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View Full Version : Does Every aspect of a TTRPG need to have a Strategic Mini-game?



Easy e
2022-10-06, 05:17 PM
I noticed that there is a strong desire on this board to create "systems" to handle all aspects of the game. So, if you want to do social skills; we need a system in order to solve who gets their way. If you are going into the woods, you need a system in order to determine how long you can survive. If you are going to intimidate somehow, you need a wide variety of choices and rolls. I understand the appeal as no matter what happens, you know what to do, and remove grey area.

Every TTRPG should have a focus or "intended state of play" in which the rules maybe more developed or focused on. For example, D&D likes to focus a lot on "tactical combat" so has a lot of rules for how to kill stuff. Those Dark Places is an industrial, sci-fi space horror game, so it has more detail mechanics on panic states. Call of Cthulthu is more of an investigation and sanity losing focus, so mechanics focus on
those game play methods. Other games have other focuses.

Mini-games and such have their place in helping create the games focus. They are also great in board games, video games, wargames, etc. However, the only way a TTRPG with a GM can cover the vast swathe of game styles, scenarios, resolutions, etc. is by letting the GM adjudicate for areas that are outside of the core "intended state of play" that make up any session. It is one of the few things that make TTRPGs unique as a game experience. Should designers lean into this advantage, or are a variety of strategic mini-games the preferred state of play?

I look forward to the discussion and solid, well thought out refutations of my poorly worded thoughts.

gbaji
2022-10-06, 09:02 PM
Mini-games and such have their place in helping create the games focus. They are also great in board games, video games, wargames, etc. However, the only way a TTRPG with a GM can cover the vast swathe of game styles, scenarios, resolutions, etc. is by letting the GM adjudicate for areas that are outside of the core "intended state of play" that make up any session. It is one of the few things that make TTRPGs unique as a game experience. Should designers lean into this advantage, or are a variety of strategic mini-games the preferred state of play?

I think it depends on the game (of course), but that's a pretty cheap cop out. So. I think there is an advantage to focusing on the core "intended state of play" with the bulk of the rules and then just adjudicating stuff outside that area. if those areas aren't that critical or focused as part of the game, the players maybe don't actually want to spend that much time dealing with them. Creating a new mini-game is just more work for very little payoff.

I've also personally found that mini-games can be jarring from a game flow point of view. I'm assuming here that the core rules don't deal with super detail on that area (except maybe some broad skill rolls), so any mini-game would presumably have completely different mechanics than the rest of the game. That can be fun. Maybe.

If it's a big issue in any given game, then maybe create house rules that cover that aspect of play but still follow the same basic outcome determination methodology as the game itself. It'll be less jarring and may lead to even more modifications in the future. The end result may be a jumbled mess, but could become (over time) a pretty elegant and much improved complete game compared with what you started with.

Satinavian
2022-10-07, 04:51 AM
Mini-games and such have their place in helping create the games focus. They are also great in board games, video games, wargames, etc. However, the only way a TTRPG with a GM can cover the vast swathe of game styles, scenarios, resolutions, etc. is by letting the GM adjudicate for areas that are outside of the core "intended state of play" that make up any session. It is one of the few things that make TTRPGs unique as a game experience. Should designers lean into this advantage, or are a variety of strategic mini-games the preferred state of play?
Personally i do like a variety of mini games providing the option to switch the focus of the game around without losing much detail. But that leads me personally to prefer crunchy games.


Recently i have sen more games offering both a minigame and a fast resolution option for various optional topics. The group can then use whichever fits more dependend on how important the part is at the moment. This generally works as long as you don't have to build differently depending on which rules you use. Otherwise you lose the ability to switch detail grade on the fly.

GloatingSwine
2022-10-07, 07:50 AM
I noticed that there is a strong desire on this board to create "systems" to handle all aspects of the game. So, if you want to do social skills; we need a system in order to solve who gets their way. If you are going into the woods, you need a system in order to determine how long you can survive. If you are going to intimidate somehow, you need a wide variety of choices and rolls. I understand the appeal as no matter what happens, you know what to do, and remove grey area.

I suspect that's because the default perspective of the board is D&D, and D&D does have a lot of system crunch in some places (combat especially) and not a lot in others even though some of those others could have consequences like combat.

So there are things that feel dissimilar that seem like they should feel similar instead.

Quertus
2022-10-07, 08:12 AM
Anything worth doing is worth doing right.

If you want Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, to part with one of his artifacts, you’ve got to present a clear reason why he should think that this is a good plan, you’ve got to play the tactical minigame of “how does he think, and what does he want”, not just roll Diplomacy at him. And I try to roleplay my NPCs with the same level of fidelity, as individuals with individual wants and needs and personalities.

Anything worth doing is worth doing right.

If combat is worth doing, make it a cool tactical minigame, filled with meaningful choices; if it’s not, let’s just “roll combat”, so we can hurry up and get to the good part.

If talking to people is with doing, make it a cool tactical minigame, filled with meaningful choices; if it’s not, let’s just “roll Diplomacy Reaction Check”, so we can hurry up and get to the good part.

Anything worth doing is worth doing right.

Whatever the game is about? Whatever the players want to do? These should be worth doing, should have an engaging minigame to play. Otherwise, we may as well “roll session”, so we can get to an RPG worth playing.

Yora
2022-10-07, 09:10 AM
Combat obviously greatly benefits from it.
For everything else it seems really out of place.

Vahnavoi
2022-10-07, 10:57 AM
Every aspect of tabletop roleplaying game already happens in the greater strategic context of how you communicate with other player and the game referee to reach your objectives. Additional minigames are only necessary where they serve aesthetics that are hard-to-reach with natural language discussion. Aspects that are way out of focus can be glossed over. A game about being parents of a small kid probably doesn't need a minigame for combat, a game about boots-on-ground combat in a medieval setting probably doesn't need a minigame for space flight, so on and so forth.

KorvinStarmast
2022-10-07, 11:03 AM
Combat obviously greatly benefits from it.
For everything else it seems really out of place. That's what I have found.

Telok
2022-10-07, 11:24 AM
Anything worth doing is worth doing right.

Yes.

It does, however, imply that the designers need to know what they want the game to mechanically do and be able to effectively communicate that to the consumers through the medium that the game rules use.

If the game is supposed to have all of the character social scenes decided by rolling one die and moving on then it needs to be called out. If the game is going to be marketed as good for running Arthurian romance shining knights on horses, you need to damn well have more stuff developed than just a combat engine designed to handle people on foot in small rooms.

If the game rules are in written books then the info on what to do with the rules needs to be in those books. If your game rules are videos & blog posts then you can put important stuff in there. But critical info like "if you blindly apply rule X as written to all possible situations then your game will stop being heroic sword & sorcery fantasy and start being silly Saturday morning cartoons", that had better be in your rule books and not buried half an hour into a video of some boring mumbling developer.

Edit: almost forgot.
Teaching someone the rules of chess does not make them a good chess player. It makes them someone who has the ability to make legal chess moves during a game. To become a good chess player they need to be shown & taught how to play the game at a level above just memorizing rules. Without that "how to apply the rules" information they face years of practice as they blindly make mistake after mistake, losing the vasy majority of games while they blindly recreate basic strategy. RPGs are the same way. How and when to apply the rules is just as, if not more, important than being able to follow them. Many games fail to fo this.

False God
2022-10-07, 03:22 PM
No.

But every section of the game should be developed enough to be able to function to the degree of detail the game is looking for.

A great deal of the game could be left up to the player describing how they want to go about doing a thing, and the GM assigning a check of some sort. There doesn't need to be a "Jump" skill, and "jumping" doesn't need to be its own action or not it's own action, it could depend entirely on what the person is trying to do.

If the game doesn't intend to really cover some area of RPGing, maybe exploration, maybe social, maybe even combat; the rules in those areas can be minimized, or even not included at all. Though it would be nice for a game to be clear about "This is a combat survival game and almost nothing will want to talk to you." before it just dumps all the social rules.

This board, like much of TTRPGing, skews towards D&D, for obvious reasons. A game with a highly developed and detailed combat system (although IMO, not a great one) and fairly minimal social and exploration rules. It is this way because of its roots in wargaming. There are survival horror games where exploration is highly detailed, because encountering almost anything will kill you. There are investigative detective games with detailed social rules.

If all these games are any indication, it generally benefits to be very detailed in whatever area you want to focus. A more general game with no specific pillar focus could probably get away with much lighter rules in all 3 areas.

Quertus
2022-10-07, 06:49 PM
Yes.

It does, however, imply that the designers need to know what they want the game to mechanically do and be able to effectively communicate that to the consumers through the medium that the game rules use.

Yes and no? Yes, but?

So, yes, one component is the game knowing what it’s about. Clearly, if the game knows that it’s about something, it should be engaging in those areas that it is explicitly about.

However

If the players decide that they want to talk to someone / something in D&D, the onus falls on the GM to make that engaging with concepts like “personality”, even if the players never get to look at a set of printed rules on “getting what you want from NPCs”. Or if the players decide that they want to make the game about Space Ship Combat as Space Vikings, then the onus falls on the GM to add a worthwhile Space Viking Ship Combat minigame. Or to say, “uh, we can’t do that in Call of Cthulhu / Shadowrun / whatever” (are there any other systems/settings where it’s obviously physically possible, but there’s no support for it?).

Thrudd
2022-10-08, 11:18 AM
I agree that not every TTRPG needs or should try to cover every aspect of life of its characters. It's a fool's errand to try to mechanically, accurately and realistically simulate every aspect of a fictional world, without complex computer algorithms (even with them). Also, not all games are intending to represent the same sorts of things or will spend time with characters doing the same things.

However, if a game has its players choosing to assign mechanical character resources to one ability or another, then both those abilities should have roughly equal impact on the game - else, there would be a clear "best" option for all characters in order to be effective in the game - see the problem with "dump stats".

If you have to choose between combat ability and social ability or knowledge for your character - but combat has definitive, mechanical effects and consequences and take up the vast majority of the game, while the social and knowledge elements are mostly useful only so far as the GM chooses to allow them to be, and adjudicates interactions without referring to any firm rules - I'd say this is a poorly designed game. Give everyone the same amount of combat-build resources, and a separate pool of non-combat abilities. Any given GM and group could choose to spend more or less time in either sphere of the game, in this case, and all the players would feel they have an equal ability to interact.

In another sense, a game isn't a game without some rule-based interactions. Any activity which is intended to have consequence in the game for the players/characters should be "gamified" in some way. The detail put into each aspect of the player's activities proportional to the import and consequence on the game's outcome. If it doesn't matter too much what happens when they're talking to each other and NPCs in between action scenes, then you don't need to many or any rules for it. If most of the game time is spent there, and it will determine a lot of what happens, then there should be some mechanical game element to it -unless the "game" is just to practice your improvisational acting and story telling. A GM led game does need rules beyond just "the GM decides what happens by whatever method they want", imo. There at least need to be definitive rules for how each player gets to contribute to the storytelling, making it fair and equal for each player, if the game premise is primarily "collaborative storytelling".

Cluedrew
2022-10-08, 02:28 PM
I'm going to answer your question with another question:

Does any aspect of a role-playing game need to have a mini-game?

(The implied answer to the original question is no, and I think I can extend this to non-strategic mini-games.)

I think the most relevant view of mini-game here is a section of game play that changes the core loop from the one used more commonly, at least we are going to try it. Because why change the core loop? Because it doesn't work with what you are doing, because you are trying to do something it wasn't built for. Why not just built the core loop to do what you want? Well because you want to do more than one thing.

And if you want your system want to do two or more significantly things, that might be just what you have to do. But otherwise (and sometimes even then) the best solution is to just try to integrate what you want from your system in the core loop. It generally helps complexity and transitioning through game states.

Not that mini-games or even a hybrid system can't work, but those are not the only options.

Anonymouswizard
2022-10-08, 05:10 PM
Combat obviously greatly benefits from it.

Does it? If I'm playing a pastoral game about exploring the town, growing as a person, and making friends strategic combat would just get in the way.


For everything else it seems really out of place.

A lot of games default to the D&D model, and thus aim themselves at combat and exploration. In this situation rules for debates are useless, but some good rules on exploring an area would be handy (which makes it odd that D&D5e provides basically nothing). Meanwhile a game like Monsterhearts probably needs a codified way of tracking social relationships between a potentially large cast, but has no need for codified combat.

To reuse a sentence I've used elsewhere in my life I don't expect D&D to have in depth hacking rules, I do expect it to have some for overland travel.

Quertus
2022-10-08, 07:21 PM
I'm going to answer your question with another question:

Does any aspect of a role-playing game need to have a mini-game?

(The implied answer to the original question is no, and I think I can extend this to non-strategic mini-games.)

I think the most relevant view of mini-game here is a section of game play that changes the core loop from the one used more commonly, at least we are going to try it. Because why change the core loop? Because it doesn't work with what you are doing, because you are trying to do something it wasn't built for. Why not just built the core loop to do what you want? Well because you want to do more than one thing.

And if you want your system want to do two or more significantly things, that might be just what you have to do. But otherwise (and sometimes even then) the best solution is to just try to integrate what you want from your system in the core loop. It generally helps complexity and transitioning through game states.

Not that mini-games or even a hybrid system can't work, but those are not the only options.

You are technically correct - the best kind of correct.

Personally, I focused more on the question of, “does every aspect of the game need to be strategic”, to which I replied, “only the parts that matter”.

But, yes, one could focus on the “minigame” aspect, and evaluate the relative value of various minigame… structuring models?

Myself, I suppose I’m all for everything following the high level
GM: this is the game state.
Player: I take this action.
GM: this is the new game state.
And the low-level resolution that gets you from state to state being a different minigame for each action.

Martin Greywolf
2022-10-10, 08:07 AM
Let's take it to LARP.

Does a LARP need rules for how a sword attack hits? No, because you have a sword and can just hit the other guy.

Does a TTRPG or LARP need rules for social interaction? No, you can just talk to people.

Does LARP need rules for hacking? Well, yes, even if the rules are "these are the things you can hack", because you otherwise do illegal things and are no longer a LARPer, but a criminal.

So, you *need* rules for things where you cannot physically do it and see what happens. But that is only the beginning.

See, if you have a LARP story that goes on over multiple years and have a character there who is supposed to be the best swordsman, well, you better hope the guy playing him is super into HEMA or Olympic fencing, because he *actually needs to be the best* (or very close to it), otherwise he literally can't play the given role convincingly - and giving the role to some rando guy who rocked up from the local HEMA club to try this LARP thing out probably isn't the best idea.

So, if you have a thing that your characters can theoretically do, but you want to enable the fantasy of being better at it than their players, you need some kind of rules for it, even if it is a simple "give our long-term LARPers one more life".

That's the answer to the question as stated, you need rules in these two cases. But there is the question as intended, and that is how deep you want to go with the mechanical complexities - this was pretty much answered already, figure out what you want to focus on in your game and make that part fancy, have some quick resolution mechanics for the rest. And you should try your best and do both the quick mechanics and complex ones well.

Lastly, there is the issue of genre. If your TTRPG has a mechanically rich combat system, but handwaves anything than combat with a single dice roll, if it an RPG? I'd say that there is a good argument for "no, it isn't", it's more of a TTTPG, a tabletop tactical puzzle game. You can roleplay in such a game, the same as you can roleplay in Call of Duty, but the game isn't really set up to support such roleplay.

As for mechanics feeling off for social stuff, you feel that way because you haven't done any melee combat. If you did, then both social and combat parts would feel off to you, it's a necessary evil you need to make this sort of game playable - I've played quite a few TTRPGs over the years, and not a single once got even close to how I make decisions when in a duel or skirmish (both of these have very different feels to them, but that's a discussion for another time).

(There is one more case of LARP rules, where they try to give you some advantage that you should have that was lost because of nature of other rules. If I rock up to a LARP wearing real chain mail, I should be harder to kill, but because of how the being hit with boffer weapons rules work, the armor does nothing but slow me down. Word of advice, you want at least triple HP, wearing the damn thing for several hours for 2 hits instead of one was not worth it. Well, except for the intimidation factor.)

GreatWyrmGold
2022-10-10, 01:40 PM
I noticed that there is a strong desire on this board to create "systems" to handle all aspects of the game. So, if you want to do social skills; we need a system in order to solve who gets their way. If you are going into the woods, you need a system in order to determine how long you can survive. If you are going to intimidate somehow, you need a wide variety of choices and rolls. I understand the appeal as no matter what happens, you know what to do, and remove grey area.

Every TTRPG should have a focus or "intended state of play" in which the rules maybe more developed or focused on. For example, D&D likes to focus a lot on "tactical combat" so has a lot of rules for how to kill stuff.
I'm going to stop you right here, because while I largely agree with what you've said up to this point, I take issue with that last statement.

It's true that D&D focuses on tactical combat, but that's because it has mechanics focused on combat. If we take WotC's statements about how D&D should play as the unsullied Authorial Truth, though, D&D is supposed to involve combat, exploration, and roleplaying, if not in equal amounts then similar ones. For that to be true, though, exploration and roleplaying would need similar levels of support to combat; in the actual book, however, half the rulebook is focused on combat, while exploration and roleplaying get maybe a couple of sections on how the DM should design stuff, maybe with some skill check DCs thrown in.

Not all aspects of a TTRPG need to be supported by mechanics. But the aspects of a TTRPG you consider important do. If you leave it up to the GM and players to figure stuff out for themselves—GMs who generally have little experience with game design and less time to do it in—they're going to focus on the parts of the game that don't require them to design it. They're going to focus on the parts of the game where hundreds or thousands of man-hours were spent making sure the system was fun and easy to run, not the part where they're flying blind.

I agree with most of what you said, but the way you said them makes it feel like those things are supporting something I don't agree with. Focusing on what systems a game doesn't need, like you're trying to defend some TTRPG from accusations of needing better mechanics for social conflicts or something, instead of focusing on what systems a game does need and opening that avenue for criticism...I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that framing feels like it's meant to imply something I don't agree with.


Postscript
Part of the problem is also that basically all big-name TTRPGs have a heavy combat focus. D&D and Pathfinder, Shadowrun, various Star Wars RPGs, even Call of Cthulhu and the World of Darkness games to an extent. WoD does have mechanics meant to get the players in the headspace of whatever supernatural creatures they're playing, but their other mechanics tend to skew towards using those creatures' supernatural powers to fight whatever supernatural foes beset them.
And while I've never played CoC, the rulebook at my local library and most of the after-action reports I've heard make it sound less like a game about psychological horror than about fighting monsters and losing (usually). The vibe I get is closer to "The Dunwich Horror" (which ends with a few professors fighting an invisible spawn of Yog-Sototh with spells they researched, a magic potion, and a shotgun) than it is to "Call of Cthulhu".

There absolutely exist TRPGs which don't focus on combat. Plenty of generic RPGs exist with rules intentionally designed to work equally well in a courtroom or hospital as on the battlefield. I've got a couple of indie RPGs I've wanted to run for ages that are nothing like dungeon-crawlers, with New Gods of Mankind being perhaps the most extreme example. And while I've heard a lot about Powered by the Apocalypse games, I've never gotten around to reading any. But with the exception of the Apocalypse Engine, none of those have even a percent of the TRPG market. They are niche.

If you want a game you can go to the local game shop and play, or that's easy to convince your D&D group to try, it's going to be D&D or a game with effectively identical mechanical priorities. For people who want to try something different, this is frustrating.

sktarq
2022-10-10, 04:51 PM
Combat obviously greatly benefits from it.
For everything else it seems really out of place.

You see I would say that combat rules basically wreck the rest of the game due being so unbalanced

Firstly when people have lots of rules/minigames for a category of action it tends to dominate the headspace and thus the reactions of the players. When confronted with an issue people tend to run down their options and due to the rules those appear disproportionatly aimed at certain outcomes. If "Combat" gives a dozen options (by looking at combat maneuvers, feats etc) "Magic bypass" gives a half-score options (with a quick scan of the spell list) and then there is talk to them....giving absolutely no idea what to say. Really how to judge what could happen etc. So picking from the better defined and more numerous options is far less mental work and so people tend to go for that. This is part of mechanics of what drives the "rule focus on X so the game focuses on X" that GreatWorldGold so nicely put just above. And that goes even for when the character would know better.

Which leads into the second point player/character separation.
Combat systems allow players who are wheelchair bound 98lb weaklings to equally play a wizard, barbarian, or an SAS officer in spite of themselves
Social minigame systems allow the shy, inarticulate, types to play bards, political fixers, and marshalls in spite of themselves.
Skill systems can support a dummy playing a genius and limit the genius playing a doufus from just ignoring that dump stat.

the "oh just act it out" option massively promotes those players who have high Charisma, Presence, Wits type traits and the Persuasion, Bluff, Intimidate, etc skills themselves over the players who don't no matter what type of character they may be playing. Now I say this as someone for whom this is a massive advantage which as a teen I abused the heck out of. But as a DM I want the shy kid to not be limited to play shy or antisocial characters (sure they may want to but if they don't the game play shouldn't penalize them)

gbaji
2022-10-10, 06:52 PM
It's true that D&D focuses on tactical combat, but that's because it has mechanics focused on combat. If we take WotC's statements about how D&D should play as the unsullied Authorial Truth, though, D&D is supposed to involve combat, exploration, and roleplaying, if not in equal amounts then similar ones. For that to be true, though, exploration and roleplaying would need similar levels of support to combat; in the actual book, however, half the rulebook is focused on combat, while exploration and roleplaying get maybe a couple of sections on how the DM should design stuff, maybe with some skill check DCs thrown in.

I think there also needs to be some awareness of the relative complexity of different aspects of playing a game though. One can argue that exploration, for example, can be accurately modeled using a relatively small number of skills that are somewhat self explanatory and therefore maybe need very little actual written rules. Same can be argued for many social skills use applications (roleplaying bits). It's somewhat part of game design. I've very rarely run into cases where myself or the players are having issues because there just aren't enough skills to check against to determine how well we wandered around looking for stuff in the wilderness. Basic rules with a handful of applicable skills (track, foraging, cartography, stealth, spot, climbing, swimming, etc) and some rules guidelines are pretty much sufficient and everyone will be satisfied with the results. More rules just take up space in a published work and may provide minimal benefit to the players (who you're asking to pay by the page for said rulebook).

I do completely agree with your point that if skills are of equal cost in the game system, they should be of equal value. A lot of this should be resolved in scenario creation and how the GM runs things. But yeah, if you've got a GM who makes combat resolution a focus and just kinda handwaves the other sections of play (making very little distinction between whether the PCs have allocated points to applicable skills or not), then that's a problem. I've certainly played in scenarios where, one way or another, the PCs were going to get the needed information from the NPCs, and were going to figure out who the bad guy was, and were going to find their way to the bad guys hideout, because that was all necessary for the scenario to play out, and so making character skill rolls along the way mattered little relative to players just figuring things out themselves. The combat at the end, however, was detailed and the outcome was 100% determined by how well the PCs could fight. And in that case, you could absolutely be left scratching your head wondering "why did I bother putting points into social or exploration skills?".


And while I've never played CoC, the rulebook at my local library and most of the after-action reports I've heard make it sound less like a game about psychological horror than about fighting monsters and losing (usually). The vibe I get is closer to "The Dunwich Horror" (which ends with a few professors fighting an invisible spawn of Yog-Sototh with spells they researched, a magic potion, and a shotgun) than it is to "Call of Cthulhu".

Just as an aside, and as someone who played a *lot* of CoC back in the day, 99% of success in the scenarios was based on using your character's social/investigative skills to great effect. Most scenarios were basically the PCs trying to figure out what was going on without cluing the evil cultists into that fact. Failure in that stage almost always resulted in horrific death. The combat system was so heavily weighted towards "side which initiates the attack against the other (by surprise is even better!) tends to win overwhelmingly" (which, to be honest, is not an inaccurate simulation of modern combat), that it made the difference between "PCs figure out what and where cultists are doing their evil stuff, sneak there, and open up on them" and "PCs fumble around foolishly, tip their hand, and the cultists figure out they are a threat and organize to take *them* out" to almost always be the difference in success or failure. Even if you managed to survive the cultists attacking you, you were rarely likely to be able to thwart their plans after that point, at least not without severe (possibly total) losses.

The old classic "Masks of Nyarlathotep" was absolutely harsh in this way. Possibly the hardest campaign source like ever. It played out in a series of scenarios set in various parts of the world as the players followed clues. One minor mistake in the earlier phases of the adventure would result in later phases becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, simply because the bad guys know who you are and begin tracking your activities. They are ready for you every time you arrive in a new city to look for clues and you will have no clue who they are. It's... brutal. It's not even just the combat system I spoke of earlier (but that's bad enough), the magic system in CoC is very "ritual magic" heavy. There are very very few direct combat type spells in CoC. There are a lot of horrifically evil things that can be summoned and sent at enemies if you know who and where they are. Things that you are almost certainly going to be completely unable to deal with. And yeah, some of the bad guys have access to spells and items that can just plain kill you from virtually *anywhere* (scry and die taken to a horrible extreme). Heaven help you if you were wounded in an early fight, and any of the bad guys (who may not have even been in the fight but become aware of it afterwards) were alive to collect a blood sample...

The psychological bits were really more expressed based on player roleplay though. So yeah, the core scenarios often did focus on the mechanics and decisions of "winning" versus "losing". But there could be some extremely fun stuff along the way, *if* you had players who were willing to actually roleplay the whole "insanity" bits of the game well. Some tables just played them as temporary hinderances to their actions, which works mechanically, I suppose. The real fun is when the players are accurately playing characters who are becoming increasingly paranoid, terrified, and frankly twitchy (like, really twitchy), as they encounter more and more horrifying things and have to deal with them. Taking the randomly rolled temporary insanities and then playing them out as lingering effects made for incredibly fun play. Doubly so if the GM just handed a note to the player telling them what was afflicting them, and they just roleplayed out it. Trying to figure out why the other PCs are behaving the way they are, and perhaps what will trigger them into some sort of over the top flight or fight mode was half (or more!) of the fun of the game.

Dunno. I really enjoyed playing that game. Needs to have an extremely good GM to work well though. And players who are willing to really get into the genre and play their characters as if they really are "normal" folks who are gradually being exposed to increasingly horrifying things, becoming more and more aware of just how "wrong" the things they are dealing with are, but are also increasingly aware of the dire consequences if they fail. It actually helps lead the players to the point of roleplaying out the sometimes extreme and desperate actions their characters may need to take to finally succeed in the end. The funny bit is that there are a number of (mostly low budget) films based on this genre, and no matter how cheesy they seem when you actually watch them, they're scarily accurate accounts as to how players tend to play their characters in a typical well run CoC adventure. I've often wondered how many of those are written and directed, not based on a strict reading of the Lovecraft works, but by folks who played CoC a lot. Cause, it's just amazing how accurate the portrayals are to how things actually ran at tables I played in. Again. Great game, if you can find the right set of players with the right mindset.


Which leads into the second point player/character separation.
Combat systems allow players who are wheelchair bound 98lb weaklings to equally play a wizard, barbarian, or an SAS officer in spite of themselves
Social minigame systems allow the shy, inarticulate, types to play bards, political fixers, and marshalls in spite of themselves.
Skill systems can support a dummy playing a genius and limit the genius playing a doufus from just ignoring that dump stat.

the "oh just act it out" option massively promotes those players who have high Charisma, Presence, Wits type traits and the Persuasion, Bluff, Intimidate, etc skills themselves over the players who don't no matter what type of character they may be playing. Now I say this as someone for whom this is a massive advantage which as a teen I abused the heck out of. But as a DM I want the shy kid to not be limited to play shy or antisocial characters (sure they may want to but if they don't the game play shouldn't penalize them)

Absolutely this. It's one of the reasons why I have pretty firm GM rules that run in both directions. I allow for the fact that the Characters are better at things than the players are *and* that the Players may be better at things than the Characters are. As a GM you have to ask that outgoing charismatic player who is a drama student and practices at the local improv every weekend "ok, did you make a social skill roll that's actually written down on your character sheet" when they dramatically roleplay how their character is going to influence the NPCs into helping out the party (or whatever social situation). I totally allow (and encourage) active roleplay by the players, but if it's not followed up by an actual skill roll based on the character's abilities, then it's lovely window dressing based perhaps on what the player wants their character to do, but clearly may not be executed as well by the actual character because you took Cha as a dump stat, and have no actual social skills whatsoever.

