, not when I failed again. The fun is in defeating the boss after a good hard fight, not after losing again- losing is easy, just stand still and let the enemy kill you, if you think it so fun.

[ImNotTrevor]

I'm torn about where this has gone, probably because I game very differently from most here. I'll outline the differences in how my groups tend to operate and go forward from there.

1. We tend to play games where all characters acting as one unit is NOT the expectation. This is less rare than you would assume, and is fun for similar reasons to those that make an evening of Super Smash Bros fun. But with cooler stories to tell our friends by the end.

2. This means that we tend to not be concerned with individual "usefulness to the party." Scenes change rapidly between many people and the systems we use are fairly light and chaotic, so the odds of sticking with one event for long are small, and most often characters find themselves in unlikely pairs either at odds or working together. (You've not had a fun time at the RP table until a homicidal religious maniac and the psychic who brainwashed him into killing his wife have to work together to stop an invading warlord.)


So basically...
My current character is probably going to lose.... maybe. That's my assessment as a player who sees all the scenes. But my character isn't me and has his own agenda which he will pursue come death and/or hell. He knows his personal quest is a longshot. He just doesn't care.

So in my personal opinion, it's not so much that losing is fun.

What's fun is to throw together a bunch of passionate, intense people in dire, horrible circumstances and see what sort of shape the resultant wreckage takes. What is fun is the uncertainty.

Now, where I'd probably differ is that I'd say this:
Failure can be Fun.

Failing is less dire than losing, and often results in more interesting results than just losing. (Many good stories both in fiction and in reality begin with a failure, not a success.) Most successful people experience many, many failures no matter how competent. And by "failures" I mean major, dire setbacks. (Like your 3rd attempt at starting a business going bankrupt.) But they are still both competent and successful overall. If the biggest failure a PC ever experiences is being unable to get extra treasure, the stakes for their adventures are probably pretty low.

The problem many systems have is that they're a bit all-or-nothing. PCs getting captured, tortured, knocked out, and otherwise is pretty rare in many wide-use systems. Hence why Losing is rarely fun there. In my favorite system, losing all your hitpoints doesn't mean death. Heck, it can happen to you 3 times before you finally HAVE to die! And having that happen means being suicidally stupid on a regular basis. It's hard to die. Why? Because death is the most boring thing that can happen to you.

So yeah. Failure can be fun. Losing... nah.

But then again, my group doesn't assume that we're all going to always be on the same team. So that colors my experience a lot.

[kyoryu]

Failing should be fun. Losing isn't fun, we tend to avoid it. But games are better when it isn't The Worst. And too many games are made so that the only viable options are either party victory or TPK.

As a gamer, in just about any game, video, sports, whatever, a good game is one that I can lose. It's not the losing itself that's fun - but the fact that I can lose, evidenced by the fact that I *do* lose on a regular basis, is what makes the victories so sweet.

If I basically know I'll "win" every encounter provided I don't totally screw up, then that's boring to me.

[Cluedrew]

On Losing is Fun: I think the point of the saying is not that it is stating that the act of losing is fun, but that losing (or failure, see ImNotTrevor) can be part of a fun experience. In fact generally, even in those contexts the act of losing itself is unfun, but often worth it to get even more fun out of the game.

And then there is the idea that "win" and "lose" are not so simple as who was the last standing in a wargame. In my group there are two famous campaigns, one where almost everyone died (all but 1 PC) and one where everyone made it out, put just barely. The first was considered a win, the latter a draw. There were a lot of objectives that did not require the PC to live in the first.

On Useless Characters: Can characters really be useless? I often joke that there are two basic roles in our party. Those who get us into trouble and those that get us out of trouble. By the standard definition the former is useless* but the game wouldn't be nearly as fun without them. So they have a use from a narrative/game flow perspective.

* Well not quite, but they have some skills and resources that help, but not as much as they need help so overall I think it counts.

[Jama7301]

I try to frame it as "Failure can be interesting". It's why I will peek in on bad TV or listen to bad music, in order to get different approaches.

Avoiding absolutes with this because hoo boy, can it go bad. Unfair failure, vindictive GMs, and the like can really strain this. It requires that you not only be on the same page as your GM, but as every other player, because someone's failure might end up costing you. It's a style that requires a lot of trust from all parties to even approach it going well.

If I act suboptimally, put the party in danger, or just botch some rolls, it's fine if we're all in on this ride together, and the GM is willing to roll with it in a way that makes sense.

If Thomas doesn't want his thief dragged into the Bard getting tossed in jail, he may find my behavior or bad luck ranging anywhere from mildly annoying to incredibly frustrating.

It's kind of a hard line to walk as a GM.

[Jay R]

It's not that "Losing is fun," or "Failing is fun."

Playing is fun. I actually enjoy playing. I can play for hours, having fun. If, at the end of that time, I fail, or lose, well, that's annoying, but nobody makes me give the fun back.

[Cluedrew]

{Laughing} Internally.

You know, there are many ways I'm sure we could state that with more accuracy, but that is a beautiful way to put it. It also has me highly amused.

[Lord Raziere]

Whatever. I don't really get it myself, while I can accept failure I'm not good at or with character death, just not my playstyle.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Failing should be fun. Losing isn't fun, we tend to avoid it. But games are better when it isn't The Worst. And too many games are made so that the only viable options are either party victory or TPK.

As a gamer, in just about any game, video, sports, whatever, a good game is one that I can lose. It's not the losing itself that's fun - but the fact that I can lose, evidenced by the fact that I *do* lose on a regular basis, is what makes the victories so sweet.

If I basically know I'll "win" every encounter provided I don't totally screw up, then that's boring to me.

I can understand this, but have to wonder. Failure is an inherent part of anything with randomization (or unknowns). Why go out of your way to increase the odds of failure? That is, what is the fun in creating a character with the intent of failing? That's what some seem to be wanting. Is it about creating the weakest character that can still succeed?


I try to frame it as "Failure can be interesting". It's why I will peek in on bad TV or listen to bad music, in order to get different approaches.

Avoiding absolutes with this because hoo boy, can it go bad. Unfair failure, vindictive GMs, and the like can really strain this. It requires that you not only be on the same page as your GM, but as every other player, because someone's failure might end up costing you. It's a style that requires a lot of trust from all parties to even approach it going well.

If I act suboptimally, put the party in danger, or just botch some rolls, it's fine if we're all in on this ride together, and the GM is willing to roll with it in a way that makes sense.

If Thomas doesn't want his thief dragged into the Bard getting tossed in jail, he may find my behavior or bad luck ranging anywhere from mildly annoying to incredibly frustrating.

It's kind of a hard line to walk as a GM.

Note: the following applies to games where some sort of party cohesion is expected. Otherwise, do as best fits the system.

As a player (and as a GM), I would be very unhappy if one player came to the table with the intention of "causing trouble" for the group. As a player, I expect everyone to try to contribute to the party's goals (or at least not actively sabotage the group). If the premise is "sneaky recovery of artifact" and one person brings a loudmouth who broadcasts the party's presence to the world, that's a problem. If the premise is "travel the world, meet interesting monsters, kill them and take their stuff," a non-combatant (or an active pacifist) is a no-no. As a DM, it feels rude for one player to disrespect the work I put in to create an active world with interesting hooks by refusing to engage with them or trying to undermine the premise. Either play someone who the group would want to be with or don't play. Playing a "look at me I'm so special and cause you all trouble" type who constantly has to be rescued is an inherently egotistical thing to do. It makes the game all about that one character instead of sharing the spotlight evenly. It also consumes an inordinate amount of GM time to plan and react to constant intentional disruption while still keeping things moving for the rest of the group.

I can understand the lure of playing a "group of level 0 commoners trying to survive in a big bad world" game, but they shouldn't stay level 0 commoners. If they do, they're gonna die real quick. Same if you try to play an incompetent who wouldn't have survived to adulthood without constant supervision in a more normal game. In this scenario, you also shouldn't have a group of level X adventurers and a PC who's a level 0 commoner (at least not for more than a single fight).

Note that I do not demand that characters be hyper-competent--just enough to not sit around twiddling their thumbs or actively draining group resources (including player time). There's a huge gap between incompetent and so powerful that you can't fail. Systems that encourage either end are Doing It Wrong(tm) in my opinion.

[Max_Killjoy]

I can understand this, but have to wonder. Failure is an inherent part of anything with randomization (or unknowns). Why go out of your way to increase the odds of failure? That is, what is the fun in creating a character with the intent of failing? That's what some seem to be wanting. Is it about creating the weakest character that can still succeed?


