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Thinker
2019-02-07, 08:59 AM
Just as the title suggests, what gameplay elements do you enjoy in an RPG? What elements are required?

Max_Killjoy
2019-02-07, 04:17 PM
Just as the title suggests, what gameplay elements do you enjoy in an RPG? What elements are required?

Could you expand on what you mean by "elements", or give some examples?

Particle_Man
2019-02-07, 05:21 PM
Combat. I get bored if there is no combat.

Man_Over_Game
2019-02-07, 07:01 PM
Just as the title suggests, what gameplay elements do you enjoy in an RPG? What elements are required?

I want it to be tactical, but in a way that being impractical is incentivized. I actually enjoy playing with "My Guy" sort of players. Why can't the Barbarian dash headfirst into battle when it makes the most sense for him to do?

For players to be fully immersed into their characters, they need to be allowed to do stupid things that those characters would do, and doing so should only impact the dynamics of the characters, not the players. But since players are sentimental about their characters as an investment, any unneeded risk feels like an attack on their belongings.

Which is why I enjoy systems that reward players for intentionally being stupid jerks. That's not saying they always need to be stupid or a jerk, or that they should always be incentivized for doing so, but it should at least be considered. In something like DnD, being reckless might get you kicked out of a table. However, in a low-risk high-narrative game like Fate, the entire point is to flesh out the story and not have any basis in tactical combat and sometimes acting out is part of the fun.

I'd like to see a game that combines both aspects; a tactical game that has bonuses for being stupid, whether that be something like a Vengeance bonus you reward the teammates you just betrayed, or some sort of Luck point that lets you change how things go (since you likely just made everything go south).

Hackulator
2019-02-08, 12:31 AM
Honestly, I love almost all of it. I enjoy do the crunchy building and optimizing. I enjoy roleplaying. I enjoy solivng mysteries. I enjoy interacting with and competing with other people in a manner that is almost never possible in real life. I enjoy the tactical aspect of combat when playing with miniatures. I enjoy worldbuilding. I enjoy getting cool magic items. I enjoy dying a heroic death. I enjoy running a game for my paraplegic friend so he can jump from rooftop to rooftop, even if only in his mind. I enjoy helping my friend get over his arachnophobia by playing with him in a game where he is playing a character who turns into a giant spider. From time to time, I enjoy brutally murdering a PC who has gotten on my character's nerves in one way or another.

Yea, pretty much all of it, to one degree or another.

Thinker
2019-02-08, 07:54 AM
Could you expand on what you mean by "elements", or give some examples?

What aspects of an RPG do you like? Combat? Social encounters (in-character)? Socializing with friends? Investigations? etc. Following up on that, are there any particular mechanics that you like playing with? Flipping it around, which elements and mechanics do you really dislike?

Thinker
2019-02-08, 08:01 AM
Combat. I get bored if there is no combat.
So what do you do when you are between combats? Do you just kind of zone out? What do you like about combat?


I want it to be tactical, but in a way that being impractical is incentivized. I actually enjoy playing with "My Guy" sort of players. Why can't the Barbarian dash headfirst into battle when it makes the most sense for him to do?

For players to be fully immersed into their characters, they need to be allowed to do stupid things that those characters would do, and doing so should only impact the dynamics of the characters, not the players. But since players are sentimental about their characters as an investment, any unneeded risk feels like an attack on their belongings.

Which is why I enjoy systems that reward players for intentionally being stupid jerks. That's not saying they always need to be stupid or a jerk, or that they should always be incentivized for doing so, but it should at least be considered. In something like DnD, being reckless might get you kicked out of a table. However, in a low-risk high-narrative game like Fate, the entire point is to flesh out the story and not have any basis in tactical combat and sometimes acting out is part of the fun.

I'd like to see a game that combines both aspects; a tactical game that has bonuses for being stupid, whether that be something like a Vengeance bonus you reward the teammates you just betrayed, or some sort of Luck point that lets you change how things go (since you likely just made everything go south).
Does your enjoyment extend to areas outside of combat? What do you think of a thief trying to lift things from the merchant while talking to him? Or a priest preparing less useful spells?


Honestly, I love almost all of it. I enjoy do the crunchy building and optimizing. I enjoy roleplaying. I enjoy solivng mysteries. I enjoy interacting with and competing with other people in a manner that is almost never possible in real life. I enjoy the tactical aspect of combat when playing with miniatures. I enjoy worldbuilding. I enjoy getting cool magic items. I enjoy dying a heroic death. I enjoy running a game for my paraplegic friend so he can jump from rooftop to rooftop, even if only in his mind. I enjoy helping my friend get over his arachnophobia by playing with him in a game where he is playing a character who turns into a giant spider. From time to time, I enjoy brutally murdering a PC who has gotten on my character's nerves in one way or another.

Yea, pretty much all of it, to one degree or another.
That's cool. Which crunchy bits (or systems) do you enjoy playing with for these sorts of games?

Zaharra
2019-02-08, 10:24 AM
Social interactions with NPCs, between PCs, even/especially casual conversations that aren't about saving the town from demons but just learning bits an peices of who a person is.

I really like romantic subplots too, watching NPC/NPC stories unfold, helping them along sometimes if needed. Social connections are the primary motivations for most of my characters, my sorceress stands before the ancient black dragon, unbowed, because her children, husband and friends are in the city the monster is set upon. Even if she dies, she dies with purpose.

I find combat to be the least interesting thing one could ever do in a fantasy world, but if there's a good reason for it I can get into it. If I need to ask "why are we here?" I'm just not into it.

Max_Killjoy
2019-02-08, 11:58 AM
What aspects of an RPG do you like? Combat? Social encounters (in-character)? Socializing with friends? Investigations? etc. Following up on that, are there any particular mechanics that you like playing with? Flipping it around, which elements and mechanics do you really dislike?


Mechanics first, I like associated mechanics, and largely dislike disassociated mechanics. (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17231/roleplaying-games/dissociated-mechanics-a-brief-primer). I greatly prefer point-build, and dislike levels, classes, and most attempts to bake "archetypes" and "niches" into the game mechanics.

I prefer being able to create the character I actually have in my head, largely complete, and then go with slow and "shallow" progression, as opposed to being forced to make a seed of a character and then undergo longterm "steep" progression to finally get to the character on paper to match the character in my head. I have functional zero interest in coming-of-age or zero-to-hero or journey-of-self-discovery "arcs".

As for gameplay, I like a mix of things. Combat, exploration, investigation, mysteries, intrigue, etc. I like believable, memorable, three-dimensional NPCs (and setting details). Relationships, romance, etc, are fine and can be fun... so long as there is absolutely ZERO contrived drama (that is, drama created for its own sake and/or in violation of established character).

I like making decisions in-character, but I know my personal limits and how hard it is for me to do things I know are counter-productive or ignorant, and I'm a setting details junky who reflexively gobbles up information about the "game world"... so I stick to smart and knowledgeable characters even if that costs "character build" resources that could go elsewhere, so I don't have to choose between "savvy" and "in-character" as often.

The fact that I'm a setting details junky also ties back to explain why I have no patience for starting off as a raw green character... I'm not going to pretend I don't know what a hobgoblin or a Brujah or an LGM or whatever are over and over and over each time I start a new character just to stay "in character" until they're "supposed to" know what those things are. Ugh.

Slipperychicken
2019-02-08, 12:16 PM
Relating to characters and events in their lives. For this reason some of my best games have taken place in settings with approximately-modern technology and either in my home-country or within a similar culture. That kind of background lets us know what the characters' lives look like, and we can both contextualize their struggles and infer many setting elements without being explicitly told about them.

'Slice of Life' segments, where we walk through typical days (or not-so-typical days) in the characters' lives. This can be quite entertaining especially if the characters are eccentric or have exceptional circumstances. It helps shape roleplay a lot and gives us a window into their minds.

Noting the development (or degradation) of relationships between characters. In shadowrun I found it tremendously satisfying to talk with stranger NPCs, add them as contacts, and note their loyalty/connection rating. Writing it down makes me feel like I made a friend who won't vanish the moment the GM's attention wanders. Likewise it can be amusing to know when we've annoyed people, terrified them, or otherwise pushed them away.

Metagame tokens to reward good or amusing roleplay. Luck, willpower, inspiration, edge, fate-points, that sort of thing. The GM can award them to players who amuse him, they must not be stockpiled endlessly (a single-digit cap on the number is quite sufficient), and they must not directly confer any permanent advantage.

Where metagame rewards exist (experience, glory, karma, etc), and for advancement-points especially, character-sheets dedicated to recording the exploits which earned those points. There a player must write down the reason why he got the points (i.e. 5 karma for 'winning an arm-wrestling tournament involving several hundred soldiers', 2 karma for 'convincing stacey's mom that we really were studying instead of fighting vampires'). That gives a lot of nostalgia/sentimental value looking back at the character's accomplishments.

Where combat exists, having a number of options which apply to 'basic' actions. That is, in the normal course of trying to hurt an enemy, without specifying anything beyond striking a foe, one may gain the option to topple him over, direct harm at a specific body part, attempt to snatch his weapon away, and so on. Mythras does this quite well with its 'Special Effects' and the method of selecting them.

Hackulator
2019-02-09, 02:37 AM
That's cool. Which crunchy bits (or systems) do you enjoy playing with for these sorts of games?

For the crunchy systems stuff I've never played a game more engaging than 3.5/PF. However, I was recently introduced to M&M 3rd Ed and while it is clearly based off 3.5, it has a power design system that is really awesome and totally different and may match or even surpass 3.5.

Man_Over_Game
2019-02-14, 04:33 PM
Does your enjoyment extend to areas outside of combat? What do you think of a thief trying to lift things from the merchant while talking to him? Or a priest preparing less useful spells?


Absolutely! Generally, out of combat is where we'll see these kind of events in something like DnD, when there is no "right answer". Since the goal is open-ended, there's no real way to fail. Even getting into trouble can have ways of making the story more interesting. Now, it does require a bit of a good DM to do properly.

Many DMs may not throttle a combat scenario based on the out-of-combat decisions a group of players make. Just because you have a pacifistic diplomat in your party that managed to end a war with words and is capable of charming almost anyone doesn't mean that a DM is going to care that you're effectively one less combatant against a band of raiders. Or the DM doesn't know how a pacifist can provide in a combat scenario, so they don't make any changes to accommodate the player (like making the Orcs susceptible to the diplomat's persuasiveness, or making some of the diplomat's many allies in the area). Most DMs I know would just say "You made your bed, sleep in it wimp" in kinder words.

I wish that combat was taken the same way as the narrative, where there is no "wrong answer". Obviously, you should avoid death, but often times combat just comes down to dealing/resisting as much damage as possible, rather than doing anything interesting. Damage should be the OPTION, not the GOAL.

Particle_Man
2019-02-14, 05:25 PM
So what do you do when you are between combats? Do you just kind of zone out? What do you like about combat?

I sometimes try a little talking to NPCs but that can get dull. Often I wait for the next combat. I like being able to use my cool powers (or sheer physical might) to do stuff in combat, which may include, but is not limited to, hitting (and possibly killing) someone on the other side.

Oh, and loot - that can sometimes be fun, if it gives me something that makes me better in combat.

That said, I also sometimes enjoy the minigame of chargen (including planning out a character 4 dimensionally).

Slipperychicken
2019-02-15, 10:20 AM
So what do you do when you are between combats? Do you just kind of zone out? What do you like about combat?

Does your enjoyment extend to areas outside of combat? What do you think of a thief trying to lift things from the merchant while talking to him? Or a priest preparing less useful spells?

I don't mean to speak for those two in particular, but many roleplayers' experiences are shaped by games which lack adequate mechanical support for areas other than combat.

If a reader flips through his game manual, sees all the cool powers and thoughtfully-constructed mechanical support and detailed guidance in the combat section, and then goes to a social-interaction section containing the professional equivalent of "just roleplay it lmao you don't need rules to talk with people, maybe roll a die and add your number, or not, who cares", then it's only natural that he will gravitate to the combat and see it as more interesting. That kind of mechanical emphasis, structure, and level of certainty plays a huge role in directing peoples' attention and interest.

I myself used to think I only enjoyed combat in roleplaying games, right up until I played games like acks and shadowrun which contain well-made rules (reaction rolls, contact connection/loyalty, detailed henchmen/minions rules, etiquette, etc) which meaningfully assist in the roleplaying of relationships and social interaction without getting in the way. The idea of mechanical support is often underrated and derided as a crutch for antisocial gamers, but it is also very helpful for getting the most out of those aspects of roleplaying.

Psikerlord
2019-02-18, 12:33 AM
I don't mean to speak for those two in particular, but many roleplayers' experiences are shaped by games which lack adequate mechanical support for areas other than combat.

If a reader flips through his game manual, sees all the cool powers and thoughtfully-constructed mechanical support and detailed guidance in the combat section, and then goes to a social-interaction section containing the professional equivalent of "just roleplay it lmao you don't need rules to talk with people, maybe roll a die and add your number, or not, who cares", then it's only natural that he will gravitate to the combat and see it as more interesting. That kind of mechanical emphasis, structure, and level of certainty plays a huge role in directing peoples' attention and interest.

I myself used to think I only enjoyed combat in roleplaying games, right up until I played games like acks and shadowrun which contain well-made rules (reaction rolls, contact connection/loyalty, detailed henchmen/minions rules, etiquette, etc) which meaningfully assist in the roleplaying of relationships and social interaction without getting in the way. The idea of mechanical support is often underrated and derided as a crutch for antisocial gamers, but it is also very helpful for getting the most out of those aspects of roleplaying.

Indeed, I tend to run gather information type rolls using the Shadowrun Contacts rules.

Psikerlord
2019-02-18, 12:40 AM
The elements I enjoy most are:

1. A strong random element to all facets of the game. ie I want to see dice being rolled whether it's combat, exploration, info gathering, social, etc.

2. Fast combat with genuine danger, and flexible options to choose from/adlib.

3. Clear, meaningful PC progression, even if only small increases.

4. Mysterious/unpredictable magic or psionics or whatever it is.

2D8HP
2019-02-18, 10:43 PM
I like "regular Joe" human scale conversations with NPC's (like you would have with someone at a bar), big meetings with pooh-bahs (Kings and such) aren't my thing.

I also like pretending to put holes in monsters with arrows and swords.

Gaining loot is good, as are descriptions of new previously unseen scenery.

Pauly
2019-02-18, 11:45 PM
I like:
Fast cinematic combat.
Tactical flexibility in combat. (No “one best way” to win)
Social combat (the ability to change an NPC’s mind through the use of various techniques, and conversely having NPC’s able to persuade PCs)
“Pulp hero” PCs (i.e, the PCs abilities top out at maximum human [or whatever race] capacity) *
Flexibility to tailor your progression through acquisition of skills and abilities.
A limited setting. It’s better to do one thing well than many things poorly.

