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PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-19, 03:12 PM
I'm using a framework where you have several categories of power for the PCs--
Gritty play has the PCs as no better than the common man at any point. In fact, most of the "common" threats are overpowering for them. Life expectancies are short, and most of the difficulty is just surviving against overwhelming odds. Even at their best, mundane, day-to-day survival is not assured or trivial.

Heroic play has PCs that are always above the common man. They're...action heroes...even at level 1. Slightly bigger, faster, harder to kill, with some capabilities that are above the norm. But still on a comparable scale--even weaker threats can still be a challenge throughout the game. PCs are generally constrained to their own personal power--PCs don't get (built-in) armies or nations as class features, but may gain narrative influence and allies who are at the national scale. Even at the full extent of their power, they're still mortals, doing mortal things, subject to mortal constraints. They face overwhelming odds, overpowering monsters and succeed (if they do succeed) more by coordination, guile, and yes, luck than personal individual power. They don't wrestle with gods or even demon princes in their power mano a mano, although as a team they may be able to take down (after a hard fight) a demon prince who has become vulnerable by their previous actions. Even the weakest god or demigod is still on a completely different scale than the PCs.

Mythic play has PCs that are, at the height of their power, comparable to demigods. Their fights reshape the landscape just by collateral damage. They can take a mountain to the face and shrug it off. They can jump across the Grand Canyon. When they speak, mortals don't have much choice but to obey (or are mesmerized by the power). Reality is their play-toy, subject only to the opposition of other comparable creatures. Often, even at their weakest, mythic characters are still categorically different than mere heroes.

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Using these definitions, games tend to focus on one or at most two scales (if they want to do it well). Many focus at the gritty level and maybe graduate to the heroic at the height. Others may start at the upper heroic scale and go into the mythic. Some, like Exalted, start at mid-level mythic and go up from there. Others, like Warhammer Fantasy, tend to stick very firmly in the gritty. D&D 5e, in my reading, tends to pretend that you can do at least mid-gritty through low-end mythic. But in reality, it's firmly embedded in the heroic realm (with a few oddities/sharp edges).

None of these are better than others. They're all valid. But systems and styles that support one scale well often fail badly when expected to support others. And that's not the system's fault--that's using the system out of its scope.

Personally, I prefer the heroic scale for a lot of reasons.

1. I don't like dark, brutal works in general. Or high-logistic play. So much of the gritty style just doesn't appeal to me (this is pure personal preference).
2. As a worldbuilder, building coherent gritty and heroic worlds is much easier and more satisfying. Mythic settings tend to just be backdrops because the active play throws out the foundations by design.
3. Heroic is more forgiving as a play style. Characters are resilient enough even from low levels that the margins for error are not as low as they are in mythic play but the power ceilings are also not "well...anything's possible", so challenging PCs is more straightforward.
4. Heroic tends more toward action rather than
4a. gritty's "must plan everything perfectly, because any risk is too much risk"
4b mythic's tendency to get bogged down in collateral consequences/5d chess.

BRC
2022-10-19, 03:38 PM
Mythic play has PCs that are, at the height of their power, comparable to demigods. Their fights reshape the landscape just by collateral damage. They can take a mountain to the face and shrug it off. They can jump across the Grand Canyon. When they speak, mortals don't have much choice but to obey (or are mesmerized by the power). Reality is their play-toy, subject only to the opposition of other comparable creatures. Often, even at their weakest, mythic characters are still categorically different than mere heroes.


This actually has me wondering

By your system it seems that Mythic play is far more than just "Heroic Play, but you are more powerful", since it proposes a completely different relationship between the PCs and their setting. Heroic Scale play is about wielding your power within the setting, Mythic scale play is about wielding power OVER the setting.


It makes me wonder if one can achieve "Mythic" style play with characters that are technically mundane power levels, simply by changing what the game is about. If the game is about political manuevering rather than combat, then "Heroic" style play would have PCs as advisors and courtiers influencing and manipulating events, while a mythic-style game in the same system might have PC's as Monarchs and High-priests and the like. Sure, your character isn't fighting gods, but the game isn't ABOUT fighting gods, so the fact that you can't fight gods isn't especially relevant.

"Cyberpunk Megacorp CEOs the RPG" feels like it would have more in common with a mythic style game than anything else.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-19, 04:31 PM
This actually has me wondering

By your system it seems that Mythic play is far more than just "Heroic Play, but you are more powerful", since it proposes a completely different relationship between the PCs and their setting. Heroic Scale play is about wielding your power within the setting, Mythic scale play is about wielding power OVER the setting.


It makes me wonder if one can achieve "Mythic" style play with characters that are technically mundane power levels, simply by changing what the game is about. If the game is about political manuevering rather than combat, then "Heroic" style play would have PCs as advisors and courtiers influencing and manipulating events, while a mythic-style game in the same system might have PC's as Monarchs and High-priests and the like. Sure, your character isn't fighting gods, but the game isn't ABOUT fighting gods, so the fact that you can't fight gods isn't especially relevant.

"Cyberpunk Megacorp CEOs the RPG" feels like it would have more in common with a mythic style game than anything else.

Heroic characters can have power over the setting, but only by a bunch of actions over the course of an (extended) adventure or campaign, and only by working through NPCs that can have their own thoughts and decisions. They convince others to do things, but only indirectly (the players don't have the NPCs as puppets, sort of persuasive vs coercive power). Mythic characters have the unilateral, "character-sheet" power over the setting. They just DO things. If there are NPCs involved, those notional NPCs are just extensions of the PC. Minon-mancers get closest to this, but mythic scale minionmancers may be manipulating entire nations and don't have to be physically present to exert direct control instead of just "I control a squad-sized group of creatures in my immediate vicinity who need my input on every thought."

So in that "mythic heroic" game, you'd be playing a metynomy--sure, your character is High Priest. But really you're playing as if the whole church/cult is an extension of your character sheet (not a bunch of independent NPCs who can do things on their own). Doable, but a very different game it seems to me.

Quertus
2022-10-20, 10:49 AM
Sign me up for mythic: if I’m not killing the gods, taking over rival corporations, conquering nations, firing the idiots responsible for <insert travesty of your choice here>, running a church or nation, or otherwise actually making lasting change, what’s the point?

I can see how some could confuse “can actually do things” with “requires 5d Wizard Chess” if they cannot imagine playing the god emperor of mankind, and casually ordering an Exterminatus of a planet as a gentle slap on the wrist for one of your subordinates.

“Playing 5d Wizard Chess” exists at that sweet spot of “I have abilities worth having and thinking about”, “there’s things worth doing” and “I can’t just casually do them”. In other words, I have a hard time distinguishing this description of “heroic” play from “Combat as Sport on easy difficulty”. Because I can play “5d Wizard Chess”, Combat as War “the fight is over before it’s begun” with basic muggles in a mundane, “real world” setting, and apply that same caution to any level of ability above that, short of omnipotence. Once I can casually do whatever I want, then I no longer need to worry about CaW 5d Wizard Chess, and there’s no reason not to play in what has been described as the “heroic” style.

So I hear this thread as confusing “play style” for “power level”, and is actually “in praise of low stakes, low threat CaS play” (which could exist at any power level). Am I wrong?

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-20, 11:01 AM
So I hear this thread as confusing “play style” for “power level”, and is actually “in praise of low stakes, low threat CaS play” (which could exist at any power level). Am I wrong?

Yes, you're wrong. Absolutely, positively, 100% wrong and off base. CaW[1] vs CaS is completely orthogonal, as is stakes/threat.

[1] which I still contend is code for "playing the DM, not playing the game." In CaW as people describe it, characters don't matter. Only players do. And your ability to do things is entirely up to DM fiat.

Heroic scale characters can absolutely make lasting changes. They just can't do so by direct application of personal power (ie by on-character sheet abilities). They do so via the cumulative effects of their (smaller-scale) actions throughout the adventure/campaign and by gaining influence over (independent) NPCs. Mythic scale characters make lasting changes as an action, unless opposed by similarly mythic characters. That's the difference.

BRC
2022-10-20, 11:08 AM
Sign me up for mythic: if I’m not killing the gods, taking over rival corporations, conquering nations, firing the idiots responsible for <insert travesty of your choice here>, running a church or nation, or otherwise actually making lasting change, what’s the point?

I can see how some could confuse “can actually do things” with “requires 5d Wizard Chess” if they cannot imagine playing the god emperor of mankind, and casually ordering an Exterminatus of a planet as a gentle slap on the wrist for one of your subordinates.

“Playing 5d Wizard Chess” exists at that sweet spot of “I have abilities worth having and thinking about”, “there’s things worth doing” and “I can’t just casually do them”. In other words, I have a hard time distinguishing this description of “heroic” play from “Combat as Sport on easy difficulty”. Because I can play “5d Wizard Chess”, Combat as War “the fight is over before it’s begun” with basic muggles in a mundane, “real world” setting, and apply that same caution to any level of ability above that, short of omnipotence. Once I can casually do whatever I want, then I no longer need to worry about CaW 5d Wizard Chess, and there’s no reason not to play in what has been described as the “heroic” style.

So I hear this thread as confusing “play style” for “power level”, and is actually “in praise of low stakes, low threat CaS play” (which could exist at any power level). Am I wrong?

Eh, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I see the three styles as primarily about the relationship between the PC's and the setting, which does somewhat scale with power.


Gritty Scale is primarily about Survival, perhaps with a bit of room to eke out your own agendas, but the big question is always "Will you Survive", for whatever that means in the context of the game. It's about working within overwhelming limitations.


Heroic is about overcoming limitations, which in turn means that the limitations must be very real. "The Heroes slay a Dragon" is the classic Heroic fantasy because it means the Heroes (Mortals, Underdogs) have defeated something that seems to be more powerful than them (With a lot of the game itself being a sleight-of-hand to allow characters to defeat threats that appear More Powerful than they are). Heroic characters DO create lasting change, but they struggle to do so, so the question is "Will they succeed".


At Mythic scale, the game should be less about the question of "Will they Succeed", if you just scale up the threat so it's Demigods vs The Dragon That Eats The Sun, instead of Knights vs A Dragon, that's just Heroic with bigger numbers IMO. Mythic scale gameplay should be more about watching the characters bounce off each other than "Here's a threat, CAN YOU NUMBERS WELL ENOUGH TO BEAT IT?". The question is not "Will their actions produce Lasting Changes to the Setting" it's "What form will that Change take".

Hence my comment about "Cyberpunk Megacorp CEOs the RPG" feeling more like a mythic-scale game, even if it's not literally about demigods punching sun dragons.


Edit: Heroic scale games can create large-scale changes by building up a bunch of smaller-scale actions to produce major change.

Mythic scale games each individual action can be a large-scale change, with the final result being the result of characters bouncing their macro-scale changes off each other.

Theoboldi
2022-10-20, 11:16 AM
So, question: It seems to me as though these power scales are applicable mainly to fantasy roleplaying games, and the way personal power tends to lead to different playstyles in those?

I am asking this because, for instance, in a superhero roleplaying game individual characters tend to have the kind of Mythical personal power you mention here. However, at the same time play in these games tends to revolve around the kind of themes you seem to call Heroic. Reacting to external threats, enacting change by slowly convincing NPCs only, etc. That is not an absolute, mind you, just a typical description of the genre.
So these categories, for instance, would not work very well to describe power scales within it.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-20, 11:22 AM
So, question: It seems to me as though these power scales are applicable mainly to fantasy roleplaying games, and the way personal power tends to lead to different playstyles in those?

I am asking this because, for instance, in a superhero roleplaying game individual characters tend to have the kind of Mythical personal power you mention here. However, at the same time play in these games tends to revolve around the kind of themes you seem to call Heroic. Reacting to external threats, enacting change by slowly convincing NPCs only, etc. That is not an absolute, mind you, just a typical description of the genre.
So these categories, for instance, would not work very well to describe power scales within it.

Superhero games are heroic-pretending-to-be-mythic (what the poster above you called "heroic with bigger numbers"). Fundamentally, their flashy powers are really just descriptively higher power. But none of the real consequences. All of the scenery damage is just cosmetic; it doesn't actually change anything (at least in the movies). Sure, you throw mountains at each other. But...fundamentally you're just punching each other. You're limited to only affecting your own personal area. And the villains are "cosmic scale"...but really mostly end up just punching people as well. And there are heavy narrative barriers to actually using those powers to make any changes directly. Mostly "because otherwise the settings disintegrate entirely" barriers rather than anything inherent in the setting or the genre. They're meta-gentleman's agreements.

Theoboldi
2022-10-20, 11:30 AM
Superhero games are heroic-pretending-to-be-mythic (what the poster above you called "heroic with bigger numbers"). Fundamentally, their flashy powers are really just descriptively higher power. But none of the real consequences. All of the scenery damage is just cosmetic; it doesn't actually change anything (at least in the movies). Sure, you throw mountains at each other. But...fundamentally you're just punching each other. You're limited to only affecting your own personal area. And the villains are "cosmic scale"...but really mostly end up just punching people as well. And there are heavy narrative barriers to actually using those powers to make any changes directly. Mostly "because otherwise the settings disintegrate entirely" barriers rather than anything inherent in the setting or the genre. They're meta-gentleman's agreements.

I see, thank you for the elaboration.

That said, might this not mean it would be better to rephrase the power-scales to focus more clearly on the impact the individual character is meant to have on the setting, and how that relates to the importance placed on their continued existence? That seems to me to be the core of your framework.

While the power level of the PCs is certainly correlated to their scale, it does not necessarily define it. And putting it up front and center when talking about your different scales I think gives it undue importance.

NichG
2022-10-20, 11:48 AM
It's probably easier to hit Mythic in the superhero genre if you do a villain campaign. Unilaterally changing things for lots of people without their consent tends to go against the sorts of morals the superhero genre tends to center. Characters might be able to do such changes but be strongly motivated to avoid doing so.

That said, last superhero game I ran the players destroyed the ability for humans to be paranoid, created an afterlife, and introduced a wish-granting engine to the world that would spontaneously respond by granting the prayers of those suffering abuse. But it did take a lot of 'make a decision here, or someone a lot worse than you will decide instead' sorts of pressure to get to those points.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-20, 12:10 PM
I see, thank you for the elaboration.

That said, might this not mean it would be better to rephrase the power-scales to focus more clearly on the impact the individual character is meant to have on the setting, and how that relates to the importance placed on their continued existence? That seems to me to be the core of your framework.

While the power level of the PCs is certainly correlated to their scale, it does not necessarily define it. And putting it up front and center when talking about your different scales I think gives it undue importance.

Power level is tightly correlated with scale unless you arbitrarily lock off the consequences of powers. Which is a form of agency denial. Effectively, what superhero games (the ones with those conventions) do is turn the setting into set dressing and prevent it from acting normally, specifically to preserve the Heroic style of play that most people seem to grasp a whole lot better. They pretend to give these flashy powers...but don't really. Because you can't actually make the decisions involved without ruining everything. So those decisions are really fake choices.

Personally, I find those kinds of meta-rules to be a system smell. If the powers aren't really going to be able to have the expected effects...don't sell them as being that way. It's one reason that superhero fiction generally doesn't appeal to me--the worlds feel very shallow. Because fundamentally it's guys in capes punching each other, just with more special effects. There isn't fundamentally a difference between what they can do and what normal people can do, it's all just bigger numbers. And their opponents scale the same way, so it's just a waste of everyone's time. Unless you just want an opportunity to watch flashy special effects and eat popcorn. In which case you're all good.

Theoboldi
2022-10-20, 12:42 PM
Power level is tightly correlated with scale unless you arbitrarily lock off the consequences of powers. Which is a form of agency denial. Effectively, what superhero games (the ones with those conventions) do is turn the setting into set dressing and prevent it from acting normally, specifically to preserve the Heroic style of play that most people seem to grasp a whole lot better. They pretend to give these flashy powers...but don't really. Because you can't actually make the decisions involved without ruining everything. So those decisions are really fake choices.

Personally, I find those kinds of meta-rules to be a system smell. If the powers aren't really going to be able to have the expected effects...don't sell them as being that way. It's one reason that superhero fiction generally doesn't appeal to me--the worlds feel very shallow. Because fundamentally it's guys in capes punching each other, just with more special effects. There isn't fundamentally a difference between what they can do and what normal people can do, it's all just bigger numbers. And their opponents scale the same way, so it's just a waste of everyone's time. Unless you just want an opportunity to watch flashy special effects and eat popcorn. In which case you're all good.

Now this I disagree with entirely. There is no agency denial involved with the players acting within the pre-established conventions and norms of a genre they themselves want to play in. The flashy powers that these systems give are completely and utterly real, they will just be used in a manner that is not entirely free. This does not diminish them, nor does it mean they're just punching opponents with bigger numbers. The possible challenges and adventures, along with their feasible solutions, that exist in a game that has such powers are fundamentally different than those within a game world of ordinary people.

Mind, this is getting off-topic from your initial presentation of your scales of play, so I'm hesitant to pursue this much further.

I will say, however, that this only further convinces me that the scales you've described are fundamentally tied to meta-game expectations rather than actual PC power. Like you yourself are saying, despite the PCs nominally having the power to change the world at their whim in a superhero setting, the genre-expectations and setting design instead moves their adventures into a more Heroic scale. It all comes down to expected and allowed impact.

BRC
2022-10-20, 01:33 PM
Power level is tightly correlated with scale unless you arbitrarily lock off the consequences of powers. Which is a form of agency denial. Effectively, what superhero games (the ones with those conventions) do is turn the setting into set dressing and prevent it from acting normally, specifically to preserve the Heroic style of play that most people seem to grasp a whole lot better. They pretend to give these flashy powers...but don't really. Because you can't actually make the decisions involved without ruining everything. So those decisions are really fake choices.

Personally, I find those kinds of meta-rules to be a system smell. If the powers aren't really going to be able to have the expected effects...don't sell them as being that way. It's one reason that superhero fiction generally doesn't appeal to me--the worlds feel very shallow. Because fundamentally it's guys in capes punching each other, just with more special effects. There isn't fundamentally a difference between what they can do and what normal people can do, it's all just bigger numbers. And their opponents scale the same way, so it's just a waste of everyone's time. Unless you just want an opportunity to watch flashy special effects and eat popcorn. In which case you're all good.

I think the idea of relevant scale is important, rather than just dropping every character on a big list of "Who would win in a fight" and saying "We've got Mythic scale up here and Heroic scale down here". Not every game is an action-adventure combat simulator, and not all forms of power are combat based.

Like, imagine a mythic scale superhero game where one character has the ability to destroy a city, the general assumption is that they WON'T, because that's not what Superheros do, but plenty of heroes exist who COULD destroy a city if they put their mind to it.

Although this does raise a thought about what sort of things might appear in a mythic-scale superhero game.

Imagine a mythic-scale superhero game about defeating an alien invasion. One of the PC's, The Sentinel, is your standard issue Superman unstoppable brick package. The Sentinel has an ability, on their character sheet, called "Unstoppable Force", which says that they can straight up Win any combat encounter (Except against a foe with a similar tier of ability), however they still need to make a roll to determine how much collateral damage occurs, because if The Sentinel unleashes their full power against a legion of alien invaders, they're going to do serious damage to the surrounding landscape.


In my mind, Mythic-tier play is a lot less interested in "Will" than in "How" and "What", if that makes sense. The PC's COULD reasonably win just by unleashing The Sentinel against every alien on the planet, but doing so isn't necessarily the best way to approach the problem. Similarly, the game is a lot less about Tactical challenge, about making the "Correct" move to succeed than it is about exploring characters and situations, otherwise it's just Big Heroic.




I will say, however, that this only further convinces me that the scales you've described are fundamentally tied to meta-game expectations rather than actual PC power. Like you yourself are saying, despite the PCs nominally having the power to change the world at their whim in a superhero setting, the genre-expectations and setting design instead moves their adventures into a more Heroic scale. It all comes down to expected and allowed impact.

This is kind of what I'm getting at, it's less about raw power than it is about power relevant to character goals.

NichG
2022-10-20, 01:56 PM
I think the idea of relevant scale is important, rather than just dropping every character on a big list of "Who would win in a fight" and saying "We've got Mythic scale up here and Heroic scale down here". Not every game is an action-adventure combat simulator, and not all forms of power are combat based.

Like, imagine a mythic scale superhero game where one character has the ability to destroy a city, the general assumption is that they WON'T, because that's not what Superheros do, but plenty of heroes exist who COULD destroy a city if they put their mind to it.

Although this does raise a thought about what sort of things might appear in a mythic-scale superhero game.

Imagine a mythic-scale superhero game about defeating an alien invasion. One of the PC's, The Sentinel, is your standard issue Superman unstoppable brick package. The Sentinel has an ability, on their character sheet, called "Unstoppable Force", which says that they can straight up Win any combat encounter (Except against a foe with a similar tier of ability), however they still need to make a roll to determine how much collateral damage occurs, because if The Sentinel unleashes their full power against a legion of alien invaders, they're going to do serious damage to the surrounding landscape.


In my mind, Mythic-tier play is a lot less interested in "Will" than in "How" and "What", if that makes sense. The PC's COULD reasonably win just by unleashing The Sentinel against every alien on the planet, but doing so isn't necessarily the best way to approach the problem. Similarly, the game is a lot less about Tactical challenge, about making the "Correct" move to succeed than it is about exploring characters and situations, otherwise it's just Big Heroic.

More examples from the last thing I ran in superhero genre, which I think was squarely in Mythic:

- Collective human psychological biases and trends were becoming sentient egregores with power over things in the domains of those biases, and the heroes had to deal with the matter that killing the egregore killed the ability of humans to partake of that psychological bias. They dealt with a sentient religion that was the 'body' of the concept of otherness, an entity that was the embodiment of suspicion and paranoia, and made an alliance with the egregore formed from the general 'desire to cast off or lock away a part of onesself'.

- There was a general issue that the heroes' universe was being used as a sandbox to invent weapons for conceptual warfare - basically trying to find concepts so potent that they would dominate regardless of how they were implemented by the physics of a universe, in order to create gear that could be used in cross-universe battles. As a result some crippled 'editing tools' had been scattered throughout the world, which was the origin of powers. So the heroes used those editing tools to try to tamper-proof their own universe and lock it down against that sort of physics editing effect by basically having a backup of the original physics that was constantly automatically re-imposing itself.

- As some examples of the these conceptual weapons they had to deal with and fight against, one area they were trying to get into was guarded by something that amounted to 'the concept of exponential growth'. One of the PCs basically ended up wielding the concept of 'there are objective truths'.

- Ultimately the BBEG of the campaign was this multiversal force that represented the idea of 'cooption of existing ideas or movements to alternate purpose', which finally invaded and attacked the heroes' works via altering the cognitive processes of sentient beings everywhere to hook them into a universe-mind (with the fluff of being a sort of mindvirus version of highly exploitative social media). So essentially the final boss was 'the idea of things like Facebook', which the party in turn fought by poisoning the well of the ideas that composed it, co-opting it in turn.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-20, 02:41 PM
I think the idea of relevant scale is important, rather than just dropping every character on a big list of "Who would win in a fight" and saying "We've got Mythic scale up here and Heroic scale down here". Not every game is an action-adventure combat simulator, and not all forms of power are combat based.

Like, imagine a mythic scale superhero game where one character has the ability to destroy a city, the general assumption is that they WON'T, because that's not what Superheros do, but plenty of heroes exist who COULD destroy a city if they put their mind to it.

Although this does raise a thought about what sort of things might appear in a mythic-scale superhero game.

Imagine a mythic-scale superhero game about defeating an alien invasion. One of the PC's, The Sentinel, is your standard issue Superman unstoppable brick package. The Sentinel has an ability, on their character sheet, called "Unstoppable Force", which says that they can straight up Win any combat encounter (Except against a foe with a similar tier of ability), however they still need to make a roll to determine how much collateral damage occurs, because if The Sentinel unleashes their full power against a legion of alien invaders, they're going to do serious damage to the surrounding landscape.


In my mind, Mythic-tier play is a lot less interested in "Will" than in "How" and "What", if that makes sense. The PC's COULD reasonably win just by unleashing The Sentinel against every alien on the planet, but doing so isn't necessarily the best way to approach the problem. Similarly, the game is a lot less about Tactical challenge, about making the "Correct" move to succeed than it is about exploring characters and situations, otherwise it's just Big Heroic.



