Ideal TTRPG

[crabwizard77]

What features would you want your Ideal RPGs to have?

[KorvinStarmast]

There is no such thing.

We had a thread on this a while back, maybe a year or so ago.

[JNAProductions]

What features would you want your Ideal RPGs to have?

Lots of customizability.
Intuitive rules.
A good focus on its goals, goals which should be stated outright.
Explanations of mechanics, designer insights, the why of a lot of stuff, not just the what.
Reasonable balance between both players and the challenges they're expected to face.

[Seerow]

I appreciate the "your" in the post, because a lot of peoples ideal rpg would be anathema to me, and vice versa.

For me I'd probably want some weird Amalgam of 3.5, PF2, 4e, and Shadowrun.


From PF2, I really appreciate the fairly tightly controlled RNG, while still having the scaling of previous editions (as opposed to 5e's bounded accuracy). Also partial successes and partial failures being standard across the board is great.

From 4e, I really like the idea of everyone having something to do that is at will, encounter, and daily based. I also like Utility and Combat capability being something you select separately (there may be some room for more overlap there, but being able to pick up a fun niche utility without sacrificing combat power is nice). I also like the different power sources and tiers of play being clearly defined.

From 3.5 I love the diversity of subsystems. Casting, Psionics, Incarnum, Initiators, Shadowmagic, Inspiration, Skill Tricks, Luck Pools, and those are all just off the top of my head. There's probably easily a dozen more. Some for just a single class. Some for a whole category of classes. Some can be picked up by anyone by spending feats/skills. These different subsystems let the game continue feeling fresh for far longer than any other game I've played.

From Shadowrun, I'd be cherry picking out the dicepool system for skills. While I feel like the d20 is a great resolution tool for combat, for non-combat things, the dice pool makes small numerical difference matter a lot more. Of course there's tons of other dicepool games out there, this is just the one I am most familiar with. I also like their method of handling Magic/Initiation, but I am not sure that would fit into the game I'm building up in my mind here.


So basically ideally I'd have a system with a relatively tightly controlled RNG, but lots of options. Each power source would have its own subsystem. All subsystems have something they can do in At Will/Encounter/Daily, but how that is handled and what ratio each power source has within those might vary dramatically. To start you'd have 1-2 classes per power source, with any new classes needing to have an interesting take on that source's subsystem to justify its existence, otherwise you have multiclassing/archetypes to fill out your roster. You'd have options to branch out to other subsystems through some sort of feat/talents system. While Combat would look largely like D&D or one of its spinoffs, out of combat would be pool based so you could have a significant difference in skill without needing to have skill ratings much higher than 8-10.

[Lalliman]

Broadly speaking...

A character customization system that:
A) Is broad enough to comfortably facilitate any character archetype that would be appropriate to play within the game’s setting and genre.
B) Doesn’t require rules mastery to make an effective build. A new player should be able to take character options at face value and have them work as expected.
C) Has minimal potential for optimization. The game should challenge the player’s gameplay choices, not their build choices.

An intuitive ruleset without dissociated mechanics. Gameplay decisions the player makes should also be decisions the character makes, and resources the player expends should be ones the character can acknowledge without breaking the fourth wall. A rarely-used meta-currency system might bypass this restriction.

A combat system with a lot of strategic depth originating mainly from in-the-moment decision-making, with minimal reliance on resource expenditure. A system that challenges player skill, but with a focus on engaging with the fiction (the parts of the system that are mostly indistinguishable from the fiction) rather than the abstract game mechanics. Players should be thinking about concrete matters such as positioning and which enemy to attack first, rather than e.g. deducing what the enemy’s AC is and calculating whether power attacking will increase their average damage output.


A good focus on its goals, goals which should be stated outright.
Explanations of mechanics, designer insights, the why of a lot of stuff, not just the what.
And this. This is good.

[Trask]

As far as fantasy goes, I would love to one day find a class and level fantasy system that accommodates dungeon crawling (TRUE dungeon crawling, not 5-room dungeon/encounter map flowchart bullscheiss...basically something I could run Undermountain in if I wanted to, within a flexible, modern ruleset that doesn't rely on overly gamist mechanics, is quick to resolve combat, and has robust subsystems for diplomacy and parley, as well as robust loot systems with a tasteful bit of gear acquisition. Character power is derived about half and half between equipment and levels.

Classes would be strongly archetypal to classic fantasy which is to say more in the vein of "knight, crusader, bard, healer, and assassin" than "talent, mageblade, soulreaper, guardian" and other silly things like that (looking at you MCDM rpg). Classes would progress in levels, but never become immune to lower level challenges. Magic would never completely bypass exploration elements. It would also not be an overly narrative or wishy washy magic system.

The game's aesthetic would trend towards the "realistic" (not really), ONLY inasmuch that it avoids looking like another anime fantasy affair with cute blue haired teenagers, but also not "die in a hole" dirt fantasy that's so popular in some circles now. The closest thing I could imagine to what I want is a sort of old school Warcraft vibe.

Finally, It would be nice to have a dungeon fantasy game that let me use hordes of monsters without slowing the game to a crawl. If the game can let me run the Mines of Moria without breaking a sweat, I know I've found The One.

Its a long list, I know. I'm not sure Santa will be able to handle it.

[Vahnavoi]

As KorvinStarmast noted, there isn't a single ideal roleplaying game. Not even on a personal level. The reason is that game design is a multi-variable equation with more than one balance point, or
solution. On the mechanical side (the physical requirements of setting it up), a game has to balance things such as cost, simplicity, resolution speed, usability etc., and on the side of aesthetics (the things a player actually experiences playing it) it has to balance discovery, self-expression, challenge, narrative, submission, sensory pleasure etc..

But, to get at this from another angle and maybe give you some food for thought: true ideal games aren't the hypothetical "best of" mix you'd prefer to have at the moment. They are, instead, the simplest possible games that can be used to introduce an idea: things like tic-tac-toe (simple positional perfect information game), rock-paper-scissors (simple game without a dominant strategy), prisoner's dilemma and extended prisoner's dilemma (simple games illustrating the equilibrium strategy might not be the best and that the equilibrium strategy may differ based on how many rounds you play, and whether you know how many rounds you play), hide-and-seek (everything stealth-related, ever, is variations of hide-and-seek), tag (chasing, position, contact), twenty questions (information gathering and using binary logic to deduce facts), so on and so forth.

With that in mind you can ask: what is the simplest roleplaying game? That is, what is the simplest game that could demonstrate the concept of answering what to do, how to do it and why from the viewpoint of a person in a staged situation?

I can tell you right now: it's not D&D. It's not any version of D&D. Even original D&D is a complex game carrying over a century's worth of design ideas from wargaming: it is a roleplaying game, a wargame, a dice game, a hidden map game and a miniature game all at once, while wholly incorporating guessing games such as twenty questions as distinct subgames (take a look at rules for divination spells...). It's because of this complexity that some people somehow manage to argue D&D is not a roleplaying game at all, despite it being the codifier for modern tabletop roleplaying games.

The actual answer is probably play-acting done by children (such as playing house), which self-serious tabletop roleplayers look down on and claim "that isn't a real roleplaying game", because, first, it is done by children and these self-serious types are adults who don't want to seem childish, and second, because it lacks all the bells and whistles they've come to expect from a tabletop roleplaying game (even if those additional elements don't have much to do with roleplaying).

[Thane of Fife]

The actual answer is probably play-acting done by children (such as playing house), which self-serious tabletop roleplayers look down on and claim "that isn't a real roleplaying game", because, first, it is done by children and these self-serious types are adults who don't want to seem childish, and second, because it lacks all the bells and whistles they've come to expect from a tabletop roleplaying game (even if those additional elements don't have much to do with roleplaying).

I feel like, to qualify as a game, something needs at least some notional form of winning and losing or success and failure, so I would suggest that the sort of student UN or mock debates that you see in schools are probably closer to what you're looking for than play-acting is.

[Vahnavoi]

Do you have a reason why staying in character does not count? A player is successful as long as other players agree that their actions make sense for their role, and fails when they don't.

[Thane of Fife]

Do you have a reason why staying in character does not count? A player is successful as long as other players agree that their actions make sense for their role, and fails when they don't.

That's perfectly acceptable as a game. But I think that, on the continuum between "I got fired from my job as an actor because I couldn't play my part convincingly" (not a game) and "I got buzzed out in Whose Line is it Anyway because I couldn't come up with an in-character line" (a game), being expelled from a group of children playing house is close enough to the former that I am not entirely comfortable calling it losing a game.

[AcerbicOrb]

For me, D&D 5e is pretty close. It trims a lot of the fiddly maths away and lets the game run more freely than 3.5e or Pathfinder, while not going as gamey as 4e.

However, if an edition came out that maintained all those strengths, but also:


Was less 'swingy', probably by using a d10 or even 3d6 instead of the d20.
Had more customisability when levelling up, rather than 90% of the decision-making coming at 1st and 3rd levels.
Had a strong set of frameworks to use for exploration, ships, strongholds, and so on.


Then that would be it for me.

[stoutstien]

For me, D&D 5e is pretty close. It trims a lot of the fiddly maths away and lets the game run more freely than 3.5e or Pathfinder, while not going as gamey as 4e.