I dislike
Puzzle monsters.
Having a quick reference sheet that is 10 pages long
A system that requires the rule book to be present on the table at all times.
“Super hero” PCs (i.e. the PCs top out at beyond what is humanly [or whatever racially] possible).*
Being locked into class choices to obtain skills.


* exception is games in the Super hero genre.

Quertus
2019-02-18, 11:45 PM
I probably should have answered before reading anyone else's reply, so as not to Taint my answer.

My favorite part is Exploration. I don't want a world perfected by the Determinator - I want the PCs to be the first to encounter and decide what to with / how to utilize something new.

Corollary: I like "grim dark", where the PCs are just about the only things that matter.

I enjoy role-playing. It's what makes RPGs better than war games for me. I don't appreciate any system getting in the way.

I like tactics. Related to the above, I want "figuring out that the person you're talking to is a vegetarian, and not offering them a steak" to matter. I can enjoy a game where my only contribution is in tactics, where my character cannot interface with the mechanics (see "sentient potted plant"). I wouldn't enjoy games that are just mechanics where tactics are irrelevant.

I enjoy combat. It's the part of the game where everyone gets to participate. And I'm a war gamer. But RPG combat is boring compared to war gamer combat.

I enjoy the "how the **** do we make this group of characters work?" minigame, rather than the cookie cutter party. Or am I repeating myself? Is that just "loves tactics" + "loves creativity"?

I sometimes enjoy the character creation minigame. Ideally, creating a character could be almost as easy as writing, "Quertus, Wizard" on the character sheet, and that be a perfectly valid character, but with the option to create much more complex playing pieces. And that complexity does not translate directly to power.

I care about player agency. That starts with the ability to choose your character, and to have that determine the difficulty of the challenge, not the GM modifying the challenge to the "correct" difficulty.

Now, for Taint.

I like playing to find out how things will turn out for *these characters, who made these choices*. I don't like it to be required to be the Determinator. But I don't want the system to give advantages for being dumb - the advantage should be getting to tell that story.

Corollary to that: no "only possible path", no railroading. I want an open world, with an open ending. So maybe, oops, we failed, and the king got assassinated. OK, not "game over", but "now what?".

I want diverse NPCs to interact with and connect to. I'm "not from around here" - make a "here" that makes me care.

I'm not a fan of PvP.

I can enjoy romance subplots - even between PCs, if nobody minds.

I love shiny toys!

And... pretty much everything that Max said. At times for slightly different reasons.

Morgaln
2019-02-19, 08:40 AM
I like most elements of RPGs, but there are a few things I enjoy especially:

- Creating a story where the decisions of the players matter. Both as a DM and as a player, I want the players to have a say in what happens during the story. When I DM, I never have a clear direction or end goal in mind. I provide an initial story hook and then let my players decide how they would like to tackle the problem/situation I presented them with. The actions they decide upon will then determine how the plot evolves.

- Character development. In general, I'm far more interested in who a character is than what he can do (i. e. personality over stats). I love to put those characters into situations that present them with morally difficult choices or question their preconceptions. Luckily, I'm blessed with awesome players who create those kinds of characters and like to roleplay them.

Conversely, I don't enjoy RPGs as much when they focus strongly on mechanics and put story and character interaction as a distant second.



Absolutely! Generally, out of combat is where we'll see these kind of events in something like DnD, when there is no "right answer". Since the goal is open-ended, there's no real way to fail. Even getting into trouble can have ways of making the story more interesting. Now, it does require a bit of a good DM to do properly.

Many DMs may not throttle a combat scenario based on the out-of-combat decisions a group of players make. Just because you have a pacifistic diplomat in your party that managed to end a war with words and is capable of charming almost anyone doesn't mean that a DM is going to care that you're effectively one less combatant against a band of raiders. Or the DM doesn't know how a pacifist can provide in a combat scenario, so they don't make any changes to accommodate the player (like making the Orcs susceptible to the diplomat's persuasiveness, or making some of the diplomat's many allies in the area). Most DMs I know would just say "You made your bed, sleep in it wimp" in kinder words.

I wish that combat was taken the same way as the narrative, where there is no "wrong answer". Obviously, you should avoid death, but often times combat just comes down to dealing/resisting as much damage as possible, rather than doing anything interesting. Damage should be the OPTION, not the GOAL.

The most memorable battles I played (and incidentally also the ones that had my players most engaged) where those where the goal was not "kill the enemy", but where the batle was a means to accomplish a different goal. E. g. "get to the altar before your friend gets sacrificed", "prevent the guards from reaching the alarm button", "keep the enemy from cutting the rope", things like that. Usually, those are also the goals that would lead to interesting new directions for the story when the players failed. So I fully agree with you on this point.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-19, 08:45 AM
Story. Everything else is secondary, to the point that if it isn't supporting the story, it's highly debatable why it's there. Like - tactical combat. Tactical combat is a fine thing in it's own right, but do I want it in my game, if it isn't making the story better? Or would I rather have cinematic combat, for instance (if that suits the story better)?

So I'm very much about the story telling. And only incidentally interested in all the rest =)

JeenLeen
2019-02-19, 09:35 AM
I like it when the mechanics and fluff go together well. That is, the rules support the text and vice-versa.
I'd like to flesh this out with an example, but tight on time.

I also like it when it's possible to build a character who is both competent and at least reasonably well-rounded in a way it makes sense for a realistic character. One of my major qualms with oWoD was that you didn't have enough skill points to both be proficient at what you focus on (combat, social control, whatever) and not stink at stuff a normal person should know (urgh... I gotta put one point in Drive or I can't drive a car? That stinks).

On a closer nuance, I dislike it when some skills become a 'tax'. Like you can't lie without the Lying skill at good levels, since everyone has some level of Awareness. The only system I've found that handles this decently is In Nomine, where a failure or success on a skill like Lying just modifies how well they can detect what you are up to; every other system it means you failed to lie in a remotely convincing way. And no granualarity: a failed lie is obvious, a successful lie is belived... but shouldn't there be results like "he's not sure about you, but can't tell you're lying or what is up about your story"?

Max_Killjoy
2019-02-19, 10:34 AM
I like it when the mechanics and fluff go together well. That is, the rules support the text and vice-versa.
I'd like to flesh this out with an example, but tight on time.

I also like it when it's possible to build a character who is both competent and at least reasonably well-rounded in a way it makes sense for a realistic character. One of my major qualms with oWoD was that you didn't have enough skill points to both be proficient at what you focus on (combat, social control, whatever) and not stink at stuff a normal person should know (urgh... I gotta put one point in Drive or I can't drive a car? That stinks).

On a closer nuance, I dislike it when some skills become a 'tax'. Like you can't lie without the Lying skill at good levels, since everyone has some level of Awareness. The only system I've found that handles this decently is In Nomine, where a failure or success on a skill like Lying just modifies how well they can detect what you are up to; every other system it means you failed to lie in a remotely convincing way. And no granualarity: a failed lie is obvious, a successful lie is belived... but shouldn't there be results like "he's not sure about you, but can't tell you're lying or what is up about your story"?

As an aside, a chunk of that was that oWoD used linear buy for character build, and then "exponential" buy for XP expenditures -- so that giving out even a few more points in Abilities (talents, skills, knowledges) would have played into the urge to ramp up a handful of them to 4 or 5 dots, to get ahead of the massive XP cost of doing it later.

But, I agree, it was really hard to make a character who was, before they became a vampire, an actual human person in the game's quasi-modern world. I've known people who simply weren't buildable as mortal characters under the game's starting character rules for mortals.

Hackulator
2019-02-19, 12:13 PM
As an aside, a chunk of that was that oWoD used linear buy for character build, and then "exponential" buy for XP expenditures -- so that giving out even a few more points in Abilities (talents, skills, knowledges) would have played into the urge to ramp up a handful of them to 4 or 5 dots, to get ahead of the massive XP cost of doing it later.

But, I agree, it was really hard to make a character who was, before they became a vampire, an actual human person in the game's quasi-modern world. I've known people who simply weren't buildable as mortal characters under the game's starting character rules for mortals.

It was a problem I think borne of an issue that most games seem to have: Designers almost never want you to optimize as much as you can. A starting character isn't really expected to have more than like, 2 dots in any skill, maybe 3 in one or two specialties. However, optimized creation for doing what you want to do dictates otherwise, which leads to problems.

Rhedyn
2019-02-19, 01:01 PM
The game needs to not break by itself.

My first instinct with a system is to punish it as much as possible. If it survives the onslaught, then it's a "good system". Other considerations for "what I actually play" end up being things like "a cool magic system" (or anything that allows the characters to have a wide variety of narratively important abilities), cool combats (make your combat a fun game in it's own right), and character concept coolness (people need to be able to make cool characters).

JeenLeen
2019-02-19, 02:56 PM
It was a problem I think borne of an issue that most games seem to have: Designers almost never want you to optimize as much as you can. A starting character isn't really expected to have more than like, 2 dots in any skill, maybe 3 in one or two specialties. However, optimized creation for doing what you want to do dictates otherwise, which leads to problems.

And that'd be fine if the description of having just 2-3 dots of something fit with being competent (as a skilled professional) and something like (to use oWoD example) of Dexterity 2 or 3 and a skill of 2 or 3 gave you decent odds at success. But it really doesn't seem built that way once you get to rolling (or just reading the text fluff.)

I think a lot could have been fixed by doing linear cost for xp just like it does during character creation. The game I'm really into right now (In Nomine) has linear costs both during char-gen and during play. It does allow you to easily make a super-optimized combat (or mental-mojo)-focused character, if you go that route, but it also really does well letting you make a reasonably well-rounded person.

I also like it when games state that some skills can be used even if you have 0 points in a Skill. Like, you can use basic e-mail and stuff like MS Word and Excel with 0 ranks of Computers, or you can drive a car in normal situations without points in Drive.

On a related note, one thing I dislike about a lot of d20 games is that, at low-level, it's hard to be competent even in what you specialize in. Your modifier to the d20 for a skill check just isn't high enough that your actual skill matters more than the randomness of the dice.

Mordar
2019-02-19, 06:30 PM
Just as the title suggests, what gameplay elements do you enjoy in an RPG? What elements are required?

From a system perspective:

Progression - Not necessarily level based, but discernible improvement over time.
Matched mechanics - If it is supposed to be an X-heavy game, the system supports greater granularity/variability/fun doing X.
Specific over general - I don't generally prefer games (like perhaps Savage Worlds) where a plethora of skills are rolled into one skill, unless it is a tree.


From an interaction perspective:

Discovery - I like learning about the system and the setting through play. I want to experience it, not just read it.
Investigation - I like play that involves investigation, either about the world/setting (Lore) or specific objectives (who killed the Duke?) and rewards the investigation. Perhaps by giving the solution that will let the party figure out what to do next, or as the main objective of the story.
Multiple formats - I generally don't prefer games that are all action all the time, or all narrative all the time, or basically anything all the time. I want to have action, and narrative, and NPC interaction and world building.


Now, the right group can make any of these preferences meaningless because with the right group of people almost anything can be fun. Similarly, wrong group yadda yadda yadda...

- M

Psikerlord
2019-02-19, 10:54 PM
Story. Everything else is secondary, to the point that if it isn't supporting the story, it's highly debatable why it's there. Like - tactical combat. Tactical combat is a fine thing in it's own right, but do I want it in my game, if it isn't making the story better? Or would I rather have cinematic combat, for instance (if that suits the story better)?

So I'm very much about the story telling. And only incidentally interested in all the rest =)

I am the opposite, mostly interested in good gameplay. Story? Well, that's what we get afterward when looking back on what happened.

NichG
2019-02-20, 07:17 AM
I like games which can inspire me. If there are things that make me want to explore them, find out how they work, see what happens, try out an idea, etc, then those are all good. In terms of how to achieve this with gameplay elements, there's a couple of factors I can think of which are important.

- If something is too self-contained, then it doesn't give me the feeling that it's necessary to explore it. So there should be things whose consequences, interactions, etc are actually fairly difficult to immediately read out. To that extent, things which try to protect and compartmentalize gameplay elements tend to detract from things for me - its better when things have the possibility of spilling outside of the area defined precisely by the rules such that they require some thought as to what will happen.

- Things which combine or interact in non-trivial ways that would require being played out to see what happens are a good way to get that inspiration feeling going.

- Similarly, things which ask you to push the bounds of imagination by specifying something which is difficult to directly render mechanical. I have a soft spot for systems with time-travel because they embed a lot of power and agency in moves which, necessarily, totally depend on the way the setting and story are structured to determine what will happen. And you basically have to try and see in order to find out how things go.

- I want the rules/gameplay so far to hint at the places where things break and where interesting directions to explore are. It doesn't work if e.g. the GM just fiats something arbitrary on the spot every time you explore a mystery - but its very good if the GM fiats into existence some underlying consistent logic or system which you can then uncover. Basically, the more the various mysteries or unresolved things hang together, the more I can feel that pursuing them is really uncovering the unknown.

Examples of inspiring/open-ended mechanics might be things such as:

- A character ability that allows you to scry upon an alternate universe centered around a specific 'what if' question.
- A character ability that lets you trade abstract things with others: anything which can be named and which clearly and uniquely belongs to you/them.
- An ability that lets you experience a particular scene or situation through the eyes of another character with whom you are familiar - feeling how they would react, etc.
- Events or situations during gameplay which can permanently modify a character or how they work, including surprising sensory or cognitive differences. Getting turned into a vampire, ascending to godhood, transferring your mind into a golem, etc can be really interesting, especially if you can further develop it or explore a path which hasn't been worked out. On the other hand, if it's just 'No Con score, +4 Str, Dex and Cha, gain undead immunities' and I can read that in the books then I'm much less interested.

Examples of mechanics which don't inspire me, or get in the way:

- Roll to see if your argument persuades someone (compartmentalizes too much).
- Rock/paper/scissors combat power interactions - shields are strong against swords and weak against spears, etc. The solutions or optimal behaviors can often be read off or pre-computed, meaning that often there's no reason to actually play them out.
- Forced balance considerations, such as systems which break if you deviate very far from 'wealth by level' or the like.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-20, 07:37 AM
I am the opposite, mostly interested in good gameplay. Story? Well, that's what we get afterward when looking back on what happened.

Yes but ... why RPG then? Seems to me you'd be just as happy, if not more, playing one of countless strategy, tactics or skirmish games. In all my experience, the rules for combat (which I assume is what you mean by 'gameplay') are way better in those games than in RPG's.