This is kind of what I'm getting at, it's less about raw power than it is about power relevant to character goals.


More examples from the last thing I ran in superhero genre, which I think was squarely in Mythic:

- Collective human psychological biases and trends were becoming sentient egregores with power over things in the domains of those biases, and the heroes had to deal with the matter that killing the egregore killed the ability of humans to partake of that psychological bias. They dealt with a sentient religion that was the 'body' of the concept of otherness, an entity that was the embodiment of suspicion and paranoia, and made an alliance with the egregore formed from the general 'desire to cast off or lock away a part of onesself'.

- There was a general issue that the heroes' universe was being used as a sandbox to invent weapons for conceptual warfare - basically trying to find concepts so potent that they would dominate regardless of how they were implemented by the physics of a universe, in order to create gear that could be used in cross-universe battles. As a result some crippled 'editing tools' had been scattered throughout the world, which was the origin of powers. So the heroes used those editing tools to try to tamper-proof their own universe and lock it down against that sort of physics editing effect by basically having a backup of the original physics that was constantly automatically re-imposing itself.

- As some examples of the these conceptual weapons they had to deal with and fight against, one area they were trying to get into was guarded by something that amounted to 'the concept of exponential growth'. One of the PCs basically ended up wielding the concept of 'there are objective truths'.

- Ultimately the BBEG of the campaign was this multiversal force that represented the idea of 'cooption of existing ideas or movements to alternate purpose', which finally invaded and attacked the heroes' works via altering the cognitive processes of sentient beings everywhere to hook them into a universe-mind (with the fluff of being a sort of mindvirus version of highly exploitative social media). So essentially the final boss was 'the idea of things like Facebook', which the party in turn fought by poisoning the well of the ideas that composed it, co-opting it in turn.

Yeah, I'd say both of those are quite firmly in the Mythic scope. I guess reframing it in terms of "scope of change/influence" and "who can oppose you/veto your actions" would work--

Gritty protagonists rarely have much scope for change at all. If they can make changes, they're temporary and local. And anyone and everything (including just pure survival) opposes/vetos actions...when they see them. Success is more about avoiding notice of all the things that can crush you until you can find the one perfect opportunity to hit them in their weak point. Failure at any stage generally means death (or worse). The primary question is "do you survive".

Heroic protagonists have personal scope for change. They have direct influence over their immediate surroundings, but can't generally directly control events at a large distance. To control organizations, they have to work through independent-minded NPCs (ie those NPCs are not modeled as part of the character's immediate power set). Even minionmancy is on a personal, "squad level" scale, not a national/universal scale. Large-scale or permanent changes tend to be the accumulated result of many actions and interactions and rely on relationships as much as personal power. You can be a king, but you can't be a borg queen. Numbers can get pretty big here, but in the end, solutions tend to revolve around going out there and punching things (possibly metaphorically speaking). You can be opposed by a wide range of things both weaker and stronger; mythic-scale actors can veto you but you can generally act (possibly with allies, possibly not) against most lower things. Lower-power creatures, in large numbers, are still often a threat. Yet you're not effortlessly crushed by simple survival or "mundane" concerns. The chances of a character dying to a random foot infection are, while not zero, smaller. Game styles here tend to avoid lol-random deaths or at least make them less frequent. Failure doesn't mean death, and death doesn't necessarily mean failure (heroic sacrifices, resurrection, etc). They see both the common man AND the Powers That Be. The primary question is "do you succeed".

Mythic protagonists have non-local scope for change. At the high side, they may be able to change things like abstract concepts. At the low side, their mere presence in a setting changes the setting. Everyone and everything else either gets out of their way, is crushed (often by accident), or is mythic scope itself. They can really only be opposed by other mythic forces--no quantity of heroic or gritty opponents can meaningfully impede them unless the mythic actor chooses to be impeded (such as by codes of conduct, etc). They can make large-scale changes to the setting by personal action, in the course of business. Sometimes unintentionally, just as a side effect of other actions. Often, death (as mortals know it anyway) isn't even really a meaningful thing for mythic actors. Failure is merely the non-progress toward a goal or the progress toward an undesired goal. Mythic actors can be defeated, but not easily. Here, the general question is "what do you succeed at, and at what cost?"

NichG
2022-10-20, 03:20 PM
I'd caveat the thing about mythic actors not being opposable by heroic ones as being that 'the character abilities of heroic actors cannot realistically interfere with the abilities of a mythic actor'. It's a trope, and an important one to many genres, that an omnipotent being isn't necessarily infinitely wise. A heroic-level spy happening on the right piece of information about one mythic actor and choosing to release it to another, for example, could absolutely cause the defeat of the one mythic actor. Or there are often particular level-crossing exceptions built into things, like the possibility for heroic or even gritty level actors to enact a summoning which a mythic level actor is compelled to respond to.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-20, 03:47 PM
I'd caveat the thing about mythic actors not being opposable by heroic ones as being that 'the character abilities of heroic actors cannot realistically interfere with the abilities of a mythic actor'. It's a trope, and an important one to many genres, that an omnipotent being isn't necessarily infinitely wise. A heroic-level spy happening on the right piece of information about one mythic actor and choosing to release it to another, for example, could absolutely cause the defeat of the one mythic actor. Or there are often particular level-crossing exceptions built into things, like the possibility for heroic or even gritty level actors to enact a summoning which a mythic level actor is compelled to respond to.

Yeah, that's fair. I had in mind direct opposition, not "trick/convince another mythic entity to help".

Mechalich
2022-10-20, 06:59 PM
Yeah, I'd say both of those are quite firmly in the Mythic scope. I guess reframing it in terms of "scope of change/influence" and "who can oppose you/veto your actions" would work--

I think, fundamentally, you're talking about the relationship between personal power - as possessed by the PCs and comparable allies/antagonists/bystanders/etc. - and societal power - as possessed by states/institutions/criminal organizations/religions/etc.

In the 'Gritty' state, societal power is overwhelmingly dominant, and characters are mostly just trying to avoid being crushed and to at best preserved their loved ones, their community, and other small-scale aspects of personal importance. This sort of scenario is commonly found in dystopian settings where the state can, and eventually will, martial overwhelming force to find and destroy anything it sees as a threat. In fantasy it's common in grimdark settings where 'the gods are evil' or 'magic is evil' or some other metaphysical constraint basically makes actual progress impossible.

In the 'Heroic' state, societal power is still dominant, but not overwhelmingly so, and the characters may have superior power in a given time and place. The 'wanted meter' in a game like GTA is a good example of this. Society has enough resources to eventually crush any character no matter how hard they rampage, but characters are capable of getting an awful lot done so long as they are discrete enough not to bring down the full wrath upon their heads. It may even be possible for powerful characters to enact change over time, given the right convergence of scale and process. For instance, effecting broad-level political change in a city through the expedient of systematically murdering all the corrupt officials (the initial plot of Arrow) is conceivable.

In the 'Mythic' state personal power is greater than societal power. Individuals, including both the PCs and their opponents are sufficiently powerful that the resources of society cannot constrain them. They can do basically whatever they want, and only their peers have any chance of stopping them, the 'masses' are irrelevant. The classic example here is Superman, who is fully capable of turning the DC Earth into whatever he wants it to be - and in numerous alternate universes, has done so - whenever he decides to do so. He may choose not to do so - and one of the central constraints of DC is that because Superman chooses not to rule, no other super gets to either - but it's his choice, billions of people are simple stuck with whatever the living god decides.

Now, a central point to all of this is that these setups depend on relative power balance, not any absolutes. If a society is weak, the amount of power that can be can to any individual before the society inevitably becomes a mythic one, even if it claims to be otherwise, is quite low. By contrast, if the power level of society is extremely high, characters can have truly epic levels of power and still be trapped in a gritty setting. Societal power, notably, is controlled primarily by tech level, other things like organizational strength and institutional unity do matter, but technology counts hardest. As a result, you can have very low power characters operating in a mythic setup simply because society is minimal or even nonexistent (for example, Beast Wars, in which the various Transformers aren't actually very powerful, but because its 4 million BC there's literally nothing else on Earth to oppose them). On the other hand, if technology is incredibly strong, things can still be gritty. Human characters in the Culture universe, for example, have a wide range of superpowers that come from just being Culture citizens and can force multiply with a huge array of weapons and armor and such, but even the weakest Minds - superintelligent AIs - can slap any number of them down with a thought and human ability to effect change is essentially dependent upon arguing and begging with minds, not any actions they themselves take.

Anonymouswizard
2022-10-20, 07:36 PM
Now I'm just thinking of Nobilis, and how it caps the power scale not at superhero levels, but at poetic levels*. It's more than reasonable for a Noble to walk through a packed convention, steal the heart of everybody there, and then trade that love for something more reasonable. Like you can still kick mountains into orbit if you want, but that's still a step lower than working in metaphor. Jenna Moran at this point pretty much defines what mythic tier play aspires to be, where PCs conspire to move cities just because they're spoiling the view.

And yeah, Nobilis is very firmly on the mythic scale. Interesting one of it's spinoff games Glitch actually arguably pulls the scale down to Heroic without altering the power level (although the PCs there don't have access to poetic scale actions). A lot can be achieved with playing around with how much power you're willing to use. Yes a Strategist is a demigod aristocrat of the primordial void able to stand up to the Powers That Be, but they don't have a handy way to walk off the costs without moving closer to the end of their story.


I'm also trying to work out where the latter stages of a Scion game sit on this list. Yeah you're a literal god with the power to reshape society, but both Fate and the other, mostly more powerful gods start to place limits on what you can reasonably do.

Of course you also have games like UA3, where characters are firmly at the gritty level but have the tools to make Heroic or even Mythic tier changes. It's a mess, and I'm really not sure the power and reach scales should be conflated as much as they are.


* I'd really like to see more games work in metaphor, the only other one I own that tries to engage in that is Don't Rest Your Head.

King of Nowhere
2022-10-21, 05:22 AM
Serms to me that heroic is by far the most common and most preferred categorization because it's just wider.
At heroic level you "overcone challenges", which could mean anything.
Even in a gritty game you want to work on achieving goals as soon as immediate survival is achieved. And in a mythic game, you've got to have some challenge to keep you occupied.
So the scenarios that cannot be described as heroic are rare.
That said, maybe there's a lot more people out there playing games i don't know about

animorte
2022-10-21, 05:32 AM
From looking at this, it presents to me that the first couple levels of D&D is gritty. Just 1 and 2, maybe 3. After that everything is heroic, up until level 17. This is where mythic kind of takes over.

Based on that, it’s safe to say that D&D overall is a heroic game. If you want to reach those other extremes, there may be optional rules to get closer, but not often there. This includes gritty realism, limited to low-level and high threat campaign, and starting at or near level 20.

Basically if you prefer either end of the spectrum, there are other games out there that make it easier, that have it built in to their core. Most of us likely prefer the heroic feel, and that’s one of the reasons D&D has managed to stay on top.

Anonymouswizard
2022-10-21, 06:59 AM
And in a mythic game, you've got to have some challenge to keep you occupied.


A well designed Mythic tier system can still provide plenty of challenges. In Nobilis you're warring against enemies with equally strong but different powers to you, have to deal with an obstructive code of conduct, and have to make sure your party next month is suitably epic. Glitch similarly has you face enemies of great power, but they're mostly getting in the way of your actual goals, and do you actually have to do stuff today or can you collapse on the sofa and do nothing?

Notably Glitch is explicitly a game where you can disintegrate a rhino with a thought and then utterly fail at smoking in the rain.

But in the two games everything comes down to the meaning of your actions.

KorvinStarmast
2022-10-21, 07:04 AM
I get the feeling that you'd like Mazes and Minotaurs. It is described as being a game of heroic adventures in the mythic age. :smallsmile:

Willie the Duck
2022-10-21, 08:28 AM
From looking at this, it presents to me that the first couple levels of D&D is gritty. Just 1 and 2, maybe 3. After that everything is heroic, up until level 17. This is where mythic kind of takes over.

Based on that, it’s safe to say that D&D overall is a heroic game. If you want to reach those other extremes, there may be optional rules to get closer, but not often there. This includes gritty realism, limited to low-level and high threat campaign, and starting at or near level 20.

Well, I think that's a good question. Looking at the ninth level spells in the game (and acknowledging that Wish may or may not be an exception based entirely on what the DM lets fly), virtually all of them are effects which happen on a very immediate, personal scale. You might be able to Gate in a representative of a heavenly or infernal realm, and they might do some pretty epic things, but even most of those are very immediate and personal-scale. Various weather-, earthquake-, and similar style spells also have scales usually in the hundreds of feet, if not less. The 3rd edition version of Genesis/Create Demiplane is perhaps the story-wise most epic thing one does - you're creating a limited universe, but even then it's a 400,000 cubic-foot structure with no native life (kind of the pretend-mythic of superhero settings, as mentioned above).

Characters in (WotC) D&D tend to affect the world by slaying singular threats, convincing powers that be to do things, raising armies, or discovering The Macguffin-of-campaign-alteration.

In the TSR era, after levels 9 or 10, your character started accruing followers, could potentially build a keep or castle, and had the potential to start effecting the world mythically in the Shadowrun CEO vein. There were rarely actual rules for most of this (other than initial followers and castle building costs), excepting in the Companion set of the BECMI(/RC) line, so it might break the OP framing of actual character sheet rules structures.

NichG
2022-10-21, 10:37 AM
Energy Transformation Field, Teleportation Circle, Polymorph Any Object, and a handful of other permanent or self perpetuating spells are the main gateways to mythic actions in 3.5. ETF lets you turn anyone with access to at will 1st level effects into infinite casting engines, so you can industrialize with it. PaO of things into the right materials or creatures has a reach much further than it's volume limits would suggest, and can be permanent.

Then there's stuff like psicrystal+forced dream. Time loop shenanigans tend to extend a bit into mythic due to the multiplicative effects of time on consequences - even if you can't just destroy an empire, if that empire could be destroyed you can choose for that to be the timeline you keep.

gbaji
2022-10-21, 12:05 PM
I think, fundamentally, you're talking about the relationship between personal power - as possessed by the PCs and comparable allies/antagonists/bystanders/etc. - and societal power - as possessed by states/institutions/criminal organizations/religions/etc.

Yeah. I'd even go a bit further and say that it's about how much power/control the PCs can exert on the world around them, and at what "level" that is happening. The counter, of course, is how much the game world impacts/controls the PCs. The "gritty" level isn't often called "street level" for nothing. The PCs tend to operate on a smaller scale, with much more narrow scope of actions and effects, but within that area, can have significant impact. These sorts of campaign settings tend to focus on local stuff, which are elevated to "huge" status, due purely to the focus itself. Stopping that street gang from distributing their recent batch of drugs on the mean streets might be a typical objective, with finding out the "big boss" and defeating him being the "epic" level conclusion of an entire campaign. Yet, on the grand scale, that big boss is a relatively minor guy, controlling a few small blocks in one city. These games work very well precisely because we just don't worry about everything "outside" the scope of the game.

In heroic level games, the PCs are operating on a large scale. Cities, nations, or the world are their playground. They travel. They are big fish often finding themselves in a variety of different size ponds as they go about doing what they do. And yeah, at that level, they may not even bother to stop and deal with much of the "gritty" stuff. Let the local's deal with that, we've got bigger fish to fry, right? It does not have to actually be power level, but the scale and scope that they are dealing with. I personally find that this is the biggest/easiest scale to run and play in. Most people will find heroic campaigns enjoyable, they provide for a wide variety of play, and are "stable" in that you can run them for a relatively long period of time without them either ending (you cleaned up the streets), or dissolving into silliness (we became the overlords of the universe, so now we're hopping universes to increase our overlord status, and now we're thinking about conquering thought itself!).

As I kinda touched on above, mythic is... well mythic (or epic, or whatever superlative you choose to use). The scope and scale of these sorts of games tend to be "grand". PCs tend to have a massive impact on the world around them, and as a few people mentioned, it's less about overcoming the specific challenge in front of you as thinking up new fronts to deal with in the first place. It can be a lot of fun, but is also *very* dependent on the players being creative, and the GM being on a similar page, and getting the "feel" of things right. Also, as I mentioned, it can tend to get a bit "too grand" over time and runs the risk of becoming boring. Dunno. Not a huge fan.

King of Nowhere
2022-10-21, 01:20 PM
Energy Transformation Field, Teleportation Circle, Polymorph Any Object, and a handful of other permanent or self perpetuating spells are the main gateways to mythic actions in 3.5. ETF lets you turn anyone with access to at will 1st level effects into infinite casting engines, so you can industrialize with it. PaO of things into the right materials or creatures has a reach much further than it's volume limits would suggest, and can be permanent.

Then there's stuff like psicrystal+forced dream. Time loop shenanigans tend to extend a bit into mythic due to the multiplicative effects of time on consequences - even if you can't just destroy an empire, if that empire could be destroyed you can choose for that to be the timeline you keep.

that's a bit of a weird case. in that the rules of the game were not supposed to give you that kind of power, and the fact that by following them exactly you can change civilization is the result of exploits.
also, most tables do not play like that, either by agreement to not use those kind of spells - especially infinite combos - or by flat out rule that those combos do not exhist or do have severe limitations.
those tables that do use that stuff often use it as worldbuilding element.

Telok
2022-10-21, 02:42 PM
So I've got an odd one. A game with background points & defined effects where the backgrounds are... it varies but from multiplicative to exponential how "big" the background gets.

If a character blows all their backgrounds on extra cyberwear & magic items then they're pretty much a top of the line SR street sam playing gritty. Total personal death on wheels, can grow into sinking the Titanic in a hit or two, damaging kilometer long starships with their literal head-banging ability. But still gritty and being capable of going down for the dirt nap if run over by a dozen public transit busses or a few cop cars worth of civil disturbance response. Leap tall buildings is "yes" but the government space station can still nuke you from orbit and there's nothing but "nukes fall, all die" that you can say.

Spend those background points differently and you get to be a starship captian capable of saying "nukes fall, all die" on entire cities. Or maybe you're that CEO of a mega-corp. Maybe you own a small planet in the fashonable part of the galaxy. There's still people & orgs bigger than you that can swat you down with a fleet of starships or such, but you don't really care about a couple cars of cops trying to arrest you. They can't do anything more than waste some of your time.

Spend those background points differently (and minmax a little) again and you can start play as a starfleet admiral with 10,000 loyal followers, Pelor is your career mentor (literally and directly), and for some reason you have Lucifer's personal cell phone number and he's always willing to deal. With effort you can move planets and the cars full of cops are your minions.

That's backgrounds, not the character's core smart/strong/sexy doctor/assassin/fighter pilot core competency. Yet these characters are expected to (and generally do) play well in the same party on the same adventures. The whole gritty-hero-mythic thing sounds nice and does match a lot of rpgs where the pcs are expected to be a small isolated group depending on their personal ability to project physical force. I'm just not yet convinced it really... does anything in general? I guess? If its specific to a system or style or genre I can see it fitting, because I'm looking at what I wrote and there's a couple several generic-ish system that can probably do the same stuff with the right options turned on/off.

Anonymouswizard
2022-10-21, 02:58 PM
So I've got an odd one. A game with background points & defined effects where the backgrounds are... it varies but from multiplicative to exponential how "big" the background gets.

If a character blows all their backgrounds on extra cyberwear & magic items then they're pretty much a top of the line SR street sam playing gritty. Total personal death on wheels, can grow into sinking the Titanic in a hit or two, damaging kilometer long starships with their literal head-banging ability. But still gritty and being capable of going down for the dirt nap if run over by a dozen public transit busses or a few cop cars worth of civil disturbance response. Leap tall buildings is "yes" but the government space station can still nuke you from orbit and there's nothing but "nukes fall, all die" that you can say.

Spend those background points differently and you get to be a starship captian capable of saying "nukes fall, all die" on entire cities. Or maybe you're that CEO of a mega-corp. Maybe you own a small planet in the fashonable part of the galaxy. There's still people & orgs bigger than you that can swat you down with a fleet of starships or such, but you don't really care about a couple cars of cops trying to arrest you. They can't do anything more than waste some of your time.

Spend those background points differently (and minmax a little) again and you can start play as a starfleet admiral with 10,000 loyal followers, Pelor is your career mentor (literally and directly), and for some reason you have Lucifer's personal cell phone number and he's always willing to deal. With effort you can move planets and the cars full of cops are your minions.

That's backgrounds, not the character's core smart/strong/sexy doctor/assassin/fighter pilot core competency. Yet these characters are expected to (and generally do) play well in the same party on the same adventures. The whole gritty-hero-mythic thing sounds nice and does match a lot of rpgs where the pcs are expected to be a small isolated group depending on their personal ability to project physical force. I'm just not yet convinced it really... does anything in general? I guess? If its specific to a system or style or genre I can see it fitting, because I'm looking at what I wrote and there's a couple several generic-ish system that can probably do the same stuff with the right options turned on/off.

I'm guessing this is Dungeons: the Dragoning? To be fair it's also similar to many games with ranked advantages, a Chronicles of Darkness character can spend their Merit points on Fighting Styles or combat boosts, or they can spend it on Resources, Contacts, Allies, and Status, with the latter in some ways being the god social merit. Status (Military) 5 means we're looking at the upper end of officer ranks.

Sure, CofD doesn't run at quite the level you're describing, but Scion and Exalted do. I should really get the other Scion 2e books so I can see just how many followers a demigod can nab.

BRC
2022-10-21, 03:00 PM
So I've got an odd one. A game with background points & defined effects where the backgrounds are... it varies but from multiplicative to exponential how "big" the background gets.

If a character blows all their backgrounds on extra cyberwear & magic items then they're pretty much a top of the line SR street sam playing gritty. Total personal death on wheels, can grow into sinking the Titanic in a hit or two, damaging kilometer long starships with their literal head-banging ability. But still gritty and being capable of going down for the dirt nap if run over by a dozen public transit busses or a few cop cars worth of civil disturbance response. Leap tall buildings is "yes" but the government space station can still nuke you from orbit and there's nothing but "nukes fall, all die" that you can say.

Spend those background points differently and you get to be a starship captian capable of saying "nukes fall, all die" on entire cities. Or maybe you're that CEO of a mega-corp. Maybe you own a small planet in the fashonable part of the galaxy. There's still people & orgs bigger than you that can swat you down with a fleet of starships or such, but you don't really care about a couple cars of cops trying to arrest you. They can't do anything more than waste some of your time.

Spend those background points differently (and minmax a little) again and you can start play as a starfleet admiral with 10,000 loyal followers, Pelor is your career mentor (literally and directly), and for some reason you have Lucifer's personal cell phone number and he's always willing to deal. With effort you can move planets and the cars full of cops are your minions.

That's backgrounds, not the character's core smart/strong/sexy doctor/assassin/fighter pilot core competency. Yet these characters are expected to (and generally do) play well in the same party on the same adventures. The whole gritty-hero-mythic thing sounds nice and does match a lot of rpgs where the pcs are expected to be a small isolated group depending on their personal ability to project physical force. I'm just not yet convinced it really... does anything in general? I guess? If its specific to a system or style or genre I can see it fitting, because I'm looking at what I wrote and there's a couple several generic-ish system that can probably do the same stuff with the right options turned on/off.

I'd say the Scales here are more about describing a type of GAME than a type of System. Most systems will only work in one scale, but there's nothing that says a single system can't work across multiple. I can even think of one system (All Flesh Must Be Eaten) that has this sort of difference explicitly built in, with a "Survivor" mode for playing scrappy everymen trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, and a "Hero" mode for playing soldiers and grizzled badasses chopping you way through zombie hordes, as a nice "Gritty vs Heroic" type of separation.


It depends on what you want to get out of the game.

Now, in that system you describe, where a character can be anything from the most badass mercenary to a Starship admiral to the CEO of a megacorp with a folder full of divine blackmail material, I'd ask what form does gameplay usually take?


Is gameplay primarily about going in and personally dealing with problems, with background abilities being a tool you have to help you in that regard? Where the Megacorp CEO's background lets them show up to the fight with a cutting edge laser cannon and a team full of lawyers to deal with the collateral damage? In that case, you're most likely looking at a Heroic game.

If the Gameplay is primarily about making decisions using your background statuses and seeing how that falls out, saying "I send a car full of cybercops to arrest the baddies" as your primary move, you're probably looking at more of a Mythic scale game.


