The Ideal Iconic Role-Playing Game

[Ignimortis]

Well you are going to have to argue down the third point I made in the opening post. To briefly summarize: The iconic role-playing game should be primarily a role-playing game and contain only minor elements of war-games and story-telling games. This is war-game stuff, optimization and a focus on numerical balance, especially around combat. I know the D&D players might be shocked but I don't think the iconic system should be watered down so much with a different genre.

Even if people argue that down or break out into a "the iconic tactical role-playing game (war-game/role-playing game hybrid)" sub-topic, I still think that levels and (D&D-style) classes are not required. Just the numbers game itself. Honestly I would prefer it is the brief exchanges about games were short stories from play. The role-playing part of the game.

There is some subjectivity to this; I don't feel role-playing games and war-games (or dungeon-crawlers) go together that well and I am sick of people acting like some scene editing of unstated detail disqualifies a system while there is a massive combat system with relatively minor chances for character expression, an out of character perspective on everything and people just accept that unquestioningly. Just getting that off my chest. Back to the main topic, in the end I would argue of being inclusive of hybrids in terms of the genre as a whole. But for the iconic system I think it should be pretty focused on the genre itself.

It's not necessarily about combat, though. The ability to make a distinct build that excels at something is an amazing help in bringing character concepts to life - no character has ever been harmed by having a gimmick the other characters don't have. It's why I don't particularly like rules-light games - they often end up with engines where there's very little space for your character X to differ majorly from character Y, who does generally similar things. They might be different as characters, but mechanically they do the same thing.

[KorvinStarmast]

So promoting the **** measuring contests of tweens is required for "iconic"? The character building minigame and the ability to 'win' it is important? Having "my character can beat up you character" as metric of discussions is good for a game?

No, since the game began among adults, not tweens. The assertion you answered is, IMO, baseless. But it may be informed by the experience of who presented it.

In order of importance.
1) Lack of levels.
2) Life Path character creation.
3) You chose how much XP (terms served) you character had at starting. The more XP the greater chance of something bad happening on your life path (permanent injury, debt, death, abilities degrading due to age)
4) Character progression was from good to better, not zero to hero.
5) Gear being more important than character feats compared to D&D

Nice summary.

Most of the other people in the gaming club were undergrads, too, aside from the occasional townie... So like, 18-22 year old STEM undergrads vs highschooler.

In my first 6 years of the hobby, nobody I played with was under the age of 15, and the majority were older with a few being in their 30's and 40's. The critical mass was ages 19-25. But the tail end of that period saw a different form of the game begin to show up in toy stores in brightly colored boxes.

A wargame where a player controls one unit instead of one army is a roleplaying game in some sense.

That was the paradigm breaking approach that the Twin Cities group adapted as the Blackmoor campaign morphed into a proto RPG.

The general definition of a roleplaying game is a rule-based exercise where a player assumes viewpoint of a character in a staged situation to decide what to do, how, and why.{snip} Which is why I don't particularly care for the idea of a single, iconic roleplaying game. Not even the idea of a single, iconic tabletop roleplaying game. The space for tabletop games in general is large enough to have several extremely different iconic games, and narrowing the focus to roleplaying games doesn't limit that space nearly as much as people presume.

A far better answer to the Original post than mine, well played.

[Pauly]

Who is this and why?

Heads up, probably going to argue against and segment being that much more important than others, but I'm still curious as to what you have to say about it. Personally, I say the numbers game should be replaced with a story swap. Which is actually talk I've heard a lot more of personally over the years.

To quote the earlier post I made.

Those tweens from 40 years ago are now the mature core group that have expanded the hobby. The current tweens, as a group, are the ones that spend the most money on the hobby and keep the game alive today. The members of the current tweens that stick with the hobby will be the driving creative force for expanding the hobby in 10 tp 20 years time.

There’s a reason hobbies die out

[Cluedrew]

It's why I don't particularly like rules-light games - they often end up with engines where there's very little space for your character X to differ majorly from character Y, who does generally similar things. They might be different as characters, but mechanically they do the same thing.

Which is actually something that makes the damage comparisons so weird to me. You are doing 12% more damage? Woot. Woot. To a lesser degree combat focused systems have this issue because they force everyone's things to be a variation on "win combat". It is only to a degree because if you zoom in then things become different again, but it is still comparatively narrow.

A far better answer to the Original post than mine, well played.

I only hinted at in the original post but I don't actually think an iconic role-playing game is a good idea. At least not one with the oppressive dominance of D&D. It being the first example is fine, but being most of all role-playing games most people interact with is not great to not to say the least. Imagine if most people had only heard of was {quick web search to find best selling computer game of 2022} Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. And people would often refuse to play other games or assume all games are like... well, enough about the troubles of a non-D&D role-player, I think the problems are varied and fairly clear.

This thread deals with the question that, if the statement "If D&D fell out of favour another system would simply take its place and have the same effect on the hobby." (which I don't agree with, but people have forwarded it) could we do better? In fact what do we think the best we could do is? Its a design question and I think that is fairly interesting.

(I suppose I could have replied directly to Vahnavoi, but this is the one that made me think that point hadn't gotten across at all.)

[Pauly]

Isn't that two systems though? I know the Storyteller system in particular has a long history of trying to put different kinds of PCs together, but I've heard mixed things about its success.

I would actually rather go with the pre-awakened angle where "normies" are starting characters and you become a supernatural being of some kind as the last stage of character creation, but you actually can play part of the campaign as an introduction before that happens. (Not my idea, I really like NichG's setting pitch and borrowed from that.) Under this model I guess secret agents with cool gear is a supernatural being; mechanically speaking. Although if you wanted to have a character option that feels more like a normal person, I would go for something about someone channelling the heroes of old so they don't really have to know what is going on but can be really good at things and have flashes of insight.

Oh yeah. Well you can have a level up, but the system of unlocks at particular levels is a terrible design pattern in a role-playing game. Basically, it means you have twenty (or N) packages of content and only one way for a character to explore them. Also it leads to the game's mode of play changing out from under you which can lead to problems.

If you want distinct level-ups, I would do a system of pools of possible upgrades, every however many points you get to pick another from the pool. This makes your skill set wider but rarely gives you strict upgrades. Which pool you start with can pretty much be your "class". Story events, or getting most of the upgrades in a pool, can give you access to a pool of stronger abilities if you do want to tier up. Unlocking another another pool on the same tier can be used to multiclass as well, if you want your secret agent to have just get a bit energetic on the full moon.
f.

I was thinking of normies in a secret organization being at a different power level, kind of like how in Mutants and Masterminds you can run ‘street level’ heroes to ‘city level’ heroes and so on. Thinking about it some more it may not be the best fit because the only way for normies to get to an equal power level is gear, and then the supernaturals will ask “why can’t we get gear?”. Then all your doing is re-inventing Shadowrun.
Sadly a normie type “hunter” or “slayer” is going to have to wait an edition or two and allow the supernats to take center stage.