I have the polar opposite view: Any old set of rules will do, because it's really not about the rules anyways, and we can bend or break them as we please, as long as it suits and/or promotes the story =)

Rhedyn
2019-02-20, 08:50 AM
Yes but ... why RPG then? Seems to me you'd be just as happy, if not more, playing one of countless strategy, tactics or skirmish games. In all my experience, the rules for combat (which I assume is what you mean by 'gameplay') are way better in those games than in RPG's.

I have the polar opposite view: Any old set of rules will do, because it's really not about the rules anyways, and we can bend or break them as we please, as long as it suits and/or promotes the story =)
There is a lot more gameplay than just combat.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-20, 09:10 AM
There is a lot more gameplay than just combat.

I suppose you could say that. I don't agree.

For every RPG I've ever seen, this is true: If you count the pages of actual rules dedicated to a given topic, more than half are combat, and more than half of the rest is character creation, leaving - at best - 25% for everything else.

Then, of course, there's the stuff that isn't specifically combat - spells, equipment, and so on - but is almost exclusively used for combat, making that yet another huge chunk of pages mainly devoted to combat.

So ... no. I do not agree with that. But I've not seen every RPG out there - and opinions do differ, of course.

Morgaln
2019-02-20, 09:30 AM
I suppose you could say that. I don't agree.

For every RPG I've ever seen, this is true: If you count the pages of actual rules dedicated to a given topic, more than half are combat, and more than half of the rest is character creation, leaving - at best - 25% for everything else.

Then, of course, there's the stuff that isn't specifically combat - spells, equipment, and so on - but is almost exclusively used for combat, making that yet another huge chunk of pages mainly devoted to combat.

So ... no. I do not agree with that. But I've not seen every RPG out there - and opinions do differ, of course.

I admit I don't have the books in front of me right now, but of the games I've played, that only seems to be true for the various iterations of D&D.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse (my preferred system) dedicates about 20-25% of their core books to describe the setting and probably about 30-35% to character creation. Of the rest, about half are powers (often not combat-related) and non-combat mechanics. Which leaves about 20-25% for combat, equipment (also not always combat-related) and foes. And this is the most martial of the various oWoD settings.

New WoD is similar in that regard.

The Dark Eye allocates a huge chunk of its core books to character creation, probably more than 50%.

Call of Cthulhu uses barely any space for combat, since getting into a fight pretty much means you're dead anyway. It focuses more on non-combat situations and setting.

I'd have to double-check GURPS, since I haven't used that one in a long time; that one might be closer to 50% in how much is combat-related, but I'm not sure.

Rhedyn
2019-02-20, 10:47 AM
I suppose you could say that. I don't agree.

For every RPG I've ever seen, this is true: If you count the pages of actual rules dedicated to a given topic, more than half are combat, and more than half of the rest is character creation, leaving - at best - 25% for everything else.

Then, of course, there's the stuff that isn't specifically combat - spells, equipment, and so on - but is almost exclusively used for combat, making that yet another huge chunk of pages mainly devoted to combat.

So ... no. I do not agree with that. But I've not seen every RPG out there - and opinions do differ, of course.
GURPS 4e has a lot devoted to combat by percentage, but it also has more rules for non-combat than most other games have rules.

D&D 3e is oddly comprehensive in the weight of the skills rules with intricate tables for various activities and tons of crafting rules.

But the raw rule percentage devoted to combat is because the rules exist to make losing feel fair and combat has the highest consequences that seem fair. Games like Numenera make the non-combat activities central to gameplay by adding resource management to skill/ability checks. If you spend 5 Might to reduce the difficulty by 2 to jump across a chasm, then you do not have that 5 Might for combat.

Savage Worlds is very much combat focused, but that doesn't stop it from having rules for quick encounters, dramatic tasks, and social conflicts, all of which are mechanics/gameplay.

NichG
2019-02-20, 01:42 PM
Nobilis has almost no combat. Its rules are more about defining the specific ways in which the semi-divine entities that are the PCs can turn the universe into silly putty, and how to determine how difficult a specific miracle should be by mapping it into that framework - plus a whole bunch of setting material and esoterica (which may be significantly more important than your actual mechanics, since they comprise potential exceptions to the general rule that nobles are more or less blanket immune to each-others' direct actions). 'Attacking' another noble is more about finding out what they secretly love and corrupting it in such a way that they either become weakened or over-extend themselves trying to protect it.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-20, 04:22 PM
GURPS 4e has a lot devoted to combat by percentage, but it also has more rules for non-combat than most other games have rules.

D&D 3e is oddly comprehensive in the weight of the skills rules with intricate tables for various activities and tons of crafting rules.

But the raw rule percentage devoted to combat is because the rules exist to make losing feel fair and combat has the highest consequences that seem fair. Games like Numenera make the non-combat activities central to gameplay by adding resource management to skill/ability checks. If you spend 5 Might to reduce the difficulty by 2 to jump across a chasm, then you do not have that 5 Might for combat.

Savage Worlds is very much combat focused, but that doesn't stop it from having rules for quick encounters, dramatic tasks, and social conflicts, all of which are mechanics/gameplay.

I never played Werewolf - but I played Vampire. If you lump together combat rules + disciplines + gear (which is mainly for combat anyways), that is a very large chunk of the rules. Whether it's as bad as in D&D I cannot say (I quite simply don't own the books, to I'm basing everything on my memory of a game I haven't played in 10 years), but it's still ... a lot.

Games I've played include - but are by no means limited to - D&D, Earthdawn, Shadowrun, Mythos, Vampire, Warhammer (various iterations, mostly 40k), CoC ... and so on. Some of the games are lost to me. Drager og Dćmoner, a local basic roleplay variant. Um. Cyberpunk.

For all of these, I swear the weight of combat rules to other rules is heavily weighted towards combat - or stuff that's mostly used in combat anyways. Like skills in D&D: They take up a lot of space, but really, there's only two types - social skills, and stuff you only use in combat (and open locks).


I admit I don't have the books in front of me right now, but of the games I've played, that only seems to be true for the various iterations of D&D.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse (my preferred system) dedicates about 20-25% of their core books to describe the setting and probably about 30-35% to character creation. Of the rest, about half are powers (often not combat-related) and non-combat mechanics. Which leaves about 20-25% for combat, equipment (also not always combat-related) and foes. And this is the most martial of the various oWoD settings.

New WoD is similar in that regard.

The Dark Eye allocates a huge chunk of its core books to character creation, probably more than 50%.

Call of Cthulhu uses barely any space for combat, since getting into a fight pretty much means you're dead anyway. It focuses more on non-combat situations and setting.

I'd have to double-check GURPS, since I haven't used that one in a long time; that one might be closer to 50% in how much is combat-related, but I'm not sure.

Call of Cthulhu is different - mainly in how you fight. Large parts of the book are about mythos and monsters, and large parts are about sanity, and magic, and so on. So ... in essence, large parts of the game are how you fight not based on your HP bar, but your mental health.

Now, I realise that might be straining it a bit, but listen: It's about conflict - it's about how the game builds tension in order to be fun and exciting to play. No, CoC doesn't do much in the way of gunning down monsters. But yes, it's all about conflict, that's what takes up the greater part of the rules, and that conflict is fought with your sanity, not your physical health.

The Jack
2019-02-20, 05:37 PM
For me, the best part of RPGs is that I can do what I want. So many games are based on the idea that you can do X to achieve Y, and you can't do a whole load of other things to do Y. I want to creatively find solutions to win. A big appeal of Pen'n paper RPGS is that I can do anything I could do in real life, whilst in Call of Duty I need to move from point A to B to C and I can't climb a lot of things or engage in shenanigans to win more easily.


A thing I don't like: Numbers for the sake of numbers. Here's a level 16 emu, later you'll find a zone filled with level 26 emus. Here's a +10 sword, and later a +30 sword, you'll need the +30 sword to achieve the same results you got from the +10 sword so many levels ago, otherwise you'll just be flailing doing little damage.
I get that some people like their WoW and their Skyrims because their minds like getting the new numbers and colours as rewards, but it just feels really hollow to me.

JoeJ
2019-02-20, 05:40 PM
I suppose you could say that. I don't agree.

For every RPG I've ever seen, this is true: If you count the pages of actual rules dedicated to a given topic, more than half are combat, and more than half of the rest is character creation, leaving - at best - 25% for everything else.

Then, of course, there's the stuff that isn't specifically combat - spells, equipment, and so on - but is almost exclusively used for combat, making that yet another huge chunk of pages mainly devoted to combat.

So ... no. I do not agree with that. But I've not seen every RPG out there - and opinions do differ, of course.

I'm looking at the core rulebook for 2nd edition Mongoose Traveller (240 pages total).

Individual combat takes up 6 pages, with another 10 devoted to spaceship combat.

There are 39 skills on the skill list, of which 6 are primarily for combat. Those 6 take up roughly 1 page out of the 8 total pages devoted to describing skills.

The equipment list covers 39 pages, of which 18 1/2 describe weapons, armor, and other equipment that is primarily used in combat.

So all things combat related combined take up 35 1/2 pages of the 240 page book, or a little under 15%, and just over half of that amount is the equipment.

(Character creation covers 49 pages, btw.)

Hoplite308
2019-02-20, 06:34 PM
Just as the title suggests, what gameplay elements do you enjoy in an RPG? What elements are required?

I tend to enjoy a combination of mechanical complexity for optimization potential, and streamlined gaming for ease of play.

As far as requried... just hand me a fire spell and something to burn, I'll be happy. :smallcool:

Quertus
2019-02-20, 06:48 PM
How much space for rules something needs, and how much time one spends on a given thing, are not related.

If they were, sports would be all about fouls, driving predominately about accidents & car maintenance, and one would likely prepare, buy, store, and dispose of most food without ever actually eating it.

Some things just don't require as much ink.

(Which reminds me - I enjoy rules lawyering)

Slipperychicken
2019-02-21, 12:16 AM
How much space for rules something needs, and how much time one spends on a given thing, are not related.

If they were, sports would be all about fouls, driving predominately about accidents & car maintenance, and one would likely prepare, buy, store, and dispose of most food without ever actually eating it.

Some things just don't require as much ink.

(Which reminds me - I enjoy rules lawyering)

All of this is true. Sometimes a subject can be given completely adequate mechanical support without much text at all.

However, while relative page-count does not necessarily determine the priorities of roleplaying game writers, it is a symbolic measurement which can serve to illustrate large disparities where they occur. And it's important for us not to become overly dependent on that measure; we don't want to pressure developers to 'pad out' their roleplaying sections with useless text or poorly-conceived rules just to keep up with the trend.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-21, 12:39 AM
I'm looking at the core rulebook for 2nd edition Mongoose Traveller (240 pages total).

Individual combat takes up 6 pages, with another 10 devoted to spaceship combat.

There are 39 skills on the skill list, of which 6 are primarily for combat. Those 6 take up roughly 1 page out of the 8 total pages devoted to describing skills.

The equipment list covers 39 pages, of which 18 1/2 describe weapons, armor, and other equipment that is primarily used in combat.

So all things combat related combined take up 35 1/2 pages of the 240 page book, or a little under 15%, and just over half of that amount is the equipment.

(Character creation covers 49 pages, btw.)

I've never even heard of Mongoose Traveller - but I'm sure you're well aware I didn't say exceptions don't exist. Looking at the web page, the first thing I see is a gnoll with a katana. I'm quite convinced if I went over the same book you're sitting with, I'd arrive at another conclusion, by the looks of it, it's not a game with little focus on combat, and quite simply it would be weird to advertise a combat-light game with a picture of swordwielding dogs.

But ... let's forget about that, and instead say I take your word for it: Swell, you have found an exception. Congratulations. Do you want to know the percentages for D&D? It is, after all, by far the best selling RPG in the world, by absolutely any metric you'd like to mention.

JoeJ
2019-02-21, 12:50 AM
I've never even heard of Mongoose Traveller - but I'm sure you're well aware I didn't say exceptions don't exist. Looking at the web page, the first thing I see is a gnoll with a katana. I'm quite convinced if I went over the same book you're sitting with, I'd arrive at another conclusion, by the looks of it, it's not a game with little focus on combat, and quite simply it would be weird to advertise a combat-light game with a picture of swordwielding dogs.

How would you arrive at a different answer? Do you have your own special way of counting?


But ... let's forget about that, and instead say I take your word for it: Swell, you have found an exception. Congratulations. Do you want to know the percentages for D&D? It is, after all, by far the best selling RPG in the world, by absolutely any metric you'd like to mention.

Best selling or not, it's still just one game, not most games. But, yes, please. What's the page count for combat rules in D&D 5e?

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-21, 01:53 AM
How would you arrive at a different answer? Do you have your own special way of counting?

Nah, but I'm quite sure there's an element of uncertainty. Let's just use D&D, because everyone knows it - and like I said, I never heard of Traveller. The skill tumble is a combat skill. It's ... largely the only one. You could make the argument for Spellcraft, or maybe Dungeoneering or some such, but all in all, most skills are out-of-combat, mostly.

And yet, the vast majority of skill rolls are done in - or in conjunction with - combat. You roll your knowledge skills to gain some insight about enemies, perception skills to spot reinforcements or ambushes, and so on. A single combat can produce any number of skill rolls (depending on the character involved) - while a social interaction or skill challenge is generally resolved with a single one.

So ... almost all skill are combat skills. So ... all pages devoted to skills in the 3.5 D&D book are combat skills. So ... my count would likely not be the same as yours.

I'm just applying the same thinking to another game - that I do not know, but I see no reason to assume it's wildly different from my expectations. Based, in part, on the fact that it advertises itself with a canine swordsdog.


Best selling or not, it's still just one game, not most games. But, yes, please. What's the page count for combat rules in D&D 5e?

I don't have 5e, I have 3.5. I'll do a quick count when I get home.

By the way, there is a certain amount of .... skewed perspective. I don't know Traveller, but keep in mind that D&D is a rulebook. It holds precious little fluff - no world info, no nations and so on. So ... if your traveller does, you really need to discount those pages, and only look at combat rules in percent of total rules. Because that's the discussion we're having, right? Not combat rules in percent of total pages, which would be kinda pointless.

So, one of the few fluff items in D&D is the pantheon - Kord and Weejas and so on. I should discount that part, but include all the domains and powers (as combat rules, of course, since they're all but exclusively used in combat).

RedWarlock
2019-02-21, 03:15 AM
So, because a mechanic can be used both in and out of combat, you count it as being FOR combat, but exclude it from counting pages about non-combat?

BS.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-21, 03:33 AM
BS.

Thank you for your stellar contribution. I always value a point well argued and presented.