If gameplay does both, bouncing between top-level "Make Big Decision" phases and on-the-ground "Go on an Adventure" phases, then I guess you're jumping between the two styles of play. That sounds hard to pull off with Mythic/Heroic specifically (I could see a game that swaps between Gritty and Heroic fairly easily), but I can believe it could be done.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-21, 04:36 PM
I'd say the Scales here are more about describing a type of GAME than a type of System. Most systems will only work in one scale, but there's nothing that says a single system can't work across multiple. I can even think of one system (All Flesh Must Be Eaten) that has this sort of difference explicitly built in, with a "Survivor" mode for playing scrappy everymen trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, and a "Hero" mode for playing soldiers and grizzled badasses chopping you way through zombie hordes, as a nice "Gritty vs Heroic" type of separation.


It depends on what you want to get out of the game.

Now, in that system you describe, where a character can be anything from the most badass mercenary to a Starship admiral to the CEO of a megacorp with a folder full of divine blackmail material, I'd ask what form does gameplay usually take?


Is gameplay primarily about going in and personally dealing with problems, with background abilities being a tool you have to help you in that regard? Where the Megacorp CEO's background lets them show up to the fight with a cutting edge laser cannon and a team full of lawyers to deal with the collateral damage? In that case, you're most likely looking at a Heroic game.

If the Gameplay is primarily about making decisions using your background statuses and seeing how that falls out, saying "I send a car full of cybercops to arrest the baddies" as your primary move, you're probably looking at more of a Mythic scale game.


If gameplay does both, bouncing between top-level "Make Big Decision" phases and on-the-ground "Go on an Adventure" phases, then I guess you're jumping between the two styles of play. That sounds hard to pull off with Mythic/Heroic specifically (I could see a game that swaps between Gritty and Heroic fairly easily), but I can believe it could be done.

Yeah. Note I said heroic play, not heroic systems.

Most systems are most comfortable in one style (writ broadly, with some overlap because the categories aren't entirely rigid). Or if they handle two, it's usually at the points where those two styles meet. So a high-gritty (say realistic vietnam-style warfare) to low-heroic (some affordances for extra survival and narrative power beyond what a grunt would normally have, things like "you conveniently happen to be at the leverage point to turn the course of the war"). Or (like 3e) from a mid-heroic (yes, low-level 3e is mid-heroic if you're not all T5+) to a sorta-kinda-low mythic (high-op, epic play). But that last is a bit shaky--it's only mythic if you take a liberal interpretation of the rules.

But it's really about style of play and what most of your "expected actions" are. Especially at the "action by action, turn by turn" level.

Personally, I'd never want to play in a system/game where some of the characters are mythic-if-you-squint (dealing at the mass, non-local level but not literally rewriting reality/dealing entirely in abstract concepts) or higher and some are high-gritty (worried about the individual bullets) at best. "Guardsmen and Chaos Gods" does not, to me, sound enjoyable as a playstyle. But that's my own preference.

Mechalich
2022-10-21, 05:04 PM
The key benefit of heroic play, as I see it, is that it allows for interactions between the characters and the surrounding society and culture in meaningful ways. In gritty play the extended setting is so powerful changing anything beyond the most localized of conditions is impossible. In mythic play the setting is irrelevant because the individual actors are so powerful that they can reshape the setting more or less at will and only personal conflicts matter. This leaves heroic play largely alone in that it operates in a space where a small group of people can actually perform actions that lead to long-lasting change in the setting (for better or worse) that has sufficient verisimilitude to feel meaningful. It's all about giving the PCs just enough oomph to make a real difference. This also lend considerably more significance to the choices of the characters because they can actually have lasting consequences. Gritty characters can have everything they do overwritten more or less instantly by the whims of far more powerful agents they can't possibly oppose, while mythic characters can simply wake up tomorrow and decide, 'f-it, I don't like nation X anymore and I'm going to make it into something else.' This means that if accomplishment and legacy are something that a campaign wants to have, it pretty much has to operate in this space.

Telok
2022-10-21, 05:26 PM
It depends on what you want to get out of the game.

Now, in that system you describe, where a character can be anything from the most badass mercenary to a Starship admiral to the CEO of a megacorp with a folder full of divine blackmail material, I'd ask what form does gameplay usually take?

Since I have a tendency to go pretty sandboxy... gameplay goes where the pcs take it. Next campaign that system & setting I have the starter adventure running with options from dealing with a clerk & buying a pet alien-dog through Shadowrun style b&e on a government to a straight dungeon crawl with optional puzzler and ending with some optional problem solving via terraforming with asteroid. Then its up to the players if they want to start stopping some of the galaxy level extinction threats loosed last campaign... most of which can be handled any way from small team of violent people (difficult but possible) to "turn several sectors of space into primal chaos" (easy but catastrophic side effrcts). Or they could grab some refugees, steal a few spaceships, and head off into infinity to found a new empire. Ya know, sandbox style stuff.

NichG
2022-10-21, 05:30 PM
The key benefit of heroic play, as I see it, is that it allows for interactions between the characters and the surrounding society and culture in meaningful ways. In gritty play the extended setting is so powerful changing anything beyond the most localized of conditions is impossible. In mythic play the setting is irrelevant because the individual actors are so powerful that they can reshape the setting more or less at will and only personal conflicts matter. This leaves heroic play largely alone in that it operates in a space where a small group of people can actually perform actions that lead to long-lasting change in the setting (for better or worse) that has sufficient verisimilitude to feel meaningful. It's all about giving the PCs just enough oomph to make a real difference. This also lend considerably more significance to the choices of the characters because they can actually have lasting consequences. Gritty characters can have everything they do overwritten more or less instantly by the whims of far more powerful agents they can't possibly oppose, while mythic characters can simply wake up tomorrow and decide, 'f-it, I don't like nation X anymore and I'm going to make it into something else.' This means that if accomplishment and legacy are something that a campaign wants to have, it pretty much has to operate in this space.

Eh, along the lines of thinking in more abstract moves, computer games like Civilization or even Crusader Kings are representations of low-mythic games. Founding a city or deploying a regiment of troops are atomic actions. If you can imagine accomplishment and legacy in those games, then that's a recipe for thinking of how to do it in mythic tabletop play.

Anymage
2022-10-21, 06:03 PM
Civilization has much longer turn time than most TTRPGs (in terms of game time elapsed between meaningful moves), and rules explicitly built to focus on society level actors. Meanwhile Hercules can reroute a river over the course of a day, and there are rarely mechanically defined effects for the downstream (pun not intended, but embraced) effects of that.

The quasi-mythic effects available to actors able to engage society-level resources are useful and interesting in their own game. The gameplay involved in minding those resources, as well as the time scales usually involved, are quite different from what I usually see in TTRPGs.

NichG
2022-10-21, 06:20 PM
Civilization has much longer turn time than most TTRPGs (in terms of game time elapsed between meaningful moves), and rules explicitly built to focus on society level actors. Meanwhile Hercules can reroute a river over the course of a day, and there are rarely mechanically defined effects for the downstream (pun not intended, but embraced) effects of that.

The quasi-mythic effects available to actors able to engage society-level resources are useful and interesting in their own game. The gameplay involved in minding those resources, as well as the time scales usually involved, are quite different from what I usually see in TTRPGs.

Well, we're talking about games and the conceptual underpinnings of different kinds of play rather than specific systems. If you understand how something like forming empires or dynasties can be decomposed into a series of abstract scale decisions such that consequences still matter, then you're well situated for building systems or campaigns around such play and still have the decisions of players feel like they have lasting consequences, as well as how to make the world still feel important.

Your atomic actions may be larger than human scale, but that doesn't mean that there aren't natural stories to be told or lived around that greater scale. And when those are different than the natural stories of human scale, you've found the stuff that mythic play in particular is well situated to explore.

Mechalich
2022-10-21, 06:23 PM
Civilization has much longer turn time than most TTRPGs (in terms of game time elapsed between meaningful moves), and rules explicitly built to focus on society level actors. Meanwhile Hercules can reroute a river over the course of a day, and there are rarely mechanically defined effects for the downstream (pun not intended, but embraced) effects of that.

The quasi-mythic effects available to actors able to engage society-level resources are useful and interesting in their own game. The gameplay involved in minding those resources, as well as the time scales usually involved, are quite different from what I usually see in TTRPGs.

Right. 'Strategy' games involve various gameplay abstractions to allow a person to represent an entire society, which is obviously an entirely different framework. Such games also tend to allow the player a far greater level of control over the society in question than any individual actor short of a superintelligent AI or actual deity could ever possess at that scale.

Pauly
2022-10-23, 01:40 AM
I think the distinction between ‘heroic’ and ‘gritty’ isn’t power.

Take for example Cyberbunk 2020 and Traveller. Both are sci-fi games where the PCs start off at roughly comparable power levels. The reason why Cyberpunk is grittier to play is that PC death is always one bad roll away. The mugger in a dark alley armed with a switchblade can kill you dead if he gets to ambush you, no matter how far your character has advanced. In Traveller the PC has a much higher chance of surviving.

In essence in a ‘gritty’ game the PC has to work hard to stay alive. PC death can happen in any combat.
In a ‘heroic’ game the PC has to work hard to die, generally death being the culmination of a series of bad decisions and rolls.

The other aspect is speed of advancement. In ‘gritty’ games character advancement is more of nuance, and your character after a 6 month campaign is still recognizable and comparable to the starting character. In ‘heroic’ games PCs advance more quickly, gain new skills and abilities and after a 6 month campaign may hive little in common with the starting PC.

Mechalich
2022-10-23, 04:34 AM
I think the distinction between ‘heroic’ and ‘gritty’ isn’t power.

Take for example Cyberbunk 2020 and Traveller. Both are sci-fi games where the PCs start off at roughly comparable power levels. The reason why Cyberpunk is grittier to play is that PC death is always one bad roll away. The mugger in a dark alley armed with a switchblade can kill you dead if he gets to ambush you, no matter how far your character has advanced. In Traveller the PC has a much higher chance of surviving.

In essence in a ‘gritty’ game the PC has to work hard to stay alive. PC death can happen in any combat.
In a ‘heroic’ game the PC has to work hard to die, generally death being the culmination of a series of bad decisions and rolls.

Lethality - the overall deadliness of system+setting, is a component of power, and especially the relationship between societal power and personal power. High lethality increases societal power compared to character power, because it's easier for any representative of society, such as a police officer, to stop the character, even if they may perish in the process.


The other aspect is speed of advancement. In ‘gritty’ games character advancement is more of nuance, and your character after a 6 month campaign is still recognizable and comparable to the starting character. In ‘heroic’ games PCs advance more quickly, gain new skills and abilities and after a 6 month campaign may hive little in common with the starting PC.

Advancement is largely irrelevant to this issue, since the play-style refers to the one a group of characters are capable of at any given point, and whether or not a setting overall qualifies as 'gritty,' 'heroic,' or 'mythic' is determined by the entities at the highest tier of personal power, who may not be PC types at all, and the highest powered society the setting can muster. There are many scenarios where a character from a gritty setting can leave the confines of the main society, go to some remote region, and become a mythic individual because the local society has none of the technology necessary to stop them. Settings were this is possible often have rules against doing this - Star Trek's Prime Directive being a famous example - but it can still happen.

Anonymouswizard
2022-10-23, 10:23 AM
I think the distinction between ‘heroic’ and ‘gritty’ isn’t power.

Take for example Cyberbunk 2020 and Traveller. Both are sci-fi games where the PCs start off at roughly comparable power levels. The reason why Cyberpunk is grittier to play is that PC death is always one bad roll away. The mugger in a dark alley armed with a switchblade can kill you dead if he gets to ambush you, no matter how far your character has advanced. In Traveller the PC has a much higher chance of surviving.

In essence in a ‘gritty’ game the PC has to work hard to stay alive. PC death can happen in any combat.
In a ‘heroic’ game the PC has to work hard to die, generally death being the culmination of a series of bad decisions and rolls.

Does this make Shadowrun more heroic than Cyberpunk, because a properly specced troll can soak a few knife hits without armour. As can some orks and dwarves if we're being fair.

Although honestly I feel like Shadowrun has been catering more to Pink Mohican style play since about the release of Anarchy. So that would at least fit the trend.


The other aspect is speed of advancement. In ‘gritty’ games character advancement is more of nuance, and your character after a 6 month campaign is still recognizable and comparable to the starting character. In ‘heroic’ games PCs advance more quickly, gain new skills and abilities and after a 6 month campaign may hive little in common with the starting PC.

Are we talking six months in-game or out of game? Because the two are very different things.

Six months in-game is mostly a measure of pacing and downtime. Which is honestly something most games could do well to give more guidelines on, how many runs is a crew expected to do in a month (working backwards from the advancement rules I think you're meant to average one a week).

Six months out of game mostly depends on how often rewards are given out. D&D is generally regarded as heroic and the various World of Darkness games as gritty, but you could easily spend months of D&D at level 2 or gain 3-4XP per session in Hunter: the Vigil (which in 2e is enough for an endowment or Attribute dot). Even at the intended rate of ~1XP a session six months is still 26 XP, which is enough to raise an attribute twice, buy up a skill from 0 to the cap of 5, and pick up a couple of useful Merits or powers.

That's not even getting into games like Scion 2e where you have multiple advancement tracks (Legend cannot be bought with XP, so raw mystical power advances only somewhat in-line with character skill).

Talakeal
2022-10-23, 03:56 PM
This seems to be a much more honest analysis pf the age old CMD debate with a lot less talking around one another.

I do find it odd that my system is one in which even wholly mundane and human characters are mythic though.

Telok
2022-10-24, 02:03 AM
In essence in a ‘gritty’ game the PC has to work hard to stay alive. PC death can happen in any combat.
In a ‘heroic’ game the PC has to work hard to die, generally death being the culmination of a series of bad decisions and rolls.

The other aspect is speed of advancement. In ‘gritty’ games character advancement is more of nuance, and your character after a 6 month campaign is still recognizable and comparable to the starting character. In ‘heroic’ games PCs advance more quickly, gain new skills and abilities and after a 6 month campaign may hive little in common with the starting PC.

Amber Diceless? Your characters basically don't change but absolutely aren't anywhere near "gritty" and not in any danger from most combat. Or Champions, heck probably most supers systems, doesn't normally aim to totally mutate your character from teenage apprentice to demigod in a few months. Several supers systems also do reasonably handle style from street level vs gangs to galaxy level vs gods. They do not typically switch gears though, its pick a power level and stay in it.

D&D (any edition since probably late 1990s) can also feel basically gritty the whole way through to level 20 if you aren't running a bunch of casters or busting into 1000+ foot jump check territory. You don't get the world changing powers, just piles of hit points and personal combat power type stuff. You change the descriptions on the monsters but it you can't run up and hit something to death then you can't do much more than a bunch of mooks could.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-24, 09:49 AM
D&D (any edition since probably late 1990s) can also feel basically gritty the whole way through to level 20 if you aren't running a bunch of casters or busting into 1000+ foot jump check territory. You don't get the world changing powers, just piles of hit points and personal combat power type stuff. You change the descriptions on the monsters but it you can't run up and hit something to death then you can't do much more than a bunch of mooks could.

That's not particularly gritty (by my model). That's firmly heroic. You're not at threat from passing monsters. You (collectively) can change the world...but only as the result of accumulating lots of individual small changes (saving a kingdom here, helping to overthrow one there, etc) and mostly by working with individual NPCs who have their own minds, rather than acting (whether via explicit mind control or just narrative control) as the hive mind center in a 4x-game fashion.

Gritty would be that you're still just as much at risk from a thug's bullet/sword as you were. Your own personal power really hasn't grown significantly relative to the social power, so you're still trying to avoid confrontation with the many many many things in your every-day life that are just plain stronger than you and will (not might, will) crush you like a bug if you get into their path. Mostly unconsciously. And you can't change a darn thing except maybe your own personal surroundings, and that temporarily. Most of your concern is just bare survival.

gbaji
2022-10-24, 11:22 AM
That's not particularly gritty (by my model). That's firmly heroic. You're not at threat from passing monsters. You (collectively) can change the world...but only as the result of accumulating lots of individual small changes (saving a kingdom here, helping to overthrow one there, etc) and mostly by working with individual NPCs who have their own minds, rather than acting (whether via explicit mind control or just narrative control) as the hive mind center in a 4x-game fashion.

I think it's remarkably hard to make any level based advancement game actually 'gritty'. Unless there's some serious slowing down of level advancement going on, anyway. PCs tend to "level out' of any street/gritty level conflict pretty quickly.

Also, just a couple notes. I did particularly enjoy Champions (the hero system as a whole, which I think the more or less standardized in 5th edition? Been awhile). And yeah, due to how the exp system worked, you generally picked a power level and stuck with it, since the points gained were typically small so worked best at adding new skills or skill levels, but rarely could you actually add new powers, or really enhance the base power level of those power. Which was not a bad way to do things. Experienced characters just got better at doing the things they started out being able to do rather than gaining more powers and abilities. We also experimented with several different base power levels (from like 50 point "street" heroes), up to say 200 point "super heroes" and everything in-between), all worked well.

I'll also put my hat in the ring for not being a super fan of mythic level play either. I find that if the players are just creating and destroying new sandboxes to play in regularly, there's not likely to be much continuity in the game. I guess some folks will enjoy that (and I can as well, for a short time), but I prefer to have a feeling like the actions of my characters had some meaning, and ironically, the more your characters can just change huge amounts of things, the *less* influence they actually really have (seems wrong, but also seems to be true in play). Eh. Just becomes boring to me.

Telok
2022-10-24, 11:32 AM
That's not particularly gritty (by my model). That's firmly heroic. You're not at threat from passing monsters. You (collectively) can change the world...but only as the result of accumulating lots of individual small changes (saving a kingdom here, helping to overthrow one there, etc) ....
.... And you can't change a darn thing except maybe your own personal surroundings, and that temporarily. Most of your concern is just bare survival.

Yeah, thing is... isn't that just any level of D&D without mainline casters? I mean effectively, with the way the game plays out, not at the meta/storytelling level.

Your group of PC face stabbers will tromp (or fly on a mount/carpet if they're really fancy) from point A to pount B facing level appropriate dangerous wandering monsters on the way. They will personally kill something by running up and, at great risk to themselves, stabbing it. And lasting change they create is dead stuff. They can't do anything about another dragon, evil vizer, or doppleganger-as-king not happen if they aren't personally there. Are they really any more world changing than a cyberpunk ganger who gets a lucky shot off at a mega-corp CEO?

I guess it may be more play style than anything with the game system. I've had Traveller and adjacent sci-fi games that ran from absolutely "will we make enough this run to buy fuel and can we avoid being mugged" to "we'll take a week to flatten a few cities and then decide if we eant to rule this planet", sometimes within the same campaign. I could run a D&D game where first level characters are high nobility and start out leading armies and ordering castles built, or one where 30th level 4e PCs are fighting mutant rats in a post-god-apocalypse wasteland to get food to survive the rest of the week.

I actually did have a 4e campaign rough mapped out that started with invading heavens & hells, killing gods for causing problems on the mortal planes. Then ended up with high level characters fighting rats for food because it turns out the god/goddess of <thing> really was why stuff happened and you couldn't just slot in any old non-god replacement to keep things working.

NichG
2022-10-24, 12:06 PM
Lots of environmental no-save-just-die or otherwise character-independent harms can support gritty play even with a leveling system. Even a Lv10 character in 1ed D&D gets autoslain by a stampeding herd of giraffes - not because the damage and tohit say so, but because the listed mechanics are just 'kills any characters caught in the path'

So if you want to support leveling and gritty play, just don't allow leveling to influence the durability or survivability of characters against the important threats in the system directly. You can learn new languages or how to tie ropes or better ways to maintain gear or what the cultural mores of Calpetia are like, but you can't learn to take a stab wound better or to need less water to survive or to reduce the consequences of hypothermia. Nor can you learn things like summoning warmth or water or causing wounds to magically heal. Narrow leveling systems, like Call of Cthulhu, where the best you're doing is reducing a 60% failure rate on normal human actions to a 20% failure rate.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-24, 12:40 PM
Yeah, thing is... isn't that just any level of D&D without mainline casters? I mean effectively, with the way the game plays out, not at the meta/storytelling level.

Your group of PC face stabbers will tromp (or fly on a mount/carpet if they're really fancy) from point A to pount B facing level appropriate dangerous wandering monsters on the way. They will personally kill something by running up and, at great risk to themselves, stabbing it. And lasting change they create is dead stuff. They can't do anything about another dragon, evil vizer, or doppleganger-as-king not happen if they aren't personally there. Are they really any more world changing than a cyberpunk ganger who gets a lucky shot off at a mega-corp CEO?

I guess it may be more play style than anything with the game system. I've had Traveller and adjacent sci-fi games that ran from absolutely "will we make enough this run to buy fuel and can we avoid being mugged" to "we'll take a week to flatten a few cities and then decide if we eant to rule this planet", sometimes within the same campaign. I could run a D&D game where first level characters are high nobility and start out leading armies and ordering castles built, or one where 30th level 4e PCs are fighting mutant rats in a post-god-apocalypse wasteland to get food to survive the rest of the week.

I actually did have a 4e campaign rough mapped out that started with invading heavens & hells, killing gods for causing problems on the mortal planes. Then ended up with high level characters fighting rats for food because it turns out the god/goddess of <thing> really was why stuff happened and you couldn't just slot in any old non-god replacement to keep things working.

I think we play radically differently.

Just going through a few of my games and the lasting changes made to the setting (and I mean lasting--it's a persistent setting):

[4e]
- Low level party 1 was involved in a seemingly-trivial wild goose chase...that turned out to be real. They got to choose how the world as everyone knew it ended and some of the starting parameters for the next world. They were involved in both the why the world was going to end (by releasing a particular individual earlier in the campaign, who ended up becoming a vessel for a world-ending threat) AND how it ended/would restart by getting their hands on a primal artifact of creation.
- Low level part 2 was among the last survivors of said end of the world (in the main play area anyway). They were critical in setting up the conditions for the new world order (in that part of the setting).

[5e, with a timeskip]
- First long-running campaign created, mostly by talking and diplomacy, an international treaty organization equivalent to the UN. This has shaped the future of that area of the setting for ~50 years at this point, basically preventing wars.
- A second long-running campaign dethroned a god. Not directly by personal power, although personal power was involved. They were part of a set of machinations to force the god into a corner as far as higher-order rules.
- Many other parties of various levels have
-- founded nations and cities
-- ended a 90-year war
-- created the first-ever airship
-- changed time itself (again, by being in teh right place at the right time)
-- and a whole bunch of other world-changing events.

In none of those was the direct, character-sheet abilities (especially not spells) the determining factor. Those abilities were important, to be sure, but only at the micro/encounter level. The big things were all personality and individual decisions about what to do and what risks/costs to incur in doing so.

That's the big difference between the three levels--
Gritty can't make lasting changes at all. No matter what, everything will revert to status quo crap after you move away from the area.
Heroic can make lasting changes, but not by pushing buttons. Instead, it comes from being the lever, the fulcrum against which you move the world. And it happens over the course of the campaign.
Mythic can make lasting changes by pushing buttons, in a single "action".

gbaji
2022-10-24, 01:02 PM
Your group of PC face stabbers will tromp (or fly on a mount/carpet if they're really fancy) from point A to pount B facing level appropriate dangerous wandering monsters on the way. They will personally kill something by running up and, at great risk to themselves, stabbing it. And lasting change they create is dead stuff. They can't do anything about another dragon, evil vizer, or doppleganger-as-king not happen if they aren't personally there. Are they really any more world changing than a cyberpunk ganger who gets a lucky shot off at a mega-corp CEO?

I would argue that if your cyberpunk characters are taking shots at mega-corp CEOs, then it's not "gritty" level. Gritty would be you struggling to deal with the street gangs running the local crime stuff in your area. And if you are able to work through them and collect sufficient intel on them, you might just find out about the "big boss behind the boss" that's funding their operations, who will in turn be a low-level middle management guy, working in the special projects group at the local branch of said mega-corp. And if you work really hard, you might be able to take that one guy out, and certainly put a crimp on the supply and support for that local gang, but it wont even be noticed by the corp itself, except to maybe re-assign someone else, and maybe switch tactics with regards to whatever plans they have going. You'll be facing another street level threat down the line, and maybe it'll be ultimately be discovered to be supported by another subsidiary of the same mega-corp, and you may even successfully deal with that as well. But the corp itself? Not going to happen. And let's not even talk about if there's a competing corp out there (which there certainly is).