Note: the following applies to games where some sort of party cohesion is expected. Otherwise, do as best fits the system.

As a player (and as a GM), I would be very unhappy if one player came to the table with the intention of "causing trouble" for the group. As a player, I expect everyone to try to contribute to the party's goals (or at least not actively sabotage the group). If the premise is "sneaky recovery of artifact" and one person brings a loudmouth who broadcasts the party's presence to the world, that's a problem. If the premise is "travel the world, meet interesting monsters, kill them and take their stuff," a non-combatant (or an active pacifist) is a no-no. As a DM, it feels rude for one player to disrespect the work I put in to create an active world with interesting hooks by refusing to engage with them or trying to undermine the premise. Either play someone who the group would want to be with or don't play. Playing a "look at me I'm so special and cause you all trouble" type who constantly has to be rescued is an inherently egotistical thing to do. It makes the game all about that one character instead of sharing the spotlight evenly. It also consumes an inordinate amount of GM time to plan and react to constant intentional disruption while still keeping things moving for the rest of the group.

I can understand the lure of playing a "group of level 0 commoners trying to survive in a big bad world" game, but they shouldn't stay level 0 commoners. If they do, they're gonna die real quick. Same if you try to play an incompetent who wouldn't have survived to adulthood without constant supervision in a more normal game. In this scenario, you also shouldn't have a group of level X adventurers and a PC who's a level 0 commoner (at least not for more than a single fight).

Note that I do not demand that characters be hyper-competent--just enough to not sit around twiddling their thumbs or actively draining group resources (including player time). There's a huge gap between incompetent and so powerful that you can't fail. Systems that encourage either end are Doing It Wrong(tm) in my opinion.


Fully agreed on both points.

I just don't get the attraction of failure, or of playing a character who contributes little and constantly needs help.

[ImNotTrevor]

This is another of those times where I kinda have to shrug because "the party working as a cohesive unit at all times" is barely a part of my usual games.

Even in my FATE games the characters are at least a liiiittle bit at odds on occassion. And that's my most teamworky game I play.

I usually do Apocalypse World and its derivatives nowadays and boy howdy does that not stick to the "party of adventurers" format. When one of the classes is basically "you're the mayor" and another is "you own a business," you're going to have a very different game than one in which everyone has different methods of killing stuff and/or acquiring loot.

That's probably a big part of why I like it so much, now that I think about it....
Since there's no out-and-out expectation for the party to be a unit, pvp is less of an issue because nothing has been damaged.
Players not contributing to the current situation isn't really a problem. They have their own concerns to attend to that have far-reaching consequences and involve some of the NPCs causing the problem you're dealing with now.
Maybe the guy who's Nash's best customer might be the guy trying to kick T-bone out of the gang. Nash wants him alive, T-bone wants him dead. Maybe Crash finds out that its his right-hand-man leaking info to Juniper when he goes to confess his sins to her. Maybe the guy Jethro blames for the problems going on down at the temple is the guy supplyinf moonshine to Nash. Maybe all of the above.
That creates way more interesting dynamics, to me, than the party needing to basically have the same relationship to an NPC. When the group understands that this kind of precarious positioning is possible and common, and commits to it, things tend to go AWESOME! Apocalypse World is probably the only game I've played where having at least one psychotic murderhobo is practically guaranteed to make it more fun.

To put it simply, in my second session of Apocalypse World ever, one of my players misunderstood an "important meeting" not to be an actual important meeting, but code meaning this guy needed to be killed. Fast forward to this guy going out a window and the whole community going bananas. In the end, the guy's "lawyer" started a coup and took over the town, leaving the players as refugees.
And we all considered it the best 4 hours of Tabletop any of us ever played.

[CharonsHelper]

This is another of those times where I kinda have to shrug because "the party working as a cohesive unit at all times" is barely a part of my usual games.

Even in my FATE games the characters are at least a liiiittle bit at odds on occassion. And that's my most teamworky game I play.

While you might not play them very much, teamwork based games are the VAST majority of TTRPGs, and earlier the OP basically said that he was talking about D&D and its derivatives.

So it's as if the OP said he didn't like getting sun in his eyes playing sports, he later admitted that he was talking specifically about baseball and maybe softball, and you're saying it's not a problem in your sports when you play squash & ping pong. Sure - squash & ping pong players don't worry about sunlight, but the vast majority of sports are outdoors & the OP specifically said that he was talking about baseball.

You're just talking past the topic at hand. Yes, your point is true, but not really relevant.

[oxybe]

@Oxybe: I disagree with your argument starting with your premise. You found your reasoning on the idea that Player A is somehow not engaging the scenario. But they are: they looked at the facts of the situation and facts of their character and decided on a course of action. They are tangibly acting in character. It is just as valid game decision as Player B's or hypothetical Player C's. It's bad character decision, but that should not make it a bad player decision.

You want to talk acting? Fine. Why should I, as an actor, share the stage with someone who doesn't do anything to move the scene along? This isn't reciting Shakespeare. There is no script to follow. This is best compared to improv, and the crowd threw you a scene and your response to the current situation is lie down and do nothing because "it's what my character would do".

There is no Stanley Kubrick breathing down your neck and asking for retakes if you don't get it just right. There is you, the others at the table and the GM.

I would say if "acting in character" would make for a bad or dull scene, be a good actor and find a reason why your character would engage in this situation. Find a rationalization as to why you would engage in something your character would normally not do and see it as a chance to grow your character. Or just say it was an out-of character panic moment. Something.

You can try to rationalize it as "I was just playing my character" but the end result is still:

A) you're not contributing to the scene or scenario. your character chose to do nothing

B) You, the player, made the choice to bring a character who chose to nothing instead of bringing in a character that would do something.

You disagree with my premise. I disagree with yours. You're not just here for yourself, you're sharing the game space with everyone else at the table, so interact with them, interact with the scene, keep the ball moving, do something other then nothing!

I'm coming from the point of view that the people at the table, the players and GM, will make an active effort to have their characters engage the situation presented to them. They'll find a way to go "yes my character will do something" and either find a way to justify it using existing character motivations or will do so to show the character is trying to change something about themselves and grow.

at this point it's probably an agree to disagree, but I unless it's a player's first session or two and they're getting a feel for the group, I would expect them to find a way to take an active role in the scene.

[Max_Killjoy]

You want to talk acting? Fine. Why should I, as an actor, share the stage with someone who doesn't do anything to move the scene along? This isn't reciting Shakespeare. There is no script to follow. This is best compared to improv, and the crowd threw you a scene and your response to the current situation is lie down and do nothing because "it's what my character would do".

There is no Stanley Kubrick breathing down your neck and asking for retakes if you don't get it just right. There is you, the others at the table and the GM.

I would say if "acting in character" would make for a bad or dull scene, be a good actor and find a reason why your character would engage in this situation. Find a rationalization as to why you would engage in something your character would normally not do and see it as a chance to grow your character. Or just say it was an out-of character panic moment. Something.

You can try to rationalize it as "I was just playing my character" but the end result is still:

A) you're not contributing to the scene or scenario. your character chose to do nothing

B) You, the player, made the choice to bring a character who chose to nothing instead of bringing in a character that would do something.

You disagree with my premise. I disagree with yours. You're not just here for yourself, you're sharing the game space with everyone else at the table, so interact with them, interact with the scene, keep the ball moving, do something other then nothing!

I'm coming from the point of view that the people at the table, the players and GM, will make an active effort to have their characters engage the situation presented to them. They'll find a way to go "yes my character will do something" and either find a way to justify it using existing character motivations or will do so to show the character is trying to change something about themselves and grow.

at this point it's probably an agree to disagree, but I unless it's a player's first session or two and they're getting a feel for the group, I would expect them to find a way to take an active role in the scene.


Agreed.

I've been going to some improv comedy shows, and the last thing I can picture them doing is refusing to engage.

If playing a character in an RPG is "acting" (which I do not actually agree with, any more than I would agree that an RPG is "a form of fiction"), then, well, acting isn't done in a vacuum, just for the actor's sake, unless the actor wants to just prance around an empty space alone and play make believe, I guess. The only audience in an RPG group is the rest of the group... who would be the rest of the "troupe" as well? Yeah, this whole "roleplaying is acting" thing falls apart pretty fast.