But yes, you're quite right, if I consider a mechanic as mostly used in a context of combat, then I that's how I count it. This was, at heart, a question of gameplay, no? Then is it truly BS to consider how various aspects of the rules are used, gameplay wise? Do you think?

Because the other part of an RPG is roleplaying, and while that may take up the majority of the time invested, it relies far, far less on rolling dice. And when you're not rolling dice, by and large it shouldn't be considered 'gameplay'.

Now, that's something you could argue against, and please do if you like. I've seen systems that used various mechanics for roleplaying - I've just never seen them used. So to me, it circles straight back to: Combat is pretty much the entirety of the gameplay.

JoeJ
2019-02-21, 03:48 AM
Thank you for your stellar contribution. I always value a point well argued and presented.

But yes, you're quite right, if I consider a mechanic as mostly used in a context of combat, then I that's how I count it. This was, at heart, a question of gameplay, no? Then is it truly BS to consider how various aspects of the rules are used, gameplay wise? Do you think?

Because the other part of an RPG is roleplaying, and while that may take up the majority of the time invested, it relies far, far less on rolling dice. And when you're not rolling dice, by and large it shouldn't be considered 'gameplay'.

Now, that's something you could argue against, and please do if you like. I've seen systems that used various mechanics for roleplaying - I've just never seen them used. So to me, it circles straight back to: Combat is pretty much the entirety of the gameplay.

Unfortunately, a claim that "If you count the pages of actual rules dedicated to a given topic, more than half are combat, and more than half of the rest is character creation, leaving - at best - 25% for everything else" is completely undermined if you count rules that are used both in and out of combat as part of the "more than half." You can't say that "everything else" is only 25% when some of what you're counting as combat is also part of the everything else.

I don't doubt that your group's play style focuses on combat, but that it not connected in any way with how many pages of the rules it takes up.

NichG
2019-02-21, 03:58 AM
Thank you for your stellar contribution. I always value a point well argued and presented.

But yes, you're quite right, if I consider a mechanic as mostly used in a context of combat, then I that's how I count it. This was, at heart, a question of gameplay, no? Then is it truly BS to consider how various aspects of the rules are used, gameplay wise? Do you think?

If I wanted to argue that no RPG is about combat, I could basically say 'any rule which can be applied in any non-combat situation, I count as a non-combat rule' and could basically obtain the opposite of your conclusion. So while 'BS' is perhaps not a well argued and presented rebuttal to your position here, I don't think the position is particularly tenable.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-21, 05:03 AM
If I wanted to argue that no RPG is about combat, I could basically say 'any rule which can be applied in any non-combat situation, I count as a non-combat rule' and could basically obtain the opposite of your conclusion. So while 'BS' is perhaps not a well argued and presented rebuttal to your position here, I don't think the position is particularly tenable.

That goes both ways - yes. I think I adressed that in a post above.

I should like to point out we're not arguing how much of the rules are devoted to combat - not really. We're arguing how much of gameplay happens to be combat, and I'm merely using combat rules as an indicator of how much of weight combat has, rules wise.

Having a different point of view on that is perfectly fine. But I really don't think you have a very good case when trying to argue that the majority of rules and gameplay both concern themselves with combat, in the majority of RPG's.

For specific RPG's that's completely different - but I've yet to see a system that doesn't concern itself with conflict on some level ... and if I found one, I cannot fathom why I'd want to play it. For the sheer drama thereof? Doubtful.

Morgaln
2019-02-21, 05:29 AM
All of this is true. Sometimes a subject can be given completely adequate mechanical support without much text at all.

However, while relative page-count does not necessarily determine the priorities of roleplaying game writers, it is a symbolic measurement which can serve to illustrate large disparities where they occur. And it's important for us not to become overly dependent on that measure; we don't want to pressure developers to 'pad out' their roleplaying sections with useless text or poorly-conceived rules just to keep up with the trend.

What I found to be a better measurement is to take a look at the official character sheet and determine what percentage of that is dedicated to pure combat stats and what percentage can be used outside combat (or even has no relation to combat at all). I feel like that provides a better impression of the priorities a given RPG has.


Thank you for your stellar contribution. I always value a point well argued and presented.

But yes, you're quite right, if I consider a mechanic as mostly used in a context of combat, then I that's how I count it. This was, at heart, a question of gameplay, no? Then is it truly BS to consider how various aspects of the rules are used, gameplay wise? Do you think?

Because the other part of an RPG is roleplaying, and while that may take up the majority of the time invested, it relies far, far less on rolling dice. And when you're not rolling dice, by and large it shouldn't be considered 'gameplay'.

Now, that's something you could argue against, and please do if you like. I've seen systems that used various mechanics for roleplaying - I've just never seen them used. So to me, it circles straight back to: Combat is pretty much the entirety of the gameplay.

Dice get rolled every time the characters need to determine whether their abilities are good enough to perform a certain task. This can involve things like stealth, investigating a crime scene, chasing someone, hunting, sleight of hand tricks, brewing potions, climbing a tree or mountain, swimming, predicting the weather, building or repairing something, driving any kind of vehicle, herding cattle, memorizing numbers, cooking, breaking a code, identifying a disease... I could go on and on. I have deliberately not included any social interactions in that list, and even those can and should be supplemented with dice rolls, since it is to be excepted that your character's social skills are different from yours.
None of the above necessarily lead to combat (many of them distinctly don't), but they are all things that can happen during a game. I've had campaigns that didn't have combat for half a dozen sessions or more in a row, but there were still plenty of dice rolls and conflict involved. Good gameplay will allow you to map all of the above and more onto the stats provided by the game without much difficulty.

NichG
2019-02-21, 05:52 AM
That goes both ways - yes. I think I adressed that in a post above.

I should like to point out we're not arguing how much of the rules are devoted to combat - not really. We're arguing how much of gameplay happens to be combat, and I'm merely using combat rules as an indicator of how much of weight combat has, rules wise.

Having a different point of view on that is perfectly fine. But I really don't think you have a very good case when trying to argue that the majority of rules and gameplay both concern themselves with combat, in the majority of RPG's.

For specific RPG's that's completely different - but I've yet to see a system that doesn't concern itself with conflict on some level ... and if I found one, I cannot fathom why I'd want to play it. For the sheer drama thereof? Doubtful.

There's a lot of different kinds of conflict. Hot conflict with other agents, e.g. combat centered on making sure that the other side can no longer act, is a specific kind that does crop up in a number of RPGs. But you can also have cold conflicts with other agents where you aren't trying to kill them but are still trying to accomplish something that is being made difficult: political interactions, solving mysteries, heists/scheming, negotiations. And you can have conflicts with non-agents, such as: survival gameplay, puzzles, exploration, environmental challenges such as navigating difficult spaces or areas, and even large-scale civil problem solving (the city is suffering from a plague, solve it; there are earthquakes of increasing magnitude, solve it). And you can have 'conflicts' with the self, such as: here is a situation where there are multiple/infinite possible directions to go in, what do you choose? Moving away from conflicts, you have things like exploration, inspiration, sense of wonderment which can drive gameplay - there's no conflict in rolling for loot, for example, but for a lot of players that random mechanically-structured reward system is part of what makes some RPGs engaging.

Even in D&D, which is explicitly very combat-focused, there's a lot of support for many of these other types of conflicts. Beyond D&D, there are very many RPG systems tailored to specific kinds of conflicts other than combat. However, if combat is what you like, its not surprising if you don't play/know about those RPGs, and thus the RPGs that matter to you end up looking as though they're all about combat. Just like if you look at the Knowledge skill and the only thing you're interested in is its combat applications, you might conclude 'this is so that I can know what monsters are immune to and what they're weak to' rather than, e.g., for spell research or for analyzing clues left behind by a murderer or for figuring out the best way to arrange to have dinner with a cadre of nobles plotting to overthrow the crown.

In tabletop RPGs, there's even more self-filtering of impressions since more than half of what makes the game is the people you're sharing the table with rather than what's written in the rules. You can take a game, read the rules and conclude that it's combat-heavy, but then find yourself at a table with a GM who only says 'roll initiative!' maybe once every five sessions. If you gravitate towards groups that like combat, you will see more combat than people who gravitate towards group that go light on it.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-21, 05:55 AM
Dice get rolled every time the characters need to determine whether their abilities are good enough to perform a certain task. This can involve things like stealth, investigating a crime scene, chasing someone, hunting, sleight of hand tricks, brewing potions, climbing a tree or mountain, swimming, predicting the weather, building or repairing something, driving any kind of vehicle, herding cattle, memorizing numbers, cooking, breaking a code, identifying a disease... I could go on and on. I have deliberately not included any social interactions in that list, and even those can and should be supplemented with dice rolls, since it is to be excepted that your character's social skills are different from yours.
None of the above necessarily lead to combat (many of them distinctly don't), but they are all things that can happen during a game. I've had campaigns that didn't have combat for half a dozen sessions or more in a row, but there were still plenty of dice rolls and conflict involved. Good gameplay will allow you to map all of the above and more onto the stats provided by the game without much difficulty.

I absolutely agree. None of that changes my point in even the slightest way: I still maintain that the overwhelming majority of dicerolls are used in combat, the majority of rules concern themselves with - or are mainly used for - combat, and gameplay, by and large, is concerned with ... combat.

Even a lenghty stealth session or social exchange is generally resolved with a single, or very few, dice rolls. You can spend hours on other kinds of game elements, and barely roll a die. You can have a campaign with very low combat focus - and still, when all is said and done, the majority of actual game play will have been combat.

Rhedyn
2019-02-21, 07:59 AM
So, because a mechanic can be used both in and out of combat, you count it as being FOR combat, but exclude it from counting pages about non-combat?

BS.Yeah, Keen has an opinion and no amount of logic or facts or examples are going to sway him from it.

He is convinced that RPGs have no gameplay outside of combat, therefore story is most important because its governs what happens outside of combat.

I'm not disagreeing with his preference, but he clearly has a very narrow view on what constitutes "gameplay" and that may come from a preconceived notion that "gameplay = bad" because game rules can undermine story.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-21, 08:49 AM
Yeah, Keen has an opinion and no amount of logic or facts or examples are going to sway him from it.

He is convinced that RPGs have no gameplay outside of combat, therefore story is most important because its governs what happens outside of combat.

I'm not disagreeing with his preference, but he clearly has a very narrow view on what constitutes "gameplay" and that may come from a preconceived notion that "gameplay = bad" because game rules can undermine story.

If you don't understand what I'm saying, you should ask - rather than create strawmen for you to attack.

I've yet to see any major effort towards logic, facts or examples, and if you put the least bit of effort into reading my posts, you'd see they too are full of logic, facts and examples. I have at at no point made any statement that could be laid out as 'gameplay = bad' - that's 100% on you.

What I've said is that roleplay isn't gameplay - one is crunch heavy, the other is freeform, perhaps peppered with a few incidental rolls.

You may disagree - I'm by no means saying my view is correct, or the only one, or particularly enlightened and the rest of you are bumbling heathens stumbling about in the dark. But I'm saying this is my experience, through 30+ years of playing roleplaying games, through many different games and systems, and I see precious little evidence to convince me otherwise.

So ... thanks for calling me narrow minded - personal attacks clearly show you to be in the right, and the larger and better person. FFS!

Rhedyn
2019-02-21, 10:48 AM
I have at at no point made any statement that could be laid out as 'gameplay = bad' - that's 100% on you. You may want to brush up on what the word 'may' means.
What I've said is that roleplay isn't gameplay - one is crunch heavy, the other is freeform, perhaps peppered with a few incidental rolls.I would say that is a narrow view on what constitutes gameplay. You play RPGs but you do not see how roleplaying can be gameplay.

Quertus
2019-02-21, 11:25 AM
I absolutely agree. None of that changes my point in even the slightest way: I still maintain that the overwhelming majority of dicerolls are used in combat, the majority of rules concern themselves with - or are mainly used for - combat, and gameplay, by and large, is concerned with ... combat.

Even a lenghty stealth session or social exchange is generally resolved with a single, or very few, dice rolls. You can spend hours on other kinds of game elements, and barely roll a die. You can have a campaign with very low combat focus - and still, when all is said and done, the majority of actual game play will have been combat.

Now, this is an interesting stance. "If it doesn't involve rolling dice, it isn't gameplay". I think that's a very appropriate comment for this thread.

That said, I don't think that everyone will agree with you.

Myself, I'm only* interested in the tactics, in the stuff that doesn't involve rolling dice. Sometimes, those tactics don't necessitate rolling at all (here, vegetarian, I've got a nice juicy steak for you). Or you could make the Cooking roll for how good it looks and smells, make rolls for spices, cooking; roll for quality the meat & skill of the cut.

Myself, I'm not interested in the rolls, but in the player skill portions.

* At least outside combat / outside a war game.

Willie the Duck
2019-02-21, 02:10 PM
However, while relative page-count does not necessarily determine the priorities of roleplaying game writers, it is a symbolic measurement which can serve to illustrate large disparities where they occur. And it's important for us not to become overly dependent on that measure; we don't want to pressure developers to 'pad out' their roleplaying sections with useless text or poorly-conceived rules just to keep up with the trend.


What I found to be a better measurement is to take a look at the official character sheet and determine what percentage of that is dedicated to pure combat stats and what percentage can be used outside combat (or even has no relation to combat at all). I feel like that provides a better impression of the priorities a given RPG has.

Both of these could have the possibility that an simple, elegant rule about which a minimal amount of space is required to convey the necessary information might be undervalued in the analysis, even if it is an instrumental part of the game. For examples, in TSR, much of the early game and how it was written to be played as was contained in the rules regarding reaction rolls and morale checks (the two, along with the combat rules making continuous fighting relatively unsurvivable, lead to the supposedly intended 'heist game inside a dungeon). Yet these two rules (minus the morale scores of individual opponents) could fit on one page with room to spare. Likewise, the entire hexcrawling subgenre of the games fit on a single page of random hex composition charts, along with some wilderness encounter tables. In comparison, even stuff considered relatively trivial or niche to the larger game (maybe rules for naval combat, or luxury goods that could be found in a rescued merchant caravan) often took 1-2 pages.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-21, 02:16 PM
Now, this is an interesting stance. "If it doesn't involve rolling dice, it isn't gameplay". I think that's a very appropriate comment for this thread.

Well - in the context of RPG's. Yes, I've seen games with mechanics that involve things other than dicerolls - cards, for instance, or complex ... schemes and rules for interactions, where you get certain powers to counteract opposing powers. Stuff. Hard to explain.


That said, I don't think that everyone will agree with you.

Hardly anyone ever does =) I'm also not really looking for agreement - nor am I specifically looking for disagreement. I'm just airing an opinion, a view on the matter.


