Theory: Every GM has a "The Game"

[Jack of Spades]

Lately I've been talking to a friend of mine about the designs of various RPG's a lot, and we each keep coming back to specific games when we're looking for an example of what we like to see in a game. For my friend, he's found a near-perfect fit for his GMing style in Turn of the Card, and I must agree that his sessions of ToTC are always a great time. For me, Burning Wheel Gold is feeling more and more like the game I've been searching for my entire life.

So I wonder, is it possible that for every GM there's a game out there that's a perfect fit for him/her? Maybe in the massive piles of indies somewhere there's a game that will settle into a permanent place in your life with an audible click, and you've just yet to find it? Or maybe good ol' DnD fits your style like a well-loved baseball glove in a 1950's coming-of-age tale?

Also, has anyone else found their "The Game"? If so, please tell me what it is so that I may take it into my being like a great tabletop whale eating paper-and-plastic krill.

If you haven't found yours, let's hear your musings! Tell us all what you really want to see in a game, whether that's a melding of some existing bits or your own crazy-awesome ideas of how things should work. Who knows, maybe someone will vomit your perfect game up from the electronic waters!

[Damon896]

I have been meaning to write something like this on my website and you have given me an idea. Your post will be rather good.

[NichG]

Lately I've been talking to a friend of mine about the designs of various RPG's a lot, and we each keep coming back to specific games when we're looking for an example of what we like to see in a game. For my friend, he's found a near-perfect fit for his GMing style in Turn of the Card, and I must agree that his sessions of ToTC are always a great time. For me, Burning Wheel Gold is feeling more and more like the game I've been searching for my entire life.

So I wonder, is it possible that for every GM there's a game out there that's a perfect fit for him/her? Maybe in the massive piles of indies somewhere there's a game that will settle into a permanent place in your life with an audible click, and you've just yet to find it? Or maybe good ol' DnD fits your style like a well-loved baseball glove in a 1950's coming-of-age tale?

Also, has anyone else found their "The Game"? If so, please tell me what it is so that I may take it into my being like a great tabletop whale eating paper-and-plastic krill.

If you haven't found yours, let's hear your musings! Tell us all what you really want to see in a game, whether that's a melding of some existing bits or your own crazy-awesome ideas of how things should work. Who knows, maybe someone will vomit your perfect game up from the electronic waters!

I don't think this is true in general. I know that at least in terms of my own GMing style, its constantly changing. The ideas that I like playing with now are different than what I was messing around with a few years ago.

These days I like the idea of 'no opposed rolls' systems - things where every 'point' of investment in something gives you a distinct 'always successful' ability, and the game arises from interactions between those abilities. But that's a pretty new idea for me.

I've also found that its good to switch back and forth between different kinds of systems every other campaign.

[Nightgaun7]

I don't know if it's "The Game" but 4E is really working for me. I'm a combat junkie and it scratches my itch as a player and as a GM.

If I could only play one game for the rest of my life, though, I would have to pick HERO

[Jack of Spades]

These days I like the idea of 'no opposed rolls' systems - things where every 'point' of investment in something gives you a distinct 'always successful' ability, and the game arises from interactions between those abilities. But that's a pretty new idea for me.

This sounds like a fascinating sort of system, and it's certainly a new idea for me as well. Do you know of any particularly good examples?

Speaking to the rest of your post: you don't see yourself ever settling into a certain spot on the RPG spectrum, then? Rules-lite, rules-heavy, all-combat or all-RP, a season for all things?

Do you have a system or type of system that you find yourself coming back to like a much-beloved book, in between your ventures into the weird new mechanical frontiers?

[andresrhoodie]

For me its the white wolf humans or hunters systems. Theres other ones I like a lot that I could play for a long time and be happy but those really fast, make decisions on the fly and roll with it, regular joes versus really scary beasts who win anyway does it for me.

I houseruled it where you add your brawl or weaponry skill to defense against hand to hand and its all opposed rolls and I love it.

We can go through an entire combat in the time it takes to do a round or two in any recent edition of D&D and its fluid and rules light enough that I can just ask people what they want to do and quickly tell them what to roll and we all roll with it.

I do have a better then average group of players right now though. Which would help any system.

[NichG]

This sounds like a fascinating sort of system, and it's certainly a new idea for me as well. Do you know of any particularly good examples?

No I don't, thats why I'm so interested in them. It strikes me as a new direction for RPG systems to move in that hasn't been explored all that much.