[Cluedrew]

You're just talking past the topic at hand. Yes, your point is true, but not really relevant.Well even though the topic is about the systems that are still heavily rooted in war games, pretending that other systems don't exist isn't helpful (as was pounded into me on the first page of this thread). I suppose the assumption that there are (~)two clear-cut sides is also a war game thing, the PCs all being on one of them might be an extension of that.

I may have missed that one in my list, it doesn't feel quite the same as others on the list but if the list is supposed to be "unspoken assumptions that date back to the war game days that may be harmful depending on context" than yes, it may belong on it.

On Not Engaging: I think there some scenes that work quite well when one of the characters just goes "nope", but they certainly aren't the norm.

[Jay R]

This article (http://lookrobot.co.uk/11-ways-better-roleplayer-safe-work-version/) has a great line on the subject of not engaging.

"Do you remember that great story about that hobbit who told Gandalf to go away, and sat at home picking his hairy toes all day before his entire village was swallowed up by the armies of darkness? No. No you bloody don’t. So put on your backpack and get out there, Frodo"

[Max_Killjoy]

This article (http://lookrobot.co.uk/11-ways-better-roleplayer-safe-work-version/) has a great line on the subject of not engaging.

"Do you remember that great story about that hobbit who told Gandalf to go away, and sat at home picking his hairy toes all day before his entire village was swallowed up by the armies of darkness? No. No you bloody don’t. So put on your backpack and get out there, Frodo"


Generally good advice in that article, if sometimes delivered too absolutely or too aggressively.

Failure to engage can sometimes be due more to lack of communication / lack of "session zero" establishing a campaign and compatible characters that everyone is OK with. And while "my character wouldn't do that" is a flimsy excuse to refuse to engage with entire campaigns (barring the really extreme, in which case we're back to something getting missed before the campaign), it is a perfectly valid reason for a particular character to not engage in a particular act.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Generally good advice in that article, if sometimes delivered too absolutely or too aggressively.

Failure to engage can sometimes be due more to lack of communication / lack of "session zero" establishing a campaign and compatible characters that everyone is OK with. And while "my character wouldn't do that" is a flimsy excuse to refuse to engage with entire campaigns (barring the really extreme, in which case we're back to something getting missed before the campaign), it is a perfectly valid reason for a particular character to not engage in a particular act.

I agree that "not acting [in one particular situation]" is different from "not engaging the premise of the game". I was in a game on Monday (a one-shot) where we were in a (presumed) no-win situation--either kill innocents or be killed ourselves. My character, refused to kill the innocents but also refused to attack the party members who were slaughtering the people; instead keeping the brain-washed hordes of people surrounding us from attacking either side. Not a nice place to be, but he's not a super nice person. The rest of the session we were all working together as a (quite bumbling) team.

Note--the situation was screwy both from a DM perspective (it wasn't clear what options we had which led to the badness) and from a player standpoint (turns out attacking the leader would be enough to break the illusion and spare the innocents. Several party members went straight for the innocents, starting with a pregnant woman :smalleek:). It would have been much better off avoided on all sides but we didn't really realize we could until later.

[kyoryu]

I can understand this, but have to wonder. Failure is an inherent part of anything with randomization (or unknowns). Why go out of your way to increase the odds of failure? That is, what is the fun in creating a character with the intent of failing? That's what some seem to be wanting. Is it about creating the weakest character that can still succeed?

I wouldn't create a character with the intent of failing.

Let me put this in a different context. I play hockey. There are many leagues. If I play a lower league, I'll win a lot - as a goalie, I can have a disproportionate effect. If I play in a higher league, I'll lose a lot, for the same reason.

Why would I play in a middle league instead of the lower one, where I could win all the time? Because I wouldn't want to play in that lower league.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I wouldn't create a character with the intent of failing.

Let me put this in a different context. I play hockey. There are many leagues. If I play a lower league, I'll win a lot - as a goalie, I can have a disproportionate effect. If I play in a higher league, I'll lose a lot, for the same reason.

Why would I play in a middle league instead of the lower one, where I could win all the time? Because I wouldn't want to play in that lower league.

I understand that part just fine. The desire for a challenge is real, certainly.

But either I was misunderstanding the tenor of the comments that prompted the "Losing is Fun" sub-discussion or else your response (while true) is non-responsive. I was understanding people to desire playing incompetent characters. That is, consciously creating characters for TTRPGs that cannot (and will never be able to, due to player choices) succeed at the presented challenges, at least not in the same manner as the rest of the group. That I do not understand.

For me, the desire to be challenged manifests as a desire to seek out harder challenges, not to weaken myself so that my present ones are challenging. In game terms, that means playing a character that is competent by the standards of the system and intentionally seeking out situations that push the limits of their capabilities. In a randomly-generated game (such as most rogue-likes), playing on "hard mode" does involve crippling oneself as you have no control over what challenges are presented. In a TTRPG that's not a complete railroad, that constraint no longer holds.

[CharonsHelper]

I'll +1 PhoenixPhyre's last post.

Being challenged is fun. Much of what I enjoy about TTRPGs are the various tactical challenges, and I wouldn't play a monte haul campaign or one where the GM puts on kid gloves & fudges his dice so that I always win with ease.

But that's a very different thing from "losing is fun". It's not the losing/failure which is fun. Losing sucks and makes me grumpy. It's knowing that losing is a possibility which makes overcoming a challenge worthwhile, and the best way to know that is if it sometimes happens, but that doesn't keep the loss/failure itself from sucking any less.

That doesn't mean that I'm going to manacle my legs together before a race so that a 100 meter dash against a bunch of toddlers is a challenge.


Let me put this in a different context. I play hockey. There are many leagues. If I play a lower league, I'll win a lot - as a goalie, I can have a disproportionate effect. If I play in a higher league, I'll lose a lot, for the same reason.

Why would I play in a middle league instead of the lower one, where I could win all the time? Because I wouldn't want to play in that lower league.

I 100% agree. But if you WERE playing in the lower one, you wouldn't tie one hand behind your back to keep it from being too easy. That wouldn't make it more fun, and it'd make your teammates grumpy.

Instead, you should pick a league which is a challenge for your skill level and then try your hardest to win every game you can. Because while the challenge is fun, losing is not fun.

[Mordar]

I wouldn't create a character with the intent of failing.

Let me put this in a different context. I play hockey. There are many leagues. If I play a lower league, I'll win a lot - as a goalie, I can have a disproportionate effect. If I play in a higher league, I'll lose a lot, for the same reason.

Why would I play in a middle league instead of the lower one, where I could win all the time? Because I wouldn't want to play in that lower league.

This was pretty much a perfect fit for me. Sometimes winning a game just isn't as fun. Sometimes the score is far from the most important determinant of enjoyability.


I understand that part just fine. The desire for a challenge is real, certainly.

But either I was misunderstanding the tenor of the comments that prompted the "Losing is Fun" sub-discussion or else your response (while true) is non-responsive. I was understanding people to desire playing incompetent characters. That is, consciously creating characters for TTRPGs that cannot (and will never be able to, due to player choices) succeed at the presented challenges, at least not in the same manner as the rest of the group. That I do not understand.

For me, the desire to be challenged manifests as a desire to seek out harder challenges, not to weaken myself so that my present ones are challenging. In game terms, that means playing a character that is competent by the standards of the system and intentionally seeking out situations that push the limits of their capabilities. In a randomly-generated game (such as most rogue-likes), playing on "hard mode" does involve crippling oneself as you have no control over what challenges are presented. In a TTRPG that's not a complete railroad, that constraint no longer holds.

I think for me the phrase is better made as "Losing can be fun, too". Similarly, I'll never make pink ninjas or pacifist warriors...but I might want a blaster mage even though it has been empirically demonstrated that Build 932.5 is better at all instances. And I might make a character that isn't as well-suited to adventuring as others, but I will not go out of my way to make someone utterly inept or a complete drag on the group. Because the social aspects are important, and the social contract shouldn't be broken. Now, I might play the social bungler who hits like a truck...but that bungling will only come out at times that are appropriate to the game and social contract (so no, not with the King during negotiations, or the guildmaster who is about to give us the adventure hook). So maybe it is a matter of degrees.


I'll +1 PhoenixPhyre's last post.

Being challenged is fun. Much of what I enjoy about TTRPGs are the various tactical challenges, and I wouldn't play a monte haul campaign or one where the GM puts on kid gloves & fudges his dice so that I always win with ease.