For an iconic game I don’t think you want multi-classing in at least the first edition or two. Assuming of course that classes or class equivalents are going to be a feature.

Agree totally about leveling up, and that it should be more free choice than set progression.

As for character generation I’m a big fan of roll for stats; choose a specialty; roll for skills/powers. I remember my favorite Traveller PC that I rolled up - I wanted to be a fighting type kept trying to enter the army, the police, the scout service but failed every entrance roll and had to roll on the default table (Belter for my origin) and was just getting angry because I kept getting zero combat skills. When the dust settled my character was a mechanic/computer tech who could repair or kludge anything and whose only social skill was the ability to drink an elephant under the table. By the end of the first session I had gone from this guy sucks to he’s the best character EVAA!

[Vahnavoi]

Vahnavoi[/B], but this is the one that made me think that point hadn't gotten across at all.)

For what it's worth, I did get the point, which I originally didn't bother to participate in the thread at all.

It was only worth it in response to ahyangyi (sorry if I botched the name).

[Quertus]

For the record, I’m looking at this as an optimization challenge: if we had a “society” RPG, where we built the whole set of events, ending up with what kind of RPG as the “flagship RPG” would be best for the health of the hobby?

In that vein, here’s my thoughts on some of the topics of the past few days:

Urban Fantasy

It’s a pretty good choice. On the plus side, it lends itself to a wide range of power levels and modding or expansions to cover adjacent genres easily (pre-modern, mundane, super heroes, future, variable levels of secrecy). On the down side, this base isn’t escapist enough for some - the idea of playing in something that is still mostly this world won’t let them play a diabolical criminal, or a fearless Paladin, or someone of another gender as easily.

For media… I think it would be another mixed bag, with more impact on movies, but less penetration into the video game market.

Modern + The Supernatural is Known to Exist

This is fine for the birth of RPGs; however, it gets a bit odd over time, especially in the Internet age.

If this follows a coherent timeline (ie, Supernatural beings have been publicly known since 1950), one has to ask how different our society and technology should be in 2020, after 70 years of Supernatural intervention. And it would be reasonable to expect that Supernatural abilities have been catalogued and posted to the Internet for some time now.

OTOH, if it’s always set Now + Supernatural beings just came out, you’re constantly rebooting like a comic book, and some of the themes and feeling just won’t carry over properly (X-men as one of the more obvious examples).

Start as Human, become Supernatural

Um… no? Or… maybe?

So, being bitten by a radioactive spider may be one way to gain super powers, but… saying everyone goes that route is kinda boring and samey compared to all the possible origin stories. Perhaps more importantly, it says something about your setting if Angels and Demons and Unicorns and Dragons were all once Human. Or, to say that another way, if a player decides they want to play a pixie or sentient toaster, the limiting factor shouldn’t be an inability to see how to make that start out as a human, or the setting breaking when a PC wasn’t formerly human.

If you look at WoD, yes, you could start as Human and have the goal to become a Vampire or Mage or Hunter I guess, and maybe a wraith (talk about some life goals there), but not a Werewolf (or other changing breed), fey, promethian, or mummy, and Demon is right out.

If you’re looking at a more postmodern setting, you’ve got Rifts, where oh so many PCs didn’t start as human, and Shadowrun, where AFAIK all PCs do, kinda, in that their ancestors were human at least.

Anyway, my vote is that having everyone start as human is too samey for the flagship to begin with, compounded by the fact that they’re all modern humans to boot, making it unqualified for the breadth of exploration of roleplaying the flagship RPG should provide, and placing unnecessary limitations on the world building and/or available PC choices.

Levels, Points, Pools, Powers, and Names
(Or how we talk about characters)

This is a big category, but the most important bit is how we talk about characters. And how we think about characters.

So, let me start here: there is power in names. Describing a character as a “five term navy doctor baronet” says a lot about a character, right? Sure. But here’s what it doesn’t say: is it balanced with a “lucky ex-soldier college history professor” or “freelance academia mage author guild master”? Are either suitable for the module Necrophilia on Bone Hill?

People are idiots. They want the simplest possible solution, and they want that solution to be right. People want the module to say “for 4-6 characters level 8-10”, and for that to just work. They want the module to say, “you’ll need at least one Con Artist, and having two Medical professionals will certainly make the module easier”, and for it to be easy to evaluate those requirements. They want “Tier 3 Magic will probably make this adventure easier than intended” or “if the party can Teleport, there is no adventure, as most of the content involves carrying the One Ring around on foot”, and for this simple checklist to let them have a good game.

If the flagship RPG requires people to think beyond what they care to do or are capable of, and this causes bad games, they’ll blame the system, not themselves. That’s just human nature.

I’ve seen a lot of games try to give such guidelines, and almost all fail, badly.

That said, it’s well known that I prefer games where one could run a level 1 and a level 20 character in the same party. Not because there’s little difference between them, but because many of the big questions the game asks don’t care about the difference between basic swords skills and <insert something snazzy here>, but between whether you choose to slay the evil princess or rescue the kidnapped Dragon; whether you choose to carry the ring to Mordor alone or go back to save your friend(s); how you choose to interpret “can be harmed by no man”.

(Also, note that very subtle thing I did, where I referenced one of the big ancestors of D&D. Having such ancestors in place… would require Urban Fantasy to be a big thing before the first RPG.)

So… that’s my preference, but… does it make for a good flagship RPG? Should the flagship RPG focus on ability (what you can do) or choices (what you choose to do)?

My answer, perhaps surprisingly, is neither. I think that roleplaying would have benefited from the flagship RPG focusing on a different question entirely: why do you choose to do this? But not mechanically, merely as a matter of spotlight. Yes, established characters have huge advantages in terms of levels and abilities and knowledge of the supernatural. But new characters are much more likely to have someone ask, “the version of your character who lives in my head would have done X. You had your character do Y. What do I not understand about your character, that would let the version who lives in my head choose as you did?”.

I think it would be best for the hobby if roleplaying were the Focus of the flagship RPG.

Levels, Points, Pools, Powers, and Names II
(Or this section was long, and this looked like a good break point)

Again, people are idiots. And rather than fix their own shortcomings, they’re far more likely to blame systems as “too complicated”. As such, it is almost certainly optimal if both the first RPG ever, and the one that influences video games, uses an idiot-proof leveling system, rather than a complex, lose at the character creation minigame point system. Sure, more advanced products can be more advanced, but I don’t think that the hobby would have gotten as much traction if character advancement were a complex minigame one could fail at.

Horizontal growth - choosing additional options from a large pool of abilities at each level-up - is arguably worse. That’s right, your 20th-level capstone is something you’ve passed up 18-19 times before. Whoopee! No, we want levels to mean something, for people to care that they’ve put dozens or hundreds of hours into this video game or RPG to get this cool new toy they were looking forward to.

Don’t get me wrong, with a good system behind such lateral growth, I could absolutely enjoy playing a Wizard who has mastered Fire, Mind, Metal, Plant, Angel Summoning, and Cookies, and who, on level up, of hundreds of options, chooses Chaos or Runes or Time or Turtles. That sounds like it could be loads of fun. But not as baby’s first RPG.

Leveled pools, where there are multiple pools whose availability is individually level-gated, OTOH, could be doable. Of course, squint a little, and one could argue that that’s exactly what D&D spells are, so… we’re not getting much better than what we’ve already got with this option, at the likely cost of stupidly unthematic characters or unfun and complex and illogical dependency trees. (Note: dependency trees can be fun and/or logical, just most designers fail and make simultaneously unfun and illogical ones.)

Wow, this is getting long. I’ll stop there for now.

[NichG]

It’s a pretty good choice. On the plus side, it lends itself to a wide range of power levels and modding or expansions to cover adjacent genres easily (pre-modern, mundane, super heroes, future, variable levels of secrecy). On the down side, this base isn’t escapist enough for some - the idea of playing in something that is still mostly this world won’t let them play a diabolical criminal, or a fearless Paladin, or someone of another gender as easily.

I don't see why this is particularly difficult in Urban Fantasy... why couldn't you play a criminal or a hunter of the supernatural or a priest actually given divine favor through your faith? And certainly playing someone of another gender should be as easy as saying 'yeah, this character is this other gender' at least system-wise (and if you mean more exotic or alien choices there, no reason you can't have 'yeah, fae society actually works like the four-suite Homestuck troll relationship types' or 'yes, mummies have genders; no, its not their biological genders when they lived; you have to understand the apportment of the soul into five pieces and how the process of undeath forces one to explicitly and consciously integrate the elements of their soul that would have happened automatically in the living, and that leads to distinct social roles...'

This is fine for the birth of RPGs; however, it gets a bit odd over time, especially in the Internet age.

If this follows a coherent timeline (ie, Supernatural beings have been publicly known since 1950), one has to ask how different our society and technology should be in 2020, after 70 years of Supernatural intervention. And it would be reasonable to expect that Supernatural abilities have been catalogued and posted to the Internet for some time now.

I mean, nothing wrong with there being lots of publically available information about supernaturals. That's no reason that literally all information would be available, especially if powers are something that are created and refined rather than innate (or are unique to specific individuals, or courts/relationships, or things like that). So sure the internet knows that vampires are a thing, and that vampires are generally stronger, faster, and have better senses than humans. And vampire wikis have records of vampires who have come out possessing the ability to command insects or to fly. But that one vampire elder manipulating things behind the scenes who has the ability to mind-control the descendants of anyone whose blood he drinks is probably not going to be advertising that too publically, and developing that ability from its seed (some form of ghouling) was a process that took him five centuries and he's not sharing any shortcuts.

Or e.g. you've got a lot of public records on broad ideas like 'fae bind themselves to a particular role in a particular story, and gain the power to enforce story tropes in accordance with that story; not all fae can bind to all stories, its hard to experiment on because changing a binding is a really big deal, and also intent relative to the story of the storyteller seems to matter - you can't just invent a story to give a fae a power you want, it has to somehow resonate with the world and people's experiences to be a story people would naturally tell, whatever that means - read these 10 research papers where scientists are still arguing about it'. But the details of the story that the Mourning Queen has bound herself to and the full extent of what it lets her do? All people really know is people who go against the Mourning Queen tend to have the people they care for suffer or die.

Think like, Shadowrun + the Awakening was 50 years ago or whatever. Lots of stuff is known, there are even industries around things, but not everything is known and the big players keep the big secrets relatively close to their chest.

Start as Human, become Supernatural

Um… no? Or… maybe?

So, being bitten by a radioactive spider may be one way to gain super powers, but… saying everyone goes that route is kinda boring and samey compared to all the possible origin stories. Perhaps more importantly, it says something about your setting if Angels and Demons and Unicorns and Dragons were all once Human. Or, to say that another way, if a player decides they want to play a pixie or sentient toaster, the limiting factor shouldn’t be an inability to see how to make that start out as a human, or the setting breaking when a PC wasn’t formerly human.

You could do all sorts of mixes here. Vampires can make vampires, easy. Mummies? Made by a ritual performed by a necromancer. How do you become a necromancer? Well, that's an in-born aptitude and you have to experience an awakening event. You can't become an angel, but you can make a partnership with one and have it possess you and lend you its abilities in order to act through your body when it normally cannot be material in the world. Demons might be made 'from' humans the same way that someone who eats beef is made from cows, but 'you' aren't surviving that transition you're just helping one be born; but you could absolutely become a warlock contracted to a demon with being that beef patty being an inevitability in your future. No one becomes fae, but individual people can give rise to lesser fae - they're totally independent consciousnesses and existences that spontaneously manifest in the wake of actions of legendary import, things which becomes stories that get told and retold. And if you're so lucky or unlucky to give birth to a fae, well, it has your memories even if it's not bound by them.

And if we go into the black site research programs and things like that, there are always attempts to graft these powers onto people. Maybe you can't become a fae, but perhaps there's a way to steal one's power or get it to sell it to you, making you something more fae-adjacent than exactly fae, but with the ability to develop and extend those powers while also retaining some of the benefits of not being literally bound to a story. Maybe there are ways to cheat and hybridize and so on, which aren't exactly char-gen options but can come up in the course of a campaign either on the PCs' side or on the NPC side, or which present questionable choices.

[Pauly]

@Querus.

Re: Modern plus supernatural.
The fix is the official fiction of the IP.
You could use a PF1 or L5R CCG approach of having tournament outcomes determining the world’s alternate history. In fact I’d steal that approach and ride it hard as a way of getting players engaged with the game’s IP.
I know in people’s campaigns the supernatural will quickly take over the world. But as long as the official IP fiction keeps reveals at a slow pace then there is no need to blow up the world with every hew edition. Lots of infighting between supernatural factions, secret government technology, supernaturals not willing to reveal everything. There are plenty if reasons a reasonable author to spin out.

Re Start as human then become supernatural.
The best aspect of this idea for me is that it gives a really good hook to get people interested in the game. The cover blurb just about writes itself. Yes it limits the potential starting characters, but at part of becoming iconic is not to overwhelm the players with choices. Once you’ve become iconic you can add in other weirder stuff.

Re levels powers and names (1).
I think this ties back to start as humans. If every character started as human, “why did your character choose to become supernatural” can be made into an integral part of character creation.
You also made a very good point about levels and how modules are advertised as suitable for [N] level [X to Y] characters. While I don’t think it’s necessary it is a very easy marketing tool one that can be applied to official tournament events.

Re Levels power and names (2)
The discussion on horizontal -v- lateral growth was fueled by vampires. Considering the variety of powers different vampires have in the source material vampires present a real challenge because there are a myriad of ways someone can imagine what their vampire character will be like. Apart from sucking blood there isn’t any real consensus on what powers a vampire must have.
Werewolves for example lend themselves much more to lateral growth as there is a more general consensus on what a werewolf’s powers are and how they should behave.

Taking the “start as human” as a starting point I think the core book should have at least 4 (D&D started as Fighter, Wizard, Cleric and then quickly added Rogue) and no more than 8 choices for supernaturals.
I would also posit “can pass as a normal human in normal human society” as a core conceit. I can get with vampires drinking their substitute blood and Starbucks, Werewolves having to attend mandatory anger management classes, witches being legally responsible both at civil and criminal level for any adverse effects of their magic being acceptable to society. However summoning demons made of pure evil by sacrificing babies or reanimating the corpse of your neighbor’s grandma to work as a field hand are never going to pass as acceptable.

Vampire, Werewolf and Witch are the big 3 that need to be in the core book. From there what else? I think that at least one of the additional core characters should be one obscure enough that you can make it your own with IP (eg D&D’s Tiefling which is a half demon)
Shapeshifter/doppelganger - makes a good sneaky character.
Beast Master/Animal Summoner - lots of variety available.
Magician/Wizard - a magic user with a different magic system to the witch. Not just a different spellbook, but a mechanically different magic system. A lot of D&D casters end up feeling very samey because they just use a different stat to cast the same spells.

[Quertus]

I don't see why this is particularly difficult in Urban Fantasy... why couldn't you play a criminal or a hunter of the supernatural or a priest actually given divine favor through your faith? And certainly playing someone of another gender should be as easy as saying 'yeah, this character is this other gender' at least system-wise

The limiting factor isn’t the system, it’s how similar to the world in which the player isn’t these things that’s potentially the problem. My hobbiest interest in psychology doesn’t leave me in a position to simple state a root cause; I can only say that from talking to others, it seems that the more distance a scenario provides from an inhibition, the easier it is to shed that inhibition and explore other possibilities. “Urban Fantasy” doesn’t feel as removed from players’ real lives as “Sword and Sorcery”.

I mean, nothing wrong with there being lots of publically available information about supernaturals. That's no reason that literally all information would be available, especially if powers are something that are created and refined rather than innate (or are unique to specific individuals, or courts/relationships, or things like that). So sure the internet knows that vampires are a thing, and that vampires are generally stronger, faster, and have better senses than humans. And vampire wikis have records of vampires who have come out possessing the ability to command insects or to fly. But that one vampire elder manipulating things behind the scenes who has the ability to mind-control the descendants of anyone whose blood he drinks is probably not going to be advertising that too publically, and developing that ability from its seed (some form of ghouling) was a process that took him five centuries and he's not sharing any shortcuts.

Let’s take a step back. Imagine that we travel back in time, and abduct the first, oh, 1,000 D&D players. We lock them in 250 rooms of parties of four, let them make new characters, and start playing. Slightly different experience, but probably similar results.

Now let’s add in two things: we let them communicate to each other via a modern wiki, and we inform them that if they die in the game, they die in real life.

After the first party that survives a Troll makes it back to the wiki, everyone will know that Trolls regenerate, and probably that fire stops their regeneration.

After they lose about half their number, let’s replenish them, by grabbing players 1,001-1,500 from the timeline where we hadn’t grabbed the first thousand. Those players will have quite the database of information that the first group didn’t when they started.

It’ll be a very different experience in several ways, but most relevantly here, the fact that, as soon as anyone knows something, everyone will. That will change the tenor of the flagship RPGs, in a way where Information should be much more front-loaded, and Exploration/Discovery of the Unknown is less of a common thread, less of a factor.

So sure the internet knows that vampires are a thing, and that vampires are generally stronger, faster, and have better senses than humans. And vampire wikis have records of vampires who have come out possessing the ability to command insects or to fly. But that one vampire elder manipulating things behind the scenes who has the ability to mind-control the descendants of anyone whose blood he drinks is probably not going to be advertising that too publically, and developing that ability from its seed (some form of ghouling) was a process that took him five centuries and he's not sharing any shortcuts.

Now imagine the first time a PC survived meeting this ancient vampire (let’s call him “Orcus”). It took Orcus 500 years to develop this one trick that maybe the PCs figured out in 5 minutes. Well, now the cat’s out of the bag, and Orcus loses his mystique for every party around the whole world for the next 500 years, until he develops a new trick

-Or-

The party doesn’t figure out the trick Orcus used. Now imagine playing that party that doesn’t figure out that fire stops trolls from regenerating, doesn’t figure out that beholders negate magic, doesn’t figure out that Orcus has a clever bloodline trick. Realistic, sure, but can you see how the game is less for these players? How the onus is (happily) on the GM to provide scenarios that are the best experience for the players -> ones where the players have the tools to and are likely to understand the world -> the world will tend to become understood?

However, unless the PCs are some very special snowflakes, it’s ludicrous to expect that any given group of PCs will be the first to encounter and figure out more than a trick or two - very different from flagship D&D expectations, IME, just based on different assumptions on information distribution.

@Querus.

Re: Modern plus supernatural.
The fix is the official fiction of the IP.

Sure. But that makes two problems, both of which come from the fact that there isn’t to the best of my knowledge an IP like that.

First is, I’m lazy - I want to just pull from existing material to use as examples, like WoD or Shadowrun or Rifts. But none of them do this, so I don’t have a handy example.

The second is, is it just a coincidence that there’s not popular games like this already, or is there some reason why this is a bad idea?

It’s just two more points that require thought, where easy, thoughtless responses are invalid.

Re Start as human then become supernatural.
The best aspect of this idea for me is that it gives a really good hook to get people interested in the game. The cover blurb just about writes itself. Yes it limits the potential starting characters, but at part of becoming iconic is not to overwhelm the players with choices. Once you’ve become iconic you can add in other weirder stuff.

There are 3 possibilities here.

1) everything starts off as humans. If the PCs encounter a sentient toaster, or an alien, or a unicorn, or an Angel, they know that it was once a human.

2) the original PC races all happen to have started as human, but other beings - including other playable races - need not have started as human.

3) while other Supernatural beings may have any origin, all present and future PC races begin as human.

All 3 of these are problematic.

You also made a very good point about levels and how modules are advertised as suitable for [N] level [X to Y] characters. While I don’t think it’s necessary it is a very easy marketing tool one that can be applied to official tournament events.

Thanks. Given how much flak the CR system has gotten, I suspect it’s a thing people care about at the table, too. Pick a random game you’re in or have been in - would a “five term navy doctor baronet”, “lucky ex-soldier college history professor” or “freelance academia mage author guild master” be suitable to that game’s balance range?

Re Levels power and names (2)
The discussion on horizontal -v- lateral growth was fueled by vampires. Considering the variety of powers different vampires have in the source material vampires present a real challenge because there are a myriad of ways someone can imagine what their vampire character will be like. Apart from sucking blood there isn’t any real consensus on what powers a vampire must have.

And the IP could simply choose what those powers are, providing a linear leveling system for Vampires. Or it could give them “3e Sorcerer’s Spell access” to tiered powers as they level. Or provide points with which to buy powers. Or any number of other options.

My point was just that none of these options are better than - and many are worse than - what the RPG flagship led with. It’s not a point on which our hypothetical Urban Fantasy flagship RPG can earn points as being a better option.

Spoiler: No replies yet, just a reminder to myself to look at these

Show

You could use a PF1 or L5R CCG approach of having tournament outcomes determining the world’s alternate history. In fact I’d steal that approach and ride it hard as a way of getting players engaged with the game’s IP.
I know in people’s campaigns the supernatural will quickly take over the world. But as long as the official IP fiction keeps reveals at a slow pace then there is no need to blow up the world with every hew edition. Lots of infighting between supernatural factions, secret government technology, supernaturals not willing to reveal everything. There are plenty if reasons a reasonable author to spin out.

Taking the “start as human” as a starting point I think the core book should have at least 4 (D&D started as Fighter, Wizard, Cleric and then quickly added Rogue) and no more than 8 choices for supernaturals.
I would also posit “can pass as a normal human in normal human society” as a core conceit. I can get with vampires drinking their substitute blood and Starbucks, Werewolves having to attend mandatory anger management classes, witches being legally responsible both at civil and criminal level for any adverse effects of their magic being acceptable to society. However summoning demons made of pure evil by sacrificing babies or reanimating the corpse of your neighbor’s grandma to work as a field hand are never going to pass as acceptable.

Vampire, Werewolf and Witch are the big 3 that need to be in the core book. From there what else? I think that at least one of the additional core characters should be one obscure enough that you can make it your own with IP (eg D&D’s Tiefling which is a half demon)
Shapeshifter/doppelganger - makes a good sneaky character.
Beast Master/Animal Summoner - lots of variety available.
Magician/Wizard - a magic user with a different magic system to the witch. Not just a different spellbook, but a mechanically different magic system. A lot of D&D casters end up feeling very samey because they just use a different stat to cast the same spells.

[NichG]

Let’s take a step back. Imagine that we travel back in time, and abduct the first, oh, 1,000 D&D players. We lock them in 250 rooms of parties of four, let them make new characters, and start playing. Slightly different experience, but probably similar results.

Now let’s add in two things: we let them communicate to each other via a modern wiki, and we inform them that if they die in the game, they die in real life.

After the first party that survives a Troll makes it back to the wiki, everyone will know that Trolls regenerate, and probably that fire stops their regeneration.

After they lose about half their number, let’s replenish them, by grabbing players 1,001-1,500 from the timeline where we hadn’t grabbed the first thousand. Those players will have quite the database of information that the first group didn’t when they started.

It’ll be a very different experience in several ways, but most relevantly here, the fact that, as soon as anyone knows something, everyone will. That will change the tenor of the flagship RPGs, in a way where Information should be much more front-loaded, and Exploration/Discovery of the Unknown is less of a common thread, less of a factor.

Its a very D&D mentality to think about the gimmicks behind generics as being important though. Everyone gets to know - really, they know it from scratch - that trolls are big and strong and have a good heal factor. But people don't meet 'a generic troll', they meet e.g. Bob the Troll who has also studied enough gramarye to apply gaesa of ill luck to those that try to get in his way, or Sally the Troll who specializes in mortal contract craft and is able to turn a pauper into a multi-millionaire over the course of a month and can gain power from it, or Fegulir the Cursed who has developed his regeneration in odd directions, allowing him to 'regenerate into someone else as a weapon' against anyone who has internalized any of his blood or other cells, going down the 'chest-burster prestige class' route.

Some of these people might be known, others might be yet unknown or semi-secret, but as long as we're talking about individuals, and as long as we're talking about a system where powers aren't static but can be developed and modified and customized, its not so hard to have it be that - when it matters - every party is dealing with new individuals. Everyone gets to discover something, but its at the scale of learning that your neighbor is secretly a spy or that the CEO of your company is using feng shui to steal the luck of his competitors and how do you feel about that? A few people get to break the big conspiracies, but then they're broken and the setting moves forward rather than being stuck in status quo - yes the president is a dragon, we all know that now; yes, there's a spell out there that lets the caster ritually steal someone's identity, social connections, and karmic relationships with just a blood sample so now we all have to adopt some new multi-factor security protocols.

Getting into a dynamic mode and learning to not feel cramped by that rather than e.g. getting yourself into the mindset of being annoyed when a player has read the Monster Manual because you were relying on them not realizing that red dragons are fire-themed or something seems like a benefit rather than a flaw.

[Pauly]

@Quertus
By IP, I am referring to IP created by the game. Such as Greyhawk, Ravenloft or the Forgotten Realms.
Yes there is a lot of inspiration out there but to be iconic creating your own IP is essential. Generic games like GURPS end up being niche products.

[KorvinStarmast]

I only hinted at in the original post but I don't actually think an iconic role-playing game is a good idea.

Which I believe is my entering position, but this conversation has taken some interesting paths through the woods...

EDIT: @Pauly. Just noticed that. Yes, setting and genre matter. (Another shameless plug for Blades in the Dark, the setting is very well done).

[Quertus]

@Quertus
By IP, I am referring to IP created by the game. Such as Greyhawk, Ravenloft or the Forgotten Realms.
Yes there is a lot of inspiration out there but to be iconic creating your own IP is essential. Generic games like GURPS end up being niche products.

Um... yeah, sure? Is there somewhere where it seems like wires have been crossed, and I'm out in left field?

I fully get that the game will create its own identity - D&D, WoD, WH40K, (I'm tired, I'll leave it at that) - they all do. And, yes, some break off into sub-bits, like D&D has Greyhawk & Ravenloft & FR & Placia.

Which... tangles up oddly when, say, my character in Bob's FR, where canonically Fey were once human, participates in your world tournament thing, ends up shaping the world and becoming a Known Entity in the world meta... and then the company finally publishes the Fey splat, where they don't work anything at all like they did in Bob's world.

Its a very D&D mentality to think about the gimmicks behind generics as being important though. Everyone gets to know - really, they know it from scratch - that trolls are big and strong and have a good heal factor. But people don't meet 'a generic troll', they meet e.g. Bob the Troll who has also studied enough gramarye to apply gaesa of ill luck to those that try to get in his way, or Sally the Troll who specializes in mortal contract craft and is able to turn a pauper into a multi-millionaire over the course of a month and can gain power from it, or Fegulir the Cursed who has developed his regeneration in odd directions, allowing him to 'regenerate into someone else as a weapon' against anyone who has internalized any of his blood or other cells, going down the 'chest-burster prestige class' route.

Some of these people might be known, others might be yet unknown or semi-secret, but as long as we're talking about individuals, and as long as we're talking about a system where powers aren't static but can be developed and modified and customized, its not so hard to have it be that - when it matters - every party is dealing with new individuals. Everyone gets to discover something, but its at the scale of learning that your neighbor is secretly a spy or that the CEO of your company is using feng shui to steal the luck of his competitors and how do you feel about that? A few people get to break the big conspiracies, but then they're broken and the setting moves forward rather than being stuck in status quo - yes the president is a dragon, we all know that now; yes, there's a spell out there that lets the caster ritually steal someone's identity, social connections, and karmic relationships with just a blood sample so now we all have to adopt some new multi-factor security protocols.

Getting into a dynamic mode and learning to not feel cramped by that rather than e.g. getting yourself into the mindset of being annoyed when a player has read the Monster Manual because you were relying on them not realizing that red dragons are fire-themed or something seems like a benefit rather than a flaw.

<long whistle>

Whew. Um... I mean, that's awesome and all, but I'm not sure if baby's first RPG, the flagship of the genre, would work well without much more iconic, cut-and-paste objects. Do you have any idea how hard it would be to code Bob the Troll and Sally Troll and Fegulir the Cursed, instead of just a simple "Troll" object? Especially back in the Atari days? How hard that makes it to look at a movie, and recognize whether or not the Troll on the screen actually belongs to the IP? How much more work that makes it for the GM, how the game isn't as open to casual gamers?

It's an awesome concept, but... I never would have gotten into it when I was 7 like I did D&D. So I'm thinking that this would be a negative trait for a flagship RPG.

[NichG]

<long whistle>

Whew. Um... I mean, that's awesome and all, but I'm not sure if baby's first RPG, the flagship of the genre, would work well without much more iconic, cut-and-paste objects. Do you have any idea how hard it would be to code Bob the Troll and Sally Troll and Fegulir the Cursed, instead of just a simple "Troll" object? Especially back in the Atari days? How hard that makes it to look at a movie, and recognize whether or not the Troll on the screen actually belongs to the IP? How much more work that makes it for the GM, how the game isn't as open to casual gamers?

It's an awesome concept, but... I never would have gotten into it when I was 7 like I did D&D. So I'm thinking that this would be a negative trait for a flagship RPG.

Like a lot of things about a flagship, that's there but you don't have to lean into it, or you could even lean into it in very different ways. Like, this is sort of the point of urban fantasy as opposed to swords and sorcery. In S&S, you have a bunch of effectively 'non-person' adversaries to be slain where the ethics etc of it is pretty simple, so you need lots of generics so you can just plop down a monster of the week in a room. If you're going the urban fantasy direction, one aspect of that decision is that you're going to be dealing with 'characters' far more frequently than with 'monsters'.

So you do have to expect that the players and GM will be coming up with and interacting with people as people as one of the main aspects of play. Meaning that everyone is unique-ish, even if they're not necessarily unique on screen. The exploration and discovery aspects become less about 'here is some fauna we've never seen before and the dangerous or useful properties they have' and more about 'here's something about these people/subcultures/groups/etc that we didn't know about or didn't know existed'.

That's why urban fantasy can work even when no one actually uses their powers with any serious frequency, because a lot of the fantasy has to do with things like different social organizations, roles, power relationships, etc.

Of course you can also have stuff more like Supernatural where you're hunting the monster of the week - but note that that only lasted for a few seasons before you started to having unique recurring NPCs and more person-like interactions. So I would expect the monster-of-the-week gaming to be either be intro mode or beer & pretzels, eventually giving way to unique individuals. And anyhow, having something where the new players to the game are new hunters and have a grizzled mentor who shows them the website with 1001 beasties on it and their job is to put the clues together 'oh, its not a poltregeist, its a sun spirit' is not a bad way to bring players into the game. Think playing Geralt in Witcher 3 or something - he already knows what everything is, but you get to learn it via his process of investigation.

[Duff]

Now if that was the most subjective point this is probably the most abstract, but at the same time it is pretty straight forward: I think the iconic role-playing game should be almost entirely a role-playing game. The genre exists in a space between tactical war games/dungeon-crawlers and story-telling games. Having elements of both is probably inevitable, and learning into one or the other doesn't necessary make for a better or worse game. Yet, if this is the iconic role-playing game, I don't think it should lean too far into either side of that scale.

I'm going to disagree here. Pure roleplaying has the disadvantage of decision paralysis.
Light crunch gives the player a small number of mechanical options. "You can pull out your sword and charge, you can pull out your bow and shoot or you can try something else" is better for people out of their comfort zone than "What do you want to do?"
It should be simple to see your options, simple to understand how they work but also limited in what it covers

[Quertus]

It's not necessarily about combat, though. The ability to make a distinct build that excels at something is an amazing help in bringing character concepts to life - no character has ever been harmed by having a gimmick the other characters don't have. It's why I don't particularly like rules-light games - they often end up with engines where there's very little space for your character X to differ majorly from character Y, who does generally similar things. They might be different as characters, but mechanically they do the same thing.

Witch

Magician/Wizard - a magic user with a different magic system to the witch. Not just a different spellbook, but a mechanically different magic system. A lot of D&D casters end up feeling very samey because they just use a different stat to cast the same spells.

I do love that two people have posted about how important having different mechanics and different feels is to them.

I can't help but agree.

The ability to make a distinct build that excels at something is an amazing help in bringing character concepts to life - no character has ever been harmed by having a gimmick the other characters don't have.

"Build" and "gimmick" aren't exactly the same. Once upon a time, there was a... league... that allowed characters to enter with one chachka, one bit of substance-free style. Like a pipe. Or an abacus. Or a harp pin? It was a way to give your character a gimmick, but required no real build skill.

OTOH, there's lots of build skill involved in the code I write... but I wouldn't say that my code has a "gimmick".

I think that it's valuable to an RPG - perhaps especially a flagship RPG - to allow players to stretch their Build muscles if they so desire, and for characters to be able to have gimmicks. But I'm not sure I see those as inherently related. I guess one could try to argue that they're better when they are (or can be) related?

I only hinted at in the original post but I don't actually think an iconic role-playing game is a good idea. At least not one with the oppressive dominance of D&D. It being the first example is fine, but being most of all role-playing games most people interact with is not great to not to say the least. Imagine if most people had only heard of was {quick web search to find best selling computer game of 2022} Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. And people would often refuse to play other games or assume all games are like... well, enough about the troubles of a non-D&D role-player, I think the problems are varied and fairly clear.

(evil anime glint) Oh, no, that's a perfect example. Two reasons.

1) I had a group of friends who'd get together periodically and run LAN parties (and, occasionally, RPGs or other activities). Getting people to play the big game(s)? Easy. Other games? "But nobody has that installed". Also learning curve issues. A much harder sell.

2) One of these great LAN games was (IIRC) Unreal Tournament. UT had some "standard" mods, like Runes and Relics, that did things like give the character who had them extra speed, or extra damage, or take less damage, or vampiric damage, or self destruct when killed. But there were lots of mods to UT. One of my friends hosted a game with some of their preferred mods. The way the game worked, it downloaded the foreign mods temporarily to play the game... but the game didn't wait on this download. Yeah, the match was over before anyone else finished downloading the missing mods... and then, when the next match started, the download process began again from scratch. Ugh.

Having a single format that everyone knows and uses is great. It means that the casual player only needs to learn 1 set of rules, purchase 1 deck, rig 1 set of weighted dice, come up with 1 character, learn 1 world history and set of lingo, install 1 app on their computer, whatever. It lowers the bar to entry for the casual gamer, and ensures that a group of friends who are into the hobby who get together have something they can do.

Unlike all the rules- and conceptual-downloading that would be necessary if a group of single-system casuals got together who had each played different games; say, Beer & Pretzels D&D, Mirror Shades Shadowrun, Plot-Driven The Dark Eye, and FATAL. They'd spend the whole session just trying to explain the game to fellow gamers without ever getting to play.

This thread deals with the question that, if the statement "If D&D fell out of favour another system would simply take its place and have the same effect on the hobby." (which I don't agree with, but people have forwarded it) could we do better? In fact what do we think the best we could do is? Its a design question and I think that is fairly interesting.

Ah, that's slightly different from the optimization perspective I was taking. I may try to recalibrate, or I may just stick with and be stuck with my momentum.

[gbaji]

It's not necessarily about combat, though. The ability to make a distinct build that excels at something is an amazing help in bringing character concepts to life - no character has ever been harmed by having a gimmick the other characters don't have. It's why I don't particularly like rules-light games - they often end up with engines where there's very little space for your character X to differ majorly from character Y, who does generally similar things. They might be different as characters, but mechanically they do the same thing.

If we're focused on RP, that's not a problem. And frankly, I tend to prefer game systems that focus on individual characters as people, even if there are minor differences between them. But that's what I prefer to pay *today*. I'm reasonably certain that wouldn't match up with an "iconic" RPG though. As several people have stated (accurately IMO), there's a lot of value in easily described yet sufficiently distinct character types. Which is where classes and levels come in and why they tend to work well in that iconic role.

Its a very D&D mentality to think about the gimmicks behind generics as being important though. Everyone gets to know - really, they know it from scratch - that trolls are big and strong and have a good heal factor. But people don't meet 'a generic troll', they meet e.g. Bob the Troll who has also studied enough gramarye to apply gaesa of ill luck to those that try to get in his way, or Sally the Troll who specializes in mortal contract craft and is able to turn a pauper into a multi-millionaire over the course of a month and can gain power from it, or Fegulir the Cursed who has developed his regeneration in odd directions, allowing him to 'regenerate into someone else as a weapon' against anyone who has internalized any of his blood or other cells, going down the 'chest-burster prestige class' route.

Yup. Pretty much the same as above. It's easier/faster to get new players into a game where "a troll" is just "a troll", and they're all alike (well, most of the time). Having trolls just be a race of creatures, who could themselves then be anything they want, having whatever skills they happen to have, learn whatever spells they want, and wear different armor, carry different weapons, etc makes for a much much more in depth game, but also presents a steeper learning curve for new players.

So yeah. Same for the PCs as for the NPCs.

Getting into a dynamic mode and learning to not feel cramped by that rather than e.g. getting yourself into the mindset of being annoyed when a player has read the Monster Manual because you were relying on them not realizing that red dragons are fire-themed or something seems like a benefit rather than a flaw.

And that's where the negative of "simple but easy/quick to learn" comes in. Once the players learn what the different types of monsters can do, and what each class can do, there isn't a lot of variation left (other than I guess adding new expansions, with new classes and monsters, I suppose, which is precisely what D&D did. Yes. I'm looking at you 2nd edition...). But hey. That's when you "graduate" to something else.

Which again presents the "iconic" versus "mature?" (not sure if that's the best term) comparison. When the encounter is less about the race/class/levels of those involved, but the less easily described skills/abilities/items/spells, you get even greater variation in the game (and far less predictability). You see a group of orcs. Do you know right now about how tough they are? Or do you have no clue?

I prefer the latter, but that's *not* what's going to work in an "iconic" game IMO. Just the way things are.

[Cluedrew]

Wow this is lively enough I couldn't even hope to reply to everything. Well I could but... you know time.

On Setting: I don't thing the other world is such a hard constraint. Especially since the official setting will probably just be a way the system can be used. I expect people will make there own. I have never played in a published setting of a role-playing game. Or though in that the awakening is happening because of the overlap with another world any you can just play in the other world if you want to.

On Levels: I was going to argue that "Fey-sworn agent" can be just as descriptive as "Level 12 Fighter" but actually I think it is more descriptive, or would be if the former came from a known system. Because "Level 12" doesn't actually tell me anything. I've never made it past level 4, what do I know what the game would look like that far above it. Which is part of the reason I think a linear progression is an incredible waste of content, even though I understand other people have had more luck than me in that regard.

Also what is the point of a "capstone"? Either you aren't done and the character should keep growing and changing or you are about to finish with the character and... why did you get the coolest thing right at the end? Give them some time to play with it.

I'm going to disagree here. Pure roleplaying has the disadvantage of decision paralysis. [...] Light crunch gives the player a small number of mechanical options.

Um... is this against the pure role-playing game or the rules-light, because those are different things.

[Pauly]

Like a lot of things about a flagship, that's there but you don't have to lean into it, or you could even lean into it in very different ways.
[snip]


That's why urban fantasy can work even when no one actually uses their powers with any serious frequency, because a lot of the fantasy has to do with things like different social organizations, roles, power relationships, etc.

Of course you can also have stuff more like Supernatural where you're hunting the monster of the week -
[snip]
.