That's how gritty campaigns work. That's what makes them gritty.


Lots of environmental no-save-just-die or otherwise character-independent harms can support gritty play even with a leveling system. Even a Lv10 character in 1ed D&D gets autoslain by a stampeding herd of giraffes - not because the damage and tohit say so, but because the listed mechanics are just 'kills any characters caught in the path'

So if you want to support leveling and gritty play, just don't allow leveling to influence the durability or survivability of characters against the important threats in the system directly. You can learn new languages or how to tie ropes or better ways to maintain gear or what the cultural mores of Calpetia are like, but you can't learn to take a stab wound better or to need less water to survive or to reduce the consequences of hypothermia. Nor can you learn things like summoning warmth or water or causing wounds to magically heal. Narrow leveling systems, like Call of Cthulhu, where the best you're doing is reducing a 60% failure rate on normal human actions to a 20% failure rate.

Eh. Not sure I agree. It's possible, I suppose, but gritty is not just about how easy it may be to die (although that can certainly be part of it). Just scaling up the threats to the level of the party, and putting in lots of "risk of sudden death" stuff doesn't make things gritty. It just makes it a killer campaign setting. What makes a game setting gritty (again IMO of course) is the concept that the PCs are continually dealing with the same power level (more or less) of foes and threats. The PCs may get somewhat better at dealing with those threats, but they should still find themselves pushing the same stone up that hill over and over and making little progress. It's more about fighting hard to prevent things from getting "worse" most of the time. Level based systems make this really hard to do well.

By their nature, level based systems encourage PCs to "grow up" and out. A party of 10th level PCs is just not going to give the time of day to dealing with the same threats that they dealt with at level 1. If for no other reason than they'll gain no experience helping a little old lady clear the large rats out of her basement, or track down the local gangs who are running protection for the local grocer, or whatever. Their skills, spells, powers, and abilities are so far beyond that, that it's overkill. Doesn't mean that they can't do this sort of stuff, just for fun or to be good people or whatever, but it's hard to justify "level appropriate" encounters to continue to scale up this way. Level 10 bad guys aren't going to be working for a local street gang, either. They level out as well. And if there are level 10 rats in people's basements, you've got bigger problems going on...

Again. It's possible to run a leveling campaign, where the PCs are dealing with bigger and bigger threats (working their way up the chain), and maintain the same gritty feel all the way. Hard. But possible, I suppose. But you more or less have to do it that way. And again, if the PCs are working their way up to bigger and bigger fish on a larger scale, at some point, you maybe aren't doing "gritty" anymore.

NichG
2022-10-24, 02:08 PM
Eh. Not sure I agree. It's possible, I suppose, but gritty is not just about how easy it may be to die (although that can certainly be part of it). Just scaling up the threats to the level of the party, and putting in lots of "risk of sudden death" stuff doesn't make things gritty. It just makes it a killer campaign setting. What makes a game setting gritty (again IMO of course) is the concept that the PCs are continually dealing with the same power level (more or less) of foes and threats. The PCs may get somewhat better at dealing with those threats, but they should still find themselves pushing the same stone up that hill over and over and making little progress. It's more about fighting hard to prevent things from getting "worse" most of the time. Level based systems make this really hard to do well.

By their nature, level based systems encourage PCs to "grow up" and out. A party of 10th level PCs is just not going to give the time of day to dealing with the same threats that they dealt with at level 1. If for no other reason than they'll gain no experience helping a little old lady clear the large rats out of her basement, or track down the local gangs who are running protection for the local grocer, or whatever. Their skills, spells, powers, and abilities are so far beyond that, that it's overkill. Doesn't mean that they can't do this sort of stuff, just for fun or to be good people or whatever, but it's hard to justify "level appropriate" encounters to continue to scale up this way. Level 10 bad guys aren't going to be working for a local street gang, either. They level out as well. And if there are level 10 rats in people's basements, you've got bigger problems going on...

Again. It's possible to run a leveling campaign, where the PCs are dealing with bigger and bigger threats (working their way up the chain), and maintain the same gritty feel all the way. Hard. But possible, I suppose. But you more or less have to do it that way. And again, if the PCs are working their way up to bigger and bigger fish on a larger scale, at some point, you maybe aren't doing "gritty" anymore.

I would say that the thing that makes something feel gritty is specifically that you never get to a point where you can willfully ignore parts of the world which might act upon you. So I'm not talking here about scaling up threats to go with the party, I'm talking about a system where you have the same threats and they remain as lethal, but the competencies of characters can still develop and grow - just never in a way that would actually make them able to just stand and fight against something that previously they had to be extremely cautious and tactical about surviving and would have been best off never engaging it in the first place.

So e.g. imagine 1ed D&D where everyone has something like the thief skills and those are the only things that level up. A kobold with a spear still has a 20% chance of one-shotting your character in an ambush at Lv1 or Lv100, if it catches you with your armor off. That kind of thing.

Characters growing does not mean they have to be working their way up a list of bigger and bigger fish. Cut that relationship and I think you can have growth+gritty just fine.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-24, 02:15 PM
I would say that strong vertical progression, especially in survivability, makes gritty styles harder to maintain. Horizonal progression is much less an issue. And it's not impossible, just more difficult.

And since the poster children for level based systems are the D&D family, and they feature very strong vertical progression...

Pauly
2022-10-24, 04:01 PM
An in depth discussion of where each game system falls on the spectrum is kind of meaningless. The campaign setting will override the game system. You can say certain systems are better suited to a one style of play or another, but people can and will shoehorn different systems into different settings for different reasons.

The issue of the world leveling with the player so lethality appears to remain consistent is a false equivalent. In ‘gritty’ games what is a lethal threat in session 1 is still a lethal threat in session 100, albeit your chances of survival have improved significantly as your skills and equipment have improved.

Equipment scaling is another factor in determining gritty -v- heroic. In Twilight 2000 no matter how good your equipment is, a rifle round to the head will always have a chance of killing you outright, you can never buy a helmet so strong it negates the risk. In D&D you can buy sufficiently epic armor that a the level 1 goblin with a spear can’t roll high enough to hit your character.

Telok
2022-10-24, 05:35 PM
I think we play radically differently.

Feels more like you didn't read thr post. You and I agreed, we can run D&D games where first level characters do "mythic" and "heroic" type stuff even using AD&D with 4hp & 1/day spell wizards. I think the mechanics of a system may influence things a bit less than you do it the system tries at all to be flexible about its genre, but it really did sound like agreement.

Honestly tho if you're going around giving world changing artifacts/plot coupons and not using the character sheets & abilities for the important world changing actions, then does the system have any real impact on if the game fits some arbitrary idea of "gritty"?

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-24, 05:58 PM
Feels more like you didn't read thr post. You and I agreed, we can run D&D games where first level characters do "mythic" and "heroic" type stuff even using AD&D with 4hp & 1/day spell wizards. I think the mechanics of a system may influence things a bit less than you do it the system tries at all to be flexible about its genre, but it really did sound like agreement.

Honestly tho if you're going around giving world changing artifacts/plot coupons and not using the character sheets & abilities for the important world changing actions, then does the system have any real impact on if the game fits some arbitrary idea of "gritty"?

I'm not actually looking at system all that much at all. I'm looking at how it's played. I don't see D&D doing either gritty or mythic play very well most of the time. It can be done, but it requires hacking things in either direction. Because in the end, D&D play usually ends up focusing on individual power of a scale and type that does make lasting changes. But only in the aggregate.

And the bold...I think we're not communicating. Their actions and abilities matter. But only in the aggregate. A mythic game (not system, game) would have those actions individually making long-term changes. I press the "throw planet" button, targeting the sun. Planet is now gone, permanently. One atomic action that can succeed or fail. A heroic version of the same might involve multiple quests, adventures to find powerful artifacts and rituals and the right place to stand. All along the way, the characters attributes (writ broadly, including abilities and character) matter. But each individual action (at the "on my turn I do <X>" level) only matter because they influenced the next thing that happened. A failure along the way doesn't mean total failure, it just means the river of events goes a slightly different way. A gritty game can't (not won't, not doesn't choose to) make lasting changes at all.

Imagine three superhero games. The same (mechanically) character is in all of them, all of them at Superman power, but the fiction around it changes.

Gritty Game has the Protagonist in a structure where no matter what he does, tomorrow is back to status quo ante. Kill a crimelord? Yup, new one tomorrow, back to status quo. Destroy a building? Tomorrow it's back. And furthermore, everyone in the setting who is anyone (every thug on the street, for instance), can kill Protagonist on a successful shot.

Heroic Game has the Protagonist facing things, most of the time, that are "on his level" more or less. Could be groups of slightly weaker, but still significant enemies, could be people a bit stronger, and there are some Powers that Be that are way above him. But they don't interfere most of the time. Heroic Protagonist can make changes, but not by simply snapping his fingers. He has to put in the hard leg (ok, flying) work. Capturing that villain so the other guy is more friendly. Making allies. Building a good reputation. Etc.

Mythic Game has the Protagonist as world-striding incomparable. There may be others of similar stature, but anyone who isn't can't even move the needle at all. Mythic Protagonist has whole nations of people under his direct, immediate, and irrevocable command. He says "jump" and they all are in motion. Every single action has the potential for irrevocable, immediate changes. Edit: and play mostly revolves around things other than Protagonist going and punching things. Political maneuvering, plotting against/reacting to actions of similar-scale incomparables, etc.

Same power, same system...very different styles. And they're all flying bricks who are faster than the proverbial locomotive.

KorvinStarmast
2022-10-24, 07:29 PM
- A second long-running campaign dethroned a god. Not directly by personal power, although personal power was involved. They were part of a set of machinations to force the god into a corner as far as higher-order rules. Uh, at least there wasn't a mountain involved. :smalleek:

Telok
2022-10-24, 07:33 PM
And the bold...I think we're not communicating.

Yeah, I think that's about it. Maybe your benchmarks for something differ from mine and we're just talking past each other a bit.

Perhaps the biggest was my contention that high level d&d runs towards gritty if you don't have casters & other big magic or provided plot coupons. But I think that's more disagreement about degree. I don't consider 200hp and killing 3.75 cr 1/8 kobolds a round a qualifier for "heroic" or changing anything large scale when 50 of those kobolds with poop smeared rusty knives is a lethal threat to a party of fighters. To me those PCs are still firmly in the "gritty" zone, even if they can hit up the convenient planar portal to the themed mini-dungeon of "named demon fight tailored to be threat level appropriate". Now someone charismatic leading a revolution might be a different story, but that's basically independent of d&d type class and level concepts.

Perhaps its that gameplay of d&d these days tends towards fights leveling up with the PCs but half-ish of the classes don't level up any abilities beyond interpersonal violence. So characters of those classes are still relatively as mechanically powerful as they were at the beginning, barring the usual plot coupons and setting specific permissions of course.

NichG
2022-10-24, 07:53 PM
I don't think you can really evaluate it without actually specifying what a kobold or named demon lord or whatever means to the setting. If the only things an average person in the setting can't avoid being threatened by are at the level of kobolds, someone who can take on the average sized raiding group with zero risk of death has power over whether or not their life and the lives of individuals they wish to protect are at risk. That puts them at least out of gritty.

The fact that a CR appropriate encounter could still kill them half the time doesn't necessarily matter, because 'dealing with CR appropriate stuff' is a metagame conceit rather than an inevitability. If the character retires to run a tavern, in most settings the bar brawls won't scale with them - they have some control.

In a gritty setting you can't turn the difficulty down enough voluntarily to guarantee personal control over your circumstances no matter how much you grow or build.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-24, 09:21 PM
I don't think you can really evaluate it without actually specifying what a kobold or named demon lord or whatever means to the setting. If the only things an average person in the setting can't avoid being threatened by are at the level of kobolds, someone who can take on the average sized raiding group with zero risk of death has power over whether or not their life and the lives of individuals they wish to protect are at risk. That puts them at least out of gritty.

The fact that a CR appropriate encounter could still kill them half the time doesn't necessarily matter, because 'dealing with CR appropriate stuff' is a metagame conceit rather than an inevitability. If the character retires to run a tavern, in most settings the bar brawls won't scale with them - they have some control.

In a gritty setting you can't turn the difficulty down enough voluntarily to guarantee personal control over your circumstances no matter how much you grow or build.

Exactly. That's one of the key differences between gritty and heroic--both deal mostly with personal-scale power. But heroic has things you can curb-stomp. As well as things that can curb-stomp you in a fair fight. Gritty only has the latter. As well as a bunch of things that can curb-stomp you even in an unfair fight.

D&D is firmly heroic. Even without plot tokens, you can change the world. As long as the DM isn't weighting the status quo against you of course.

Of those parties I mentioned? The only one that did have plot-scale artifacts for their big changes was the very first one. The one that started the fantasy UN? Did that all on their own. Nothing depended on it being a rogue, a monk, a warlock, and a druid. But it did depend heavily on it being Paresten, Kalesin, Paresten, and Safrir. Of note, the least influential (to the outcome of the game and the effect on the settings) character there was the druid. By far and away. The rogue and warlock were tied, and not due to power. But due to them being the driving forces. The monk was mostly a steadying influence; the druid was kinda just there. In a fun sort of way, but definitely not driving things. The biggest spell the warlock cast 99% of the time was telekinesis. But they discovered, browbeat, convinced, and inveigled leaders of 5 different nations to come together in some sort of peace. Catalyzed by taking out the two biggest threats and stabilizing a third. They didn't force anyone together by sheer might or wave a wand. They just worked hard and had a goal.

Gritty style games can't do that at all. It would have been guaranteed (by narrative necessity) to have fallen apart instantly or degenerated into a farce immediately.

Drakevarg
2022-10-24, 10:04 PM
Exactly. That's one of the key differences between gritty and heroic--both deal mostly with personal-scale power. But heroic has things you can curb-stomp. As well as things that can curb-stomp you in a fair fight. Gritty only has the latter. As well as a bunch of things that can curb-stomp you even in an unfair fight.

...

Gritty style games can't do that at all. It would have been guaranteed (by narrative necessity) to have fallen apart instantly or degenerated into a farce immediately.

I'm curious how you'd categorize a mismatch.

Like a game wherein you can gather all the personal strength you want, curb-stomp every two-bit fool who steps up to you, and yet at the end of the day the setting doesn't care and doesn't move.

Or a game where the status quo can be altered with great effort, but one wrong step can snatch it all away from you because no matter how much influence you have, you're still made of meat.

'cause if they're both "heroic," I feel like the category might be a bit too broad, encompassing anything that doesn't fully line up with Gritty or Mythic.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-24, 10:28 PM
I'm curious how you'd categorize a mismatch.

Like a game wherein you can gather all the personal strength you want, curb-stomp every two-bit fool who steps up to you, and yet at the end of the day the setting doesn't care and doesn't move.

Or a game where the status quo can be altered with great effort, but one wrong step can snatch it all away from you because no matter how much influence you have, you're still made of meat.

'cause if they're both "heroic," I feel like the category might be a bit too broad, encompassing anything that doesn't fully line up with Gritty or Mythic.

If the setting doesn't care and doesn't move, it's one of two things. Either deeply gritty (cf WH40K, where even the most BA folks...can't do a darn thing in the greater scope of things except make life worse) or incoherent. Or, I guess, played for laughs (aka a deconstruction). But I wouldn't call it heroic.

If the status quo can be altered, but really really doesn't like to be and the risks are great, it's somewhere at the border of heroic and gritty.

Because, in the end, these aren't hard-and-fast things. They're...squishy. A bit. The overlap is non-zero. You can (as was explained to me and now I see) have high-power gritty. As long as the setting itself has more "inertia" or maybe force. And you can have really low-power heroic (or mythic).

NichG
2022-10-24, 10:31 PM
I'm curious how you'd categorize a mismatch.

Like a game wherein you can gather all the personal strength you want, curb-stomp every two-bit fool who steps up to you, and yet at the end of the day the setting doesn't care and doesn't move.


I'd probably put that one in heroic since 'the setting moves' is more of an essential characteristic of mythic (for me), whereas with heroic it was more like 'this doesn't exclude the setting moving, but the setting moving is not part of the day-to-day of the campaign'.



Or a game where the status quo can be altered with great effort, but one wrong step can snatch it all away from you because no matter how much influence you have, you're still made of meat.


I'd probably put that one in gritty, assuming the 'one wrong step' isn't just a blunder or mistake, but could also be a totally reasonable and expected failure to deal with a fundamentally unfair threat or series of events. If the person is in charge but messes up and dies, it feels heroic; if the person isn't in charge and you're amazed that they lived, it feels gritty.

Though I wonder where this would put something like the Paranoid Mage series or other things within the 'underdog overthrows the status quo' genre. Usually the protagonist would absolutely be squashed in any direct confrontation, but has the setting/plot armor that they have a fundamentally different view on things like fairness or honor or whatnot that lets them basically cheat and thereby succeed against expectations. I guess I'd probably put that in heroic, but it feels like it tries to 'borrow' an illusion of a gritty feel in order to amp up the impressiveness of the heroic achievements.

Drakevarg
2022-10-24, 10:40 PM
If the setting doesn't care and doesn't move, it's one of two things. Either deeply gritty (cf WH40K, where even the most BA folks...can't do a darn thing in the greater scope of things except make life worse) or incoherent. Or, I guess, played for laughs (aka a deconstruction). But I wouldn't call it heroic.

If the status quo can be altered, but really really doesn't like to be and the risks are great, it's somewhere at the border of heroic and gritty.

Because, in the end, these aren't hard-and-fast things. They're...squishy. A bit. The overlap is non-zero. You can (as was explained to me and now I see) have high-power gritty. As long as the setting itself has more "inertia" or maybe force. And you can have really low-power heroic (or mythic).

Solid answers, I'll take it. In the former case, I was actually considering citing Cyberpunk 2077 as an example, since becoming an unstoppable badass is well within your ability but in the end Night City will still be Night City, and V probably won't see 2078. But I wanted to leave it open-ended instead.

I also applaud conceding to the flexibility. It can be tedious when someone tries to put forth a grand unifying theory to fiction and either gets dogmatic about their boxes or vague to the point of uselessness (or some combination thereof).

Telok
2022-10-24, 10:44 PM
'cause if they're both "heroic," I feel like the category might be a bit too broad, encompassing anything that doesn't fully line up with Gritty or Mythic.

I'm starting to think most of the thread is hinged on personal definitions of adjectives that aren't very explicitly defined. Full honesty, my personal definitons of gritty/heroic/mythic aren't hard edged defined and they're imprecise & possibly overlapping because they're relative to some or all of style, genre, and system.

Mostly I think when I'm talking about these sorts of things its in respect to how a game (session+system) feels as a player. So Shadowrun felt heroic* while playing a mundane in D&D 5e feels gritty**. Which of course is absolutely opposite how people are trying to define things.

* stompin' insect spirits, blasting toxic shaman, blowing up corp ickyness labs in a way that put the horrid animal-things on the news, making the world a better place with pink mohawks & machine guns, feels like heroes

** duergar city got lava vaped by mind flayers and we couldn't do anything, let loose an ancient vamp warlord and can't catch up (teleports), leaving portals to hell open behind us through negligence, it all doesn't really do anything as bigger organized hero alliances will clean it up and likely eventually squish us for making waves, plus the melee pcs keep getting beat down all the time and can't accomplish much but killing stuff that's trapped in the same room or it sits still for them, does not feel heroic

Mechalich
2022-10-25, 12:15 AM
I'm starting to think most of the thread is hinged on personal definitions of adjectives that aren't very explicitly defined. Full honesty, my personal definitons of gritty/heroic/mythic aren't hard edged defined and they're imprecise & possibly overlapping because they're relative to some or all of style, genre, and system.

Mostly I think when I'm talking about these sorts of things its in respect to how a game (session+system) feels as a player. So Shadowrun felt heroic* while playing a mundane in D&D 5e feels gritty**. Which of course is absolutely opposite how people are trying to define things.


Sort of. The problem is that settings generally have to be designed around a certain style of play with regard to the interaction between the power of the characters and the power that society can bring against them (this does presume the setting contains meaningful societies as a relevant thing, which many settings don't and there are only individuals of varying degrees of power). Usually what happens when characters from one type are brought into a setting of a different type the game breaks down.

For example, Mythic characters in a Heroic or Gritty setting just roflstomp everything and it becomes stupid. This is the big problem high level D&D (especially 3.X) has. The power level of the character has exceeded the ability of the setting to constrain. Likewise Gritty characters in a Heroic or Mythic setting has a very strong tendency to become pointless. Sure, it's possible to play as Mortals in Exalted, the rules allow for it, but why? The party could labor for decades only to have some Exalt wander past an undo everything in an afternoon.

Quertus
2022-10-25, 09:14 AM
That's the big difference between the three levels--
Gritty can't make lasting changes at all. No matter what, everything will revert to status quo crap after you move away from the area.
Heroic can make lasting changes, but not by pushing buttons. Instead, it comes from being the lever, the fulcrum against which you move the world. And it happens over the course of the campaign.
Mythic can make lasting changes by pushing buttons, in a single "action".


Exactly. That's one of the key differences between gritty and heroic--both deal mostly with personal-scale power. But heroic has things you can curb-stomp. As well as things that can curb-stomp you in a fair fight. Gritty only has the latter.


If the setting doesn't care and doesn't move, it's one of two things. Either deeply gritty (cf WH40K, where even the most BA folks...can't do a darn thing in the greater scope of things except make life worse) or incoherent. Or, I guess, played for laughs (aka a deconstruction). But I wouldn't call it heroic.

If the status quo can be altered, but really really doesn't like to be and the risks are great, it's somewhere at the border of heroic and gritty.

Because, in the end, these aren't hard-and-fast things. They're...squishy. A bit. The overlap is non-zero. You can (as was explained to me and now I see) have high-power gritty. As long as the setting itself has more "inertia" or maybe force. And you can have really low-power heroic (or mythic).

This is much more coherent than your opening post. But I’ve still got a few issues.

First is, no matter how gritty the setting, I expect that a “muggle” in a coma is not something that has any chance of curb stomping the PCs. I expect that, no matter how gritty the setting, there are still things that the PCs can actually curb stomp, from helpless/comatose foes to piñatas to a Potted Plant.

Now, I suppose, in a sufficiently gritty system, those actions might not be automatic successes, meaning that if there was a ticking clock, you might not be able to move the Potted Plant off to the side, and break the piñata hiding the ticking bomb you intend to tie to the coma patient before it explodes. Is that why you believe that “gritty” (defined as unable to make lasting change) must needs also always only have things that could curb stomp the PCs? Because I’m not otherwise seeing how “cannot make lasting change” inherently necessitates that the opposition must always definitionally be able to curb stomp the PCs.

Speaking of… long ago, in a thread far, far away, someone asked what a D&D Wizard 20 could accomplish in the Warhammer 40k universe. I answered “nothing” (at least so long as they were roleplayed correctly), because one of the conceits of the setting is that (roughly) Belief powers the Warp, and people’s hopelessness caused by the bleak setting powers a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, even as a Wizard 20, Warhammer 40k matches your definition of “gritty” of “can't make lasting changes at all. No matter what, everything will revert to status quo crap after you move away from the area”. Yet that Wizard could curb stomp a lot of things in the Warhammer 40k universe.

Or are these both covered by your more recent admission that “You can (as was explained to me and now I see) have high-power gritty”, and you just haven’t released updated “core concept” blurbs to match your new understanding yet?

kyoryu
2022-10-25, 10:19 AM
I'm not sure if you'd call it heroic or gritty or what, but what I like is games where:

A. The heroes are generally competent, at least to an expected level. It's not a comedy of errors. That does not mean hyper-competent. It means that if you're a sword-dude, you know how to use a sword. You might not be the best in the land, there might be people and things tougher than you - maybe a lot. But you know which way the sharp end is. If you're something like a guard, you can defeat the typical robber in combat. You may not be able to defeat a knight - he's got training well beyond yours.