But that's a very different thing from "losing is fun". It's not the losing/failure which is fun. Losing sucks and makes me grumpy. It's knowing that losing is a possibility which makes overcoming a challenge worthwhile, and the best way to know that is if it sometimes happens, but that doesn't keep the loss/failure itself from sucking any less.

That doesn't mean that I'm going to manacle my legs together before a race so that a 100 meter dash against a bunch of toddlers is a challenge.

Similarly, "Sometimes winning isn't that much fun" applies too...like you say, the Monty Haul campaign generally isn't very satisfying from the meat of the story perspective. But in rare occasions the group and situation can still make it enjoyable.


I 100% agree. But if you WERE playing in the lower one, you wouldn't tie one hand behind your back to keep it from being too easy. That wouldn't make it more fun, and it'd make your teammates grumpy.

Instead, you should pick a league which is a challenge for your skill level and then try your hardest to win every game you can.

We don't know why kyoryu didn't want to play in the lower league...it could be as you surmise, that the challenge is insufficient, or the pace of play is dull, or winning all the time gets boring. Or it could be, as I read it initially, that the environment isn't as fun, the friends aren't the same, the overall experience suffers. Winning isn't enough cause to want to play with a bunch of [insert funny name here].

If you are playing only for the challenge and improving your skill, it will always make sense to base the league decision solely on skill level. To me, this is the classic mountain climber ideal. But sports (for me it is baseball and basketball) are at least as much about the social elements (and no, I don't just mean chit chat) as the personal improvement. That doesn't mean I don't play hard and try to win. But it may mean I try to work on a different part of my game (much more applicable in basketball, of course) if I'm matched up against a noticeably weaker or less skilled defender. Sometimes that means shifting the spotlight to other players so that I don't dominate the ball and destroy the fun for the whole of the group. Similarly, if my match-up is someone better, I'll try to mitigate their advantage (which may involve shifting spotlight to other players too...but for a completely different reason). But barring the people being complete tools, I'm playing for fun. And that isn't impacted nearly so much by the final score as by the experience along the way. I'm not going to get an NBA contract playing ball at the park every Saturday, and no one on this forum is going to get scooped up to West Point based on their tactical acumen.

In summary, I try to abide by the social contracts while still having agency, and find that a well-fought loss and be as much or more fun than a victory, and the experience is based on much more than the final tally.

- M

[Max_Killjoy]

I'll +1 PhoenixPhyre's last post.

Being challenged is fun. Much of what I enjoy about TTRPGs are the various tactical challenges, and I wouldn't play a monte haul campaign or one where the GM puts on kid gloves & fudges his dice so that I always win with ease.

But that's a very different thing from "losing is fun". It's not the losing/failure which is fun. Losing sucks and makes me grumpy. It's knowing that losing is a possibility which makes overcoming a challenge worthwhile, and the best way to know that is if it sometimes happens, but that doesn't keep the loss/failure itself from sucking any less.

That doesn't mean that I'm going to manacle my legs together before a race so that a 100 meter dash against a bunch of toddlers is a challenge.



I 100% agree. But if you WERE playing in the lower one, you wouldn't tie one hand behind your back to keep it from being too easy. That wouldn't make it more fun, and it'd make your teammates grumpy.

Instead, you should pick a league which is a challenge for your skill level and then try your hardest to win every game you can. Because while the challenge is fun, losing is not fun.


Finding the right level of challenge within an RPG, getting the players and DM all on the same page and a page where they're all enjoying the game, is tricky.

A long-time fellow gamer, when DMing, will say "It's supposed to be a challenge!" in frustration when PCs take a pass on hooks he offers up because they just sound too damn much like total traps, or TPKs waiting to happen. Thing is, he has a habit of giving about half the relevant information, kinda assuming we should be getting the same mental picture he already has, and then his NPCs get evasive when pushed for more information or commitment, so combined with his desire to see the PCs "challenged", it always feels like we're sticking our necks out way too far.

[Talakeal]

I would oersonally say that the problem with losing is in absolutes. Always losing is no fun, but neither is always winning. For the game to have any meaning you have to be facing real challenges, and that means that sometime you will ose. Imo reacting to failure is the best opportunity for genuine character growth and introspection, and gives me emotional experiences that I dont normally get from the game, win win.

I would tend to agree that characters need to have some flaws and need to lose in fiction. I am straining to think of any stories where this is not the case. Can anyone give me some examples? Even the likes of Batman and Goku have character flaws they struggle to overcome and fail now and again.


Also, what is wrong with a character not contributing in a situation? In games I play in people are fighting for spotlight time, and I cnsider it gracious to let other people shine. You talk about improv comedy, but in actual ensemble movies you dont have every character in every scene, and even the characters who are in the scene often fade into the background to let other characters have their moments.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I would oersonally say that the problem with losing is in absolutes. Always losing is no fun, but neither is always winning. For the game to have any meaning you have to be facing real challenges, and that means that sometime you will ose. Imo reacting to failure is the best opportunity for genuine character growth and introspection, and gives me emotional experiences that I dont normally get from the game, win win.


Again, not responsive. No one claims that they need to always win, just that playing well (as in aiming for success) is the goal. Challenges certainly need to be actual challenges (although I am not really motivated by challenge myself). Failure is inevitable, why build characters or systems that increase the odds of failure?



I would tend to agree that characters need to have some flaws and need to lose in fiction. I am straining to think of any stories where this is not the case. Can anyone give me some examples? Even the likes of Batman and Goku have character flaws they struggle to overcome and fail now and again.


First, what works in authorial fiction may not work in a TTRPG. As an author you can guarantee the fail-fail-succeed arc. In a game (or in life), you can't. Failure usually leads to failure and death unless the challenges aren't really challenges.

Second, characters inevitably have flaws, because they're played by flawed humans. Thus, claiming that characters need flaws doesn't do anything. The trick is to create characters whose flaws help the game (provide hooks, allow for interesting situations for all to enjoy, etc). In a game about fighting giant spiders from hell, a flaw like arachnophobia isn't useful.



Also, what is wrong with a character not contributing in a situation? In games I play in people are fighting for spotlight time, and I cnsider it gracious to let other people shine. You talk about improv comedy, but in actual ensemble movies you dont have every character in every scene, and even the characters who are in the scene often fade into the background to let other characters have their moments.

I don't have a problem with one character fading into the background, but there's a difference between willingly ceding the spotlight and not being able to even participate in a raft of situations because of class/build/mechanical choices. One is a player choice, the other is a system flaw. Participating is not hogging the spotlight by the way--the spotlight can be on several characters at once. Lastly, it being someone else's time to shine does not mean that you have to be useless. There's a continuum between the two. Everyone can be competent in the encountered situations (but not overpoweringly so) while still having individual places to shine.

[Max_Killjoy]

I would oersonally say that the problem with losing is in absolutes. Always losing is no fun, but neither is always winning. For the game to have any meaning you have to be facing real challenges, and that means that sometime you will ose. Imo reacting to failure is the best opportunity for genuine character growth and introspection, and gives me emotional experiences that I dont normally get from the game, win win.

I would tend to agree that characters need to have some flaws and need to lose in fiction. I am straining to think of any stories where this is not the case. Can anyone give me some examples? Even the likes of Batman and Goku have character flaws they struggle to overcome and fail now and again.


The problem comes when a certain sort of creative writing or dramatic fiction or lit-crit snobbery seeps in and turns that into "Flaws and failure are what MAKE a character, so the more flaws and failures, the better (https://www.google.com/search?as_q=flaws+make+the+character)."

And sometimes, I don't want the story to get caught up in a widening gyre of navel-gazing and teeth-gnashing the character's flaws. One of the things I like about a certain sort of "crime procedural" is that it doesn't dwell on the personal faults and dramatic personal lives of the characters, it concentrates on the mystery at hand, on figuring out the crime and catching or otherwise bringing to justice those responsible. Certain documentary series lost their appeal for me when they went from being about the task at hand (catching crustaceans, making motorcycles, etc) and instead focused on the "interpersonal drama"... ie, people screaming at each other and breaking things and slamming doors over stupid crap.




Also, what is wrong with a character not contributing in a situation? In games I play in people are fighting for spotlight time, and I cnsider it gracious to let other people shine. You talk about improv comedy, but in actual ensemble movies you dont have every character in every scene, and even the characters who are in the scene often fade into the background to let other characters have their moments.