Same deal in the opposite direction. The absence of a player actively playing out what their character is doing doesn't disallow them making a skill roll if they have it on their character sheet. I strongly believe that one of the great things about RPGs is that it allows us to play characters that are decidedly "not like us". So players should not be penalized for playing characters with dramatically different personalities/skills than they have themselves, just because they're not able to perform the actions themselves. I don't ask a socially shy player to stand up on the table and sing a song for the group to illustrate what their bard is doing. If they want to, that's great (uh... if not overdone), but if they just want to describe that "my bard will stand on the table and sing a ballad", I'm ok with just having them roll that.

And yeah. One of the trickiest things to do when judging tourney tables was to actually tune out the antics of the more outgoing/exuberant players. Otherwise, all you'd ever get at the final round was a table full of drama queens. While amusing (often very much so), it's not terribly fair to the other players.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-10, 07:11 PM
I'd say that most aspects (those that belong to the expected gameplay areas, at least) need at least some abstraction. But the proper depth and complexity of abstraction depends more on how hard that area is to grasp for the players, as well as how severe the consequences for failure are than on anything else, at least beyond a certain level of granularity. Which means that for things where you're accepting a low level of granularity or where it's something most people can at least do ok at[1], you can get away with a simpler abstraction (possibly just needing some basic principles and a resolution mechanic), whereas for things where the expected gameplay has lots of granularity or that are very outside most people's experience, you need a lot more. Even holding granularity constant, familiar things need (generally) less abstraction than more alien things. Because you have to translate alien aspects into terms people can wrap their heads around.

For everyone I've ever played with, talking is something much more familiar than fighting, especially fighting monsters. So naturally, combat abstractions need a lot more moving parts even if combat isn't super dominant. My games tend to be largely talking and much less fighting. And even most of the talking is just...talking. In those instances, I am the translation layer between the fiction and the players. In combat, there are too many moving pieces and the granularity is too high and the familiarity is too low for me to effectively serve as that translation layer. In other games, sure, you could get away with a "roll Fight to resolve the conflict" system. That's a very basic abstraction, just like "roll Charisma (Persuasion) to convince the person" is. But it's a system none-the-less.

It's important to distinguish between
a) a game that has no rules for something (5e D&D has no rules for hacking a computer, although you could apply the generic ability checks)
b) a game that has rules that don't fit someone's desires/wants/needs in that area.
5e D&D does have rules and mechanics for exploration and social stuff. Just not the rules that some people wish it had.

Cluedrew
2022-10-13, 09:28 PM
Personally, I focused more on the question of, "does every aspect of the game need to be strategic", to which I replied, "only the parts that matter".OK, it took me a second read through several days later. But what exactly is strategic and are we sure we want it to be put into the parts that matter? Like, even if you have a good model for discussion, do we want character development to happen along paths laid out in the rules, involve a lot of player skill testing challenges and are so - very - slow - to - resolve? I don't think so and that is the vibe I'm getting here.

Tanarii
2022-10-13, 11:42 PM
TTRPGs need good game structures for the things that are supposed to be the focus of that particular RPG. Without them, players don't have an easy way to resolve "what do I do next?"

Even ihe answer is "explore the environment until I find something to do next" then they need a game structure to enable that and kick start them in that direction.

Otherwise you have a bunch of PCs sitting around in a tavern starting a brawl because the Quest Giver / DM proxy hasn't shown up yet to tell them what to do.

Mechalich
2022-10-14, 12:51 AM
The rules are a dispute resolution mechanism. It is possible to game without rules - freeform - with a table that is capable of reasonably resolving disputes in a way that is acceptable to all parties. However, only a small fraction of tables are able to accomplish this (and even those only some of the time for certain types of games). The rest rely on rules.

Within the TTRPG framework, there's basically three ways to arrange the rules: a mini-game, a simple flat rule, or no rules. These are basically in tension between their ability to assist in providing satisfactory resolution and the time and effort required to deploy them. Consequently, the more important a given aspect of the game is and the more likely it is to produce disputes the greater reason to have a minigame.

Combat is an obvious candidate for minigames, because it is extremely likely to produce disputes of the most substantial kind. 'Your character is dead' is the sort of thing that generally doesn't go over very well without rules.

Vahnavoi
2022-10-14, 03:22 AM
Wild thought: only a small amount of tables can do freeform right because people keep explaining freeform wrong to them.

"Feeform" doesn't mean "without rules". It means "free in format", as in, a player can explain what they want to do in a natural language, in any way they see fit.

It is completely common for freeform games to have rules. One of the more common ones is "one person is chosen as a referee - in case of a dispute, the referee has final say". Tabletop roleplaying games copied this from wargaming and feeform wargames existed before modern tabletop roleplaying games.

The error persists because tabletop rolepayers, for reasons that make little sense even in context and no sense outside of it, regularly use words such as "rule" and "rules" only to refer to abstracted mechanics governing characters in the game. When in truth rules about player conduct and game process are just as important and can be used to sidestep the need for complex abstracted rules in the first place.

"B-b-but fiat! Fiat BAD!"

Games are fundamentally arbitrary. All abstracted mechanics are just codified fiat decisions. Stop screaming about fiat and start paying attention to who's fiat decisions you are adhering to and why.

Kane0
2022-10-14, 03:32 AM
No it doesn't, the same way a CRPG doesnt always need to be centered around a gripping narrative.

Jakinbandw
2022-10-14, 09:56 AM
The answer is of course not. You don't even need a single minigame, and can just rely on a single core resolution mechanic (see FATE).

That said, this tactical systems can add more depth to the rest of the game and allow for interesting results. I'm designing an RPG right now, and I have around 4 mini games: one for combat, one for social interactions, one for 'problem solving', and one for running a faction. All these minigames bleed into one another a bit, so they aren't completely discreet, but it means that I can offer a lot of options to the players in a wide variety of areas.

Also it allows those GMing my system to have more options for interesting encounters rather than just combat. Last session in my play test, players used the problem solving and social systems to turn a primordial being of creation into a normal person instead of needing to kill them. This involved hours of game time puzzle solving, and discussion where every member of the party was able to take part, from the fighters to the mages. However that only worked because I'd written up classes in such a way that they all had ways of interacting with each subsystem.

Contrast DnD where the only mechanical subsystem is combat (and maybe problem solving). This means that during social interactions, there isn't enough mechanical complexity to give different classes different ways to interact with the system, thus even though it's a large portion of the game, doing well in it comes down to having a high ability score, and maybe one or two spells. You can't give fighters things to make them better at social, because there really aren't any other mechanics for them to interact with other than 'roll high' and maybe 'know what your target is thinking'.

If charisma and social spells were removed, then there wouldn't even be a social system and all characters could interact with it somewhat equally again. Having a commonly interacted with system, without making it tactically complex, often leads to players that are unable to interact with it, and thus have to sit out portions of the game.

Quertus
2022-10-14, 09:58 AM
OK, it took me a second read through several days later. But what exactly is strategic and are we sure we want it to be put into the parts that matter? Like, even if you have a good model for discussion, do we want character development to happen along paths laid out in the rules, involve a lot of player skill testing challenges and are so - very - slow - to - resolve? I don't think so and that is the vibe I'm getting here.

Great example. So, sure, Character growth can be strategic, filled with decision points and meaningful choices… or not.

Bruce Payne can have his parents shot and killed in front of him, and have a scary encounter with bats in a dark cave…

… and decide that fear is a powerful weapon, one he intends to use as he fights crime, shooting criminals as karmic revenge for his parents being shot, while dressed as a rat (Because what are bats but rats with wings, and he can’t fly, so dressing up as a bat would just be silly).

… or decide that the bats represent the criminal element, by overcoming his fear of one he overcomes his fear of the other, and what are bats but rats with wings, so he’ll become their predator, and dresses up as Catman, who toys with his victims before tearing them to shreds and eating them. Maybe his victims are even criminals.

Or the GM could say, no, I gave you these encounters so that you could become The Light, and fight against the darkness in a suit of high-tech power armor - anything else would be incoherent, and bad roleplaying on your part, and result in us not having a game, because I’ve already put lots of work into light puns, and appropriate villains. No, you don’t get to make light puns - that’s what the villains will be doing. You need to be dark and brooding, because your parents just died, like, 20 years ago or something, and left you with nothing but your looks, your intellect, a fortune, a loyal butler, a high-tech company, and a great reputation. Um, that is, until your arch nemesis taunts you about being so dark, then you need to do a 180, and become a happy-go-lucky, carefree Super who throws jokes at the villains about their own names and actions. That’s your character arc.

Over the top? Sure. But hopefully it gets across what I mean about a strategic minigame having meaningful choices.

Is it “so very slow to resolve”? I mean, I hope so, as character growth doesn’t normally happen overnight. But neither “very slow to resolve” nor “strategic” necessitate a laborious minigame.

That said, getting to know your target, finding out their likes and fears and motivations, and using those to your advantage, isn’t exactly trivial, and I like how The Negotiator handled a blunder on that in its opening scene. I personally generally prefer for “talky bits” in an RPG to be, eh, roughly as laborious as combat? Probably generally less, but greatly more so for a worthy challenge (usually - that time the party plows through a worthy challenge, they get to feel awesome)? How about you? How much relative time and effort do you like to spend on a combat, a social challenge, and a character growth arc? Do you like them to be filled with strategic options and meaningful choices that can affect the outcome of the story?

kyoryu
2022-10-14, 10:58 AM
To answer OP's question: Not necessarily.

I do think games are the most interesting when they offer choices, but not all games emphasize the same choices.

So you're doing a thing, and you make a roll by itself, with no system. Is that interesting?

Maybe.

For instance, say you're trying to get into a castle. You could fight your way in.... or you could sneak in... or you could bluff your way in.... or you could disguise yourself. Let's say you sneak. You've made a choice, of many, to do this. You know the risks (if you're cuaght, the guards will probably fight you). You roll the dice...

I'd say that's interesting. It's not the dice roll that's interesting in and of itself, but you've made an interesting decision (which approach you'll take, what success you'll get, what risks you're taking) and the die roll tells you how that played out. I'd say that's really interesting, even if the mechanical parts of the die roll, themselves, aren't.

Okay, another situation. You've been trapped in a cave. The only way out (and all other options have been exhaustively tested) is to jump over a crevasse. You roll to do so. That's not interesting to me. That's just being told to roll the dice, you don't have any choices or decisions to make.

So..... does everything need to be a system? In a game (note: not game system) where the players have few choices at that macro-level, I think you need to have choices somewhere, so making mechanical systems interesting makes a lot of sense.

In games where you already have a lot of agency at that macro-level, it matters less. If I was playing a dungeon-delving game where most of the game was "where do we go, what do we fight, what do we not fight, what do we sneak around, what do we avoid, how do we interact with stuff" and the like, I'd be perfectly okay with a combat system, even, that was extremely brief and let me get back to the other stuff.

OTOH, if I'm playing a game where most of the game is being led from one combat to another, and the combat is supposed to be the "interesting" bits? That combat system needs to have a lot more heft and decisions in it.

So, no, not everything needs to be a "system". But you should be giving your players interesting choices, and making "systems" around things is one way to do that.


The answer is of course not. You don't even need a single minigame, and can just rely on a single core resolution mechanic (see FATE).

Arguably Fate has three minigames - Conflicts, Challenges, and Contests.

Jakinbandw
2022-10-14, 11:31 AM
Arguably Fate has three minigames - Conflicts, Challenges, and Contests.

Lasers and Feelings then.

kyoryu
2022-10-14, 11:48 AM
Lasers and Feelings then.

A very good example. A game can be incredibly light on mechanics, if there's enough decision-making happening in non-mechanics areas of the game!

(I actually want to make a micro-game experiment called "flip" where there is literally one mechanic - flip a coin)

Pauly
2022-10-14, 09:02 PM
Essentially in a RPG a character has two basic choices
1) Move i.e. change what you can interact with, and
2) Interact, most commonly resolved by rolling dice and getting a success/fail outcome.
In addition to the player choices, sometimes the environment interacts with the character, in which case usually the player rolls dice and goes to success/fail. Other times the environment will impose a condition on the player and the success/fail result is to determine the severity of the condition
This is commonly referred to as the “core mechanics”.

In game design, the designer may choose to make a particular set of interactions more detailed, which is commonly called a mini-game. In some cases the mini-game is such a large part of the game it becomes more important than the core mechanics, and D&D is a good example where the combat mini-game overshadows the core mechanics.

To go through the questions, both implied and explicit in the OP.
1) Are mini games needed?
No.
2) Are mini games desirable?
Maybe. They are desirable when they enhance the core focus of the campaign, but become less and less desirable the further you get from the core experience of the campaign. A good example is ship travel and ship to ship combat. If you’re playing a dungeon crawl campaign, then a ship navigation and combat mini-game isn’t desirable, but in a naval exploration campaign it is highly desirable.
3) what features make a ‘good’ mini-game?
i) Speed of resolution.
ii) the whole party contributes meaningfully.
iii) consistency with the core mechanics. If positive modifiers are good in the core they should be good in the mini-game. If roll over target number is the core mechanic then it should be the same in the mini-game. Using the same dice is desirable. It should feel like you are still playing the same game.
iv) meaningful choices for the players. Players shouldn’t feel that in mini-game [X] they just keep mashing button A.
v) a level of detail appropriate of the importance of the mini-game to the campaign. Too much detail and the players will get bored, too little detail and the players will feel cheated.

I think it also is helpful to focus on the campaign, not the game system. For example in D&D a trip across the desert may be decided by a single skill roll to gain passage on a caravan, a hexcrawl with 20km hexes, or a detailed map crossing done in real time. The focus of the campaign will determine what is appropriate for the that group at that time.

Cluedrew
2022-10-14, 09:22 PM
Over the top? Sure. But hopefully it gets across what I mean about a strategic minigame having meaningful choices.It... ... does not. Luckily I already know a strategic mini-game can have meaningful choices. But there are different types of meaningful choices and different ways to arrive at them. For instance D&D combat is not strategic it is tactical and by the time you have entered combat the strategic layer is mostly been passed, and while you can go back to it there is nothing in the rules to really support that.

Any honestly maybe strategic/tactical divide wasn't the best example because I don't know if people divide them up in the same way I do and even if they do that isn't a huge divide compared to some of the others in system. Like the tactical/narrative divide, and although some people say there is no need to get rules in character / personality stuff, there are certainly meaningful choices to be made.


Is it "so very slow to resolve"? I mean, I hope so, as character growth doesn’t normally happen overnight. But neither "very slow to resolve" nor "strategic" necessitate a laborious minigame.That's opposite what I was going for; by slow to resolve I do in fact mean "a laborious mini-game" not the amount of time it takes at the table. A 5-minute conversation has the same resolution speed as a 1-hour conversation. A 5-minute combat has the same resolution speed as a 1-hour combat. Assuming the same system, and I'm talking table time (trying to resolve 600 rounds of D&D combat sounds nightmarish).

Quertus
2022-10-15, 05:45 PM
D&D combat is not strategic it is tactical and by the time you have entered combat the strategic layer is mostly been passed, and while you can go back to it there is nothing in the rules to really support that.

I mean… on the one hand, I agree, D&D combat is usually tactical. OTOH, there are usually strategic considerations, like “leave the untrustworthy NPCs in a worse position than the party, to discourage their sudden but inevitable betrayal” vs “treat the NPCs well, to win their loyalty”. Or “nova to end the encounter quickly, to reduce turns opponents get, in order to reduce losses and conserve resources” vs “use weaker / unlimited options, to conserve resources”. Or “take the bandits alive” vs “kill ‘em all”. Or “gamble on SoD effects” vs… almost too many other choices to list.

So there’s plenty in the rules of D&D to support different, potentially viable strategies, even in combat. Even if, yes, those vast number of strategic possibilities are but a small fraction of those available before the initiative dice are cast.

Vahnavoi
2022-10-16, 12:13 AM
We're talking about games, the line between "strategy" and "tactics" is somewhat vague on the player level. Game theoretically, "strategy" simply refers to rules a player uses to decide between available actionable options. This kind of strategy exists on every level of a roleplaying game, from combat to freeform discussions between players. Applying other definitions of "strategy" or "tactics" relies more on in-character realities. In common use sense of "tactics", yes, D&D combat is primarily tactical, but it would be odd to propose strategy is not involved anywhere, because tactics is the study of most effective means to secure objectives set by strategy. The two go together, there can be no tactics in absence of a strategy.

Quertus
2022-10-16, 05:29 AM
there can be no tactics in absence of a strategy.

Well, sure. But the point is, it’s not like D&D combat strategy is limited to, “make the other side dead”. Even in the middle of combat, D&D has more strategic richness than your average RPG, board game, video game, or RPG player, IME. And a lot of that is baked pretty clearly into the rules (of some editions).

I guess what I’m saying is, wouldn’t it be nice if game designers (including GM’s “forced” to create / Flesh out new minigames) actively thought in terms of providing such a rich, layered strategic environment, with so many theoretically viable strategic options?

I feel like a lot of games just don’t get it, where the only variances are the “noob/leet” spectrum of skill, or dodging trap options to find the one true way, rather than real strategic depth.

Cluedrew
2022-10-17, 07:53 AM
Stuff in meat-space getting in the way, so this reply is definitely slow. Especially since this is a short reply.

To Quertus: Look, if D&D is tactical or strategic is not the main point, the main point is that there are different types of meaningful decisions (with tactical vs. strategic being an example there) and that you don't need something like D&D's combat system to have them. Or mechanical rules at all, but not everyone clicks with free-form role-playing.

Composer99
2022-10-17, 09:33 AM
I noticed that there is a strong desire on this board to create "systems" to handle all aspects of the game. So, if you want to do social skills; we need a system in order to solve who gets their way. If you are going into the woods, you need a system in order to determine how long you can survive. If you are going to intimidate somehow, you need a wide variety of choices and rolls. I understand the appeal as no matter what happens, you know what to do, and remove grey area.

Every TTRPG should have a focus or "intended state of play" in which the rules maybe more developed or focused on. For example, D&D likes to focus a lot on "tactical combat" so has a lot of rules for how to kill stuff. Those Dark Places is an industrial, sci-fi space horror game, so it has more detail mechanics on panic states. Call of Cthulthu is more of an investigation and sanity losing focus, so mechanics focus on
those game play methods. Other games have other focuses.

Mini-games and such have their place in helping create the games focus. They are also great in board games, video games, wargames, etc. However, the only way a TTRPG with a GM can cover the vast swathe of game styles, scenarios, resolutions, etc. is by letting the GM adjudicate for areas that are outside of the core "intended state of play" that make up any session. It is one of the few things that make TTRPGs unique as a game experience. Should designers lean into this advantage, or are a variety of strategic mini-games the preferred state of play?

I look forward to the discussion and solid, well thought out refutations of my poorly worded thoughts.

Every TTRPG has gameplay procedures (what you call "mini-games"). That's what separates them from pure freeform roleplaying or make-believe. So I can't agree that GM adjudication as such is the crucial advantage of TTRPGs - say rather that it is their synthesis of freeform roleplay and structured procedures, which so far as I am aware is a feature unique to TTRPGs.

As for D&D in particular, especially 5e, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, of course, it is the largest game on the market by far, and therefore is being played by gamers with many different playstyles and preferences. Second, the game has always had pretensions to being universally adaptable to different playstyles and kinds of adventures. Third, at least part of the promise of this edition (which is being recycled in the 1D&D playtest) is the idea of not only being an "evergreen" edition, but also the idea of having modularity - a slim core ruleset with the ability to bolt on gameplay procedures and content to suit the desires of the table.

So I think the answer to your question is:
- Generally speaking, the quantity and nature of structured gameplay procedures in a TTRPG versus expectation of freeform adjudication (which can be done by any of the players, not just a GM) depends on the focus of that TTRPG, how far away from that focus a given aspect of gameplay is, and how important it is to the playgroup that there be an impersonal resolution of gameplay.
- For D&D in particular, there ought to be options for both greater and lesser amounts of structured gameplay, with each table making use of structured gameplay according to its tastes and needs. (See Pauly's example of desert travel, for instance.)

Jakinbandw
2022-10-18, 08:41 AM
I guess what I’m saying is, wouldn’t it be nice if game designers (including GM’s “forced” to create / Flesh out new minigames) actively thought in terms of providing such a rich, layered strategic environment, with so many theoretically viable strategic options?

I feel like a lot of games just don’t get it, where the only variances are the “noob/leet” spectrum of skill, or dodging trap options to find the one true way, rather than real strategic depth.


For the game I'm working on it. It's harder than it looks though. For example I wrote a really cool social power that allowed a class to, when someone thought they were friends, freely destroy them, and anyone under their power at the cost of a single social action and a little time.

Turns out it's a trap ability because by the time you are friends you don't need to kill them any more. So while I thought it was an awesome ability, a player in my playtest with it has never found a use for it. And when you are trying to write a lot of abilities into your game (think 3.5 srd), you can't test every single one.

That said, on the tactics and strategy side writing a system that can support that number of abilities makes the game very strategic. In combat right now there are several roles that characters can use and switch between.

First they have to decide with melee vrs ranged, as the party needs at least one character willing to get into melee. If that character goes down they need to be replaced, so an off melee character is often advisable.

Then for roles they have buffing/debuffing, battlefield alteration, damage dealing, accurate attacks, protection, horde countering, and designated survivor.

There are other options too, but those are the major ones, with characters usually being able to slip between 2 or 3 roles as they need and desire.

I'd love to get you as a playtester but I suspect it wouldn't work out, and that you wouldn't enjoy the martial/mage divide in my game. Martials in my system are as supernatural as mages, they just having a different skill set. Time mages can stop or reverse time, while an Assassin can make it so failed actions never happened, or even make perfect plans that literally can not fail (at a high cost).

Quertus
2022-10-18, 10:35 AM
Stuff in meat-space getting in the way, so this reply is definitely slow. Especially since this is a short reply.

To Quertus: Look, if D&D is tactical or strategic is not the main point, the main point is that there are different types of meaningful decisions (with tactical vs. strategic being an example there) and that you don't need something like D&D's combat system to have them. Or mechanical rules at all, but not everyone clicks with free-form role-playing.

Yes, looking back, it’s fair to say that that was your main point.

Here’s mine (maybe?): if those decisions don’t involve a strategic layer, if those decisions cannot be made by employing one or more of multiple strategies, and in so doing, both the choice of strategy and the implementation thereof don’t affect the story, then they’re not worth my time to think about, and aren’t meaningful.

Let me take an example from the strength-based intimidation thread.

Goal: Having killed most of the cultists of Ytherg, get information from one of the survivors.

Strategy: intimate with threat of [pain {DC25} / contamination with salt {DC15} / killing other cultist {auto-fail} / threatening family {DC20}] vs “pull a Ramsay” vs…

Implementation: “Uh, betray us, and I will fong you, until your insides are out, your outsides are in, your entrails will become your extrails I will w-rip... all the p... ung. Pain, lots of pain.” vs Westley’s “To the Pain” speech from The Princess Bride.

Any decision that doesn’t respond to different strategic inputs with different outputs isn’t a decision that I find worthwhile. Anything that responds to various diverse strategic inputs with corresponding different logical outputs is a strategic minigame, regardless of whether it’s white box or black box, regardless of whether it’s laborious legalese or educated fiat.

“Any sufficiently advanced fiat is indistinguishable from rules. Any sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from fiat.”

But anything worth doing in a game is worth having the depth and level of detail that the strategic layer matters.

Actually writing down the rules of the strategic minigame, and/or having them be derivable from other established facts (Salt is Ytherg‘s bane, cultists of Ytherg undergo torturous physical training, “he ate my egg, I’m glad he’s dead”) is an important tool for consistency, fairness, and actually thinking through whether your material and game actually possess strategic depth.

Any clearer?

gbaji
2022-10-18, 02:28 PM
Let me take an example from the strength-based intimidation thread.

Goal: Having killed most of the cultists of Ytherg, get information from one of the survivors.

Strategy: intimate with threat of [pain {DC25} / contamination with salt {DC15} / killing other cultist {auto-fail} / threatening family {DC20}] vs “pull a Ramsay” vs…

Implementation: “Uh, betray us, and I will fong you, until your insides are out, your outsides are in, your entrails will become your extrails I will w-rip... all the p... ung. Pain, lots of pain.” vs Westley’s “To the Pain” speech from The Princess Bride.

What about this example? You mention the example, but then don't actually use it for anything, as far as I can tell. Or is your examination of the example here?:


Any decision that doesn’t respond to different strategic inputs with different outputs isn’t a decision that I find worthwhile.

Extremely vague statement to follow an example which presumably should have had some specific cases explored, but regardless, I'm either completely misunderstanding you, or I completely disagree (and I'm honestly not sure which).

If you mean this to say: "If the game system allows multiple methods to generate an outcome, the outcomes must be different based on the methodology used", then I have to completely disagree. Going back to your "questioning the cultist" example, there are really only two outputs: The cultist talks, or the cultist does not talk. It's entirely reasonable to assume that there may be multiple methods the PCs may utilize to try to get the cultists to talk, and some of them may be more successful than others. But they are all aimed at the same result.

Your statement seems to be saying that the cultist should say completely different things based on what method is used to question him? Or maybe the very fact that there's only one (bi-directional) output, you're arguing there shouldn't even be rules for this, or you're not interested in having rules for this? I'm not sure. Maybe be more clear what you're actually saying? I honestly read and re-read this like 5 times and still can't quite figure out what the point you're trying to make is.


Anything that responds to various diverse strategic inputs with corresponding different logical outputs is a strategic minigame, regardless of whether it’s white box or black box, regardless of whether it’s laborious legalese or educated fiat.

Maybe define "inputs" and "outputs" here. Are you saying that if the players have multiple things they can do, with multiple possible outcomes resulting from those actions, that this is automatically a mini-game? I'm not sure that's true either. We can absolutely use some very simplistic base rules in a game to generate rolls for a whole lot of things, filling in the gaps with roleplaying alone, and not really call that a "mini-game" (as least not how I'd define it). Sure you could have a different skill for every form of interrogation and pick which ones you use, and based on that get different information, or you could have a very broad "interrogation" skill and use that, and just roleplay what specific methods you are using, and have the GM roleplay the NPC's reaction based on that and the skill roll to decide the result. No mini-game required, but plenty of options for different outputs.

Heck. You could have even more generic skills and go from there too, if you want. I could run a game where the closest applicable skill was super broad like "social skills", and still manage an interrogation session just fine.


“Any sufficiently advanced fiat is indistinguishable from rules. Any sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from fiat.”

I don't think those go both ways. Sufficiently advanced rules are entirely distinguishable from fiat. Pretty much axiomatic actually. Well, unless your rule is "what I say goes" (fiat). I'm not sure anyone would define those as "sufficiently advanced rules" though.


But anything worth doing in a game is worth having the depth and level of detail that the strategic layer matters.

I disagree. Most things can be managed with a smallish set of logical skills and a decent amount of common sense and roleplaying. I think the biggest flaws in many game systems are when they try to be too detailed. Because when you do that, you will miss things, and those gaps will be noticed.


Actually writing down the rules of the strategic minigame, and/or having them be derivable from other established facts (Salt is Ytherg‘s bane, cultists of Ytherg undergo torturous physical training, “he ate my egg, I’m glad he’s dead”) is an important tool for consistency, fairness, and actually thinking through whether your material and game actually possess strategic depth.

I think you are mixing up game rules with game content. The specifics of a group of cultists likes, dislikes, hates, etc are not part of the game system rules. They are data used within a ruleset to determine outcomes. You absolutely should not have written in your game rules specific stuff about specific people, places, events, etc. You should have rules that allow those things to be managed logically. That way you are not constrained in any way within the rules.

Quertus
2022-10-18, 05:21 PM
For the game I'm working on it. It's harder than it looks though. For example I wrote a really cool social power that allowed a class to, when someone thought they were friends, freely destroy them, and anyone under their power at the cost of a single social action and a little time.

Turns out it's a trap ability because by the time you are friends you don't need to kill them any more. So while I thought it was an awesome ability, a player in my playtest with it has never found a use for it. And when you are trying to write a lot of abilities into your game (think 3.5 srd), you can't test every single one.

That said, on the tactics and strategy side writing a system that can support that number of abilities makes the game very strategic. In combat right now there are several roles that characters can use and switch between.

First they have to decide with melee vrs ranged, as the party needs at least one character willing to get into melee. If that character goes down they need to be replaced, so an off melee character is often advisable.

Then for roles they have buffing/debuffing, battlefield alteration, damage dealing, accurate attacks, protection, horde countering, and designated survivor.