B. The heroes are dealing with things that are at least somewhat bigger than their scope. It's an uphill battle, but not so uphill that you can't imagine them winning.

C. They can win, but aren't guaranteed to win, and success usually comes with some level of sacrifice. They're "heroes" because they choose to make the sacrifice, not because they can casually steamroll everything.

D. Mostly their opponents are on the same "scale". They're dealing with people. Maybe tougher people, or ones with more power, but fundamentally people. They may be in the opposite sides of the power range, but they're still in the power range.

So you could still have a game where you're gods. But maybe you're upstart gods, dealing with the entrenched powers. You could be kids on bikes, dealing with slightly adult problems, or those same adults dealing with a larger scope. Whatever it is you do, you can do it to a reasonable level, and failure is generally because you're doing hard stuff, not because you just drop the ball. You can defeat the problem, but it's gonna take some work, and probably some cleverness.

If you think about it, this describes like 90% of movies. Even with "over-the-top" action movies, the hero is dealing with things that are equally over the top.

NichG
2022-10-25, 10:35 AM
I think a useful line between gritty and heroic is, in a heroic story the characters are dealing with difficult things for which failure is possible because they step up - they could have stayed home and been a baker, but they're heroes so they put themselves in danger for the sake of others. Whereas in a gritty story, characters don't have the choice to avoid danger - even doing their utmost to stay out of risky things, their power and agency in the setting is insufficient to actually do so. To the extent that eventually slipping up is nearly inevitable, and the question that is being asked is whether you accomplish some immediate personal goal before that time.

In a gritty story maybe success just means that you personally escape the circumstances that make the world so hostile, or you find a stable enough niche that 'do you survive?' isn't a day to day consideration anymore.

BRC
2022-10-25, 10:37 AM
I'm not sure if you'd call it heroic or gritty or what, but what I like is games where:

A. The heroes are generally competent, at least to an expected level. It's not a comedy of errors. That does not mean hyper-competent. It means that if you're a sword-dude, you know how to use a sword. You might not be the best in the land, there might be people and things tougher than you - maybe a lot. But you know which way the sharp end is. If you're something like a guard, you can defeat the typical robber in combat. You may not be able to defeat a knight - he's got training well beyond yours.

B. The heroes are dealing with things that are at least somewhat bigger than their scope. It's an uphill battle, but not so uphill that you can't imagine them winning.

C. They can win, but aren't guaranteed to win, and success usually comes with some level of sacrifice. They're "heroes" because they choose to make the sacrifice, not because they can casually steamroll everything.

D. Mostly their opponents are on the same "scale". They're dealing with people. Maybe tougher people, or ones with more power, but fundamentally people. They may be in the opposite sides of the power range, but they're still in the power range.

So you could still have a game where you're gods. But maybe you're upstart gods, dealing with the entrenched powers. You could be kids on bikes, dealing with slightly adult problems, or those same adults dealing with a larger scope. Whatever it is you do, you can do it to a reasonable level, and failure is generally because you're doing hard stuff, not because you just drop the ball. You can defeat the problem, but it's gonna take some work, and probably some cleverness.

If you think about it, this describes like 90% of movies. Even with "over-the-top" action movies, the hero is dealing with things that are equally over the top.

That's pretty firmly Heroic scale.

Thinking about it, I think most long-running campaigns are going to be Heroic. Gritty kind of requires the regular, and very real, threat of character death, which makes it great for meatgrinder one-shots, but hard to sustain a long campaign. Mythic is more about bouncing character concepts off each other, and the game is almost entierly defined by the character dynamics, which means that a given set of characters will get stale over a longer campaign.

Pex
2022-10-25, 12:05 PM
My issue is one of attitude. I won't say it of everyone who likes gritty play, but I often find those who prefer gritty play boast of it to the point of self-righteousness. For D&D in particular they will then blame D&D for not living up to their standards instead of playing a game system purposely designed to suit their style of play. They're also the ones who tend to scream the loudest when things that were obstacles at low level no longer are, which is why they scream about fly or teleport. They have low tolerance level for PC power, so complain about Great Weapon Master and Healing Word.

NichG
2022-10-25, 12:15 PM
That's pretty firmly Heroic scale.

Thinking about it, I think most long-running campaigns are going to be Heroic. Gritty kind of requires the regular, and very real, threat of character death, which makes it great for meatgrinder one-shots, but hard to sustain a long campaign. Mythic is more about bouncing character concepts off each other, and the game is almost entierly defined by the character dynamics, which means that a given set of characters will get stale over a longer campaign.

My average campaign length tends to be about 50-70 sessions and I tend to run mythic for the most part (or rather, I tend to run either full mythic or heroic->mythic progression games). I've played in one long-ish gritty game, but for the most part the gritty stuff I've run or played in tends towards 1-3 session durations.

gbaji
2022-10-25, 02:14 PM
I'm starting to think most of the thread is hinged on personal definitions of adjectives that aren't very explicitly defined. Full honesty, my personal definitons of gritty/heroic/mythic aren't hard edged defined and they're imprecise & possibly overlapping because they're relative to some or all of style, genre, and system.

Mostly I think when I'm talking about these sorts of things its in respect to how a game (session+system) feels as a player. So Shadowrun felt heroic* while playing a mundane in D&D 5e feels gritty**. Which of course is absolutely opposite how people are trying to define things.

There is value in making a distinction between a "game" (specific scenario or set of scenarios), and a "game system" (actual rules used for play). Any game system can be used to run a scenario that is "gritty". But some game systems will work better for maintaining a longer series of scenarios that remain gritty than others.

So yeah, you can run low level D&D characters through some gritty scenarios. But at a certain point, they level to the point where you have to scale up the threats to the point where they can't logically fit into the game world without being shifted to a more "heroic" level play. You simply can't justify why low level street mooks, or rats, or bats, or spiders are sufficient threats to your characters to maintain a gritty feel, but also haven't completely wiped out the local populace of whatever environment you are in. It's the difference between dealing with threats that are a danger to the environment you are in, and holding them at bay while attempting to maintain that environment (street level "gritty" play) vs marching heroically over to the ruins of an ancient city that was long ago wiped out by something, and dealing with the threat there (very clearly heroic). Anything powerful enough to be a threat to even low-mid level D&D characters will absolutely wipe out or have conquered any "normal" population. That's just a function of how the level system works.

Other game systems (typically skill based instead of level based) are excellent for running sustained gritty campaigns because while you get better at what you do, you never really become "more powerful", not in the way level based systems (and especially D&D do). IMO, it's all about hit points that really make this a big deal. And while there are some systems in non-level based games that simulate this to a degree (some more than others), it's never the same as "I can just take X more damage, and are Y harder to hit/affect every single level" like D&D has.

BRC
2022-10-25, 02:21 PM
My issue is one of attitude. I won't say it of everyone who likes gritty play, but I often find those who prefer gritty play boast of it to the point of self-righteousness. For D&D in particular they will then blame D&D for not living up to their standards instead of playing a game system purposely designed to suit their style of play. They're also the ones who tend to scream the loudest when things that were obstacles at low level no longer are, which is why they scream about fly or teleport. They have low tolerance level for PC power, so complain about Great Weapon Master and Healing Word.
I think the attitude is mostly from the idea that "Gritty=Hard and you need to be an ESPECIALLY SKILLED PLAYER to win!" which isn't necessarily the case.

I'd also say that D&D 5e can only really pull off Gritty at low levels, and even then is a pretty bad "Gritty" game. Yeah you can get the feel, but the RNG of the dice are so prominent at low levels that you're mostly just playing Russian roulette and seeing who gets unlucky. There are not that many tools for low-level characters to avoid combat if it's presented, and deadly combats at low levels are usually mostly about luck, there isn't much you can do if you can go down to 2 decent hits from a goblin.


My average campaign length tends to be about 50-70 sessions and I tend to run mythic for the most part (or rather, I tend to run either full mythic or heroic->mythic progression games). I've played in one long-ish gritty game, but for the most part the gritty stuff I've run or played in tends towards 1-3 session durations.

I'm curious what a long-lasting Mythic game looks like. In my mind the fun of a mythic game is to show up and explore the dynamics of your character's powerset, but that will get old, especially since you reshape the setting with your actions, eventually the setting is mostly just The Soup that the PC's created.
Plus, character progression for a mythic game doesn't seem especially interesting to my mind (Doesn't mean I don't believe it can't be done, I just don't have a mental image for what that looks like)

kyoryu
2022-10-25, 02:51 PM
So yeah, you can run low level D&D characters through some gritty scenarios. But at a certain point, they level to the point where you have to scale up the threats to the point where they can't logically fit into the game world without being shifted to a more "heroic" level play. You simply can't justify why low level street mooks, or rats, or bats, or spiders are sufficient threats to your characters to maintain a gritty feel, but also haven't completely wiped out the local populace of whatever environment you are in. It's the difference between dealing with threats that are a danger to the environment you are in, and holding them at bay while attempting to maintain that environment (street level "gritty" play) vs marching heroically over to the ruins of an ancient city that was long ago wiped out by something, and dealing with the threat there (very clearly heroic). Anything powerful enough to be a threat to even low-mid level D&D characters will absolutely wipe out or have conquered any "normal" population. That's just a function of how the level system works.

For me, at least, it's not really a matter of absolute power levels - it's more a matter of relative power levels to what you're doing.

What I want in a heroic/gritty game is a very real chance of failure. Sometimes you lose. In a gritty game, that's probably a lot, and in a heroic game, it's frequent. In a superheroic game, not so much.

Like, basically:

Gritty: You're just trying to survive. Actually solving problems is beyond your scope.
Heroic: You can solve problems, but doing so will require sacrifice, and you'll experience setbacks.
Superheroic: Of course you solve problems. You rarely lose.

NichG
2022-10-25, 03:55 PM
I'm curious what a long-lasting Mythic game looks like. In my mind the fun of a mythic game is to show up and explore the dynamics of your character's powerset, but that will get old, especially since you reshape the setting with your actions, eventually the setting is mostly just The Soup that the PC's created.
Plus, character progression for a mythic game doesn't seem especially interesting to my mind (Doesn't mean I don't believe it can't be done, I just don't have a mental image for what that looks like)

So the last two campaigns I ran:


One was something called Mythclad, which was based on a total rewrite of 3.5e that basically had all classes have tiered abilities between 1 and 10 (like spell or maneuver levels), as well as an extra layer of open-ended dramatic editing powers the PCs could choose from by 'being aligned with a particular myth' that got advanced every 5 character levels. Basic campaign conceit was that myths determined reality for this world, rather than vice versa, and everything permanent was being constantly regenerated by progressing through particular story loops. But anyhow, this was a heroic -> mythic progression campaign. It started at Lv3 with 'you all got captured by slavers and taken aboard their airship' with the airship being commandeered by the PCs and some other NPCs that were with them in session 1, after which they got blown off course by the intercession of one of the PC's distant family members 'to help him grow' (said PC was playing a great, great, ..., great grandchild of an ancient dragon, who eventually wanted to use them as a bargaining chip in a political marriage, and had a sort of 'family interference' metagame thing going on). Session 2 had them exploring an island that had the ruins of both an older civilization and an outpost of an imperial government of the setting, and in the ruins they found a 'phrase' that had been under a bunch of antimemetic protections - the phrase jumped into one of the PCs' heads, and basically they made contact with an eldritch being sworn to protect the phrase, and this was basically the start of the campaign-long metaplot. The next several sessions involved un-twisting the story of an island where its story had been perverted by external forces, dealt with a hundred-year-sacrifice-to-the-shark-that-eats-everything local tradition, came upon a city that had been shelled by the empire and agreed to find the ghost of someone killed in the shelling, etc, etc. PCs unlocked their first two mythclad abilities by this point IIRC, which included things like a Gamer-esque 'know what something is, and have the personal comments of the creator of the setting about it', an ability that gave the holder 'automatic recognition as an approved user of any system or technological device', an ability to consume the curses of others and turn them into strengths, an ability to treat the scenery as containing any temporary details one might need in order to do stunts, etc. Not quite atomic action rewrite the setting stuff yet, but getting open-ended.

Around session 12 was the first big mythic moment, where the party was investigating a mine just after getting back to known skies, and found themselves in a race against members of a cult of sorts to access an area in the mine - which they found contained a sort of written record of the myths that established the properties of metals in the setting, negotiated with the guardians, and basically got administrator access to move the anchor-point around (and change the material properties of metals if they wanted). Following that they dealt with an island that appeared to be an artist enclave but everyone was sort of part of a collective hivemind aesthetic ('the song'), which they made a deal with to remove the ability of one of the PCs to be bound by the machinations of others, in exchange for basically carrying the song to another empire in the setting and dropping it on them like a bomb. There were various other things, still probably heroic or high-heroic with only bits and pieces of fully mythic actions, until session 19 or 20, at which they basically figured out how to 'use' the phrases - each of which essentially was a thing that forbade the last copy of itself from leaving existence in the world, and as well each gave lie to one aspect of the world-as-is. At that point the party was in a race to block enemy forces from accessing things that might let them divine the phrases or capturing the NPC and so on. And also the presence of the phrases tended to do things, so the party had to consider and control their consequences to the fabric of reality. The party had a PC with a phrase that let them 'deny aspects of reality which go unobserved' and the party had an NPC ally who had the phrase that let them 'prevent the ratification of the next moment of time', and those things would 'happen' with or without the intention of those characters. So at this point its kind of getting there. By Session 25, one of the PCs basically stormed their home nation and upended its political structure by messing with something that 'gave everyone with shared nationality a feat possessed by the wielder', mostly to tell off their parents for attempting to lock them into an arranged marriage - that was like a third of a session worth of play. Bit by bit...

Around Session 30 they started to deal with multiverse/time stuff, and got a hint that the phrases indicated some greater instability of their reality. By Session 40 they started the 'jungle portal' arc where the PCs basically decided enough with the cult trying to collect the phrases, lets just unmake them pre-emptively. They found that the cult was all about bringing back some sort of abomination that had been created by the royal family which had the only copy of the third phrase and so couldn't be killed or truly banished. There was a bit of a thing here that's a bit complicated to explain but effectively the PCs more or less decided the succession war of one of the big empires in the setting by kidnapping one person, setting a trap for the armies of the other person to essentially collide and distract the armies of the cult, etc, etc. A combination of small actions in some cases, but some of these things were on the basis of a high tier Strategist ability that one PC had to 'know what someone else would do in a situation you envision' that could be spammed. They basically used that to create a sort of perfect storm of bad events for all their enemies they didn't like, so those people would take each-other out off-screen. I think that probably counts as fully mythic scale at that point. They proceeded into a reality tear in the jungle, used a trick to read the third phrase from the mind of the abomination, and used a different mythclad ability to 'eradicate a plague by killing its source' in order to cure that thing's corruption setting-wide in a single action.

This was all well and good except that now they had all three phrases in close proximity, and putting the pieces together they found that the setting as it currently was (supported by story cycles, etc) was basically a lie that had been made real to avert a catastrophe that had occurred in the wider multiverse. Essentially their entire world was a liferaft of denied causality, a bubble that could be 'popped' as long as the three phrases existed within the world, but also where the existence of the three phrases was mandated by the force that supported the world. So this was the turn into full mythic, with subsequent events being things like: negotiating with other survivors from that wider multiverse who wanted to reclaim stuff that had been stolen to give the bubble the concepts it needed to exist - things like 'time' and 'life'; operating in a space without time Sluggy Freelance style, then learning from eldritch beings how to exploit the ambiguity of the concept of simultaneity to not care about timelessness; going through the judgment process of the Egyptian afterlife in order to steal Maat's feather for use in shenanigans and ending up in a debate with her about how opposing conceptual domains should play together without leading to chain cascade failures like the disaster that had happened, while also playing tag with Apophis who ended up dubbing one of the PCs his rival after a sort of stalemate conflict, having one PC magitechnologically rebuild their own mind in such a way that they could spend an unthinkable number of perceptual years collecting every single salvageable fragment of every soul that had been lost in the disaster from all corners of the multiverse, in order to reassemble them as best they could, etc. The campaign concluded on session 57, with the PCs having basically constructed a new 'truth' for what had happened during the disaster using Ma'at's feather to make it stick, cleaned up all of the inconsistencies with that truth remaining in reality by post-hoc resolving them - essentially coming up with an answer to the paradox posed by each of the three phrases - and unlocked their world to the greater multiverse, ending the cycle of story and allowing events to continue.


The other campaign...


I don't have as detailed notes at a session-by-session level, but the premise of this campaign was a system in which superheroes and supervillains would have absolute control over a particular theme or concept of power, but did not necessarily realize or understand the extent of their control. Basically you could always create a new 'level 0 power' on the fly, and as long as no one else with powers opposed the action of that power, it basically does what you say it does. You do however have to purchase 'modalities' which are sort of broad ways in which powers can manifest into moves - things like 'create' or 'transmute' or 'know'. So characters grew by expanding their modality list, or by investing in moves to bring them up above the 0-dice point so they could be used in successful contest with other power-wielders. The other gimmick of the system is that at any time, you can give yourself as much XP as you want, but you take a corresponding amount of 'dissonance' - which increases the probability that if you roll dice, something goes wrong, up to and including your power separating from you as an omnipotent NPC that wants to destroy everything that could emotionally impact you. So in principle, at any point, any power-wielder can go nuclear and become as powerful as they understand how to express.

Session 1 involved one of the PCs sort of incidentally adding an expanding physics bubble to the world that 'it is a law of the world that I do not speak untruths', but which in turn sort of had the effect of 'whatever I say will be true, or else' when un-opposed.

The campaign progressed from a 'fleeing people who want to kidnap us for our powers' caravan plotline across post-apocalyptic Europe to things like starting a medicine company using the Alchemy + Invention powerset of one of the PCs, dealing with humanity's collective subconscious and the various egregores manifested from it, retroactively rewriting the holy book and all copies of it that had been made of a pop-up religion that was preaching extermination of the powered, dealing with a group of kid geniuses who had made contact with an entity from the far future of an alternate timeline by listening to radio static in very specific ways, rewriting the nature of powers to allow them to work according to the Law of Contagion and then using that to assassinate a living idea using material from its alternate-timeline self (and thereby removing the ability of humans to mistrust one-another), creating a school for powered children including one student who was actually someone's power broken free of their control, taking control of the process by which people gained powers and making it less destructive, creating and populating an afterlife including a celestial bureaucracy sort of spirit world - all made from applications of one PC's power, participating in conceptual warfare against a multiversal corporation whose essence was the idea of 'co-option of purpose', etc, etc.

I think it was also around 50 or 60 sessions...


Current campaign is Limit Break - Villains. The players had to make a sort of four-arc plan for apotheosis as part of character gen. One character for example has the first arc being 'take down a public figure in the city we're in', second arc 'take down the leading politicians of our city', third arc is 'create a revolutionary organization that independently of their own actions takes down existing rule in places', and fourth arc is 'render it impossible for hypocritical leaders to reign in the world anywhere, ever and forever' Another PC has first arc 'get a costume and take over a news program to broadcast an episode of a villain show', and fourth arc 'none will be able to look away, none can avoid it - all will watch my work'

Mechalich
2022-10-25, 05:27 PM
For me, at least, it's not really a matter of absolute power levels - it's more a matter of relative power levels to what you're doing.

What I want in a heroic/gritty game is a very real chance of failure. Sometimes you lose. In a gritty game, that's probably a lot, and in a heroic game, it's frequent. In a superheroic game, not so much.

Like, basically:

Gritty: You're just trying to survive. Actually solving problems is beyond your scope.
Heroic: You can solve problems, but doing so will require sacrifice, and you'll experience setbacks.
Superheroic: Of course you solve problems. You rarely lose.

It's still possible to solve problems in gritty play, the issue is that the party operates in a small pond and society as a whole is fully capable of erasing said pond entirely, often entirely without malice, and erasing the impact of all the PCs have accomplished and their failures at a stroke.

For example, consider a 'street level' game largely confined to a single slow district in a city. The PCs could do all sorts of great things in that slum, fight crime, pursue redevelopment, reform local politicians, etc. and yet the major could, at the end of the campaign, sign a bill bulldozing the whole district that the PCs could do absolutely nothing to stop.

That's the thing about gritty, if some societal change or historical development overrides the PCs ongoing efforts there's nothing they can do about it. In heroic play they can do something about it, though it may be really hard. In mythic play this can't happen because society has to take it's cues from the mythic entities not the other way around.

Pauly
2022-10-25, 08:44 PM
That's pretty firmly Heroic scale.

Thinking about it, I think most long-running campaigns are going to be Heroic. Gritty kind of requires the regular, and very real, threat of character death, which makes it great for meatgrinder one-shots, but hard to sustain a long campaign. Mythic is more about bouncing character concepts off each other, and the game is almost entierly defined by the character dynamics, which means that a given set of characters will get stale over a longer campaign.

Having played a couple of long running ‘gritty’ campaigns it isn’t hard to sustain a ‘gritty’ campaign. The players just have to be careful and be fully aware of the lethality of their surroundings. As a GM the challenge is to make sure that the players have plenty of options other than ‘kick the door down and start spraying lead and pray there aren’t too many bad guys’.

I’m mostly happy with “the players aren’t going to change the world” as a way to define gritty -v- heroic, but I don’t think it is a compete definition by itself. There are some genres which are firmly heroic, but the players aren’t going to alter the world in a meaningful way - Three Musketeer style swashbuckling campaigns for example. On the other hand Cthulhu campaigns may be about end of the world events but can be firmly gritty in play.

False God
2022-10-25, 11:07 PM
In a general sense, I would agree that "heroic" is my ideal level of play. Neither so dangerous that the players lock up due to fear that any action could kill them, no so high-powered that a flick of their pinky-finger can raze continents.
Somewhere around "Danger can be reasonably found anywhere, but the PCs are also dangerous."

Duff
2022-10-25, 11:36 PM
It seems to me like this is partly a product of the scale of the campaign and the scale or the character's actions.
If the action is all zoomed in really close to the PCs, but the world is zoomed way out, you're playing gritty. If the scene of everything affected by the PCs is a shot showing the whole country or the world, you're mythic.
Maybe a good benchmark is "How common are events that you need to endure vs events you need to resolve." or "How often does the GM describe to the players an Out of context problem?"

A mid level D&D wizard leading a small island is mythic if the whole campaign is tightly focused on that Island. The god you face down live in the island's volcano. You talk to it, or fight it and it doesn't blow up the island. You fight the forest fire.
OTOH, the representatives of a whole medieval level world are operating at gritty level if they're trying to save their planet in the context of a campaign where the setting is a significant fraction of the galaxy. When the orcs come, you're hiding the population in caves. When the inquisition come, you jump though the hoops to prove to them that the planet shouldn't be glassed.
Though in these extreme cases, the player will know the setting and that will influence the feel.

And I agree that a lot of games only do one well. I think that's a style thing. A lot of games include the scale in their "pitch" and that commits them to keeping to that scale.

kyoryu
2022-10-26, 09:28 AM
It seems to me like this is partly a product of the scale of the campaign and the scale or the character's actions.
If the action is all zoomed in really close to the PCs, but the world is zoomed way out, you're playing gritty. If the scene of everything affected by the PCs is a shot showing the whole country or the world, you're mythic.
Maybe a good benchmark is "How common are events that you need to endure vs events you need to resolve." or "How often does the GM describe to the players an Out of context problem?"

A mid level D&D wizard leading a small island is mythic if the whole campaign is tightly focused on that Island. The god you face down live in the island's volcano. You talk to it, or fight it and it doesn't blow up the island. You fight the forest fire.
OTOH, the representatives of a whole medieval level world are operating at gritty level if they're trying to save their planet in the context of a campaign where the setting is a significant fraction of the galaxy. When the orcs come, you're hiding the population in caves. When the inquisition come, you jump though the hoops to prove to them that the planet shouldn't be glassed.
Though in these extreme cases, the player will know the setting and that will influence the feel.

And I agree that a lot of games only do one well. I think that's a style thing. A lot of games include the scale in their "pitch" and that commits them to keeping to that scale.

I think that's a good set of things to look at.

I also think how often the players are reasonably expected to fail is another. Note that I'm not including how severe that failure is.