Speaking to the rest of your post: you don't see yourself ever settling into a certain spot on the RPG spectrum, then? Rules-lite, rules-heavy, all-combat or all-RP, a season for all things?

Not really. There are certain themes that I need from a system - it must preserve the ability to have mystery, discovery, and the unknown. I don't want to get too bogged down in minutiae/rules-lawyering, nor do I want the system to be so rules-lite that there is no strategy or interesting tactics.

I prefer systems that preserve the ability to challenge the players, not the characters, and which focus on in-play decision making rather than character generation choices. I also tend to dislike canned systems that dominate the plot too much (e.g. Tippyverse interpretations of D&D), but its fine when its homebrew that I've made because I can tune the system to allow the plots I want to include to still make sense and be coherent.

Do you have a system or type of system that you find yourself coming back to like a much-beloved book, in between your ventures into the weird new mechanical frontiers?

The last several campaigns I've run have been so homebrewed from their base systems as to possibly defy categorization as part of that system. Specifically:

The current campaign uses a system written completely from the ground up, designed to allow the variance of checks to remain relatively constant with respect to the mean, to allow 'lethal things' to remain lethal at all levels (but instead has a mechanic where you can spend from pools of points to allow players to choose which attacks/effects hit them and which don't).

Last campaign was heavily modified D&D 3.5 - when I say heavily modified, I mean a 200 page document of new mechanics that included completely replacing spells above 3rd level and all PrCs, as well as creating new functionality for feats in the entire Complete series, both PHBs, and a couple other sources (have to thank my players for all contributing to that massive endeavor).

Before that it was a very heavily modified version of 7th Sea/L5R.

Before that it was D&D but instead of gaining levels, characters were frozen at Lv5, the level they died at, and instead used a completely different point-buy based subsystem to become ancestral gods in a system heavily inspired by Vodun.

Before that it was D&D E6 in space. Before that it was Planescape using heavily modified 7th Sea rules. Before that it was regular D&D, and there was nothing before that - if I'm counting correctly. Obviously I got started in D&D and then branched out as I played more games and became aware of more systems (7th Sea and L5R were the next two systems I played, so you can see the effect of early influence; since then I've also played in a WoD-based campaign, Exalted, BESM, FATE, and a few other things). Currently I'm interested in giving Numenera a shot.

[Glimbur]

I find that I have the most fun running one-shots of Wuthering Heights. Possibly it is because I enjoy thinking on my feet, maybe I like seeing just what shenanigans ordinary gamers can get up to when deprived of a clear objective, and maybe I just like the problem table.

I also really enjoyed running a two-group game of D&D 3.5 (with a few house rules) with several other DM's. At the end of it, we had the Good party and the Evil party fight. Good paid Evil to throw the fight, which was much funnier than anything I could have planned. I got to explore two rather different styles: Good was pretty reactive, so we laid a trail to lead them to the flying city of Good. Said city happened to be flying thanks to the presence of mind flayers and a machine that fed on people's life force. The Evil party, on the other hand, was more self-motivated so we set up an Evil city with various power players and an election. How they won the election was kind of up to them; also they wandered off to fight a dragon and learned just how bad of an idea that was.

So, it seems like what I really want is the ability for players to surprise me, as well as a system that provides options. Wuthering Heights provides options by being rules-light, and D&D 3.5 provides options by having like 60 source books.

[Jay R]

Depending on what I want to do, it's either original D&D, D&D 2E, Champions (or Hero Systems in general), Flashing Blades, or TOON.

But none of them can replace any of the others.

Ironically, GURPS is probably the second best for any of the above. For that reason, GURPS is probably the best overall system, but since it's always in second place, I haven't played it in 20 years.

Edit: And I have to give an honorable mention to Chivalry and Sorcery. In the early days of role-playing, it was the most lush, complete, exciting, and realistic unplayable mess I have ever seen.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I think there's a very good reason for that: we can talk and talk about the sorts of things we'd like to see in our gaming "match", but it isn't until we find a game that seems to encapsulate everything we knew we wanted (and everything we didn't know we wanted) that we can point to something like that.

(It's Burning Wheel Gold for a friend of mine, too.)

I'm not sure that I have a committed game, though. I like to explore games and see what different ones have to say, because every game is one person's perspective and philosophy on roleplaying games: what they put in, what they leave out, and what they highlight. I love seeing all of those perspectives, and experimenting with them.

[Frozen_Feet]

Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Praedor are as close as it has gotten so far. Still, I periodically go back to other systems to scavenge for ideas, particularly older versions of D&D for LotFP.

I do not believe "the game" just for me exists out there just yet. In fact, I'm pretty convinced I'll have to do make it myself one day. I've given it many attempts to date, but have not yet succeeded.

[valadil]

I don't think this is true in general. I know that at least in terms of my own GMing style, its constantly changing. The ideas that I like playing with now are different than what I was messing around with a few years ago.

Word. I like variety too much. If you ask me my favorite food, right now I'd tell you filet mignon. If I have filet mignon for dinner tonight and you asked me tomorrow morning, I'd still probably say filet mignon (seriously, my mouth is watering from typing out this example). But after a week or so I'd probably tell you chili.

No I don't, thats why I'm so interested in them. It strikes me as a new direction for RPG systems to move in that hasn't been explored all that much.

I actually thought 3.5 had a bit of that and what I saw didn't please me. Take Tumble. If you have enough ranks, you automatically succeed. Barring a few exceptions there's no way around it. Or fighting a wizard. Grapple completely disables him. Unless he has freedom of movement up. Then it's useless against him. I haven't played the game in about 5 years so I can't remember more examples, but I remember a bunch of our high level games coming down to a series of wins and counters, none of which were opposable. It was like magical rock paper scissor, and I mean that in a bad way.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Upon reflection: this is probably the same core motivation that spurs on fantasy heartbreakers--a desire to create "The One".

[Frozen_Feet]

It is. It definitely is. At least I've been there - looking at some version of D&D, thinking it's almost what I want but something is just missing. Hey, that's one reason why I rewrote all the feats and the baseclasses in SRD.

[NichG]

I actually thought 3.5 had a bit of that and what I saw didn't please me. Take Tumble. If you have enough ranks, you automatically succeed. Barring a few exceptions there's no way around it. Or fighting a wizard. Grapple completely disables him. Unless he has freedom of movement up. Then it's useless against him. I haven't played the game in about 5 years so I can't remember more examples, but I remember a bunch of our high level games coming down to a series of wins and counters, none of which were opposable. It was like magical rock paper scissor, and I mean that in a bad way.

Well one way you can think about it is, D&D wasn't designed to have it, but the emergent game from people who got very good at knowing what works well and what doesn't in D&D tends to focus on pushing D&D in that direction.

In my mind though its less about rock/paper/scissors, and more about 'combining incomparable qualitative effects creates in-game strategy'.

For example, is an ability that lets you teleport your movement range when you move instead of walking 'better' or 'worse' than an ability that lets you prevent an enemy from moving through a set of up to 10 protected 5ft squares? They're 'incomparable' at least in principle, whereas something like +2 to hit vs +4 to hit are pretty obviously directly comparable.

If the entire game is made of incomparables like that, then it puts a lot of focus not just on selecting the right abilities, but also knowing how to deploy them to maximum effect. It also tends to de-emphasize the 'brute force' aspects of optimization where you're trying to get bigger numbers than the next guy so you can win all the opposed checks, and puts more emphasis on picking abilities that are intuitive to you and work together well.

Also I think this gets really neat when you apply it to out-of-combat stuff. I've been thinking that a system like this would be perfect for something like a heist game, because if each ability 'just does something' it makes it easier to create long, convoluted plans without compounding chances of failure due to a sequence of dice rolls.

A concrete example for a heist game might be something like:

Knowledge: For each rank of this, you can ask the GM one question about a given scenario before it begins and receive a truthful answer.

Rush: For each rank of this, you can complete one multi-round task in a single round (per scenario).

Manipulate: For each rank of this, you can trick one one NPC/enemy squad to be at a certain place at one particular point in time during the scenario.

[Airk]

I definitely think that SOME people have an 'ideal game'. And then there are people who crave variety, or who like several different experiences. I think both sets of people should explore as many games as possible though, because you never know what interesting things you'll find.

[SimonMoon6]

For me, the ideal game system is Mayfair's DC Heroes Role-Playing Game.

Because of its exponential mechanics, it is effortless to make characters who can juggle planets or characters who are ordinary people. I've played through every so-called generic game system I could get my hands on, but no other system does everything as well.

Other games either get bogged down by trying to over-emphasize the worthless abilities of ordinary humans (so that by the time you get to SUPER humans, the game gets crazy complicated) or they take out all the rules so that you have to judge everything yourself. The few exceptions (like TSR's Marvel Super-Heroes RPG) end up with weird game mechanics that aren't always satisfying (high agility characters aren't hard to hit, for example, in MSHRPG). And while DCH does have its quirks (what game doesn't?), most of them are easily house-ruled away (like saying that damage powers don't use their damage values as the value for hitting people too).

My main complaint is that you can't let an actual player anywhere near the character creation system.

[Airk]

My main complaint is that you can't let an actual player anywhere near the character creation system.

That sounds like a pretty serious flaw. o.o

[valadil]

Well one way you can think about it is, D&D wasn't designed to have it, but the emergent game from people who got very good at knowing what works well and what doesn't in D&D tends to focus on pushing D&D in that direction.

That's definitely a fair point. It's not fair for me to compare some gameplay that happened by accident versus something that was designed to work in a particular way. It's also a different scenario when you've got a whole system that uses that versus 3.5's system of 10-20 abilities you have to check off when buying gear.

[Flickerdart]

Nitpick: This isn't what a theory is. This is conjecture, or at best a hypothesis.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Nitpick: This isn't what a theory is. This is conjecture, or at best a hypothesis.

Well...

...I finally decided to do some digging on what this word means. And here, it's correct. Because it's not being used in an empirical scientific context, "theory" is actually relevant here. It's terribly confusing, but it's being used legitimately in this post. (In the same sense that we talk about "theoretical optimization" versus "practical optimization", for instance, in the context of CharOp.)

NichG: Are you familiar with any of the GUMSHOE system games? They don't go all the way in the direction that you're interested in, but they incorporate a lot of that. Player abilities act as pools of points (which refresh during gameplay) that you can spend to do things like gain clues from an interrogation. In addition, some GUMSHOE games (like Night's Black Agents) give you a special ability when the max pool for an ability is 8.

[NichG]

NichG: Are you familiar with any of the GUMSHOE system games? They don't go all the way in the direction that you're interested in, but they incorporate a lot of that. Player abilities act as pools of points (which refresh during gameplay) that you can spend to do things like gain clues from an interrogation. In addition, some GUMSHOE games (like Night's Black Agents) give you a special ability when the max pool for an ability is 8.

I'm not familiar with GUMSHOE in particular. If anything, I'm kind of basing this on a mix of how World of Darkness handles non-mundane 'skills' (each dot of something gets you a distinct 'ability' or class of things you can do) and some stuff I've seen in computer RPG design.

Arcanum, for example, had a special ability associated with maxing out each of the basic stats; furthermore, you had stuff like stats letting you unlock new schematics or spells, giving you new slots for maintaining multiple spells up at the same time, etc. The skills also had a 0-5 system where you got very special things at 3 and 5. Another good example would be the various powers you can purchase in Dishonored - each rank of each ability gives you a distinctive new 'thing' you can do.

[Airk]

Arcanum, for example, had a special ability associated with maxing out each of the basic stats; furthermore, you had stuff like stats letting you unlock new schematics or spells, giving you new slots for maintaining multiple spells up at the same time, etc. The skills also had a 0-5 system where you got very special things at 3 and 5. Another good example would be the various powers you can purchase in Dishonored - each rank of each ability gives you a distinctive new 'thing' you can do.

There's some of this embedded in a number of games systems (I think including the one I wrote myself a while ago and then threw away because it was basically pointless.). The one that springs to mind immediately is that this is exactly how Arts of War work in Tenra Bansho zero.

That said, I don't think that this is a good, widely applicable system. While it works well for some "cool and special" things, it's really dumb if you apply it to everything. "Okay, so I only have two dots in Drive, so I can't drive stick - that's a level 3 ability!" is not something that should happen. Indeed, neither is "I only have two dots in Drive, so I can't even attempt <fancy driving maneuver X>" Most of the time, you should let people TRY to do things, even if it's likely that they fail. Gating the ability to do things behind a skill threshold has all kinds of weird implications that are best kept limited, IMHO.

[veti]

This sounds like a fascinating sort of system, and it's certainly a new idea for me as well. Do you know of any particularly good examples?

Munchkin.

OK, tongue in cheek. But it's a lovely example of a game with no opposing rolls. Once your group has got a couple of sessions under your belt and understood the rules, such as they are - it's a fun game.

[NichG]

There's some of this embedded in a number of games systems (I think including the one I wrote myself a while ago and then threw away because it was basically pointless.). The one that springs to mind immediately is that this is exactly how Arts of War work in Tenra Bansho zero.

That said, I don't think that this is a good, widely applicable system. While it works well for some "cool and special" things, it's really dumb if you apply it to everything. "Okay, so I only have two dots in Drive, so I can't drive stick - that's a level 3 ability!" is not something that should happen. Indeed, neither is "I only have two dots in Drive, so I can't even attempt <fancy driving maneuver X>" Most of the time, you should let people TRY to do things, even if it's likely that they fail. Gating the ability to do things behind a skill threshold has all kinds of weird implications that are best kept limited, IMHO.

So in 'my ideal system' I would say that having even one dot in Drive is enough to drive any kind of vehicle - cars, tanks, etc with no meaningful chance of failure (someone with zero dots attempting to drive a vehicle might be subject to a 'free GM Intrusion' during the operation, in the vein of Numenera's GM intrusions; or they might be forced to spend a Fate point to be temporarily skilled enough to succeed). The second dot in Drive allows you to overdrive a vehicle, operating it at +25% of its normal safe maximum speed. The third dot in Drive allows you to do a hand-brake spin, reversing direction at high speed in a single round. The fourth dot in Drive allows you to jump the vehicle over/through obstacles. The fifth dot in Drive allows you to drive along the walls.

I prefer this kind of thing because, most of the time, failure just isn't interesting. Much of the time in systems like D&D or World of Darkness, the question being asked by a skill roll is 'did you waste your turn this round?', which I think is bad game design. Its even worse in the case of 'gateway skill checks' like Lockpicking or Search for Clues, where either you succeed or the plot comes to a screeching halt.

Edit: In fact, you can even salvage something harsh like 'it takes 3 dots to drive a stick shift' by combining it with a mechanic of 'you have 10 Fate Points per session, and you can spend to temporarily raise your effective skill level'. It means that now the question isn't 'did you waste your turn?' but instead is 'how much is it going to cost you?', which at least corresponds to an interesting resource management subgame.

[Airk]

So in 'my ideal system' I would say that having even one dot in Drive is enough to drive any kind of vehicle - cars, tanks, etc with no meaningful chance of failure (someone with zero dots attempting to drive a vehicle might be subject to a 'free GM Intrusion' during the operation, in the vein of Numenera's GM intrusions; or they might be forced to spend a Fate point to be temporarily skilled enough to succeed). The second dot in Drive allows you to overdrive a vehicle, operating it at +25% of its normal safe maximum speed. The third dot in Drive allows you to do a hand-brake spin, reversing direction at high speed in a single round. The fourth dot in Drive allows you to jump the vehicle over/through obstacles. The fifth dot in Drive allows you to drive along the walls.

Except for the last of those, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to attempt those at lower levels.

I prefer this kind of thing because, most of the time, failure just isn't interesting. Much of the time in systems like D&D or World of Darkness, the question being asked by a skill roll is 'did you waste your turn this round?', which I think is bad game design. Its even worse in the case of 'gateway skill checks' like Lockpicking or Search for Clues, where either you succeed or the plot comes to a screeching halt.

IMHO this is actually the GM's fault (well, the GM and the system). Even in a system like D&D it's possible to apply the "you succeed but..." concept from Burning Wheel - essentially, you make failure interesting by either creating interesting consequences "You accelerate hard into the turn, pull the handbrake, and spin out into a fruit stand. Your car is still operational, once you turn the windshield wipers on to clear the mango off, but you've now got an angry fruit vendor in pursuit." or "While you are puttering with the lock, the guards arrive!". Or you allow success at a cost - "Just as you finally pop open the secret compartment, the Grand Duke returns from the council!" is a perfectly legitimate "you failed your search roll" result. If there is NO interesting fail case, then you don't roll. Never roll the dice if the fail case cannot be made interesting. If the party MUST find a piece of evidence to succeed, you have A) crafted a bad adventure and B) Made the mistake of not just having the player with the best search roll find it.

Edit: In fact, you can even salvage something harsh like 'it takes 3 dots to drive a stick shift' by combining it with a mechanic of 'you have 10 Fate Points per session, and you can spend to temporarily raise your effective skill level'. It means that now the question isn't 'did you waste your turn?' but instead is 'how much is it going to cost you?', which at least corresponds to an interesting resource management subgame.

Used by itself, this is a bandaid for fundamentally poor GMing, IMHO. Used WITH the solutions above, it makes for a more interesting game, but still does not justify locking people out of being able to attempt actions. Why not allow the player to roll their crummy drive skill and then spend points later to improve their result to what they need if they don't want a complication, instead of just saying "No, sorry, you're not allowed."

[NichG]

Except for the last of those, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to attempt those at lower levels.

Well, if you have Fate points to spend, you can boost things up.

Personally I'm well past the point where I care about 'realism' in a system, and I don't much care about a system being able to model 'everything' or to model anything 'accurately'. I'm okay with a system saying 'Anything an average person might be able to do? You can do it. Lets focus on the exceptional stuff'.

IMHO this is actually the GM's fault (well, the GM and the system). Even in a system like D&D it's possible to apply the "you succeed but..." concept from Burning Wheel - essentially, you make failure interesting by either creating interesting consequences "You accelerate hard into the turn, pull the handbrake, and spin out into a fruit stand. Your car is still operational, once you turn the windshield wipers on to clear the mango off, but you've now got an angry fruit vendor in pursuit." or "While you are puttering with the lock, the guards arrive!". Or you allow success at a cost - "Just as you finally pop open the secret compartment, the Grand Duke returns from the council!" is a perfectly legitimate "you failed your search roll" result. If there is NO interesting fail case, then you don't roll. Never roll the dice if the fail case cannot be made interesting. If the party MUST find a piece of evidence to succeed, you have A) crafted a bad adventure and B) Made the mistake of not just having the player with the best search roll find it.

These GM sandtraps are part of why I like the idea of deterministic abilities so much. There's no issue of 'is it fair if I just let this go without a roll?' or 'does the player need to guess whether or not a skill will ever actually be used where failure is interesting, or if it will be glossed over?' or even 'by giving the enemy this many ranks, am I guaranteeing success/failure?'.

Your example B, for example, is a classic problem you can find in many systems - the devaluation of resource investment due to 'relative' challenges.
My ranks in Search are devalued by other party members taking ranks in Search; if none of us take Search, however, the necessary clues will still be found, so the true optimal behavior is that no one should take any ranks in any skill that is dominated by plot-mandated applications.

This can happen to a lesser extent in any system based on comparative-numerical advancement as well (e.g. when the party levels up, the CR of their opponents goes up too).

Used by itself, this is a bandaid for fundamentally poor GMing, IMHO. Used WITH the solutions above, it makes for a more interesting game, but still does not justify locking people out of being able to attempt actions. Why not allow the player to roll their crummy drive skill and then spend points later to improve their result to what they need if they don't want a complication, instead of just saying "No, sorry, you're not allowed."

Well, let me turn it around. Why make the roll the central part of the game? It's just an assumption about how games have been in the past, but its clearly not necessary for interesting games (Chess, Go, many other board games, card games, etc do not have 'triggered randomness').

Just because tabletop games have used dice isn't any reason to me that we should be restricted to that part of the design space. There are a lot of other interesting ideas to explore, and personally I don't find the 'try something - random pass/fail' mechanic very compelling after having used it for years.

[Airk]

Personally I'm well past the point where I care about 'realism' in a system, and I don't much care about a system being able to model 'everything' or to model anything 'accurately'. I'm okay with a system saying 'Anything an average person might be able to do? You can do it. Lets focus on the exceptional stuff'.

So am I, but that doesn't mean I appreciate abitrarily locking people out of being able to attempt cool things.

These GM sandtraps are part of why I like the idea of deterministic abilities so much. There's no issue of 'is it fair if I just let this go without a roll?' or 'does the player need to guess whether or not a skill will ever actually be used where failure is interesting, or if it will be glossed over?' or even 'by giving the enemy this many ranks, am I guaranteeing success/failure?'.

I'm afraid I'm not following you here at all.

Your example B, for example, is a classic problem you can find in many systems - the devaluation of resource investment due to 'relative' challenges.
My ranks in Search are devalued by other party members taking ranks in Search; if none of us take Search, however, the necessary clues will still be found, so the true optimal behavior is that no one should take any ranks in any skill that is dominated by plot-mandated applications.

Absolutely not. If the players don't take Search, then the GM shouldn't be designing an 'adventure' that REQUIRES Search to proceed. He can still design tasks that are made EASIER by search even if no one has any because maybe someone could roll well, but if there is no way to make failure acceptable, a roll SHOULD NOT occur.

Well, let me turn it around. Why make the roll the central part of the game? It's just an assumption about how games have been in the past, but its clearly not necessary for interesting games (Chess, Go, many other board games, card games, etc do not have 'triggered randomness').

That's fine, yes, but I'm not sure where you're going with this.

Just because tabletop games have used dice isn't any reason to me that we should be restricted to that part of the design space. There are a lot of other interesting ideas to explore, and personally I don't find the 'try something - random pass/fail' mechanic very compelling after having used it for years.

Then maybe you shouldn't be playing a game with skill ranks and whatnot at all, because really, all those are for is for ranking how "good" you are at something when rolling dice. Arbitrarily giving people a few things they are "allowed" to succeed at is going to mean that you've either:

A) Forced people into an extremely limited list of "cool things" (In your drive skill example above, what level of drive do I need in order to pull a wheelie that allows me to fit my car through an alley more narrow than the vehicle? Does the GM decide? Now we're back in "arbitary GM decision land", so why bother with the lists of stuff?)
OR
B) just put a useless little bandaid on the issue, because most things are still covered by rolls - in the example above, if the GM goes back to making the player make a roll, what have you really accomplished with your system?

Maybe you should instead completely rejigger your 'fate points' option above. What if having 5 dots in drive meant you could do five completely outrageous driving stunts per session? It doesn't matter what they are, but you get to do more of them than a character with fewer points. And a character who is better at fencing gets more outrageous fencing tricks. This seems closer to your intent, to me, although this is, at this point, coming down into a sort of weird valley between "traditional (albiet relatively modern) roleplaying games" and "story games" here.

[NichG]

So am I, but that doesn't mean I appreciate abitrarily locking people out of being able to attempt cool things.

I think this is a double standard. Take something like D&D. If the DC is 20 higher than my skill modifier, I'm just as locked out of it as if there were a hard cutoff for me to get the ability. And on top of that, there are a whole host of things that require buy-in to get access to. I can cast spells or I can't. I can sneak attack someone or I can't. I can take no damage on being hit by a fireball and making the save or I can't.

I can't decide 'I'm Joe Fighter, but this round I'm going to try casting Disjunction even though I've never seen it cast nor heard of it before'. As a Wizard, I can't decide 'okay, I'm going to try to pull off White Raven Tactics this round'.

Those 'buy-in' abilities are, IMO, the best parts of D&D. Having +7 in Tumble is not interesting. Having Evasion or Spiderclimb or Speak with Dead or Robilar's Gambit is interesting. I've found the same thing to be true in other systems as well - in 7th Sea, for example, I'm far more interested in the idea that at Master level of El Fuego Adentro I can summon a huge bird made of fire and ride it around than the idea that 'I have a higher probability of successfully hitting someone with a sword' or 'I have a higher chance of being able to swing from a chandelier'. In Exalted I'm more interested in 'I have this charm that lets me see what something is truly worth to a person' than 'My average number of successes when haggling with a merchant is one higher'.

I'm afraid I'm not following you here at all.

Lets say someone puts a lot of ranks into Empathy, to use an example from my current campaign. Enough that I know that against a given NPC they'll basically succeed. If I say 'okay, here is what the NPC is feeling' without having them roll, I lessen their feeling that they got something of value for that investment. There's a suspicion that I would have let that information go anyhow, or that I'm doing it because 'their thing is that they're the empathic character'.

Another example, someone puts a lot of ranks into Athletics (which in my system contains tasks like climbing walls). They want to climb to the rooftop of a building so they can keep an eye out. There is no time constraint and no real penalty for failure worth mentioning (they fall a few feet and at worst suffer an irrelevant amount of damage). In this situation, I could just say 'okay, failure is uninteresting, so you climb up to the rooftops'. But in that case, the person with 10 ranks of Athletics has no actual advantage over the guy with no Athletics, despite the task in question being specifically about climbing (which, again, is Athletics in this system).

If I had designed the system so that each rank of Athletics gave you a certain 'thing' you could do and you could spend Body Points to temporarily boost your rank, then even in a situation like that, investment in Athletics would pay off for the player - the guy with ranks could climb for free, while the person without ranks would have to spend out of a per-day resource in order to do it.

Absolutely not. If the players don't take Search, then the GM shouldn't be designing an 'adventure' that REQUIRES Search to proceed. He can still design tasks that are made EASIER by search even if no one has any because maybe someone could roll well, but if there is no way to make failure acceptable, a roll SHOULD NOT occur.

This is exactly why this is a problem. If the players don't take Search, the GM then designs adventures so that it was never necessary. So why take Search? Compared to a group where no one took Search, a player taking it has actually bought themselves a disadvantage.

Lets compare with the 'point pool, fixed skill requirements' case. To proceed with the adventure, the party needs to find a DC 3 clue. If no one has Search, that means that someone needs to spend 3 fate points. If someone has 3 dots of Search, that means that the party saves those 3 fate points. There is now a concrete benefit to taking Search, even if it gets homogenized to 'saving fate points'.

That's fine, yes, but I'm not sure where you're going with this.

What I'm saying is that you're operating under the assumption 'the game must have random rolls, how can I modify my GM-ing style so that those rolls are not harmful?'. I'm saying 'I would like to disregard the premise that the game must have random rolls. It seems like you can have a perfectly interesting game without them, and it has the benefit that a lot of these cases of bad GM-ing are suppressed.'

Then maybe you shouldn't be playing a game with skill ranks and whatnot at all, because really, all those are for is for ranking how "good" you are at something when rolling dice. Arbitrarily giving people a few things they are "allowed" to succeed at is going to mean that you've either:

This is an assumption that is predicated on 'well other systems seem to do it this way'. A 5 dot system, for example, can describe the acquisition of abilities just fine. It can still be a skill system; there's nothing intrinsic to it about rolling dice or comparing results between opponents.

As I said, its a new design space - there are very few games that take this view, and that makes it particularly exciting to me.

A) Forced people into an extremely limited list of "cool things" (In your drive skill example above, what level of drive do I need in order to pull a wheelie that allows me to fit my car through an alley more narrow than the vehicle? Does the GM decide? Now we're back in "arbitary GM decision land", so why bother with the lists of stuff?)

Well I'm not explicitly trying to avoid GM decisions with this sort of system. Obviously GM decisions are a tool that can be used as part of system design, and all systems make use of them to greater or lesser degree.

So, pulling a wheelie like that could easily be described as 'driving up the walls', the 5 dot ability. However, given that you're doing this in a narrow space that supports both sides of your vehicle in order to pass a narrow alley, lets classify it as 'jumping through an obstacle' instead, which makes it only require 4 dots. Which means if you have 2 dots in Drive, spend 2 points and you're good to go.

I mean, look at something like Mage for a good example of this kind of system and how it works with GM arbitration. There isn't a short list of '3 dots of Life lets you do these spells and only these spells' - instead its described based on classes of things.

OR
B) just put a useless little bandaid on the issue, because most things are still covered by rolls - in the example above, if the GM goes back to making the player make a roll, what have you really accomplished with your system?

Who said anything about making the player make a roll? I'm suggesting a system with no rolls anywhere involved in the process.

Maybe you should instead completely rejigger your 'fate points' option above. What if having 5 dots in drive meant you could do five completely outrageous driving stunts per session? It doesn't matter what they are, but you get to do more of them than a character with fewer points. And a character who is better at fencing gets more outrageous fencing tricks. This seems closer to your intent, to me, although this is, at this point, coming down into a sort of weird valley between "traditional (albiet relatively modern) roleplaying games" and "story games" here.

Okay, now I think you're getting the idea. This system would in fact be in the same design space as the system I was talking about. It is, as you point out, a more narrative and less 'tactical' system as a result, but there is certainly room for that sort of game.

I like the tactical aspects, so I'd probably lean away from this sort of thing. I don't really like how in FATE, for example, all Aspects basically do the same thing and only vary based on what situation they apply to.

[CombatOwl]

Lately I've been talking to a friend of mine about the designs of various RPG's a lot, and we each keep coming back to specific games when we're looking for an example of what we like to see in a game. For my friend, he's found a near-perfect fit for his GMing style in Turn of the Card, and I must agree that his sessions of ToTC are always a great time. For me, Burning Wheel Gold is feeling more and more like the game I've been searching for my entire life.

So I wonder, is it possible that for every GM there's a game out there that's a perfect fit for him/her? Maybe in the massive piles of indies somewhere there's a game that will settle into a permanent place in your life with an audible click, and you've just yet to find it? Or maybe good ol' DnD fits your style like a well-loved baseball glove in a 1950's coming-of-age tale?

Also, has anyone else found their "The Game"? If so, please tell me what it is so that I may take it into my being like a great tabletop whale eating paper-and-plastic krill.

If you haven't found yours, let's hear your musings! Tell us all what you really want to see in a game, whether that's a melding of some existing bits or your own crazy-awesome ideas of how things should work. Who knows, maybe someone will vomit your perfect game up from the electronic waters!

Eh, there's some I like more than others, but I'm just as happy running Fate as I am running Mage, or Shadowrun.