Let me try to clarify that. My concern is with:



The character who can't at least hold their own when the inability to do so will repeatedly put other characters at risk.
The character who can't at least keep their head on straight and defend themselves / find cover in a combat situation.
The character who is so bad at stealth that they have to be left behind by the rest of the party whenever they want to sneak past something, because that PC *WILL* fail, in a game where stealth will be happening routinely.
The character who is so utterly socially inept that they can't keep their mouth shut for 5 minutes even when it's life-or-death, or stop scratching their arse and burping during an audience with Her High Holy Eminence the Anointed Empress of Ninety-Nine Worlds.
The character who is so utterly clueless about technology in a game full of high technology that they keep randomly pressing buttons and making bad things happen / making things worse.
Somewhat related, the character who keeps doing the most dramatically or comically "appropriate" thing even when it blows up what the other characters are trying to accomplish at the time.





First, what works in authorial fiction may not work in a TTRPG. As an author you can guarantee the fail-fail-succeed arc. In a game (or in life), you can't. Failure usually leads to failure and death unless the challenges aren't really challenges.

Second, characters inevitably have flaws, because they're played by flawed humans. Thus, claiming that characters need flaws doesn't do anything. The trick is to create characters whose flaws help the game (provide hooks, allow for interesting situations for all to enjoy, etc). In a game about fighting giant spiders from hell, a flaw like arachnophobia isn't useful.


So true, on both counts. Here we're getting into why I so very much loath the notion that RPGs are just another form of fiction, and that they should function exactly like, and be approached exactly like, creating works of authorial fiction.

[CharonsHelper]

Finding the right level of challenge within an RPG, getting the players and DM all on the same page and a page where they're all enjoying the game, is tricky.

Oh - I agree that it can be tricky. As GM I generally err on the side of being too easy. I mean - the PCs are supposed to win most of the time, and as long as the challenge is enough to be engaging and burn through some resources it works.

And occasionally stomping something can be fun, especially if it's something which used to give you a hard time and let the players realize just how much more powerful they are now.

Plus - the players don't generally know exactly how hard/easy it is going in.


A long-time fellow gamer, when DMing, will say "It's supposed to be a challenge!" in frustration when PCs take a pass on hooks he offers up because they just sound too damn much like total traps, or TPKs waiting to happen. Thing is, he has a habit of giving about half the relevant information, kinda assuming we should be getting the same mental picture he already has, and then his NPCs get evasive when pushed for more information or commitment, so combined with his desire to see the PCs "challenged", it always feels like we're sticking our necks out way too far.

Yeah - that goes back to my "Losing sucks and makes me grumpy.". I like enough of a challenge where there is a chance of losing, but I'm not going to go into a situation which will do nothing but make me grumpy. (Or one which will make me Grumpy either - I don't want to babysit some unconscious pale girl.)

[Alcore]

To the title: No. I have read some good books on the warhammer 40k universe. It is clear to me that role playing can fit in a wargame.


I feel they must be divorced from each other to a point. I feel we have already reached that point, or the game has anyways. My soldiers are rarely soldiers and often suck at combat. A GM advertises a 'peaceful' game with little combat and always you have one Conan in the group. The rest bristle with weaponry.


Point two is one i get into the most trouble with. People expect me to pick the best option. If I don't then I'm not doing it right, I'm killing the team, etcetera. People argue with me, if I claim role playing i get bad words back. often i just don't know as pbp doesn't allow real life experience to accumulate.


As for downtime; that is where RP should pick up the slack. Don't like that answer? Sometimes it's just that simple.


Most of this is just a taste and expectation deal. D&D should keep it's roots; it sells it. Not financially but socially. MnM 3e tore away from D&D (and other similar systems) and made it's own nitch; but you can still see it's roots....

[Talakeal]

This article (http://lookrobot.co.uk/11-ways-better-roleplayer-safe-work-version/) has a great line on the subject of not engaging."

So, after reading the article I have to say that while I agree with much of what he says, overall he sounds a lot like my ex-DM. "Youre snowflake characters are but a neccesary evil which I must endure to fully express the glory that is my STORY! Behold its glory and despair ye mere players!"

Also, it seems like he wants a game where everyone is bored and no one has fun rather than risk any ine player stepping on anyone else's toes by having too much fun.

[Talakeal]

The problem comes when a certain sort of creative writing or dramatic fiction or lit-crit snobbery seeps in and turns that into "Flaws and failure are what MAKE a character, so the more flaws and failures, the better."

And sometimes, I don't want the story to get caught up in a widening gyre of navel-gazing and teeth-gnashing the character's flaws. One of the things I like about a certain sort of "crime procedural" is that it doesn't dwell on the personal faults and dramatic personal lives of the characters, it concentrates on the mystery at hand, on figuring out the crime and catching or otherwise bringing to justice those responsible. Certain documentary series lost their appeal for me when they went from being about the task at hand (catching crustaceans, making motorcycles, etc) and instead focused on the "interpersonal drama"... ie, people screaming at each other and breaking things and slamming doors over stupid crap.




Let me try to clarify that. My concern is with:



The character who can't at least hold their own when the inability to do so will repeatedly put other characters at risk.
The character who can't at least keep their head on straight and defend themselves / find cover in a combat situation.
The character who is so bad at stealth that they have to be left behind by the rest of the party whenever they want to sneak past something, because that PC *WILL* fail, in a game where stealth will be happening routinely.
The character who is so utterly socially inept that they can't keep their mouth shut for 5 minutes even when it's life-or-death, or stop scratching their arse and burping during an audience with Her High Holy Eminence the Anointed Empress of Ninety-Nine Worlds.
The character who is so utterly clueless about technology in a game full of high technology that they keep randomly pressing buttons and making bad things happen / making things worse.
Somewhat related, the character who keeps doing the most dramatically or comically "appropriate" thing even when it blows up what the other characters are trying to accomplish at the time.





So true, on both counts. Here we're getting into why I so very much loath the notion that RPGs are just another form of fiction, and that they should function exactly like, and be approached exactly like, creating works of authorial fiction.

Oh, ok. I thiught you were objecting to the idea of people playing non-combatant characters, when it really seems like you are more objecting to people who play Jar Jar / Tasselhoff.

[Max_Killjoy]

Oh, ok. I thiught you were objecting to the idea of people playing non-combatant characters, when it really seems like you are more objecting to people who play Jar Jar / Tasselhoff.


It is in part the latter.

It's also in part the former, but more broadly than just regarding combat -- what I object to is when any X is a regular part of the game, and the character starts out and stubbornly stays so inept at X that it endangers the rest of the party, either literally or in terms of their eventual success at overcoming the challenges they encounter.

[Mordar]

Oh, ok. I thiught you were objecting to the idea of people playing non-combatant characters, when it really seems like you are more objecting to people who play Jar Jar / Tasselhoff.

Hey, whoa! Tasslehoff Burrfoot was pretty darn important and contributed a ton to the story of Dragonlance in general, and the success of the Heroes of the Lance in particular. Just because 1,000,000 people played incorrect versions of him in games after the novels came out doesn't besmirch his role in those novels! :smallannoyed::smallwink:

But that Jar Jar cat can go stick his tongue in a light socket.

- M

[ImNotTrevor]

The problem comes when a certain sort of creative writing or dramatic fiction or lit-crit snobbery seeps in and turns that into "Flaws and failure are what MAKE a character, so the more flaws and failures, the better."


As someone who has been around a lot of writers and does some amateur fiction writing in his spare time, and reads a lot of writing advice...

Anyone claiming that flaws are what makes a character good is an idiot and doesn't actually understand what a Mary Sue is. Mary Sues who are poor helpless screwups with nothing going for them are widely considered exactly as bad a perfect paragons of skilledness. That you interact with the opposite of this opinion makes me think you may be spending an unusual amount of time around edgy 13-year-olds, who are the main core of people with this opinion.

Again, I'm firmly in the camp of "failure can be fun" or perhaps as "failure SHOULD be NOT-BORING." This is as well as I can word it.

If the party is fighting a spider, and loses, which is more fun:
They're all dead the end.

They wake up 2 hours later wrapped in spider silk with goblins rooting through their stuff.

Choose the fun one. Yes, this requires some improv ability. But it's way more interesting than a TPK.

Everyone got eaten by the Terrasque? Guess they're in a dungeon made of meat now.

Etc.

Failure should be not-boring.