King of Nowhere
2022-10-26, 10:48 AM
Perhaps the biggest was my contention that high level d&d runs towards gritty if you don't have casters & other big magic or provided plot coupons. But I think that's more disagreement about degree. I don't consider 200hp and killing 3.75 cr 1/8 kobolds a round a qualifier for "heroic" or changing anything large scale when 50 of those kobolds with poop smeared rusty knives is a lethal threat to a party of fighters. To me those PCs are still firmly in the "gritty" zone, even if they can hit up the convenient planar portal to the themed mini-dungeon of "named demon fight tailored to be threat level appropriate". Now someone charismatic leading a revolution might be a different story, but that's basically independent of d&d type class and level concepts.

you underestimate how much of a difference "keep fighting, but better" makes. at level 1 your party can take a group of 5 kobolds with some small risk. 50 kobolds are suicide.
at high level, assuming they somehow don't have access to healing magic or resurrection or teleport away in case of need, say they can kill 500 with relative impunity. that's not "the same, on a bigger scale". that's something that can change the world. because you are basically an army, and an army is something that can change the world on the large scale.
first of all, eve though in theory 600 kobolds may kill you, it won't happen; people rarely fight to the death. those kobolds on the front line won't charge against certain death because after the first 500 of them died, maybe you will be weakened enough that the rest may stand a chance. those kobolds in the front line, as soon as they realize they have no chance, they will flee. So you can basically disperse an army all by yourself.
but even putting that aside, by being an army you have leverage power. the king may not like you, but you being able to knock down the door of the castle, kill all the guards and kill the king means the king can't dismiss you. even if you have no diplomacy and a permanent charisma drain, you can still get more political concessions out of the king than you could get as a first level diplomancer, because what you can bring to the bargaining table matters a lot more than how well you talk.

and so you end at heroic level, or possibly even mythic, despite lacking any kind of skill besides "kills stuff really well". and that works even if the society can potentially kill you, which is your qualfier for gritty. sure, that kobold army maybe will manage to kill you after all. but do you take the risk? do you accept the inevitable casualties? wouldn't you rather have this powerful dude on your side? it's world-changing by its pure bargaining power.

gbaji
2022-10-26, 02:43 PM
And on the flip side of the coin, that ShadowRun street gang that was a big threat to your characters when they were just starting out, are still a threat if given just slightly better gear/weapons, and employing slightly better tactics a couple of years of play time later. The equivalent in D&D will *never* be a threat to a mid level party, no matter how much gear you give them, or how great their tactics are. The only way you make them a threat is by increasing their level. And once you do that, you've leveled them out of anything that would reasonably be hanging out causing trouble for "normal people". You somewhat automatically level up into a heroic level, just by sheer economics of scale/power.

KorvinStarmast
2022-10-26, 02:59 PM
Blades in the Dark feels like it wants to be gritty most of the time, but our campaign is only a few sessions old and we have not yet leveled up the crew.

NichG
2022-10-26, 03:02 PM
I mean, that actually tells you one way to run gritty D&D - have the game take place in a setting where the illithids, ancient dragons, yugoloths, or whomever won and wiped out or enslaved 99% of the other species. And the PCs start as Lv1 standard races. Even if you gain ten levels, that at best brings you up to 'could actually win a fight against a citizen'.

If levels are insurmountable and you're level 10 in a world run by level 20s, that's going to be gritty.

awa
2022-10-26, 03:47 PM
you underestimate how much of a difference "keep fighting, but better" makes. at level 1 your party can take a group of 5 kobolds with some small risk. 50 kobolds are suicide.
at high level, assuming they somehow don't have access to healing magic or resurrection or teleport away in case of need, say they can kill 500 with relative impunity. that's not "the same, on a bigger scale". that's something that can change the world. because you are basically an army, and an army is something that can change the world on the large scale.
first of all, eve though in theory 600 kobolds may kill you, it won't happen; people rarely fight to the death. those kobolds on the front line won't charge against certain death because after the first 500 of them died, maybe you will be weakened enough that the rest may stand a chance. those kobolds in the front line, as soon as they realize they have no chance, they will flee. So you can basically disperse an army all by yourself.
but even putting that aside, by being an army you have leverage power. the king may not like you, but you being able to knock down the door of the castle, kill all the guards and kill the king means the king can't dismiss you. even if you have no diplomacy and a permanent charisma drain, you can still get more political concessions out of the king than you could get as a first level diplomancer, because what you can bring to the bargaining table matters a lot more than how well you talk.

and so you end at heroic level, or possibly even mythic, despite lacking any kind of skill besides "kills stuff really well". and that works even if the society can potentially kill you, which is your qualfier for gritty. sure, that kobold army maybe will manage to kill you after all. but do you take the risk? do you accept the inevitable casualties? wouldn't you rather have this powerful dude on your side? it's world-changing by its pure bargaining power.

I mean in theory in but in practice not necessarily I have played games both in person and on computers where the wold kinda levels up with you so that you never really get ahead. I recall one particularly annoying example where our pc encountered a 5th level+ pick pocket, and were supposed to feel bad for the urchin with magic items "just stealing to feed themselves" we were unimpressed with this logic. Just because it is bad world building does not change that it can happen. Because while rarely so blatantly it definitely does.

King of Nowhere
2022-10-26, 04:51 PM
I recall one particularly annoying example where our pc encountered a 5th level+ pick pocket, and were supposed to feel bad for the urchin with magic items "just stealing to feed themselves" we were unimpressed with this logic. Just because it is bad world building does not change that it can happen. Because while rarely so blatantly it definitely does.
:smallbiggrin::smallbiggrin:
it reminds me of a game where we had a guy with a vow of poverty, and we often jokes that he would make charity by giving his loot to the poor as it is. "i'm hungry, please a coin" "here, good man, take this +2 full plate armor".
perhaps that urchin was the result of such an encounter. :smallbiggrin::smallbiggrin:

but seriously, if i have to gain level just so that the world scales with me so I will do exactly the same thing with bigger numbers, I'd rather just not gain levels. I abandoned videogames over this


I mean, that actually tells you one way to run gritty D&D - have the game take place in a setting where the illithids, ancient dragons, yugoloths, or whomever won and wiped out or enslaved 99% of the other species. And the PCs start as Lv1 standard races. Even if you gain ten levels, that at best brings you up to 'could actually win a fight against a citizen'.

If levels are insurmountable and you're level 10 in a world run by level 20s, that's going to be gritty.

hey, I like that idea. could make for a cool setting.

awa
2022-10-26, 06:28 PM
:smallbiggrin::smallbiggrin:
it reminds me of a game where we had a guy with a vow of poverty, and we often jokes that he would make charity by giving his loot to the poor as it is. "i'm hungry, please a coin" "here, good man, take this +2 full plate armor".
perhaps that urchin was the result of such an encounter. :smallbiggrin::smallbiggrin:

but seriously, if i have to gain level just so that the world scales with me so I will do exactly the same thing with bigger numbers, I'd rather just not gain levels. I abandoned videogames over this



.

Ironically the one good thing about that dm was he allowed us to spend vow of poverty money helping people rather than nebulously tossing it into charity. It turns out you can brute force a lot of problems with that kinda gold. I mostly recall using the cash to buy teleports for refuges. On the other hand they were both useless, annoying and a constant problem.

RandomPeasant
2022-10-26, 11:05 PM
What I want in a heroic/gritty game is a very real chance of failure. Sometimes you lose. In a gritty game, that's probably a lot, and in a heroic game, it's frequent. In a superheroic game, not so much.

That's largely orthogonal to the question of power level, though. You can have real chances of failure even at very high levels of power. The Avengers (at least, ones like Doctor Strange or Thor) are more powerful than most people who talk about "gritty" games want D&D characters to be. But they lose at the end of Infinity War, and they lose hard. And, sure, we all knew that would get rolled back in Endgame, but the superheroic setting still produced a story where people lost. If you look at Elseworlds-type stuff that's of more limited scope, you can find even more direct examples. And you can have stories about characters who are not very powerful but still never face any real stakes.


It's still possible to solve problems in gritty play, the issue is that the party operates in a small pond and society as a whole is fully capable of erasing said pond entirely, often entirely without malice, and erasing the impact of all the PCs have accomplished and their failures at a stroke.

But "society as a whole" is also playing in that same "gritty" setting. In the terms people tend to use, that mayor is very much playing a "gritty" game, just one that happens to get more of its DNA from Factorio or Sim City than D&D. The real difference is whether the party is able to effect change within the paradigm of D&D, where actions are primarily personal. Making the game "gritty" or "heroic" doesn't stop you from making sweeping changes. It just means that the mechanisms by which those changes are made are divorced from the core gameplay loop. Ironically, in the effort to create a more coherent game by limiting power levels, you've actually broken the "game" part of the game.


I’m mostly happy with “the players aren’t going to change the world” as a way to define gritty -v- heroic, but I don’t think it is a compete definition by itself.

Honestly, I don't think it's a very good definition at all. Whether a story involves the world changing is mostly orthogonal to how powerful the participants are. "And then they lived happily ever after and did political reforms you're not interested in hearing about because this is an action movie" is a resolution to plenty of action movies. But so is "and then they all kind of sat around until the next action movie premise showed up". The distinction between "gritty" and not is less about whether the power to change the world exists, and more about whether that power is personal or institutional.

Ignimortis
2022-10-27, 02:32 AM
In games governed by numbers, such as most TTRPGs, enough numbers will still shift the scale. If you take a D&D level 20 Champion Fighter and put them in a world where they can only be hit on a roll of 20, each hit does 1 damage, and every enemy has 1 HP, with very powerful ones having maybe 5 damage per hit and 10 HP, they are still mythic. They can enforce their will through sheer violence, and no amount of opposition will ever stop them.

If you take the same character and put them in a game where everything has hundreds of HP, hits on a 5+ and deals 50 HP per hit? Instant grittiness, because taking on more than one enemy is likely to kill you in very short time.

So while mythic and gritty are not exactly only "heroic with more/less numbers", they can be.

NichG
2022-10-27, 02:47 AM
In games governed by numbers, such as most TTRPGs, enough numbers will still shift the scale. If you take a D&D level 20 Champion Fighter and put them in a world where they can only be hit on a roll of 20, each hit does 1 damage, and every enemy has 1 HP, with very powerful ones having maybe 5 damage per hit and 10 HP, they are still mythic. They can enforce their will through sheer violence, and no amount of opposition will ever stop them.

If you take the same character and put them in a game where everything has hundreds of HP, hits on a 5+ and deals 50 HP per hit? Instant grittiness, because taking on more than one enemy is likely to kill you in very short time.

So while mythic and gritty are not exactly only "heroic with more/less numbers", they can be.

Heroic sure. Mythic... I don't necessarily agree. It would depend on the structure of the world having hierarchies where an efficient kill could implement a macro change. If you don't have that, well, big numbers are big. To some extent they don't really need to be stopped, just avoided (and the specific numbers you gave, ~5000 soldiers with longbows kills that character in one round). There's also a metagame factor - if the DM actually requires them to play out their actions round by round rather than just handwaving away 'yeah, you can totally kill that army, lets move on', then due to the sheer time it would take to actually wipe out an army of 10k soldiers for example, it just wouldn't happen. You could write mythic fiction about that character, but you can't necessarily force the actual game being played into mythic stance just by virtue of numbers if those numbers don't come with an accompanying change in the scale of resolution.

Telok
2022-10-27, 03:09 AM
In games governed by numbers, such as most TTRPGs, enough numbers will still shift the scale. If you take a D&D level 20 Champion Fighter and put them in a world where they can only be hit on a roll of 20, each hit does 1 damage, and every enemy has 1 HP, with very powerful ones having maybe 5 damage per hit and 10 HP, they are still mythic. They can enforce their will through sheer violence, and no amount of opposition will ever stop them.

How about a dystopian hell-hole with small enclaves trying to survive millions of those 1 hp, 1 dmg, only hit on a 20... I dunno, call them demon-rats or something. Mr. Fighter, by dint of D&D being pretty well screw job on all base warriors, can rule one tiny enclave and personally battle & die from being swarmed by demon-rats while struggling to get enough of a meager harvest in that only old poeople & small children die of hunger this winter. Mythic?

I mean, even cutting the rats into "level appropriate" sport fights with short rests after each (since its 5e D&D what with "champion fighter") said hero, even four such grand warriors, can't change the world. When the game system's heroic capability caps out at "hit with sword", "has many hit points", and "usually makes run/jump/swim/climb rolls", then it's pretty much all setting details & plot coupons defining if you're a grub eating survivalist or some world shaping power broker.

Like I said, I'm in a 5e D&D game where the tone & feel is decidedly gritty despite the party being 14th level, all flying, all with swim speed/water breathing. Biggest thing we can do is cause or prevent a war that might affect ten cities on the smallest and most sparsely populated of three continents. Win or lose, in a hundred years it'll be an entry in a history book and nothing really changes because of D&D faux medieval stasis and actually powerful immortal D&D creatures in the monster manual being on cosmic cleanup duty. Heck, we can't even gin up an army of our own or talk to kings because we're just no-reputation homeless murderers decked out in magic items.

Ignimortis
2022-10-27, 03:39 AM
Heroic sure. Mythic... I don't necessarily agree. It would depend on the structure of the world having hierarchies where an efficient kill could implement a macro change. If you don't have that, well, big numbers are big. To some extent they don't really need to be stopped, just avoided (and the specific numbers you gave, ~5000 soldiers with longbows kills that character in one round). There's also a metagame factor - if the DM actually requires them to play out their actions round by round rather than just handwaving away 'yeah, you can totally kill that army, lets move on', then due to the sheer time it would take to actually wipe out an army of 10k soldiers for example, it just wouldn't happen. You could write mythic fiction about that character, but you can't necessarily force the actual game being played into mythic stance just by virtue of numbers if those numbers don't come with an accompanying change in the scale of resolution.

Of course, the world-building matters more than numbers, but sometimes numbers are enough to shift the mood. My first version of that post was less abstract: dropping the Fighter into Conan's world would let them become a powerful warrior-king in short order, and would have legends told about his combat prowess a thousand years later, while dropping them into Exalted would maybe amount to them being a heroic mortal, still small fry whenever actual Exalts are involved.

But consider, for a moment, that you take that same Fighter and also give them +150 to all statistics (ability scores, saves, AC, skill ranks...) and an unfatiguing movement speed of 30 km per round, while retaining the same general resolution metrics...darn, it's 5e, ability check numbers don't matter. Alright, let's take a 3.5 level 20 Fighter instead and give them that. They are now, probably, dunking on most Solar Exalted through sheer numbers and the ability to be anywhere in a matter of minutes.

You can inflate numbers further until it hits Superman levels of awareness (can hear/see things for miles). Eventually, just having numbers approaching infinity will make you able to resolve any problem as long as high checks are allowed to have fantastic effects unbound by hard facts of reality (i.e. a +1000 Craft (cooking) check producing more food than was technically possible with the ingredients you had).

In short, as long as the base rules are permissive enough about results, just saying "more numbers!" can shift the scale anyway. But quite often those numbers are far beyond what the game would allow you to get.


When the game system's heroic capability caps out at "hit with sword", "has many hit points", and "usually makes run/jump/swim/climb rolls", then it's pretty much all setting details & plot coupons defining if you're a grub eating survivalist or some world shaping power broker.

Like I said, I'm in a 5e D&D game where the tone & feel is decidedly gritty despite the party being 14th level, all flying, all with swim speed/water breathing. Biggest thing we can do is cause or prevent a war that might affect ten cities on the smallest and most sparsely populated of three continents. Win or lose, in a hundred years it'll be an entry in a history book and nothing really changes because of D&D faux medieval stasis and actually powerful immortal D&D creatures in the monster manual being on cosmic cleanup duty. Heck, we can't even gin up an army of our own or talk to kings because we're just no-reputation homeless murderers decked out in magic items.

I think that's a general issue of D&D-likes that only gets circumvented by powerful magic (sometimes) or not at all. Since 5e is very heavy on DM-may-I, it gets even more noticeable, but let's just say that more definite designs do not avoid that either - I've been in enough games, both D&D-like and not, to know that if the GM wants you to be murderhobos with no agency beyond going somewhere and killing something, they will do so. It's just that other games can maybe probably sometimes have tools for you to try and break the mold.

Telok
2022-10-27, 10:32 AM
I've been in enough games, both D&D-like and not, to know that if the GM wants you to be murderhobos with no agency beyond going somewhere and killing something, they will do so. It's just that other games can maybe probably sometimes have tools for you to try and break the mold.

Funny thing, I think murder-hoboing comes about equally from bith directions. The DM can quash or force it for sure (most systems), but players often seem to go out of their way to avoid anything remotely involving talking to NPCs if it isn't buying gear or "that quest dude in that one town". Yeah, I really had a player say that one time in a sandbox game with very few defined "quest' situations. I couldn't even figure out what he was talking about becaise he couldn't point to a town on a map or name/describe an NPC.

Generally if the game lacks any sort of reputation or social bearing/status rules & effects I find that most non-DM players who are long term mainly 3e & later D&D, will only un-hobo if the DM actively pushes something in the setting that does it. They'll go around killing a dozen major dragons, but only ever talk to NPCs to buy/get more gear & maybe find the next dragon. They pop back into a city they left 6 months and 12 levels ago now decked out in a fortune of magic items, sleep in a cheap inn on the edge of town, buy potions & diamonds & ****, then fade back into the wilderness. It goes down in history as "this year a bunch of dragons on the continent died and all their treasure disappeared" and the PCs are... murder hobos.

Be sure, a lot is with how the DM runs the setting too, but that's leading into some ideas I have for a different thread.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-27, 11:33 AM
Funny thing, I think murder-hoboing comes about equally from bith directions. The DM can quash or force it for sure (most systems), but players often seem to go out of their way to avoid anything remotely involving talking to NPCs if it isn't buying gear or "that quest dude in that one town". Yeah, I really had a player say that one time in a sandbox game with very few defined "quest' situations. I couldn't even figure out what he was talking about becaise he couldn't point to a town on a map or name/describe an NPC.

Generally if the game lacks any sort of reputation or social bearing/status rules & effects I find that most non-DM players who are long term mainly 3e & later D&D, will only un-hobo if the DM actively pushes something in the setting that does it. They'll go around killing a dozen major dragons, but only ever talk to NPCs to buy/get more gear & maybe find the next dragon. They pop back into a city they left 6 months and 12 levels ago now decked out in a fortune of magic items, sleep in a cheap inn on the edge of town, buy potions & diamonds & ****, then fade back into the wilderness. It goes down in history as "this year a bunch of dragons on the continent died and all their treasure disappeared" and the PCs are... murder hobos.

Be sure, a lot is with how the DM runs the setting too, but that's leading into some ideas I have for a different thread.

Oddly, I've had exactly 1 murder hobo. And he lasted one session. I've never had any issue with players not buying into the setting. In fact, they often buy in way more than I expect them to. I've had a lot of rather brutal characters, but they definitely interacted with NPCs and the ongoing narrative and world. They just had no compunctions about murdering the "bad guys" in lots of horrific ways. But shopkeepers? Nah.

Maybe I've just lived a charmed gaming life?

kyoryu
2022-10-27, 11:35 AM
That's largely orthogonal to the question of power level, though. You can have real chances of failure even at very high levels of power. The Avengers (at least, ones like Doctor Strange or Thor) are more powerful than most people who talk about "gritty" games want D&D characters to be. But they lose at the end of Infinity War, and they lose hard. And, sure, we all knew that would get rolled back in Endgame, but the superheroic setting still produced a story where people lost. If you look at Elseworlds-type stuff that's of more limited scope, you can find even more direct examples. And you can have stories about characters who are not very powerful but still never face any real stakes.

Well, yes, that's my point. I think that gritty/etc. isn't really about "power level" directly.

Ignimortis
2022-10-27, 12:19 PM
Funny thing, I think murder-hoboing comes about equally from bith directions. The DM can quash or force it for sure (most systems), but players often seem to go out of their way to avoid anything remotely involving talking to NPCs if it isn't buying gear or "that quest dude in that one town". Yeah, I really had a player say that one time in a sandbox game with very few defined "quest' situations. I couldn't even figure out what he was talking about becaise he couldn't point to a town on a map or name/describe an NPC.

Generally if the game lacks any sort of reputation or social bearing/status rules & effects I find that most non-DM players who are long term mainly 3e & later D&D, will only un-hobo if the DM actively pushes something in the setting that does it. They'll go around killing a dozen major dragons, but only ever talk to NPCs to buy/get more gear & maybe find the next dragon. They pop back into a city they left 6 months and 12 levels ago now decked out in a fortune of magic items, sleep in a cheap inn on the edge of town, buy potions & diamonds & ****, then fade back into the wilderness. It goes down in history as "this year a bunch of dragons on the continent died and all their treasure disappeared" and the PCs are... murder hobos.

Be sure, a lot is with how the DM runs the setting too, but that's leading into some ideas I have for a different thread.
That's an extremely rare experience for me, but I've heard enough reports about it.

However, in my experience, players generally get disinterested in the setting when it does not mesh with their expectations from the game. My first two 5e games back in 2014-2018 were set in a setting loosely based on medieval Europe dynamics, except south was China instead of Africa, and while the DM provided long descriptions of cultures, historical events, slightly grimderp politics, even gave us our small domain in campaign 2, etc - except nobody really cared about that stuff aside from one player. That player took center stage, and everyone else kinda tagged along trying to have fun in their own way. We weren't murderhobos, but we did have an attitude of "that guy in that city" towards things, except we were polite enough to remember the names - in part because 90% of named NPCs ended up on our hit lists for being smug and unpleasant to deal with, and you need to remember what exactly you want to shank a guy for.

I can honestly say that by 2017 onwards I mostly showed up for sessions due to a sense of obligation and unwillingness to inconvenience the DM (my character technically did have a major part in the story, but I didn't really feel able to interact with it).

The next setting the very same DM made in late 2018 was noticeably more fantastical, and by that time he was less annoyed by requests for stuff that would be derided by him as "anime BS" back in 2015. So it garnered a much warmer reception from most players (funnily enough, the player who used to be center stage left soon after the switch), and has been a mainstay ever since.

During the same time (2015-2018) I was also in a long-running VtM game with a different GM, and let's just say that the D&D DM scarcely believed me to be capable of initiative I've showed in VtM by my own description, but it was later confirmed to him by the VtM GM that I wasn't exaggerating.

Pauly
2022-10-27, 03:34 PM
Well, yes, that's my point. I think that gritty/etc. isn't really about "power level" directly.

If we take Warhammer 40k, the game that literally invented the term ‘grimdark’ as an example. PCs in 40k can be some of the most overpowered and extreme characters in all of gaming. Yet if a world is burned to ashes and every soul consumed by demons, in 40k that’s a pretty quiet Thursday. You have to be changing the fate of sectors involving hundreds of worlds before you even get to the footnotes of the daily briefings.

It doesn’t matter if you’re playing a veteran space marine captain in full terminator armor or a guardsman with a lasgun, the world is gritty.

gbaji
2022-10-27, 04:27 PM
I don't know if I'd define "gritty" based solely on the risk of loss/death. At least, not specifically to the PCs. I usually define gritty based on how dangerous the environment itself is to the PCs. If just basic background stuff is dangerous, then it's gritty. That stuff could be random encounters, animals wandering around threatening people, roving bands of <whatever>, etc.

Basically, if the same stuff that is a threat to, but not instantly/automatically fatal to, normal everyday people in the world is a threat to the PCs, then the game is "gritty". To me, it's about how much more capable the PCs are then just any random person in the area, if they were to pick up a weapon and fight (or even/especially in settings where there's some ever present threat and *everyone* has weapons and fights, or dies).

The Avengers? Doesn't matter that they can lose a fight, even a big one. That's never ever gritty. They are the heroes precisely because they are so much more powerful than the normal person walking down the street, that they are in an entire different level. Anything that's a threat to them at all, is something a "normal" person can't hope to manage via any means. That's heroic. Same deal with most D&D parties once they reach even 5th level or so. They are so much more powerful than a 1st level commoner, that the gap between what is a threat to one and a threat to the other is just too high to really run "gritty" well.

You *can*, but you basically have to constantly move up the level of threats to the PCs, and move them into constantly more challenging and dangerous environments to do it. And honestly, I also don't see "gritty" as including the PCs moving easily/constantly on to "new more challenging things". If your PCs travel back to where they started at 1st level, and the things that were threats then are no longer threats to them now? Not gritty. Now, if there is nowhere to go back too, or the whole world has gotten destroyed and/or more dangerous? You could pull that off (think days of future past type worlds). There are exceptions to every rule.