There are other options too, but those are the major ones, with characters usually being able to slip between 2 or 3 roles as they need and desire.

I'd love to get you as a playtester but I suspect it wouldn't work out, and that you wouldn't enjoy the martial/mage divide in my game. Martials in my system are as supernatural as mages, they just having a different skill set. Time mages can stop or reverse time, while an Assassin can make it so failed actions never happened, or even make perfect plans that literally can not fail (at a high cost).

First things first: I’m glad you perceive me as a valuable tester (I am in some dimensions, but you’d definitely also need someone to cover my weaknesses in other dimensions) but… why would you think I’d not enjoy your system? :smallconfused:

Hmmm…
“a really cool social power that allowed a class to, when someone thought they were friends, freely destroy them, and anyone under their power at the cost of a single social action and a little time.” - that’s… I’m not quite sure what you’re going for here. “Those we allow in, past our defenses, can hurt us more” seems true, and doesn’t require a special power to implement. “I’m friends with your boss, so I can hurt you” can be similar, but depends on the nature of the relationship with the boss… and the boss’ actual influence over you.
“Turns out it's a trap ability because by the time you are friends you don't need to kill them any more.” - wait, kill?! Ok, that’s… different. Huh. The Determinator might find it suboptimal to the point of being a trap, but I can see a roleplayer playing a vengeful character using it in spades.
“characters usually being able to slip between 2 or 3 roles as they need and desire.” - can a Chronomancer choose to build their character as Melee / BFC / Survivor, or as Ranged / Buff/Debuff / horde countering, or are they limited by the roles designated by the class?
“buffing/debuffing, battlefield alteration, damage dealing, accurate attacks, protection, horde countering, and designated survivor.” - especially with you having social powers and a “friendship” status with actual teeth, are there designated roles outside combat? Like moral support, yes man, moral compass, idea man, life of the party, coordinator, “I know a guy”, neutral third party, voice of reason? Or is the detail limited to combat?
“martial/mage divide” - sounds limiting compared to just “characters”
“Martials in my system are as supernatural as mages, they just having a different skill set” - ok.
“Time mages can stop or reverse time” - that sounds like a thing that a Chronomancer could do.
“while an Assassin can make it so failed actions never happened” - sounds like a cool ability. Not seeing how it’s logically related to being an Assassin. I can see that Power being handy for an Assassin, but I don’t see it as related to being an Assassin.
“or even make perfect plans that literally can not fail (at a high cost).” - unless it’s “I kill the target by blowing up the planet”… no, even then, this didn’t sound like an intrinsic part of being an assassin, but of a “5d Wizard Chess” chessmaster. Also, sounds like it’d remove game play, rather than adding to it.


That last ability is about the only thing I’ve heard that I’m not a fan of, that I most likely wouldn’t enjoy. If you had a particularly limited and silly vision of what certain conceptual archetypes mean, and limit your players to those visions rather than a more open system where players build their own “firefighter” power set, then I could see me not having fun. But so long as it’s coherent, even if it’s campy or “only works for exactly one setting”? That’s fine.

Hmmm… you never said “roleplaying game”, just “game”. If this is for a multi-prong war game (like 4e, but with more support for social powers)? You’re right, I wouldn’t enjoy it if I was expecting an RPG. But viewed through the lens of a war game, I can see definite potential. In that context, my concerns about how being an Assassin helps you gain Fate-manipulation powers (Euthanatos, perhaps?), or “friendship is magical… because it can kill you, and your little dog, too” don’t matter. If I don’t have to roleplay the playing piece, if I don’t have to get inside their head and make the reality make sense to me, if it’s just a Gamist game, then… wow. The only Gamist game of such complexity I’ve played is Magic, and this sounds like it has the potential to be cooler than that (dependent upon implementation, of course).

——-

Whew, that was more virtual ink than I’d intended to spill.

——-

As far as “trap options” go… there’s a difference between a single small “whoops” in a complex game, and the Determinator attitude that 80-90% of the 3e base classes are trap options.

Jakinbandw
2022-10-18, 07:11 PM
First things first: I’m glad you perceive me as a valuable tester (I am in some dimensions, but you’d definitely also need someone to cover my weaknesses in other dimensions) but… why would you think I’d not enjoy your system? :smallconfused:

I think it's mostly because of the discussions I've seen you have over magic vs mundane. That said from a differant angle, I guess that was never really over mage vs marital, so I guess I was pretty wrong.



“a really cool social power that allowed a class to, when someone thought they were friends, freely destroy them, and anyone under their power at the cost of a single social action and a little time.” - that’s… I’m not quite sure what you’re going for here. “Those we allow in, past our defenses, can hurt us more” seems true, and doesn’t require a special power to implement. “I’m friends with your boss, so I can hurt you” can be similar, but depends on the nature of the relationship with the boss… and the boss’ actual influence over you.
“Turns out it's a trap ability because by the time you are friends you don't need to kill them any more.” - wait, kill?! Ok, that’s… different. Huh. The Determinator might find it suboptimal to the point of being a trap, but I can see a roleplayer playing a vengeful character using it in spades.
Yeah, it was what I was thinking when I wrote it up. Maybe it just comes down to the players I have in the current playtest, a player picked it, excited to play with it, but every time they managed to get someone to think they were friends, they ended up not wanting to use it. Maybe a different group would find it more useful.


[LIST]
“characters usually being able to slip between 2 or 3 roles as they need and desire.” - can a Chronomancer choose to build their character as Melee / BFC / Survivor, or as Ranged / Buff/Debuff / horde countering, or are they limited by the roles designated by the class?
So classes are just a list of abilities the character can choose from. So a chronomancer would have access to two other classes when building (for maximum freedom). That said, while they wouldn't necessary be the best at those suggested rolls with just chronomancer abilities, they could build for both and switch between them. That said, designated survivor is something of a ranged role, so while they have tools they could use to help with that, they wouldn't be able to pull it off in melee. That said, most of their abilities are utility based, and they don't have many abilities that increase their combat efficiency.

They do have an incredibly fun finishing move that allows them to completely rewrite a target's backstory and history in combat however, so they aren't entirely utility.


[LIST]
“buffing/debuffing, battlefield alteration, damage dealing, accurate attacks, protection, horde countering, and designated survivor.” - especially with you having social powers and a “friendship” status with actual teeth, are there designated roles outside combat? Like moral support, yes man, moral compass, idea man, life of the party, coordinator, “I know a guy”, neutral third party, voice of reason? Or is the detail limited to combat?

Mostly limited to combat. They also aren't called directly out, but rather something that players seem to fall into when trying to play optimally. Often a character will take on one or two of those roles within combat. I just ended up writing them down so that as I designer, I keep them in mind when designing abilities for classes. A paladin character gets a bunch of the extra tools to allow them to protect others more efficiently, because that's often what paladins are expected to do, as an example.

Outside of combat, the roles are much more loose. If I had to pick for social, I'd say there is the favor gainer (A character that can generate a lot of small favors giving the party a leg up in social interactions), the information gatherer (who specializes in learning about npcs, specifically their social traits), and the favor enhancer (someone who can take favors being owed, and use them to gain large benefits). That said, while my social system has teeth, I intentionally kept it more loose than combat. I wanted all characters to be able to interact with characters socially, so the honest baseline of 'talking with them' is actually the most used, and most important part of the social system.

Outside of social and combat... I wouldn't even try to come up with roles. It just falls into the boiling pot of problem solving. From reversing time, to having functionally infinite money, to (last session), an epic level character picking up an entire town to move it out of the way of a battle with a massive serpent. I've been working with a database to keep track of all the abilities I've written for balancing purposes, and an entire tag is just called 'weird utility' because each does something so different that it only exists for that one ability.



[LIST]
“martial/mage divide” - sounds limiting compared to just “characters”
You know, when I'm on this forum for too long browsing, this language just slips in to how I talk. At the end of the day, I'm not sure the divide exists as clearly in my system as in dnd.


[LIST]
“while an Assassin can make it so failed actions never happened” - sounds like a cool ability. Not seeing how it’s logically related to being an Assassin. I can see that Power being handy for an Assassin, but I don’t see it as related to being an Assassin.
“or even make perfect plans that literally can not fail (at a high cost).” - unless it’s “I kill the target by blowing up the planet”… no, even then, this didn’t sound like an intrinsic part of being an assassin, but of a “5d Wizard Chess” chessmaster. Also, sounds like it’d remove game play, rather than adding to it.


That last ability is about the only thing I’ve heard that I’m not a fan of, that I most likely wouldn’t enjoy. If you had a particularly limited and silly vision of what certain conceptual archetypes mean, and limit your players to those visions rather than a more open system where players build their own “firefighter” power set, then I could see me not having fun. But so long as it’s coherent, even if it’s campy or “only works for exactly one setting”? That’s fine.

One one hand, you're right that they aren't core to playing an assassin, but they are often part of the fantasy of playing an assassin. Pulling off the perfect assassination, never being seen, and all that jazz. Probably their most assassiny ability is that they can study a target over downtime (giving the GM a heads up before the next adventure), and have a high chance to one shot kill that target if they manage to get a surprise round against them. This can allow them to defeat foes that are well above the parties capability to defeat, at a fairly high cost.

The super plan ability is certainly an outlier. And while it sounds awesome, it's really closer to setting a savepoint. You start a plan, then play the game normally, and as long as combat is avoided, you can freely take back any actions that didn't involve a failed roll. Once you fail a roll, or enter combat, you must either commit to the current situation, or jump back to when you started planning, discarding the plan. certainly it's 5d wizards chess, but I don't think it slows down the game significantly.



Hmmm… you never said “roleplaying game”, just “game”. If this is for a multi-prong war game (like 4e, but with more support for social powers)? You’re right, I wouldn’t enjoy it if I was expecting an RPG. But viewed through the lens of a war game, I can see definite potential. In that context, my concerns about how being an Assassin helps you gain Fate-manipulation powers (Euthanatos, perhaps?), or “friendship is magical… because it can kill you, and your little dog, too” don’t matter. If I don’t have to roleplay the playing piece, if I don’t have to get inside their head and make the reality make sense to me, if it’s just a Gamist game, then… wow. The only Gamist game of such complexity I’ve played is Magic, and this sounds like it has the potential to be cooler than that (dependent upon implementation, of course).




As far as “trap options” go… there’s a difference between a single small “whoops” in a complex game, and the Determinator attitude that 80-90% of the 3e base classes are trap options.

That seems fair.

Thank you for taking the time to respond! I'll try to invite you to the next playtest, and we'll see if you have time.

Cluedrew
2022-10-20, 09:13 PM
For the game I'm working on it. It's harder than it looks though.Oh yeah, that lesson comes in real quick. But I wish you the best of luck.


Any decision that doesn’t respond to different strategic inputs with different outputs isn’t a decision that I find worthwhile. [...] Any clearer?What do you mean by "strategic"? Because you seem to be using it to mean anything that goes between scenes which is - if nothing else - much broader than how I use the word.


Extremely vague statement to follow an example which presumably should have had some specific cases explored, but regardless, I'm either completely misunderstanding you, or I completely disagree (and I'm honestly not sure which).One of my favorite stories is the one time we (the forum community) spend six pages arguing, and then figuring out what everyone meant by "tier 1". After we got that done everyone started agreeing with each other.

olskool
2022-10-21, 10:20 AM
I noticed that there is a strong desire on this board to create "systems" to handle all aspects of the game. So, if you want to do social skills; we need a system in order to solve who gets their way. If you are going into the woods, you need a system in order to determine how long you can survive. If you are going to intimidate somehow, you need a wide variety of choices and rolls. I understand the appeal as no matter what happens, you know what to do, and remove grey area.

Every TTRPG should have a focus or "intended state of play" in which the rules maybe more developed or focused on. For example, D&D likes to focus a lot on "tactical combat" so has a lot of rules for how to kill stuff. Those Dark Places is an industrial, sci-fi space horror game, so it has more detail mechanics on panic states. Call of Cthulthu is more of an investigation and sanity losing focus, so mechanics focus on
those game play methods. Other games have other focuses.

Mini-games and such have their place in helping create the games focus. They are also great in board games, video games, wargames, etc. However, the only way a TTRPG with a GM can cover the vast swathe of game styles, scenarios, resolutions, etc. is by letting the GM adjudicate for areas that are outside of the core "intended state of play" that make up any session. It is one of the few things that make TTRPGs unique as a game experience. Should designers lean into this advantage, or are a variety of strategic mini-games the preferred state of play?

I look forward to the discussion and solid, well thought out refutations of my poorly worded thoughts.

I would say 5e has the beginning of a "universal mechanic" which can be used for anything. WOTC just hasn't fully developed it yet. The PROFICIENCY SYSTEM is a very good start to a universal mechanic. You can use it by first defining the DIFFICULTY LEVEL of a given challenge. I like to use the following DCs to determine the DIFFICULTY of any given task. Please note, that the task is the task in my world and this Difficulty doesn't adjust simply because the PCs become more skilled.

Easy Task = 5 DC or a 75% chance of success with no modifiers
Average Task = 10 DC or a 50% chance of success with no modifiers
Difficult Task = 15 DC or a 25% chance of success with no modifiers
Formidable Task = 20 DC or a 5% chance of success with no modifiers
Impossible Task = 25 DC or NO CHANCE of success unless modifiers are present.

75% of all tasks we do from day to day will be Easy tasks. 20% of the tasks we do will be Average tasks. Less than 5% of tasks will be harder.

Now, all we need to do to avoid "mini-games" is give a listing of typical DC levels (Easy, Average, etc...) for everything from Climbing to Hiding to Perception. You then will use this one mechanic for everything.

It should be noted that early D&D had "mini-games for everything" because it evolved from a first-generation tabletop WARGAME. In the early days of gaming, Wargames had countless rules added to a base game, and each one was "optimized" for the certain situation which prompted its creation.

gbaji
2022-10-21, 10:43 AM
One of my favorite stories is the one time we (the forum community) spend six pages arguing, and then figuring out what everyone meant by "tier 1". After we got that done everyone started agreeing with each other.

I'm by no means always as quick to detect this as I should be (I think everyone suffers from this). But when I run into a situation where someone is saying something and I'm like "huh?", I try to take the time to ask "OK. What do you mean by X, or Y? Step me through what you're trying to say". I've found that a lot of times, disagreements often boil down to people actually using the same word(s) to mean completely different things.

Also (and I'm absolutely as guilty of this as anyone else), there's usually a tendency to want to get your point across and it's so clear in your own head, that you may not realize that an outside observer isn't going through the same mental process you are, and isn't seeing the same thing you are, and therefore doesn't get what you are actually trying to say. It can be difficult to actually slow down, pause your argument, and clearly explain not just the point you are making, but each supporting assumption, term, definition, etc. It's tedious, but sometimes necessary.

Quertus
2022-10-21, 12:18 PM
What do you mean by "strategic"? Because you seem to be using it to mean anything that goes between scenes which is - if nothing else - much broader than how I use the word.

I’m too senile to remember if I should attribute my memories of this feeling to you, or even exclusively to you.

What do I mean by “strategic”? Well, um… it’s… Ah… huh.

Ok, it’s part of a hierarchy, like TCP/IP. It lives between “goal” and “tactics”. It might, at times, be a synonym for “approach”. While Goal is what you intend to accomplish with a plan, Strategy is the how.

So, for example, when presented with a thread of conversation, I might select…

Goal: move this conversation forward in a productive direction, end the conversation, <insert social goals here, like “flirt with cute Pokémon daycare receptionist” or whatever>, <insert “do something magical”, in color, here>, give the post visual clarity, and make things visually interesting

Strategy: Attack the character of anyone who disagrees with me, provide additional details to explain my previous posts, ask clarifying questions, make things so political that the thread gets locked, read back in the thread to see what we’re talking about, pretend like I remember what we’re talking about, remind everyone of my senility, remind myself of my senility, cast “Wall of Text”, answer direct questions

Tactics: scream “you’re an idiot!”, compare anyone who would hold a particular view to masochistic Rick and Mortar fans (no offense to either, I just took the last media and last thing that sounded like it was being used as an insult I heard… and didn’t know enough about either to successfully spell either one… so it’s functionally random words), … blah blah blah … (attempt to) give a simple, direct answer to the question directly, answer the question with a question, explain with examples, <insert something here>, reference old conversations to make it seem like I still remember things, <insert something here>, interspace “selected” options with “unselected” options, spend time polishing the post, leave it with a “work in progress” feel, like I accidentally hit the “submit” button

Note how not all strategies are equally compatible with all goals, and, in fact, some are actively detrimental to some goals. Round by round tactics - actual actions - live in a similar optimal / suboptimal / detrimental spectrum for goals and approaches.

Note also that the layers are a bit fuzzy… is “humor” a goal, a strategy, or a tactic? Arguably, it could be any of the above.

So… a “strategy” is not limited to just “anything that goes between scenes” (although, at this point, saying I have no idea where you got that idea carries approximately zero weight).

Now, it might not be relevant, but CaW is all about delaying a scene, to plan and to utilize strategies that wouldn’t be available to a “beer and pretzels” CaS “kick in the door” Leroy Jenkins party. So I guess I can see how you might take something I’ve said, and equate “strategy” with “between scenes”, given that I’ve said CaW “utilizes the strategic layer”.

However, this runs into two problems.

The first… actually, they both boil down to the fact that I’m terrible at communication, and “setting things up so as to change or remove the difficulty of the encounter” arguably is more “planning” and “preparation” than “strategy”.

So now you can see the goals, strategies, and tactics I’ve utilized in this post (sort of - we can pretend, right?), and that helps you understand what I mean by the word “strategy”, which has almost no similarity to the phrase “strategic layer” I (probably foolishly) use when discussing CaS vs CaW. Right? Maybe? Clear as mud?

gbaji
2022-10-21, 01:47 PM
Ok. Having read more of what you posted, and then re-reading this:


Here’s mine (maybe?): if those decisions don’t involve a strategic layer, if those decisions cannot be made by employing one or more of multiple strategies, and in so doing, both the choice of strategy and the implementation thereof don’t affect the story, then they’re not worth my time to think about, and aren’t meaningful.

I think I get what you're saying. Is it basically that if the detail about exactly how someone does something doesn't matter (much), then there's not a lot of value in putting detail into the game mechanics involving that action? That, I completely agree with.

If no one actually cares about the precise steps involved in making a 5 star meal to impress the local mafia boss and get on his good side, we don't need a mini-game involving 18 different skills that might be required for an executive chef to pull of such a thing, nor do we need a blow by blow account of each course, what you're doing to make it "special", researching his favorite foods/spices, what ingredients you are using, etc. Just roll a "cooking" skill and move on (or just roleplay hiring a top chef to do the work, while you stand around and take credit for making it all happen or something). Say what you are doing, role a die or something, then move on to the parts we actually care about.

Got it. Agree 100%. I think what threw people (and me) off, was using the phrase "strategic layer". To me, that means anytime we put forth a plan to do something, the layer that planning is occurring at is the "strategic layer" of the game (as opposed to "tactical layer" which is where we detail out the nuts and bolts of our actions). Clearly, the "plan" is to get on the mafia boss' good side by making him a 5 star meal. The strategic layer exists whether we choose to detail out the specific actions involved or not (which is what a min-game is about). It's really whether the details matter that much to us, or just the outcome. in this case, we only care about the outcome, so minimize the details and die rolling and move on.

animorte
2022-10-21, 05:06 PM
I would say 5e has the beginning of a "universal mechanic" which can be used for anything. WOTC just hasn't fully developed it yet. The PROFICIENCY SYSTEM is a very good start to a universal mechanic.
Yea, this specific statement right here. I feel very strongly yes to this. It still requires adjustments and consistency with everything around it, but yes. Absolutely, 100%.



What do I mean by “strategic”? Well, um… it’s… Ah… huh.

This… this entire thing was a very entertaining and enlightening display of self-awareness. You made my entire week. Thanks for sharing.

Quertus
2022-10-21, 08:47 PM
This… this entire thing was a very entertaining and enlightening display of self-awareness. You made my entire week. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks. I do try, even though I’ve (rightly) gotten in trouble when I forgot to consider what my joke looked like if you didn’t realize that it was supposed to be a joke.


Ok. Having read more of what you posted, and then re-reading this:



I think I get what you're saying. Is it basically that if the detail about exactly how someone does something doesn't matter (much), then there's not a lot of value in putting detail into the game mechanics involving that action? That, I completely agree with.

If no one actually cares about the precise steps involved in making a 5 star meal to impress the local mafia boss and get on his good side, we don't need a mini-game involving 18 different skills that might be required for an executive chef to pull of such a thing, nor do we need a blow by blow account of each course, what you're doing to make it "special", researching his favorite foods/spices, what ingredients you are using, etc. Just roll a "cooking" skill and move on

That’s part of it, yeah. At a higher level, do we even care how someone is trying to “get on his good side”? Do we care that it’s cooking? If that doesn’t matter, don’t bother explaining that that’s your strategy for the goal “get on his good side”.

The flip side is, I want things where the strategic layer matters, where the difference between “cook him a meal”, “get him a gift”, “clone his dead dog”, “tell him about his wife’s infidelity” actually matters to the story.

But if the most impact they have is which skill you roll when trying to get on his good side, they aren’t what I consider important or meaningful.

Quertus
2022-10-23, 02:42 PM
“Any sufficiently advanced fiat is indistinguishable from rules. Any sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from fiat.”


I don't think those go both ways. Sufficiently advanced rules are entirely distinguishable from fiat. Pretty much axiomatic actually. Well, unless your rule is "what I say goes" (fiat). I'm not sure anyone would define those as "sufficiently advanced rules" though.

Now, I know I say some crazy stuff sometimes, but I decided I wanted to address this, to show that there is an underlying method to my madness.

When you’re a young babe, suckling at your mother’s teet, there are a few rules which make sense: when you cry your hungry cry, the soft, warm source of milk arrives; when you cry your angry cry, you get put in the Dark Place, where spiders vie for room on your face. Everything else in the world - including things like “the persistence of objects” - is sufficiently advanced that, to you, it may as well be fiat.

So any rules that exist beyond the scope of comprehensible complexity or whatever (like, how does Burger King pricing work, or why is the Necron deck the most expensive one?) are indistinguishable to the viewer from fiat.

That’s what I mean when I say that any sufficiently advanced rule is indistinguishable from fiat: that, if the player isn’t reading the rules (and maybe even if they are), the rules are too complex to be distinguishable from fiat, too complex for the viewer to comprehend the underlying consistency given the expected amount of data / expected number of interactions with the rule.

Obviously, if the rule writer and the viewer have similar ideas about how the universe works, that viewer will have an advantage when attempting to discern the underlying rules created by that writer. I’ve met a few people whose… stats, experiences, and world view, I suppose?… were similar enough to my own that their underlying mechanics were close enough to transparent and reasonable to my eyes. Everyone else, it’s gibberish nonsense. Like that string of guys who keep disappearing behind hands, only for another one to magically appear to the magic words “peekaboo!”. I’ve gotta learn that spell.

Cluedrew
2022-10-24, 06:11 PM
What do I mean by "strategic"? Well, um... it's... Ah... huh. [...] Clear as mud?That is a fairly reasonable general definition, you know the first one on the list. Unfortunately I'm not using the general definition, I'm using what I thought was the standard gaming definition.*

The quickest way I have to describe this, that should still work, is "strategic" also means "of or reminiscent of strategy games". Which does pull in the general definition of strategy, as that genre tends bring in those choices.

But it also brings in some other things which, although not always bad, are certainly always good. The big one is a focus on testing a player's skill. Now, how good a player at the game is always going to be a factor, but I for one don't think that it should be a design goal that character ability should be tied to player ability.

Hopefully, that should give everyone an idea of what I mean by strategic.

* And if you think I should of seen that coming, wait until I get to the story I was shocked to discover someone was using the word martial to mean "of war".

kyoryu
2022-10-24, 06:22 PM
The big one is a focus on testing a player's skill. Now, how good a player at the game is always going to be a factor, but I for one don't think that it should be a design goal that character ability should be tied to player ability.

All games test skill, to some extent. The only real question is which skills you're looking to test.

gbaji
2022-10-24, 08:43 PM
Now, I know I say some crazy stuff sometimes, but I decided I wanted to address this, to show that there is an underlying method to my madness.

When you’re a young babe, suckling at your mother’s teet, there are a few rules which make sense: when you cry your hungry cry, the soft, warm source of milk arrives; when you cry your angry cry, you get put in the Dark Place, where spiders vie for room on your face. Everything else in the world - including things like “the persistence of objects” - is sufficiently advanced that, to you, it may as well be fiat.

So any rules that exist beyond the scope of comprehensible complexity or whatever (like, how does Burger King pricing work, or why is the Necron deck the most expensive one?) are indistinguishable to the viewer from fiat.

That’s what I mean when I say that any sufficiently advanced rule is indistinguishable from fiat: that, if the player isn’t reading the rules (and maybe even if they are), the rules are too complex to be distinguishable from fiat, too complex for the viewer to comprehend the underlying consistency given the expected amount of data / expected number of interactions with the rule.

You keep using the word "fiat". I do not think it means what you think.

Hint: "Fiat" means to declare something to be <whatever> by sheer authority (eg: "The rule is what I say it is because I say it is"). When you say a sufficiently advanced rule is indistinguishable from fiat, you are literally saying that sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from "because I say so". Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what "sufficiently advanced rules" are supposed to do (avoid determinations by fiat). Rules give us the means to determine what to do when there's a conflict in a game: I think my character hit, you think he missed. Either we just decide one of us is right (that's "fiat"), or we come up with rules to determine this objectively (like calculating odds and rolling dice).

The more advanced the ruleset the farther away we get from any one person just "deciding" what the outcome is. And thus farther way from ruling by fiat.

Quertus
2022-10-25, 07:56 AM
That is a fairly reasonable general definition, you know the first one on the list. Unfortunately I'm not using the general definition, I'm using what I thought was the standard gaming definition.*

The quickest way I have to describe this, that should still work, is "strategic" also means "of or reminiscent of strategy games". Which does pull in the general definition of strategy, as that genre tends bring in those choices.

But it also brings in some other things which, although not always bad, are certainly always good. The big one is a focus on testing a player's skill. Now, how good a player at the game is always going to be a factor, but I for one don't think that it should be a design goal that character ability should be tied to player ability.

Hopefully, that should give everyone an idea of what I mean by strategic.

* And if you think I should of seen that coming, wait until I get to the story I was shocked to discover someone was using the word martial to mean "of war".

The best thing about my definition is, it was made by me. But the second best thing is, it matches yours. No, seriously. In other threads, we’ve got people decrying how forcing “strategy” is unfair, because it tests player skill. I’m… honestly not sure how you could possibly miss the concept that, if the strategy you choose matters, then the existence of the strategic layer is inherently a test of player skill. Maybe you’re used to RPGs where you roll the appropriate skill to determine your strategy? Where your roll tells you that the best way to get the king on your side is to impregnate his daughter? If so, then, yeah, I guess I could see the confusion. (Note to self: steal this idea for response to “it’s unfair” comment).

I’ll say it again (Although maybe for the first time in this thread): Strategy & player skill determine what direction you’re headed; tactics and character ability determine how far you go in that direction.

In any game where the player has agency to make meaningful decisions, it had better not just be a “design goal” but an absolute requirement where falling the test is a sign of utter failure to produce anything even remotely acceptable, that character impact on the narrative should be tied to player choices, and, thus, to player skills.


You keep using the word "fiat". I do not think it means what you think.

Hint: "Fiat" means to declare something to be <whatever> by sheer authority (eg: "The rule is what I say it is because I say it is"). When you say a sufficiently advanced rule is indistinguishable from fiat, you are literally saying that sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from "because I say so". Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what "sufficiently advanced rules" are supposed to do (avoid determinations by fiat). Rules give us the means to determine what to do when there's a conflict in a game: I think my character hit, you think he missed. Either we just decide one of us is right (that's "fiat"), or we come up with rules to determine this objectively (like calculating odds and rolling dice).

The more advanced the ruleset the farther away we get from any one person just "deciding" what the outcome is. And thus farther way from ruling by fiat.

You keep using the word “magic”. I do not think it means what you think it means. Technology is inherently built upon known scientific principles; the more advanced the technology, the further away we get from “magic”.

Thank you for demonstrating that I said exactly what I meant to say.