[coffeeman]

Not every TTRPG follows that trend. Ryuutama is Oregon Trail, if it was told by Miyazaki. You're a group of people going from A to B and you're not Badass adventurers, you're like... a farmer, a merchant, a bright-eyed youth looking for adventure and a country girl who's going to join a convent and the game is basically the stuff that happens between A and B.

Does that make Ryuutama the superior game because it lacks the wargaming roots? Well, it's a poor game if you're looking to tell a story about adventurers dungeon delving and kicking in faces, but that's not what the game is about. I'm sure you can make it work with some tinkering, but that's largely missing the point in my opinion. D&D is way better at telling that story out of the box.



I came in here to recommend that very game, along with Golden Sky Stories, for those who are looking for an RPG that doesn't necessarily involve combat.

[Pelle]

Even the likes of Batman and Goku have character flaws they struggle to overcome and fail now and again.


I bolded what I feel is important. Having flaws is not an issue if you still try to succeed despite them.

Quote from Reiner Knizia about boardgames that I think can apply to RPGs as well:
'When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning'

meaning that as long as everyone tries to win, the game works and is fun to play, even if you lose. It's no fun winning or even playing a board game if your opponents actively tries to lose or simply don't care.

In an RPG, having your character actively trying to lose is not fun (to me). However, eventually losing can be fun as long as you have tried your best to avoid it!

[Jay R]

So, after reading the article I have to say that while I agree with much of what he says, overall he sounds a lot like my ex-DM. "Youre snowflake characters are but a neccesary evil which I must endure to fully express the glory that is my STORY! Behold its glory and despair ye mere players!"

Did we read the same article? His description starts with, "Job One for you as a player is to do stuff; you should be thinking, at all times – 'What are my goals? And what can I do to achieve them?' You are the stars of a very personal universe, ..."

He also says, "Your character is part of the story; this is not your character’s story." That is not stating or implying that characters are a necessary evil; it's making your character as important as any other, but no more so.

It is not true that either the individual character is the only thing that matters, or it doesn't matter at all. Both absurdly simplistic approaches are equally invalid. You're accusing him of pushing for one extreme, which is untrue. He merely pushed against the other one


Also, it seems like he wants a game where everyone is bored and no one has fun rather than risk any ine player stepping on anyone else's toes by having too much fun.

His advice for players would reduce the total amount of player/player drama and player/DM friction, thereby, in my estimation, increasing the total amount of fun.

The only reference to a snowflake character is tied to getting along with the group, and choosing character goals that won't prevent the other players from having fun as well.

It's not (in your words) "a game where everyone is bored and no one has fun rather than risk any ine player stepping on anyone else's toes by having too much fun." A better description is "a game where everyone is working together and everyone has fun rather than risk any one player stepping on anyone else's toes by having disruptive fun that prevents other players' fun."

His description of what a game should be matches virtually every great gaming experience with no player drama I've ever had, as a player or as a GM.

[Talakeal]

I bolded what I feel is important. Having flaws is not an issue if you still try to succeed despite them.

Quote from Reiner Knizia about boardgames that I think can apply to RPGs as well:
'When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning'

meaning that as long as everyone tries to win, the game works and is fun to play, even if you lose. It's no fun winning or even playing a board game if your opponents actively tries to lose or simply don't care.

In an RPG, having your character actively trying to lose is not fun (to me). However, eventually losing can be fun as long as you have tried your best to avoid it!

The problem with doing this most RPGS is that they dont have any (or atleast any good) mechanics for modelling personality flaws, and thus it is up to the player to set their own limits.

It is much easier in single author fiction where you can play up the character's struggles and weaknesses but still have them succeed (or lose) through author FIAT.

[Pelle]

Good point. It can be tricky to find the right balance. I guess it just hurts immersion for me if the game becomes too slapstick. Having a penalty in wisdom checks is enough of a flaw for me, it's not necessary to additionally insult kings and so on.

[Koo Rehtorb]

Flaws make a character interesting. But they're not the only thing that makes a character interesting, and they don't have to be crippling flaws.

[Talakeal]

Did we read the same article? His description starts with, "Job One for you as a player is to do stuff; you should be thinking, at all times – 'What are my goals? And what can I do to achieve them?' You are the stars of a very personal universe, ..."

He also says, "Your character is part of the story; this is not your character’s story." That is not stating or implying that characters are a necessary evil; it's making your character as important as any other, but no more so.

It is not true that either the individual character is the only thing that matters, or it doesn't matter at all. Both absurdly simplistic approaches are equally invalid. You're accusing him of pushing for one extreme, which is untrue. He merely pushed against the other one



His advice for players would reduce the total amount of player/player drama and player/DM friction, thereby, in my estimation, increasing the total amount of fun.

The only reference to a snowflake character is tied to getting along with the group, and choosing character goals that won't prevent the other players from having fun as well.

It's not (in your words) "a game where everyone is bored and no one has fun rather than risk any ine player stepping on anyone else's toes by having too much fun." A better description is "a game where everyone is working together and everyone has fun rather than risk any one player stepping on anyone else's toes by having disruptive fun that prevents other players' fun."

His description of what a game should be matches virtually every great gaming experience with no player drama I've ever had, as a player or as a GM.

It does not match my gaming experience.

I have had a lot of really great games with lots of in character drama where the DM wasn't really needed, my Mage group, for example, was the best game I was ever in and we all had very strong characters who we RPed first and foremost and who often had conflicting goals, and I often commented that though our DM was super great, we didn't really need him as we could spend the entire session simply talking in character and have a great time, and our conflicting character goals would make drama without needing a DM or PiS to make artificial conflict.

I have also had plenty of bad games that died when people just tried to go along with the flow and it made for a boring and bland game where nothing happens and we end up forgetting about it between sessions.

I agree that he doesn't flat out say that his awesome story is more important than the player's or their characters, but I have heard a lot of bad DMs use that sort of language in person to mean "You are the audience for my railroad. Don't get in the way!"

Honestly, reading the article more closely, he sounds a lot like good old Ron Edwards. This article really seems to boil down to "Narrative games uber alles, simulationist and gamist players are having bad-wrong-fun and should be excluded from the hobby lest they ruin our good time,"

I personally prefer elements of all tree, but I definitely prefer simulationist first, gamist a distant second, and narrativist a distant third. So to me a story should be descriptive rather than prescriptive, it is mostly an emergent property of simulationist and gamist play that only occasionally needs a little nudge upfront. I personally find that people coming into the game with expectations of where the story should go and trying to make it happen that way are a cause for a lot more conflict than letting it emerge organically. I know as a DM a lot of my biggest mistakes came from having a really cool scene set up and then trying to force the players into a position where they can observe it play out the way I have imagined.

But that is just my opinion, I am not going to write an article that goes out of its way to insult and berate people with different priorities and explain to them why they are problem players who are doing it wrong.

I thought about writing out a point by point rebuttal of his article, but then I realized I probably shouldn't derail this thread with an eleven topic analysis of a five year old article on a different site that is only tangentially related to the topic at hand.


Also, it is kind of weird and hypocritical that he hates kender and their players but then praises players who go out of their way to get other characters involved in their adventures when it would be easier to everyone involved not to do so.



It is in part the latter.

It's also in part the former, but more broadly than just regarding combat -- what I object to is when any X is a regular part of the game, and the character starts out and stubbornly stays so inept at X that it endangers the rest of the party, either literally or in terms of their eventual success at overcoming the challenges they encounter.

If someone doesn't want to participate in a certain part of the game, why should you begrudge them that? For example, I have plenty of players who only show up for the combat and just zone out for the talky bits and vice versa, and these people typically make their character in such a way that they are focused around doing the things they like. Why begrudge them that and force them to contribute to parts of the hobby which they don't personally enjoy but are still willing to be an active audience and somewhat passive participant to while still remaining a part of the group and contributing to the parts of the hobby they do enjoy?

Now, the Game System might have something to do with this. A game that doesn't allow people to contribute in combat without blasting away at the enemy (like that time I tried to play a bard in stupid 4E grrrr.....) might make this a problem, but many games allow for a support role in combat that still helps the team.

It is also partly the DM's fault, if they are doing tightly balanced combats but not taking into account individual abilities, that is one them. If, for example, I have a group of four warriors and a civilian and I tightly balance my fights CR so that it takes 5 warriors to make it a fair fight I am doing it wrong.