RandomPeasant
2022-10-27, 09:04 PM
How about a dystopian hell-hole with small enclaves trying to survive millions of those 1 hp, 1 dmg, only hit on a 20... I dunno, call them demon-rats or something. Mr. Fighter, by dint of D&D being pretty well screw job on all base warriors, can rule one tiny enclave and personally battle & die from being swarmed by demon-rats while struggling to get enough of a meager harvest in that only old poeople & small children die of hunger this winter. Mythic?

I think that's getting too caught up on the specifics of the numbers and missing the broader point. Suppose we have a 3.5 Fighter, who simply cannot be damaged by low level characters, because he has DR from various sources that is larger than the amount of damage low-level opponents are capable of dealing (or that we're playing some version of the game where a natural 20 isn't an auto-hit and he has an AC of 35 or something). That guy can just walk around killing everybody. And he can do so forever.


actually powerful immortal D&D creatures in the monster manual being on cosmic cleanup duty.

But that's just admitting that you are in a Mythic setting, you're just not allowing the PCs to be mythic.


Generally if the game lacks any sort of reputation or social bearing/status rules & effects I find that most non-DM players who are long term mainly 3e & later D&D, will only un-hobo if the DM actively pushes something in the setting that does it.

Honestly, I don't find that all too surprising. Of course people will follow their incentives. If there's no social status to be gained, people won't do anything to gain social status.


If we take Warhammer 40k, the game that literally invented the term ‘grimdark’ as an example. PCs in 40k can be some of the most overpowered and extreme characters in all of gaming. Yet if a world is burned to ashes and every soul consumed by demons, in 40k that’s a pretty quiet Thursday. You have to be changing the fate of sectors involving hundreds of worlds before you even get to the footnotes of the daily briefings.

It doesn’t matter if you’re playing a veteran space marine captain in full terminator armor or a guardsman with a lasgun, the world is gritty.

It goes both ways though. In 40k, you can save the world. You can take a world that is full of demons daemons and orcs orks and clean it up and install democracy and improve standards of living and reignite the light of science and end the persecution of mutants. And that's a Mythic victory if you do it in a D&D campaign. It's just that you can run a campaign where you do that every day for a hundred years and still not have fixed even half of the worlds in the Imperium. That doesn't lessen those accomplishments, it just means that 40k exists at a scale that breaks people's brains. The Imperium has been decaying for longer than writing has existed in the real world. It will continue decaying for even longer before things come to a head.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-27, 09:27 PM
Honestly, I don't find that all too surprising. Of course people will follow their incentives. If there's no social status to be gained, people won't do anything to gain social status.


Oddly enough, my players do it all the time, even without mechanical incentives or in fact anything other than it being "what their character would do." And the reverse--the high-charisma paladin in my Saturday game told off the guards and the head general after (justifiably, but unknown to him) killing his aide and lover in front of him, even ignoring a bona-fide assassin who was demonstrably attempting to kill a member of the royal family. Why? Because that's who he is. Despite knowing that it would be dramatically sub-optimal.

I find people who are motivated primarily by "what can I get out of it mechanically" to be people I'd rather not play with. It's a style I don't like (not something inherently wrong, mind).

Mechalich
2022-10-27, 10:03 PM
It goes both ways though. In 40k, you can save the world. You can take a world that is full of demons daemons and orcs orks and clean it up and install democracy and improve standards of living and reignite the light of science and end the persecution of mutants. And that's a Mythic victory if you do it in a D&D campaign. It's just that you can run a campaign where you do that every day for a hundred years and still not have fixed even half of the worlds in the Imperium. That doesn't lessen those accomplishments, it just means that 40k exists at a scale that breaks people's brains. The Imperium has been decaying for longer than writing has existed in the real world. It will continue decaying for even longer before things come to a head.

Scale is definitely an element of this. The bigger a setting is, the more difficult it becomes to have impacts at setting scale, and the more power needed to be heroic or mythic. If there's a setting with millions of settled planets, then 'saving a planet' can still be a gritty goal, especially if there are planet destroying weapons that can come along an eliminate all life on that planet on a random Tuesday. The real problem is that because Sci-Fi Authors Have no Sense of Scale, most stupidly huge settings don't actually function and don't have institutions strong enough to hold something so absurdly massive together. This creates incongruities because the players (or their enemies) might do truly astounding things and yet have it not actually mattered, or they might do something absurdly modest and yet somehow it changes the fate of the galaxy.

RandomPeasant
2022-10-27, 11:22 PM
I find people who are motivated primarily by "what can I get out of it mechanically" to be people I'd rather not play with. It's a style I don't like (not something inherently wrong, mind).

The mechanics are the game telling you what is important. If the game doesn't tell you that the social stuff matters, you really can't fault people who don't care for it. If you want social stuff to matter, make it matter.


Scale is definitely an element of this. The bigger a setting is, the more difficult it becomes to have impacts at setting scale, and the more power needed to be heroic or mythic.

But is impact "at setting scale" really what those things are about? The idea that a mechanically identical story stops being "mythic" if you add an "even bigger" to contrast it with doesn't really hold up. If a guy says that he doesn't want Thor in D&D because he thinks Thor is beyond the "heroic" power level he wants, he's not suddenly going to change his mind if Marvel releases a "Mega Thor" movie next week which reveals that there are even more powerful Norse-looking aliens out there. The objective power level does matter. It's not the only thing that matters, but it does matter.

What scale (in the specific way that 40k does it) is give you replayability. You can do a campaign where the PCs save this world, then you can do another one later in what is recognizably the same setting without needing to explicitly roll back what they did in the previous one. Because there are an infinity of problems to solve, you can keep solving problems without ever fundamentally changing the setting. It's a bit like how cop shows set in the real world work. No matter how many crimes you solve, there's always going to be another crime, so you can always keep going.


most stupidly huge settings don't actually function and don't have institutions strong enough to hold something so absurdly massive together.

Well, with 40k, that's the point. The Imperium doesn't hold together. It's just that it is so large, and takes such a long time dying, that you can have stakes that are larger than any "mythic" D&D campaign and still not alter the balance of power. A game like that isn't "not mythic" just because you can do another one like it next year.

Drakevarg
2022-10-27, 11:34 PM
Think there's some trouble defining terms here. People are trying to simultaneously define the power scale of both the system, the setting, and the story and coming into conflict because it's relatively easy to find examples that don't line up on all three simultaneously.

I don't think anyone would really debate that as a setting, WH40K is gritty. It literally codifies grimdark and even if you had a mythic quest to save an entire world, another nightmare factory could steamroll the place literally the very next day and nobody in the wider setting would even notice.

That doesn't mean that you couldn't pull the camera in and tell that mythic story from the point of view of the boots on the ground for whom the stakes actually do matter, and tell a mythic story in the gritty setting.

By contrast, I don't think there's much debate that Star Wars is a fairly heroic setting, what with it being a big sweeping space opera/western/samurai/swashbuckling/pulp/war story. And yet, Rogue One is a story about the desperate struggle of a bunch of freedom fighters who all die just to give someone they don't even know a fighting chance at saving the day. And the one person from the bigger heroic setting who shows up stars in what is essentially a one-minute-long slasher film from the perspective of the normies he's up against. Pretty gritty, particularly in contrast.

You're never going to fit anything into some sweeping theory that sums up every facet of it into a single word. So a better set of conditions might be called for here.

Psyren
2022-10-28, 12:09 AM
Heroic is my cup of tea as well. Having said that, I enjoy PF1's approach to Mythic - i.e. it's a temporary and plot-based power boost that you can grant to the players for a period, and then remove as needed without needing to massively rework their sheets.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-28, 12:10 AM
Think there's some trouble defining terms here. People are trying to simultaneously define the power scale of both the system, the setting, and the story and coming into conflict because it's relatively easy to find examples that don't line up on all three simultaneously.

I don't think anyone would really debate that as a setting, WH40K is gritty. It literally codifies grimdark and even if you had a mythic quest to save an entire world, another nightmare factory could steamroll the place literally the very next day and nobody in the wider setting would even notice.

That doesn't mean that you couldn't pull the camera in and tell that mythic story from the point of view of the boots on the ground for whom the stakes actually do matter, and tell a mythic story in the gritty setting.

By contrast, I don't think there's much debate that Star Wars is a fairly heroic setting, what with it being a big sweeping space opera/western/samurai/swashbuckling/pulp/war story. And yet, Rogue One is a story about the desperate struggle of a bunch of freedom fighters who all die just to give someone they don't even know a fighting chance at saving the day. And the one person from the bigger heroic setting who shows up stars in what is essentially a one-minute-long slasher film from the perspective of the normies he's up against. Pretty gritty, particularly in contrast.

You're never going to fit anything into some sweeping theory that sums up every facet of it into a single word. So a better set of conditions might be called for here.

I was mostly talking about game styles. As in "how does this particular table play. And what kinds of stories and settings do they use." Not of systems (although some systems do some styles better than others as a general rule). And certainly not fictional stories as a whole. Or even settings as a whole.

And I've given up on grand unifying theories. These were more of definitions so I could sum up the things I like in a few words. Loose conversational shorthand, if you will.


The mechanics are the game telling you what is important. If the game doesn't tell you that the social stuff matters, you really can't fault people who don't care for it. If you want social stuff to matter, make it matter.


This is exactly the mechanics first and foremost attitude I dislike. For me, mechanics are helps. Tools to make some actions you're doing a lot easier. A shared language. Not anything truly indispensable or necessary. Just useful at times. And ignorable the rest. Games that try to force the mechanics into primacy, that demand that they be played in certain ways are games I dislike. Don't tell me, Mr rule designer, how I must play. Give me a box of tools, some prefab toys I can use or not, a framework to agree on, and then get the heck out of my way. I and my table will decide what matters to us. We don't need the rules to butt in and try to force us one way or another.

Drakevarg
2022-10-28, 12:14 AM
Heroic is my cup of tea as well. Having said that, I enjoy PF1's approach to Mythic - i.e. it's a temporary and plot-based power boost that you can grant to the players for a period, and then remove as needed without needing to massively rework their sheets.

Y'know I've looked at that book once or twice, and honestly could never wrap my head around what it was trying to do.


I was mostly talking about game styles. As in "how does this particular table play. And what kinds of stories and settings do they use." Not of systems (although some systems do some styles better than others as a general rule). And certainly not fictional stories as a whole. Or even settings as a whole.

And I've given up on grand unifying theories. These were more of definitions so I could sum up the things I like in a few words. Loose conversational shorthand, if you will.

I think that's a much more useful context to express the terms in. I just feel like the conversation's bounced back and forth as to the scope under discussion and as a result kind of lost the basic thread.

RandomPeasant
2022-10-28, 09:16 AM
I don't think anyone would really debate that as a setting, WH40K is gritty. It literally codifies grimdark and even if you had a mythic quest to save an entire world, another nightmare factory could steamroll the place literally the very next day and nobody in the wider setting would even notice.

Even that, I think, is a matter of perspective. There are people who are (in various iterations of the continuity) trying to save the whole setting, and who could plausibly succeed at it. There are win conditions out there for the various factions, some of which you might even argue are win conditions by the standards of sane humans. And the key (in terms of the discussion "gritty/mythic/heroic" is being used for) is that if you were to do that story, it would not involve characters who were that much more powerful than the ones who save a specific world. A story where the victory screen is "and then the Emperor woke up and fixed the Imperium" is, to a first approximation, a million times more impactful than one where the victory screen is "and then you made this particular Imperial colony a good place to live". But the protagonists aren't a million times more powerful.


This is exactly the mechanics first and foremost attitude I dislike. For me, mechanics are helps. Tools to make some actions you're doing a lot easier.

Yes, exactly. The things a game makes easy are the things that game is signaling to be important. You're not doing some noble or important thing by asking people to roleplay when the game doesn't provide any mechanical support for social interactions, you're using a bad tool to do something it wasn't designed for. You can use a flashlight as a hammer. I've done it, and I've assembled perfectly serviceable IKEA furniture that way. But having an actual hammer is better even if all you care about is the furniture and not whatever philosophical value you might place on using things for their intended purpose.

Theoboldi
2022-10-28, 09:48 AM
Yes, exactly. The things a game makes easy are the things that game is signaling to be important. You're not doing some noble or important thing by asking people to roleplay when the game doesn't provide any mechanical support for social interactions, you're using a bad tool to do something it wasn't designed for. You can use a flashlight as a hammer. I've done it, and I've assembled perfectly serviceable IKEA furniture that way. But having an actual hammer is better even if all you care about is the furniture and not whatever philosophical value you might place on using things for their intended purpose.

Why does this have to be philosophical? If some people prefer certain parts of their roleplaying to be handled in freeform, while wanting more guidelines for others, that is a mere matter of preference and personal enjoyment. Insisting that a system that does not provide in-depth mechanics for an aspect of play is inherently unfitting for a game that features this aspect of play prominently has no meaning when rules are not desired at all.

To expand on your metaphor and give an example, I can roleplay a conversation with no mechanical help whatsoever, and often do so because it is fun to me. But I cannot ram a nail into a wall without the use of a tool. Treating the two scenarios as though they place equal importance on the presence of a tool does not work, because it brings in an assumption that already is contrary to what the less mechanically inclined side wants.

Psyren
2022-10-28, 10:13 AM
Y'know I've looked at that book once or twice, and honestly could never wrap my head around what it was trying to do.

Short version is that it creates an entirely tangential leveling progression and powerset that you can bolt onto characters of any level, and take away again as needed. It is unlocked purely by plot and lasts until the plot removes it. You can also use it as a post-20 Epic-style progression.

For example, you could have a mid-level party be enlisted to defend a sacred grove in the Feywild First World from fiendish incursion, and the archfey there share some of the grove's fruit with the party. While in the grove, they get a massive power boost (Mythic) that they then lose once the threat has been rebuffed. This will allow the party to punch way above their weight class temporarily without you needing to hand out new character sheets to them.

Some of the Mythic abilities really should have been baseline (particularly for martials) - e.g. "I can charge past allies to reach an enemy!" or "I can use an enemy I'm grappling as a human shield!" And some of them were even baselined in 5e, e.g.: "I can share the space of a creature two sizes larger than me" and "I can move up to my speed between all my attacks" etc. But some are truly worthy of the title like being able to ignore hardness/DR when sundering things.

Quertus
2022-10-28, 12:44 PM
I was mostly talking about game styles. As in "how does this particular table play.

How does that differ from “Challenge” from “8 kinds of fun”?

PhoenixPhyre
2022-10-28, 12:49 PM
How does that differ from “Challenge” from “8 kinds of fun”?

Entirely. Because it's about the characters, not the players. Challenge, as a fun style, is about the real people feeling challenged.

Heroic vs gritty vs mythic is orthogonal to that. All the characters are being challenged. Or not. The question is how, and by what, and are the challenges amenable to fixes solutions that persist even if the characters move on.

Telok
2022-10-28, 12:52 PM
Why does this have to be philosophical? If some people prefer certain parts of their roleplaying to be handled in freeform, while wanting more guidelines for others, that is a mere matter of preference and personal enjoyment. Insisting that a system that does not provide in-depth mechanics for an aspect of play is inherently unfitting for a game that features this aspect of play prominently has no meaning when rules are not desired at all.

Well it came out of the stuff about if it was the setting, game, or GM making things grit/hero/myth. Sort of semi-tangential since some people were describing PCs with social status using that to hero/myth with characters that were mechanically in grit.

Basically if the game mechanics lack or punish stuff then the GM may override that or insert anything that crosses their mind. Some GMs may do it as a matter of course or habit, others on a case by case basis, others may want to follow the rules. Players learn from that and tend to develop habits based on early experiences. Playing with less experienced GMs & players who were introduced to gaming from video games there is, in my experience, a tendency among most to start from a point of using and trusting the rules first.

And this ties back into the original point I made: That games with weak or no social rules or structures are dependent on the GM to make that stuff matter. D&D, being these days a game generally lacking such rules for the players to engage with, rewards murder-hobo style play with more time spent on combat and more powerful pizza characters because less freeform GMs will more often nope or ignore stuff outside the core rules.

Anyone can chime in with "well i dont play like that and players at my table dont either", but that just means they're a GM who uses freeform rp to reward the players or have homebrewed something to use instead of the weak/missing rules. This applies to any game and to and missing rules or obscure optional rules subsection.

I noted that in my area the majority of muppets & GMs are comfortable following a game's core rules, uncomfortable modifying game state based on freeform rp, and have negative opinions of homebrew & optional rules as things like "too op" or "too fiddly". Its taken years to get some of these people to start trying more rp stuff that's not codified in the rules in games I GM, and I can sometimes tell when another GM in another game has slapped them down for trying to go outside the rules. Therefore, if the games doesn't mechanically enable something and the GM isn't proactively pushing for that thing, then players revert to the things they can count on being rewarded by the game mechanics.

Psyren
2022-10-28, 01:44 PM
Well it came out of the stuff about if it was the setting, game, or GM making things grit/hero/myth. Sort of semi-tangential since some people were describing PCs with social status using that to hero/myth with characters that were mechanically in grit.

Basically if the game mechanics lack or punish stuff then the GM may override that or insert anything that crosses their mind. Some GMs may do it as a matter of course or habit, others on a case by case basis, others may want to follow the rules. Players learn from that and tend to develop habits based on early experiences. Playing with less experienced GMs & players who were introduced to gaming from video games there is, in my experience, a tendency among most to start from a point of using and trusting the rules first.

And this ties back into the original point I made: That games with weak or no social rules or structures are dependent on the GM to make that stuff matter. D&D, being these days a game generally lacking such rules for the players to engage with, rewards murder-hobo style play with more time spent on combat and more powerful pizza characters because less freeform GMs will more often nope or ignore stuff outside the core rules.

Anyone can chime in with "well i dont play like that and players at my table dont either", but that just means they're a GM who uses freeform rp to reward the players or have homebrewed something to use instead of the weak/missing rules. This applies to any game and to and missing rules or obscure optional rules subsection.

I noted that in my area the majority of muppets & GMs are comfortable following a game's core rules, uncomfortable modifying game state based on freeform rp, and have negative opinions of homebrew & optional rules as things like "too op" or "too fiddly". Its taken years to get some of these people to start trying more rp stuff that's not codified in the rules in games I GM, and I can sometimes tell when another GM in another game has slapped them down for trying to go outside the rules. Therefore, if the games doesn't mechanically enable something and the GM isn't proactively pushing for that thing, then players revert to the things they can count on being rewarded by the game mechanics.

Depending on the GM to make any of the pillars matter isn't a good or bad thing, it's just a design decision. D&D relies heavily on the GM for the social and exploration pillars, and less for the combat pillar, because they (I would argue correctly) determined that combat is where newcomers to the genre would need the most help with crafting exciting challenges.

I'd further argue that it's not D&D's job to repair player trauma with bad GMs. Simply creating the space to encourage unlisted actions and checks, as D&D 5e does, is enough - eventually players will feel comfortable exploring this space with a GM who is fine with it, so long as said GM cares about their fun.

Quertus
2022-10-28, 01:55 PM
Entirely. Because it's about the characters, not the players. Challenge, as a fun style, is about the real people feeling challenged.

Heroic vs gritty vs mythic is orthogonal to that. All the characters are being challenged. Or not. The question is how, and by what, and are the challenges amenable to fixes solutions that persist even if the characters move on.

That’s… huh. I guess I can see how you could read it that way. So you’re describing something I’ve always* viewed as a component of “Challenge”. Which… hmmm… while it maybe helps cement what you mean, it’s probably best to discuss your words, as “Challenge” has some strange cruft around it.

As far as “the level of challenge the game provides the characters”? I hate all three styles given. I want a mix of difficulties, that represents the character’s abilities. I want them to automatically overcome some things (like, say, the werewolf ranger finding food in a forest where game is plentiful), automatically fail at some things (said Ranger getting on the prissy Princess’s good side by carrying the dead deer back into camp while naked and covered in blood), and have various levels of challenge at other tasks (like investigating a murder, playing cat and mouse with another werewolf, or fighting a vampire).

I want different members of the same party to live at different points on the “Challenge” scale for the same encounter (the academia mage, for example, couldn’t find food in said forest, for example, but might at least have a shot at befriending rather than alienating or terrifying the Princess).

Does that response match the words you’re using, as you intend them to be used?

* or at least since that article - further back than my senile mind can safely be trusted to remember.

NichG
2022-10-28, 02:30 PM
As much as I dislike describing tabletop things in terms of story, I do think at least for this gritty/heroic/mythic breakdown, 'story' is the most closely aligned place for it to reside rather than things like 'system' or 'rules' or 'character' or 'setting' or even my usual go-to words for describing a bundled tabletop experience 'game' or 'campaign'.

That's why you can't really cleanly point to a game system or a setting and say 'this is a gritty setting' without someone finding an exception that actually feels like an authentic exception. Because in the end, the setting can be subjectively gritty or mythic from different points of view. Yet its also not inherently the character either. And it depends so much on the level of abstraction used...

Theoboldi
2022-10-28, 02:36 PM
Well it came out of the stuff about if it was the setting, game, or GM making things grit/hero/myth. Sort of semi-tangential since some people were describing PCs with social status using that to hero/myth with characters that were mechanically in grit.

Basically if the game mechanics lack or punish stuff then the GM may override that or insert anything that crosses their mind. Some GMs may do it as a matter of course or habit, others on a case by case basis, others may want to follow the rules. Players learn from that and tend to develop habits based on early experiences. Playing with less experienced GMs & players who were introduced to gaming from video games there is, in my experience, a tendency among most to start from a point of using and trusting the rules first.

And this ties back into the original point I made: That games with weak or no social rules or structures are dependent on the GM to make that stuff matter. D&D, being these days a game generally lacking such rules for the players to engage with, rewards murder-hobo style play with more time spent on combat and more powerful pizza characters because less freeform GMs will more often nope or ignore stuff outside the core rules.

Anyone can chime in with "well i dont play like that and players at my table dont either", but that just means they're a GM who uses freeform rp to reward the players or have homebrewed something to use instead of the weak/missing rules. This applies to any game and to and missing rules or obscure optional rules subsection.

I noted that in my area the majority of muppets & GMs are comfortable following a game's core rules, uncomfortable modifying game state based on freeform rp, and have negative opinions of homebrew & optional rules as things like "too op" or "too fiddly". Its taken years to get some of these people to start trying more rp stuff that's not codified in the rules in games I GM, and I can sometimes tell when another GM in another game has slapped them down for trying to go outside the rules. Therefore, if the games doesn't mechanically enable something and the GM isn't proactively pushing for that thing, then players revert to the things they can count on being rewarded by the game mechanics.

And all of these are fair points! But acting as though all preference for certain elements to be handled in this more freeform manner comes from a place of ignorance or trauma is not, and I chafe at the suggestion that it is.

Likewise, I'm always fundamentally going to disagree with the idea that a system which does not provide tools for some pastime is automatically a bad tool in and of itself for that very pastime. It comes in with the assumption that a tool is necessary or desired, which simply is not the case for a sizeable amount of players and GMs.
And, I do wish to point out, I actually am a huge fan of systems that provide softer tools for these sorts of activities. Things like random tables for rolling up social scenarios and characters, GM advice on how to run them, etc. There's plenty of alternatives to having fully fleshed out rules, most of which even trend towards being system agnostic.

There's also an argument to be made that there's a difference between mechanics that run counter to an intended activity and mechanics that don't or only loosely interact with an intended activity. Plus, even in the former case, there are multiple degrees of difficulty that a system can cause, any of which could be ultimately dismissed by the individual player or GM for other perfectly valid reasons of preference.

I would also question whether players who are hesitant to RP and try things outside the codified rules are really going to be fixed by codifying more things, but that's a pretty large discussion that I don't think I'll have the time to really delve into. My main issue was with RandomPeasant's idea that somehow a preference for a lack of rules stems from a purely philosophical point of view.

Telok
2022-10-28, 03:57 PM
And all of these are fair points! But acting as though all preference for certain elements to be handled in this more freeform manner comes from a place of ignorance or trauma is not, and I chafe at the suggestion that it is.