Myself, I'm only* interested in the tactics, in the stuff that doesn't involve rolling dice. Sometimes, those tactics don't necessitate rolling at all (here, vegetarian, I've got a nice juicy steak for you). Or you could make the Cooking roll for how good it looks and smells, make rolls for spices, cooking; roll for quality the meat & skill of the cut.

Myself, I'm not interested in the rolls, but in the player skill portions.

* At least outside combat / outside a war game.

Well .. yes. Yes, I can totally follow you - and that type of game is something I love too. I do consider it rare, though, and I don't consider it gameplay. Generally, it cannot be codified (is that the word - but put it into rules and systems and lines and squares), and I do not consider freeform to be gameplay.

It's ... the bard, right? The cunning manipulator, and you play that by being clever, and occasionally supporting your cleverness with a diceroll.

Dunno if that makes sense, or if I'm reading you right =)

Quertus
2019-02-21, 08:26 PM
I've seen games with mechanics that involve things other than dicerolls - cards, for instance, or complex ... Stuff. Hard to explain.

and I don't consider it gameplay. Generally, it cannot be codified

Dunno if that makes sense, or if I'm reading you right =)

Sure, "dice" is shorthand. We're on the same page there.

-----

Since it seems appropriate to the thread...

Challenge: make a meal for the king.

Resolution 1) roll profession: cook or craft: culinary. Done.

I would have no interest in this.

Resolution 2) investigate the king, choose menu accordingly, evaluate quality and cut of meat, spices, aesthetics, smell, lighting, color balance, place setting, wood used for cooking, drink served, etc etc. Entirely player skills as to how complex this section is, with player skill occasionally supported by rolls.

This is the part I care about (although the rolls are more of a "necessary evil").

Resolution 3) roll to see if your character thinks to investigate the king; if so, roll to investigate the king; if you succeed, you learn that the king a vegetarian / that the queen is allergic to grapes / whatever. Roll to see if your character thinks to care about the quality of the silverware or the size of the King's cups; if so, roll...

Nah, I would have negative interest in this. I'll take option 1 over this, because at least I'm surrendering less time rolling.

-----

Sounds like the part of the game that I like - the player skills, the framing the discussion, the micromanaging the details - is something that you consider "not gameplay" by virtue of it not being codified, whereas I'd rather leave the codified bits to code, and poke at the bits that make pen & paper RPGs different from (and, IMO, better than) computer "RPGs".

Psikerlord
2019-03-03, 08:55 PM
Yes but ... why RPG then? Seems to me you'd be just as happy, if not more, playing one of countless strategy, tactics or skirmish games. In all my experience, the rules for combat (which I assume is what you mean by 'gameplay') are way better in those games than in RPG's.

I have the polar opposite view: Any old set of rules will do, because it's really not about the rules anyways, and we can bend or break them as we please, as long as it suits and/or promotes the story =)

Because I like the roleplaying of course! I just don't require any (prescripted) story to go with it.

Kaptin Keen
2019-03-04, 12:38 AM
Because I like the roleplaying of course! I just don't require any (prescripted) story to go with it.

Ahhh - but emergent storytelling. You can hide, but you can't run! :p

Thinker
2019-03-04, 08:19 AM
Ahhh - but emergent storytelling. You can hide, but you can't run! :p

Just because someone can come along after the fact and tell a story of what happened in your game doesn't mean that storytelling happens in every game. During gameplay (including all of the narrative elements), you have specific events, dialogue, and actions. Even narrative elements does not make the game into a story - I watched TV for two hours last night and watched three shows. Despite there being narrative elements on the TV, I was not seeking to create the story of how I watched TV, nor was the output of my TV watching a story. Games are also not necessarily structured like a story. Some groups may go out of their way to do so, but it is not a requirement for the game. That said, certain groups (and it sounds like yours falls into this), specifically seeks to create a story through play. And that sounds fun, but doesn't reflect what everyone is trying to do.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-04, 09:42 AM
Just because someone can come along after the fact and tell a story of what happened in your game doesn't mean that storytelling happens in every game. During gameplay (including all of the narrative elements), you have specific events, dialogue, and actions. Even narrative elements does not make the game into a story - I watched TV for two hours last night and watched three shows. Despite there being narrative elements on the TV, I was not seeking to create the story of how I watched TV, nor was the output of my TV watching a story. Games are also not necessarily structured like a story. Some groups may go out of their way to do so, but it is not a requirement for the game. That said, certain groups (and it sounds like yours falls into this), specifically seeks to create a story through play. And that sounds fun, but doesn't reflect what everyone is trying to do.

Nailed it in one.

Nothing wrong with those who find it adds to or drives their enjoyment of RPGs including some degree of deliberate storytelling or "about story" in their gaming -- the more kinds of RPG gaming and people "doing RPGs" the better.

But that's both an entirely subjective preference, and an absolutely completely optional element, when it comes to RPGs.

Quertus
2019-03-04, 12:46 PM
Nailed it in one.

Nothing wrong with those who find it adds to or drives their enjoyment of RPGs including some degree of deliberate storytelling or "about story" in their gaming -- the more kinds of RPG gaming and people "doing RPGs" the better.

But that's both an entirely subjective preference, and an absolutely completely optional element, when it comes to RPGs.

Wait... Maybe I'm confused here, but how does "entirely optional" mesh with your "must have these Venn Diagram else it isn't an RPG" stance?

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-04, 01:04 PM
Wait... Maybe I'm confused here, but how does "entirely optional" mesh with your "must have these Venn Diagram else it isn't an RPG" stance?


Because "about story", intentional during-play story-making, isn't part of that diagram.

sleepy hedgehog
2019-03-04, 04:04 PM
My favorite part is just hanging out with my friends.
It doesn't matter if it's playing DnD, roleplaying out MtG decks or RPG video games.
Also, it's the primary reason I could never get into online play.


Though for things I really like in RGP systems:

*Flat power levels*
I prefer high floors and low ceilings, where increasing in strength primarily increases options.
Stat's costs should grow exponentially as they improve, or strength grow sub-linearly.
If there's a maximum cap of 6 in a stat, I want to start with a couple skills in the 3-4 range.
And over the course of the campaign get a few more to 5.
Or take a single skill up to 6, and have increased literally nothing else

*World-building and exploration*
Worldbuilding is where a pretty reasonable amount of my free time goes.
Sometimes I like to show off a piece of it.
And that's when I DM.
When I'm playing I want to explore the world, and figure things out.
Which his one of the reasons I hate divination (and knowledge checks to some extent), since it tends to shortcut that.
I hope to never DM again, where anytime anything out of the ordinary shows up, I get 4 people saying "I detect magic on it"

*Hidden information/Individual goals*
I like when each PC has a goal that's separate from the parties goal.
Maybe not enough for PvP to happen, but enough to add friction and force decisions.
That said, PvP can be OK, but systems need to design for it, or at least consider it might happen.
Also it takes the right people.
Really, I just like where the best answer, the correct answer, and the player's answer are not necessarily the same.

*Campaign length*
I really like things that can wrap up in around 1/2 a year or less.
Optimally somewhere in the 8-18 weekly session range.
Shorter than that and it feels insufficiently epic.
Longer than that and I'm ready to move on to something new.


EDIT: Also I REALLY love unbalanced parties. And the struggles to solve what could be a trivial task for the missing parts.

Quertus
2019-03-04, 08:53 PM
*World-building and exploration*
Worldbuilding is where a pretty reasonable amount of my free time goes.
Sometimes I like to show off a piece of it.
And that's when I DM.
When I'm playing I want to explore the world, and figure things out.
Which his one of the reasons I hate divination (and knowledge checks to some extent), since it tends to shortcut that.
I hope to never DM again, where anytime anything out of the ordinary shows up, I get 4 people saying "I detect magic on it"

*Hidden information/Individual goals*
I like when each PC has a goal that's separate from the parties goal.
Maybe not enough for PvP to happen, but enough to add friction and force decisions.
That said, PvP can be OK, but systems need to design for it, or at least consider it might happen.
Also it takes the right people.
Really, I just like where the best answer, the correct answer, and the player's answer are not necessarily the same.

*Campaign length*
I really like things that can wrap up in around 1/2 a year or less.
Optimally somewhere in the 8-18 weekly session range.
Shorter than that and it feels insufficiently epic.
Longer than that and I'm ready to move on to something new.


EDIT: Also I REALLY love unbalanced parties. And the struggles to solve what could be a trivial task for the missing parts.

World-building: I, too, hate Knowledge skills, but I find that Senses / Detect spells facilitate the characters learning about the world. Why do our experiences differ here?

Individual goals: all of my best characters have many "hidden" goals. In fact, in many ways, one can measure how "good" one of my characters is by how many individual goals they have.

Unbalanced parties + individual goals: what about parties where the power level is askew between individuals, and one person's individual goal is something that they struggle with, but could be easily accomplished by someone else (who doesn't necessarily share and may even oppose that goal if it were explained to them)?

Thinker
2019-03-05, 07:48 AM
World-building: I, too, hate Knowledge skills, but I find that Senses / Detect spells facilitate the characters learning about the world. Why do our experiences differ here?

Individual goals: all of my best characters have many "hidden" goals. In fact, in many ways, one can measure how "good" one of my characters is by how many individual goals they have.

Unbalanced parties + individual goals: what about parties where the power level is askew between individuals, and one person's individual goal is something that they struggle with, but could be easily accomplished by someone else (who doesn't necessarily share and may even oppose that goal if it were explained to them)?

I've changed knowledge skills in just about all of my games these days. The players ask questions. If the answer is common knowledge for a player, I'll answer honestly and completely. If the answer is specialized or hidden in some way, I'll ask for a relevant roll. If they hit the target number, I'll answer honestly and completely; if they greatly surpass the target number, I'll answer honestly and completely and give them some other useful information they might not have asked for; if they miss by a little, I give them some information, but it might be wrapped in a lie or incomplete; if they miss by a lot, I'll give them bad information (or I'll give them good info, but they'll think it's bad because they missed).

Typically, the roll is good for the duration of the scene to avoid having to reroll about related things. If the circumstance changes in some way during the scene that would improve their knowledge, I'll allow a reroll with a bonus.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-06, 09:10 PM
Started a Worldbuilding take on this thread.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?582736-What-Setting-Elements-Do-You-Enjoy-In-A-quot-Fanstasy-quot-World

NichG
2019-03-06, 11:28 PM
Knowledge skills sort of seem like a good attempt at abstraction that nevertheless misses something of what it feels like to have knowledge or to be knowledgeable. I suppose the thing that bothers me about them is that they're too reflexive - the kind of 'lets find out if you knew all along' is a bit dissonant to me, and that just gets worse when it interacts with the idea that there are pieces of specific knowledge where the dynamics of how those become to be known is tightly interwoven with the intended gameplay.

E.g. if the BBEG happens to also be famous noble who is known to be deathly allergic to garlic, it seems like asking the character with high Knowledge(Nobility and Royalty) to accidentally start planning to resolve the situation through poisoning and then explicitly ask 'do I know if our enemy have any particular food allergies?' is sort of silly. Rather, what would feel more authentic would be if the player of that character already knew about the food allergy, and so because of that knowledge decided that it might be feasible to concoct a plan to poison their enemy. This is especially an issue if there are disconnects between the mechanics (food allergy doesn't do anything, poisons generally won't kill strong people) and the fiction - which is what things like the Knowledge skills are supposed to help bridge in the first place. Or another example would be, it would be great if Knowledge(Arcana) proactively generated plot hooks for how a wizard could advance the practice of their magic - experiments, magical locations, etc. But since it's 'check if you know', there's something a little bit backwards in that someone has to assume that there will be a plot hook and then may e.g. succeed in the roll but found that they asked the wrong question, where their Knowledge should be helping to inform what the right question would be.

At the same time, I'm not entirely satisfied with systems that let Knowledge-bearers set facts about the universe either, outside of a particular kind of campaign. In the 'how to advance my magic' case above, if someone asks 'Using Knowledge(Local), where can I go in this 30 person town to buy a greater artifact?' then I want the answer to be 'you would know that's not really feasible; but maybe in the nearby metropolis, where there's a famous archmage in residence' not 'okay, tell me about how it goes'.

I've wanted to have a system where for example you make a deck of secrets and, based on someone's investment into Knowledge, they get a certain number of draws per session (or maybe one draw per session, but their skill profile changes the composition of the deck - though that would be more time consuming if you aren't e.g. playing online and can just use automated solutions). So you get special things that only you know, which become prompts of things you could pursue or ignore as you like. But I haven't found a way to do it yet that isn't either underwhelming, a huge amount of work, or a huge time cost.

Quertus
2019-03-07, 07:08 AM
@NichG - I would strongly dislike the "draw every session" method you have described. Why would the knowledgeable person know something this session, but not last session? :smallconfused: (EDIT - although it might work well for modeling my senility...)

I have used a "draw at character creation" method that has worked for my groups. I've also used a similar technique for Gather Information / library research - type activities, with the number of draws based on the characters skill, time spent, and player skill (ie, ability to acquire modifiers).

NichG
2019-03-07, 10:48 AM
@NichG - I would strongly dislike the "draw every session" method you have described. Why would the knowledgeable person know something this session, but not last session? :smallconfused: (EDIT - although it might work well for modeling my senility...)

I have used a "draw at character creation" method that has worked for my groups. I've also used a similar technique for Gather Information / library research - type activities, with the number of draws based on the characters skill, time spent, and player skill (ie, ability to acquire modifiers).

I've done the 'when you buy the point of Knowledge, gain one secret about the cosmos' thing before, but the problem is that compared to other character resources which continue to be useful over time, that's only useful once. So the idea is, having investment in Knowledge is more like having some sort of channel or source by which you regularly gain new information (experimentation, going to libraries, having networks of contacts, hanging out in the pub and keeping your ear to the ground, whatever). So you know something this session but not last because your research turned it up in the time between sessions, and the specific quality or rarity of that information (lets not say the number of draws because that's awful) would depend on your rank in the skill/advantage/etc - e.g. at 1 point the deck has Rank 1 secrets, at 2 points it has Rank 1 and Rank 2 secrets, ...

The point is basically to preserve a central conceit that when it comes down to it 'your character knows what you know', and have the Knowledge skill be about moving more things into the set of 'things that you know'.

But as I said, I never figured out how to make it work.

Quertus
2019-03-07, 11:09 AM
I've done the 'when you buy the point of Knowledge, gain one secret about the cosmos' thing before,

That, at least, preserves some illusion of cause-and-effect. I could accept that.


but the problem is that compared to other character resources which continue to be useful over time, that's only useful once.

Um, no? "I know that mixing sulfur and bat guano produces gunpowder", "I know how to find and activate ancient Way Points", "I know a second trick for becoming a god" all sound awful useful in a "more than once" kind of way (well, if you'd like your whole party to ascend, and maybe stop others from ascending).


So the idea is, having investment in Knowledge is more like having some sort of channel or source by which you regularly gain new information (experimentation, going to libraries, having networks of contacts, hanging out in the pub and keeping your ear to the ground, whatever). So you know something this session but not last because your research turned it up in the time between sessions, and the specific quality or rarity of that information (lets not say the number of draws because that's awful) would depend on your rank in the skill/advantage/etc - e.g. at 1 point the deck has Rank 1 secrets, at 2 points it has Rank 1 and Rank 2 secrets, ...

The point is basically to preserve a central conceit that when it comes down to it 'your character knows what you know', and have the Knowledge skill be about moving more things into the set of 'things that you know'.

But as I said, I never figured out how to make it work.

Again, I used a similar system for "every time you actively do research". This passive, "happens to occur at the rate of once per session" thing sounds too Gamist for my tastes, but it seemed perfectly workable the way I did it.

And why would you consider "number of draws" to be awful? The quality of the draws is based on the quality of the source (researching at the Imperial Library vs Quertus' Library will produce different results); the number of draws is based on your skill at Research. The number of rumors you know is based on your Gather Information; the deck you draw from is based on your backstory. Worked fine for me - why do you consider this awful? :smallconfused:

Thinker
2019-03-07, 11:14 AM
Knowledge skills sort of seem like a good attempt at abstraction that nevertheless misses something of what it feels like to have knowledge or to be knowledgeable. I suppose the thing that bothers me about them is that they're too reflexive - the kind of 'lets find out if you knew all along' is a bit dissonant to me, and that just gets worse when it interacts with the idea that there are pieces of specific knowledge where the dynamics of how those become to be known is tightly interwoven with the intended gameplay.

E.g. if the BBEG happens to also be famous noble who is known to be deathly allergic to garlic, it seems like asking the character with high Knowledge(Nobility and Royalty) to accidentally start planning to resolve the situation through poisoning and then explicitly ask 'do I know if our enemy have any particular food allergies?' is sort of silly. Rather, what would feel more authentic would be if the player of that character already knew about the food allergy, and so because of that knowledge decided that it might be feasible to concoct a plan to poison their enemy. This is especially an issue if there are disconnects between the mechanics (food allergy doesn't do anything, poisons generally won't kill strong people) and the fiction - which is what things like the Knowledge skills are supposed to help bridge in the first place. Or another example would be, it would be great if Knowledge(Arcana) proactively generated plot hooks for how a wizard could advance the practice of their magic - experiments, magical locations, etc. But since it's 'check if you know', there's something a little bit backwards in that someone has to assume that there will be a plot hook and then may e.g. succeed in the roll but found that they asked the wrong question, where their Knowledge should be helping to inform what the right question would be.

At the same time, I'm not entirely satisfied with systems that let Knowledge-bearers set facts about the universe either, outside of a particular kind of campaign. In the 'how to advance my magic' case above, if someone asks 'Using Knowledge(Local), where can I go in this 30 person town to buy a greater artifact?' then I want the answer to be 'you would know that's not really feasible; but maybe in the nearby metropolis, where there's a famous archmage in residence' not 'okay, tell me about how it goes'.

I've wanted to have a system where for example you make a deck of secrets and, based on someone's investment into Knowledge, they get a certain number of draws per session (or maybe one draw per session, but their skill profile changes the composition of the deck - though that would be more time consuming if you aren't e.g. playing online and can just use automated solutions). So you get special things that only you know, which become prompts of things you could pursue or ignore as you like. But I haven't found a way to do it yet that isn't either underwhelming, a huge amount of work, or a huge time cost.

I agree that knowledge skills as being reactive is not ideal. Even questions and answers requires the player to think of the right questions. Under my system with your example, the player would have to think, "Based on my knowledge of the nobility, is there anything the noble is allergic to?" The problem with that is obviously how specific the question is. A better question might be, "What do I know about the noble's weaknesses?" So, we're relying on player skill to figure out character knowledge. The ideal would be for me to bring up the noble and for the player to know everything about their foe (that would be in their expertise).

Sadly, most players don't know much about the setting. They won't do "homework" to read up about the world. Thus, most of their information is only what is discovered through play. Given that, we can either do questions or info dumps. Info dumps would be something like creating a dossier for our noble and handing it to the player who would know about it. That can be time intensive for the GM to have to create dossiers about everything players might know about. You introduced a suggested third option: Draws.

From my understanding, a Draw would be a piece of information drawn from a deck based on the character's skill. This has a similar issue to the information dump - a lot of prep work for the GM while also being random in the information provided with little consideration for player input. This is the worst of both worlds in my opinion, high prep and little ability for the player to change the outcome.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-07, 11:39 AM
This is where we get into the question of what the character's "build" is for.

IMO, it's about mapping the character into the system, so that the character "feels" like the character in actual gameplay, as it interacts with other characters and the world. But the system itself can also fail to handle this, being so focused on a certain sort of mechanical gameplay that it fails to even have a way to represent some aspects of the character.

Even if they're rarely used for rolling, it's valuable to have some way on the character sheet to differentiate between characters based on how educated, well-read, experienced, etc, they're supposed to be.

There should also be layers of knowledge -- common knowledge, educated knowledge, specialized knowledge, whatever.

JoeJ
2019-03-07, 12:15 PM
Knowledge skills sort of seem like a good attempt at abstraction that nevertheless misses something of what it feels like to have knowledge or to be knowledgeable. I suppose the thing that bothers me about them is that they're too reflexive - the kind of 'lets find out if you knew all along' is a bit dissonant to me, and that just gets worse when it interacts with the idea that there are pieces of specific knowledge where the dynamics of how those become to be known is tightly interwoven with the intended gameplay.

I find knowledge skills, or really any game mechanic way of representing a player character's knowledge, to be mostly useless. If a bit of information is vital, you don't want to risk bringing the adventure to a crashing halt because of one missed die roll. For non-vital information, why not just decide based on the character's background whether or not they know something?

I also find that knowledge mechanics break verisimilitude by treating what a PC knows as a random collection of facts rather than the result of somebody's specific life history.

Quertus
2019-03-07, 01:08 PM
I find knowledge skills, or really any game mechanic way of representing a player character's knowledge, to be mostly useless. If a bit of information is vital, you don't want to risk bringing the adventure to a crashing halt because of one missed die roll. For non-vital information, why not just decide based on the character's background whether or not they know something?

I also find that knowledge mechanics break verisimilitude by treating what a PC knows as a random collection of facts rather than the result of somebody's specific life history.

So, being me, I'll point out that I prefer games where there is no such thing as "required" information. Otherwise, I agree with this sentiment.

That's one of the things I enjoy running Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named - I can generally just remember the facts he knows. Knowledge skill ranks are just fluff - a description of what he knows.

Thinker
2019-03-07, 02:27 PM
I find knowledge skills, or really any game mechanic way of representing a player character's knowledge, to be mostly useless. If a bit of information is vital, you don't want to risk bringing the adventure to a crashing halt because of one missed die roll. For non-vital information, why not just decide based on the character's background whether or not they know something?

I also find that knowledge mechanics break verisimilitude by treating what a PC knows as a random collection of facts rather than the result of somebody's specific life history.

I agree that vital information should not be hidden from the players. Clues should be apparent and obvious. I disagree about non-vital information - you can have non-vital information that is also useful. Knowing that trolls are weak to fire isn't vital to defeating them, but can be useful. Knowing that the Bandits at Black Keep receive a shipment of ale every Thursday can be useful to infiltrating their lair. A character could learn about the Bandits from their knowledge about local criminal elements or maybe she found out about it via a rumor.

If you make all potentially useful information known, they will always choose the best course of action, which makes their options less interesting.

JoeJ
2019-03-07, 02:35 PM
I agree that vital information should not be hidden from the players. Clues should be apparent and obvious. I disagree about non-vital information - you can have non-vital information that is also useful. Knowing that trolls are weak to fire isn't vital to defeating them, but can be useful. Knowing that the Bandits at Black Keep receive a shipment of ale every Thursday can be useful to infiltrating their lair. A character could learn about the Bandits from their knowledge about local criminal elements or maybe she found out about it via a rumor.

If you make all potentially useful information known, they will always choose the best course of action, which makes their options less interesting.

I never said make all potentially useful information known. I said decide based on the character's background what they would know. When I'm the GM, if a player can give me a good reason why their character would know the information in question (that is, a reason that makes sense within my knowledge of my world), I'll tell them. If it's something that the player already knows, as in the troll example, I'll just let that player decide whether or not their character knows as well.

Thinker
2019-03-07, 03:31 PM
I never said make all potentially useful information known. I said decide based on the character's background what they would know. When I'm the GM, if a player can give me a good reason why their character would know the information in question (that is, a reason that makes sense within my knowledge of my world), I'll tell them. If it's something that the player already knows, as in the troll example, I'll just let that player decide whether or not their character knows as well.

I don't like it, but I can see the value in it.

Man_Over_Game
2019-03-07, 05:26 PM
I find knowledge skills, or really any game mechanic way of representing a player character's knowledge, to be mostly useless. If a bit of information is vital, you don't want to risk bringing the adventure to a crashing halt because of one missed die roll. For non-vital information, why not just decide based on the character's background whether or not they know something?

I also find that knowledge mechanics break verisimilitude by treating what a PC knows as a random collection of facts rather than the result of somebody's specific life history.

Interestingly enough, 13th Age (from the guys who made Dnd 4e) does exactly that. Your knowledge or ability to do something is based on things in your background.

NichG
2019-03-07, 08:04 PM
I find knowledge skills, or really any game mechanic way of representing a player character's knowledge, to be mostly useless. If a bit of information is vital, you don't want to risk bringing the adventure to a crashing halt because of one missed die roll. For non-vital information, why not just decide based on the character's background whether or not they know something?

I also find that knowledge mechanics break verisimilitude by treating what a PC knows as a random collection of facts rather than the result of somebody's specific life history.

I'm not looking at the Knowledge skills to decide whether someone knows something, I'm looking at the Knowledge skills to allow a player to decide that they want to know more. It's a subtle difference perhaps, but in practice what it means is that if I have such a skill, it isn't there to handle things that could just nebulously be part of a character's background. Not 'trolls are weak to fire' but 'Shamghash the troll has his lair around Pyresburg, and reports of his activities in the area go back 10 times the normal lifespan of trolls' or as Quertus mentioned 'a second trick for becoming a god'.

The idea would be that whatever information you get from an investment of character resources should be actionable, the same way that investing character resources into movement, combat, etc abilities gives you specific new options or sources of agency.


That, at least, preserves some illusion of cause-and-effect. I could accept that.

Um, no? "I know that mixing sulfur and bat guano produces gunpowder", "I know how to find and activate ancient Way Points", "I know a second trick for becoming a god" all sound awful useful in a "more than once" kind of way (well, if you'd like your whole party to ascend, and maybe stop others from ascending).

This is another option for a Knowledge system - that rather than giving you information, it gives you access abilities that are in some sense knowledge-gated. E.g. 'to learn spells with the [Fire] descriptor you need at least X amount of these different knowledge skills' or 'by having this amount of Knowledge(Engineering) you can build a water-wheel'. I think that's valid, though I don't entirely like how that ties character resources to things that could be discovered or invented through action in the world. E.g. I'd prefer if 'I spend 10 years of downtime studying with masters in Fire magic, can I learn a [Fire] spell?' didn't depend on whether you embarked on that downtime with spare XP on your character sheet.

The ability to obtain information by alternate sources is also why I'm calling the 'fact reveal' type of Knowledge a one-off. Imagine a group where someone makes a character, dumps all their XP into Knowledge, tells the others, and then suicides and makes a new character. It's not that that would necessarily happen at a table, but rather given the nature of a large and integrated world, getting any one particular fact would have alternate ways of obtaining it that wouldn't cost character resources - so giving a particular fact in exchange for character resources feels like a bad exchange. Investing a permanent, campaign-limited resource generally should come with a permanent local advantage where you spent it relative to spending that resource elsewhere.

I could still see it if the scale of the thing you learn is sufficiently potent (second trick for becoming a god) such that choosing how and when to reveal it lets you forcibly change the world in a way you want, but then I wouldn't want it to be a skill but rather something like a Background or Advantage selected at character creation since it needs to be fairly transformative and definitive, and also loses impact the longer the campaign goes on (e.g. the more times you use access to the secret to create change). Having it be char-gen only also would help with the time costs of doing a 'draw from the deck' type of thing - if you only do it once, it can be fancier.



Again, I used a similar system for "every time you actively do research". This passive, "happens to occur at the rate of once per session" thing sounds too Gamist for my tastes, but it seemed perfectly workable the way I did it.

And why would you consider "number of draws" to be awful? The quality of the draws is based on the quality of the source (researching at the Imperial Library vs Quertus' Library will produce different results); the number of draws is based on your skill at Research. The number of rumors you know is based on your Gather Information; the deck you draw from is based on your backstory. Worked fine for me - why do you consider this awful? :smallconfused:

Draws take time and you also need a sufficient pool of things to draw that you don't repeat. Imagine 6 players, each one draws one card a session, over a 30 session campaign. So for no repeats you need a minimum of 180 cards already and that's at one draw a person. You're also going to spend 15 minutes+ at the start of each session resolving the Knowledge skills. Now, if each player had 5 or 10 draws, this becomes the entire session. The reason for a 1/session scaling rather than per time is twofold:

One is that, from experience, random reward mechanisms with no downsides (or even ones with downsides) quickly take over the list of 'things to do today' in a session, and players will generally put off actual going out and doing stuff in favor of taking more draws from the deck if the number of draws isn't somehow limited in a way that forces them to do something else in between. I've had this happen in campaigns with Deck-of-many-things type objects and other sorts of mechanisms where you can exchange resources for a random spin. Random rewards have a pretty strong psychological effect, so it takes careful design to not let them take over a system.

The second is that as a DM, I don't want to feel compelled to be putting the party in a state of constant emergency as a matter of game balance. If a group wants to take a 100 year downtime and has the abilities to do so, I want to be able to say 'sure!' without having to second guess whether there are things in the system which were balanced around the assumption that stuff like that won't be happening. If research rolls are 1/month in game, then my deck of 200 cards will work for a campaign where each session is about a week of time, but will be almost instantly exhausted the moment the party decides to do a 10 year timeskip. So making it tied to in-game time is unstable against options that I want to feel free to say 'yes' to without reservation.

JoeJ
2019-03-07, 08:34 PM
I'm not looking at the Knowledge skills to decide whether someone knows something, I'm looking at the Knowledge skills to allow a player to decide that they want to know more. It's a subtle difference perhaps, but in practice what it means is that if I have such a skill, it isn't there to handle things that could just nebulously be part of a character's background. Not 'trolls are weak to fire' but 'Shamghash the troll has his lair around Pyresburg, and reports of his activities in the area go back 10 times the normal lifespan of trolls' or as Quertus mentioned 'a second trick for becoming a god'.

In a game where the players can declare things about the world, I could see having a knowledge skill mechanic to determine whether or not a player is allowed to introduce the information about Shamghash at a given point in the game. In a more traditional game, where the GM is the sole person describing the world, I as GM, would have to have created that bit of information about Shamghash. If I did that, I would decide at the same time how I was going to introduce it; whether that be by having one of the PCs know, or having it be something that could be discovered through investigation.

Quertus
2019-03-08, 08:24 AM
The ability to obtain information by alternate sources is also why I'm calling the 'fact reveal' type of Knowledge a one-off. Imagine a group where someone makes a character, dumps all their XP into Knowledge, tells the others, and then suicides and makes a new character. It's not that that would necessarily happen at a table, but rather given the nature of a large and integrated world, getting any one particular fact would have alternate ways of obtaining it that wouldn't cost character resources - so giving a particular fact in exchange for character resources feels like a bad exchange. Investing a permanent, campaign-limited resource generally should come with a permanent local advantage where you spent it relative to spending that resource elsewhere.

I could still see it if the scale of the thing you learn is sufficiently potent (second trick for becoming a god) such that choosing how and when to reveal it lets you forcibly change the world in a way you want, but then I wouldn't want it to be a skill but rather something like a Background or Advantage selected at character creation since it needs to be fairly transformative and definitive, and also loses impact the longer the campaign goes on (e.g. the more times you use access to the secret to create change). Having it be char-gen only also would help with the time costs of doing a 'draw from the deck' type of thing - if you only do it once, it can be fancier.

Draws take time and you also need a sufficient pool of things to draw that you don't repeat. Imagine 6 players, each one draws one card a session, over a 30 session campaign. So for no repeats you need a minimum of 180 cards already and that's at one draw a person. You're also going to spend 15 minutes+ at the start of each session resolving the Knowledge skills. Now, if each player had 5 or 10 draws, this becomes the entire session. The reason for a 1/session scaling rather than per time is twofold:

One is that, from experience, random reward mechanisms with no downsides (or even ones with downsides) quickly take over the list of 'things to do today' in a session, and players will generally put off actual going out and doing stuff in favor of taking more draws from the deck if the number of draws isn't somehow limited in a way that forces them to do something else in between. I've had this happen in campaigns with Deck-of-many-things type objects and other sorts of mechanisms where you can exchange resources for a random spin. Random rewards have a pretty strong psychological effect, so it takes careful design to not let them take over a system.

The second is that as a DM, I don't want to feel compelled to be putting the party in a state of constant emergency as a matter of game balance. If a group wants to take a 100 year downtime and has the abilities to do so, I want to be able to say 'sure!' without having to second guess whether there are things in the system which were balanced around the assumption that stuff like that won't be happening. If research rolls are 1/month in game, then my deck of 200 cards will work for a campaign where each session is about a week of time, but will be almost instantly exhausted the moment the party decides to do a 10 year timeskip. So making it tied to in-game time is unstable against options that I want to feel free to say 'yes' to without reservation.

So, let me address all of this.

Let's just focus on one single thing: the second trick for becoming a god.

At the start of the campaign, someone drew from a list of starting rumors that a particular ascended mortal was not / did not (insert qualifier for becoming a god).

The party becomes curious about whether this is true or not.

I know which libraries/sources have - in whole or part - the knowledge that the rumor is true, and which ones have (in whole or in part) the trick that was used.

If the party find the right library, and decided to camp there for 100 years, I'll just hand them the answer (along with whatever other information they seem interested in that the library contains, and remember whatever else it had, in case it comes up later).

If the party find the right library, and uses a Wish to optimize their research, I'll just stack the deck, and give them the answer along with other random draws.

But, in general, they get draws based on research skill, time spent, etc.

Oh, and, at times, there were duplicates when drawing starting rumors. "No duplicates" is not a thing which holds value to me. In fact, most GMs just blurt out the exact same rumors to the entire party, so "everyone gets duplicates" is the default state, IME.

There is not an easy to game the system. I mean, I suppose you could have the 100-member suicide pact, where 100 people from around the world come together, state all their rumors, then commit suicide. And then you play member 101, who collected all the rumors. Oh, and have them all be ancient librarians, too, who have read from every known library.

Short of something like that, the system I've used isn't terribly easy to game, afaict.

NichG
2019-03-08, 10:22 PM
So, let me address all of this.

Let's just focus on one single thing: the second trick for becoming a god.

At the start of the campaign, someone drew from a list of starting rumors that a particular ascended mortal was not / did not (insert qualifier for becoming a god).

The party becomes curious about whether this is true or not.

I know which libraries/sources have - in whole or part - the knowledge that the rumor is true, and which ones have (in whole or in part) the trick that was used.

If the party find the right library, and decided to camp there for 100 years, I'll just hand them the answer (along with whatever other information they seem interested in that the library contains, and remember whatever else it had, in case it comes up later).

If the party find the right library, and uses a Wish to optimize their research, I'll just stack the deck, and give them the answer along with other random draws.

But, in general, they get draws based on research skill, time spent, etc.

Oh, and, at times, there were duplicates when drawing starting rumors. "No duplicates" is not a thing which holds value to me. In fact, most GMs just blurt out the exact same rumors to the entire party, so "everyone gets duplicates" is the default state, IME.

There is not an easy to game the system. I mean, I suppose you could have the 100-member suicide pact, where 100 people from around the world come together, state all their rumors, then commit suicide. And then you play member 101, who collected all the rumors. Oh, and have them all be ancient librarians, too, who have read from every known library.

Short of something like that, the system I've used isn't terribly easy to game, afaict.

The issue is that there will be some characteristic timescale such that if the campaign is faster-paced than that timescale then the research/knowledge mechanism isn't going to be useful, but if the campaign is slower-paced than that timescale then the research/knowledge mechanism will be used up rapidly. The width of the workable region in between those extremes is based on just how many different rumors/secrets/etc the GM prepares ahead of time. If things like 'becoming a god' are on the table, the range of downtime timescales that I could expect to be relevant to the campaign might vary between 1 week and 1000 years. So that's a lot of prep (and honestly, a lot of reading of info-dumps if someone actually does feel like they want to make sure they're using their Knowledge properly and insists on getting every draw they're due when the rest of the party goes on a crafting downtime).

If we're talking research rather than knowledge, one answer to this would be to make research projects that have exponentially distributed time and resource costs. E.g. 'discovering gunpowder requires you to accumulate 100 research points, but discovering the ascendancy equation that lets you compute and become an ultimate final form of your species requires 10^12 research points'. In that case, if the party says 'we just sit down and research the thing because we want it' then the cost structure is driving the motivation justifying the particular lengths of downtime, which is actually a good thing. But while I can get behind that for things like city building, research and development, etc, it's not exactly filling the needs that 'knowledge' skills currently awkwardly provide.

Quertus
2019-03-09, 01:30 AM
The issue is that there will be some characteristic timescale such that if the campaign is faster-paced than that timescale then the research/knowledge mechanism isn't going to be useful, but if the campaign is slower-paced than that timescale then the research/knowledge mechanism will be used up rapidly. The width of the workable region in between those extremes is based on just how many different rumors/secrets/etc the GM prepares ahead of time. If things like 'becoming a god' are on the table, the range of downtime timescales that I could expect to be relevant to the campaign might vary between 1 week and 1000 years. So that's a lot of prep (and honestly, a lot of reading of info-dumps if someone actually does feel like they want to make sure they're using their Knowledge properly and insists on getting every draw they're due when the rest of the party goes on a crafting downtime).

If we're talking research rather than knowledge, one answer to this would be to make research projects that have exponentially distributed time and resource costs. E.g. 'discovering gunpowder requires you to accumulate 100 research points, but discovering the ascendancy equation that lets you compute and become an ultimate final form of your species requires 10^12 research points'. In that case, if the party says 'we just sit down and research the thing because we want it' then the cost structure is driving the motivation justifying the particular lengths of downtime, which is actually a good thing. But while I can get behind that for things like city building, research and development, etc, it's not exactly filling the needs that 'knowledge' skills currently awkwardly provide.

... You seem to be thinking in terms of researching things from scratch, rather than just getting someone else's research. To my mind, I'm not talking about researching a new spell, just copying one into your spellbook.

So, if I wrote the secrets to becoming a god in my notebook, you reading it takes far less time than you researching it from scratch. OTOH, you reading just one of my sources may give you the idea that it's possible, or even a guess how to do it, you just need to do the research to find the things that have the properties required for it to work.

So, in a sandbox, when the PCs are researching about becoming a god, but find something else interesting? IME, they usually see if that something else is actionable, and, if so, go take actions on it, then come back later to research more.

If the world has 50 things going on, and the PCs care about even 20 of them, that's awesome!

If they only care about 1 thing, then, yes, time skip, they spend the time, and learn all they can about that 1 thing.

NichG
2019-03-09, 03:01 AM
... You seem to be thinking in terms of researching things from scratch, rather than just getting someone else's research. To my mind, I'm not talking about researching a new spell, just copying one into your spellbook.

So, if I wrote the secrets to becoming a god in my notebook, you reading it takes far less time than you researching it from scratch. OTOH, you reading just one of my sources may give you the idea that it's possible, or even a guess how to do it, you just need to do the research to find the things that have the properties required for it to work.

So, in a sandbox, when the PCs are researching about becoming a god, but find something else interesting? IME, they usually see if that something else is actionable, and, if so, go take actions on it, then come back later to research more.

If the world has 50 things going on, and the PCs care about even 20 of them, that's awesome!

If they only care about 1 thing, then, yes, time skip, they spend the time, and learn all they can about that 1 thing.

Maybe I need to take another tack to explain this.

Lets say the party finds out that the Library of Owls in the Mirror Realm contains copies of works that had otherwise nominally been expunged from the timeline of their universe due to an action by the gods to censor certain discoveries. They say 'we go there (adventure follows as appropriate) and try to find a copy of that banned spell'. In that case, regardless of character resources, skill levels, etc, I want to be able to say 'yes, it's established that that information is there, so after a few hours/days of looking around the library, you have the information'. That kind of thing is not what the skill is for.

On the other hand, in the same system there might be a character whose player says 'I want to play a spymaster who accumulates blackmail material on people, so that when it comes down to social confrontations he can mention something or threaten to reveal a secret and get them to back off or do what he says - how should I go about playing this at your table?'. Well, one answer would be to one by one pick specific nobles or officials, infiltrate their offices, talk to their associates, and accumulate the blackmail material during play. As per the former example, if you actually go through the trouble to do all of that, then I want to be able to say 'okay, great, here's what you find'. However, that's going to require that player to spend a lot of active screen time just to be able to play their concept - it would be more appropriate for most games to abstract that away somehow.

One option would be to say 'based on a character skill, you can roll to see if you know some blackmail material when you're in a social conflict with someone' but that gives us the weird anti-knowledge thing - you should already know before you make the choice to get into that conflict if you've got dirt on the guy or not. You could have a system where you can invent a certain amount of blackmail material based on your skill, but then you have the potential for incoherence between parts of the world the players don't yet know and what the player comes up with. Or you could have a system (my preference) where there is some way that you obtain an inventory of blackmail material in advance, in exchange for investment of character resources. So if e.g. someone is actually incorruptible, they're just not going to have anything in the deck of secrets in the first place. And if you draw a Major Threat against the King, now you can actually say 'hey wait a minute, here's this thing we can rely on in order to make our plans - if we get in trouble in the kingdom, we can get a pardon no problem' before you actually get into trouble and need it.

So the question then is, how to balance this kind of system so that it doesn't force me to bend other parts of the campaign around it? If you get a certain amount of material per week per skill point lets say, then just saying 'lets double the length of our downtimes' is equivalent to saying 'I pay no cost, but double my effective skill rank'. So that means that downtime length becomes the same kind of resource as whatever the character advancement resource is - that's not good design. To fix this, you either make the scaling sublinear enough that its just not worth it even if it's free (the time to the next blackmail tip doubles each time you receive one, and that counter resets when you increment the skill), tie it to some normalizing factor like 1 tip per session or 1 tip per milestone, add secondary costs (getting tips costs both time and money, even if you have the skill), or design the entire thing to operate in the saturated regime (if you have 3 dots of Secrets you automatically know all rank-3 secrets and below, here they are).

Quertus
2019-03-09, 09:40 AM
So the question then is, how to balance this kind of system so that it doesn't force me to bend other parts of the campaign around it? If you get a certain amount of material per week per skill point lets say, then just saying 'lets double the length of our downtimes' is equivalent to saying 'I pay no cost, but double my effective skill rank'. So that means that downtime length becomes the same kind of resource as whatever the character advancement resource is - that's not good design. To fix this, you either make the scaling sublinear enough that its just not worth it even if it's free (the time to the next blackmail tip doubles each time you receive one, and that counter resets when you increment the skill), tie it to some normalizing factor like 1 tip per session or 1 tip per milestone, add secondary costs (getting tips costs both time and money, even if you have the skill), or design the entire thing to operate in the saturated regime (if you have 3 dots of Secrets you automatically know all rank-3 secrets and below, here they are).

There is nothing to fix.

In your specific example, you learn that the Duke is having an affair. Three years later, your "spymaster" decides to use this secret, only to learn that someone else has already exposed the Duke, plus his wife is dead, and he's married his former partner in crime.

There is nothing to fix.

It's like saying, "we could just spend 20 years of downtime making Craft checks to make money, so there's no point in taking more than single rank in Craft". It completely devalues time in a way I can't see as realistic for even mortal murder-hobos.

There is nothing to fix.

You can certainly let the spymaster focus on particular individuals, or particular types of iniquity, rather than the general "draw of opportunity", and balance realism, spotlight time, etc.

There is nothing to fix.

Well, OK, actually, my system(s) lacked the "gated behind skill requirements" that you mentioned. I rather like the idea that certain secrets only get added to the deck once you have a certain level of skill.

So maybe there is something to fix.

Cluedrew
2019-03-09, 01:58 PM
For what I enjoy? I like role-playing, creating characters and seeing how they interact with each other. I like story-telling*, seeing how events unfold with the rules being tools to help shape that. I like creating diverse characters, with just enough mechanics to reflect who they are. I like the tension of not knowing what will happen next and yet being able to look back and see all the things that got us to this point.

In my mind, for it to be a role-playing game there must be a divide between in-character and out-of-character and the focus is on the in-character side. Otherwise it is just a war game (just, like I don't enjoy those too) or a dungeon crawling board game or... you get the idea. Which might be a bit narrow for some people and it is just a line I find useful. But yeah, also compared to those war games I enjoy I find combat in tactical role-playing games to be slow, unwieldy and kind of void of interesting decisions. Better then to focus in on how character effects combat which the lighter combat systems do quite well. I guess generally I consider the rules in role-playing games to be at their best when they are a tool for expression of characters and situations.

* I realize a couple people will disagree with my use of story-telling here. But as flawed as this term is, I don't have a better one.

NichG
2019-03-09, 08:20 PM
There is nothing to fix.

In your specific example, you learn that the Duke is having an affair. Three years later, your "spymaster" decides to use this secret, only to learn that someone else has already exposed the Duke, plus his wife is dead, and he's married his former partner in crime.


In this example, the GM has to be sure to come up with in-world reasons that the benefits of each Knowledge skill have a shelf life, which is an undesirable property for a system since it means that the setting must warp to preserve the abstractions in the mechanics.



There is nothing to fix.

It's like saying, "we could just spend 20 years of downtime making Craft checks to make money, so there's no point in taking more than single rank in Craft". It completely devalues time in a way I can't see as realistic for even mortal murder-hobos.


I've been in campaigns where we've done basically that. In an Elder Scrolls RPG game where my character owned a potion shop, at one point the group decided that the best thing to do would be to just take a month or two off to make money since we could do it faster and more reliably this way than by adventuring. On the far, far extreme I was in another game (D&D-based) where one of the campaign gimmicks was that the party had access to the point at the end of time, and one of its properties was that you could pass an arbitrary amount of time doing something (and you wouldn't age in doing so), but for anyone else who wasn't actually sitting there and watching you whatever you did would only take a few seconds - we very quickly entered the 'you have infinite gold' regime of play, which was fine in that campaign since it was part of the point to explore what things break and what things work when you push them as far as possible.

I've also run a campaign where every 3 sessions was followed by a 15 year timeskip, and 'tell me everything that happened that's relevant to my interests in the last 15 years' was a common but painful request.

Otherwise, this is rare in D&D because mundane crafting is so worthless beyond the lowest levels that it'd often not even be worth taking the 1 skill point, and non-mundane crafting is lucrative but gated behind a per-session resource (experience points).

Oh, and honorable mention, the game about time travel where the PCs did the usual 'deposit 10000gp into a bank a thousand years in the past and take advantage of the compound interest'. I've also had a campaign with combinatoric exploration of magical gems where the PCs farmed out the exploration job so they could just have the whole grid completed in one go, which is not quite the same but...



There is nothing to fix.

You can certainly let the spymaster focus on particular individuals, or particular types of iniquity, rather than the general "draw of opportunity", and balance realism, spotlight time, etc.


Yes, being able to filter the deck would make for a good set of Feat-like character abilities in this space.
* Focused Research - Each Secret has one of the following keywords: "Person", "Place", "Thing", "Concept"; pick one keyword, and compose the deck entirely out of cards of that type.
* Literature Meta-study - Each Secret has one of the following keywords: 'Forgotten', 'Hidden', 'Never Known', 'Missed Implication'; pick one keyword and compose the deck entirely of cards of that type.
* Process of Elimination - the GM withdraws all cards from the deck about a subject of inquiry, discards half of the remaining cards, and shuffles the held out cards back in.

5crownik007
2019-03-10, 05:02 PM
I find it important that the book has situational contingency rules. I'm bad at coming up with a houserule on the fly. The three important ones are fall damage, vehicle weapons fired at characters and vehicles colliding with characters. Those are essential. Other than that, I can probably figure it out.

Quertus
2019-03-10, 05:46 PM
For what I enjoy? I like role-playing, creating characters and seeing how they interact with each other. I like story-telling*, seeing how events unfold with the rules being tools to help shape that. I like creating diverse characters, with just enough mechanics to reflect who they are. I like the tension of not knowing what will happen next and yet being able to look back and see all the things that got us to this point.

In my mind, for it to be a role-playing game there must be a divide between in-character and out-of-character and the focus is on the in-character side. Otherwise it is just a war game (just, like I don't enjoy those too) or a dungeon crawling board game or... you get the idea. Which might be a bit narrow for some people and it is just a line I find useful. But yeah, also compared to those war games I enjoy I find combat in tactical role-playing games to be slow, unwieldy and kind of void of interesting decisions. Better then to focus in on how character effects combat which the lighter combat systems do quite well. I guess generally I consider the rules in role-playing games to be at their best when they are a tool for expression of characters and situations.

* I realize a couple people will disagree with my use of story-telling here. But as flawed as this term is, I don't have a better one.

You know, my senile mind thinks it remembers you saying that we want different things out of a game, but then you go and make posts like this, and I'm all like, "how is that even possible?". Most of that is very much my jam.


I've also run a campaign where every 3 sessions was followed by a 15 year timeskip, and 'tell me everything that happened that's relevant to my interests in the last 15 years' was a common but painful request.

I wouldn't expect that to need to be a request; I'd expect the GM to just give my that information when he narrated the time skip.


Yes, being able to filter the deck would make for a good set of Feat-like character abilities in this space.
* Focused Research - Each Secret has one of the following keywords: "Person", "Place", "Thing", "Concept"; pick one keyword, and compose the deck entirely out of cards of that type.
* Literature Meta-study - Each Secret has one of the following keywords: 'Forgotten', 'Hidden', 'Never Known', 'Missed Implication'; pick one keyword and compose the deck entirely of cards of that type.
* Process of Elimination - the GM withdraws all cards from the deck about a subject of inquiry, discards half of the remaining cards, and shuffles the held out cards back in.

Ouch.

So, completely without feats, I'd expect a spymaster to be able to...
* Gather rumors (a number of draws from the deck based on skill & modifiers, with the composition of the deck varying by skill)
* Gather rumors about X (a much lower number of draws from a deck only containing rumors about X)
* Roleplay through specific actions taken to gather information.

EDIT:
In this example, the GM has to be sure to come up with in-world reasons that the benefits of each Knowledge skill have a shelf life, which is an undesirable property for a system since it means that the setting must warp to preserve the abstractions in the mechanics.

Actually, exactly the opposite. I'm saying, don't warp the world around the system, make the world keep behaving realistically. Which will naturally give some items a shelf life, and others not.

Cluedrew
2019-03-10, 06:14 PM
You know, my senile mind thinks it remembers you saying that we want different things out of a game, but then you go and make posts like this, and I'm all like, "how is that even possible?". Most of that is very much my jam.I mean yes, but that doesn't prevent us from enjoying some of the same things as well. People are not conveniently sorted into boxes and all.

Telok
2019-03-11, 01:43 AM
I've been thinking about things for a while. Across about 8 or systems over the last 10 years. And I have identified one thing that makes me generally like or dislike systems. It is something so totally within the power of the designers to get right and so completely basic to the systems that I'm starting to consider failure an unforgivable flaw.

Get your math right.

Go down to the local university, find the statistics class, offer someone who passed an internship as the "math guy" for minimum wage, part time, and a non-disclosure agreement.

Get the bloody math right.

Having to errata target numbers for whole subsections. Failure. Herculean heros failing average strength related tasks with regularity. Failure. Adding stuff in supplements as character 'options' because the characters get worse at stuff as they gain levels. Failure. GM can't even assign a target number because they can't figure out what the baseline person should be able to succeed at. Failure. People telling me not to use the target numbers printed in official adventures because they're bad. Failure.

Resolving the characters hot-potato-with-a-live-nuke dillemma via rock/paper/scissors weighted by bribing the GM with chocolate? Paranoia gives you backup clones for a reason. Also, it's funny.

A system where the average warm body on the street rolls four dice and keeps two for tasks that cover their day job? Success. I know the target number for something a competent person should succeed at most of the time. A hero's core competency is roll 8 and keep 4? There's a chart tbat tells me the %s for them getting different numbers? Success. I know what this system expects to be rolled and how it expects those nu.bers to work. I can use that.

Get the math right. I enjoy games that got their basic task resolution systems and major subsystems right.

Also remember to check your spaceship length/mass/density ratios. Cruise ships, aircraft carriers, and submarines make a good starting point.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-11, 08:34 AM
I've been thinking about things for a while. Across about 8 or systems over the last 10 years. And I have identified one thing that makes me generally like or dislike systems. It is something so totally within the power of the designers to get right and so completely basic to the systems that I'm starting to consider failure an unforgivable flaw.

Get your math right.

Go down to the local university, find the statistics class, offer someone who passed an internship as the "math guy" for minimum wage, part time, and a non-disclosure agreement.

Get the bloody math right.

Having to errata target numbers for whole subsections. Failure. Herculean heros failing average strength related tasks with regularity. Failure. Adding stuff in supplements as character 'options' because the characters get worse at stuff as they gain levels. Failure. GM can't even assign a target number because they can't figure out what the baseline person should be able to succeed at. Failure. People telling me not to use the target numbers printed in official adventures because they're bad. Failure.

...

A system where the average warm body on the street rolls four dice and keeps two for tasks that cover their day job? Success. I know the target number for something a competent person should succeed at most of the time. A hero's core competency is roll 8 and keep 4? There's a chart tbat tells me the %s for them getting different numbers? Success. I know what this system expects to be rolled and how it expects those nu.bers to work. I can use that.

Get the math right. I enjoy games that got their basic task resolution systems and major subsystems right.

Also remember to check your spaceship length/mass/density ratios. Cruise ships, aircraft carriers, and submarines make a good starting point.

Yes on both points.

I can't stand it when game systems fail at math, and it's doubly aggravating when caring about the math is attacked as "playing numbers instead of characters" or "caring more about the odds than the story". It's as if there's a chunk of the gaming population who can't differentiate the designer-level challenges of crafting a game system, from their preferences for playing the system.

And it's like we've gone through (or are going through) a phase of "innovative" mechanics being more important than functional mechanics.

I keep coming across systems that look promising but then fail the "math test" -- such as the system where the average person fails an average strength, or intelligence, or constitution check over half the time. Some would argue that they shouldn't even be rolling, but here they don't even succeed on the majority of rolls.

Lucas Yew
2019-03-11, 10:00 PM
Mechanical crunch that interacts universally simulation-wise with the game world.

Such as the Strength-Carry equation and the implications Teleportation abilities bring to a 'verse.

OmSwaOperations
2019-03-12, 05:57 AM
One gameplay element I think is criminally undervalued in a lot of RPGs is social negotiation: arguing with NPCs about what's right and wrong, trying to convince them to act in your favour, playing factions off against one another, etc.

It's a lot more nuanced and open ended than combat, which is a bit advantage, but I guess it requires a lot more making stuff up on the fly (you can stat up a combat encounter, whereas it's difficult to stat up *an ideology* or *the way a person with x personality will respond to y argument*)

Willie the Duck
2019-03-12, 07:26 AM
One gameplay element I think is criminally undervalued in a lot of RPGs is social negotiation: arguing with NPCs about what's right and wrong, trying to convince them to act in your favour, playing factions off against one another, etc.

It's a lot more nuanced and open ended than combat, which is a bit advantage, but I guess it requires a lot more making stuff up on the fly (you can stat up a combat encounter, whereas it's difficult to stat up *an ideology* or *the way a person with x personality will respond to y argument*)

I don't really feel that it is ignored in all that many games, so much as there doesn't seem to be much consensus on how best to rules-codify it. Players tend to value the autonomy they have over their characters, and thus, barring certain 'special cases' (mind control magic widely acknowledged as being whammied, having to make a willpower check against an addiction of compulsion you chose to take for more points in a point-buy game), they don't want to be told what decision their characters have made. This makes it hard to make a game where one rolls to see how a conversation when, because if the PCs are immune to 'your opponent has successfully convinced you, now your action is...' effects, it is really hard to use it for the NPCs and make it work.

Thus, most TTRPGs tend to simply have reaction charts or negotiation skills, and let the GM arbitrate the outcome... which is actually where lots of gamers prefer things to be, if my anecdotal personal experience is any indication.

OmSwaOperations
2019-03-15, 01:13 PM
One element which I think is neglected in a lot of RPG systems (possibly for want of appropriate mechanics) is persuasion. The gameplay experience of convincing a powerful NPC to support you, turning the bad guy's supporter against him, explaining why you aren't *actually* stealing the gem of Zumalkis but just inspecting it, etc. is super fun. There just isn't much crunch to back it up in most RPGs.

Man_Over_Game
2019-03-15, 01:43 PM
One gameplay element I think is criminally undervalued in a lot of RPGs is social negotiation: arguing with NPCs about what's right and wrong, trying to convince them to act in your favour, playing factions off against one another, etc.

It's a lot more nuanced and open ended than combat, which is a bit advantage, but I guess it requires a lot more making stuff up on the fly (you can stat up a combat encounter, whereas it's difficult to stat up *an ideology* or *the way a person with x personality will respond to y argument*)


One element which I think is neglected in a lot of RPG systems (possibly for want of appropriate mechanics) is persuasion. The gameplay experience of convincing a powerful NPC to support you, turning the bad guy's supporter against him, explaining why you aren't *actually* stealing the gem of Zumalkis but just inspecting it, etc. is super fun. There just isn't much crunch to back it up in most RPGs.

Erm, not sure if you meant to, but you basically posted the same thing twice. Kinda funny.

Quertus
2019-03-15, 02:02 PM
Erm, not sure if you meant to, but you basically posted the same thing twice. Kinda funny.

Same? Hmmm, I read that as posting opposing opinions.

Cluedrew
2019-03-16, 05:57 PM
Get your math right.This I would not call a game-play element, but I would put on a list of design requirements for any good system. I can thing of a few:

Math: As stated, doesn't have to be perfect, especially if it errs on the side of simplicity and improving the game's pace.

Clarity: If I have the rule-book in front of me and still can't figure out how something is supposed to work, this is a serious problem. Contradictions between rule sets are an immediate red mark. As are serious ambiguities that mean I can't figure out what is supposed to me. Organizational clarity, being able to find things in the rule book, is also important.

Unity: This one is a bit softer, but a system should understand what kind of system it is trying to be and work towards that. D&D has some problems with this one. Some examples include odd changes in level of detail or sudden changes in tone. The reason this one is softer is that there can be good reasons for these shifts so it can get into subjective "is this the system I am looking for" territory really quickly.

Pacing: You have to be able to resolve common occurrences quickly. Similarly with mostly unimportant things. There is a subjective threshold here as well, but they are pretty close together for many things. I have heard consistent complaints about any combat system that uses more than 2 rolls per attack. Side abilities get boiled down to one.