If I happen to have memorized 5,000 pages of rules on ship combat (that you’ve never read or even heard of) could you really tell the difference between me following those rules and fiat? Over time, you might notice some patterns… but are those a sign that my fiat has internal consistency, or that I’m following some actual rules?

“Indistinguishable” is not a question of *is*, it’s a question of perception.

(Note: you’d probably amazed at the results of some of the tests I’ve run, at how long it takes players who’ve never heard of the concept and haven’t been told what system we’re playing in (let alone allowed to read the rules) to understand that things like “encumbrance” or “fatigue” impact their abilities.)

gbaji
2022-10-25, 12:06 PM
Just for clarity, and to show the context of your original statement:


Any decision that doesn’t respond to different strategic inputs with different outputs isn’t a decision that I find worthwhile. Anything that responds to various diverse strategic inputs with corresponding different logical outputs is a strategic minigame, regardless of whether it’s white box or black box, regardless of whether it’s laborious legalese or educated fiat.

“Any sufficiently advanced fiat is indistinguishable from rules. Any sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from fiat.”

But anything worth doing in a game is worth having the depth and level of detail that the strategic layer matters.

Actually writing down the rules of the strategic minigame, and/or having them be derivable from other established facts (Salt is Ytherg‘s bane, cultists of Ytherg undergo torturous physical training, “he ate my egg, I’m glad he’s dead”) is an important tool for consistency, fairness, and actually thinking through whether your material and game actually possess strategic depth.


You keep using the word “magic”. I do not think it means what you think it means. Technology is inherently built upon known scientific principles; the more advanced the technology, the further away we get from “magic”.

Thank you for demonstrating that I said exactly what I meant to say.

If I happen to have memorized 5,000 pages of rules on ship combat (that you’ve never read or even heard of) could you really tell the difference between me following those rules and fiat? Over time, you might notice some patterns… but are those a sign that my fiat has internal consistency, or that I’m following some actual rules?

“Indistinguishable” is not a question of *is*, it’s a question of perception.

Yes. Very clever wordplay. Um... Also incredibly non-useful in a conversation about strategic mini games. You specifically contrasted "fiat" and "laborious legalese" in your preceding statement. Perhaps try to not step on your argument with clever wordplay?

And yes, I get the difference between perception and reality, and if we were having a conversation about how to get unknowing players to play games the way we want, or follow the rules we're setting down, it would be a wonderful point. But the assumption here is that we're all discussing the nuts and bolt of game rules and when to be more or less detailed and specific with those rules. The audience here is *not* the people who are going to just say "someone told me the rules say X, so they must be right". Ok. Some might, but anyone earnestly engaged in the very thread we are in presumably is *not*.


I also still think you are using fiat incorrectly anyway. Fiat isn't "I know the rules and I'm telling you they are X". Fiat is literally "the rules are whatever I say they are". Not "appear to be to you because you don't know any better", but you are literally just making them up. There is no 5000 page rulebook. Just you making stuff up as you go along. Now, yes you could lie and claim there's a 5000 page rulebook you are quoting form, and perhaps some wont realize the difference. But, to follow the analogy all the way, in this case you actually *are* using magic, and when someone say's "it's magic!" you're telling them, "no, it's actually technology". Er... No. It's magic. You're not following rules here.

Stonehead
2022-10-27, 11:58 AM
You keep using the word "fiat". I do not think it means what you think.

Hint: "Fiat" means to declare something to be <whatever> by sheer authority (eg: "The rule is what I say it is because I say it is"). When you say a sufficiently advanced rule is indistinguishable from fiat, you are literally saying that sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from "because I say so". Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what "sufficiently advanced rules" are supposed to do (avoid determinations by fiat). Rules give us the means to determine what to do when there's a conflict in a game: I think my character hit, you think he missed. Either we just decide one of us is right (that's "fiat"), or we come up with rules to determine this objectively (like calculating odds and rolling dice).

The more advanced the ruleset the farther away we get from any one person just "deciding" what the outcome is. And thus farther way from ruling by fiat.

It's a fair comparison if the players can't see the system.

You throw a fireball, roll damage, and it deals that much damage, you get the system. It doesn't feel like fiat. Occasionally you run into demons who have resistance to fire damage. At first it's strange, but before long you figure out that some creatures just take a flat amount less damage from fire, and you understand the system again. It doesn't feel like DM fiat.

Now imagine some hypothetical system where tensile strength, flame resistance, combustibility, melting point, and humidity are all used to determine the amount of damage a fireball deals. There are so many independent variables that it'd be almost impossible for the players to figure out how advanced the system is. There would be no way of telling if there was a lot of math going in to a consistent system for how much damage is dealt, or if the DM is just making it all up on the spot.

At least, that's my attempt at summarizing someone else's point.

IMO it only really applies to DM-side systems that the players can't see. If I were designing a game I probably wouldn't design a minigame, especially not a strategic one, whose mechanics were hidden from the players but I'm not a pro game designer.

Quertus
2022-10-27, 03:04 PM
It's a fair comparison if the players can't see the system.

You throw a fireball, roll damage, and it deals that much damage, you get the system. It doesn't feel like fiat. Occasionally you run into demons who have resistance to fire damage. At first it's strange, but before long you figure out that some creatures just take a flat amount less damage from fire, and you understand the system again. It doesn't feel like DM fiat.

Now imagine some hypothetical system where tensile strength, flame resistance, combustibility, melting point, and humidity are all used to determine the amount of damage a fireball deals. There are so many independent variables that it'd be almost impossible for the players to figure out how advanced the system is. There would be no way of telling if there was a lot of math going in to a consistent system for how much damage is dealt, or if the DM is just making it all up on the spot.

At least, that's my attempt at summarizing someone else's point.

IMO it only really applies to DM-side systems that the players can't see. If I were designing a game I probably wouldn't design a minigame, especially not a strategic one, whose mechanics were hidden from the players but I'm not a pro game designer.

Well put. Kudos!

Only thing I can add to your excellent explanation is the concept of players who enjoy the game, but have 0 cares to give wrt the underlying mechanics. All that “humidity and tensile strength” (or even the “d6 per caster level”) might technically be visible to the players on paper, but this class of players just isn’t interested in opening that black box to understand what’s under the hood. “Huh. This time, Fireball dealt 27 damage.” or “Huh. This time, the Fireball didn’t kill the Treefolk.” is the extent of their interaction with the underlying system.

Thrudd
2022-10-27, 04:29 PM
"rules so complex they are incomprehensible" are not really a problem in just about any TTRPG. Rules so complex that a reasonable and attentive player can't predict how the variables will likely impact the outcome would be too unwieldy for a pen and paper game. I feel like this scenario can be ruled out as something people need to be worried about - overly complicated rules with too many steps will make the game unplayable long before they are so complex that it will resemble fiat.

Both "The GM keeps all rules hidden from the players" and "Some players are oblivious/disinterested in rules to the extent that they aren't aware of even the most basic mechanics" suggest that only with great effort or in fringe cases will rules appear equivalent to fiat.

So I'd say that, for the purposes of a discussion about actual, extant TTRPGs played by average people, mechanics are never going to be indistinguishable from fiat. Also, even in the most complicated calculations, there are usually a few major variables that will allow the outcome to be generally predictable. Players who are aware of even very complicated rules with lots of variables will still likely be able to correctly predict how their input will affect the outcome to some degree. A player would need to be trying really hard to be oblivious to make the game seem like a black box.

gbaji
2022-10-27, 05:16 PM
At least, that's my attempt at summarizing someone else's point.

And it's a fair point. One can certainly argue that as the rules for any given system become overly complex, the tendency to handwave the outcomes (GM fiat) instead of actually following the rules will increase. Doubly so if the bulk of the players are not going to have access to or time to absorb the full rules.

But the rules themselves never become indistinguishable from fiat. The "rulings" may, but not the actual rules. One has to assume that the intent of writing increasingly more detailed rules is specifically to avoid fiat rulings by the GM. This is, as I said, axiomatic. In the absence of a rule to handle something, the GM just decides what happens (that's fiat). Once you add a rule to handle that situation, fiat gives way to "following the rule". Cases where the GM chooses to use fiat anyway and is counting on the players not knowing that a rule exists to handle the situation doesn't mean that the rules are indistinguishable from fiat, but that fiat is being used instead of the rules.

But yeah. I can imagine a situation where the players may not know and therefore not be able to tell the difference. Seems like a pretty narrow case to make a such a broad proclamation though. If the statement was "hidden rules are indistinguishable from fiat", I'd be in complete agreement (Paranoia anyone?).


IMO it only really applies to DM-side systems that the players can't see. If I were designing a game I probably wouldn't design a minigame, especially not a strategic one, whose mechanics were hidden from the players but I'm not a pro game designer.

That was more or less my follow up reasoning. We're in a conversation about when to use/create a minigame to handle specific situations within a game. The assumed case is "we don't have any rules for this", which means that the GM has to rule by fiat (even if just by deciding which skill applies when there isn't one that is obvious), and we are discussing creating or adding new rules to handle those situations so that it is *not* fiat rule. So yeah, the assumption is that a need for more detailed rules exists, and we're asking when that may be and what to do about it. We can certainly speculate cases where the opposite is the case (too many too detailed rules), of course.

And yeah, there's certainly some validity to state the need for caution by creating overly complex rules. But I don't know if I'd have stated it that way. You'll reach the point of "takes too much time to use" long before you reach "GM will just ignore it, and rule how he wants, and the players wont be able to tell the difference". I suppose you'll go back to semi-fiat rulings in both cases, but again, no one is being fooled into thinking the rules are the same as fiat. They're just choosing not to follow the rules.

And as a long time Star Rules Battle player, I know all about folks trying to pretend the rules say what they want rather than what is written. But then, in that game, everyone would call you out on that if you tried it. The "fun" with that game was that as they added more rules to handle more situations, the sheer number of books you had to flip through increased, and what rules you were playing with literally changed based on what rulebook sets were present at the game session (Do we have the rules for sideslips here? How about Romulan space mines? Proximity fuses? Ubitron interface modules? Is the ISC in this game? NCLs? Drone variants?).

Quertus
2022-10-27, 07:39 PM
So, what I’m hearing is, y’all agree that this sub-discussion is pointless, which was my point?

Cluedrew
2022-10-27, 09:02 PM
All games test skill, to some extent. The only real question is which skills you're looking to test.There is two questions actually, which skills you are looking to test and how much you are looking to test them. And then there other things such as "Does the game actually test those skills?" but from a design perspective I think we can focus on those two.

I'm going to skip over the "which" part since I think everyone is clear on that. For the "how much" part, ever heard of skill ceilings? A skill ceiling represents the hard to quantify point at which getting better doesn't improve your results, or starts giving significantly diminished returns. I would be surprised if anyone here has hit the skill ceiling in chess, there could be a chess grandmaster wandering around but I don't expect it. On the other hand if half the people in this thread have hit the skill ceiling in Tic-Tac-Toe, that just kind of makes sense. And now I realize that skill ceilings are just a bridge to skill floors.

A skill floor is how good at a game (the skills it is testing) you have to be to function as intended within it. I'm not interesting in limiting skill ceilings, but making sure the skill floor is accessible is important. Being a masterful public speaker might help play a good bard, but it shouldn't be required.


But the second best thing [about my definition of strategy] is, it matches yours. No, seriously. In other threads, we've got people decrying how forcing "strategy" is unfair, because it tests player skill. I'm... honestly not sure how you could possibly miss the concept that, if the strategy you choose matters, then the existence of the strategic layer is inherently a test of player skill.But by "strategy" they could either mean anything on the strategic layer, or they could have meant positioning, threat evaluation and a bunch of other skills that go into a combat mini-game? The second is my second definition and if you are here for a game about expression, getting into a character's head and improvising a story arc suddenly being tested on a completely different set of skills could seem unfair.

As a possibly useful illustration; Quertus, the academic mage for which your account is named, researched a lot of spells over his many adventures correct? I recall hearing stories about that. Could you send me that research? You did that research in real life to test your player skill before Quertus the character researched the spell, right? No?** Well, of course not, because the skills the character is expressing aren't always the ones we want to test on the player. So yeah, I get that player skill is involved, I don't see why your small squad combat skills should be one of them.

The squad combat skills are part of my second definition of strategy, which is the one I've been talking about most of this post. But it is not part of the first definition. In fact the first isn't really a skill because it is actually more general than that, so I don't think you could test it without narrowing it down a bit first.

* Although I'm sure if I spent some time in a player horror story thread I could find one.
** Admittedly you are high on the list of people who might actually do that, but pretend you didn't for a moment. Also send me that research if you still go it, that sounds really cool.

Stonehead
2022-10-27, 09:35 PM
Only thing I can add to your excellent explanation is the concept of players who enjoy the game, but have 0 cares to give wrt the underlying mechanics. All that “humidity and tensile strength” (or even the “d6 per caster level”) might technically be visible to the players on paper, but this class of players just isn’t interested in opening that black box to understand what’s under the hood. “Huh. This time, Fireball dealt 27 damage.” or “Huh. This time, the Fireball didn’t kill the Treefolk.” is the extent of their interaction with the underlying system.

Actually, that's a really good point I hadn't thought of. "These systems are hidden from the players' perspective" and "These players don't care about these systems they could hypothetically read" are two different situations. I don't think there's anything wrong with the second group of players joining a campaign either.


"rules so complex they are incomprehensible" are not really a problem in just about any TTRPG. Rules so complex that a reasonable and attentive player can't predict how the variables will likely impact the outcome would be too unwieldy for a pen and paper game. I feel like this scenario can be ruled out as something people need to be worried about - overly complicated rules with too many steps will make the game unplayable long before they are so complex that it will resemble fiat.

We're getting into the area of personal experience here, so keep in mind everything I'm about to say is one person's anecdotal experience with one DM.

I've played in multiple campaigns in which I couldn't tell what was going on behind the scenes or, to a lesser extent, if our actions even had consequences. From what we were told OOC, the DM was tracking major world events with various clocks, Blades in the Dark style. He tracked the different major factions' development, who would go to war with who, what major artifacts were where, etc. The clocks themselves weren't shown to the players. Any changes we made to the clocks was similarly not told to us, and neither was what threats even had clocks. From our perspective, we couldn't tell if he was actually tracking anything, or just making it all up. Gut instinct is to trust your friend when they tell you you're doing something, but you can never really be sure.

BitD style threat clocks are hardly a complex set of rules, but to the players they were incomprehensible. Not because of any complexity, but because it was totally obfuscated. So maybe "rules so complex that an attentive player can't predict the outcomes" don't exist in real life, but "systems that attentive players can't predict" certainly do. At the very least, one system does.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-27, 09:40 PM
... Not because of any complexity, but because it was totally obfuscated. So maybe "rules so complex that an attentive player can't predict the outcomes" don't exist in real life....

Speaking as someone whose social abilities are not automatic or instinctive, I take exception to this. I'm attentive. And 90% of the time, my ability to predict the outcomes of things is subject to massive uncertainty. Especially in "unstructured" social events. If I try to emulate "how other people will respond to <X>", by the time I can come to any kind of conclusion, the conversation has moved on and mooted the entire thing. Everyone seems to be moving based on completely obfuscated, randomly changing rules.

This has gotten better as I've aged, but most of that is due to not participating in such unstructured events nearly as much.

Thrudd
2022-10-27, 11:25 PM
Actually, that's a really good point I hadn't thought of. "These systems are hidden from the players' perspective" and "These players don't care about these systems they could hypothetically read" are two different situations. I don't think there's anything wrong with the second group of players joining a campaign either.



We're getting into the area of personal experience here, so keep in mind everything I'm about to say is one person's anecdotal experience with one DM.

I've played in multiple campaigns in which I couldn't tell what was going on behind the scenes or, to a lesser extent, if our actions even had consequences. From what we were told OOC, the DM was tracking major world events with various clocks, Blades in the Dark style. He tracked the different major factions' development, who would go to war with who, what major artifacts were where, etc. The clocks themselves weren't shown to the players. Any changes we made to the clocks was similarly not told to us, and neither was what threats even had clocks. From our perspective, we couldn't tell if he was actually tracking anything, or just making it all up. Gut instinct is to trust your friend when they tell you you're doing something, but you can never really be sure.

BitD style threat clocks are hardly a complex set of rules, but to the players they were incomprehensible. Not because of any complexity, but because it was totally obfuscated. So maybe "rules so complex that an attentive player can't predict the outcomes" don't exist in real life, but "systems that attentive players can't predict" certainly do. At the very least, one system does.

That's true. But I wouldn't call the behind-the-screen management of the game world a strategic mini-game. it's not ever meant for the players, but to aid the GM in keeping the world moving. Players are only expected to predict things based on information available to their characters. They should be able to tell that, if they increase their advantages and decrease their disadvantages they will have a better chance of success at specific tasks; and it ought to be clear, in general, what things will be advantageous or disadvantageous in most circumstances, based on both the fiction and the math of the mechanics. You might not know that more bad guys will show up in five turns, but you do know that if you have someone keep watch, you'll have a better chance of not being ambushed by anything, or at least you ought to, whether the mechanics are rolled behind the screen or up front by the players. The players know that one character has better perception than others, and will therefore have the best chance on watch. Even if there's twenty calculations that happen to the perception score and the DC to figure out what happens, there's likely no way that a character with lower perception score would have a greater chance of success in the same circumstances.

But I suppose that the BitD example is an example of "mechanics indistinguishable from fiat", though in this case that is precisely the intent of the mechanics, as they are intended to be GM-side only. That you couldn't tell if your actions were doing anything is, I'd say, more a fault of the GM and the specific scenarios than of the system itself. But I mean...if you killed a bad guy, you do know you had an impact- now that bad guy isn't around to cause trouble anymore. If you were worried about enemies preparing to attack your stronghold, you probably sent out scouts to see who, if anyone, might be lurking around your territory. You don't know if the GM has preplanned an attack, or rolled on a series of tables to see if there will be one, but you know that conducting reconnaissance will give you a better chance of detecting a threat before it's on top of you (or it ought to, with a fair GM and a system that makes sense). So of course, nobody should ever totally be able to predict the outcome, or absolutely always see what's coming, that's the excitement of this sort of game. But you will know what might tip the odds in your favor, or against you, in the situations immediately facing your characters.

Quertus
2022-10-28, 08:54 AM
I wouldn't call the behind-the-screen management of the game world a strategic mini-game. it's not ever meant for the players, but to aid the GM in keeping the world moving. Players are only expected to predict things based on information available to their characters.

But you will know what might tip the odds in your favor, or against you, in the situations immediately facing your characters.

How about Encumbrance? If the players don’t know that encumbrance has effects on their characters’ performance, do you expect results which differ from my experience, and that the players will quickly realize this fact?


A skill floor is how good at a game (the skills it is testing) you have to be to function as intended within it. I'm not interesting in limiting skill ceilings, but making sure the skill floor is accessible is important.

I may be the wrong person to have this conversation with you (or maybe the very right person?), as my “skill floor” involves 7-year-olds and roleplayers whose character actions can be at times detrimental (constantly detrimental characters are “politely” asked to leave, or given Uncle Enzo’s treatment of his old CO, and their players beaten with a clue-by-four wrt group expectations). But…

It’s fine at my tables to play a BDF who never sets up obvious flanking opportunities, whose tactical acumen amounts to “charge the closest foe” (that was pretty much the entire party except my character in one game) or “hit whoever hit me last”. It’s fine at my tables to play a Wizard who is saving his spells “for the right moment”, or a Psychic Warrior who goes nova every fight then whines for 15m work days. It’s fine at my tables to literally “phone in” your character’s actions oblivious to the battle mat or even the rules of the game, and from just hearing descriptions - to, in effect, act at the strategic layer (and to do so suboptimally) rather than the tactical layer.

I think that’s a pretty low skill floor*.

And, yes, “having a clue” is an absolutely huge force multiplier compared to that floor. The ceiling lies so far beyond that floor as to make one identical character able to be a rock star and carry the entire party.

* this distinction, that it’s table rather than system, might be important. Also, it’s come up in another thread (about “heroic” something), although the definitions there are pretty terrible so far - maybe after people nail down a single thing to discuss, it might be worth starting a new thread that’ll actually be productive to discuss.


Being a masterful public speaker might help play a good bard, but it shouldn't be required.

Absolutely not required (or even helpful) at my tables. Noticing the puffiness around the eyes (I forget how the GM described it), making inquiries, and saying “sorry for your loss” to the NPC farmer, without assuming that “Betsy” was a cow? That level of social acumen, to make the right choices, to move the conversation in the right direction, is handy to leverage your character’s skills in a productive manner.


But by "strategy" they could either mean anything on the strategic layer, or they could have meant positioning, threat evaluation and a bunch of other skills that go into a combat mini-game? The second is my second definition and if you are here for a game about expression, getting into a character's head and improvising a story arc suddenly being tested on a completely different set of skills could seem unfair.

Yes, people use “strategy” to mean “tactics”. I’m not seeing the value in mentioning that except in passing in a conversation about the value of the existence of the strategic layer.


As a possibly useful illustration; Quertus, the academic mage for which your account is named, researched a lot of spells over his many adventures correct? I recall hearing stories about that. Could you send me that research? You did that research in real life to test your player skill before Quertus the character researched the spell, right? No?** Well, of course not, because the skills the character is expressing aren't always the ones we want to test on the player. So yeah, I get that player skill is involved, I don't see why your small squad combat skills should be one of them.

My player skill (and roleplaying) was in which spells to research. Just like my players skills (and roleplaying) is in which spells to memorize and cast (and at what area / targets).

I’m not really seeing a significant difference here.


The squad combat skills are part of my second definition of strategy, which is the one I've been talking about most of this post. But it is not part of the first definition. In fact the first isn't really a skill because it is actually more general than that, so I don't think you could test it without narrowing it down a bit first.

Now I’ve gotta read… if your second “definition” of “strategy” is conflating it with “tactics”, then… I really have negative cares?

But for actual strategy? Do you go straight for the mothership, or do you clear out the fighter escorts first? Do you focus fire on one target, or split off into one on one duels (and, if the latter, how do you choose who fights whom?)? Do you wrap your message subtly into the story, or do you shove it in peoples faces with a lecture? Do you take turns punching Doom, or do you crouch down behind him so your teammates can use you to trip him? Do you let Quertus stand there useless, or do you throw him under the bus to get the bus driver to stop the bus (I’ll get him back for that some day :smallamused:)? Do you use Loxodon Warhammer or Basilisk Collar to gain lifelink… no, that’s tactical… do you add a source of lifelink, some form of threat removal, or focus on killing your foes faster / hopefully before that matters? Do you use any old dice, or test them & use the “lucky” ones? Do you test how your players will respond to different styles of games with a series of one-shots, or do you say, “nah, it’ll be fine”, and start the next campaign with untested rules? Do you build just a single character, or do you have replacements ready for if they die?

If your evil overlord mandated 5-year-old advisor can’t understand the question, it’s probably not at the strategic layer. If you feel you absolutely have to stop roleplaying to answer the question, it’s probably not at the strategic layer*,**.

* or your table places the floor too high, or the system has some nonsensical mechanics that break you out of RP stance over strategy.
** ignoring that I think 2 or 3 of those are meta, where you are the character in question.


** Admittedly you are high on the list of people who might actually do that, but pretend you didn't for a moment. Also send me that research if you still go it, that sounds really cool.

Unlike my academia mage, irl I hate such things. Even if there were rules for such, I’d ask the GM if I couldn’t stick to the strategic layer, rather than playing through the tactical minigame here.

Item creation, otoh, I do enjoy writing arcane recipes like…

So, suppose I took that mammoth horn, and carved it into a pair of Wands.

One Wand, I smeared with a paste made from 1000 hand-collected wasps and the blood and sweat of a dozen apprentice Wizards, and tipped with the adamantine arrowhead used to carve it. Will that fly for a Wand of Magic Missile? What if I did one step (the carving, the smearing, the tipping) on a battlefield where at least 1,000 lives were lost to arrows?

The second wand, I leave soaking in Dragon blood for a year and a day. I pull it out and set it on a dwarven hearth, and pull out a ruby, mined by my own hands during its bath, imbued with the spirit of a Fire Elemental. I break and powder the ruby over the wand, then grasp it, and thrust my hand and it into lava. Good for an Eternal Wand of Fireball? What if I add a core made from the heart of a sulfur elemental, and find an anthropomorphic bat Tainted Sorcerer, and use its intestines for the Dragon blood bath?

Then I powder all the scrap mammoth horn bits. I take the head of a mace, wielded by a Cleric of Saint Cuthbert for at least 10 levels, and melt it down, forging a ring from a bit of the metal. I soak the ring in a bath of anthropomorphic rhino Monk drool, imbued with the powdered mammoth horn. Good for a Ring of the Ram? What if I add runes carved by a dwarven smith?

Thrudd
2022-10-28, 11:04 AM
How about Encumbrance? If the players don’t know that encumbrance has effects on their characters’ performance, do you expect results which differ from my experience, and that the players will quickly realize this fact?


Why would players not know about encumbrance? That's definitely a thing the character would be aware of, and if the rules track it, then the players will know that, too. If being encumbered means -5 speed and -2 on dex checks, the players knows how it will affect their performance. If the players would rather not pay attention to that, so the GM tracks it for them, then it would also be the GM's responsibility to tell them when they are carrying too much stuff and that it will make them slower. I still don't think that players unwilling or unable to learn rules or track numbers is a good argument for rules being the same as fiat.
"If you choose to ignore the existence of the rules, and/or the GM keeps them all hidden from you, then the rules appear the same as fiat" might be true- but I'm not sure of the aim of pointing that out?
Is it to say that the GM shouldn't bother with any rules that would be opaque to the players, might as well just fiat all of it?
Or that if your players aren't interested in strategic or tactical play, then forgo rules and play free form, or as simplified a system as possible?

Certainly it is possible to go too far in trying to model complex interactions with mechanics, making a pen&paper game unwieldy, nobody denies it. But this doesn't mean any modeling will be too complex. If your players struggle to notice what factors are giving them disadvantages, the GM can point them out, and then the players will learn and be able to make better decisions on their own. The strategic "floor" doesn't need to stay in one spot. One of the GM's roles is to teach the players how to play the game. Early on you needed to hold their hands more, the more you play, the more they remember and the better they get at the strategy and recognizing how the mechanics affect what is happening.

gbaji
2022-10-28, 06:45 PM
Certainly it is possible to go too far in trying to model complex interactions with mechanics, making a pen&paper game unwieldy, nobody denies it. But this doesn't mean any modeling will be too complex. If your players struggle to notice what factors are giving them disadvantages, the GM can point them out, and then the players will learn and be able to make better decisions on their own. The strategic "floor" doesn't need to stay in one spot. One of the GM's roles is to teach the players how to play the game. Early on you needed to hold their hands more, the more you play, the more they remember and the better they get at the strategy and recognizing how the mechanics affect what is happening.

Agree 100% There is definitely a "sweet spot" where you have enough rules to model something, but not so many that it becomes cumbersome. Obviously, where that spot is can vary from table to table. I do absolutely agree that players will become more familiar with any given system over time, so rules that may have appeared complex or even unwieldy at the start are second nature a few months later. I always err in two directions:

1. Try the rules out for a while and see how the work. As observed above, sometimes rules that may have appeared too complex at first turn out to be "just right" once you get the feel for them. Also, sometimes you may not see why a rule is written a specific way when reading it, but when playing things out you go "Oh! That's why the rule works that way". The flip side to this is that if we've played with a rule for a while and it's just not working, then we have a conversation about it and propose a change, and repeat the testing process again.

2. Having said that, when creating my own rules, or adding new rules to an existing game, I always try to start small. Keep them as simple as possible. If we decide that we really need some sort of rule for handling pottery making in our game, I'm probably going to start out with a single skill "Pottery making", slot it into an existing skills category, and move on (and yeah, this is probably already supported by the main game rules, it's just an example...). 99% of the time, just having a single simple skill is sufficient. If we *really* want to get into the intricate details of every step in pottery making though, we can break that down into a handful of smaller and more specific skills though (er, again, don't get caught up on the admittedly silly example here).