Now, in character, I can see getting frustrated about a party member's lack of combat skills and berating them or urging them to pick up training / change their ways. But, ideally, you still have a reason to travel with them. In most games if someone is helpless in combat they are really good in other areas, and if those other areas are things you need to do your missions (again DM responsibility) then you still put up with it. Imagine a heist movie where one of the guys on the team is a nerdy little computer hacker or safe cracker and the big burly macho gun guys on the team have the job of getting them past the guards so they can do their work in peace. Honestly, you probably wouldn't want such a character to participate in the combat as if they step out of cover during a fire fight to take a shot they are more likely to be shot in return and taken out thus compromising the mission.

Or, even if they have no useful skills, make up an RP reason. Maybe they are playing your kid sister or your girlfriend, and you recognize that they are in danger with you, but they are soft and innocent and it is a dangerous world, they depend on you and wouldn't make it on their own. So you bring them along, do your best to keep them safe, and when the fighting starts you tell them to keep their head down and try to stay safe while you do what has to be done.



Hey, whoa! Tasslehoff Burrfoot was pretty darn important and contributed a ton to the story of Dragonlance in general, and the success of the Heroes of the Lance in particular. Just because 1,000,000 people played incorrect versions of him in games after the novels came out doesn't besmirch his role in those novels! :smallannoyed::smallwink:

But that Jar Jar cat can go stick his tongue in a light socket.

- M

I actually really like Tasslehoff. But you do have to admit that, while he did save the day more than once, he got the party into more problems than he got them out of. But yeah, the kender does attract a certain annoying type of problem player at the table.

[CharonsHelper]

I agree that he doesn't flat out say that his awesome story is more important than the player's or their characters, but I have heard a lot of bad DMs use that sort of language in person to mean "You are the audience for my railroad. Don't get in the way!"

Honestly, reading the article more closely, he sounds a lot like good old Ron Edwards. This article really seems to boil down to "Narrative games uber alles, simulationist and gamist players are having bad-wrong-fun and should be excluded from the hobby lest they ruin our good time,"

From this and your other threads, Talakeal, I think that you have a tendency to read people you don't know well in the absolute worst light possible.

Because I certainly didn't read any of that in the article AT ALL.


Also, it is kind of weird and hypocritical that he hates kender and their players but then praises players who go out of their way to get other characters involved in their adventures when it would be easier to everyone involved not to do so.

Is there anyone who doesn't hate kender? I was under the impression that they held a place in D&D nerd-dom similar to Jar Jar's in Star Wars. Hate of them (Tasslehoff notwithstanding) is the common ground that we can all sing Kumbaya on.

[Max_Killjoy]

Flaws make a character interesting. But they're not the only thing that makes a character interesting, and they don't have to be crippling flaws.


True, but it's a shame we can't get more of the lit-fic crowd and those they influence to realize that malignantly useless protagonists are not the height "realism".

[FreddyNoNose]

Hey, whoa! Tasslehoff Burrfoot was pretty darn important and contributed a ton to the story of Dragonlance in general, and the success of the Heroes of the Lance in particular. Just because 1,000,000 people played incorrect versions of him in games after the novels came out doesn't besmirch his role in those novels! :smallannoyed::smallwink:

But that Jar Jar cat can go stick his tongue in a light socket.

- M
Well said! The Kender hatred is strong around these parts.

[Talakeal]

From this and your other threads, Talakeal, I think that you have a tendency to read people you don't know well in the absolute worst light possible.

Because I certainly didn't read any of that in the article AT ALL.

Really? Because he flat out says repeatedly that story trumps character and people who value character integrity of drama are problem players and/or playing the game wrong.

Which is his point of view, but not one I share. All of my bests games, both as a PC and a DM, have been character driven with the plot as a mere backdrop. Heck, most of my favorite books and movies are the same way.

Which is a fine opinion for him to have, I just don't agree with it. But he writes the article going out of his way to be belligerent (mostly for effect), which is going to provoke stronger reactions.


In my experience DM's who go on and on about how great the story is are just using it to justify their railroading. Heck, I have had multiple people accuse me of doing the same thing as a game designer, that by putting my Setting chapter before my Character Creation chapter I am implicitly telling them that their stories will never be as important as my own.



Edit: I just realized that the linked article is actually a highly abridged version of the original, rather than merely censoring the profanity the clean version uses much milder language all around and cuts out a lot of the meat of the original. So I might actually be responding to things that are in the original but not in the article that was actually linked.

[Max_Killjoy]

Really? Because he flat out says repeatedly that story trumps character and people who value character integrity of drama are problem players and/or playing the game wrong.

Which is his point of view, but not one I share. All of my bests games, both as a PC and a DM, have been character driven with the plot as a mere backdrop. Heck, most of my favorite books and movies are the same way.

Which is a fine opinion for him to have, I just don't agree with it. But he writes the article going out of his way to be belligerent (mostly for effect), which is going to provoke stronger reactions.


In my experience DM's who go on and on about how great the story is are just using it to justify their railroading. Heck, I have had multiple people accuse me of doing the same thing as a game designer, that by putting my Setting chapter before my Character Creation chapter I am implicitly telling them that their stories will never be as important as my own.



Edit: I just realized that the linked article is actually a highly abridged version of the original, rather than merely censoring the profanity the clean version uses much milder language all around and cuts out a lot of the meat of the original. So I might actually be responding to things that are in the original but not in the article that was actually linked.



I should read the original, then -- because maybe it contains what I see hints of in the abridged version.

The abridged version appears to be giving some fairly good advice if the advice is taken in moderation, but the wording hints at a far more aggressive and counter-productive stance than that.

There are a couple of places where a generous reading chalks it up to writing style, but a cynical reading really does leave the abridged article coming across as "sit down, shut up, and know your character's narrative role, pleb". Or as you put it, the Edwardian assertion that "your character is a nobody".


E: IMO, there should be a setting summary, at least, before character creation. Characters, like people, don't come into existence in a vacuum, and players should be making their characters with the setting in mind.

[ImNotTrevor]

True, but it's a shame we can't get more of the lit-fic crowd and those they influence to realize that malignantly useless protagonists are not the height "realism".

I'm still unsure of how many authors you think are doing this or preaching this outside of strange corners of Deviantart.

Usually a "helpless" protagonist is meant to be an easy association for a reader entering a new world. They are disoriented, unsure, and learning a lot of information. The reader, incidentally, is in a very similar position. It's a pretty good way to ease a reader into a new world, and the character's arc will usually involve increasing mastery of their world. The two biggest examples I can think of come from literature for adolescents:
Harry Potter and Eragon.
Aside from subjective quality discussions, these two characters have "plucky underdog: the character arc" for the first book and improve from there. Using this sort of structure in TRPGs has been a thing since Gygax days.

Parallels to literary structures are not unwelcome, in my mind, because while TRPGs create (or imo should create) and Emergent Narrative, the language of story is already there for our use and it's not exactly a stretch in most cases. (We use terms like Character, plot, plot-twist, scene, dialogue, character development/growth, and others that far more often describe literary ideas.)

Sure, some low-talent writers substitute flaws for actually interesting character development. I'm just not sure if I've seen anyone declare in no uncertain terms that More Flaws = better characters anywhere but in edgy teenagers. I know people who personally prefer deeply flawed characters, but none that declared this as objectively better. I'm genuinely interested to know where you're finding these people that are supposedly everywhere.

(I suppose if you count dime-novel fantasy and the like then I could see Sentimentality being the real big pusher, leading to comically stupid flaws and characters who stagnate. But that's a different problem based on laziness, not perceived superiority.)

[Tanarii]

I think another thing we have to break away from as an industry (and again, this is largely an issue because we're a nerd hobby) is this idea that we can't make mistakes. Don't get me wrong, if you find you're making a mistake, and it could make things better to correct it, then by all means correct it. But if you're having fun, and you're playing your games and everything is going swimmingly, mistakes or no, it doesn't matter. What matters is you're gaming. Mistakes are house rules, nothing more, nothing less.Mistakes are things that negatively impact the gaming experience. If you then write them off as, or turn them into, house-rules, which is unfortunately common, then you're not making things better. You're making things worse.

[ImNotTrevor]

Mistakes are things that negatively impact the gaming experience. If you then write them off as, or turn them into, house-rules, which is unfortunately common, then you're not making things better. You're making things worse.

We discovered soft T-rex tissue in a fossil because an intern made a mistake.