However, if an edition came out that maintained all those strengths, but also:


Was less 'swingy', probably by using a d10 or even 3d6 instead of the d20.
Had more customisability when levelling up, rather than 90% of the decision-making coming at 1st and 3rd levels.
Had a strong set of frameworks to use for exploration, ships, strongholds, and so on.


Then that would be it for me.

Sounds like a WWN/Godbound hybrid game.

[SimonMoon6]

My ideal RPG would include the following things:

1. It should be able to handle all power levels without getting unnecessarily weird and complicated at high levels of power.

For example, any superhero RPG that cannot easily describe within its system (and also easily use during combat) the most classic example of a superhero (the pre-Crisis Superman) is a failure.

Obviously, this doesn't need to be an option for a beginning PC, but it should be a character that can be represented in the game without the game breaking apart or needing 1,000,000 dice to be rolled or other weird kludges (like, okay, instead of being *actually* as strong as Superman with all the damage that would be required, let's give you a decent STR and then this feat or something that says you can lift a bit more weight and we give you this feat a bunch of times) and without any weird game restrictions (like the faster you are and able to dodge stuff, the less immunity to damage you can have... that would obviously be a stupid rule that no game should have).

It's so weird how many superhero games there are that simply cannot even represent this version of Superman. (It doesn't have to do a perfect job because there's always a level of vagueness that can't be avoided, but to not even be able to represent a character who can move planets around is a failure). In fact, I can't think of such a game that has been published in the last few decades.

2. It should be easy for a GM to create a character on the fly.

Basically, if you can conceive of what a character should be capable of, the GM should be able to write down the exact stats that the character should have without having to dig through sourcebooks to find the perfect feats or magic items or classes or whatever. Anything that helps a GM run a sandbox game without having to suddenly stop the adventure because the PCs went to an unexpected area is crucial.

One of the implications of this is that the game should NOT have a bunch of fiddly bits to assemble. There should not be endless sourcebooks with new spells, magic items, feats, etc. And the game probably shouldn't have classes because those are terrible. Basically, the game should list all the things that are possible in one book and that's it. Everything should be customizable from those rules. (Exception: something like TORG is okay, where you have the one main rulebook and then *one* sourcebook (more or less) for each specific type of characters.)

3. It should neither be too vague nor too crunchy.

By too vague, I mean something where you might have "Ice Powers" and you don't know what you can and can't do with those powers except that you have a vague power rating that says that you can do some cool stuff and maybe convince the GM to let you try things. Can you create a castle of ice? Maybe. Can you use telekinesis on blocks of ice? Maybe. Can you create animated creatures made of ice and snow? Maybe. Can you use ice powers to change the way your clothing looks? Maybe.

By too crunchy, I mean, something like Champions where, if you want your fire powers to burn something (rather than just do damage) or illuminate an area, you have to take extra powers to indicate that your fire is capable of burning things or illuminating an area, which means that people with different abilities involving fire might have fire working differently for different people because that's just science, right?

Characters should know exactly what they can do without having to spell out obvious things like "fire burns" or "electricity spreads in water" or "cold causes water to freeze", etc.

My one caveat here is that it's okay to have something like the "power stunt" system of TSR's MSHRPG (FASERIP) game, where you can try to use your power in new ways (with a cost attached to it).

4. The game should be able to handle every kind of power and ability that a player can imagine.

Now, not every power has to be explicitly listed, but they should able to be customized from the existing powers (using some sort of advantages/bonuses and disadvantages/limitations system). Like, you don't have to list "I can shoot hamsters at my enemies" as a power but you should be able to take the "I can shoot projectiles at my enemies" power and customize it to shoot hamsters instead of bullets.

In particular, the way I judge a game system is: how well does it handle Shape-Changing powers (turn into animals, turn into people, turn into objects, etc) and how well does it handle "Meta" powers (neutralize powers, copy powers, steal powers, etc). If it struggles to handle these powers quickly and easily (that rules out Champions for example), then the game system is not for me. (But I don't count 5e's polymorph because while it handles the shape-changing *easily* it doesn't do so *well*... whereas 3.x handles it well but not easily (or in any balanced way))

The game also needs to be able to handle gadgeteers (who might build a new gadget on the fly) or sorcerers (who seem to have any power available to them at any time), but those are more typically represented in a game.

5. The game needs to not be tied to a specific world or universe.

I want to be able to make my own game worlds. I want to do weird and wonderful things. I need my game system to be flexible enough to let me do that. For example, even though Mayfair's DCHRPG is supposedly connected to the DC Universe, you can take it out of the DC Universe with no difficulty whatsoever. Whereas, D&D 3.x is inextricably tied to the notion that the universe you're in has magic shops or else you're screwing over mundane people and you mess up all sorts of things, so that's no good.

6. No classes.

I mentioned this before, but no classes. At least, no *required* classes. I don't mind a game system that has "recommended" builds or something like that, but there shouldn't be any sort of structure forced on the PCs and especially not the NPCs.

7. No levels.

Levels are dumb. No levels please. Incremental advancement is fine, but levels are just bad... at least as they have been currently implemented in every game system so far.

8. No alignments.

Don't pigeon hole people into vague categories that nobody can agree on the meaning of.

9. No arbitrary HP inflation.

Hit Points are a fine abstraction for a war-game, but they just don't work in an RPG. Why can a 20th level human survive being stabbed over and over again by a weapon that would instantly kill a 1st level human? I know, all the explanations, but they're garbage, especially when paired with how healing spells work. "Cure Light Wounds" actually heals up your luck and exhaustion instead of literal wounds? No, that's just garbage.

[RandomPeasant]

HP inflation is fine if you are willing to lean into the non-stupid explanation: high level characters are superhuman. No one is confused why Superman can survive being stabbed more often than Daredevil can, nor does it break anyone's suspension of disbelief.

[Vahnavoi]

That's perfectly acceptable as a game. But I think that, on the continuum between "I got fired from my job as an actor because I couldn't play my part convincingly" (not a game) and "I got buzzed out in Whose Line is it Anyway because I couldn't come up with an in-character line" (a game), being expelled from a group of children playing house is close enough to the former that I am not entirely comfortable calling it losing a game.

It is not obvious why you'd consider play-acting by children to be closer to the former rather than the latter.

Furthermore, are you sure your juxtaposition points to a difference between a non-game and a game? Because one could get fired from their job as a soccer player for failing to play well just the same, but I doubt you'd argue that would mean soccer isn't a game.

Even more, etymologically and conceptually, roleplaying comes from acting. I believe in English, "play" and "game" were synonyms for a long while, and there are similar cases in other languages. Like a player in a game, an actor follows rules that establish a special place for special behaviour, with special conditions for success and failure (what you call winning and losing) based on those rules. So, the idea that playing a role for a play isn't a game, is itself ill-established.

Consider also some arguments tabletop roleplayers themselves often make. Firstly, starting with Gygax & co, tabletop roleplayers have compared roleplaying to acting, for example Gygax comparing the activity to radio theatre. Secondly, tabletop roleplayers are often quick to claim there are no winners or losers (or no winning or losing) in tabletop roleplaying games, which, according to you, would keep these activities from being games at all!

Note: I don't actually agree with the second argument, because in order to apply, we again have to answer why staying in character is not a sufficient victory condition.

[Psyren]

9. No arbitrary HP inflation.

Hit Points are a fine abstraction for a war-game, but they just don't work in an RPG. Why can a 20th level human survive being stabbed over and over again by a weapon that would instantly kill a 1st level human? I know, all the explanations, but they're garbage, especially when paired with how healing spells work. "Cure Light Wounds" actually heals up your luck and exhaustion instead of literal wounds? No, that's just garbage.

HP can only be meat is garbage. Or at the very least, if you want HP to only be meat, you need to rework damage and durability from the ground up into a wounds and anatomy system.

[stoutstien]

HP can only be meat is garbage. Or at the very least, if you want HP to only be meat, you need to rework damage and durability from the ground up into a wounds and anatomy system.

Well if we are talking about ideal design, I'd like to split HP into two types (the vague non meat points stuff and then the meat points) woul also act as better "you should probably recover/adjust tactics" threshold than just falling to 0.

[Ignimortis]

The one I have in my head, but actually coherent and laid out onto a series of text files I can read.

[gbaji]

As stated previously, I don't think there's any one "ideal TTRPG". I do think that there are some rule sets that work better for different themes/genres being played at the table though. So the closest I could come is "the one that best fits what you and your players are playiing right now". Some rules systems are very broad and light, but work fine if the "feel" of the game is supposed to be focused more on narrative versus skill/combat resolution. If I'm playing a very combat heavy game, a system that has greater detail for combat is going to be "more ideal".

I will say, very broadly, that any system that can be played almost exclusively based on what's written on the PC sheets is heading well towards "ideal". The skills/abilities written down should be broad and clear enough that players should know which one applies to any given situation, and their ability to succeed can be determined by looking at the value on their sheet (and a die roll of some kind). The more tables and charts that have to be looked at to resolve things, the less "ideal" the game is to me.

Same thing with spells/powers. If I have to keep looking up the description in the book to see exactly what it does, and how to resolve it (different rules/tables/whatever for each one), that's heading towards the "less ideal" end of the spectrum. Having a consistent set of effect/resolution rules for all spells/powers heads us towards that ideal side.

I'm not actually married to any single RNG mechanic at all. I've played in a variety of them, and all can work. I will agree that some work better for certain types of resolutions than others, but... having multiple different RNG mechanics in the same game also lean us away from ideal a bit. So, I"m not sure there is a single "best method" here at all. I will say that aiming towards clear and simple resolutions is always a good approach. Consistency is important. If you have partial success rules, they should be consistent across all types of resolutions. Pick a method, and then fit everything else to that method I guess?

Beyond that? I'll just loop back to "what works for the players". Yeah. Total cop out. I know.

[KorvinStarmast]

I feel like, to qualify as a game, something needs at least some notional form of winning and losing or success and failure, so I would suggest that the sort of student UN or mock debates that you see in schools are probably closer to what you're looking for than play-acting is. Winning and losing is not required in a role playing game.
That is one of the core tenets of D&D - as a paradigm breaking game - when it first came out: there were no victory conditions. Play continued during the next session (back when rolling up a new character didn't require so much time and agonizing).
Granted, what "success" and "failure" meant (got the treasure, didn't get the treasure) was folded in. Winning and losing? Not so much. I thus respond with no, winning or losing is not necessarily a part of an RPG. (It is almost antithetical to the genre).

HP can only be meat is garbage. Yes.

[Thane of Fife]

It is not obvious why you'd consider play-acting by children to be closer to the former rather than the latter.

Furthermore, are you sure your juxtaposition points to a difference between a non-game and a game? Because one could get fired from their job as a soccer player for failing to play well just the same, but I doubt you'd argue that would mean soccer isn't a game.

Consider the game of hide and seek. Suppose a group of people agree to play and set some ground rules: you must hide within some pre-defined area (perhaps on the first floor or in one of these three backyards). There are multiple consequences that could arise in this game. If you are found, perhaps you have to be it in the next round (or perhaps you removed from consideration to be it in the next round, or whatever your rules for hide and seek prescribe). If you are repeatedly caught hiding outside of the agreed upon bounds for the game, there may also be consequences (arguments, expulsion from the game, exclusion from future games, etc). I think that there is a distinction between these types of consequences, and it is my opinion that the latter is not sufficient to qualify something as a game. Obviously, this is a complex continuum - losing at Risk means expulsion and I think we would all agree that that is a game.

I think that the consequences in the typical play-acting I recall from my youth (I'll even be hypocritical and call them games of pretend) are of the second form and are not sufficient to qualify as a game.


Consider also some arguments tabletop roleplayers themselves often make. Firstly, starting with Gygax & co, tabletop roleplayers have compared roleplaying to acting, for example Gygax comparing the activity to radio theatre. Secondly, tabletop roleplayers are often quick to claim there are no winners or losers (or no winning or losing) in tabletop roleplaying games, which, according to you, would keep these activities from being games at all!

Roleplaying is certainly very similar to acting; I think that there is a difference between role-playing and a role-playing game (in the same way that guessing is different from a guessing game).

I also did not say that a game requires winning or losing; I said winning and losing or success and failure. Tag has no winner or loser, but there is certainly relative success or failure.


Winning and losing is not required in a role playing game.
That is one of the core tenets of D&D - as a paradigm breaking game - when it first came out: there were no victory conditions. Play continued during the next session (back when rolling up a new character didn't require so much time and agonizing).
Granted, what "success" and "failure" meant (got the treasure, didn't get the treasure) was folded in. Winning and losing? Not so much. I thus respond with no, winning or losing is not necessarily a part of an RPG. (It is almost antithetical to the genre).

Again, I did not say there mus be winning and losing, I said winning and losing or success and failure. In D&D, having your character die is absolutely a form of failure and gaining levels is a form of success.

[2D8HP]

The closest to a “perfect” TTRPG was 1985’s King Arthur Pendragon and the subsequent sequels (judging by the 2023 Pendragon Starter Set a great new version is upcoming that I’m looking forward to!); otherwise there’s:

1977’s Basic Dungeons & Dragons

1981’s Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer

2010’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess

and

2014’s “5e” Dungeons & Dragons

all seem pretty close to perfect to me, which would be my preference depends on my mood; if I want something more like Excalibur then I’ll choose Pendragon; and if I want something more like Ill Met In Lankhmar then I’ll chose one of the others.

I really can’t see how one could best Pendragon for “Arthurian”; but for “Sword & Sorcery” some sort of blend would be good, I guess Stormbringer comes closest (especially of the “sorcery” part, but I like D&D and CoC too much to not want elements mixed in.

The “system” should encourage one to play a swordsman or an archer; but playing a magician should be an option, but eventually a demon should eat the magicians mind, or the spell caster should suffer some other kind of grisly end.

Character creation for a player should have options that make it as quick and easy as in ‘77 D&D to create a character, or as detailed as in 1977 Traveler, whichever one chooses.

Combat should be relatively simple, and frankly a player shouldn’t have to learn much rules at all, only the GM (who can make ‘em up if they don’t feel like turning too many pages.

I’ve never played it but Cthulhu Dark Ages May be close.

Anyway, there should be “faerie”/monsters, and swordsmen should sometimes get to stab sorcerers.

[Zuras]

The ideal TTRPG has simple, easy to understand and apply principles that can be applied to a wide variety of genres. Any additional books covering genre-specific mechanics should be available as inexpensive PDFs, and my players should be excited to play it.

No game actually hits all those points, but FATE probably gets the closest. That’s ironic, because FATE is terrible at simple beer & pretzels dungeoncrawls, which is the style of game I run most often.

[Vahnavoi]

Consider the game of hide and seek. Suppose a group of people agree to play and set some ground rules: you must hide within some pre-defined area (perhaps on the first floor or in one of these three backyards). There are multiple consequences that could arise in this game. If you are found, perhaps you have to be it in the next round (or perhaps you removed from consideration to be it in the next round, or whatever your rules for hide and seek prescribe). If you are repeatedly caught hiding outside of the agreed upon bounds for the game, there may also be consequences (arguments, expulsion from the game, exclusion from future games, etc). I think that there is a distinction between these types of consequences, and it is my opinion that the latter is not sufficient to qualify something as a game. Obviously, this is a complex continuum - losing at Risk means expulsion and I think we would all agree that that is a game.

I think that the consequences in the typical play-acting I recall from my youth (I'll even be hypocritical and call them games of pretend) are of the second form and are not sufficient to qualify as a game.

The difference seems to me to be elimination due to losing a game goal versus elimination due to breaking rules. The problem with this for your argument is that you then have to explain (in the latter case) why the rules in place don't constitute game rules. Additionally, if you accept the relationship between losing and elimination is a complex one, then you have to answer: why can't there be a category of simple games where the only recognized lose condition is failing to follow the rules? Consider another simple children's game, Simon Says. The rules of that game can be summed up as, "act in response to correctly formatted orders, and only in response to correctly formatted orders", and doing anything else is a breech of rules and leads to elimination.


Roleplaying is certainly very similar to acting; I think that there is a difference between role-playing and a role-playing game (in the same way that guessing is different from a guessing game).

But can you explain what that difference is? Especially since that difference does not exist between playing a role on a stage versus playing a role in a tabletop game.

To elaborate: a guessing game is a rule-based exercise where a player has to guess something specifically set up by those rules. It's that special, rule-based context that sets it apart from guessing in general.

But as noted, an actor on a stage unquestionably is operating in a special, rule-based context. So the case for a play not being a game remains ill-established.

To approach this from a different angle, we can take my definition of a roleplaying game from earlier: a rule-based exercise where a player decides what to do, how and why from the viewpoint of a character in a staged situation. It is certainly possible to imagine an activity where a person is deciding what to do, how and why from the viewpoint of a character in a situation that is NOT staged. F. ex. "What would a paramedic do?" is roleplaying in a game when responding to a staged car crash, but just roleplaying when responding to an actual car crash - because an actual car crash does not stem from any special rules of the exercise and thus cannot be argued to be part of any game.

But you can't use that either to distinquish playing a role on stage from playing a role in a game, because the actor's role and situation they're in are, obviously, staged. So, again, the case for a play not being a game remains ill-established.


I also did not say that a game requires winning or losing; I said winning and losing or success and failure. Tag has no winner or loser, but there is certainly relative success or failure.

If you can identify success and failure, you have also identified winning and losing - because victory means succeeding in a pursuit and loss means failing at one. Basic tag has no terminal victory conditions in its rules, the pursuer and the pursued can theoretically swap places forever, but it makes perfect sense to say the pursuer wins and the pursued loses whenever there's a capture.

---

@KorvinStarmast:

Thank you for exemplifying the common argument.

But, as notes, I don't actually buy it. Firstly, D&D is not and was not unique in lacking a terminal victory condition, so if it was paradigm-breaking, it was only so in comparison to earlier wargames and board games of its era. Secondly, while the base game does not have a terminal victory condition, it has an explicit point-scoring mechanic in both experience points and treasure gained. So, the way D&D and games similar to it are actually played, a character is winning if those values are going up and losing if they're going down (usually because a character died). Thirdly, lack of system-level terminal victory conditions has never precluded scenario and campaign level terminal victory conditions, or terminal loss conditions for that matter, whether stemming from the player's side ("kill the dragon, save the princess, get half the kingdom") or the dungeon master's side ("destroy magic whats-it or the world ends").

Same points apply broadly to most commonly played tabletop roleplaying games. Also, as noted above, If you can identify success and failure, you have also identified winning and losing - because victory means succeeding in a pursuit and loss means failing at one. So even ignoring all three observationa above, in order to claim roleplaying games have no winning and losing, you need to explain: why doesn't staying in character count?

[KorvinStarmast]

@KorvinStarmast:

Thank you for exemplifying the common argument.

But, as notes, I don't actually buy it. Firstly, D&D is not and was not unique in lacking a terminal victory condition, so if it was paradigm-breaking, it was only so in comparison to earlier wargames and board games of its era. Secondly, while the base game does not have a terminal victory condition, it has an explicit point-scoring mechanic in both experience points and treasure gained. So, the way D&D and games similar to it are actually played, a character is winning if those values are going up and losing if they're going down (usually because a character died). Thirdly, lack of system-level terminal victory conditions has never precluded scenario and campaign level terminal victory conditions, or terminal loss conditions for that matter, whether stemming from the player's side ("kill the dragon, save the princess, get half the kingdom") or the dungeon master's side ("destroy magic whats-it or the world ends").

Same points apply broadly to most commonly played tabletop roleplaying games. Also, as noted above, If you can identify success and failure, you have also identified winning and losing - because victory means succeeding in a pursuit and loss means failing at one. So even ignoring all three observationa above, in order to claim roleplaying games have no winning and losing, you need to explain: why doesn't staying in character count? What was paragidm breaking was (1) the game didn't end with the session ending (2) there was no clear winner or loser since you'd find something out in the next sessoin (3) the game in theory never ended. And lastly, the big paradigm break was that the game was not defined by its rules. It had a rule book that could be better described as guidelines for play. (Both Gygax and Arneson expounded on this in different ways, to be sure, and EGG seemed to be always trying to capture the game in his next batch of rules (he'd started writing game rules a decade prior, he couldn't help himself).

Success in role play (find the treasure, rescue the princess) is similar to but not the same as winning since winning is an end in and of itself.
Diplomacy, which almost all of the early D&D players had played, is a fine example of that. It has an end state and victory conditions for that game (even though it was not uncommon for a Diplomacy game to take more than one session to complete if there were a lot of players). So too with games like Avalon Hill's 1914 if all of the optional rules were being used.

Dying in D&D specifically is not losing, although you can attribute to either a tactical failure or bad luck. You roll up another character and you play on. The game does not end. You didn't win or lose. You had a temporary set back, and you play on.

This is and was in contrast, and a stark one it was, to the board games, card games, and tabletop games we played before D&D came out.

[Easy e]

People are listing off their ideal RPGs, and other people want to argue about how they should not think that is their ideal. The internet in a nutshell.


For me, the "Ideal RPG" does not exist. However, I prefer very simple mechanics, very few rules, and a heavy narrative lean. FATE, FUDGE, PbtA, and some other systems are the closest I have seen yet.

[gbaji]

But, as notes, I don't actually buy it. Firstly, D&D is not and was not unique in lacking a terminal victory condition, so if it was paradigm-breaking, it was only so in comparison to earlier wargames and board games of its era. Secondly, while the base game does not have a terminal victory condition, it has an explicit point-scoring mechanic in both experience points and treasure gained. So, the way D&D and games similar to it are actually played, a character is winning if those values are going up and losing if they're going down (usually because a character died). Thirdly, lack of system-level terminal victory conditions has never precluded scenario and campaign level terminal victory conditions, or terminal loss conditions for that matter, whether stemming from the player's side ("kill the dragon, save the princess, get half the kingdom") or the dungeon master's side ("destroy magic whats-it or the world ends").

If you're going to say that a game wasn't unique due to some quality, it might be helpful to provide examples of other games that have that same quality, as support for your statement. Otherwise, anyone responding has to play 20 questions. That's not to say you are not correct, but the only games I can think of that had that "lacking a terminal victory condition" quality were gambling games. One can argue that when you sit down for poker night, you may leave the table up, or leave the table down, and that this is similar to the outcomes when playing an RPG like D&D. I suppose we could lump in other imagination based games as well, but those lack the continuity that a D&D game tends to have (we pick up where we left of last session, unlike a game of "name the cloud shapes", or similar).

I think the bigger paradigm change here is that the RPG has you "play a character" that is not yourself, while engaging in a (relatively) unending series scenarios, with up/down resolutions being tracked and maintained from one session to the next. And sure, we could downplay this by equating "winning a hand of bridge" to "defeating the dragon". But the difference is that when the game of bridge ends, we have no continuation to the next. Sure, we could "keep score" across games, and track tourney level rankings and whatnot (and many games like this do), but that's not really the same thing because the "wins/losses" are for the player, and not the character.

It is, therefore, relevant to compare D&D to previous wargames/boardgames of the era, because while I might be "playing" an army/side/general/whatever in those game, they had definite end points and victory conditions. The combination of that aspect of play "you are playing a game which simulates you being someone/something else" *and* having no specific terminal win/loss point is a pretty significant change in gaming. It's what makes it a roleplaying game. The focus is on playing that role, repeatedly, in different scenarios. Where in a traditional war/board game, the focus was on the scenario, and the "role" you were playing in that scenario was secondary.


And... yeah. I'm not sure how we got from discussing what makes an RPG "ideal" to what makes RPGs "special/unique/whatever" in the first place, but there you have it.

[Thane of Fife]

Additionally, if you accept the relationship between losing and elimination is a complex one, then you have to answer: why can't there be a category of simple games where the only recognized lose condition is failing to follow the rules? Consider another simple children's game, Simon Says.

Certainly, there can be games like that. You even name one. Perhaps the difference is in your words, "recognized lose condition" (in contrast to, perhaps, "recognized social more").


To elaborate: a guessing game is a rule-based exercise where a player has to guess something specifically set up by those rules. It's that special, rule-based context that sets it apart from guessing in general.

But as noted, an actor on a stage unquestionably is operating in a special, rule-based context. So the case for a play not being a game remains ill-established.

I think there is more of a difference than that. Driving your car down the road is also done in a special, rule-based context, but it still is distinct from a driving game.

And since I apparently cut out your "But can you explain what that difference is?," I would still say I think it is the winning and losing or success and failure (perhaps the "recognized as a game" winning and losing or success and failure).


If you can identify success and failure, you have also identified winning and losing - because victory means succeeding in a pursuit and loss means failing at one. Basic tag has no terminal victory conditions in its rules, the pursuer and the pursued can theoretically swap places forever, but it makes perfect sense to say the pursuer wins and the pursued loses whenever there's a capture.

I think that winning and losing normally carry an implication of being terminal, but if you disagree, then I agree there is no distinction between winning/losing and success/failure. But I think that when people say RPGs have no winning and losing, they usually mean in a terminal sense.


People are listing off their ideal RPGs, and other people want to argue about how they should not think that is their ideal. The internet in a nutshell.

In their first post, Vahnavoi rejected the idea of a personally ideal RPG in favor of discussing a "true ideal game." I think Vahnavoi's discussions on games are generally interesting and insightful, so I challenged the discussion mostly out of a desire to draw them into discussion rather than out of any desire to tell them they're wrong.

[warty goblin]

I feel compelled to point out that "player" is a longstanding synonym for "actor." Playing a part, playing a game, acting, play-acting, playing, role-playing, I think they all denote tightly coupled actions taken in some bounded, liminal space, generally for amusement or some other purpose that isn't immediately practical. Trying to define all these things in rigorous, space-partitioning detail is I think destined for failure and frustration.

[Vahnavoi]

Dying in D&D specifically is not losing, although you can attribute to either a tactical failure or bad luck. You roll up another character and you play on. The game does not end. You didn't win or lose. You had a temporary set back, and you play on.

I don't buy this argument at all. Since a character is a player's primary way to interact with the game, termination of that character is an obvious loss condition and a natural break off point for a player's participation. Furthermore, since the rules place limits on character resurrection, there is in fact a way to permanently lose a character. That's a clear terminal loss condition right there, and this claim is supported by how people actually play: death of an individual character is dreaded because it threatens end of that character and death of all player characters is dreaded because it threatens end of the entire scenario or even campaign.

Yeah, it's possible to roll a new character and continue play. But that is not different from a game of tag continuing with pursuer and pursued just swapping places, or follow the leader continuing when the last follower standing becomes the new leader, etc.. The idea that no loss happened doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

---


If you're going to say that a game wasn't unique due to some quality, it might be helpful to provide examples of other games that have that same quality, as support for your statement.

As noted several times, basic tag qualifies: there is no rule for when the game is supposed to end, the pursuer and pursued just swap places when capture happens. Hence, no terminal victory condition, even though the pursuer has a clear victory condition and the pursued has a clear loss condition. A game of basic tag can hence, in theory, go on forever.

If you accept the claim made that character death doesn't count as losing (as explained above, I don't accept it, but in case you do): follow the leader stipulates that the last follower standing becomes the new leader and then everyone else rejoins the line. This, too, can in theory continue forever. Mother may I and its variants have a similar rule: the person who reacher mother becomes new Mother and everyone else returns to starting line. Again, in theory, this can continue forever.


And... yeah. I'm not sure how we got from discussing what makes an RPG "ideal" to what makes RPGs "special/unique/whatever" in the first place, but there you have it.

I already explained that above. Me and Thane of Fife are discussing "ideal roleplaying game" in the sense of "simplest game that can be used to demonstrate the concept of deciding what to do, how and why from the viewpoint of a character in a staged scenario". We're talking of winning and losing (or success and failure) specifically because Thane of Fife raised that as a necessary quality for something to count as a game.

---


Certainly, there can be games like that. You even name one. Perhaps the difference is in your words, "recognized lose condition" (in contrast to, perhaps, "recognized social more").

The problem with that kind of argument is that then there might not be a difference anywhere except in word used. It's similar to people arguing over whether some shade is "strawberry red" versus "apple red", when in reality we might observe both strawberries and apples can be of various shades and the range of shades they can be perfectly overlaps. The only reason to recognize a thing as the former but not the latter is founded on which word you're used to hearing in context - a distinction without a difference.


I think there is more of a difference than that. Driving your car down the road is also done in a special, rule-based context, but it still is distinct from a driving game.

I'd say there's an argument to be made that the artificial rules and laws about driving constitute a game if considered on their own, but, like in the cases of guessing versus a guessing game and roleplaying versus a roleplaying game I made above, we can make the argument that the environment the driving takes place in is not staged for a game, and that's why driving isn't always part of a game.


I think that winning and losing normally carry an implication of being terminal, but if you disagree, then I agree there is no distinction between winning/losing and success/failure. But I think that when people say RPGs have no winning and losing, they usually mean in a terminal sense.

I agree people often imply that, but it isn't actual consistent feature of usage and definition of these terms. More importantly, when we get to analyzing games, the implication of terminality frequently fails to be true or relevant. I've focused on children's games, but we can also consider games such as Tetris or Phobia. These have no terminal win condition - blocks keep falling or enemies keep spawning until the player fails - but would anyone be genuinely confused if you said the way to win is to line up the blocks or kill the enemies? I don't think so, because the general meaning of victory is success. So, again, if you can identify success, you have identified winning. Equivalent argument can be made for losing: for example, we can imagine a Tetris with unbounded screen. That version of Tetris never ends, but an observer can still easily tell if a player is doing badly and can hence say they're losing.

---


I feel compelled to point out that "player" is a longstanding synonym for "actor." Playing a part, playing a game, acting, play-acting, playing, role-playing, I think they all denote tightly coupled actions taken in some bounded, liminal space, generally for amusement or some other purpose that isn't immediately practical. Trying to define all these things in rigorous, space-partitioning detail is I think destined for failure and frustration.

I know, hence why I brought up that "play" and "game" have been synonyms in the past. The reason why we're here is Thane of Fife's argument that play-acting by children is closer to professional acting than a party game such as "Who's Line Is It?". In order to exclude play-acting as possible simplest roleplaying game, this line of argument relies on stage acting not being a game, but if stage acting itself cannot be firmly established to not be a game, neither can play-acting.

For contrast, let me show an alternative line of argumentation that could be used: games and play are activities done for their own sake, "for fun" out of the internal motivation of the players rather than for external motivations such as money. That's clear enough and excludes professional acting from being a game - but it's clear from observation that both play-acting by children and "Who's Line Is It?" tend to be in the category of play and games rather than professional anything, causing Thane of Fife's argument to fail.

Furthermore, since we've now made the distinction between game and not a game dependent on presence of external motivation, this leads to situations where the exact same activity can be and not be a game for different players depending on why they are there. For example, professional soccer both is not a game for a player trying to earn their paycheck and is a game for a player who is there for the love of the sport, even when these two players are on the same field at the same time doing the same things. It's possible to bite the bullet here and say "yeah, makes sense", but it doesn't answer my root question of "why doesn't staying in character count as a victory condition?".

[EggKookoo]

The one I have in my head, but actually coherent and laid out onto a series of text files I can read.

You have that game too?

[warty goblin]

I know, hence why I brought up that "play" and "game" have been synonyms in the past. The reason why we're here is Thane of Fife's argument that play-acting by children is closer to professional acting than a party game such as "Who's Line Is It?". In order to exclude play-acting as possible simplest roleplaying game, this line of argument relies on stage acting not being a game, but if stage acting itself cannot be firmly established to not be a game, neither can play-acting.

Right, and I think their line of reasoning is wrong. I recall what would be described as a long-running freeform LARP I played as a kid for multiple years, everybody had a fixed character, but there was no winning or losing and events proceeded through a combination of in-character action and explicit out-of-character negotiations over plot points and what should happen next. Breaking character was definitely not losing, because everybody did it all the time, and it was an essential part of the structure of the game, because if we wanted to do a crime story somebody had to commit that crime, which generally meant attacking somebody else. Since that's not acceptable behavior it required what amounts to the blessing of the entire playerbase agreeing it's part of the fiction and therefore OK.

Really, the closest thing to "losing" we had was an adult getting called in. That meant somebody had really messed up, but this wasn't so much a loss as a temporary halt and possibly a renegotiation of the completely uncodified but nevertheless well understood meta-rules that governed activity.

I don't think victory conditions are necessary for a game. They're one of the forms that the bounding rules can take, specifically to limit behavior by directing it and limit the duration or expanse of the game by having a halting activity. Because they make a game externally legible and appealing to adults, they tend to get emphasized a lot in modern culture, but they're hardly necessary. To use an adult-targeted example, No Man's Sky is a game, but it doesn't really have a 'victory condition' or even ways to meaningfully lose. But it's got the key aspects of a game to me, a set of rules that demarcate the game as a separate space where different actions are possible, and those actions are given particular meaning by those rules in that space, without much motivation to accomplish anything meaningful outside of that space.


For contrast, let me show an alternative line of argumentation that could be used: games and play are activities done for their own sake, "for fun" out of the internal motivation of the players rather than for external motivations such as money. That's clear enough and excludes professional acting from being a game - but it's clear from observation that both play-acting by children and "Who's Line Is It?" tend to be in the category of play and games rather than professional anything, causing Thane of Fife's argument to fail.

Furthermore, since we've now made the distinction between game and not a game dependent on presence of external motivation, this leads to situations where the exact same activity can be and not be a game for different players depending on why they are there. For example, professional soccer both is not a game for a player trying to earn their paycheck and is a game for a player who is there for the love of the sport, even when these two players are on the same field at the same time doing the same things. It's possible to bite the bullet here and say "yeah, makes sense", but it doesn't answer my root question of "why doesn't staying in character count as a victory condition?".

I think the distinction of why you are doing it is actually fairly important to the idea of playing. To return to my childhood LARP example, the most common plot was somebody committing a crime, which generally took the form of trying to "kill" somebody else, because stick sword fights are fun. Attacking somebody with a stick is clearly not OK behavior, play-attacking somebody however is fine, hence the need to pre-negotiate who is doing the attacking, and who is to be attacked.

[Vahnavoi]

Right, and I think their line of reasoning is wrong.

[. . .]

I don't think victory conditions are necessary for a game. They're one of the forms that the bounding rules can take, specifically to limit behavior by directing it and limit the duration or expanse of the game by having a halting activity. Because they make a game externally legible and appealing to adults, they tend to get emphasized a lot in modern culture, but they're hardly necessary. To use an adult-targeted example, No Man's Sky is a game, but it doesn't really have a 'victory condition' or even ways to meaningfully lose. But it's got the key aspects of a game to me, a set of rules that demarcate the game as a separate space where different actions are possible, and those actions are given particular meaning by those rules in that space, without much motivation to accomplish anything meaningful outside of that space.

That separates your line of reasoning from Thane of Fife's, then. This would free us from needing to identify win or loss conditions when searching for the simplest possible roleplaying game. That leaves four elements that have to be in place for a game to count: 1) it has a player 2) who decides what to do, how and why 3) from the viewpoint of a character 4) in a staged situation.

If you think you can of a simpler example than play-acting by children, do tell. Note that it doesn't have to be a pre-existing game. Since we are talking of simple games, in principle it should be possible to just construct such a game in the space of a forum post.


I think the distinction of why you are doing it is actually fairly important to the idea of playing. To return to my childhood LARP example, the most common plot was somebody committing a crime, which generally took the form of trying to "kill" somebody else, because stick sword fights are fun. Attacking somebody with a stick is clearly not OK behavior, play-attacking somebody however is fine, hence the need to pre-negotiate who is doing the attacking, and who is to be attacked.

As noted, it's possible to just bite the bullet and include motive in definition of a game. It leads to some funny places, but it's not fatal to your argument since you don't have to answer why staying in character doesn't count as a victory condition. Furthermore, your argument is congruent with my emphasis on a staged situations - or, as you put it above, game rules need to demarcate a separate space where different actions are possible.

As a sidenote, irrelevant to the argument, I find the term "LARP" hilarious, even more so in languages other than English that have adopted it. Reason being, the whole thing strikes me as reinventing the wheel while climbing a tree upside down. We could just call LARPs "acting games" (or equivalent in other languages) and it would make just as much sense. This is further reinforced by how derivates of LARP (such as "larping" as a verb) are contemporarily used to mock people for (badly) acting or pretending to be someone they're not.

[KorvinStarmast]

Since a character is a player's primary way to interact with the game, termination of that character is an obvious loss condition and a natural break off point for a player's participation. No, it is not. When your character dies, you aren't out of the game. It is not an elimination game. (Exception: one shots, and I know that you run stuff at cons. The game as built is a campaign game ...).
I suppose you could play it as an elimination game, but that's a great way to lose players from your group.

[glass]

There is no such thing.Sure there is! Not for everyone collectively, but for at least some of us individually.


For me I'd probably want some weird Amalgam of 3.5, PF2, 4e, and Shadowrun.This is me!

(Although some of the details are different - the main thing I would take from SR is the idea of priority-based character creation. And from D&D 4e, Healing Surges, but with a better name.)


The one I have in my head, but actually coherent and laid out onto a series of text files I can read.This is also me!

[Ignimortis]

You have that game too?
I figure lots of us do. But since things are what they are, I have to be content with just making a Shadowrun hack and telling myself that maybe if I hack another system after that, it'll be enough for a while.



(Although some of the details are different - the main thing I would take from SR is the idea of priority-based character creation. And from D&D 4e, Healing Surges, but with a better name.)

This is also me!
Why priority, though? It is a rather unwieldy system that only kind of barely works for Shadowrun because giving a player X karma and saying "go nuts" tends to give them pause even more.

[Vahnavoi]

No, it is not. When your character dies, you aren't out of the game. It is not an elimination game.

It is in the exact same way and to the exact same degree as getting caught in statue tag. In case you're not familiar with that variant of tag, the rule is that upon capture, the caught player has to strike a pose and stay in that pose until another player saves them. What is going on in both cases is that a player is eliminated and is out of the running until a special condition is reached - resurrection or creating a new character in D&D's case. In D&D, this is a direct result of the character being the primary way through which a player interacts with the game. There are all kinds of additional rules you can use to shorten the time between character termination and a player rejoining a game (such as letting a player play one of their retainers, or one of the enemies), but the idea that a player doesn't lose when they lose a character continues to be nonsense.


I suppose you could play it as an elimination game, but that's a great way to lose players from your group.

Why would a practice that is ubiquitous in games lose gamers? Games end and new ones start. Like you yourself said, a player can always make a new character - the difference is that on my side of the fence, this is recognized as losing and starting over.

[KorvinStarmast]

It is in the exact same way and to the exact same degree as getting caught in statue tag.
We called it freeze tag.

[Zuras]

Where does this idea that all wargames in the 70s had a defined victory condition come from?

They had defined end conditions (one side destroyed or retreats), but the long-running strategic campaigns that generated the individual battles often had very nebulous win conditions, if any, and most were probably played either till they stopped generating interesting scenarios or the players got bored and wanted to shift from Napoleonic era to WW2 in a new campaign.

[KorvinStarmast]

Where does this idea that all wargames in the 70s had a defined victory condition come from?
Avalon Hill and SPI games had them.
Micro Armor games that I played usually had an objective and / or a victory condition (or levels of victory) that were laid out before play.
Same with Napoleonics.

Stratego, Diplomacy ... all had win/lose conditions.


They had defined end conditions (one side destroyed or retreats), but the long-running strategic campaigns that generated the individual battles often had very nebulous win conditions.
Let's not mix apples and oranges here. I was not referring to long running historical campaigns. And I agree with this:

, if any, and most were probably played either till they stopped generating interesting scenarios or the players got bored and wanted to shift from Napoleonic era to WW2 in a new campaign. Yep. Most of what I played were single instance battles/encounters.

Not to mention that the miniatures war games were an extremely niche hobby ... Peterson covers that in Playing the World and his later work, The Elusive Shift. I am aware of the critical mass of miniatures gamers in Twin Cities and Chicago (and for that matter, Boston and Dallas and California) who you can rightly say formed the core of the niche community who first caught on to D&D.

A great many people came to D&D in the original game who were NOT miniatures gamers, but were instead board gamers. As but one example, my entire first group (all high school students) were board game players. Only two of whom (myself and my brother) had ever played miniatures war games, and those were with adults who had those small armies of 25 MM figures, or Arafix plastic ones ... or both.

Didn't get into micro armor until college.

[glass]

Why priority, though? It is a rather unwieldy system that only kind of barely works for Shadowrun because giving a player X karma and saying "go nuts" tends to give them pause even more.Because I think it will help balance diverse options that would otherwise be hard to balance. And if it turns out it doesn't, I'll drop the idea.

[gbaji]

As noted several times, basic tag qualifies: there is no rule for when the game is supposed to end, the pursuer and pursued just swap places when capture happens. Hence, no terminal victory condition, even though the pursuer has a clear victory condition and the pursued has a clear loss condition. A game of basic tag can hence, in theory, go on forever.

If we're being that broad, so can just about any game. I think you are being selectively narrow with the term "terminal victory conditions" when considering RPGs, but then extremely broad when considering other games. A game of tag ends when the players get tired of running around in the back yard. The game does not "continue" when we start it up again. It's a brand new game of tag. We don't preserve the state from the game we played last week in Tommy's backyard when playing this week at Susie's house.

That is markedly different from RPGs, where the default is that the state "when last we met to play" is retained and continued as though nothing had happened in between. That is more properly defined as a continuation of the same game versus merely starting a new instance of the game.

Prior to RPGs like D&D, there were games which retained state between sessions. But those had "terminal victory conditions". Whether we're talking about a stragegy game, war game, board game, or card game, if we suspend play to resume at a later time, we continue the game until the game ends. Even large campaign style war games still tended to have end points (when the <side> win or lose the war).


If you accept the claim made that character death doesn't count as losing (as explained above, I don't accept it, but in case you do): follow the leader stipulates that the last follower standing becomes the new leader and then everyone else rejoins the line. This, too, can in theory continue forever. Mother may I and its variants have a similar rule: the person who reacher mother becomes new Mother and everyone else returns to starting line. Again, in theory, this can continue forever.

Again though, we don't generally retain state between sessions of those sorts of games, so they are disqualified. The closest we can get prior to D&D were long running war game campaigns (and it's where we get the term "campaign" in RPGs). That's the clear ancestry of the "save state and continue playing" nature of RPGs. But, yeah... those old war games were rare to run that way *and* still often had some kind of clear victory/loss point. And while I suppose you could assume that the general you were "playing" in the "war on the western front" campaign, is the same guy you are playing again in your "gaulic wars" campaign today, that's usually not the case. The player is playing the board pieces, based on the specifics of this current war game scenario or campaign. The concept that "Grodd the mighty" could adventure with a group of other PCs in the "campaign to stop the kobold invasion", and then later be played (with the same or other PCs) in the "defeat the lich king" campaign is absolutely a concept that was unique to RPGs.


And sure, that's a bit beyond just whether there are "terminal victory conditions" or not, but it's relevant to point out that in RPGs you don't just track the results of one session for each "side", but specific details about the characters involved. And those characters can pass on to later play in totally different scenarios and campaigns. While you could certainly choose to name your leader units in various war games, that was not typical, and didn't actually have any effect on the outcome (it was just for fun/color). The "roleplaying" nature of the game, combined with concepts derived from wargaming (saving state through scenarios/campaigns/settings), is what made games like D&D so different.

[Thane of Fife]

I'd say there's an argument to be made that the artificial rules and laws about driving constitute a game if considered on their own, but, like in the cases of guessing versus a guessing game and roleplaying versus a roleplaying game I made above, we can make the argument that the environment the driving takes place in is not staged for a game, and that's why driving isn't always part of a game.

I feel like at this point we're at a somewhat circular semantic definition - for something to be a game, it must be staged for the purpose of being a game.

I think that's a reasonable aspect of such a definition, but it's not especially useful. At that point, the disagreement comes down to whether a play is being staged for the purpose of being a game or for other purposes.

(I would like to say that I think something can certainly be staged for purposes other than to be a game, such as to establish an alibi, but then, such a thing could be described as a "confidence game," so...)




I've focused on children's games, but we can also consider games such as Tetris or Phobia. These have no terminal win condition - blocks keep falling or enemies keep spawning until the player fails - but would anyone be genuinely confused if you said the way to win is to line up the blocks or kill the enemies? I don't think so, because the general meaning of victory is success.

I suspect that if someone had no familiarity with Tetris, and you told them that you win by lining up blocks, some people would indeed be genuinely confused that the game continues after you accomplish that.


For contrast, let me show an alternative line of argumentation that could be used: games and play are activities done for their own sake, "for fun" out of the internal motivation of the players rather than for external motivations such as money. That's clear enough and excludes professional acting from being a game - but it's clear from observation that both play-acting by children and "Who's Line Is It?" tend to be in the category of play and games rather than professional anything, causing Thane of Fife's argument to fail.

My intention was less to make the argument that play-acting is more akin to professional acting and more along the following line:

1. I think that for something to be a game, it must exhibit winning/losing or success/failure.

2. I do not think that play-acting, as typically performed by children, exhibits either of these.

3. I was anticipating that you would point to someone playing their part contrary to the desires of their playmates and being expelled as a losing state.

4. I was trying to point to an actor being fired (and later to the hide-and-seek game) to establish that one can fail in the social environment surrounding the form of play, and thus be expelled from it, without that being evidence of the form of play having winning/losing or success/failure in itself.

5. I think.


I figure lots of us do. But since things are what they are, I have to be content with just making a Shadowrun hack and telling myself that maybe if I hack another system after that, it'll be enough for a while.

There's an old saying among wargamers that the only perfect set of rules is the one you make yourself. I think that's because these sorts of games are generally supposed to enable us to have some sort of experience, but our expectations for that experience are so personal and subjective that nobody else can ever really provide what we, personally, are looking for.

[Vahnavoi]

I feel like at this point we're at a somewhat circular semantic definition - for something to be a game, it must be staged for the purpose of being a game.

You misunderstand me and create the tautology by adding "for a game" where I don't think it's necessary.

That is: when people are setting up a stage for a play, they are, very clearly, creating a separate space for the activity to happen in - even if they'd argue 'till they're blue in the face that it's "not for a game".

You can't make the same argument about a deer wandering into traffic, or other such things that just happen independent of rules for driving. A driver may have rules for how to react to the deer, but the fact that there is a deer does not stem from those rules. The situation is not staged.


I think that's a reasonable aspect of such a definition, but it's not especially useful. At that point, the disagreement comes down to whether a play is being staged for the purpose of being a game or for other purposes.

(I would like to say that I think something can certainly be staged for purposes other than to be a game, such as to establish an alibi, but then, such a thing could be described as a "confidence game," so...)

As noted, a motivation-based definition of games is possible, which what the first paragraph boils down to. It is actually reasonably useful, since we can practically ask people why they do things, ie. "what do you think is the purpose of this activity". It only starts to fail when the people answering the question are making distinctions without a difference, as explained earlier.

As for the part in parentheses, the need for an alibi stems from human-made social rules. That's why any staging effort becomes a game-like activity for the deceptive party. The argument for it not being a game is reliant on your opinion on deception - after all, the whole point is for the deceptive party to prevent the ones being deceived from realizing that there is a game afoot.


I suspect that if someone had no familiarity with Tetris, and you told them that you win by lining up blocks, some people would indeed be genuinely confused that the game continues after you accomplish that.

The good thing is that this is something you could feasibly empirically test. I still maintain it leans too much on colloquial implication that doesn't hold up for analyzing games. I've focused on games without terminal victory conditions, but there's also a huge body of games where the terminal condition and the victory conditions are obviously distinct - such as Go, where the game ends either when no legal moves are left or when both players agree how the game would end. Or any sport where the terminal condition for a game is time, with victor decided after the game has ended. Such games, by construction, show that terminal conditions and victory conditions are two different things that need not overlap. Another subset of games worthy of consideration are games that can end in draw, once again showing by construction that terminal conditions and victory conditions need not overlap.


My intention was less to make the argument that play-acting is more akin to professional acting and more along the following line:

1. I think that for something to be a game, it must exhibit winning/losing or success/failure.

2. I do not think that play-acting, as typically performed by children, exhibits either of these.

3. I was anticipating that you would point to someone playing their part contrary to the desires of their playmates and being expelled as a losing state.

4. I was trying to point to an actor being fired (and later to the hide-and-seek game) to establish that one can fail in the social environment surrounding the form of play, and thus be expelled from it, without that being evidence of the form of play having winning/losing or success/failure in itself.

5. I think.

Again: it's not obvious why you'd think play-acting to be closer to professional acting than something you yourself consider a game. The point of the contrasting line of argumentation was to show that there is a fairly simple case to be made for why being fired from a job would be distinct from losing in a game, but by that standard, being expelled from a playgroup of children is clearly more like losing a game than being fired.

---


If we're being that broad, so can just about any game.

No, because some games have actual well-established terminal conditions, in ways that forever games don't.


I think you are being selectively narrow with the term "terminal victory conditions" when considering RPGs, but then extremely broad when considering other games. A game of tag ends when the players get tired of running around in the back yard.

Here, you confuse several different things. First, you confuse what it means for a game to be able to continue forever in theory, versus in practice. In practice, no game runs forever. Second, you confuse terminal victory condition with what is just a terminal condition. "Game stops because everyone is too tired to continue" is neither a victory condition nor a loss condition for any player playing basic tag by the rules of basic tag. Thirdly, it's not an actual rule in basic tag. That matters when talking about games in theory versus in practice. Every game of D&D also has a number of conditions that would in practice end the game (such as all players dying in an accident), but are not mentioned anywhere in its rules. When me and, hopefully, KorvinStarmast, talk about games that can go on forever in theory, we are referring to analysis of their explicit rules. Games that can theoretically go on forever because their rules lack a terminal condition are quite common, and more can be easily constructed. No-one is under the illusion that this is practical.


The game does not "continue" when we start it up again. It's a brand new game of tag. We don't preserve the state from the game we played last week in Tommy's backyard when playing this week at Susie's house.

Irrelevant to my argument. When I say basic tag can go on forever, I don't mean stopping it and and starting again at some later point. I mean that by its rules, it never has to stop.


That is markedly different from RPGs, where the default is that the state "when last we met to play" is retained and continued as though nothing had happened in between. That is more properly defined as a continuation of the same game versus merely starting a new instance of the game.

Prior to RPGs like D&D, there were games which retained state between sessions. But those had "terminal victory conditions". Whether we're talking about a stragegy game, war game, board game, or card game, if we suspend play to resume at a later time, we continue the game until the game ends. Even large campaign style war games still tended to have end points (when the <side> win or lose the war).

State suspension is irrelevant to my argument. You lose track of even your own once you mix in long-term games that have state suspension yet still have terminal victory conditions - clearly, this means the two mechanisms are separate and can apply independently of one another. Which means that this line:


Again though, we don't generally retain state between sessions of those sorts of games, so they are disqualified.

Is nonsense. The quality of a game being able to last forever has nothing to do with continuity between sessions, because the theoretical case can be made and is made for a single session of play. You are disqualifying them for criterion they don't have to meet.

[stoutstien]

Give Keith Baker, Kevin Crawford, Monte Cook, and Rob Schwalb about a million dollars and a year of free time. Matt C can come along for all the energy drinks he want which would probably cost more than the cash.

[Leon]

Isn't out yet but in a month or so.

[PhoenixPhyre]

My ideal is a constantly moving target. The definition changes from day to day.

But one fairly consistent factor is the need to be able to modify it easily and without breaking things.

Another is for it not to be bound to a single setting unless that setting is mine :) Because large scale world building is one of my driving factors. And I've got tens of thousands of hours (guesstimate) into building it, including play time. Which as a living world, counts.

[Ignimortis]

There's an old saying among wargamers that the only perfect set of rules is the one you make yourself. I think that's because these sorts of games are generally supposed to enable us to have some sort of experience, but our expectations for that experience are so personal and subjective that nobody else can ever really provide what we, personally, are looking for.
Pretty much.


Because I think it will help balance diverse options that would otherwise be hard to balance. And if it turns out it doesn't, I'll drop the idea.
It usually doesn't unless the rest of the rules also try to help with balancing. SR3 priority was maybe somewhat balanced due to the rest of the rules working out in a decent way. SR5 priority is anything but.

Personally, I would just give players XP, point them at basic archetypes, list stuff that is important to those archetypes, and tell them "ok, get this for your first character, whatever's left is free game".

Give Keith Baker, Kevin Crawford, Monte Cook, and Rob Schwalb about a million dollars and a year of free time. Matt C can come along for all the energy drinks he want which would probably cost more than the cash.
Who in their right mind would let Monte Cook even remotely close to designing a TTRPG again? At least, if any sort of magic not being face-meltingly broken and non-mages not being relegated to NPC roles is a concern.

[glass]

[A priority system] usually doesn't unless the rest of the rules also try to help with balancing.Well, obviously. No one rule can balance things out if everything else is a mess!


SR3 priority was maybe somewhat balanced due to the rest of the rules working out in a decent way. SR5 priority is anything but.Ironically, most of my Shadowrun play was 4e which lacks the priority system. I did play 3e a little, but not enough to comment on its balance. 5e I have the CRB, but have never played.

[stoutstien]

Who in their right mind would let Monte Cook even remotely close to designing a TTRPG again? At least, if any sort of magic not being face-meltingly broken and non-mages not being relegated to NPC roles is a concern.

As much as I harp on a lot of magic systems being unwieldy, you need a little bit of this. Not the sense that it prevents other factors from being effective but if magic isn't exciting it's not really magic.

His nuts and bolt design strength isn't that great but his ideas tend to work. This ends up where his games run well inspite of the rules.(see cypher). Even though he's probably most famous for his work in d&d I don't think his designs ever worked well within that system. A lot of people lay the blame of how those with spells vs those who don't progress, especially in 3.x but I don't know how much of it was actually him versus the baggage just for being d&d. They fix this in 4th edition and people hated it.

Plus there are two people on that list that have firm grasp of system cohesion so you need someone to push the limits in the areas they like.

[warty goblin]

Cypher is such a weird system, it's like an attempt at a rules-light system by somebody who doesn't really get the point of a rules-light system for people who want the odd combination of a simple game and a zillion crunchy character options. Like yeah sure, the actual core mechanic fits on a single page. But that isn't the same thing as being light, since there's a hundred plus pages of character stuff after that, which kinda creates the impression that you need to engage with all of that to make and progress a character.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Cypher is such a weird system, it's like an attempt at a rules-light system by somebody who doesn't really get the point of a rules-light system for people who want the odd combination of a simple game and a zillion crunchy character options. Like yeah sure, the actual core mechanic fits on a single page. But that isn't the same thing as being light, since there's a hundred plus pages of character stuff after that, which kinda creates the impression that you need to engage with all of that to make and progress a character.

Honestly, that reminds me of my initial impression of 4e. The actual rules? Very very simple. Not as simple as 1 page, but easily summed up in low-density in 5-6 pages. The content you need to master to actually make and play an effective character? Huge.

Individual classes only have like 1-2 actual features. The rest is basically just the equivalent of a spell list...in excruciating, redundant detail.

I recognize that in practice, 4e was much heavier than that. But it's just what it made me think of.

[RegalKain]

My ideal RPG would include the following things:
Snip


While it certainly doesn't cover all of these points (Nothing ever will unless you make it yourself.) I'd HIGHLY recommend checking out Godbound.


I started creating my perfect ideal pen and paper system with the help of three friends. 9 Years and tens of thousands of hours later, we realized as we played other games and saw other innovations we never would have thought relevant. That we had to start over, so we have. And are working on it again. I'm sure by the time the heat death of the universe comes along, we might be close to a closed-beta.

Otherwise, Godbound is good for high fantasy.
Dogs in a Vineyard is good for people who enjoy Roleplay heavy systems with an emphasis on clever wordplay.
BESM 2.0 with several hundred hours of homebrew fixes to make it not rocket tag is decent for mid level power.

I'd also highly recommend people who like big mechs check out LANCER, and people who like JRPGs check out Fabula Ultima.

As someone with over a decade of world-building in the same universe, someone who is now an amateur writer, writing in that universe. Perfection doesn't exist. As soon as you create your first draft, you realize how terribly flawed it all really is and need to start over.

As you innovate something, you realize how terribly flawed it really is and must innovate it again. The "Ideal" TTRPG doesn't exist. Even for the individual. I'd wager that if someone handed anyone in this thread their "current" thoughts on an "ideal" TTRPG it'd be obsolete in 5-10 years, or they'd fine something they find wrong and fiddle with it. This is ultimately why Rule 0 exists and why most systems emphasize guidelines and not a hardline.

[NichG]

Cypher is such a weird system, it's like an attempt at a rules-light system by somebody who doesn't really get the point of a rules-light system for people who want the odd combination of a simple game and a zillion crunchy character options. Like yeah sure, the actual core mechanic fits on a single page. But that isn't the same thing as being light, since there's a hundred plus pages of character stuff after that, which kinda creates the impression that you need to engage with all of that to make and progress a character.

I don't think Cypher is trying to be rules light. I think that's just what happens when you want something crunchy like D&D but you have to create something more or less from scratch in a single book over a short period of time. D&D has a lot of layered history that in some sense makes it easy for it to not be rules-light - a large portion of the spell text feels like it was nearly taken verbatim from 2e to make 3e, at least going by the occasional oddly nonsensical phrasing or mismatch (like how Regeneration is the 'I want to restore a lost limb' spell, but you can't really lose limbs other than your head). So someone who wants that layered history to call on for crunch but doesn't have it has to start building those layers of complexity from scratch, which means the initial offering probably won't actually be that complex. But that wouldn't mean that complexity wasn't ultimately desired, just that you can only go so far in the first few steps.

Also I guess it's explicitly part of Cypher that they want the complexity to be in the kitchen sink style (where there are a lot of things out there that could interact and it takes years to learn about them all) versus the kind of high resolution simulation style of complexity where the baseline of resolution requires more factors and more decisions to be considered every time ('I attack', 'okay, are you in an aggressive or defensive stance? Aiming for a particular limb - the enemy has different armor on their arms versus their hands, so it matters! Okay - the enemy gets to try to shift the blow to a different location now. Lets consider locational damage, miscellaneous effects from the wound, ... well that's one second of combat resolved, next second!).

I actually do think Cypher mostly makes sense for what it's trying to do, with a few major issues (abilities separate VERY strongly into minor mechanical bonus versus huge narrative power, not just for the mage equivalents - a Speaker at first tier can choose between an ability to erase people's memories of the last 5 minutes or do *what appears to be* a no-save Suggestion effect. Or they can uh, get +2 to certain rolls, or grant +2 to certain rolls). Honestly I kind of think having the 'classes' bit was maybe a mistake of the 'don't we need something like this?' form. If you just focused the quirks and the cyphers, and had continuous advancement through Effort, Edge, and Skills rather than through tiers, with maybe some of the stuff that lets you spend advancement to maintain reusable cyphers, it'd fit more with the MacGyver in fantasyland feel.

[gbaji]

No, because some games have actual well-established terminal conditions, in ways that forever games don't.

My point is that you can apply the "forever game" template to just about any game you want. If you decide to do so. But those game, by default, are not played that way, and are generally not terribly satisfying, nor add any additional enjoyment to the players, when played that way (which RPGs do).



Here, you confuse several different things. First, you confuse what it means for a game to be able to continue forever in theory, versus in practice. In practice, no game runs forever.

Sure. Kinda irrelevant to the discussion, but ok.


Second, you confuse terminal victory condition with what is just a terminal condition. "Game stops because everyone is too tired to continue" is neither a victory condition nor a loss condition for any player playing basic tag by the rules of basic tag.

I think this is you kinda twisting the meaning other people are using for the term(s), applying your own meaning, and then creating strawmen out of it.

The point isn't just that the game of tag stops when we get tired of running round in the back yard. It's *also* that we don't resume the same game of tag the next time we play. There is no state retained from one game session to the next. I made this point, quite clearly, in my previous post, but you seem to have chosen to ignore it.

The follow up to that point is that those few games (outside of RPGs) where we *do* retain state from one game session to another, are specifically games where there is, in fact, a well defined victory condition, and we continue the game to "see who wins". In games without any victory conditions (ie: "run around until we are tired"), there is no state to retain, and thus no point in "continuing" an existing game. The next time we play tag, we just start a new game. RPGs are different in this regard in that we not only continue the same game, session after session, but we also retain state from one session to the next even when the immediate objectives of the game have been met. This is not true of other game types.


Thirdly, it's not an actual rule in basic tag. That matters when talking about games in theory versus in practice. Every game of D&D also has a number of conditions that would in practice end the game (such as all players dying in an accident), but are not mentioned anywhere in its rules. When me and, hopefully, KorvinStarmast, talk about games that can go on forever in theory, we are referring to analysis of their explicit rules. Games that can theoretically go on forever because their rules lack a terminal condition are quite common, and more can be easily constructed. No-one is under the illusion that this is practical.

Again though, games like D&D do this by design. Other games, only do this if you choose to add something extra outside of the defined rules to do so. You can, for example, choose to track league stats for just about any game. This is done in Chess, Bridge, Golf, Bowling, Baseball, etc... But no one confuses this at all with whether those games "end", or have clearly defined victory conditions. We're just tracking win/loss stats over time.

There's no comparison in those game to RPG characters gaining levels, or acquiring items, or spells, or curses, geases, or whatever over time, and continuing to play those things out, in game session after game session, and adventure after adventure. The character(s) and their advancement/changes over time is the point of playing. The specific adventures are important as well, but are more like chapters in a longer story.



Irrelevant to my argument. When I say basic tag can go on forever, I don't mean stopping it and and starting again at some later point. I mean that by its rules, it never has to stop.

Uh... Depends on the version of tag you are playing. Most games of tag end when all of the players have been tagged. Then we start a new game, with a new person being "IT". There are team versions, with home bases, and rules for freeing captured players, but also have a victory condition as well. I mean, sure, if we remove all rules from tag and just leave it as "run around trying to tag people eternally with no actual point other than running around", then we could say the game never ends. But that falls into the "there's no state to save from one session to the next" as well.

You are discounting the differnce between games when they are stopped for today and then resumed on a later day, but that's precisely what makes RPGs different than other games. That's kinda like saying birds are just like cats, as long as we ignore anything involving flying. Um...



State suspension is irrelevant to my argument.

Well, then your argument fails to actually counter what other people are talking about then.



You lose track of even your own once you mix in long-term games that have state suspension yet still have terminal victory conditions - clearly, this means the two mechanisms are separate and can apply independently of one another.

Sigh... Yes. This was the point. Games without state suspension aren't like RPGs, because RPGs have state suspension. Thus, RPGs are not the same as a game of tag. Get it? So stop talking about tag.

Games *with* state suspension, prior to RPGs, always preserve that state purely for the purpose of determining a terminal vcitory condition which has not yet been met. If I resumve a game of bridge with the same folks I was playing with last session, it's only because we didn't finish the game in the last session and we want to see who wins.

RPGs were new/different in that they both preserve and resume state between game sessions *and* have no specific terminal victory conditions. Even if you "win" the current adventure, the characters continue. We preserve their state, and may play them again in a later adventure. We might record the money and position and properties held by each player in a game of Monopoly, with the intent of finishing the game at a later date. But once the game is over, we don't start up another game and say "Hey, I'm playing the Top Hat, so I'm going to start this game with all of the money and properties I had the last time I played the Top Hat".

Even in league play, while the stats are tracked, you still start and play each individual game as a single game. No points are carried over from one to the next. Even when we extend this to seasons or whatever, once one it's done, it's done. Next season, we all start off with a clean slate again. Every other game I can think of that does track anything from one game to another, still has some sort of reason for doing so, and that reason is always merely a longer "game/season" mechanic, which itself also has a firmly defined victory condition (you win the cup, seaon trophy, whatever). Then you start the process over again.



Is nonsense. The quality of a game being able to last forever has nothing to do with continuity between sessions, because the theoretical case can be made and is made for a single session of play. You are disqualifying them for criterion they don't have to meet.

It's criteria that RPGs meet that other games do not. Isn't that the entire point of this side conversation? We're examining what is "new/different" about RPGs compared to other games. Yes, we can sit here all day listing off ways they are the same, but the point is made when we examine the ways in which they are different. Declaring those differences to be irrelevant kinda misses the entire point.