So yeah, for me, the answer to the OP is an absolute "no". Certainly "every aspect" does not need its own specialized rules. But the more focused the game becomes on an area in which the rules are maybe a bit vague? Sure. Add some additional rules. These decisions aren't even game system dependent but strongly table play based (and often player makeup as well). I've had players who were absolutely obsessed with world building stuff. Wanted to start businesses, build castles, play kingmaker games, etc. Other players? Want to get into making potions, or whatnot. Others are just fine with beating things up and taking their cash. Totally dependent on your players IMO.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-29, 11:37 AM
Every rule you add to a game comes at a cost, one that scales faster-than-linear with the total weight[1] of rules. Every rule you add may come with a benefit as well. In the best case, those benefits scale slower-than-linear (and certainly slower than the costs) with the total weight of rules. Some rules provide little or no benefit whatsoever. Some rules provide massive benefits. And both costs and benefits depend, at least partially, on the people playing (ie what some people consider costs, others consider benefits and vice versa, or some weigh different costs and benefits differently). Both costs and benefits are also path dependent--they depend on the history of the game when added after people start playing[2]. Thus, there's a point that critically depends on the individuals involved and on the rest of the system, as well as the actual rules and what they're addressing where adding a particular new rule will only add net cost, not benefit.

The ur-state, the primal origin of roleplay is with kids doing imaginative play. This generally starts out as unstructured free-form, with only the haziest (if any) rules, and those mostly dictated by the one most willing to get mad. Rules quickly evolve in many cases. At first, those rules are great scaffolds. They help the players have a shared language, a shared structure for resolution, and take a huge load off of the players by allowing pre-agreement about how some cases will be handled. But just like you need different scaffolds on different parts of the building, you need different rules for different parts of play. Generally those parts that are least accessible in that particular design need the most scaffolding. Want to paint high vaulted ceilings? Better have a good scaffold or some kind of hoist (which is an alternate form of support). Are you painting the normal-height walls or floor? Scaffolds are not only unnecessary, they're actively in the way. And rules-first types of people often keep adding rules for the sake of having rules for things until you've got scaffolds covering the entire surface and you can't actually get at the building itself.

And, like scaffolds, rules are secondary. They're helps, not the game itself. Because the game is much deeper, much older, pre-existing rules like chickens predate eggs (oops :smallwink:)...like being a baby pre-dates (in any individual's history) getting old.

[1] not necessarily number or even page count. High-density, high-convolution rules "weigh" more. This is intentionally fuzzy because "weight" is somewhat subjective in this context.
[2] Both in the history of a game system[3] and in the history of an individual campaign. The latter is obvious--people generally react to significant houserules differently when added 6 months in by surprise than when presented at session zero.
[3] rules set expectations. And when the developers later push some rules that "clarify" (aka nerf) things, people react much worse than if the game had been designed that way all along.

Tanarii
2022-10-29, 11:59 AM
That's true. But I wouldn't call the behind-the-screen management of the game world a strategic mini-game. it's not ever meant for the players, but to aid the GM in keeping the world moving. Players are only expected to predict things based on information available to their characters.
Why not? If the GM wants the players to have player agency impacting the game world, they need to have visible game structures that the players can plug into, make moves within, and somewhat predict results.

Cluedrew
2022-10-29, 01:21 PM
Yes, people use "strategy" to mean "tactics". I'm not seeing the value in mentioning that except in passing in a conversation about the value of the existence of the strategic layer.Generally true perhaps, but for this thread, the fact that people use "strategy" to mean "tactics" is the only reason the word "strategic" appears in the title of this thread; that is probably worth mentioning. Easy e can clarify if they would like, but most of the opening post is about flow state in mini-games, just mentions tactical combat and doesn't seem to say anything about the strategic layer.

And I got nothing else to say on mini-games and the strategic layer. Just: Any well designed mini-game complex enough to have approaches in it should make those choices in approach be a meaningful decision (for a mini-game too simple for that... maybe engaging in the mini-game is the strategic choice, depends on context). Also, connections between the mini-game and the rest of the system, allowing one to affect the other, are also good and allow for larger scale consequences and meaningful decisions.

So now, moving onto mini-games and the other definition of strategy, which means something like tactics. I don't think a mini-game has to be designed to test player skill. Like driving a car, which does take player (er, driver) skill but testing that skill is not the point. In fact, a lot of effort has been put into making it as low skill as possible, because people messing up is bad.

(Just encase it wasn't obvious, I realized my previous attempts weren't getting my point across. So I decided to use a completely different sort of explanation to get my point across. Also I figured more stuff out myself and hopefully folding that in also makes things clearer.)

Quertus
2022-10-29, 03:13 PM
Generally true perhaps, but for this thread, the fact that people use "strategy" to mean "tactics" is the only reason the word "strategic" appears in the title of this thread; that is probably worth mentioning. Easy e can clarify if they would like, but most of the opening post is about flow state in mini-games, just mentions tactical combat and doesn't seem to say anything about the strategic layer.

And I got nothing else to say on mini-games and the strategic layer. Just: Any well designed mini-game complex enough to have approaches in it should make those choices in approach be a meaningful decision (for a mini-game too simple for that... maybe engaging in the mini-game is the strategic choice, depends on context). Also, connections between the mini-game and the rest of the system, allowing one to affect the other, are also good and allow for larger scale consequences and meaningful decisions.

So now, moving onto mini-games and the other definition of strategy, which means something like tactics. I don't think a mini-game has to be designed to test player skill. Like driving a car, which does take player (er, driver) skill but testing that skill is not the point. In fact, a lot of effort has been put into making it as low skill as possible, because people messing up is bad.

(Just encase it wasn't obvious, I realized my previous attempts weren't getting my point across. So I decided to use a completely different sort of explanation to get my point across. Also I figured more stuff out myself and hopefully folding that in also makes things clearer.)

I continue to hold that, any part of the game worth caring about, the strategic layer should matter. The tactical layer? Meh.

So let’s look at two examples: Combat, and Conversation.

“Roll combat” is a terrible way to resolve combat - there’s no game. (Reminder: “playing the game” means “making meaningful decisions”, not “rolling dice”). However, if combat is resolved by a strategic minigame? “If you attack the mothership, turn to page 47; if you destroy the Fighter escorts first, turn to page 123.”? That’s worth thinking about, that’s actually getting to play the game. And when it’s not a “choose your own adventure” book, but an actual RPG, where you can go off-script, and do things like “introduce a virus (either type) to the enemy fleet” or “sneak aboard the mothership to sabotage its recreational systems”, it’s worth asking, “WWQD?”, it’s worth actually roleplaying, instead of just playing the minigame.

IME, when 2 PCs talk to one another, they usually just roleplay, occasionally aided by a roll (or magical ability), when appropriate. And I generally prefer my interactions between PCs and NPCs (or even between multiple NPCs) to be handled the same way. Did you offer Quertus the chance to become famous? Yeah, he’s not interested. Did you promise the king that you’d spank his bratty daughter once you rescued the dragon from her evil clutches? Um…

The big thing about the tactical minigame is that it had best not get in the way of either the strategic layer, or of roleplaying. And, as a lesser subset of that, there’d best not be strange dissonance between the layers / perverse incentives that exist only at the tactical layer, that unreasonably invalidate higher-level decisions.

As far as “not testing player skill” goes… the strategic layer absolutely should? And if the tactical layer doesn’t, what’s the point?

Now, to backpedal slightly… sure, you could say that the strategic layer of “getting on the good side of the mob boss by cooking him a meal vs getting him a gift vs whatever” could be played as fluff, like the child being told a story asking if the color of the character’s clothing could be the hue of their choice. The existence of the strategic layer doesn’t necessitate that the choice is meaningful.

But anywhere where the choice is meaningful, I don’t see how you can get away from the fact that player skill is important in making the correct choice.

Still, I’m curious if you have anything… if not “actionable”, at least “meaty” wrt the idea of lowering the floor on required player skill (especially when the one asking already plays with 7-year-olds, and otherwise has a purportedly pretty low skill floor required).

kyoryu
2022-10-29, 03:37 PM
As far as “not testing player skill” goes… the strategic layer absolutely should? And if the tactical layer doesn’t, what’s the point?


All games test player skill. The only question is if they test the ones you want tested.

If choices are actually meaningful, then player skill is inherently tested.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-29, 04:28 PM
All games test player skill. The only question is if they test the ones you want tested.

If choices are actually meaningful, then player skill is inherently tested.

Test and skill imply there are right and wrong answers and actions. You can have meaningful choices without those, where the outcomes on either side are merely different.

You can have games where success is assured and the real question is what do you choose to do, not do you succeed at doing it.

So I disagree.

Cluedrew
2022-10-29, 09:32 PM
I continue to hold that, any part of the game worth caring about, the strategic layer should matter. The tactical layer? Meh.How do you think that relates to what I said in my post?


So let's look at two examples: Combat, and Conversation.

"Roll combat" is a terrible way to resolve combat - there's no game. (Reminder: "playing the game" means "making meaningful decisions", not "rolling dice"). However, if combat is resolved by a strategic minigame? "If you attack the mothership, turn to page 47; if you destroy the Fighter escorts first, turn to page 123."? That’s worth thinking about, that's actually getting to play the game. And when it's not a "choose your own adventure” book, but an actual RPG, where you can go off-script, and do things like "introduce a virus (either type) to the enemy fleet" or "sneak aboard the mothership to sabotage its recreational systems", it's worth asking, "WWQD?", it's worth actually roleplaying, instead of just playing the minigame.

IME, when 2 PCs talk to one another, they usually just roleplay, occasionally aided by a roll (or magical ability), when appropriate. And I generally prefer my interactions between PCs and NPCs (or even between multiple NPCs) to be handled the same way. Did you offer Quertus the chance to become famous? Yeah, he's not interested. Did you promise the king that you'd spank his bratty daughter once you rescued the dragon from her evil clutches? Um...

The big thing about the tactical minigame is that it had best not get in the way of either the strategic layer, or of roleplaying. And, as a lesser subset of that, there'd best not be strange dissonance between the layers / perverse incentives that exist only at the tactical layer, that unreasonably invalidate higher-level decisions.

As far as "not testing player skill" goes... the strategic layer absolutely should? And if the tactical layer doesn't, what's the point?

Now, to backpedal slightly... sure, you could say that the strategic layer of "getting on the good side of the mob boss by cooking him a meal vs getting him a gift vs whatever" could be played as fluff, like the child being told a story asking if the color of the character's clothing could be the hue of their choice. The existence of the strategic layer doesn't necessitate that the choice is meaningful.

But anywhere where the choice is meaningful, I don't see how you can get away from the fact that player skill is important in making the correct choice.Oh boy, I don't have time to go into all of this in depth and almost want to skip it, but you know you I'll see what I can do quickly.
I mean you just researched the spell after you decided which spell to research, why can't I just win the combat after picking who to fight at some cost of HP.
Turn to page 47 or turn to page 123 is not a meaningful choice. And that is what combat can feel like at low skill levels. And at higher skill levels the choices start to feel like loose 13 HP to win or loose 27 HP to win.
Yes, open ended decisions is definitely a positive, I don't see how that relates here.
I have no idea what this mob example is getting at. But sure, let's say that I say "well... you have to get the thing from the mod to continue, so I'm not even going to pretend you can fail... so just say how you succeed" and one character points out they are so dangerous it isn't worth making them angry over this, get the thing, another offers a magically enforced deal to get the thing, and gets the thing, one points out they have mob connections chats the mob boss up and buys an expensive bottle of something as payment and gets the thing. They all got the thing but in meaningfully different ways. I agree with PhoenixPhyre, skill testing means that you can make the wrong choice, I think that isn't the point. Ever heard of the 8 aesthetics of play? Only one of them is challenge (testing player skill) the other seven are about different things. Now that is still just one model, but still there are other things I'm interested in. As a bonus question, what of those three methods above showed the most player skill.
What are you doing to your posts? I keep having to edit all the "Â"s out. I did which is why you can't see them. (And that one mutated after I copied it out, it had a ^ before.)
Well, this is a mess, but I think there are good points in there and I am out of time. I'd probably just focus on the mob boss part if I had time to edit it.

Pauly
2022-10-29, 10:50 PM
This thread has been confusing me, and I think it’s mainly because people are using ‘strategic’ in a manner I find hard to follow.

There are generally accepted as three levels of analysis, originally derived from military writing.
Tactical - what happens on the battlefield. Where each unit moves and fights.
Strategic - What you do before the battle starts. Where to fight, what troops to commit to the fight.
Operational - Resource allocation. Where to send reinforcements and supplies.

In RPG terms
Tactical - what happens on the battle-map or equivalent.
Strategic - The hexcrawl. Choosing where to go and with which members of the party. In an RPG choosing between knocking down the front door or sneaking in the back door is a strategic decision.
Operational - Choosing attributes, skills and equipment for your character.

In an RPG a strategic minigame is generally covered in the exploration mechanics. How to run a ship minigame is a strategic minigame. Hexcrawling through the wilderness is a strategic minigame. Dungeon mapping can be a strategic minigame.

Quertus
2022-10-30, 11:39 AM
How do you think that relates to what I said in my post?

In your post, you addressed how words had been used. I was restating my position in that context. So, the literal answer to your question is that your post was the context for that statement.


Oh boy, I don't have time to go into all of this in depth and almost want to skip it, but you know you I'll see what I can do quickly.

I’m glad you didn’t skip it.


I mean you just researched the spell after you decided which spell to research, why can't I just win the combat after picking who to fight at some cost of HP.

That sounds like a perfectly viable set of rules for combat in an RPG to me? (Granted, I’d prefer a little more game, where attributes like “immunity to fire” or “ranged” or whatever can affect those numbers against certain opponents, but even the base is viable). But I’ll assume the literal answer is, “because that doesn’t match the rules of the RPG you are playing”.

But the point is, if the choice is meaningful, then the strategy of who fights whom must actually matter. It must actually change the outcome in a meaningful way. So, lose 1 HP if you fight a pawn, lose 3 HP for fighting a Knight or Bishop, etc? In the right setup, that can involve meaningful choices, where you actually have to think about your moves, where your decisions can matter to the final outcome. (EDIT: imagine a “clear the chess board without losing a party member given 4 10-HP heroes and 1 5-HP sidekick”; see also the “one jug holds 5 gallons, the other holds 7” puzzle)

Or, the encounter could have been handled by “bribe” (lose X resources), stealth (lose Y time), etc? That also presents potentially meaningful choices.

That said, what separates an RPG from a war game is the ability to go outside the box. So the extent to which the system discourages the GM from accepting strategies not on the explicitly given list of options is the extent to which it isn’t suited to being an RPG.

And, again, anything not meaningful generally isn’t worth my time.


Turn to page 47 or turn to page 123 is not a meaningful choice. And that is what combat can feel like at low skill levels. And at higher skill levels the choices start to feel like loose 13 HP to win or loose 27 HP to win.

Um… “Turn to page 47 or turn to page 123” is not the choice, it’s the outcome. If you’re having trouble with things that basic, we may need to take a few steps back.



Yes, open ended decisions is definitely a positive, I don't see how that relates here.

I’ll need context… hmmm… ok. Here’s my guess: I think you’re referencing “WWQD”, which I think is me referencing your earlier statement involving comments about roleplaying (maybe combat taking you out of roleplaying?). I’m saying, so long as there’s (in your words) an open-ended strategic layer, so long as it’s an RPG, you can roleplay. Period.

Now, your table may set the floor too high / your character may be too tactically inept to succeed in such an environment, but even so, the opportunity to roleplay their failure is there.



I have no idea what this mob example is getting at. But sure, let's say that I say "well... you have to get the thing from the mod to continue, so I'm not even going to pretend you can fail... so just say how you succeed" and one character points out they are so dangerous it isn't worth making them angry over this, get the thing, another offers a magically enforced deal to get the thing, and gets the thing, one points out they have mob connections chats the mob boss up and buys an expensive bottle of something as payment and gets the thing. They all got the thing but in meaningfully different ways. I agree with PhoenixPhyre, skill testing means that you can make the wrong choice, I think that isn't the point. Ever heard of the 8 aesthetics of play? Only one of them is challenge (testing player skill) the other seven are about different things. Now that is still just one model, but still there are other things I'm interested in. As a bonus question, what of those three methods above showed the most player skill.

Well, this is a stolen borrowed example (hopefully from this thread? (Darn senility)), but I’ll do my best.

Goal: get on the mob boss’s good side

Strategy: get him a gift, fix him a meal, tell him about his wife’s infidelity

Tactics: who cares? (Fresh ingredients, authentic ingredients, from his homeland, favorite meal, favorite spices, etc)

If I read you right, you’re playing the game at an even higher level, outright rejecting the goal of “get on the mob boss’s good side”. And that’s outside the scope of the question, “does ‘get on his good side’ need a strategic (or tactical) minigame?”. But it’s good evidence that you could play CaW.



What are you doing to your posts? I keep having to edit all the "Â"s out. I did which is why you can't see them. (And that one mutated after I copied it out, it had a ^ before.)

New phone? Oh, I think I see - it’s “curly quotes” (I think) being misinterpreted.



Well, this is a mess, but I think there are good points in there and I am out of time. I'd probably just focus on the mob boss part if I had time to edit it.

Really? I’d think the first bit, about removing tactical combat as we know it, and replacing it with purely strategic combat choices, was the real winner here.

Quertus
2022-10-30, 12:44 PM
All games test player skill. The only question is if they test the ones you want tested.

If choices are actually meaningful, then player skill is inherently tested.


Test and skill imply there are right and wrong answers and actions. You can have meaningful choices without those, where the outcomes on either side are merely different.

You can have games where success is assured and the real question is what do you choose to do, not do you succeed at doing it.

So I disagree.

I think this is… an interesting bit of language?

Suppose Witch Hunter Robin wants to test her powers, and see how many candles she can light / what her current “light percent accuracy” is / whatever. The test doesn’t really have a “fail” state, outside oddities like being unable to measure the results (“I told you we couldn’t do this test outside in a Hurricane!”). But it is still a test, to measure her current abilities.

Suppose I want to build a Magic deck. There’s not much in the way of fail states - so long as I can count to 60 (or 100 for Commander, or 40 for more casual play, or…), and I don’t include the Ace of Spades or something, the end result will be a Magic deck. But the choice of what I put in the deck is meaningful, and involves skill.

Suppose I want to post in a thread about “strategic” minigames. This will probably require my player to choose a goal and strategy, and to make at least an Expression roll for me. Now, while I may fail to achieve my goal, “posting in a thread” doesn’t inherently have win/fail conditions.

Suppose I’m playing an RPG, and see multiple paths forward. Regardless of whether or not any of those paths have a chance of “failure”, my skill is being tested wrt my ability to determine where those paths will lead, what the effects and side-effects of this decision might be. What might happen if I offer to abduct a second Dragon for the evil Princess? If I preemptively kill and Animate the citizens of the kingdom as a firebreak against the Necromancer? If I travel back in time, and replace the stolen relics with replicas before their theft? If I pickpocket Harry and Thanos before they can do their respective snaps?

There’s definitely skill involved, regardless of whether one is measuring “success” or difference. And I think it’s fair to say that those skills are being tested, even in cases where they cannot fail.

That at least seems true from a certain point of view.

Quertus
2022-10-30, 06:37 PM
If you attack the mothership, turn to page 47; if you destroy the Fighter escorts first, turn to page 123

I’m about to sound like something I hate from the Dresden RPG, but there’s a whole lot packed into those few little words. Let’s unpack them together.

First off, this is obviously a “choose your own adventure” book format, not something from an RPG. For those unfamiliar, the reader is presented with a scenario (“and then this happened”), and asked to make a choice, generally wrt the actions of the “viewpoint” character.

This isn’t roleplaying (by my definitions), because the options are pre-written - you can no more play a pacifist in this scenario than I can write additional pages into the book.

Despite these limitations, it’s enough to fool some readers into believing that they’re roleplaying, and the general sequence of “this is the scenario” “I take this action” “this is the new scenario” is the heart and core of (most?) RPG gameplay loops. So it’s kinda like a proto-RPG. Because it’s a simplified proto-RPG, it’s simpler and easier to discuss and dissect than a full RPG.

(For anybody who hasn’t fallen asleep yet, it’s the “would you rather…” counterpart to a full open-ended RPG. Rather than asking, “WWQD?”, you’re limited to answering, “would Quertus rather…?”. For anybody unfamiliar with “would you rather…?”… look it up.)

Now, presumably, this isn’t page 1 - this isn’t where you start. In fact, even if it is page 1, it still isn’t where you start. Where you start is with the descriptive text, with the author setting the scene, giving you the details you need to answer the question.

So, would Quertus go straight for the mothership, or would he destroy the Fighter escorts first? Is the answer obviously one or the other, or does it depends on additional details of the scenario, or on what has happened before?

For example, a vengeful character might choose to attack whichever had something / someone he felt vengeful against. Someone who paid attention to what the pilots in Wing Commander said would clear the Fighter escort first. Someone who was familiar with the underlying mechanics of Wing Commander (and many other video games) would believe that fighters auto-replenish, and would act accordingly (in this case, that means choosing “target the mothership”).

All that said, irrespective of the character, the scenario might well give you the “correct” answer. For example, if the mothership can destroy whole planets, and you’re defending your homeworld?

A) there are 20 fighters and 1 mothership. You can destroy a Fighter every 10 seconds; the mothership takes 2 minutes of concentrated fire to destroy. It takes 3 minutes for the mothership to fire its planet-destroying bream.

B) the mothership cannot fire its beam without all its fighters, which it can regenerate 1 every 10 seconds.

C) you are expecting reinforcements in 5 minutes.

D) if you attack the fighters, you can hold out for 10 minutes. If you ignore them, you won’t last 1.

Did you notice how your opinion of “which is the correct choice” changed as you read these details?

Now, these details might not be gift wrapped and handed to you. In fact, they might not be visible at all until after the fact (like if you challenged a Rook from my other example, and only then learned that the result was “loose 5 HP”, and you had to build the rules and a successful strategy while you play the game).

So, the author has to walk the line, providing enough information at the right time to allow the reader to have an enjoyable experience playing with the PoV character’s choices, just as a GM has to walk a very similar line, providing enough information for the players to make meaningful decisions in an enjoyable fashion.

Now, sometimes, you don’t have anywhere near such clear math. Sometimes, all you have to work with is knowledge: author - from what I know of this author, from the choices I’ve made thus far in this “choose your own adventure” book, and the responses that the author has given, are they likely to believe that “clearing the fighters” or “attacking the mothership” is the correct answer? Which are they more likely to reward / which choice will they reward more?

So the choice of “Attack mothership” vs “clear fighters first” can be informed by the character, by scenario considerations, and/or by knowledge: author. Just like how, in an RPG, one’s choices could be informed by roleplaying the character, by scenario considerations, and/or by Knowledge: system and Knowledge: GM… plus things like metagame concerns, like “will this hurt anyone’s fun?” and “what are our gentleman’s agreements?”.

Nonetheless, when the reader turns to page 123, they should not feel betrayed by the results. They should, if only in retrospect, be able to see how said results logically followed from the scenario, and their choices. Even if a sufficiently ignorant reader may not understand why a pawn caused the character challenging them to lose 1 HP, they should at least be able to understand that there is an underlying consistency.

All that, obvious from just those few words. Just like Dresden being a Wizard PI or whatever. Truly, masterfully efficient communication at its finest.

Anyway, that’s my stab at trying to spell out everything I was trying to communicate with those few words. I probably missed a few things.

So, what does so that have to do with the necessity of the strategic and/or tactical layer?

Any time the reader/player is to make a meaningful choice (such as between “attack the fighters first” vs “charge straight at the mothership”), a) there must be a meaningful difference between the outcome of possible choices (page 47 vs page 123)… and several other letters that are left as an exercise to the reader to fill in. :smallamused:

kyoryu
2022-10-31, 10:33 AM
Test and skill imply there are right and wrong answers and actions. You can have meaningful choices without those, where the outcomes on either side are merely different.

You can have games where success is assured and the real question is what do you choose to do, not do you succeed at doing it.

So I disagree.

I think you're reading these words more narrowly than intended.

Presuming you have an ideal end result, or at least some things you'd prefer to see and not to see, if you have any reasonable agency at all, some of your choices will/are more likely to end up in the ideal end result than others.

Your ability to make the choices that result in your desired end result is at some level a matter of "skill", though which skill it is can be very different.

There's really two exceptions to this - one where no matter what you do, the same results happen (therefore the caveat on decisions being meaningful) and another one where you just say what you want to happen (there's no uncertainty or other actors). Which starts to get close to just writing a book.

So, in the broad sense, I'm standing by that, though I agree with you in the more narrow sense.

Tanarii
2022-10-31, 01:35 PM
In an RPG a strategic minigame is generally covered in the exploration mechanics. How to run a ship minigame is a strategic minigame. Hexcrawling through the wilderness is a strategic minigame. Dungeon mapping can be a strategic minigame.
What you're describing is game structures. Not mini games.

Pauly
2022-10-31, 02:33 PM
What you're describing is game structures. Not mini games.

No, I’m trying to describe what is ‘strategic’. The question in the OP is literally meaningless because not every aspect of RPGs are strategic in nature. ‘Strategic minigames’ are a subset of minigames, the other main subsets being ‘tactical minigames’ and ‘operational minigames”.

gbaji
2022-10-31, 04:49 PM
Now, sometimes, you don’t have anywhere near such clear math. Sometimes, all you have to work with is knowledge: author - from what I know of this author, from the choices I’ve made thus far in this “choose your own adventure” book, and the responses that the author has given, are they likely to believe that “clearing the fighters” or “attacking the mothership” is the correct answer? Which are they more likely to reward / which choice will they reward more?

So the choice of “Attack mothership” vs “clear fighters first” can be informed by the character, by scenario considerations, and/or by knowledge: author. Just like how, in an RPG, one’s choices could be informed by roleplaying the character, by scenario considerations, and/or by Knowledge: system and Knowledge: GM… plus things like metagame concerns, like “will this hurt anyone’s fun?” and “what are our gentleman’s agreements?”.

Nonetheless, when the reader turns to page 123, they should not feel betrayed by the results. They should, if only in retrospect, be able to see how said results logically followed from the scenario, and their choices. Even if a sufficiently ignorant reader may not understand why a pawn caused the character challenging them to lose 1 HP, they should at least be able to understand that there is an underlying consistency.

All that, obvious from just those few words. Just like Dresden being a Wizard PI or whatever. Truly, masterfully efficient communication at its finest.

Anyway, that’s my stab at trying to spell out everything I was trying to communicate with those few words. I probably missed a few things.

So, what does so that have to do with the necessity of the strategic and/or tactical layer?

Any time the reader/player is to make a meaningful choice (such as between “attack the fighters first” vs “charge straight at the mothership”), a) there must be a meaningful difference between the outcome of possible choices (page 47 vs page 123)… and several other letters that are left as an exercise to the reader to fill in. :smallamused:

I think the point that was raised is that you can add even more depth to a game by not just presenting absolute "action/outcome" pairs, but "action/probability" pairs instead. So instead of "action A/flip to page X" or "action B/flip to page Y', you have "action A takes skill B, which has probability C" vs "action X, takes skill Y, which has probability Z". Doing it this way provides the same ability for the players to make choices, but also presents it in a more realistic way (you can never know for sure how good you are at something, and no skills are absolute). And yes, you can still introduce the same concept of "hidden outcomes" by the fairly common game mechanic of the GM setting unknown difficulty factors to the die roll for skill B or skill Y attempts.

I know that you seem to want/desire games with absolute outcomes that are always known ahead of time (even if just by the GM and not the players), such that all outcomes are based solely on player choices, but I have a sneaking suspicion that most players don't prefer this, and most players like the idea that by introducing skills into games, with ranks/level/whatever, that they can achieve discrete and measurable values for determining both probability *and* character advancement over time in a game.

There is value to this purely because it introduces uncertainty into the game, while still retaining "good vs bad choices" dynamics. And, heaven forbid, it allows us a method to determine what happens then "the best swordsman in the world" faces off with someone else who is "the best swordsman in the world". Not having such things, and yes, the various mini-games/rules/whatever to allow for them, leaves us either just declaring a winner, or restricting us to never having two people with similar abilities ever face off against each other (cause we have no method to resolve this).

You can certainly play games with diceless and/or skillless rules. But given that the entire topic of this thread assumes otherwise, maybe we should stick to that range of game styles and assume that we're operating within that framework? Introducing a min-game of any kind into a system like Tune, for example, would be silly. But that's the exception case and not what I'm assuming is being examined here.

Quertus
2022-10-31, 06:41 PM
I know that you seem to want/desire games with absolute outcomes that are always known ahead of time (even if just by the GM and not the players), such that all outcomes are based solely on player choices,

I honestly have no idea where you got this impression from.