We have the Slinky due to a mistake. (Obviously one of the world's most important inventions)

Some of my favorite gaming moment came from us making mistakes, figuring that was probably wrong, and deciding to just roll with it this one time. (Or, when we discovered our ruling made more sense, we tossed the old rule out and used our quickfix instead.)

Defining mistakes as things that worsen the gaming experience means that some rules are mistakes. Meaning that doing it CORRECTLY can be a mistake.

Not sure this is the right way to go.

[Tanarii]

Defining mistakes as things that worsen the gaming experience means that some rules are mistakes. Meaning that doing it CORRECTLY can be a mistake./shrug. Yes. So what?

Of course, "worsen the gaming experience" will mean completely different things to different people. :smallbiggrin:

[ImNotTrevor]

/shrug. Yes. So what?
Probably the part where Mistake has a generally accepted meaning and doing something correctly being a mistake is directly the opposite of that definition. :P


Of course, "worsen the gaming experience" will mean completely different things to different people. :smallbiggrin:

Sure. Just that within the context of the quote he clearly means "mistake" to mean "enforcing a rule in a manner inconsistent with what it says to do. Aka incorrectly."

Broadening the term "mistake" to be anything that worsens the gaming experience makes the distinction between GM mistakes and poor game design meaningless.

[Aotrs Commander]

I consider myself a wargamer first and a roleplayer second, and a good chunk of my group are the same way.

n my weekly games I run a hideous mutant hybird of 3.4/PF labeled 3.Aotrs, running, typically adventure paths (and previously, convcerted AD&D modules, as even I no longer have the tiem to write a whole weekly campaign).

In general, being APs, this is fairly heavily focussed on combat.

When I write my own adventures for our day quests, I tend to find I end up writing a typically different sort of game.

About half of these games are in Rolemaster, which does not lend itself well to the same level of tactical thinking and combat as D&D. In fact, a great deal of my RM games (in sc-fi) ended up being very explore-y, with relatively little combat.

I have started a new RM party a couple of years ago, and went the whole hog - the party are in fact a (coincidentally) evil undead version of Stargate SG-1. The characters were all designes such that all of them (while they were expected to be able to ight when required, at least to a degree) had plenty of skills for doing other things and the whole thing works really rather well.

The party i am currently writing a day quest for is another Evil party, this time in D&D and basically a dirty black ops team for the Dark Lord. Again, while they are expected to be fairly combat capable, the PCs were also created to be capable of doing that sort of undercover work - and unlike the weekly adventures, combat is very mcuh a secondary function. (In fact, aside from them melting the face off that one dude, I don't think they had a fight that entire last adventure and they executed (which is not actually an inaccurate turn of phrase!) their mission goals with absolute perfection.

Part of this bias is, of course, that combats take quite a lot of the limited time a day session has, so I try not to have more than one or two at most, and there is the chance there could be none at all.



So to some extent, if you want to play a game where combat is a lesser role, you need "only" to change the fundemental basis of the campaign. the Umbra Vigiles, as mention above are D&D characters in the D&D world, but are very far removed in the sort of game they play in. You could agre that other systems might do the job better than D&D, but given as the camapign world was developed as a D&D one, it would be more faff than it was worth to change it around.

(And I'd only use Rolemaster then. I don't believe in using a different game with different game rules for the sake of it (and usually very underwhelmed by other sets). If I have to adjudicate primarily on the fly and make up difficulty targets, why am I paying money for it, I always say. I don't really care for fanciness is conflict resolution; the dice are there to do a job and the roll of a single dice (two if you're using percentiles) is plenty enough to do the job, as far as I'm concerned.)



You can legitimate me accuse me of being a DM who creates essentially a module for the players to play (and I have my player's characters fit to the game, not vice-versa), but given that I am by necessity, a prep-heavy DM (typically, a day quest file runs to the length of about 10-12 pages of type 10 font, sometimes in two columns), that's the price of admission. My games, I'm sure. would not be to the tastes of everyone, but considering people still turn up week after week after twenty five years, (and I have more players than spaces for my day games!) I can't do be doing too much wrong...!

(For the very brave and insane I actually did a riduclously long post-up (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?462170-The-Myst-Project-Aotrs-Myst-Exploratory-Team-Mission-001) of the first two-part (i.e. two day quest) adventure for the aforementioned Evil Lich SG-1 team on the forums. Granted, as this was the set-up for the party of the next twenty or so real years, it took a little more set-up than usual, but the level is about where I set pretty much all of the games I make myself. Lots of exploration and Finding Out Stuff, with a bit of combat occasionally.

The party they are going to "replace" will have existed for twenty-two years by the time I do their last adventure for my 40th in a couple of year's time. Unquiely - and let's see if anyone can to this - one of the characters is onto her third player and had achieved the feat of being older (in real years) than her actualm player. (The character belonged to my eldest sister, passed to my youngest sister when she took it up and finally has passed to my eldest sister's daughter, now my youngest sister's son has been born...!))

[1337 b4k4]

Mistakes are things that negatively impact the gaming experience. If you then write them off as, or turn them into, house-rules, which is unfortunately common, then you're not making things better. You're making things worse.

To be fair, I did say if things would be made better by fixing it, then fix it. My concern is that there is A LOT of pressure on GMs to perform perfectly, or at least to perform better than any of the players at the table. To me this is a detriment to our hobby. Playing the role of the GM is a vital part of the hobby and we should give just as much leeway to GMs as we do players to not have system mastery. To that end, not putting such a heavy emphasis on doing things "right" would go a long way towards encouraging more people to try their hand at GMing and possibly even do so on an infrequent basis even if they don't do it regularly. The pre-AD&D attitude (and the non TSR Owner Gary Gygax attitude) of "do what fits for your table and your world" is infinitely more welcoming to new GMs than the later eras of "you must play by all of these rules, or you aren't Doing It Right™". GMs (and new GMs especially) are going to make mistakes, sometimes they won't harm anything, sometimes they will. I feel experienced players have an obligation to distinguish between the two, and also to know when it's important to bring it up right now at the table (IMO almost never) and when it's better to take the GM aside after the fact for an FYI, and likewise when it's important to remind them that it's not the way the rules say, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have to change it. It can be a Bob Ross Happy Accident instead.

[Tanarii]

Probably the part where Mistake has a generally accepted meaning and doing something correctly being a mistake is directly the opposite of that definition. :P

Sure. Just that within the context of the quote he clearly means "mistake" to mean "enforcing a rule in a manner inconsistent with what it says to do. Aka incorrectly."

Broadening the term "mistake" to be anything that worsens the gaming experience makes the distinction between GM mistakes and poor game design meaningless.
Considering I'm the one that made the original comment and used the term mistake, I'm just telling you what I meant.


To be fair, I did say if things would be made better by fixing it, then fix it. My concern is that there is A LOT of pressure on GMs to perform perfectly, or at least to perform better than any of the players at the table. To me this is a detriment to our hobby. Playing the role of the GM is a vital part of the hobby and we should give just as much leeway to GMs as we do players to not have system mastery. To that end, not putting such a heavy emphasis on doing things "right" would go a long way towards encouraging more people to try their hand at GMing and possibly even do so on an infrequent basis even if they don't do it regularly. The pre-AD&D attitude (and the non TSR Owner Gary Gygax attitude) of "do what fits for your table and your world" is infinitely more welcoming to new GMs than the later eras of "you must play by all of these rules, or you aren't Doing It Right™". GMs (and new GMs especially) are going to make mistakes, sometimes they won't harm anything, sometimes they will. I feel experienced players have an obligation to distinguish between the two, and also to know when it's important to bring it up right now at the table (IMO almost never) and when it's better to take the GM aside after the fact for an FYI, and likewise when it's important to remind them that it's not the way the rules say, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have to change it. It can be a Bob Ross Happy Accident instead.Okay fair enough. And sorry if I was argumentative. My primary purpose was to tell you what I meant, since it didn't seem like you understood. But I also tend to go into 'argumentative' mode in responding to comments.

I agree that new DMs can be overly focused on getting the rules 'right'. But IMX that's far more common in the middle phase of player and DM evolution. IMX we mostly tend to go through 3 phases:
1) Wild West because we don't know the rules but holy crap this is FUN!
2) Slavishly sticking to the rules
3) understanding the purpose of rules, and modifying them or disregarding them if they don't work for us. And realizing we missed some important ones that would have improved the game play experience.

Of course some people go to 2b) rules are for suckers! We don't want no rules in our talky-time gaming sessions! Real players talky-time their characters, they don't roll dice! :smallwink: