Game Theory / Have you seen Rock-Scissors-Paper done right?

[Man_Over_Game]

Having had some lawyer exposure by writing computer programs for them I can assure you the vast majority of them do not like complexity in communications. What you're probably thinking of is documents that sound complex because litigation requires absolute specificity and covering all potential corner cases. Really all most of those documents are doing is saying about six things each in ten different ways.

Someone was telling me that a big cause for the overcomplexity of lawyer-talk is so that it's inaccessible for the public. When one person can afford a lawyer that can navigate the laybrinth of legalities, and another can't, it ensures that one of the two stays on top. When the system reliably catches 95% of the problems, folks will think that's good enough and stop wasting resources on the remaining 5%, essentually securing a window for those that can access it. It's kinda the same way how the IRS is having problems taxing the very wealthy in the states. Wealth disparity, class systems, and all that jazz.

In essence, a positive feedback loop that promotes those who are already on top, similar to how the victor in a fighting game is the one who's better able to manipulate the dozens of mini-systems involved. Same thing could be said about Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

I'm not smart enough or educated enough to know any better about the topic, I was just meaning to explain the thought process, although I agree with you. I haven't done that kind of programming before, but I have done both programming and generating a bunch of by-laws, and I can definitely see why real folks would prefer something simpler.

[HidesHisEyes]

So… maybe that's all I'm really looking for, is robust systems.

Thing is, though, if that's true, then I'm uncertain if… line… "advanced rock paper scissors theory-crafting" will actually be as helpful a tool as I had hoped to apply to issues like "martial / caster disparity", or ensuring everyone gets their time in the spotlight.

So… I'm hoping that there's more to it than that.

I think you’ve pretty much cracked it. I think there’s something we value which is better served by emergent interactions between mechanics that are already there than new mechanics with the specific intention of creating a RPS dynamic.

I suppose the value is… something to do with discovery? Creativity? Having a set of elements to play with and being able to understand them and navigate them in a logical way to get the results you’re after. As opposed to the game just telling you “this is how you do this thing, this is how you do that thing”.

This reminds me of Chris McDowall’s slogan “put the core to work”, meaning have a robust, flexible mechanical core that can be used to resolve all sorts of situations, instead of having subsystems for everything. He usually says it in support of rules-lite minimalism, but I think in this context it applies to more complex systems too.

[Pauly]

Someone was telling me that a big cause for the overcomplexity of lawyer-talk is so that it's inaccessible for the public. When one person can afford a lawyer that can navigate the laybrinth of legalities, and another can't, it ensures that one of the two stays on top. When the system reliably catches 95% of the problems, folks will think that's good enough and stop wasting resources on the remaining 5%, essentually securing a window for those that can access it. It's kinda the same way how the IRS is having problems taxing the very wealthy in the states. Wealth disparity, class systems, and all that jazz.

In essence, a positive feedback loop that promotes those who are already on top, similar to how the victor in a fighting game is the one who's better able to manipulate the dozens of mini-systems involved. Same thing could be said about Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

I'm not smart enough or educated enough to know any better about the topic, I was just meaning to explain the thought process, although I agree with you. I haven't done that kind of programming before, but I have done both programming and generating a bunch of by-laws, and I can definitely see why real folks would prefer something simpler.

Having been a lawyer in a former career it isn’t that.
Some reasons include:
- The law has a jargon, based on the wording of legislation and precedents. It’s kind of like casting a magic spell, for the spell to work properly you have to use the correct incantation. Paraphrasing or shortening the magic phrases doesn’t work because it shows that you don’t fully understand the relevant law. Some of these magic phrases are from 100 years ago or more, so sound stilted and complex to modern ears, but to lawyers it’s just jargon. For example in my jurisdiction lawyers never said “it was his own fault”, instead they said “he was the author of his own misfortune” because the latter was the magic incantation and the former had no magic power even though they mean the same thing.
- specificity as outlined by Telok.
- Complexity. A simple action may involve several precedents and several different pieces of legislation. To be thorough, and to prevent themselves being sued for incompetence, lawyers will walk you through each individual step in the process every time a new issue arises.

You do get lawyers who send overly complex hard to decipher letters. That is a clear sign that they have a weak case. Lawyers who have a good case will hit you over the head with it in the simplest and bluntest language.

[Man_Over_Game]

Having been a lawyer in a former career it isn’t that.
Some reasons include:
- The law has a jargon, based on the wording of legislation and precedents. It’s kind of like casting a magic spell, for the spell to work properly you have to use the correct incantation. Paraphrasing or shortening the magic phrases doesn’t work because it shows that you don’t fully understand the relevant law. Some of these magic phrases are from 100 years ago or more, so sound stilted and complex to modern ears, but to lawyers it’s just jargon. For example in my jurisdiction lawyers never said “it was his own fault”, instead they said “he was the author of his own misfortune” because the latter was the magic incantation and the former had no magic power even though they mean the same thing.
- specificity as outlined by Telok.
- Complexity. A simple action may involve several precedents and several different pieces of legislation. To be thorough, and to prevent themselves being sued for incompetence, lawyers will walk you through each individual step in the process every time a new issue arises.

You do get lawyers who send overly complex hard to decipher letters. That is a clear sign that they have a weak case. Lawyers who have a good case will hit you over the head with it in the simplest and bluntest language.

I'm glad I was wrong, thanks for correcting me. It was way too cynical of a perspective to want to keep around.

[BloodSquirrel]

My understanding of game design is that the problem is complexity vs depth. I'm not going to do these ideas justice because I'm not a professional or anything, but broadly speaking, depth is good, and complexity is bad. This is a very specific meaning of complexity, which is a little different from normal usage, so even for people who like "complex" games, this form of complexity is usually bad. It's something like the amount of discrete rules there are, or how hard it is to learn a game. Depth is something like how many different meaningful choices you have, or how much strategy goes into your decisions. So, "emergent" rps is good because it adds depth without adding any complexity. If your game has accuracy and flat dr, then the above triangles will naturally add depth without adding any complexity to the game. "Forced" rps isn't necessarily bad, because it does add depth, it just also adds complexity. So meta-rules creating rps elements isn't necessarily bad, it's just that naturally emerging triangles is better (and more fun to talk about).

I think "depth" is best described as the size of your game's valid possibility space. Complexity is the cost to create depth, but good or bad design decisions can lead to an enormous gap in how much depth your complexity buys you.

Case in point: If you have three damage types in your FPS, and you give your player three guns (one with each damage type), and then put one group of monsters in each room that is immune to two damage types, then you have spent complexity without creating depth. The valid possibility space is the same as if you only had one gun- in each room there, is only one valid gun to use. In face, you may have reduced your depth by adding complexity. If you had three guns with different firing rates/optimal ranges/etc then, without the damage types, you would have had three valid guns to use in each room. Now you only have one. More complexity with even less depth.

A game with lots of depth is one where there can a lot of different meaningfully distinct game states that don't immediately resolve to "you lose" or "you win". A game that runs entirely on strict RPS has almost no such possibility space- If your opponent chooses rock, then paper is an insta-win and scissors is an insta-lose.

But that's where I think the OP's premise is flawed. The comparison is being made between a system where multiple mechanics are interacting and a system that consists of a single mechanic because the result is similar. I haven't played Middle Earth, but it's easy to speculate that a game could have a forced RPS mechanic that interacts with other mechanics to create more emergent strategies. Easy example: If you have a rock monster in your hand in MtG, and your opponent puts out a scissor monster, do you put the rock monster out this turn? Do you wait, in case he has multiple scissor monsters, hoping that he'll spend his mana putting another one out instead of doing something more dangerous to you with it? Should you put the scissor monster you have in your hand out instead to see if he has any kind of "kill target creature" card in his hand? Do you wait because you know that he need blue mana to summon scissor monsters, and you want to let him put out more blue lands instead of switching to white lands to summon a paper monster?

A game that relies entirely on a single forced RPS system is going to be pretty shallow, but would be just as true for MtG if it relied solely on creature cards with attack/defense stats with no abilities, artifacts, spells, enchantments, etc.

[kyoryu]

The example I use for complexity vs. depth is Rock Paper Scissors Dynamite.

Everyone gets RPS - each play beats one other, and loses to one other, and ties against itself. There's a Nash Equilibrium at "play a symbol randomly". All choices are valid, and useful.

Dynamite adds dynamite to the game. Dynamite gets its wick cut by scissors, cancels itself, and blows up rock and paper. So... what does this do to the game?

Well, if you look at it, dynamite and paper lose to scissors... paper loses to dynamite, but they both beat rock. Any time that you might play paper, you may as well play dynamite. You'll always get as good of or a better result. This is called a "dominated strategy" *

So, you have more possible choices. But, after crunching the numbers, it turns out that really, you have three viable choices - Rock, Dynamite, Scissors. So the depth of RPSD is exactly the same as RPS, it just has higher complexity.

* technically a choice needs to be better than another one in all cases to dominate it. I call this "weakly dominated" in that each scenario is as good or better - while it's still not actually "dominated", there's no reason to ever choose paper, so the effect is the same.

[Man_Over_Game]

The example I use for complexity vs. depth is Rock Paper Scissors Dynamite...
So, you have more possible choices. But, after crunching the numbers, it turns out that really, you have three viable choices - Rock, Dynamite, Scissors. So the depth of RPSD is exactly the same as RPS, it just has higher complexity.

I think "depth" is best described as the size of your game's valid possibility space. Complexity is the cost to create depth, but good or bad design decisions can lead to an enormous gap in how much depth your complexity buys you....

A game that relies entirely on a single forced RPS system is going to be pretty shallow, but would be just as true for MtG if it relied solely on creature cards with attack/defense stats with no abilities, artifacts, spells, enchantments, etc.

So...Why many word when few word do trick?

[Stonehead]

I think "depth" is best described as the size of your game's valid possibility space. Complexity is the cost to create depth, but good or bad design decisions can lead to an enormous gap in how much depth your complexity buys you.

Case in point: If you have three damage types in your FPS, and you give your player three guns (one with each damage type), and then put one group of monsters in each room that is immune to two damage types, then you have spent complexity without creating depth. The valid possibility space is the same as if you only had one gun- in each room there, is only one valid gun to use. In face, you may have reduced your depth by adding complexity. If you had three guns with different firing rates/optimal ranges/etc then, without the damage types, you would have had three valid guns to use in each room. Now you only have one. More complexity with even less depth.

A game with lots of depth is one where there can a lot of different meaningfully distinct game states that don't immediately resolve to "you lose" or "you win". A game that runs entirely on strict RPS has almost no such possibility space- If your opponent chooses rock, then paper is an insta-win and scissors is an insta-lose.

But that's where I think the OP's premise is flawed. The comparison is being made between a system where multiple mechanics are interacting and a system that consists of a single mechanic because the result is similar. I haven't played Middle Earth, but it's easy to speculate that a game could have a forced RPS mechanic that interacts with other mechanics to create more emergent strategies. Easy example: If you have a rock monster in your hand in MtG, and your opponent puts out a scissor monster, do you put the rock monster out this turn? Do you wait, in case he has multiple scissor monsters, hoping that he'll spend his mana putting another one out instead of doing something more dangerous to you with it? Should you put the scissor monster you have in your hand out instead to see if he has any kind of "kill target creature" card in his hand? Do you wait because you know that he need blue mana to summon scissor monsters, and you want to let him put out more blue lands instead of switching to white lands to summon a paper monster?

A game that relies entirely on a single forced RPS system is going to be pretty shallow, but would be just as true for MtG if it relied solely on creature cards with attack/defense stats with no abilities, artifacts, spells, enchantments, etc.

Hmmm.

Actually, I do remember MaRo saying that one of the reasons Magic was so successful, is because "vanilla" magic is still pretty fun. Even with no special abilities, the decisions of when to cast who, and when to attack or block is still pretty complex. Definitely wouldn't be the massive hit it is without special effects, but interesting enough to keep you entertained for a few hours.

Tangents aside, I think it's still worth pointing out that forced rps mechanics can still add fun depth. Like, in your fps example, if instead of being immune to 2/3 damage types, the enemies took half damage or something, then assuming there's some overhead to switching weapons, you've added some depth to your gameplay. Is it worth the extra time to switch weapons in order to deal more dps? The main advantage of "emergent" rps mechanics isn't that it's the only one that adds depth, but that it's the only one that adds basically no complexity. Hard coding type resistances (usually) adds both.

[Vahnavoi]

It makes the issue easier to understand once you get that emergent interactions don't add depth - they are depth.

[Zuras]

Are we talking about RPGs or games in general here? Because the issue in RPG design is less Rock-Paper-Scissors and more analogous to Magic’s “Color Pie”, where the goal is to provide every class a useful role.

[KorvinStarmast]

This reminds me of Chris McDowall’s slogan “put the core to work”, meaning have a robust, flexible mechanical core that can be used to resolve all sorts of situations, instead of having subsystems for everything. He usually says it in support of rules-lite minimalism, but I think in this context it applies to more complex systems too.

I love his thought on that, but I will also say that I think it's 'easy to say and hard to do' in practice. It sure is a good target to aim at.
(Have you got a few games that you think take this advice and apply it well?)

[Yakk]

I think it's more that they (we) want a level of depth that's impossible with a low complexity. Like, how deep of a game do you think you could make that only has 3 rules?

1. Each player takes turns placing their stones on a 19x19 grid; if you can't play, you lose.
2. Connected groups of allied stones (horizontally/vertically) need a connected empty space to live. Enemy dead stones leave the board after you play; moves that kill your own stones are illegal.
3. No repeating board positions.

I think that replicates go, even down to victory conditions. Someone can probably make a better version of it.

But that is sort of cheating, because go is poetry in game design.

(The "who can stop the enemy from playing" rule is very close to every single go scoring mechanism; the scoring rules basically avoid having to actually play it out, as I understand it.)

[MoiMagnus]

1. Each player takes turns placing their stones on a 19x19 grid; if you can't play, you lose.
2. Connected groups of allied stones (horizontally/vertically) need a connected empty space to live. Enemy dead stones leave the board after you play; moves that kill your own stones are illegal.
3. No repeating board positions.

I think that replicates go, even down to victory conditions. Someone can probably make a better version of it.

But that is sort of cheating, because go is poetry in game design.

(The "who can stop the enemy from playing" rule is very close to every single go scoring mechanism; the scoring rules basically avoid having to actually play it out, as I understand it.)

Yeah, even with very few rules, one can make a game with a lot of depth.
(Chess has more rules than Go, but one could easily remove the few weird rules and obtain a high depth game with a handful of rules other than the list of pieces and their movement)

And while that's not really a game, the Game of Life is also a good example of absurdly high depth and variety from just a couple of rules.

However, all those examples have one thing in common: they are abstract games.
An by that I don't just mean that they lack a theme, you could quite well add some worldbuilding behind chess that justify all the movement rules.
I mean that the rules are first and foremost designed to make an interesting "mathematical problem", rather than trying to simulate how a given world behave in a way that happens to also lead to interesting strategies.

[Additionally, those games are way above the threshold of "how much system mastery influence your strength at the game" of what is commonly considered as acceptable for a TTRPG.]

[Stonehead]

1. Each player takes turns placing their stones on a 19x19 grid; if you can't play, you lose.
2. Connected groups of allied stones (horizontally/vertically) need a connected empty space to live. Enemy dead stones leave the board after you play; moves that kill your own stones are illegal.
3. No repeating board positions.

I think that replicates go, even down to victory conditions. Someone can probably make a better version of it.

But that is sort of cheating, because go is poetry in game design.

(The "who can stop the enemy from playing" rule is very close to every single go scoring mechanism; the scoring rules basically avoid having to actually play it out, as I understand it.)

Haha, you win this round.

[Aedilred]

RPS is the guiding principle of a number of Napoleonic tabletop wargames, from what I understand (it's not my period, so I can't cite specific examples with confidence, but have heard Napoleonic gamers talk about it quite a bit), with the idea that you have the three combat arms (infantry, cavalry, artillery) each of which has its specific strengths and weaknesses and have to be used cooperatively, with the right tool for the right job at the right time. You also have, in some systems, the ability for infantry to choose between line and square formation, which provide protection against artillery and cavalry respectively.

They're not RPGs, obviously, but if you're looking for whole game systems built around the idea of RPS they're probably not a bad place to look.

The first Total War Game, Shogun, was one of the best examples of this type of thing I can recall in video-game format - no artillery, obviously, but archers largely filled the same role. Everyone had access to more or less exactly the same troop types so battles were a question of, firstly, bringing the right troops, and secondly, using them effectively. Notably this was before the Mongol Invasion expansion, which ruined Total War forever introduced ninjas and kensai which completely threw out the balance of the game.