Yes, the moments where it’s obvious how things will turn out, no rolls required, that are powered purely by the characters’ choices, like Anakin falling to the dark side because he chose to kill the raiders, because he chose to kill Dooku, because he chose to betray Mace, those are the best. But I’ve never held that you should eat only chocolate. I may consider games without any chocolate inferior, but that doesn’t mean that I consider games that are entirely chocolate to be superior.

That said, it’s also 100% irrelevant (as is your commentary on what is better/deeper/whatever), as the “choose your own adventure” format was chosen for its simplicity - and, in that regard, I can only hope that you can see, once it’s pointed out to you, that removing those extra things makes the example, well, simpler.

EDIT: although, technically, some “choose your own adventure” books actually do have that element of random chance - usually calculable, as you advocate, but sometimes not.

Stonehead
2022-11-01, 09:58 AM
Certainly it is possible to go too far in trying to model complex interactions with mechanics, making a pen&paper game unwieldy, nobody denies it. But this doesn't mean any modeling will be too complex. If your players struggle to notice what factors are giving them disadvantages, the GM can point them out, and then the players will learn and be able to make better decisions on their own. The strategic "floor" doesn't need to stay in one spot. One of the GM's roles is to teach the players how to play the game. Early on you needed to hold their hands more, the more you play, the more they remember and the better they get at the strategy and recognizing how the mechanics affect what is happening.

I think "can" is the important word here. A good GM can make sure the players are all well informed, and the minigames are all understood, but not everyone's a good GM. I think a perfect group could have fun in essentially any system. The rules are there in part to make that easier.

I don't think "The GM just did it wrong" is always a very good defense of a rule set. Sure there are definitely times in which GMs just miss important parts of the system, or homebrew the thing into a non functionality then blame the original game, but there are also games with pointless bloat and games that require a lot more out of GMs than others. "Handling hidden information" definitely falls in to one of the latter categories.

On the original point about advanced subsystems vs GM fiat, the GM deciding when to give information to the players based on how well it looks like they're understanding things kinda sounds more like GM fiat to me.

Thrudd
2022-11-01, 01:10 PM
I think "can" is the important word here. A good GM can make sure the players are all well informed, and the minigames are all understood, but not everyone's a good GM. I think a perfect group could have fun in essentially any system. The rules are there in part to make that easier.

I don't think "The GM just did it wrong" is always a very good defense of a rule set. Sure there are definitely times in which GMs just miss important parts of the system, or homebrew the thing into a non functionality then blame the original game, but there are also games with pointless bloat and games that require a lot more out of GMs than others. "Handling hidden information" definitely falls in to one of the latter categories.

On the original point about advanced subsystems vs GM fiat, the GM deciding when to give information to the players based on how well it looks like they're understanding things kinda sounds more like GM fiat to me.

If the information is available to the players, but they are new and aren't accustomed to the system yet, it isn't really the GM deciding to give them hidden information- it's completely in the players' hands to read and learn the system. You're right, "The GM did it wrong" is a bad defense of a poorly designed system that few people can actually use as written. But this doesn't mean that every time a GM or a player is confused by something in a system, it is necessarily a poorly designed system. The GM needs to learn the system they are running, and teach it to the players. There is a learning period during which the players might not understand how everything works. This is a temporary condition. During that brief learning period, the GM may be said to exercise "fiat" in when and how to introduce certain rules, balancing explaining how things work with actual play- but this brief condition doesn't reflect any real parity between mechanical/mathematical resolution and fiat. It is a sign that a system is too complex or burdensome for a particular group, if the learning period goes on too long, and players never catch on. If this is the case with most groups trying to use the system, then it's a sign of a poorly designed system. However, a GM who fails (or even refuses) to help their new players learn the system is a bad GM, imo. Excluding outright bad systems and bad GMs, and following the necessary teaching period, players will not be mystified by the results of a game's mechanics. Predicting something that depends on GM fiat is an exercise in psychology...predicting something that depends on mechanical rules requires math. Those aren't the same thing.

I also think that there are few to no examples of systems so complex that anyone paying attention would be confused about how results are achieved. There certainly are those that are bloated and burdensome to run, which aren't worth the effort - but I'm not sure that there are any actually using math so complex that people can't tell how the numbers they can see will affect outcomes. It's more likely that they use so much randomness that it becomes frustrating, because their ability to tweak numerical advantages and disadvantages have minimal impact on results. In this case, you might say the mechanics are not much different from fiat, because nothing the players do will reliably change the outcome. This is not an excessively complex game, though, rather an excessively simple one where there aren't many modifiers and single pass/fail dice rolls decide most things. If the GM decides to keep some or all such die rolls behind the screen, then I can see the comparison with fiat growing closer.

gbaji
2022-11-01, 04:23 PM
I honestly have no idea where you got this impression from.

I'm going to assume you just forgot to fill your blue ink cartridge on that one. In just the short time I've been posting here, I've seen repeated and consistent posts by you extolling the virtues of CAW vs CAS, multiple statements about the value of the strategic layer over the tactical one, and yet more statements about how if the players take an action without already knowing the outcome, then they are "doing it wrong". Every one of those positions is about wanting systems (or at least play style) in which if all of the possibilities and choices are examined, there will be one which will achieve the desired goal with absolute certainty, with no die rolls needed (or with the die rolls being irrelevant), and if there isn't, then you don't seem to have much use for said system, or at least prefer not to play in it.

And then there's statements like this:


Yes, the moments where it’s obvious how things will turn out, no rolls required, that are powered purely by the characters’ choices, like Anakin falling to the dark side because he chose to kill the raiders, because he chose to kill Dooku, because he chose to betray Mace, those are the best. But I’ve never held that you should eat only chocolate. I may consider games without any chocolate inferior, but that doesn’t mean that I consider games that are entirely chocolate to be superior.

So you aren't saying that situations where the outcomes are "obvious" and "no rolls are required" are "best"? Cause that's literally what you just said. Why be surprised when someone points this out? You clearly prefer outcome generation where there is no random chance involved. That's clearly your position, right? Why not just own it? I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, just that it "is", and that this preference is certainly going to influence your opinion on the subject of mini-games (I would assume in the negative).



That said, it’s also 100% irrelevant (as is your commentary on what is better/deeper/whatever), as the “choose your own adventure” format was chosen for its simplicity - and, in that regard, I can only hope that you can see, once it’s pointed out to you, that removing those extra things makes the example, well, simpler.

Just presenting the flip side here, where differences in probability matter. It's relevant to a thread about mini-games because typically in mini-games we're exploring additional skills/abilities and how those might provide more granularity/accuracy in determining outcomes in the specific game aspects being detailed. And yes, your example does make things "simpler", but it also removes the very thing that we're talking about in the first place (more skills/abilities in a mini-game provide more choices, which in turn can be examined by differing probability of success based on which choice is made, the relative skill applicable skill level, and the difficulty assigned).

Removing those skill differences (and resulting probability differences) removes the reason to have a mini-game in the first place. You may as well have just said "I don't like rolling dice to determine outcomes, so mini-games have no value to me". Which is a totally valid response BTW. Unless you are proposing mini-games of a strict "do X, always get Y outcome" nature? I'm not sure I'd even define that as a mini-game, but I suppose it's possible.


Having said all of that, I will observe that increasing a small ruleset into a larger more granular one can be very problematic (and unbalancing) in game systems with skill point buy. You basically will discourage investment into that area of the game, since it will automatically become more expensive for characters to be equally as good. So there are definite negatives and pitfalls to this approach. And yes, you absolutely are correct that if the increased complexity doesn't add sufficiently to the gaming experience, then it's not worth it. That calculation, however, is entirely based on the likes/dislikes of the players. Not all tables or players are going to want the same things.

Quertus
2022-11-01, 05:23 PM
I'm going to assume you just forgot to fill your blue ink cartridge on that one. In just the short time I've been posting here, I've seen repeated and consistent posts by you extolling the virtues of CAW vs CAS, multiple statements about the value of the strategic layer over the tactical one, and yet more statements about how if the players take an action without already knowing the outcome, then they are "doing it wrong". Every one of those positions is about wanting systems (or at least play style) in which if all of the possibilities and choices are examined, there will be one which will achieve the desired goal with absolute certainty, with no die rolls needed (or with the die rolls being irrelevant), and if there isn't, then you don't seem to have much use for said system, or at least prefer not to play in it.

And then there's statements like this:



So you aren't saying that situations where the outcomes are "obvious" and "no rolls are required" are "best"? Cause that's literally what you just said. Why be surprised when someone points this out? You clearly prefer outcome generation where there is no random chance involved. That's clearly your position, right? Why not just own it? I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, just that it "is", and that this preference is certainly going to influence your opinion on the subject of mini-games (I would assume in the negative).




Just presenting the flip side here, where differences in probability matter. It's relevant to a thread about mini-games because typically in mini-games we're exploring additional skills/abilities and how those might provide more granularity/accuracy in determining outcomes in the specific game aspects being detailed. And yes, your example does make things "simpler", but it also removes the very thing that we're talking about in the first place (more skills/abilities in a mini-game provide more choices, which in turn can be examined by differing probability of success based on which choice is made, the relative skill applicable skill level, and the difficulty assigned).

Removing those skill differences (and resulting probability differences) removes the reason to have a mini-game in the first place. You may as well have just said "I don't like rolling dice to determine outcomes, so mini-games have no value to me". Which is a totally valid response BTW. Unless you are proposing mini-games of a strict "do X, always get Y outcome" nature? I'm not sure I'd even define that as a mini-game, but I suppose it's possible.


Having said all of that, I will observe that increasing a small ruleset into a larger more granular one can be very problematic (and unbalancing) in game systems with skill point buy. You basically will discourage investment into that area of the game, since it will automatically become more expensive for characters to be equally as good. So there are definite negatives and pitfalls to this approach. And yes, you absolutely are correct that if the increased complexity doesn't add sufficiently to the gaming experience, then it's not worth it. That calculation, however, is entirely based on the likes/dislikes of the players. Not all tables or players are going to want the same things.

I… whew. I’m probably too old and too senile to figure out what you will and won’t hear, but I guess I’ll stop trying to learn when I’m dead. So here goes.

Part 1 - Strategic / CaW / Chocolate

Chocolate is the best. That means desserts with no chocolate are inferior, but does not mean that pure chocolate is superior. I know I said it before, but I’m saying it again anyway.

So I can say that CaW - that aiming to solve things on the strategic rather than the tactical level - is how I play. Aiming needn’t involve 100% success.

I can say that to the original, old school, pure CaW players considered any time the dice came out to represent a failure… without implying the same for myself.

I could even consider any time the dice come out to represent a personal failure… without demanding a personal 100% success rate.

I can say that the best moments in a game are ones where the situation is resolved at the strategic layer, without the dice coming out, without requiring that all moments occur that way.

And I’m a War Gamer. I like the 8-hour tactical minigames.

What I don’t like is the stupid, like demanding we drop to the tactical minigame for Superman vs Humanity, if it’s painfully obvious that it’s a complete waste of time, there’s no need for rolls, Superman kills billions, guaranteed.

Are you any closer to understanding that there’s more nuisance to my position than

I know that you seem to want/desire games with absolute outcomes that are always known ahead of time (even if just by the GM and not the players), such that all outcomes are based solely on player choices,

? Because there’s actually a lot more nuisance to it than what I’ve stated, but I’m hoping that’s enough to see that such nuisance exists in my position.

Part 2 - the value of simplicity vs oversimplification

I believe it was Einstein who said, “everything should be as simple as it can be… and no simpler”. Most humans oversimplify that to “everything should be as simple as it can be”, just as they oversimplify most things.

If I tried to take a discussion about human hands and grasping capabilities, and tried to simplify it to talking about fingerless stumps, that would be an obvious oversimplification. If, instead, I caught that the key concept was “opposable thumbs”, and simplified to “crab claws”, there might be some arguments to be made about the validity of the model for certain applications.

Here, we’re talking about the value of the strategic and tactical layers. You are (I believe - reading comprehension isn’t my strong suit) attempting to claim that “randomness” is a vital component to understanding the value of the tactical layer over the strategic, thereby making my “choose your own adventure” format an oversimplification, rather than a mere simplification.

There are two problems with this.

The first is (as I’ve already stated) “choose your own adventure” books can utilize random rolls. Yes, even going so far as to involve different rolls and different probabilities of success for different approaches! (“If you attempt to sneak past, roll Stealth DC X - success turn to Y, fail turn to Z; if you attempt to go through the checkpoint, roll Charisma DC…”).

The second is, you need to demonstrate that the randomization actually adds some value vital to the discussion of the importance and necessity of the different layers. What is gained by having “challenge the Rook” mean “lose d6+3 HP” over the flat “lose 5 HP”?

So, for my simplification to be classified as an oversimplification, you need to address both issues - you need to explain why randomization is essential to the discussion of the value of the layers, and demonstrate that the randomization a “would you rather” format can offer is insufficient to fill that role.

Afaict, you have done neither.

Stonehead
2022-11-01, 09:30 PM
If the information is available to the players, but they are new and aren't accustomed to the system yet, it isn't really the GM deciding to give them hidden information- it's completely in the players' hands to read and learn the system. You're right, "The GM did it wrong" is a bad defense of a poorly designed system that few people can actually use as written. But this doesn't mean that every time a GM or a player is confused by something in a system, it is necessarily a poorly designed system. The GM needs to learn the system they are running, and teach it to the players. There is a learning period during which the players might not understand how everything works. This is a temporary condition. During that brief learning period, the GM may be said to exercise "fiat" in when and how to introduce certain rules, balancing explaining how things work with actual play- but this brief condition doesn't reflect any real parity between mechanical/mathematical resolution and fiat. It is a sign that a system is too complex or burdensome for a particular group, if the learning period goes on too long, and players never catch on. If this is the case with most groups trying to use the system, then it's a sign of a poorly designed system. However, a GM who fails (or even refuses) to help their new players learn the system is a bad GM, imo. Excluding outright bad systems and bad GMs, and following the necessary teaching period, players will not be mystified by the results of a game's mechanics. Predicting something that depends on GM fiat is an exercise in psychology...predicting something that depends on mechanical rules requires math. Those aren't the same thing.

I also think that there are few to no examples of systems so complex that anyone paying attention would be confused about how results are achieved. There certainly are those that are bloated and burdensome to run, which aren't worth the effort - but I'm not sure that there are any actually using math so complex that people can't tell how the numbers they can see will affect outcomes. It's more likely that they use so much randomness that it becomes frustrating, because their ability to tweak numerical advantages and disadvantages have minimal impact on results. In this case, you might say the mechanics are not much different from fiat, because nothing the players do will reliably change the outcome. This is not an excessively complex game, though, rather an excessively simple one where there aren't many modifiers and single pass/fail dice rolls decide most things. If the GM decides to keep some or all such die rolls behind the screen, then I can see the comparison with fiat growing closer.

Ok, but anyone can learn anything given enough time. By that logic, not understanding special relativity is just a "temporary condition" to middle schoolers. Also, I don't understand why not understanding being temporary makes the "Any sufficiently advanced system is indistinguishable from fiat" statement untrue. It's clearly a reference to the "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" quote, which still makes sense if the technology is learnable. Show the internet to someone from the 40s, and it'd seem like magic. 60 years later, they very well might understand it. And besides, if it takes some player 5 weeks to finally understand how grappling works, and you run them a one-shot then switch to a different system, then we have "a system indistinguishable from fiat"

Also, it's not hard to come up with real world examples at all:

Grappling is one, I play with a guy who still doesn't understand grappling. "Ok, he's grabbed, now I want to tie him up." "Sorry, you need him to be pinned to do that." "Are you just making this stuff up?".
I know there are monsters in DnD that deal different dice of damage based on the targets' alignment. When 1d6 can deal 6 damage and 2d6 can deal 2, it's pretty easy for the damage to seem arbitrary.
Random encounter tables with modifiers. I've seen games in which doing dangerous things (being closer to a dungeon, carrying too many valuables, etc) adds a flat modifier to the table. Random encounters are usually rolled in secret, and +20 isn't that easy to notice on a d100 table.
Hidden clocks are an obvious example from an earlier post.
Any lookup table as a resolution mechanic. Off the top of my head, Fright Checks in GURPS.
Collision damage/fall damage in GURPS.


Finally, you shouldn't overestimate the average person. Sure 21st century men like you and I can understand germ theory, but even the smartest people from the 14th century didn't. Diehard ttrpg enthusiasts who post on forums understand grappling or whatever, but your average player who's played a wizard for half a year in his cousin's campaign probably doesn't.

Tanarii
2022-11-02, 03:36 AM
I'm reminded of the Viva La Viva PUBG video where Ben doesn't realize he's why he's moving so slowly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5isf1Sh0PEk

True friends right there :)

Thrudd
2022-11-02, 09:48 AM
Ok, but anyone can learn anything given enough time. By that logic, not understanding special relativity is just a "temporary condition" to middle schoolers. Also, I don't understand why not understanding being temporary makes the "Any sufficiently advanced system is indistinguishable from fiat" statement untrue. It's clearly a reference to the "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" quote, which still makes sense if the technology is learnable. Show the internet to someone from the 40s, and it'd seem like magic. 60 years later, they very well might understand it. And besides, if it takes some player 5 weeks to finally understand how grappling works, and you run them a one-shot then switch to a different system, then we have "a system indistinguishable from fiat"

Also, it's not hard to come up with real world examples at all:

Grappling is one, I play with a guy who still doesn't understand grappling. "Ok, he's grabbed, now I want to tie him up." "Sorry, you need him to be pinned to do that." "Are you just making this stuff up?".
I know there are monsters in DnD that deal different dice of damage based on the targets' alignment. When 1d6 can deal 6 damage and 2d6 can deal 2, it's pretty easy for the damage to seem arbitrary.
Random encounter tables with modifiers. I've seen games in which doing dangerous things (being closer to a dungeon, carrying too many valuables, etc) adds a flat modifier to the table. Random encounters are usually rolled in secret, and +20 isn't that easy to notice on a d100 table.
Hidden clocks are an obvious example from an earlier post.
Any lookup table as a resolution mechanic. Off the top of my head, Fright Checks in GURPS.
Collision damage/fall damage in GURPS.


Finally, you shouldn't overestimate the average person. Sure 21st century men like you and I can understand germ theory, but even the smartest people from the 14th century didn't. Diehard ttrpg enthusiasts who post on forums understand grappling or whatever, but your average player who's played a wizard for half a year in his cousin's campaign probably doesn't.

I mean...the only people relevant to the discussion are 21st century people (primarily adolescents and adults) who are interested in playing TTRPGs. The average player who hasn't learned the rules is exactly the person that the GM is responsible for teaching. Not knowing the rules by heart doesn't mean they won't understand how the rules work when they are explained...so the player who doesn't know how grappling works will understand it, when the GM says it's a strength check and the enemy can use strength or dex to oppose it. They will understand that having high strength makes it easier, and trying to do it against someone with high strength or dex is less likely to succeed. If they forget how it works the next session, the GM tells them again. That isn't akin to fiat- no reasonable person will be mystified by the results if they try to grapple a dragon and fail, or won't understand why the barbarian is better at it than the wizard. Being a casual player who doesn't remember all the rules isn't the same as being unable to calculate your odds despite the mechanic being visible and explained.

Yes, the more random it is, the less predictable it is, and therefore may resemble GM fiat more. However, hidden random tables wouldn't be a "strategic mini game" (by whatever definition of "strategic" is intended). It's true that luck plays a big role when dice are involved, and the bigger the die and the smaller the modifiers, the less predictable it will be - but if players are allowed to know the possible results and the modifiers which affect those results, as would be required for it to be considered a "strategic mini-game", then they will know their odds. If the players aren't told the mechanics, then they can't be said to be participating in a "mini game". Which gets back to my original problem with the statement that "sufficiently complex mechanics resembles fiat" - this applies only in specific conditions, not as a general rule. There is a big caveat necessary to make it true: "when the players are not allowed to see the mechanics" or "when the players refuse to learn the mechanics and the GM declines to inform them of relevant modifiers".

If the players could see the random tables and knew what sort of actions and abilities will generate modifiers to the rolls, then they know their chances, even though it is still heavily dependent on luck. They can strategize ways to make it more likely to get the results they prefer. This does not resemble fiat- GM fiat would mean the players are guessing what they can do to affect the GM's decision making, not knowing whether anything they do will have any effect for certain. A table with modifiers means they know they can take an action or have an ability that will give them 1% or 5% better odds of getting a good result. Perhaps these things are equally predictable- but that is a condemnation of using too much luck in your mechanics rather than a condemnation of having mechanics with too many modifiers and fiddly bits- which I believe is the gist of the criticism of creating "mini-games" or subsystems for various aspects of PC engagement with the game world.

Easy e
2022-11-02, 10:24 AM
I knew I should have avoided using the word "Startegic" in this thread. :(

Quertus
2022-11-02, 11:22 AM
By that logic, not understanding special relativity is just a "temporary condition" to middle schoolers. … It's clearly a reference to the "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" quote, which still makes sense if the technology is learnable. Show the internet to someone from the 40s, and it'd seem like magic. … And besides, if it takes some player 5 weeks to finally understand how grappling works, and you run them a one-shot then switch to a different system, then we have "a system indistinguishable from fiat"

Grappling is one, I play with a guy who still doesn't understand grappling. "Ok, he's grabbed, now I want to tie him up." "Sorry, you need him to be pinned to do that." "Are you just making this stuff up?".

Sounds like you get it. If your expected exposure is less than the time it takes to learn, it is Indistinguishable from fiat. I’d add to your list “hidden subjective” variables, like “if the PC has a reputation for being kind, they get a +1 to loyalty rolls for X but a -1 to loyalty rolls for Y”. Does the GM think that the PC comes across as kind? Who knows.


I mean...the only people relevant to the discussion are 21st century people (primarily adolescents and adults) who are interested in playing TTRPGs.

Well, no. RPGs existed in the 20th century, and, in the unfortunate event that the world & humanity & civilization continue existing, RPGs will likely exist in the 51st century, as well.

Further, testing should be done at - at minimum - the boundary conditions, and the quote in question originated from a speaker who often comments on gaming with 7-year-olds, so “children” are clearly important to testing the phrase.

As would those with the lack of explanatory skill necessary to produce the classic “gazebo” story.


The average player who hasn't learned the rules is exactly the person that the GM is responsible for teaching.

You put “GM” and “responsible” in the same sentence. :smallbiggrin:


Not knowing the rules by heart doesn't mean they won't understand how the rules work when they are explained...

Ok. The rule is “any sufficiently advanced rule is indistinguishable from fiat”. Do you understand the rule, now that it has been explained? :smallamused:


so the player who doesn't know how grappling works will understand it, when the GM says it's a strength check and the enemy can use strength or dex to oppose it. They will understand that having high strength makes it easier, and trying to do it against someone with high strength or dex is less likely to succeed.

Clearly, you’re not familiar with the breed of players with the “eyes glaze over” trait. Or with rules complex enough to be triggering. Note that we are discussing “any sufficiently complex rules”, not “any rules”.


If they forget how it works the next session, the GM tells them again.

There is no next session - it was a one-shot. Or it’s a campaign, but the rule involves the interaction of artifacts and volcanos - not likely to come up again.


That isn't akin to fiat- no reasonable person will be mystified by the results if they try to grapple a dragon and fail, or won't understand why the barbarian is better at it than the wizard.

Actually, the Wizard deals megadamage, while the Barbarian only deals regular damage. Also, the Dragon has the [Magical] [Terrifying] [Spirit] and attributes, which interact with key words on the Wizard and/or Barbarian class (or, at least, the Spirit Totem Barbarian and Imperial Geometer Witch Hunter subclasses). Oh, and the Barbarian [Rage] feature affects his grappling, not to mention the feats…

… 5 pages of explanation later… so obviously the Wizard is better at grappling the Dragon than the Barbarian.

Any sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from fiat by your “reasonable person”. “Roll Strength” is not sufficiently advanced (for most audiences).


Why would players not know about encumbrance? That's definitely a thing the character would be aware of, and if the rules track it, then the players will know that, too. If being encumbered means -5 speed and -2 on dex checks, the players knows how it will affect their performance. If the players would rather not pay attention to that, so the GM tracks it for them, then it would also be the GM's responsibility to tell them when they are carrying too much stuff and that it will make them slower. I still don't think that players unwilling or unable to learn rules or track numbers is a good argument for rules being the same as fiat.
"If you choose to ignore the existence of the rules, and/or the GM keeps them all hidden from you, then the rules appear the same as fiat" might be true- but I'm not sure of the aim of pointing that out?
Is it to say that the GM shouldn't bother with any rules that would be opaque to the players, might as well just fiat all of it?
Or that if your players aren't interested in strategic or tactical play, then forgo rules and play free form, or as simplified a system as possible?

Certainly it is possible to go too far in trying to model complex interactions with mechanics, making a pen&paper game unwieldy, nobody denies it. But this doesn't mean any modeling will be too complex. If your players struggle to notice what factors are giving them disadvantages, the GM can point them out, and then the players will learn and be able to make better decisions on their own. The strategic "floor" doesn't need to stay in one spot. One of the GM's roles is to teach the players how to play the game. Early on you needed to hold their hands more, the more you play, the more they remember and the better they get at the strategy and recognizing how the mechanics affect what is happening.

Imagine a Simulation so complex, it can really only be played with the aid of a computer. It tracks precise weight of armaments and fuel, such that your vehicle performance characteristics actually vary each round as you consume fuel & ammo, for example.

The players have never played anything so complex, and only conceptualize “encumbrance” in an old school video game “yes/no”, “can we squeeze one more ounce of loot on this character before we hit our max encumbrance. They’ve never even played modern “take penalties / lose stamina faster” games before.

Oh, and the GM is one of them. He has no clue, either.

They all just enter their data, have the computer both calculate the odds and roll the dice, and have no clue why one player is the rockstar.

Or it’s just something like “grappling”, where peoples eyes glaze over whenever you discuss the [I]really simple mechanics.

JNAProductions
2022-11-02, 11:49 AM
The statement "Sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from fiat" might be a true statement.
But it's not a useful statement.

At least for any TTRPG I've played, the rules are such that they're not overly complicated to understand-which makes sense. People have to use them, not computers that can process way faster. Yes, you can envision rules so complicated that they might as well be fiat to anyone not in the know, but do you have any actual examples of such rules, Quertus?
And I will caveat that by saying we should assume an invested and reasonably intelligent player. Yes, players who aren't invested might not learn about grappling if that's not what their PC does, but you can have someone who can fail to learn tic-tac-toe if they're not invested. That's not pertinent to this conversation.

Quertus
2022-11-02, 12:14 PM
The statement "Sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from fiat" might be a true statement.
But it's not a useful statement.

At least for any TTRPG I've played, the rules are such that they're not overly complicated to understand-which makes sense. People have to use them, not computers that can process way faster. Yes, you can envision rules so complicated that they might as well be fiat to anyone not in the know, but do you have any actual examples of such rules, Quertus?
And I will caveat that by saying we should assume an invested and reasonably intelligent player. Yes, players who aren't invested might not learn about grappling if that's not what their PC does, but you can have someone who can fail to learn tic-tac-toe if they're not invested. That's not pertinent to this conversation.

Grappling rules. Don’t know why, nobody can ever get them.

2e D&D and earlier: “do I roll High or low? Or High without going over? Or…”

Polymorph.

Time. No, seriously, the concept of things like “10 minutes” just doesn’t click in the way you’d think it would.

Roleplaying (as a rule, I guess “limit the characters decisions to being based on what they know”). Especially by GM’s.

Full auto. Or any rule with the word “cumulative”, actually.

MtG Power and Toughness. And Walls cannot attack.

Do I really need to keep going?

And that’s college-educated adults. 7-year-olds are another story altogether. They’re generally smarter, IME.

And the statement actually has negative value, as my point in stating it was because I didn’t want to discuss it - I wanted a “one and done” “let’s not bother discussing this bit, k?”

Sigh.

Thrudd
2022-11-02, 01:07 PM
Sounds like you get it. If your expected exposure is less than the time it takes to learn, it is Indistinguishable from fiat. I’d add to your list “hidden subjective” variables, like “if the PC has a reputation for being kind, they get a +1 to loyalty rolls for X but a -1 to loyalty rolls for Y”. Does the GM think that the PC comes across as kind? Who knows.



Well, no. RPGs existed in the 20th century, and, in the unfortunate event that the world & humanity & civilization continue existing, RPGs will likely exist in the 51st century, as well.

Further, testing should be done at - at minimum - the boundary conditions, and the quote in question originated from a speaker who often comments on gaming with 7-year-olds, so “children” are clearly important to testing the phrase.

As would those with the lack of explanatory skill necessary to produce the classic “gazebo” story.



You put “GM” and “responsible” in the same sentence. :smallbiggrin:



Ok. The rule is “any sufficiently advanced rule is indistinguishable from fiat”. Do you understand the rule, now that it has been explained? :smallamused:



Clearly, you’re not familiar with the breed of players with the “eyes glaze over” trait. Or with rules complex enough to be triggering. Note that we are discussing “any sufficiently complex rules”, not “any rules”.



There is no next session - it was a one-shot. Or it’s a campaign, but the rule involves the interaction of artifacts and volcanos - not likely to come up again.



Actually, the Wizard deals megadamage, while the Barbarian only deals regular damage. Also, the Dragon has the [Magical] [Terrifying] [Spirit] and attributes, which interact with key words on the Wizard and/or Barbarian class (or, at least, the Spirit Totem Barbarian and Imperial Geometer Witch Hunter subclasses). Oh, and the Barbarian [Rage] feature affects his grappling, not to mention the feats…

… 5 pages of explanation later… so obviously the Wizard is better at grappling the Dragon than the Barbarian.

Any sufficiently advanced rules are indistinguishable from fiat by your “reasonable person”. “Roll Strength” is not sufficiently advanced (for most audiences).



Imagine a Simulation so complex, it can really only be played with the aid of a computer. It tracks precise weight of armaments and fuel, such that your vehicle performance characteristics actually vary each round as you consume fuel & ammo, for example.

The players have never played anything so complex, and only conceptualize “encumbrance” in an old school video game “yes/no”, “can we squeeze one more ounce of loot on this character before we hit our max encumbrance. They’ve never even played modern “take penalties / lose stamina faster” games before.

Oh, and the GM is one of them. He has no clue, either.

They all just enter their data, have the computer both calculate the odds and roll the dice, and have no clue why one player is the rockstar.

Or it’s just something like “grappling”, where peoples eyes glaze over whenever you discuss the [I]really simple mechanics.

"Imagine a simulation so complex"...in a discussion about game systems for TTRPGs? Have you ever encountered such a game? I propose that there is no such TTRPG, and therefore bringing up this hypothetical simulation, or computer games, in a discussion about designing pen and paper RPGs is a nonsequitur.

You're right that the grappling example is not "sufficiently complex", that's my point. Players not being able to remember or understand a mechanic doesn't mean it's "too complex". Hiding the mechanics doesn't make them "sufficiently complex". I don't think there is any TTRPG with mechanics sufficiently complex to be indistinguishable from fiat, and my post was attempting to refute the idea that any of the proposed examples of such things are actually very complex. They only resemble fiat when they are hidden from the players, so they don't know what variables are affecting the odds.

Everyone playing RPGs right now lives in the 21st century. Games that were created in the 70's and 80's, where they are still being played, are being played in the 21st century by people with 21st century knowledge. Whatever form TTRPGs might take in subsequent centuries is quite irrelevant.

players whose "eyes glaze over" at even simple rules do not make the case for "rules sufficiently complex..."

your example of a system with many different riders and keywords affecting how they interact with things is an example of complexity- but is it "sufficient"? When players are thinking about what sort of character to choose and what abilities to take as they level up, these things create complexity that might only be fully exploited by someone who has studied the game and all its options quite a bit. But in the moment, when they are actually interacting with the rules in-play, each player has one character with a set of abilities they see on their character sheet, and they know (unless they are an "eyes glaze over" sort), that each keyword and number on their sheet adds and subtracts things from different tests, and it isn't so complex that they can't tell that they will do more damage if they use the thing with the bigger number, or by targeting the thing the enemy is weak in they will be more likely to succeed. That they might not know all the abilities of other PCs or all the potential enemies they can run into doesn't mean that outcomes resemble fiat to them. Getting lost and unable to keep track of all the things that affect outcomes might mean the system is unwieldy and hard to play, but it doesn't look like fiat.

If the real aim of your arguments is: "games intended for 7 year-olds shouldn't be too complex", I don't disagree and I don't think anyone else would either. However, not all games need to be playable by 7 year-olds. Things too complex for the average 7 year-old are not too complex for the average 10 year-old, let alone teens and adults. Most TTRPGs are not targeted towards children so young. So, while your particular needs might result in pursuit of very simple games to play with your children, this is a niche concern which doesn't apply to TTRPG players on the whole. Children grow older and learn things (hopefully). A lot of us who started playing young graduated from simpler games to more complex ones.

I'm not debating that sometimes the results of a mechanic might look like fiat to some players in specific circumstances. In a one-shot, where nobody really knows the rules of the game - in a situation that only comes up once and never again - for children who barely know how to add and subtract - when everything is hidden from the players - but these cases don't mean the mechanic is so complex that it is indistinguishable from fiat. It means that maybe having complex mechanics for these specific situations is not worth the load on the GM, unless they have tools that make things quick to resolve and/or the integrity of simulation is important to them.

Yes, we're always balancing GM workload, playability and accessibility, simulation and challenge and all that stuff, when designing games. It's worth thinking about when and where to use mechanics, and when to leave things up to the GM. But a TTRPG is never going to have mechanics so complex that it might as well be fiat, at least as long as they are intended to be played by humans. In the 51st century, when we're all cyborgs or mentats, things could look a lot different- but then, things that would be "sufficiently complex" to resemble fiat to us would not seem as such to an advanced computer brain, would it? lol

Quertus
2022-11-02, 02:09 PM
"Imagine a simulation so complex"...in a discussion about game systems for TTRPGs? Have you ever encountered such a game? I propose that there is no such TTRPG, and therefore bringing up this hypothetical simulation, or computer games, in a discussion about designing pen and paper RPGs is a nonsequitur.

This is a tricky one.

1) I’m told there was an RPG that was based on a military simulator that didn’t require a computer, but did factor in individual bullet weight when calculating performance characteristics, such that “casual” players would never want to play it without such. I never played or even saw it myself.

2) it wouldn’t be that hard for me to take such a simulator and turn it into a turn-based computer-aided RPG. It’s kinda hard to imagine a good programmer/tester hasn’t done so already (unless I am the only good programmer/tester dual-class, which I guess wouldn’t be too surprising anymore, I suppose).

So the full example is a theoretical, yes, but the individual components should theoretically exist.


You're right that the grappling example is not "sufficiently complex", that's my point. Players not being able to remember or understand a mechanic doesn't mean it's "too complex".

It makes it “too complex for them”. That’s kinda my point. Different people have different metrics for “too complex”.

“Wounds and Vitality”, as outside my previous experience, was “too complex” for me to instantly grok. With sufficient exposure, I got it; had my expected exposure been less than that, it would have been “too complex for me to grok” - which, granted, is not identical to “too complex to distinguish from fiat”, but I imagine you get the right chemicals in me (enough whiskey might do it), and you’d find the results indistinguishable.


Hiding the mechanics doesn't make them "sufficiently complex".

Hiding the mechanics, while an explicit part of some systems (and some tables) is less about lowering the bar for what’s too complex, so much as it is about lowering the bar for the reader to understand the idea, to be able to accept, “oh, if I think in terms of ‘not seeing’, I can see how someone with a mental block, or who lacked the same experience I have, could manage to just not see how this works”.


I don't think there is any TTRPG with mechanics sufficiently complex to be indistinguishable from fiat, and my post was attempting to refute the idea that any of the proposed examples of such things are actually very complex. They only resemble fiat when they are hidden from the players, so they don't know what variables are affecting the odds.

I’m guessing you didn’t play in the heyday of “for the GM’s eyes only” games?

See also “hidden subjective” variables, like “does the GM think that this character is kind” or “does the GM think that this character has sufficiently violated the codes of their religion”?


Everyone playing RPGs right now lives in the 21st century. Games that were created in the 70's and 80's, where they are still being played, are being played in the 21st century by people with 21st century knowledge. Whatever form TTRPGs might take in subsequent centuries is quite irrelevant.

The statement was not bounded by time. “Sufficiently advanced… Indistinguishable” involves subjective measurements - what’s “too complex” will vary from person to person.


players whose "eyes glaze over" at even simple rules do not make the case for "rules sufficiently complex..."

It’s subjective - it’s too complex for them, too complex for them to distinguish from fiat.

Really, if you don’t get that it’s subjective, I guess I can see how you might not understand where I’m coming from. You might say that the concept is just too complex for you.


your example of a system with many different riders and keywords affecting how they interact with things is an example of complexity- but is it "sufficient"?

Sufficient to be counterintuitive to your “reasonable person” example.

I’ve played games like this, that were highly counter-intuitive. Sometimes just to new players (like 3e “Fighter is a sidekick to the Wizard”), but made sense once you accepted the new paradigm; other times, I’ve never met players who could explain any underlying theme.


When players are thinking about what sort of character to choose and what abilities to take as they level up, these things create complexity that might only be fully exploited by someone who has studied the game and all its options quite a bit. But in the moment, when they are actually interacting with the rules in-play, each player has one character with a set of abilities they see on their character sheet, and they know (unless they are an "eyes glaze over" sort), that each keyword and number on their sheet adds and subtracts things from different tests, and it isn't so complex that they can't tell that they will do more damage if they use the thing with the bigger number, or by targeting the thing the enemy is weak in they will be more likely to succeed.

Which enemy is weak to [Witch Hunter] is likely easy to Intuit (right or wrong), but which enemies do you think will be weak to [Rage]? Not all keywords evoke an obvious interaction (regardless of whether what’s “obvious” is actually correct or not).


That they might not know all the abilities of other PCs or all the potential enemies they can run into doesn't mean that outcomes resemble fiat to them. Getting lost and unable to keep track of all the things that affect outcomes might mean the system is unwieldy and hard to play, but it doesn't look like fiat.

If you were simply told that your Barbarian failed to grapple the Dragon, but the Wizard succeeded, how would you distinguish that from fiat?


If the real aim of your arguments is: "games intended for 7 year-olds shouldn't be too complex", I don't disagree and I don't think anyone else would either. However, not all games need to be playable by 7 year-olds. Things too complex for the average 7 year-old are not too complex for the average 10 year-old, let alone teens and adults. Most TTRPGs are not targeted towards children so young. So, while your particular needs might result in pursuit of very simple games to play with your children, this is a niche concern which doesn't apply to TTRPG players on the whole. Children grow older and learn things (hopefully). A lot of us who started playing young graduated from simpler games to more complex ones.

Again, my experience is that 7-year-olds do a better job learning RPGs than college-educated adults. So… feel free to market those simplified RPGs to adults, I guess?


I'm not debating that sometimes the results of a mechanic might look like fiat to some players in specific circumstances.

That’s… pretty much what I’m saying with the subjective “Indistinguishable”.


In a one-shot, where nobody really knows the rules of the game - in a situation that only comes up once and never again - for children who barely know how to add and subtract - when everything is hidden from the players - but these cases don't mean the mechanic is so complex that it is indistinguishable from fiat. It means that maybe having complex mechanics for these specific situations is not worth the load on the GM, unless they have tools that make things quick to resolve and/or the integrity of simulation is important to them.

Yes, we're always balancing GM workload, playability and accessibility, simulation and challenge and all that stuff, when designing games. It's worth thinking about when and where to use mechanics, and when to leave things up to the GM. But a TTRPG is never going to have mechanics so complex that it might as well be fiat, at least as long as they are intended to be played by humans. In the 51st century, when we're all cyborgs or mentats, things could look a lot different- but then, things that would be "sufficiently complex" to resemble fiat to us would not seem as such to an advanced computer brain, would it? lol

Mostly just left this in ‘cause it’s fun. Although I’m liking the ideas you’ve put forth about complexity. I’m… guessing… my head is stuck in… something adjacent to… “the integrity of simulation is important to them”? Or maybe a cross between that and “consistency”? “The consistency of the resolution of the system”? Eh, maybe I’ll figure it out.

Thrudd
2022-11-02, 04:28 PM
It makes it “too complex for them”. That’s kinda my point. Different people have different metrics for “too complex”.


So is the point of this to say: "when designing mechanics one should strive for greatest simplicity- keeping in mind the abilities of young children, potentially drunk players, and those who might not be able to grok too much." I don't totally disagree. I'd say, keep in mind the likely capabilities of your intended audience, level of inclusivity, and the intended format for games when designing (among other concerns). Greatest simplicity in all things may or may not be the optimal choice.

If you're playing a game and some or all of your players aren't "grokking" something- maybe the rules are too complex for them, or the game is poorly designed, or what it's simulating is outside their experience, or they just haven't had a chance to read the rules or had them explained sufficiently. The solution might be to amend or house rule so it is easier to use- it might be to make a point to explain how it works more thoroughly- it might be to switch systems or GMs, if everyone is having the same problems.

Quertus
2022-11-02, 04:42 PM
So is the point of this to say: "when designing mechanics one should strive for greatest simplicity- keeping in mind the abilities of young children, potentially drunk players, and those who might not be able to grok too much." I don't totally disagree. I'd say, keep in mind the likely capabilities of your intended audience, level of inclusivity, and the intended format for games when designing (among other concerns). Greatest simplicity in all things may or may not be the optimal choice.

If you're playing a game and some or all of your players aren't "grokking" something- maybe the rules are too complex for them, or the game is poorly designed, or what it's simulating is outside their experience, or they just haven't had a chance to read the rules or had them explained sufficiently. The solution might be to amend or house rule so it is easier to use- it might be to make a point to explain how it works more thoroughly- it might be to switch systems or GMs, if everyone is having the same problems.

The original point was to say, “I don’t want to talk about rule complexity or fiat in the context of evaluating the value of the Strategic and/or Tactical layer(s)”.

The most related question I’d rather look at is, does the extent to which your players grok the game affect the relative value of the Strategic and/or Tactical layer(s)?

Thrudd
2022-11-02, 05:07 PM
The original point was to say, “I don’t want to talk about rule complexity or fiat in the context of evaluating the value of the Strategic and/or Tactical layer(s)”.

The most related question I’d rather look at is, does the extent to which your players grok the game affect the relative value of the Strategic and/or Tactical layer(s)?

Oh, well yes, obviously it does. Not grokking elements of the game definitely reduces the ability to participate in strategy and tactics relying on those elements. If all your players don't grok strategy or tactics (and/or the mechanical systems which enable them in the game), then you're probably better off not trying to play a game that relies on those elements. If you are setting up strategic and tactical challenges for your players, relying partly or wholly on game mechanics, but all they can do is flail about and hope because the game and its mechanics are a mystery to them, I'd say there's little value in giving them such challenges- unless your intention is to teach them, and when they start flailing about, you help them see/learn what they might be missing.

gbaji
2022-11-02, 05:38 PM
So I can say that CaW - that aiming to solve things on the strategic rather than the tactical level - is how I play. Aiming needn’t involve 100% success.

I can say that to the original, old school, pure CaW players considered any time the dice came out to represent a failure… without implying the same for myself.

I could even consider any time the dice come out to represent a personal failure… without demanding a personal 100% success rate.

Um... But you are literally defining "100% success" as the absence of random factors (die rolling in this case). That's exactly what I said. That you prefer game systems (or playstyle) in which there are no die rolls used to determine outcomes. Again. You are insisting that you don't hold this position, and yet you repeat it over and over.

I'm not saying that you demand this. I'm saying that you prefer it. Given that you just defined a 100% success as being "no dice come out", I'm not sure why you are debating this.


I can say that the best moments in a game are ones where the situation is resolved at the strategic layer, without the dice coming out, without requiring that all moments occur that way.

And here's you repeating it. Again. I'm talking about your preference, which you have been clear about in the past, and are being very clear about again right here in this post. Just own your preferences. There's nothing wrong with that.


What I don’t like is the stupid, like demanding we drop to the tactical minigame for Superman vs Humanity, if it’s painfully obvious that it’s a complete waste of time, there’s no need for rolls, Superman kills billions, guaranteed.

Sure. But that's a pretty extreme example (strawman even). There's a whole range of things we may need to resolve in a game that fall well within the range of uncertainty, unlike "superman vs normal humans". How about batman vs a city? Or just joe the cop dealing with a small lightly armed gang member? Leaping immediately to the most absurd case doesn't a strong argument make.



? Because there’s actually a lot more nuisance to it than what I’ve stated, but I’m hoping that’s enough to see that such nuisance exists in my position.

I'm going to assume you meant to say "nuance" there. And yes, I absolutely agree. But then why go to the least nuanced example case of "superman vs humanity"? How about something far less clear cut? Those are the areas we might want to create or run mini-games, right? So let's examine those cases instead.


I believe it was Einstein who said, “everything should be as simple as it can be… and no simpler”. Most humans oversimplify that to “everything should be as simple as it can be”, just as they oversimplify most things.

Yup. More or less the same concept as Occam's razor. And yes, also often misused.

But the concept is absolutely applicable to a mini-game. The rules should be just as complex as needed to simulate whatever you are simulating, and no more. That's what I've been saying all along. If the players are happy resolving things by just flipping a coin (or even just the GM saying "yeah, you can do that" or "nope. wont work"), then that's sufficient. In most systems, however, we may want to decide if/why some characters may be better at some things than others. At that point, we may need to create skills and abilities that define those things. And we may need to create a means to determine whether someone who has X skill level in a skill can accomplish the tasks, but someone with Y skill level cannot. Or maybe both can. Or neither. All are possible outcomes, and a good system should be able to resolve those cases and the conditions that lead to them.


There are two problems with this.

The first is (as I’ve already stated) “choose your own adventure” books can utilize random rolls. Yes, even going so far as to involve different rolls and different probabilities of success for different approaches! (“If you attempt to sneak past, roll Stealth DC X - success turn to Y, fail turn to Z; if you attempt to go through the checkpoint, roll Charisma DC…”).

Um... Not to be picky, but you didn't actually state a problem here. Just defined the methodology.


The second is, you need to demonstrate that the randomization actually adds some value vital to the discussion of the importance and necessity of the different layers. What is gained by having “challenge the Rook” mean “lose d6+3 HP” over the flat “lose 5 HP”?

It adds uncertainty and risk to the game. If I have 7 hps, and I'm presented with a challenge that will cost me 5hp, I know I will survive. Period. There's no wondering about it. If I'm presented with a "you will lose 1d6+3 hps", then I'm not certain what will happen. The average loss is 6.5 hps. Maximum is 9. I could die, or I might live. Should I risk taking the action? I'm not sure. In the immortal words of Dirty Harry: "Do you feel lucky?"

That's also only one area in which randomization is present in a game system (and a poor example for a mini-game discussion IMO). A more relevant one is skill rolls. Our strike team needs to bypass the security system to get through the blast door. We have a crack security guy with 8 ranks in "disarm security doors" skill (or whatever). Unfortunately, that guy (team1) got caught up in a firefight on level 3 and is delayed. A second group (team2), which took a different route has arrived at the security panel, but the best guy in that team only has 4 ranks in "disarm security doors". He may be able to open the door. We've got a third team (our main strike force), currently pinned down waiting for that door to open, or they're going to start taking casualties. It'll take 3 round to make the door opening attempt. It'll take about 5 more rounds for the team1 to get to the door, now that they've gotten through that minor firefight. Do you risk the less skilled guy making the attempt, possibly just failing and nothing happens, or possibly failing and causing a lock down and the whole mission fails? Or do you wait another 5 rounds, then take another 3 to have the expert attempt it?

Having skill levels and die rolls to determine this provides additional depth to the discussion and decision. If you know absolutely that a 4 rank skill will always fail with a lock down, you wont attempt it at all. If you know that it'll just fail, you wont attempt it (no harm in trying in this case, but you may be better off doing something else with your time). But what if that 4 rank skill is up against a level 10 security system, where you know that you get to roll a D10 and add your rank to determine success (with reaching the difficulty level being success, -5 means lock down). See. I'm making up a mini-game right here while writing this example. Ok. So I know that my rank 4 guy has to roll a 6 or better to succeed. Not great odds, but possible to succeed and get the mission moving. But, if I roll a 1, the result will be a 5, and that's -5 from the security difficulty, so the lockdown will occur. So 50% chance of success, 40% chance of simple failure, and 10% chance of lockdown. What do you do? You have a 50% chance of getting the blast doors open in 3 rounds, with a risk of lockdown and total mission failure, or you have a 90% chance of success if you take 8 rounds (5+3), with zero chance of lockdown (cause that's why he's the expert, right).

That's the advantage of adding die rolls to your game system. We can go further and assume hidden versus known factors. In my case, the player knows his skill level (4), knows the difficulty factor of the security system (10), and knows the game rules for this mini-game (roll a D10, add your skill ranks, and compare to the difficulty). They know the risks, and can make an educated choice about what to do. All while not actually knowing for certain what the actual result will be. If the factors are hidden, then the player still knows his skill level (4), still knows the rules (roll D10, add to skill, match against difficulty). He just doesn't know how difficult the security door is. He may know it's "high", and that his skill isn't great, so may speculate how well he'll do, but doesn't know for sure. This can heighten the unknown factors, which is still "fun" (and still "unknown").

In the "no die rolls" scenario, the rules may simply be "you either have enough skill or you don't". So obviously, we have to change the difficulty level to make this work. Let's say that it's a level 6 difficulty security system, so we know that the rank4 guy can't ever succeed, but the rank8 guy will always succeed. We also know that -5 will activate a lockdown, so the rank4 guy wont fail badly enough to trigger that (thank goodness we put that guy in team2, or we'd have the rank1 guy there, and we'd be screwed, right?). This means there is no decision to be made at all. We wait for the expert and have no reason to make any choice. But what if we hide the factors? It's an unknown difficulty, right? So it could be level 4 or lower, and we should attempt it. Or it could be rank 9 or higher, and we'll fail and lockdown. But then the rank8 guy would have had no chance, so we know that if the mission is at all possible to achieve, then we can't activate the lockdown by trying, right? And it costs us nothing to do so (3 rounds vs waiting 5 rounds to even start, right?), so why not? Again, there's no real risk here, unless the GM has set us on a mission we could not possibly succeed at in the first place. So you should always make the attempt in this case (again, no actual "choice" being made here).

That's where random rolls add value and depth to a game. Now maybe you don't like this, but most players do.


So, for my simplification to be classified as an oversimplification, you need to address both issues - you need to explain why randomization is essential to the discussion of the value of the layers, and demonstrate that the randomization a “would you rather” format can offer is insufficient to fill that role.

I just did. In every play situation, the introduction of a die roll based rules system for this scenario makes the gameplay more interesting and more challenging to the players. It forces them to actually make a decision without knowing for certain what the outcome will be. It introduces risk to the outcome as well, and even when playing with hidden factors it *still* provides the players with more real choices to make. The absence of such things becomes an exercise in robot play. Follow the script. You know what will happen if you do X versus Y, so all choices are clear as to outcome, so mistakes will only happen if the players just don't think clearly or something.

There is a reason why the vast majority of all TTRPGs (and strategy games as well) utilize dice rolling. Now, don't get me wrong, I love me a good game of Diplomacy when I can find a good set of players. Incredibly fun (and difficult!) game. But for most games? Die rolling provides that uncertainty and is a better method for simulating "real life situations" than just static methods. And also, ironically, what can happen in static systems which include hidden GM applied modifiers (in order to create that uncertainty) is that it will become more like GM fiat. The GM knows the player skill levels, and can set the difficulties to ensure success or failure of any given action that is attempted. That takes a lot of the choice/power away from the players and puts it in the hands of the GM. The other way around? No real choices to be made. Just following a pre-defined "pass/fail" graphed route to success. I find that boring. I mean, there are ways of making such games interesting, but they all require some level of social interaction *and* unknown factors (typically player versus player). Games like Diplomacy and RoboRally do this very well. But those are players competing against each other. What about cooperative games (like most TTRPGs)? Player vs GM doesn't work well without die rolls (arguably at all).

Quertus
2022-11-02, 05:38 PM
Oh, well yes, obviously it does. Not grokking elements of the game definitely reduces the ability to participate in strategy and tactics relying on those elements. If all your players don't grok strategy or tactics (and/or the mechanical systems which enable them in the game), then you're probably better off not trying to play a game that relies on those elements. If you are setting up strategic and tactical challenges for your players, relying partly or wholly on game mechanics, but all they can do is flail about and hope because the game and its mechanics are a mystery to them, I'd say there's little value in giving them such challenges- unless your intention is to teach them, and when they start flailing about, you help them see/learn what they might be missing.

You know, I’m not sure if it’s the players or the characters of “the All guardsman party” that completely fail at several things. So I’m not sure if “that’s what you get when you give them such games anyway” is true or not.

Regardless, when some players don’t “get it”, it sounds to my ears like a golden opportunity for spotlight sharing. Or, put another way, some players/characters will get to shine; the GM (and maybe the party) just needs to look for opportunities for the others to get to shine, as well.

Quertus
2022-11-02, 09:09 PM
My battery and I might not last, but let’s see how far we get.


Um... But you are literally defining "100% success" as the absence of random factors (die rolling in this case). That's exactly what I said. That you prefer game systems (or playstyle) in which there are no die rolls used to determine outcomes. Again. You are insisting that you don't hold this position, and yet you repeat it over and over.

I'm not saying that you demand this. I'm saying that you prefer it. Given that you just defined a 100% success as being "no dice come out", I'm not sure why you are debating this.

I’m not sure (as I’m bad at reading comprehension) if this connects to what I said or not. So let’s try again: one can define things (desires, perhaps?) such that A success can involve “the dice do not come out on this scenario - it is handled purely at the CaW strategic layer”, without requiring 100% success rating across all challenges, without requiring always successfully resolving things at the strategic layer.

I mean, heck, with Resurrection in 3e, one can define success as “surviving” without requiring a 100% success rating across all encounters. Doesn’t usually work as well irl, though. :smallamused:

Are we on the same page wrt “a success” and “100% success rating”?


And here's you repeating it. Again. I'm talking about your preference, which you have been clear about in the past, and are being very clear about again right here in this post. Just own your preferences. There's nothing wrong with that.

My preference is for a well-earned 8-hour tactical slog minigame, because we definitively proved that this was worth playing through. That’s my preference.

Or it’s closer to it than your belief of my preference is.


Sure. But that's a pretty extreme example (strawman even).

No, we’re talking my preference, remember? Things of that ilk are definitely something I hate.


There's a whole range of things we may need to resolve in a game that fall well within the range of uncertainty, unlike "superman vs normal humans". How about batman vs a city? Or just joe the cop dealing with a small lightly armed gang member? Leaping immediately to the most absurd case doesn't a strong argument make.

A good tester understands the value of “boundary conditions”. I’ve just helped define my preference by returning the result at a boundary condition. That result is hatred.

Btw, while CaS Batman pulls out the dice with glee, CaW Batman drops a nuke on the city. With autopilot.


I'm going to assume you meant to say "nuance" there.

Maybe. :smallredface: Darn autocorrect.


And yes, I absolutely agree. But then why go to the least nuanced example case of "superman vs humanity"? How about something far less clear cut? Those are the areas we might want to create or run mini-games, right? So let's examine those cases instead.

Again, we’re talking about your mis-statement of my preferences. And I’m a good tester, who understands the value of boundary conditions.

Do I need to spell out… fine. So, therefore, I’m demonstrating in memorable fashion a boundary condition, like Superman vs naked humans, where, even against billions of them, not only is the outcome a foregone conclusion, but I would expect very few people would want to manually roll out via individual attack and damage rolls.

This is far more worth talking about, because most reasonable people would be more likely to remember this example, and maybe even remember it if someone once again says something like, “Quertus always wants…”.

Nah. I almost always want to try to resolve things in the CaW Strategic layer. I also want to often, but not always succeed at doing so, and therefore sometimes have to break to the Tactical layer. But decidedly not on the stupid. In fact, one could perhaps build a spectrum with “the stupid” at one end, and use that to approximate how I might feel about breaking to the tactical layer. It won’t be 100% perfect accurate, as there are other factors involved, but it might be closer than your statement of my preferences.

Boundary conditions. They have value outside of testing.


Yup. More or less the same concept as Occam's razor. And yes, also often misused.