Please do note that I'm never trying to say my experiences are somehow universal, just that its a distinct trend among the majority of gamers I've played with for the last 20 years or so. And I don't suggest that preferring or disliking more or fewer rules on something is based in ignorance or trauma or chocolate. I'm saying I've observed some people acting these ways based on those experiences and situations, and its been most notable & pronounced in D&D and with people who mainly play D&D.

Theoboldi
2022-10-28, 04:32 PM
Please do note that I'm never trying to say my experiences are somehow universal, just that its a distinct trend among the majority of gamers I've played with for the last 20 years or so. And I don't suggest that preferring or disliking more or fewer rules on something is based in ignorance or trauma or chocolate. I'm saying I've observed some people acting these ways based on those experiences and situations, and its been most notable & pronounced in D&D and with people who mainly play D&D.

Which is quite true! Though I honestly would blame that phenomenon on D&D being the most typical entry point for casual roleplayers, and it having a lot of common with the video games they are used to. We as human beings tend to stick to what we already know in behavior, after all. :smalltongue:

I'm glad, anyhow, that you're not painting people with such a broad brush. And I do apologize if I came across as accusing you of such. My issue really was mainly with the original poster I responded to, and I saw your words more as giving legitimacy to their words in an incidental way. :smallsmile:

Quertus
2022-10-28, 07:47 PM
As much as I dislike describing tabletop things in terms of story, I do think at least for this gritty/heroic/mythic breakdown, 'story' is the most closely aligned place for it to reside rather than things like 'system' or 'rules' or 'character' or 'setting' or even my usual go-to words for describing a bundled tabletop experience 'game' or 'campaign'.

That's why you can't really cleanly point to a game system or a setting and say 'this is a gritty setting' without someone finding an exception that actually feels like an authentic exception. Because in the end, the setting can be subjectively gritty or mythic from different points of view. Yet its also not inherently the character either. And it depends so much on the level of abstraction used...

As usual, I feel like you’re saying something smart, but I can’t quite manage to follow it. So… why can’t you use the word “campaign”? What does “story” entail, to you, that “campaign” does not?

And, for my own take, if I said I wanted a story/campaign to be none of the above, to be a mix of gritty, heroic, and mythic, would you opine that I’m saying something incoherent?

NichG
2022-10-28, 07:59 PM
As usual, I feel like you’re saying something smart, but I can’t quite manage to follow it. So… why can’t you use the word “campaign”? What does “story” entail, to you, that “campaign” does not?

And, for my own take, if I said I wanted a story/campaign to be none of the above, to be a mix of gritty, heroic, and mythic, would you opine that I’m saying something incoherent?

Well, one important thing is that a story is told - the same set of events could be described in different ways, with different levels of detail. In that sense I can envision borderline cases the exact same sequence of events with the exact same characters could be told in a way that makes the difference between mythic and heroic feels. Did the author say 'he waved his hand, the crops grew, and the famine ended'? Or did the author spend three pages describing the ritual magic, the reagents that needed to be gathered, the logistics of getting the food to the people who needed it, etc?

That can happen at the level of system or game in the sense that you can have a system that lets someone do something as an atomic action. But it's also dependent on how the GM interfaces with that, etc. Importantly, I think, it can depend on how the GM interfaces with it as a storyteller more-so than the way the GM interfaces as an adjudicator or game designer or player at the table. That isn't to say that GMs who don't try to tell a story would be running games that couldn't be described well by these adjectives, but I think the 'story' element of the play experience - organic story or intentional one - is the most aligned with what feels like these words are being used to describe, to me.

A system won't guarantee grittiness or mythicness or heroicness. Neither will a setting. Neither will a character sheet build. In order for something like grittiness to actually be guaranteed and not just emergent, you would have to start from the conclusion and work backwards. Not only that, but you have to actually view the events subjectively from a certain stance. I could believe that a player could for example play through a gritty campaign but relate to it as though it were a mythic one, and that may well disrupt that experience from actually being well-described by gritty. That's not really something that exists at the campaign level, exactly. It exists at the level of the interpretation of the campaign as a story.

Anyhow, mixes and transitional stories that cross between levels and so on can all certainly be identifiable. I think 'incoherent' would be mistaking a measure for a metric...

RandomPeasant
2022-10-28, 08:15 PM
To expand on your metaphor and give an example, I can roleplay a conversation with no mechanical help whatsoever, and often do so because it is fun to me. But I cannot ram a nail into a wall without the use of a tool.

Ah, but that's breaking the metaphor. When I assemble IKEA furniture, the goal isn't to do the assembly, it's to get a piece of furniture that does some particular task. But all those tasks are doable without furniture. I don't need a bookshelf to store my books, I can just put them in a pile. It may even be that I prefer the pile to a bookshelf that is sufficiently badly designed or assembled with sufficiently lacking tools. But the idea that such a situation negates the need for bookshelves is simply inaccurate. The goal of roleplaying is to produce a compelling story. It may be that you don't trust designers to do a better job framing that story than you expect to do by making things up. But the things you're making up are still rules. They're just rules that aren't tested very well and aren't predictable or accessible to other people.


Anyone can chime in with "well i dont play like that and players at my table dont either", but that just means they're a GM who uses freeform rp to reward the players or have homebrewed something to use instead of the weak/missing rules. This applies to any game and to and missing rules or obscure optional rules subsection.

It's the difference between Linux and Windows. Yes, you can get your system to do what you want really exactly with Linux. I've done that. But most people don't do that. I don't even currently do that. What most people do is use Windows, and maybe try to tweak the settings it exposes to make things more like how they like, then give up if they can't. That means that what you are really asking for when you say "leave it up to the DM" is "most people don't get to do that". I am sure freeform social mechanics work for you. But the result of leaving social mechanics to be handled freeform is that most tables don't get any social mechanics. And that is, again, because the mechanics a game includes are its way of signaling what it considers to be important. When someone doesn't roleplay because the game doesn't give them hooks to do it, they're not failing, they're being failed.


I'm always fundamentally going to disagree with the idea that a system which does not provide tools for some pastime is automatically a bad tool in and of itself for that very pastime.

Imagine saying this about any other subject. Is a printer that only prints standard 8.5x11 sheets not a bad tool for printing business cards? Is an oven that doesn't include a broiler not a bad tool for broiling? Is a table that can only support 50lbs not a bad tool for supporting 500lbs? Certainly, freeform play is a valid form of play, but it is one that every game includes, and indeed one no game can exclude. If you want to do freeform Chess or Magic: the Gathering, you can. Including fixed mechanics doesn't take that away from you, it just makes things easier for people who are not as willing as you are to play freeform.

Quertus
2022-10-28, 10:12 PM
I think 'incoherent' would be mistaking a measure for a metric...

Dagnabbit, I was with you until this part. :smalltongue:

I like the idea that the story told about the events can be gritty, heroic, or mythic. And that the story is related to the experience. And I definitely prefer my RPG experience, and somewhat my RPG stories, to be a mix of all three.


Imagine saying this about any other subject. Is a printer that only prints standard 8.5x11 sheets not a bad tool for printing business cards? Is an oven that doesn't include a broiler not a bad tool for broiling? Is a table that can only support 50lbs not a bad tool for supporting 500lbs? Certainly, freeform play is a valid form of play, but it is one that every game includes, and indeed one no game can exclude. If you want to do freeform Chess or Magic: the Gathering, you can. Including fixed mechanics doesn't take that away from you, it just makes things easier for people who are not as willing as you are to play freeform.

Yes, custom-tailored clothing fits so much worse than items bought off the rack. Rules - ones simple enough to play with, at any rate - impose limitations on the fidelity of such complex systems as are better handled by freeform. That’s the inescapable truth you seem to be attempting to escape.

Telok
2022-10-28, 10:54 PM
It's the difference between Linux and Windows. Yes, you can get your system to do what you want really exactly with Linux. I've done that. But most people don't do that. I don't even currently do that. What most people do is use Windows, and maybe try to tweak the settings it exposes to make things more like how they like, then give up if they can't. That means that what you are really asking for when you say "leave it up to the DM" is "most people don't get to do that". I am sure freeform social mechanics work for you. But...

I like the bookshed metaphore.
I am a 100% Linux scuzzer because I accept the responsibility for potentially nuking my hdd in exchange for getting to fool with open source network card drivers to blacklist certain IPs and packet headers.
I dislike freeform social non-mechanics because they don't work for me.

Off topic partial explain to avoid too much tangent
As a player I have no idea what the GM is thinking and I can't see or hear the imaginary people at the other end of the conversation. If there aren't some sort of player facing mechanics I can engage then it's all dependent on the GM's acting, judgement, goals, biases, etc., etc. If the GM is great at it and I'm in good RP form that day, yeah it works great. But if anyone's doing less than great it invariably bogs down into an akward Q&A where people start getting confused, frustrated, or impatient. Then the dice come out as neutral arbiters at some point, but if there's still no mechanics for me as a player to engage then it's still all on the GM to do their best.

As a GM, all that stuff is work. If a system has some level of player facing rules for it then the players can invoke those cheeseburgers when stuff starts bogging down. Alternately, if I feel I'm not at my best for running pure freeform that night I have a fallback to the rules and the players aren't left guessing what they need to do. That's... not having to figure out how to run a "social encounter" from the game's base principals means less work for me to do while running the game and I'm left with more attention & energy to spend on keeping the pace up and stuff.

And that's getting into something for a different thread so I'll leave this incomplete.

NichG
2022-10-29, 12:39 AM
Dagnabbit, I was with you until this part. :smalltongue:

Well its just the usual 'don't mistake a classification system or ontology as saying that it is the duty for actual things to try to fit into the system'. That's backwards.

Fiery Diamond
2022-10-29, 12:57 AM
Y'know I've looked at that book once or twice, and honestly could never wrap my head around what it was trying to do.

While the other poster who responded to this mentioned how it can easily be added or removed, from my reading that's not the primary purpose of it. It seems pretty self-explanatory to me: they're trying to evoke the "Aw, that's so awesome! That's so cool and powerful!" feeling. I suppose this wouldn't make sense to someone who 1) doesn't think power fantasies are cool; 2) doesn't think "coolness" or "awe-inspiringly fantastical" are desirable objectives; 3) sees a contradiction between super low optimization and high powered; 4) thinks blaster casters are uninteresting; 5) thinks martials should be happy with what they already have; or 6) thinks default high-optimization is already interesting and "powerful enough." As someone who likes power fantasies, hates high-optimization play, loves playing blaster casters, thinks fantastical (look at some of the mythic spells that aren't damage dealers sometime - they definitely can play into the fantastical; and look at the descriptions of how the setting should be for mythic play - that's far more fantastical than the default game) is cool and more desirable than game balance, that martials are completely shafted by default rules, and that high-optimization is uninteresting, tedious, and the wrong kind of powerful to be fun, I find Pathfinder's Mythic Rules to be a massive improvement over default play.

Theoboldi
2022-10-29, 08:09 AM
Ah, but that's breaking the metaphor. When I assemble IKEA furniture, the goal isn't to do the assembly, it's to get a piece of furniture that does some particular task. But all those tasks are doable without furniture. I don't need a bookshelf to store my books, I can just put them in a pile. It may even be that I prefer the pile to a bookshelf that is sufficiently badly designed or assembled with sufficiently lacking tools. But the idea that such a situation negates the need for bookshelves is simply inaccurate. The goal of roleplaying is to produce a compelling story. It may be that you don't trust designers to do a better job framing that story than you expect to do by making things up. But the things you're making up are still rules. They're just rules that aren't tested very well and aren't predictable or accessible to other people.

You are still making assumptions here that do not hold for everyone. For instance, that the goal of roleplaying for everyone is to produce a compelling story. Or that a personal dislike for rules stems from a distrust in the designers to deliver a good framing for a story. These are not universally true, and unless you discard them nothing I can say will make sense to you.



Imagine saying this about any other subject. Is a printer that only prints standard 8.5x11 sheets not a bad tool for printing business cards? Is an oven that doesn't include a broiler not a bad tool for broiling? Is a table that can only support 50lbs not a bad tool for supporting 500lbs? Certainly, freeform play is a valid form of play, but it is one that every game includes, and indeed one no game can exclude. If you want to do freeform Chess or Magic: the Gathering, you can. Including fixed mechanics doesn't take that away from you, it just makes things easier for people who are not as willing as you are to play freeform.

But aren't you somewhat contradicting yourself here? On the one hand, you say that rules and a lack thereof fundamentally shape gameplay. Yet on the other, you say that existing mechanics can easily be ignored with no issue by anyone who wants to. Wouldn't the presence of these rules shape the expectations and culture of tables exactly the same way that a lack of them would?

And again, I like tools! I think they can be very useful! I've put away many RPG products and fantasy heartbreakers because they promised me games about one thing, but expected players and GMs to deliver those all on their own. However your definition of what a useful tool is appears to me overly simplistic and caught up in too many assumptions to be useful.

Quertus
2022-10-29, 08:49 AM
I like the bookshed metaphore.
I am a 100% Linux scuzzer because I accept the responsibility for potentially nuking my hdd in exchange for getting to fool with open source network card drivers to blacklist certain IPs and packet headers.
I dislike freeform social non-mechanics because they don't work for me.

Off topic partial explain to avoid too much tangent
As a player I have no idea what the GM is thinking and I can't see or hear the imaginary people at the other end of the conversation. If there aren't some sort of player facing mechanics I can engage then it's all dependent on the GM's acting, judgement, goals, biases, etc., etc. If the GM is great at it and I'm in good RP form that day, yeah it works great. But if anyone's doing less than great it invariably bogs down into an akward Q&A where people start getting confused, frustrated, or impatient. Then the dice come out as neutral arbiters at some point, but if there's still no mechanics for me as a player to engage then it's still all on the GM to do their best.

As a GM, all that stuff is work. If a system has some level of player facing rules for it then the players can invoke those cheeseburgers when stuff starts bogging down. Alternately, if I feel I'm not at my best for running pure freeform that night I have a fallback to the rules and the players aren't left guessing what they need to do. That's... not having to figure out how to run a "social encounter" from the game's base principals means less work for me to do while running the game and I'm left with more attention & energy to spend on keeping the pace up and stuff.

And that's getting into something for a different thread so I'll leave this incomplete.

I think it can be part of the main topic, but sure.The quick of it is, most social mechanics have fatal flaws, like, “I’ve convinced you that your best friend would be delicious, so now you have to kill and eat them” or “humanity died out, because babies couldn’t convince their parents to feed them”. Put another way, if you wouldn’t be willing to have those rules hard-coded in your brain irl (with the foreknowledge that people like me will be there to exploit them), I don’t want them in my games.

Now, on the one hand, I agree with a lot of what you said. I’ve had a few GM’s who actually get it, who can actually roleplay believable characters with believable, accessible motivations, and give the players enough… “description” (not always just of the NPC, but of the setting and the circumstances) for the players to be able to reasonably play the social minigame… but most GM’s IME are somewhere between “useless” and “detrimental” to the game. Most GM’s, when you find out what they think makes people tick, you realize that those rules I laughed at are actually looking rather good by comparison. I had a shopkeeper ask, “what do you know about a customer when they ask, ‘how much does this cost?’”, and I was shocked to learn that I was the only one at a table of roleplayers to be able to answer that question correctly. People just don’t understand people.

So, when you’ve got a good GM, who actually understands what makes people tick? That’s when it’s actually worth your time to interact with NPCs.

But what if you’re having a bad day? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some rules to fall back on?

On the one hand, I agree. In fact, in the general case, I’m all about the game being able to be played entirely via the rules, as well as (more or less) entirely via freeform, “outside the box” thinking. Like, I could get through combat in D&D by making attack rolls and dealing damage… or… hmmm… I think 3e actually has rules for collapsing the ceiling, and the effects of replacing the air with poison (suffocation + poison damage), so I’m failing my roll to give an actual “outside the box” Strategy for 3e combat. But you know what I mean, right?

But my issue is, when it comes to social interaction, there’s very few rules that are actually sufficiently unobtrusive that accepting “off the rack” clothes isn’t too containing compared to their custom-tailored counterparts. Where you don’t have people asking what the Diplomacy DC is to convince the king to trade his kingdom for a rock, or what the Bluff DC is to convince someone that the sky they’re looking at isn’t the color they see it to be.

So what tools are unobtrusive enough that I’ll accept them? 2e D&D “Reaction Roll”: if the GM doesn’t know what attitude the people/monster has towards the PCs, or if the PCs actively attempt to talk to them, this roll, modified by the speaker’s Charisma, determines the attitude they approach the conversation with (like “friendly” or “wary” or “punch you in the face” (I didn’t look them up)). Or 3e Diplomacy, if it’s used just like a 2e Reaction Roll. Sense Motive to get a feel for “why did the NPC suddenly start acting cagy?” / “Is it just me, or is that NPC acting cagy today?”. That’s about the level of unobtrusive I’ll accept from mechanics in a game.

I guess my question is, what mechanics do you feel you’d like to be able to fall back on, and why?

Also… how do you handle two PCs talking to one another? For me, the answer is the same as PC/NPC interactions, or even multiple NPCs interacting: everyone just roleplays, occasionally aided by something like a Bluff, Charm, or Intuition roll, if needed.

Drakevarg
2022-10-29, 08:10 PM
While the other poster who responded to this mentioned how it can easily be added or removed, from my reading that's not the primary purpose of it. It seems pretty self-explanatory to me: they're trying to evoke the "Aw, that's so awesome! That's so cool and powerful!" feeling. I suppose this wouldn't make sense to someone who 1) doesn't think power fantasies are cool; 2) doesn't think "coolness" or "awe-inspiringly fantastical" are desirable objectives; 3) sees a contradiction between super low optimization and high powered; 4) thinks blaster casters are uninteresting; 5) thinks martials should be happy with what they already have; or 6) thinks default high-optimization is already interesting and "powerful enough." As someone who likes power fantasies, hates high-optimization play, loves playing blaster casters, thinks fantastical (look at some of the mythic spells that aren't damage dealers sometime - they definitely can play into the fantastical; and look at the descriptions of how the setting should be for mythic play - that's far more fantastical than the default game) is cool and more desirable than game balance, that martials are completely shafted by default rules, and that high-optimization is uninteresting, tedious, and the wrong kind of powerful to be fun, I find Pathfinder's Mythic Rules to be a massive improvement over default play.

While 1 and 4 at least are correct, that's not what I meant at all, and it's kinda weird you'd jump to those conclusions. I didn't mean "I didn't like the book's ideas and don't understand why anyone would," I mean I literally couldn't figure out what the book was trying to do on a basic reading comprehension level. Admittedly I was just skimming it in a bookstore or whatever, but still.

Fiery Diamond
2022-10-30, 07:23 AM
While 1 and 4 at least are correct, that's not what I meant at all, and it's kinda weird you'd jump to those conclusions. I didn't mean "I didn't like the book's ideas and don't understand why anyone would," I mean I literally couldn't figure out what the book was trying to do on a basic reading comprehension level. Admittedly I was just skimming it in a bookstore or whatever, but still.

I wasn't saying that any particular one of those six possible explanations were true of you, I was suggesting possible reasons why what was completely blindingly obvious to me (that the intention was to evoke the "that's so cool and awesome and powerful and fantastical!") might not have clicked for someone, since, as you said, you simply didn't "get" what they were trying to do.

Since, like I said, it was really self-explanatory from my perspective. And, as it turns out, a couple of those possible explanations happened to be true of you! By your own admission just now. So, hey, it looks like I might have been onto something.

RandomPeasant
2022-10-30, 10:01 AM
Yes, custom-tailored clothing fits so much worse than items bought off the rack. Rules - ones simple enough to play with, at any rate - impose limitations on the fidelity of such complex systems as are better handled by freeform. That’s the inescapable truth you seem to be attempting to escape.

But off-the-rack clothing fits better than something that is not trying to be clothing. Certainly, you can write specialized rules that do exactly what you want and those will, by definition, do more of what you want than more general rules. But those are still rules. Once we can accept that, we can get on to the question of "is it better for the system you are using to create something with other people to allow those people to make informed decisions about the outcomes of their actions".


For instance, that the goal of roleplaying for everyone is to produce a compelling story.

Perhaps, instead of asking me to simply take this on faith, you could explain to me what it is you think they want instead. Because it seems quite likely to me that this is going to end up being some sort of semantic argument where actually they want a "positive experience" or a "fun time" or something else that was already included in what I meant by "compelling story" (or that I intentionally excluded because I had the last version of this argument with someone who demanded the opposite set of shibboleths from you).


But aren't you somewhat contradicting yourself here? On the one hand, you say that rules and a lack thereof fundamentally shape gameplay. Yet on the other, you say that existing mechanics can easily be ignored with no issue by anyone who wants to. Wouldn't the presence of these rules shape the expectations and culture of tables exactly the same way that a lack of them would?

Does the existence of Shadowrun shape the way you play Dungeons and Dragons? If you change the rules they are different and they inculcate different expectations. Yes, if you change the rules ad hoc during play, you'll get dissonance, but doing that is a bad idea for precisely that reason. And, crucially, it is a bad idea whether your change is "there were these rules and we are ignoring them" or "there were no rules so I am making some up". In both cases, outcomes are necessarily disconnected from player expectations.

Quertus
2022-10-30, 01:01 PM
But off-the-rack clothing fits better than something that is not trying to be clothing. Certainly, you can write specialized rules that do exactly what you want and those will, by definition, do more of what you want than more general rules. But those are still rules. Once we can accept that, we can get on to the question of "is it better for the system you are using to create something with other people to allow those people to make informed decisions about the outcomes of their actions".

Your question is invalid. The more accurate version of your question might be: “is it better to rely on Knowledge: rules or Knowledge: GM when making the determination of what the outcome of your actions might be”. And, at that level, in the general case, I do favor Knowledge: rules.

However, I can only assume that you’re assuming that freeform is devoid of rules. Rather than, say, custom-tailoring those rules to the situation at hand.

Once you can accept that such freeform can involve custom-tailored rules, we can get on to questions like, “are off the rack rules a) a good enough fit; b) better than what the idiots passing for tailors are likely to produce?”.

Of course, my answers wrt social rules in particular are “no” and “no, they’re both horrible”, because I live in the grimdark of generally talentless hacks with no understanding of humanity, no understanding of what makes people tick.

Theoboldi
2022-10-30, 08:07 PM
Perhaps, instead of asking me to simply take this on faith, you could explain to me what it is you think they want instead. Because it seems quite likely to me that this is going to end up being some sort of semantic argument where actually they want a "positive experience" or a "fun time" or something else that was already included in what I meant by "compelling story" (or that I intentionally excluded because I had the last version of this argument with someone who demanded the opposite set of shibboleths from you).

Well, sure. To give an example, I personally am not looking to produce a compelling story when I roleplay, or do some kind of collaborative storytelling. Rather, I want to experience an adventure from the viewpoint of a character within a collaboratively imagined world. Whether that ends up being a compelling story is rather secondary to what I want.

To give another example, other people may wish to test their personal wits and ingenuity against dangers and perilous situations in this imagined world.

Or is your question what I think that PhoenixPhyre wants out of a roleplaying game? I do not wish to speculate on that, and it is somewhat irrelevant to my own stance on the matter anyways, so I will not attempt to speak for them on this.


Does the existence of Shadowrun shape the way you play Dungeons and Dragons? If you change the rules they are different and they inculcate different expectations. Yes, if you change the rules ad hoc during play, you'll get dissonance, but doing that is a bad idea for precisely that reason. And, crucially, it is a bad idea whether your change is "there were these rules and we are ignoring them" or "there were no rules so I am making some up". In both cases, outcomes are necessarily disconnected from player expectations.

I'm somewhat confused. I was not talking about changing rules ad hoc during play. I was questioning about whether the same argument that applies to lacking or non-existant rules shaping player expectations and behaviors would not also apply to existing rules that one wants to ignore, but which by their presence would still shape expectations.

Changing player expectations up front by clarifying houserules and explaining ones playstyle seems to me to be a separate topic, and one that as a method can be used to overcome disconnect whether you are going from lack of rules to rules or from rules to lack of rules. It seems irrelevant.

Hytheter
2022-10-31, 01:17 AM
ywhat you can bring to the bargaining table matters a lot more than how well you talk.

I'm gonna try and hold onto this quote. :smallbiggrin: