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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Ettin in the Playground
     
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    Default Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Someone recently opined within my hearing that a particular RPG was "an Atlas of RPGs", meaning that the GM carried the entire game. Good game? Because GM. Bad game? Because GM. And I though, "I can see it that way, it's lots of work running that game". After a few days I've formed a rough proto-theory.

    I though at first of a range, from games that were lots of work to GM to those that were little work to GM. But that's a very simplistic model that leaves out something important. The idea has shaken out to be a description of how much effort a GM has to put in to the mechanics of running a game. Don't care about the setting here, nor the session prep like making maps or picking out premade NPCs to use. Not talking about how fast or slow or complicated the game rules are, it can be related but it may well be more correlation than causation. This is just about how much work and effort the mechanics of the game make the GM do in order to have a functioning system at the table during the session. The scope of the game, what it tries or is supposed to cover, does matter. But reasonable people can reasonable disagree on exact boundaries of a game's scope while agreeing that, for example, a wild west/cowboy themed game should probably be able to cover cattle stampedes and horseback chase scenes without the GM having to completely make them up from scratch.

    The idea is that the amount of effort it takes a GM to mechanically run the game can be expressed as a triangle. Three corners, in one corner is Atlas, another is Zeus, and in the third is Hephaestus. The Atlas corner represents RPGs where the GM has to do a ton of work during game to keep things running smoothly. The Zeus corner represents RPGs where the GM doesn't have to do anything to make the rules work smoothly. Hephaestus though, represents an RPG where there's a ton of up front work picking out which bits to use and hammering them into shape, and then the game runs smoothly and easily. Any particular game, or serious portion of a game within the game's scope, will fall somewhere in the triangle representing how much effort the GM will need to put into manipulating the game mechanics to produce a decently fun game. This isn't about the effort to plod through a rule itself, long division to get the dice result or a table lookup aren't part of this they're the rule in action and being applied. This is about the amount of effort put on the GM, by the game mechanics, before and after actually getting to roll a die and get a result.

    With more precision and examples:

    For a Hephaestus leaning RPG the GM does a bunch of prep work to make the game mechanics play smoothly. But once all the work is done the game is easy to run and the GM doesn't need to adjust the rules, look obscure optional rules, or suddenly change the way something works because it's too strong/weak. I did this once for a D&D 3.5 game; defined what would and wouldn't be used for class-spell-item-etc., prepped a bunch of notes & NPCs, laid out house rules, wrote down specific rulings for some rules questions. Then when it was time to play... everything worked. I only once had to puzzle over what some spell or feat should do, never worried about whether or not to call for a skill check, didn't get caught by any nasty conundrums of if something was or wasn't allowable. Ran that campaign for over a year from 3rd to at 14th level. The system mechanics were never any work for me after all the prep and I could focus on the adventure. Gurps and many supers systems work this way a lot, when done properly. The GM makes a bunch of decisions and adjustments up front about what books & rules & options to use. Then once you're in session there's very little thinking about the mechanics of the rules, you just roll the dice, get the result, and go to the next thing.

    For a Zeus type game the mechanics & rules are either sufficiently comprehensive or simple and robust enough that there's no "how does this rule?" type of work to do. Lightweight games like Risus lean this way. For others the rules might not be simple, but they're comprehensive enough within the scope of what the game does that the GM never has to worry about which rule to apply or how to use it. There's a rule, general or specific or in between, you make the rolls (or spend tokens or compare values for diceless games or whatever), and you get a nice result that doesn't make people go "wait wait that can't be right" and suddenly have an overwhelming urge to house-rule it mid-session. To be sure I don't think there's going to be any really rule heavy games that are perfectly 100% out in this corner of the triangle, but I could be wrong. Does anyone actually read my posts. Personally, I find the Paranoia Anniversary edition to lean pretty far out this way, for me at least. I just make up some lunatic mission to send the PCs on, think up some R&D tech they get to play with and die from, decide on any secret society orders to add extra backstabbing, random gen up some NPCs & rooms & corridors, and its a go. I never have to check that the mission length/type or R&D toys break anything, don't worry about probabilities or improbabilities or "legal" NPCs. I just build the setting stuff, have people roll dice, and I get to focus on keeping the game funny and moving quickly along.

    For an Atlas type RPG the GM has to engage in adjusting, changing, skipping, and making critical decisions about the mechanics all the time in order to keep the game working. Any time players get up to something the GM has to think through a whole list of things; "do I want to use the game mechanics for this?" "which rule or optional rules should I use this time?" "how do I use the rule this time?" "am I rolling too often or not enough?" "do I need to change the rule or use a different optional rule to fit the circumstances?" "will this rule give me the right result or an unacceptable outcome?" "player rolled X and the rule answer is Y but how do I use that?" "should I house-rule or change something about this rule?". That's all work that the GM is doing just to keep the game mechanics functioning smoothly. Not saying that the game automatically breaks if the GM makes a mistake, or that this is "bad" or anything. It's just about the GM having to keep making rules decisions all the time that are going beyond "what do I tell the player to roll?". For my group D&D 4e was like this. Not combat, that was firmly in Zeus territory (just slow and eventually annoying). But pretty much everything else outside of combat had the GM hemming and hawing over whether to use the skill challenges, how to deal with rituals, the "oh god not again" for mounted combat, if PC powers could be used for stuff, and how to get us more horses because the last batch exploded into chunky salsa from turn one AoE splash damage again*.

    To be sure, there's no "right answer" here. This is just an idea for describing the amount and type of work a GM has to do to keep a game system working during a session. Some people may prefer one way or another, people who don't GM don't have to worry at all. Many games are somewhere probably closer to the middle than anywhere else, and parts of games may be in one corner or another. This isn't a problem or a description of a problem, it's an observation.

    * OK, that last one isn't really a rules problem because we kept finding it funnier and funnier. Plus it really was the rules working as intended, damage scaled and horses didn't. But some people consider it an issue and the DM was going nuts for a while because there was a mission timer and we had to cross lots of plains/prairie.

  2. - Top - End - #2
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    Does anyone actually read my posts.
    Nope.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    I lean heavily into Zeus games now-a-days.
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    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    Someone recently opined within my hearing that a particular RPG was "an Atlas of RPGs", meaning that the GM carried the entire game. Good game? Because GM. Bad game? Because GM. And I though, "I can see it that way, it's lots of work running that game". After a few days I've formed a rough proto-theory.

    I though at first of a range, from games that were lots of work to GM to those that were little work to GM. But that's a very simplistic model that leaves out something important. The idea has shaken out to be a description of how much effort a GM has to put in to the mechanics of running a game. Don't care about the setting here, nor the session prep like making maps or picking out premade NPCs to use. Not talking about how fast or slow or complicated the game rules are, it can be related but it may well be more correlation than causation. This is just about how much work and effort the mechanics of the game make the GM do in order to have a functioning system at the table during the session. The scope of the game, what it tries or is supposed to cover, does matter. But reasonable people can reasonable disagree on exact boundaries of a game's scope while agreeing that, for example, a wild west/cowboy themed game should probably be able to cover cattle stampedes and horseback chase scenes without the GM having to completely make them up from scratch.

    The idea is that the amount of effort it takes a GM to mechanically run the game can be expressed as a triangle. Three corners, in one corner is Atlas, another is Zeus, and in the third is Hephaestus. The Atlas corner represents RPGs where the GM has to do a ton of work during game to keep things running smoothly. The Zeus corner represents RPGs where the GM doesn't have to do anything to make the rules work smoothly. Hephaestus though, represents an RPG where there's a ton of up front work picking out which bits to use and hammering them into shape, and then the game runs smoothly and easily. Any particular game, or serious portion of a game within the game's scope, will fall somewhere in the triangle representing how much effort the GM will need to put into manipulating the game mechanics to produce a decently fun game. This isn't about the effort to plod through a rule itself, long division to get the dice result or a table lookup aren't part of this they're the rule in action and being applied. This is about the amount of effort put on the GM, by the game mechanics, before and after actually getting to roll a die and get a result.

    With more precision and examples:

    For a Hephaestus leaning RPG the GM does a bunch of prep work to make the game mechanics play smoothly. But once all the work is done the game is easy to run and the GM doesn't need to adjust the rules, look obscure optional rules, or suddenly change the way something works because it's too strong/weak. I did this once for a D&D 3.5 game; defined what would and wouldn't be used for class-spell-item-etc., prepped a bunch of notes & NPCs, laid out house rules, wrote down specific rulings for some rules questions. Then when it was time to play... everything worked. I only once had to puzzle over what some spell or feat should do, never worried about whether or not to call for a skill check, didn't get caught by any nasty conundrums of if something was or wasn't allowable. Ran that campaign for over a year from 3rd to at 14th level. The system mechanics were never any work for me after all the prep and I could focus on the adventure. Gurps and many supers systems work this way a lot, when done properly. The GM makes a bunch of decisions and adjustments up front about what books & rules & options to use. Then once you're in session there's very little thinking about the mechanics of the rules, you just roll the dice, get the result, and go to the next thing.

    For a Zeus type game the mechanics & rules are either sufficiently comprehensive or simple and robust enough that there's no "how does this rule?" type of work to do. Lightweight games like Risus lean this way. For others the rules might not be simple, but they're comprehensive enough within the scope of what the game does that the GM never has to worry about which rule to apply or how to use it. There's a rule, general or specific or in between, you make the rolls (or spend tokens or compare values for diceless games or whatever), and you get a nice result that doesn't make people go "wait wait that can't be right" and suddenly have an overwhelming urge to house-rule it mid-session. To be sure I don't think there's going to be any really rule heavy games that are perfectly 100% out in this corner of the triangle, but I could be wrong. Does anyone actually read my posts. Personally, I find the Paranoia Anniversary edition to lean pretty far out this way, for me at least. I just make up some lunatic mission to send the PCs on, think up some R&D tech they get to play with and die from, decide on any secret society orders to add extra backstabbing, random gen up some NPCs & rooms & corridors, and its a go. I never have to check that the mission length/type or R&D toys break anything, don't worry about probabilities or improbabilities or "legal" NPCs. I just build the setting stuff, have people roll dice, and I get to focus on keeping the game funny and moving quickly along.

    For an Atlas type RPG the GM has to engage in adjusting, changing, skipping, and making critical decisions about the mechanics all the time in order to keep the game working. Any time players get up to something the GM has to think through a whole list of things; "do I want to use the game mechanics for this?" "which rule or optional rules should I use this time?" "how do I use the rule this time?" "am I rolling too often or not enough?" "do I need to change the rule or use a different optional rule to fit the circumstances?" "will this rule give me the right result or an unacceptable outcome?" "player rolled X and the rule answer is Y but how do I use that?" "should I house-rule or change something about this rule?". That's all work that the GM is doing just to keep the game mechanics functioning smoothly. Not saying that the game automatically breaks if the GM makes a mistake, or that this is "bad" or anything. It's just about the GM having to keep making rules decisions all the time that are going beyond "what do I tell the player to roll?". For my group D&D 4e was like this. Not combat, that was firmly in Zeus territory (just slow and eventually annoying). But pretty much everything else outside of combat had the GM hemming and hawing over whether to use the skill challenges, how to deal with rituals, the "oh god not again" for mounted combat, if PC powers could be used for stuff, and how to get us more horses because the last batch exploded into chunky salsa from turn one AoE splash damage again*.

    To be sure, there's no "right answer" here. This is just an idea for describing the amount and type of work a GM has to do to keep a game system working during a session. Some people may prefer one way or another, people who don't GM don't have to worry at all. Many games are somewhere probably closer to the middle than anywhere else, and parts of games may be in one corner or another. This isn't a problem or a description of a problem, it's an observation.

    * OK, that last one isn't really a rules problem because we kept finding it funnier and funnier. Plus it really was the rules working as intended, damage scaled and horses didn't. But some people consider it an issue and the DM was going nuts for a while because there was a mission timer and we had to cross lots of plains/prairie.
    I guess I'd frame it a bit differently... Some RPG design elements require work in order to be used and bring about a certain predetermined lift in certain qualities of the game, but it doesn't really matter 'how well' that work is done - it's just the inherent friction in how things are either prepared or resolved in order to actually be usable and to be run, and within those elements the work can either be offloaded to different times (so you can do it in prep instead of at the table) or to different people (so you can e.g. ask a player to take over the task). Then there's the opposite, things that have 'negative friction' values, where including them in the game increases the efficiency of other work or reduces the absolute amount of work needed while still improving certain game qualities, by virtue of introducing abstractions or by having a bunch of canned prep-work already done.

    But then there are the RPG design elements which act as levers - you could do little work or a lot of work through them, but it absolutely depends on what you're trying to use them for and how you're using them. Whereas a rule like 'roll two dice and keep the higher value' involves a little bit of frictional work (you have to do it, but there's no real question about how you do it), a rule like 'NPCs can have Virtues and Vices, which interact with forms of persuasion in certain ways' could be used in a lazy way to poor effect (everyone just has the same defaults) or could be used with more effort to either good effect (NPCs have Virtues and Vices that align with their behaviors and roles, and players can figure them out) or terrible effect (NPCs have the most counter-intuitive Virtues and Vices and they're chosen such that the consequences of those attributes are rarely going to line up with what the party's relationship with those NPCs is likely to be).

    So your Atlas, Hephaestus, and Zeus categories would basically be in the former group - design elements that are primarily friction or lubricant for the processes of the game. But I think there should be an additional category as well for those design elements that act as leverage to allow someone (could be a player just as well) to direct their effort in order to shape the game, for better or worse.

  5. - Top - End - #5
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    So, let’s say, right this second, I invent a new RPG. It’s really limited in scope of what it covers… maybe only “matches in a Magic: the Gathering arena”. The rules? They’re “play Magic decks to resolve combat”.

    And… that’s it.

    Extremely high complexity / high crunch / whatever, yet almost 100% pure Zeus.

    The only thing you might have to and be allowed to make a ruling on are things that don’t come up in normal play, but could here, like (if the rules don’t specify) what counts as an “opponent” when alliances can be made and broken mid-fight (maybe this is already covered in MtG?).

    (Ok, as an RPG, arguably you could allow custom content. That would be highly… Hephaestus. People might want to come in with completely crazy things, like summoning troops from Warhammer 40k and ordering an exterminatus or something. )

    Note that, if there are no NPCs, you don’t even need rules for “what does it take to convince someone to join your side in a fight” or “will they trade the cards/spells”. If there are NPC characters, I’m not sure whether “roleplay them like they were PCs” is Hephaestus or Atlas.

    All that said, the amount of effort the GM needs to put in isn’t exactly a 1-to-1 correlation with the system’s Zeus rating. After all, creating content for 3e D&D is such a chore compared to doing the same for 2e and earlier, for example.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    So, let’s say, right this second, I invent a new RPG. It’s really limited in scope of what it covers… maybe only “matches in a Magic: the Gathering arena”. The rules? They’re “play Magic decks to resolve combat”.

    And… that’s it.

    Extremely high complexity / high crunch / whatever, yet almost 100% pure Zeus.
    This brings up a point that I hadn't considered, but there is an element of this which has to do with how you perceive parts of 'doing things at the table' to be work, versus to be playing the game.

    Like, if playing MtG is a chore to you, that's going to feel like a lot of work compared to a system that goes 'to resolve a combat, sum up both sides' combat scores, and the higher wins'. Similarly, if you're doing the deck-building for your NPCs and monsters and such, that could feel strongly in the Hephaestus direction, unless MtG deckbuilding happens to be a thing you do for fun in your spare time anyhow and you've got an archive of hundreds of decks ready to go.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    How would you class games where the mechanics are simple and known to everyone, but using those mechanics requires heavy improv by the GM? Like many PbtA games, for example.

    Personally I'd call them Atlas games, since I find improv to be as much or more work than mechanics adjudication, but from discussions about it many GMs would say there's a complete difference.


    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    Similarly, if you're doing the deck-building for your NPCs and monsters and such, that could feel strongly in the Hephaestus direction, unless MtG deckbuilding happens to be a thing you do for fun in your spare time anyhow and you've got an archive of hundreds of decks ready to go.
    Incidentally, this is one of the two reasons my attempts at an RPG where the combat system is just MtG never took off. Too much prep. The other being the fact that MtG matches can be rather lengthy, and changing the rules to make them shorter obviously changes the balance of all the cards.
    Last edited by icefractal; 2022-10-31 at 01:45 PM.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Oh, this person who made the Atlas post might have been me, because I seem to remember making this kind of statement in the last week or so.

    As for your types, I think there might be a fourth type, or at least a subtype that I would call "Hades" games. Those being, in essence, generally Hephaestus-type games of the sort that relies less on having the GM do all the prep and instead more on having such boatloads of content that the GM can, possibly, just scour their "treasure trove" of books and find something that can be semi-seamlessly used in their game anyway. I think GURPS and D&D 3.5/PF1 may fall under this definition. Arguably, some other splatsplosion-focused games might qualify, like old Vampire or something.

    But personally, I have always disliked Atlas-type games, since they tire and bore me as both a player and a GM (constant improvisation and making rulings on the fly as a GM is hard, not knowing what you can do because it's always up to GM is unpleasant and limits your options as a player).
    And despite being an adept of Hephaestus-type games for almost 10 years now, I begin to dislike them as well - at least as a GM, because the player rarely has to do much in those games and reaps a lot of benefits (as is common for crunchier systems that are still playable) for very little work.
    As for Zeus-type games...I, quite frankly, haven't really played a pure one, ever. Maybe Vampire was a Zeus-type game for one of my GMs - he claims to this day that working with Storyteller has been extremely easy for him, and I know that he needs maybe half an hour of prep to make a decent session, and yet there was very rarely any need for instant adjudication or resolving something in a way that I couldn't predict with rule knowledge.

    Going by this model, though, my modest desire is to make most of the games I enjoy shift at least halfway into those, so maybe you're onto something there.

    I also have to commend you on the specific type name choices, as Atlas has immense strength but is also bound by it, Hephaestus toils endlessly but is one of the least lucky and least favored on Olympus despite his talent and hard work, while Zeus, mostly known for his quick temper and questionable (at the very least) shenanigans, is still revered as head of the pantheon and has lots of fun regardless.
    Last edited by Ignimortis; 2022-10-31 at 01:48 PM.
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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Nope.
    Some days, it's hard to tell. Fer ex...
    This isn't about the effort to plod through a rule itself, long division to get the dice result or a table lookup aren't part of this they're the rule in action and being applied. This is about the amount of effort put on the GM, by the game mechanics, before and after actually getting to roll a die and get a result.
    Although I admit even my examples were distinctly imperfect.
    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Extremely high complexity / high crunch / whatever, yet almost 100% pure Zeus.....
    .....All that said, the amount of effort the GM needs to put in isn’t exactly a 1-to-1 correlation with the system’s Zeus rating. After all, creating content for 3e D&D is such a chore compared to doing the same for 2e and earlier, for example.
    My intent is/was about the "rules about the rules" and how much effort, and perhaps fiddlyness or work or fragility, there is in those. I'm not trying for a full "joules required to run a session", or even "joules required to use a rule", but more "joules required during session in order to use the rule". With the assumption that the rules are being used correctly.

    I'm afraid I can't speak to BitD or Fate or anything. They read very nicely, I've cribbed a couple prep & story methods off them, and the SR hack I ran across looks intresting. But local rpg culture is... we'll be nice and say "allergic" to those hamburgers.

    Would do more but on mobile & family time incoming.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    I think a lot of this is highly subjective. For me, 5e D&D basically runs itself. Sure, I have to make lots of decisions. But they're basically all at the narrative level, not the mechanical level. The mechanical level handles itself. 90% of my prep time is world building and narrative level scenario prep, dealing with the consequences of previous sessions. Most of the remainder is preparing battle maps for my online game (the in person one is done on the fly). A tiny percentage is about mechanical stuff.

    For me, ad libbed, ad hoc decisions about how things should resolve are the core of TTRPGs. Rules are there in theory to assist, to take some of the load off, to automate common interactions. But in many games the mechanics start making demands for attention, forcing interaction with them instead of interaction with the game world. Like a bad CAD package, you spend more time and effort trying to navigate the interface than actually building things.
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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    you spend more time and effort trying to navigate the interface than actually building things.
    I have a bad habit of wanting to navigate new systems instead of actually playing them. But once it’s been a while without actually playing, I get sick of it. I need to get back to ole reliable with friends.

    Having a system that works well without too much necessary interference is a blessing.
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    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    Some days, it's hard to tell. Fer ex...

    My intent is/was about the "rules about the rules" and how much effort, and perhaps fiddlyness or work or fragility, there is in those. I'm not trying for a full "joules required to run a session", or even "joules required to use a rule", but more "joules required during session in order to use the rule". With the assumption that the rules are being used correctly.
    Yup, I figured. Half the point of my post was to make that difference really plain, to give you the opportunity to weigh in on what the “executive summary” of your post would look like. That said,

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    I think a lot of this is highly subjective. For me, 5e D&D basically runs itself.

    For me, ad libbed, ad hoc decisions about how things should resolve are the core of TTRPGs.
    On the one hand, I agree, in that, without (the potential for) “ad libbed, ad hoc decisions”, it is not, by my definitions, an RPG. So you’re kinda definitionally correct.

    Otoh, I think that one measure of a “good” RPG is that the box is sufficiently inclusive that the entirety of the core gameplay loop could instead be played entirely “inside the box”, where if the GM fell asleep and was replaced by omniscient co-GM doppelgänger, the results would be indistinguishable. (EDIT: gah, that wasn’t clear at all! What I mean is, I think a good RPG should have sufficient rules that, if the players so chose, they always had the option to take actions that involved 0 GM adjudication (when dealing with 100% public information; no “But the fire elemental is actually a troll with an illusion”, which necessitated the need for the omniscient doppelgänger).)

    Regardless, 5e “make stuff up” skills place it clearly outside Zeus territory. Whether it’s Hephaestus or Atlas I guess depends on the extent to which you can and bother to plan for the actions of the PCs. And how much effort that takes depends somewhat on the GM, being subjective in that regard? But still quite objective for which camp it’s in, wrt when the rule work is actually done.
    Last edited by Quertus; 2022-10-31 at 09:49 PM.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    For me, it's almost all about mental overhead required to run the game. 3-4 hours of running a game, adjudicating on the fly and remembering how the rules work, is like running a mental marathon. At the end of that, I'm shot.

    It's not really your point, but let me start off with adventure design: The more I have to make stuff up on the fly, the faster I burn out. Looking stuff up constantly screws up pacing and leads to player boredom, so it's to be avoided as much as possible. That means well known material or winging it. Keeping stuff in memory is tiring. But inventing is far more mentally exhausting. So that means prep work is key, whether that my own design or running a module. Notes need to be as simple and easy to reference as possible, during a session to jolt my memory of the more detailed information I already knew from designing/studying it. Brief, on point, and properly organized. (As a side note, D&D modules have gone from bad under TSR to execrable under WotC on all three fronts. And other system's adventures are often worse, hard as it is to believe.)

    So for game rules, same concept applies. They can be a little dense, as long as I've had plenty of time to study them, and I can find what I need easily. But the very nature of highly complex systems is it's generally hard to find the rules for something quickly, and they tend to need to be referenced more often because they're harder to remember. Simple comparison is trying to run Shadowrun/Gurps vs D&D 3e/4e vs D&D 5e/BECMI. The first two are a nightmare all the time. The second two are quite difficult as soon as combat begins, even with good 'notes'. The last two are a cakewalk. On the flip side something where I have to completely wing it and re-invent the rules all the time is exhausting, e.g. most Palladium games. For similar reasons, I've never had any desire to look at Fate.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    I think a lot of this is highly subjective.... Like a bad CAD package, you spend more time and effort trying to navigate the interface than actually building things.
    Yeah, like a lot of life stuff is different based on where you see it from. For me 5e looks like a decent plug-n-play combat system married to your bad CAD package for everything else. I like not having to know what numbers are on the player's character sheets, worry if I'm calling for too many checks, or have to explain why one character gets a roll and another doesn't. I'm willing to make the players do a little more adding up numbers if the rules relieve me of those sorts of issues and can cover or prevent my mistakes. I'm happier when my notes on a pc are "good at <thing>, bad at <thing>, tempt with <thing>, fears <thing>" and a keyword summary of their background and current fame/social reputation.

    Other people like or internalize the things I think of as "working the rules to make the rules work". I'm happier doing a bunch of prep work when there's no time or attention pressure than trying to figure out how to get rules to give appropriate results or if I need to abandon the rules and do a butt pull in order to keep the game going smoothly. I know a DM who absolutely adored 4e combat because he had no decisions to make. He just picked monsters, added up xp, scribbled a map, ran the monsters, and the fights... well they worked untill the hp & condition bloat got too much.

    One thing I dislike about the UI metaphor is that a properly designed UI will restrict and channel a user's actions into what the developer wants the user to do. If the software is properly presented and the UI is appropriately subtle then the user won't try to do stuff outside the scope of the software. RPGs... don't function like software or UIs and most of the major titles are, I feel, oversold to the users on their scope. Like software an RPG is just a collection of rules. Unlike software they aren't executed by precision instruments that perform each step as designed. The UI metaphor seems to excuse sloppy rules writing by saying that you're expected to not use the rules because they'll sometimes fail under normal use cases. I don't think that's how the metahpor is intended, but that's how it communicates to me.

    More or less unrelated, being the kind of person who likes data & result driven decisions, I had at one point, some years ago, a spreadsheet. Yeah, big surprise eh? It had (or has since its probably still around on the hdd somewhere) a series of questions about RPGs. Typical stuff like how much work you"re willing to put in, how much time & money you want to spend, how much houseruling & prep. All on the usual.... I think it was a 1 to 5 scale. It also clustered them into categories and put a "how important is this question" and "how important is this category" rating on top of those. Then I filled in copies for every RPG I owned or had played. Comparing results & stuff showed me trends in what and why I enjoyed some games more than others. Not a thing I'd expect to be useful across different people, but useful (to me) for provoking thoughts & questions about how I valued, used, and enjoyed different games.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    I though at first of a range, from games that were lots of work to GM to those that were little work to GM. But that's a very simplistic model that leaves out something important. The idea has shaken out to be a description of how much effort a GM has to put in to the mechanics of running a game. Don't care about the setting here, nor the session prep like making maps or picking out premade NPCs to use.
    Not sure why excluding this stuff. Your model works here as well. Premade settings everyone knows by heart and which can be used without any further explaination and adjustment would be Zeus, GM-made settings would be Hephaistos and vague settings that are only expanded/developed in play by the GM would be Atlas.

    Similar with NPCs. If the system provides enough sensible premades for all occasions it would be Zeus, if you have to craft them yourself in preptime, it would be Hephaistos and if you give your NPCs only stats on the fly during game, it would be Atlas.

    But sure, if you want, you could restrict the discussion to rules and rulings only. But it is worth considering that there are many groups where rules decisions are not something the GM can or should do unilaterally so it is not really him carrying the game here.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
    Not sure why excluding this stuff. Your model works here as well. Premade settings everyone knows by heart and which can be used without any further explaination and adjustment would be Zeus, GM-made settings would be Hephaistos and vague settings that are only expanded/developed in play by the GM would be Atlas.

    Similar with NPCs. If the system provides enough sensible premades for all occasions it would be Zeus, if you have to craft them yourself in preptime, it would be Hephaistos and if you give your NPCs only stats on the fly during game, it would be Atlas.

    But sure, if you want, you could restrict the discussion to rules and rulings only. But it is worth considering that there are many groups where rules decisions are not something the GM can or should do unilaterally so it is not really him carrying the game here.
    Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
    For me, it's almost all about mental overhead required to run the game. 3-4 hours of running a game, adjudicating on the fly and remembering how the rules work, is like running a mental marathon. At the end of that, I'm shot.

    It's not really your point, but let me start off with adventure design: The more I have to make stuff up on the fly, the faster I burn out.
    And this was the other half of the point of my post. While I think whether rules are Zeus, Hephaestus, or Atlas is a valid metric, it’s just… not the one that matters to me? What matters to me is the effect on the game and on myself that the total package has. Fate, or 5e skills, where I constantly have to Atlas? 5e skills, where I have to remember 1,000 pages of house rules / rulings for every single DC I’ve ever set in order to have a consistent game? **** that! There’s no advantage the system can give me to be with that effort! Compound that with the number of worlds and GM’s compiling those 1,000 page rulings documents I have to remember, to know whether attacking the mothership or clearing out the Fighter escorts first is likely to be the better plan, and to know whether I’m likely to be able to swim through lava or climb a tree to get to them, or should just ask for a Fly Spell? No way! Whereas pre-written rules & tables of DCs, where anyone at the table can chime in with “so that’s roll X, right?”, where the GM’s workload might well be 0, and my memorization workload is “whatever I feel like / can manage”, where such memorization just improves the game rather than being a necessity? That’s the good stuff. That’s the sweet spot where I won’t burn out, where games only get better as you play them, as opposed to building up more and more balls to juggle.

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    I'm happier when my notes on a pc are "good at <thing>, bad at <thing>, tempt with <thing>, fears <thing>" and a keyword summary of their background and current fame/social reputation.
    Huh. My notes are usually the PCs interface to the system; ie, their senses and appearance and “AC” and sometimes “Charisma” - the things I need to know for the world and them to interact. But I usually eventually need to add or remember a few “good at <thing>” bits to not bog the game down with unnecessary rolls, and “reputation” for obvious reasons. So maybe I should add those to my standard sheet.

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    More or less unrelated, being the kind of person who likes data & result driven decisions, I had at one point, some years ago, a spreadsheet. Yeah, big surprise eh? It had (or has since its probably still around on the hdd somewhere) a series of questions about RPGs. Typical stuff like how much work you"re willing to put in, how much time & money you want to spend, how much houseruling & prep. All on the usual.... I think it was a 1 to 5 scale. It also clustered them into categories and put a "how important is this question" and "how important is this category" rating on top of those. Then I filled in copies for every RPG I owned or had played. Comparing results & stuff showed me trends in what and why I enjoyed some games more than others. Not a thing I'd expect to be useful across different people, but useful (to me) for provoking thoughts & questions about how I valued, used, and enjoyed different games.
    Sounds cool. Any particular trends you can remember?

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    @Telok

    For me, I find pre-planning any kind of actual detail (as opposed to large-scale worldbuilding and scenario building) to be a tremendous time-sink for basically zero value. I've tried it, and it results in one of two states, both pathological
    1. Because I'm determined to get my "money's worth" for the planning, I have a tendency to try to channel the party down one of the pre-determined paths. That creates friction and, in my experience, leads to less consistent narratives. Because the players often realize things I didn't and teach me about my setting and its needs.
    2. If I'm trying not to "railroad" the party down one of the pre-planned paths, things rapidly diverge from my planning. Leading to the planning being utterly wasted--I can't even re-use it because the assumptions it was based on have radically changed.

    Pre-planning details causes absurdity and waste in my experience. And is really annoying. So I don't do it. I plan the high-level and make maps as needed (with an eye to generic reuse). I don't ever plan encounters until the moment of.

    @Quartus

    I long ago gave up trying to be long-term consistent with DCs. Why? Because, in my experience, the base condition for re-use of DCs are never met. Those include that all the circumstances around the check (who is doing it, under what conditions, with what effects on success/failure) stay the same within a narrow margin. False consistency is, in my mind, worse than inconsistency. And the exact number just never matters. The general band (+-5) matters, but 10 vs 11 vs 9? Yeah, no.

    Instead, I select either 10 or 15, defaulting to 10. Very rarely 20, if something strikes me as substantially out of the norm difficult. Most of my mental effort (such as it is) goes into deciding what the spectrum of possible outcomes will be, including deciding whether I need a check at all.
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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
    Not sure why excluding this stuff. Your model works here as well. Premade settings everyone knows by heart and which can be used without any further explaination and adjustment would be Zeus, GM-made settings would be Hephaistos and vague settings that are only expanded/developed in play by the GM would be Atlas.
    I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I assumed it was because setting work can be done in almost any system. You could use a prewritten setting guide, or homebrew a world with millions of inhabitants, regardless of if you're playing GURPS or 5E, or Fate.

    Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
    Similar with NPCs. If the system provides enough sensible premades for all occasions it would be Zeus, if you have to craft them yourself in preptime, it would be Hephaistos and if you give your NPCs only stats on the fly during game, it would be Atlas.
    Even in a situation like this, different systems make the process of NPC creation much easier than others. Creating a level 10 wizard to be some dungeon's mook is a lot more effort than creating an enemy in a system like Feng Shui or Lancer. In other systems like GURPS, creating a stat stick takes 10 seconds maybe, but creating a memorable enemy that's fun to fight takes a lot more effort than it does in systems that give you npc building frameworks.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Man, looking at my post last night... that was some damn disjointed rambly stuff. Not my best work...

    Trends... unified die mechanics weren't important but consistent use of dice methods & mechanics was... clear game mechanic goals stated in the books were a plus... player facing stunts & abilities were more fun than those requiring gm work... higher expectations of systems functioning without gm changes/rules work for paid systems & it scaled with $$ spent... huge lists of **** to wade through for a few good choices was a turn off... huge lists to wade through where everything was useful was a plus... a speed of play vs gm workload vs player workload thing...
    My memory is a bit hazy on it, been a good while since then. Memorably tho, the D&Ds & knockoffs got lower ratings as the edition numbers went up, with an inverse between AD&D 2e S&P to 3e but a return to pattern with 3.5e.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    I find it funny that what people are calling Atlas is basically the polar opposite of what I'd understood Atlas as from the OP, e.g. what resonated with me about the idea of discussing GM effort.

    For me, the extreme examples of in game GM effort all have to do with things where the system obligates you to perform tedious multistep computation or resolution in order to run things, or where running NPCs to a reasonable percentage of their supposed abilities requires a lot of problem solving or optimization or planning.

    For example, grapple mechanics to me are 'high in-game GM effort'. Or detailed hitpoint tracking for hundreds of units in mass-battle systems that don't do abstraction well. Or motion planning for ships or low maneuverability fliers.

    Making stuff up on the fly on the other hand is low to zero effort.

    The reason I introduced that extra category is that, no, that doesn't mean free form is always best, because some things which require effort give you a return on that effort. Whereas other things like tracking HP individually for every soldier in an army are basically wasted effort - you can do it, but there's no real benefits commensurate with the time it costs you.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    For me, the extreme examples of in game GM effort all have to do with things where the system obligates you to perform tedious multistep computation or resolution in order to run things, or where running NPCs to a reasonable percentage of their supposed abilities requires a lot of problem solving or optimization or planning.
    Thats stuffs only a problem because it slows the game down. It requires basically zero mental overhead.

    Making stuff up on the fly on the other hand is low to zero effort.
    Whereas I see it as 90% of the mental overhead for running a game, the part that's exhausting by the end of a session.

    I'm fine with it if it's making it up within a fairly tight framework, and the benefit largely outweighs the cost. For example figuring out a D&D 5e DC for a declared PC task is a relatively easy task after some pre-thought about how the numbers work, and has zero of the "slows down the game to look it up" problems that D&D 3e skill checks had. But as at least one poster have pointed out in the 5e forum over the years, there is still a mental overhead / exhaustion cost for having to wing them. (And it was only after that was pointed out to me to my initial total disbelief that making up stuff on the fly could be exhausting, that I payed attention to what it was that causes me to be exhausted by the end of a session.)

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    @Quartus

    I long ago gave up trying to be long-term consistent with DCs. Why? Because, in my experience, the base condition for re-use of DCs are never met. Those include that all the circumstances around the check (who is doing it, under what conditions, with what effects on success/failure) stay the same within a narrow margin. False consistency is, in my mind, worse than inconsistency. And the exact number just never matters. The general band (+-5) matters, but 10 vs 11 vs 9? Yeah, no.

    Instead, I select either 10 or 15, defaulting to 10. Very rarely 20, if something strikes me as substantially out of the norm difficult. Most of my mental effort (such as it is) goes into deciding what the spectrum of possible outcomes will be, including deciding whether I need a check at all.
    I almost agreed with you, until, on the second read-through, I caught the bit I bolded. When you say that the DC varies based on who is taking the action, I have to assume you mean something better than, “climbing the fence is DC 20 for character A, but DC 10 for character B, because clear GM favoritism”. Care to explain your actual reasoning here?

    Also… while I completely agree that 90+%, probably 99+% of the DCs won’t get used again outside the immediate future, likely not even outside the given scene, if the fence was DC 20 to climb 30 sessions ago, it’d better **** well be DC 20 to climb that same fence now. And if the party isn’t complete murderhobos, destroying every person and bit of scenery they ever interact with, that means you’ve got to remember those 1,000 or so pages of made up DCs if you want to run a consistent world, because you’ve no idea which few rolls the party might repeat. And if it’s not a consistent world, it’s not worth my time to think about.

    Now, if I read you right (not my forte, I know), it sounds like you’re saying that you can manage rough consistency by generally throwing out the variable DCs, and making the outliers really something special, make the outliers really stick out. If I’ve read you right, then (I hope I’ve got this phrase right) I tip my hat to you, as that sounds like a brilliantly efficient bit of Hephaestus to minimize your (and your table’s) cognitive load. Kudos!

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    Man, looking at my post last night... that was some damn disjointed rambly stuff. Not my best work...

    Trends... unified die mechanics weren't important but consistent use of dice methods & mechanics was... clear game mechanic goals stated in the books were a plus... player facing stunts & abilities were more fun than those requiring gm work... higher expectations of systems functioning without gm changes/rules work for paid systems & it scaled with $$ spent... huge lists of **** to wade through for a few good choices was a turn off... huge lists to wade through where everything was useful was a plus... a speed of play vs gm workload vs player workload thing...
    My memory is a bit hazy on it, been a good while since then. Memorably tho, the D&Ds & knockoffs got lower ratings as the edition numbers went up, with an inverse between AD&D 2e S&P to 3e but a return to pattern with 3.5e.
    I haven’t fully processed your list yet, but I wanted to not only thank you for your reply, but to comment that the one I bolded really stuck out to me, because it’s something I also appreciate, that I usually see people describing negatively. It’s nice to know that there’s others out there who also appreciate “lots of good”.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Stonehead View Post
    I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I assumed it was because setting work can be done in almost any system. You could use a prewritten setting guide, or homebrew a world with millions of inhabitants, regardless of if you're playing GURPS or 5E, or Fate.
    But then you have games like SR or The One Ring which basically assume that you use a particular official setting, which is basically the opposite from GURPS which wants to be setting agnostic and universal.
    Last edited by Satinavian; 2022-11-01 at 12:55 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
    Thats stuffs only a problem because it slows the game down. It requires basically zero mental overhead.

    Whereas I see it as 90% of the mental overhead for running a game, the part that's exhausting by the end of a session.
    Yeah, we're basically completely opposite on this. A way to think of it is, I have a certain degree of momentum when running (or playing) a game, and that momentum is a bit of a limited resource - tedious things, stuff that slows the game down, etc saps my momentum - it basically makes me feel 'I want the session to be over'. When I have no momentum, I can't run the game effectively. Coming up with stuff on the fly tends to be momentum neutral or even momentum positive for me, to the extent that when I make custom systems I make sure to put things in there that force me to come up with new mechanics or design system stuff on the fly in response to player requests, because that actually helps me keep up momentum during play. I don't mean setting DCs, I mean things like making it easy or even expected for players to be inventing new moves or spells or items on the fly, and writing up the mechanics of those custom effects during game. To me that is lower effort than actually running a 3.5e style grapple.
    Last edited by NichG; 2022-11-01 at 01:07 PM.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    I would say that the same game can be played and dmed according to all the styles.
    you said you run a 3.x game where you did lots of preparation, but then it ran smoothly and you never had to look up stuff. i suppose it's possible to do so
    myself, when running 3.x i do it more atlas-style, because every week a player comes up with a new trick he wants to use, or perhaps i come up with a new trick to give an npc. or a player would try something really unusual during a session and i'd have to figure out how to handle it mechanically. either way, it's a continuous work, and i can't conceive dming any other way.
    while i can totally see a group of casual players sticking to the simple rules, just making attack rolls and using simple spells, and never needing to stop to adjudicate something. i was in one such group as a kid.

    so, it's a group style rather than a feature of a game system
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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
    But then you have games like SR or The One Ring which basically assume that you use a particular official setting, which is basically the opposite from GURPS which wants to be setting agnostic and universal.
    I could easily run a D&D style fantasy middle ages game using SR, just dump all the tech & change the money numbers. Run a Traveller knockoff by dropping all the magic, scaling vehicle rules up to spaceships, and probably nuking some of the combat cyberware & matrix bits. Its a solid base system in most editions.

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    myself, when running 3.x i do it more atlas-style, because every week a player comes up with a new trick he wants to use, or perhaps i come up with a new trick to give an npc. or a player would try something really unusual during a session and i'd have to figure out how to handle it mechanically. either way, it's a continuous work,
    See, that's weird to me because I think it means you're always having to coming up with new houserules and subsystems, or digging through books looking for rules to apply.

    Like in the d&d 3.5 game one player had a cunning plan involving earth elementals digging a five mile long tunnel, some bags of holding, and a giant magic crystal in the fort at the center of a stalemated war. Never did figure out why, something something research... Anyways, I just told him to check for mining rules between games and quarter the time if earth elementals weren't in them and I picked a dc for the series of arcana checks he'd need to make.

    I suppose if that character had survived another few sessions I might have had to decide something else, but I wasn't doing anything I considered work. Didn't have to decide if I needed to use rules or not, didn't need to check the character or earth elemental stats, wasn't going to do any cr calcs for the invading army, the player could do the damage rolls & math to determine how big the crater would be if he broke it.

    Now if it were d&d 4e then there may have been work for me to do. I don't know the noncombat dm-side rules there well enough to really say. Might have had to work up a skill challenge & maybe check probabilities or scissors. Maybe try to figure out a new ritual or magic item if there weren't guidelines on the dmg for that stuff.

    I really am strictly separating the ideas of "make content for setting" from "figure out which rules to use and how to apply them" here. Setting content is easy with stuff like decent random npc & mini-dungeon & magic item shop generators, or just having npcs act based on personality & capabilities. Having guidelines in 3.5 to make magic items & spells takes a load off in that system. I can always use the magic item & spell creation stuff, reasonably applied because I'm not a blind rule following idiot, to work out what a feat or variant class feature should be like. That's all just stepping through a process, which is pretty fast & easy if it's clearly laid out and the biggest judgement call is if it's noticably more or less powerful than existing options.

    Like I rewrote parts of Dungeons the Dragoning over more than a year. That was work. The kind I'm talking about in the op. When I re-did the numbers for warp travel I had a recursive function spreadsheet and built simulations, because it's basically roughly similar to a d&d type exploration/travel skill challenge. I needed to know that the results of the rules gave reasonable outputs for the entire range of inputs. With the original milkshake I'd ended up repeatedly stopping to try to figure if I wanted to even use the rulesnor butt pull something. Then I needed to make bunches of sub-decisions and consider if the system was going to throw me a curveball. After the rewrite I can just point to a 5 step bullet point process on a cheat sheet, set three target numbers based on the setting stuff, and I might have to roll a random encounter monster, ship, or possessed spaceship crewman. And there's random generators for the encounters.

    With all that rules level prep done I never have to question the rules, ask if using the rules is the right thing to do, say "what does this rule try to do", look at character sheets, worry that the rules will spit out results I need to override, make fiat decisions that npcs don't follow rules because it would breat the setting or game if they did. I just pick the relevant target numbers off the setting's space map and tell the players to roll, no worries just have to pick where or who a random encounter (if any) happens to.

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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    For example, grapple mechanics to me are 'high in-game GM effort'. Or detailed hitpoint tracking for hundreds of units in mass-battle systems that don't do abstraction well. Or motion planning for ships or low maneuverability fliers.

    *snip*

    Making stuff up on the fly on the other hand is low to zero effort.
    Sure but is making up good stiff zero effort?

    I guess it just goes to show how different different people are, I hold basically the exact opposite view. Remember a few dozen numbers? Sure, no problem. Do some 2 digit mental math? Won't slow down the game at all. Use basic tactics? I'd be doing that anyways.

    Come up with an appropriate, compelling consequence for "success at a cost" for roughly half of all die rolls? I'm going to struggle, and the quality of the game will struggle for it.

    I could be misrepresenting a conversation I wasn't there for, but the OP made it sound like "Atlas" systems were systems that provide good sessions when run by good GMs and bad sessions when run by inexperienced/bad GMs. If a good GM runs a fast campaign with no pauses, and an inexperienced GM runs a similar campaign with a few 3 minute breaks to do some math or look up a rule, I'd still probably enjoy the second campaign, although likely not quite as mich. If a good GM runs a fun campaign with interesting and appropriate consequences, and an inexperienced GM runs a similar game with boring consequences that don't logically fit the set up, I don't think I would enjoy the second campaign much at all.

    It's not about how "easy" or "hard" a system is necessarily, it's about how much the outcome depends on the skill and effort of the GM.

    Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
    But then you have games like SR or The One Ring which basically assume that you use a particular official setting, which is basically the opposite from GURPS which wants to be setting agnostic and universal.
    True, there are systems like that. Most systems have some form of a built-in setting though, and those that don't can just use one of the many generic settings that people have published, so it doesn't make as much sense as the criteria for these categories.

  28. - Top - End - #28
    Firbolg in the Playground
    Join Date
    Dec 2010

    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Stonehead View Post
    Sure but is making up good stiff zero effort?
    Basically. In terms of that idea of momentum, its momentum-positive rather than momentum-negative - it makes me have more energy and willingness to continue running the session rather than less.

    I guess it just goes to show how different different people are, I hold basically the exact opposite view. Remember a few dozen numbers? Sure, no problem. Do some 2 digit mental math? Won't slow down the game at all. Use basic tactics? I'd be doing that anyways.

    Come up with an appropriate, compelling consequence for "success at a cost" for roughly half of all die rolls? I'm going to struggle, and the quality of the game will struggle for it.

    I could be misrepresenting a conversation I wasn't there for, but the OP made it sound like "Atlas" systems were systems that provide good sessions when run by good GMs and bad sessions when run by inexperienced/bad GMs. If a good GM runs a fast campaign with no pauses, and an inexperienced GM runs a similar campaign with a few 3 minute breaks to do some math or look up a rule, I'd still probably enjoy the second campaign, although likely not quite as mich. If a good GM runs a fun campaign with interesting and appropriate consequences, and an inexperienced GM runs a similar game with boring consequences that don't logically fit the set up, I don't think I would enjoy the second campaign much at all.

    It's not about how "easy" or "hard" a system is necessarily, it's about how much the outcome depends on the skill and effort of the GM.
    This was basically the extra category I wanted to add to the original - the idea that some things act as levers through which you can (with skill) expend effort in order to increase quality. As opposed to things which just cost effort but don't allow that effort to be intentionally directed to any particular purpose.

  29. - Top - End - #29
    Troll in the Playground
     
    WolfInSheepsClothing

    Join Date
    Feb 2008
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    Italy
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    Default Re: Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    See, that's weird to me because I think it means you're always having to coming up with new houserules and subsystems, or digging through books looking for rules to apply.
    depends on how you define "often". depends also on what you count as "work".
    but running through manuals to look for stuff is something we do in every major fight. a major fight will involve dozens of buff spells being used on all sides, and there will always be questions on which bonuses stack with which. then just keeping track of them all when the debuffs start flying entails lot of paperwork. even just keeping track of your to-hit total is not trivial at high level. and there's bound to be some detail we forget. but looking it up takes a minute of online searching, so not a big deal. still, high level combat takes easily one hour to resolve one round.
    don't get me wrong; at my table we like to dive into strategy and think things through. we like to try and pile up effects just right. but figuring out what happens takes time.
    for non-combat sessions, adjudicating a dc also requires work. two sessions ago a player declared "I want to foster rivalry and infighting into our enemies. I want to use my wealth to create them problems, and I want to promote a noble house rivaling the one in power.". Another player suggested "I want to get X Y and Z nations to make a joint war with us against them". yes, my campaign has a lot of political stuff in it. I don't know how you count it in your system, but it's certainly the kind of stuff that has me react with "wait, give me a minute and let me think of something".

    Houseruling doesn't come up every session, but there's a decision process involved in what is allowed and what isn't. homebrewing also doesn't happen every session, but i made a whole bunch of rules for gunpowder and a lot of custom monsters - especially golem, because they fit the magitek theme of my setting. and in years of playing, those activities produced several dozens of pages.
    building up foes is perhaps the activity that takes more time. hours, for bosses. playing at high optimization, I have to optimize the npcs too. random generators won't do. the good thing is, with resurrection being relatively commonplace, I can reuse those bosses for multiple fights

    anyway, I have a big folder full of files, and I have to check and reference stuff often enough. it's pleasant work, it's work that makes for a better session, but it's work nonetheless.
    In memory of Evisceratus: he dreamed of a better world, but he lacked the class levels to make the dream come true.

    Ridiculous monsters you won't take seriously even as they disembowel you

    my take on the highly skilled professional: the specialized expert

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