But the concept is absolutely applicable to a mini-game. The rules should be just as complex as needed to simulate whatever you are simulating, and no more. That's what I've been saying all along. If the players are happy resolving things by just flipping a coin (or even just the GM saying "yeah, you can do that" or "nope. wont work"), then that's sufficient. In most systems, however, we may want to decide if/why some characters may be better at some things than others. At that point, we may need to create skills and abilities that define those things. And we may need to create a means to determine whether someone who has X skill level in a skill can accomplish the tasks, but someone with Y skill level cannot. Or maybe both can. Or neither. All are possible outcomes, and a good system should be able to resolve those cases and the conditions that lead to them.

It feels like you’ve managed to put the cat before the house (autocorrect, not fixing it, hoping someone finds it funny) twice here, which IMO is a record. This statement feels too early in the conversation, and, more importantly, I tend to put “having stats” before “evaluating whether we need to roll vs yeah you got this”.

Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, doesn’t need to roll Spellcraft because his bonus is an order of magnitude higher than the DC. The outcome of Superman vs Humanity isn’t in question because we’ve established that their damage output is orders of magnitude too low to affect him.


Um... Not to be picky, but you didn't actually state a problem here. Just defined the methodology.

Touché. This is the Playground, home of the highest standards in pedantry, so I’d not fault you for being picky, even if the conversation wasn’t about ironing out minute details of misunderstanding (which it is), or what was missing wasn’t also a rather vital omission (Which it is).

What was stated in the later summary, but should have been explicitly stated here as well, was that you need to demonstrate that the capacity for access to randomization in a “would you rather…”, “choose your own adventure” format is inadequate to demonstrate its validity to be used to evaluate the necessity of the strategic and/or tactical layer.

What was included was, indeed, an attempt at explaining just what (notably non-zero) randomization capacity was available.


It adds uncertainty and risk to the game.

That’s… not terribly useful. There already is the capacity for uncertainty - in fact, @Cluedrew was concerned that there was too much, and one could easily add more.

I’m guessing you’re attempting to argue that it adds a particular flavor of uncertainty.


If I have 7 hps, and I'm presented with a challenge that will cost me 5hp, I know I will survive. Period. There's no wondering about it. If I'm presented with a "you will lose 1d6+3 hps", then I'm not certain what will happen. The average loss is 6.5 hps. Maximum is 9. I could die, or I might live. Should I risk taking the action? I'm not sure. In the immortal words of Dirty Harry: "Do you feel lucky?"

Still not terribly useful. Might be more useful if coupled with a discussion of evaluating alternatives. Here, this is worded as “would you rather…”, but where one of the two choices is “do nothing”. As written, it’s even less interesting than the model it presumes to replace.


That's also only one area in which randomization is present in a game system (and a poor example for a mini-game discussion IMO). A more relevant one is skill rolls. Our strike team needs to bypass the security system to get through the blast door. We have a crack security guy with 8 ranks in "disarm security doors" skill (or whatever). Unfortunately, that guy (team1) got caught up in a firefight on level 3 and is delayed. A second group (team2), which took a different route has arrived at the security panel, but the best guy in that team only has 4 ranks in "disarm security doors". He may be able to open the door. We've got a third team (our main strike force), currently pinned down waiting for that door to open, or they're going to start taking casualties. It'll take 3 round to make the door opening attempt. It'll take about 5 more rounds for the team1 to get to the door, now that they've gotten through that minor firefight. Do you risk the less skilled guy making the attempt, possibly just failing and nothing happens, or possibly failing and causing a lock down and the whole mission fails? Or do you wait another 5 rounds, then take another 3 to have the expert attempt it?

Now that’s a good example.

That said…

If you have the less skilled guy make the attempt, draw 3 “combat consequences” cards for team 5, and roll Skill 4 - 3+ successes turn to page 42; fewer, turn to page 76. If you wait for the team1 Expert, draw 8 combat consequences cards for team 5, then roll Skill 8 - 3+ turn to page 42; fewer, turn to page 76.

Not seeing how that example invalidates “choose your own adventure” as sufficiently featureful to suffice as a simplification.


Having skill levels and die rolls to determine this provides additional depth to the discussion and decision. If you know absolutely that a 4 rank skill will always fail with a lock down, you wont attempt it at all. If you know that it'll just fail, you wont attempt it (no harm in trying in this case, but you may be better off doing something else with your time). But what if that 4 rank skill is up against a level 10 security system, where you know that you get to roll a D10 and add your rank to determine success (with reaching the difficulty level being success, -5 means lock down). See. I'm making up a mini-game right here while writing this example. Ok. So I know that my rank 4 guy has to roll a 6 or better to succeed. Not great odds, but possible to succeed and get the mission moving. But, if I roll a 1, the result will be a 5, and that's -5 from the security difficulty, so the lockdown will occur. So 50% chance of success, 40% chance of simple failure, and 10% chance of lockdown. What do you do? You have a 50% chance of getting the blast doors open in 3 rounds, with a risk of lockdown and total mission failure, or you have a 90% chance of success if you take 8 rounds (5+3), with zero chance of lockdown (cause that's why he's the expert, right).

That's the advantage of adding die rolls to your game system. We can go further and assume hidden versus known factors. In my case, the player knows his skill level (4), knows the difficulty factor of the security system (10), and knows the game rules for this mini-game (roll a D10, add your skill ranks, and compare to the difficulty). They know the risks, and can make an educated choice about what to do. All while not actually knowing for certain what the actual result will be. If the factors are hidden, then the player still knows his skill level (4), still knows the rules (roll D10, add to skill, match against difficulty). He just doesn't know how difficult the security door is. He may know it's "high", and that his skill isn't great, so may speculate how well he'll do, but doesn't know for sure. This can heighten the unknown factors, which is still "fun" (and still "unknown").

In the "no die rolls" scenario, the rules may simply be "you either have enough skill or you don't". So obviously, we have to change the difficulty level to make this work. Let's say that it's a level 6 difficulty security system, so we know that the rank4 guy can't ever succeed, but the rank8 guy will always succeed. We also know that -5 will activate a lockdown, so the rank4 guy wont fail badly enough to trigger that (thank goodness we put that guy in team2, or we'd have the rank1 guy there, and we'd be screwed, right?). This means there is no decision to be made at all. We wait for the expert and have no reason to make any choice. But what if we hide the factors? It's an unknown difficulty, right? So it could be level 4 or lower, and we should attempt it. Or it could be rank 9 or higher, and we'll fail and lockdown. But then the rank8 guy would have had no chance, so we know that if the mission is at all possible to achieve, then we can't activate the lockdown by trying, right? And it costs us nothing to do so (3 rounds vs waiting 5 rounds to even start, right?), so why not? Again, there's no real risk here, unless the GM has set us on a mission we could not possibly succeed at in the first place. So you should always make the attempt in this case (again, no actual "choice" being made here).

That's where random rolls add value and depth to a game. Now maybe you don't like this, but most players do.

Oh no, you’ve sold me on the value of random rolls. (Kudos! Excellent example, really made me want to play. 10/10.)

BUT

They’re just like avoiding rolls, they’re chocolate: a game without them may be inferior, but that doesn’t mean that pure chocolate is superior.

Or, at least, that’s my preference.

(Also, my preference is for, well, stuff like you just described, tbh. That was such a good recipe, I might only half-heartedly ask if anyone can just blow the door open, or blast through the wall, or hack the lockdown, or reset the computers, or “fight defensively” / throw smoke grenades / attempt to parlay / whatever to reduce casualties while waiting for the door to open, or…)

(Note that convincing me is not the same as convincing a true old school CaW maximally paranoid tactician of the value in letting dice decide one’s fate.)


I just did. In every play situation, the introduction of a die roll based rules system for this scenario makes the gameplay more interesting and more challenging to the players. It forces them to actually make a decision without knowing for certain what the outcome will be. It introduces risk to the outcome as well, and even when playing with hidden factors it *still* provides the players with more real choices to make. The absence of such things becomes an exercise in robot play. Follow the script. You know what will happen if you do X versus Y, so all choices are clear as to outcome, so mistakes will only happen if the players just don't think clearly or something.

No, you’ve only… proven? Demonstrated? Whatever. You’ve only addressed one of the two requirements; namely, the value of randomization. You have not addressed the other half, demonstrating that the simplified “code your own adventure” format provides inadequate access to that tool. (Autocorrect, leaving it). In fact, I demonstrated how your example could be written in that format.


There is a reason why the vast majority of all TTRPGs (and strategy games as well) utilize dice rolling. Now, don't get me wrong, I love me a good game of Diplomacy when I can find a good set of players. Incredibly fun (and difficult!) game. But for most games? Die rolling provides that uncertainty and is a better method for simulating "real life situations" than just static methods. And also, ironically, what can happen in static systems which include hidden GM applied modifiers (in order to create that uncertainty) is that it will become more like GM fiat. The GM knows the player skill levels, and can set the difficulties to ensure success or failure of any given action that is attempted. That takes a lot of the choice/power away from the players and puts it in the hands of the GM. The other way around? No real choices to be made. Just following a pre-defined "pass/fail" graphed route to success. I find that boring. I mean, there are ways of making such games interesting, but they all require some level of social interaction *and* unknown factors (typically player versus player). Games like Diplomacy and RoboRally do this very well. But those are players competing against each other. What about cooperative games (like most TTRPGs)? Player vs GM doesn't work well without die rolls (arguably at all).

I’m not sure of the relevance. Am I just too tired to process this, does it actually matter to the two ____s that need to be ____ed, or is it its own Topic?

Quertus
2022-11-04, 07:21 AM
So, again, my position, in summary:

Every aspect of a TTRPG involving meaningful decisions worth caring about needs to have a CaW Strategic layer, where the decisions the characters make have the ability to affect the outcome of the story in a substantive way.

The presence or absence of the CaS Tactical layer is optional.

——-

While not an RPG, a “would you rather…”, “choose your own adventure” format is a nice simplification with which to evaluate this question.

——-

Both “resolving things within the Strategic layer” and “rolling dice” are “chocolate”, IMO: the game is better with their liberal inclusion, in the right places, but the game needn’t be composed entirely of either.

Satinavian
2022-11-04, 07:36 AM
I seem to remember that your idea of CaW basically only includes static problems that get treated by the players like a riddle and not situations where the PCs and their adversaries compete on the strategic layer dynamically.

So no, this kind of CaW is not necessary. You can have very meaningful strategic gameplay that not conforms to this idea.

Quertus
2022-11-04, 07:46 AM
I seem to remember that your idea of CaW basically only includes static problems that get treated by the players like a riddle and not situations where the PCs and their adversaries compete on the strategic layer dynamically.

So no, this kind of CaW is not necessary. You can have very meaningful strategic gameplay that not conforms to this idea.

Terminology error: I’m talking about the strategic layer, not about CaW. CaW is being used to help differentiate what I mean by the word “Strategic layer”. So your comment is misplaced.

That said… um… never mind. I guess “you can have meaningful Strategic gameplay without the Strategic layer” isn’t actually worth discussing.

I think you may have an interesting point in here, but it’s hampered by your misinterpretation of my use of “CaW” in context. (EDIT: “the Strategic layer can be put to more uses than strict/pure/oldschool CaW utilizes” - would that be a valid rewording of your point?)

Satinavian
2022-11-04, 09:57 AM
(EDIT: “the Strategic layer can be put to more uses than strict/pure/oldschool CaW utilizes” - would that be a valid rewording of your point?)Yes.

But if you mean "strategic layer", please write "strategic layer" and not CaW. Those terms are not interchangeable.


Thinking about how long the last discussion about CaW dragged on, it is probably better to avoid the term altogether if you want to be better understood..

Quertus
2022-11-04, 11:30 AM
Yes.

But if you mean "strategic layer", please write "strategic layer" and not CaW. Those terms are not interchangeable.


Thinking about how long the last discussion about CaW dragged on, it is probably better to avoid the term altogether if you want to be better understood..

Different people are using words differently; therefore, I am referring to the CaW Strategic layer, to differentiate it from other definitions of “Strategy”-centric words.

How else would you recommend enhancing comprehension rates in this current quagmire of words, given my stated goals?

That said (or asked, or whatever)…

I agree that “pure” CaW underutilizes the strategic layer. Do you have any comments wrt how that impacts discussion of whether a game needs a strategic and/or tactical layer?

CaW says “there needs to be both a tactical and strategic layer. If we actually have to use the tactical layer, we’ve messed up. It’s a necessary fail state.”

CaS says “there needs to be a tactical layer, but the strategic layer needs to not exist / needs to be inaccessible / is cheating.”

So I see how CaW and CaS have commentary wrt the layers; I’m just drawing a blank on how “CaW underutilizes the strategic layer” informs our analysis of the necessity of the two layers. (EDIT: “the Strategic layer is more powerful than pure CaW gives it credit for, and, thus, the tactical layer actually is optional, contrary to what one would Divine from pure CaW”? That’s… kinda my position (“Strategic layer is required, Tactical layer is optional”), so… I agree?)

Satinavian
2022-11-04, 02:06 PM
I agree that “pure” CaW underutilizes the strategic layer. Do you have any comments wrt how that impacts discussion of whether a game needs a strategic and/or tactical layer?
Mostly i was just complaining about your confusing use of the word, not the underlying argument.

But if were to consider the question which of the layers is necessary, i would say neither. Most RPGs i have played have both layers, but i have been in games with only the strategic layer and i have been in games with only the tactical one. Those experiences were quite different, but i still would consider them as roleplaying experiences/games without any reservation. So neither layer is necessary.

However, if you are asking about meaningful decisions that change the outcome of the story, there is a strong correlation to the strategic layer. But those meaningful decisions are in itself, while often desired, optional as well. There are many groups out there who are perfectly happy to get railroaded through an existing story and mostly play the reaction of their characters to the unchainging events.

Quertus
2022-11-04, 02:13 PM
Mostly i was just complaining about your confusing use of the word, not the underlying argument.

But if were to consider the question which of the layers is necessary, i would say. Most RPGs i have played have both layers, but i have been in games with only the strategic layer and i have been in games with only the tactical one. Those experiences were quite different, but i still would consider them as roleplaying experiences/games without any reservation. So neither layer is necessary.

However, if you are asking about meaningful decisions that change the outcome of the story, there is a strong correlation to the strategic layer. But those meaningful decisions are in itself, while often desired, optional as well. There are many groups out there who are perfectly happy to get railroaded through an existing story and mostly play the reaction of their characters to the unchainging events.

“Every aspect of a TTRPG involving meaningful decisions worth caring about needs to have a CaW Strategic layer”, in the case where there are 0 such meaningful decisions does, indeed, work with your “getting railroaded through unchanging events”. It’s not the most obvious application of the rule, but it was designed and intended to not break for that use case.

Satinavian
2022-11-04, 02:21 PM
I am aware. I did not actually disagree with this particular statement.

gbaji
2022-11-04, 06:52 PM
Well, I tried to trim this down a bit. I really did. Then my fingers kinda got away from me. Sigh...


A good tester understands the value of “boundary conditions”. I’ve just helped define my preference by returning the result at a boundary condition. That result is hatred.

Again, we’re talking about your mis-statement of my preferences. And I’m a good tester, who understands the value of boundary conditions.

Do I need to spell out… fine. So, therefore, I’m demonstrating in memorable fashion a boundary condition, like Superman vs naked humans, where, even against billions of them, not only is the outcome a foregone conclusion, but I would expect very few people would want to manually roll out via individual attack and damage rolls.

This is far more worth talking about, because most reasonable people would be more likely to remember this example, and maybe even remember it if someone once again says something like, “Quertus always wants…”.

This whole bit. I'm not sure where you're going with it. Yes. I get the concept of a boundary condition. But that's you telling me your "anti-preference". If someone says "Hey Quertus. Based on your posting history, you seem to prefer strawberry ice cream", responding with "I don't know why you think that, I just hate chocolate" isn't terribly useful.

Literally no-one is disagreeing with your assertion that there's no value to spending time resolving a "superman vs naked humans" contest. No one. Ever. At all. It's not even remotely in question. Also, not remotely relevant to the issue.

The assumption behind even considering a mini-game is when we have a need to resolve something which is not automatically clear in terms of how it should be resolved (ie: *not* superman vs naked humans), and there do not appear to already be sufficient rules to manage that resolution. Again. That's the assumption here. So let's discuss cases where that is, well... the case. Right?

I'll also point out, as someone who works directly in a testing industry, that setting boundary conditions is only the very first step in testing. Actually, it's not even technically part of testing. It's like setting the environment in which you will run tests. The actual testing is all of the conditions inside the boundaries. So (to follow my silly analogy above), we don't talk about chocolate at all, but test whether vanilla is better than strawberry, or blueberry, or peach, or praline, or mint, or whatever. All the other "stuff" is what you test, not the boundary. If the only thing my testing equipment could output in such tests is "chocolate" or "not chocolate", it's a useless test. Ok, to be fair, that might be considered a basic "continuity test" or similar, used just to verify that the equipment is working or something, but those aren't actual test results that provide us any real data, much less allow us to make any decisions based on that data.

So yeah, if my response to your posts is that you may have a bit of bias towards certain systems, based on my own observations of your past posting on such topics, that's a valid thing for me to point out. The correct response should either be "yeah. Those are my preferences and that's why I prefer <insert resolution methodology here>" *or* "No, that's not my preference, my preferred method for resolution is really <insert some other methodology here instead>". Simply saying "I don't know where you got that idea", and then only talking about extreme examples of methods you dislike (and which everyone else, regardless of preference probably also dislikes), is not terribly useful.

Don't tell me what you dislike. Tell me what you like.



Nah. I almost always want to try to resolve things in the CaW Strategic layer. I also want to often, but not always succeed at doing so, and therefore sometimes have to break to the Tactical layer. But decidedly not on the stupid. In fact, one could perhaps build a spectrum with “the stupid” at one end, and use that to approximate how I might feel about breaking to the tactical layer. It won’t be 100% perfect accurate, as there are other factors involved, but it might be closer than your statement of my preferences.

Again. We all agree with that. But how about "non-stupid" conditions, in which breaking down to a more tactical layer may be useful? How do you feel about such things? I'm assuming every game session you play isn't purely strategic: "We will resolve the enemies plot by breaking into his headquarters in town while he's not there, stealing his plans, then interrupting his plans and saving the day", and the GM just says "That's a brilliant plan! You succeed. The city has been saved", and then you all have pizza or something? At some point, there must be some amount of drill down into details, right? And at some point, there must be some method used to resolve at least some conflicts those details involve. I mean, you have to determine if you can break into the HQ. Whether there are guards and security systems to deal with. Whether you can find the plans, depending on where they are, how well hidden, encoded, whatever. Then, once you have them, you have to figure out another plan to defeat the bad guys plan, right? And that may also involve many details.

I'm just struggling to understand how you can play a TTRPG without frequent dips into the "tactical layer", unless the entire game is just players and GM doing cooperative story time or something. Unless the entire game world is segmented into very clear and already known "things you can do" and "things you can't do", I'm not sure how this works.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the value of having a strong strategic layer and "plan" to act on. But my experience is that the vast majority of the "fun" of a TTRPG is actually playing out the actions, not just sitting around a table making the plans. So it's a bit strange to encounter someone who seems (again this is just my perception) to hold the exact opposite view. And yeah, I'm honestly curious if this is just a miscommunication or represents a complete style of play that I've never really encountered outside of a handful of pure strategy games (like Chess, Checkers, Diplomacy, etc), none of which are anything similar to what I'd call a TTRPG.


Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, doesn’t need to roll Spellcraft because his bonus is an order of magnitude higher than the DC.

If this is actually the case, all the time, in your game, then your GM is "doing it wrong". Can we both agree on that? And therefore also reject this as a case to examine? What about the situations where your mage is facing a situation where the DC is high enough to challenge his spellcraft skill? What do you do then?



If you have the less skilled guy make the attempt, draw 3 “combat consequences” cards for team 5, and roll Skill 4 - 3+ successes turn to page 42; fewer, turn to page 76. If you wait for the team1 Expert, draw 8 combat consequences cards for team 5, then roll Skill 8 - 3+ turn to page 42; fewer, turn to page 76.

Not seeing how that example invalidates “choose your own adventure” as sufficiently featureful to suffice as a simplification.

Er. Except you've converted your original "choose your own adventure" example into a die rolling situation. You've made a distinction without a difference. If "page 42" is where I wrote the part of my adventure that details what's behind the blast door when they open it, and "page 76" is where I wrote what happens if they fail to get the door open, you've basically not changed anything at all. You've just introduced drawing cards as the random generator rather than rolling dice. It's still random determination, right? No real difference except what physical media you are using to do so.

And it's not really "choose your own adventure", since the pages in the book are just the portions of my adventure notes where I detail different things that are there. You've managed to eliminate the very thing I was objecting to (the lack of random factors in a "choose your own adventure" book) and then insisted that this somehow invalidate my objection. Er. It doesn't. I don't care if we call the adventure a "book", and the portions of the adventure specific "pages in the book", or whether we use dice, or cards, or computer generated musical notes to determine outcomes, you've not invalidated my original objection, which was not to the tools used, but to the absence of any sort of random results generation engine being used.

If you're in agreement that using methods to generate random numbers to determine outcomes does, in fact, work, then that's great. I'm still not sure if that's what you're actually saying though.



(Also, my preference is for, well, stuff like you just described, tbh. That was such a good recipe, I might only half-heartedly ask if anyone can just blow the door open, or blast through the wall, or hack the lockdown, or reset the computers, or “fight defensively” / throw smoke grenades / attempt to parlay / whatever to reduce casualties while waiting for the door to open, or…)

Lol! When I was posting that, my first thought was "Quertus is going to ask about blowing through the wall, or nuking it from orbit, or something else to get around things". Yeah. Let's assume the "blast door", is somewhat by definition, weaker than the walls around it (cause otherwise that's pretty stupid, right?). And let's also assume that the entire reason you need to hack the security panel is because you cannot bring anything capable of blasting through the door to get inside with your strike team(s), due to size restrictions, need for stealth on approach, weight restrictions on the HAHO jump to get there, etc. And no, in this game world there exist no magical phasing tech to get through, nor teleportation tech that can penetrate, nor are any of the ventilation/water shafts large enough for you to get through, and let's also assume that you need something inside to be removed to "outside", intact (the princess held in the detention level, plans for the death star, or whatever), so you can't just nuke the facility and call it a day or something.


(Note that convincing me is not the same as convincing a true old school CaW maximally paranoid tactician of the value in letting dice decide one’s fate.)

I find it a personal challenge to force those old school paranoids into having to get their hands dirty by touching dice. I mean, unless they just want to automatically fail instead of having a chance to succeed, that's what they're going to have to do. And they'll just have to learn to love it or something... :smallbiggrin:



No, you’ve only… proven? Demonstrated? Whatever. You’ve only addressed one of the two requirements; namely, the value of randomization. You have not addressed the other half, demonstrating that the simplified “code your own adventure” format provides inadequate access to that tool. (Autocorrect, leaving it). In fact, I demonstrated how your example could be written in that format.

As I've already pointed out though, all you did was counter my argument that random number generation methods should be used to resolve conflicts in which there is doubt about the outcome, by... providing a more complex version of "choose your own adventure" in which you used random number generation to resolve the conflict. So you disagreed with me by agreeing with me?

It's not the format that I care about, or what we call the thing we wrote down the different outcome sections of the adventure in ("adventure notes" vs "choose your own adventure pages"). I care about whether we should employ some form of random tools to generate success/fail outcomes. That was literally my objection to your original example (the absence of random generation). You "solved" that by adding in random generation, so... what was your reasoning again?

Are we agreed that incorporating some form of random number generation to produce outcomes where skill vs difficulty provides for uncertain outcomes is a valid method to use? Just wanting some form of clarification here.

Because IME, a whole heck of a lot of gaming involves this. And yes, not to bring this back to the original topic, but it's also pretty much the entire point of creating any form of min-game at all. No one creates mini-games to resolve things in which the resolution is automatic and obvious. It's always the cases where it's not automatic, nor obvious, what the outcome should be that we look at for these things. And to go even further, it's cases where those two things exist *and* for which there do not appear to be sufficient rules already present to sufficiently generate outcome determinations given desired player choices and the game world environment, in which we're going to want to do this.

And yeah, at the risk of repeating myself, most of those mini-games are going to involve rules more complex than "If you have skill A, you can simply do thing A". I mean, you could do it that way, but then you actually are creating mini-games for the equivalent of "superman vs humans", which you and I (and everyone else) agrees is pointless. So, assuming we *don't* want to do that, then we're left with those other cases, and those other cases somewhat require some method of die rolling (or equivalent RNG) be involved. Again, at least to me, this is somewhat axiomatic. Any case where you might consider actually needing a mini-game is always goin to be one where the outcomes are uncertain, and your players maybe want some more details in which to use to resolve that uncertainty in a more satisfying and realistic way.

At least, that's what I think mini-games are for.

Cluedrew
2022-11-07, 07:59 AM
Even given how busy I've been recently, I am not so busy the reply that this had to take this long. Woops, sorry about that.
Now I’ve gotta read... if your second "definition" of "strategy" is conflating it with "tactics", then... I really have negative cares?The first part is true (I agree it is a conflation, but that is how the words are used sometimes) and the second part is my point. So I think we are done.


I knew I should have avoided using the word "Startegic" in this thread. :( Now I am curious, was your intent to refer to strategy, tactics or nothing?

Easy e
2022-11-07, 03:14 PM
Now I am curious, was your intent to refer to strategy, tactics or nothing?

My intent.... I'm not sure I even know anymore.

I think it was to address the concept that everything in an RPG needed a mini-game/effort vs impact/Cycle of Reward/Game Theory of some type in order to make it more impactful or meaningful to players.

gbaji
2022-11-07, 05:50 PM
My intent.... I'm not sure I even know anymore.

I think it was to address the concept that everything in an RPG needed a mini-game/effort vs impact/Cycle of Reward/Game Theory of some type in order to make it more impactful or meaningful to players.

IMO, the broad answer is "no". As Quertus has (correctly) pointed out, situations where the outcome is certain should just be narrated and then we move on. Every other situation should be resolved with a level of specificity proportional to how interesting/valuable that level of specificity is. And yeah, I get that this is a completely circular statement, but that's probably the most clearly stated way of looking at it.

The key here is "impactful or meaning full to players". This is always going to have to be balanced with "time/effort by the players". And this will vary wildly from table to table and game to game. Players will be willing to drill down into greater detail, and follow more specific rules if and only if the payoff is worth it to them. What "worth it" means will depend on the players. I think we've bashed the details beyond that point to death at this point though.

KorvinStarmast
2022-11-09, 05:15 PM
"Feeform" doesn't mean "without rules". It means "free in format", as in, a player can explain what they want to do in a natural language, in any way they see fit.

It is completely common for freeform games to have rules. One of the more common ones is "one person is chosen as a referee - in case of a dispute, the referee has final say". Tabletop roleplaying games copied this from wargaming and feeform wargames existed before modern tabletop roleplaying games. I am reminded of a game we played in High School called Dangerous Parallels, that had some elements of free form in it as moderated by the referee/teacher, but maybe that had too much structure to fit into 'free form' in the sense that you mean it.

This thread has been confusing me, and I think it’s mainly because people are using ‘strategic’ in a manner I find hard to follow. Indeed. TTRPGs only get strategic at the campaign level.

There are generally accepted as three levels of analysis, originally derived from military writing.

Tactical - what happens on the battlefield. Where each unit moves and fights.
Strategic - What you do before the battle starts. Where to fight, what troops to commit to the fight.
Operational - Resource allocation. Where to send reinforcements and supplies.
Not sure what military writing you are referring to, but a key aspect of the strategic is knowing what the aims are (indeed, establishing what they are in the first place) and then setting up a series of steps / operations to achieve them.
I won't go into the formal education in operational art, et al, I got while in the military but it's a little bit different from what you outline there. If I may restate your summary (which has some merit) somewhat differently:

- Strategy involves identifying aims and assets allocated to achieve those aims.
- The Operational art is resourcing, and positioning (in time and space) the assets to achieve those aims
- The tactics is, with a given set of assets, going out and using various steps (and METT-T analysis, et al) to materially achieve those aims - to include the tried and true 'economy of force and mass of effects at the decisive points'.
That last bit is alive and well in TTRPGs at the tactical level in a given combat encounter, and in some systems in the social encounters depending on which game currency one is allocating.

In RPG terms
Tactical - what happens on the battle-map or equivalent.
Strategic - The hexcrawl. Choosing where to go and with which members of the party. In an RPG choosing between knocking down the front door or sneaking in the back door is a strategic decision.
Operational - Choosing attributes, skills and equipment for your character.
OK, close enough, particularly in a game without an overarching campaign or goal.