Which touches on something about being iconic.
The game needs to be able to handle newbie/casual players wanting to play whack a monster because that’s all they want to do or all they have developed the skills to do so far.
The game also needs to be able to handle a more mature space for character driven drama, which is where more mature gamers tend to drift. D&D isn’t particularly good at character driven drama, buts lots of tables find ways to make it work.

Certainly some well developed rules about reputation, political influence, competing social constructs and so on would help. The new players will probably gloss over this aspect of the rules and not engage with it, as will beer and pretzels monster whackers. But having it sitting in the core rulebook will help players transition from simplistic campaigns to something they can enjoy as a 10 year veteran of the hobby

There are 3 possibilities here.

1) everything starts off as humans. If the PCs encounter a sentient toaster, or an alien, or a unicorn, or an Angel, they know that it was once a human.

2) the original PC races all happen to have started as human, but other beings - including other playable races - need not have started as human.

3) while other Supernatural beings may have any origin, all present and future PC races begin as human.

All 3 of these are problematic.

The way I see it the three possibilities for everyone PC starts as a normie human

1) It can happen to anyone.
Classic vampire/werewolf bite.

2) Anyone can do it if they pass through the gate.
Like becoming a wizard, bard or cleric in D&D. Provided you meet the gatekeeping standard you can become a supernatural type.

3) You were born special, but didn’t know it + triggering event.
The classic bloodline trope. You can dress it up with some fancy PSB about recessive genes and DNA or however you like. Then you add in a triggering event like getting a bucket of pig’s blood dropped on you at the prom and your latent powers get activated. There’s a lot of work going on in epigenetics that support this framework. From a fiction/world building point of view this is probably the most difficult to sell properly.

As superhero movies have shown everyone loves a good origin story. It’s a hook for new players to play out their character’s origin story in their first introduction to the game.

[Ignimortis]

Which is actually something that makes the damage comparisons so weird to me. You are doing 12% more damage? Woot. Woot. To a lesser degree combat focused systems have this issue because they force everyone's things to be a variation on "win combat". It is only to a degree because if you zoom in then things become different again, but it is still comparatively narrow.

Number differences aren't exactly what I had in mind. But, say, there's a marked difference in how a combat character can achieve their ends (are they that much faster than the opposition? are they durable enough to outlast everyone? etc), or a hacker (sneaky? smash-and-grab? social engineering or hollywood hacker?), or a stealth expert (physical stealth? social infiltration? manipulating events from afar?), etc, etc.

D&D actually doesn't do much on that end, it's very bad at making characters with meaningful niches, even combat-wise. About the most difference you can get in D&D 5e is whether you have full casting, partial casting or no casting, but in any case you are a combat specialist with maybe something on the side (or nothing on the side).

I was thinking of normies in a secret organization being at a different power level, kind of like how in Mutants and Masterminds you can run ‘street level’ heroes to ‘city level’ heroes and so on. Thinking about it some more it may not be the best fit because the only way for normies to get to an equal power level is gear, and then the supernaturals will ask “why can’t we get gear?”. Then all your doing is re-inventing Shadowrun.

About dang time, Shadowrun is about 20 years past its' prime (people praise the setting, but it brought out the best stuff early on, and pretty much everything past 3e has been rehashing old concepts without advancing the setting well).

And yes, getting normies-superpowered-through-tech is a quite noble goal for the game, as well as inventing a good reason why this tech doesn't really work well for "natural" supers.

"Build" and "gimmick" aren't exactly the same. Once upon a time, there was a... league... that allowed characters to enter with one chachka, one bit of substance-free style. Like a pipe. Or an abacus. Or a harp pin? It was a way to give your character a gimmick, but required no real build skill.

OTOH, there's lots of build skill involved in the code I write... but I wouldn't say that my code has a "gimmick".

I think that it's valuable to an RPG - perhaps especially a flagship RPG - to allow players to stretch their Build muscles if they so desire, and for characters to be able to have gimmicks. But I'm not sure I see those as inherently related. I guess one could try to argue that they're better when they are (or can be) related?

What I meant is a mechanics-backed gimmick. Having hyperspecialized so much in a certain skill that you are, in-universe, are inhumanly amazing at it, is cool. My 5e Monk who has never had less than a 23 on Perception and eventually had a passive Perception of 32 had a gimmick. Was it amazingly useful or build-defining? Probably not, but it was memetic and it did give the character some spice. That sort of thing.

If we're focused on RP, that's not a problem. And frankly, I tend to prefer game systems that focus on individual characters as people, even if there are minor differences between them. But that's what I prefer to pay *today*. I'm reasonably certain that wouldn't match up with an "iconic" RPG though. As several people have stated (accurately IMO), there's a lot of value in easily described yet sufficiently distinct character types. Which is where classes and levels come in and why they tend to work well in that iconic role.

Classes can work decently enough, if they're written by someone with actual understanding of what a "class" is supposed to be like in the system. For instance, current D&D has almost no idea what their classes are about other than "general flavour", which means that you get a slew of classes like "Ranger" and "Wizard" instead of something that would actually mean something beyond vague general flavour. I have had a discussion on that recently, and believe that at the very point your class system defines a character by what weapon they use or what color their magic sparkles are, you have failed to design a class system.

To provide a basic example, if your system has a class which is primarily defined by using heavy armor and a shield, it's a bad class. If your system has a class that is tanky and can keep the enemies' attention on them, and also can do that while using heavy armor and a shield and that's a solid choice for them, but also can do it in different ways, now that's a good class. Classes are functions, not flavours. Flavour should generally be as free as possible. If there's no functional difference between a shadow mage and a fire mage other than "Shadowball" dealing a different type of damage, you don't need them, you need a Battlemage who can choose their elemental affinity at chargen.

Levels, however, are usually just bad. You don't need levels unless your game assumes a really steep power progression. If your power curve is relatively bounded, as it tends to be for, say, most urban fantasy systems, you don't need levels, they just muck things up. It is not hard for anyone to deal with spending XP on skills and such. I've known people who didn't want to bother with any version of D&D, and they figured out VtM's XP spending just fine.

[KorvinStarmast]

I have never played in a published setting of a role-playing game.

I got my first taste of that with Empire of the Petal Throne. Most of the games I have played are in the "DM/GM is world builder" with sometimes modules/prefab adventures added alongside regular play.

What is the point of a "capstone"? Either you aren't done and the character should keep growing and changing or you are about to finish with the character and... why did you get the coolest thing right at the end? Give them some time to play with it.

I concur.

[gbaji]

On Levels: I was going to argue that "Fey-sworn agent" can be just as descriptive as "Level 12 Fighter" but actually I think it is more descriptive, or would be if the former came from a known system. Because "Level 12" doesn't actually tell me anything. I've never made it past level 4, what do I know what the game would look like that far above it. Which is part of the reason I think a linear progression is an incredible waste of content, even though I understand other people have had more luck than me in that regard.

I'm not sure I agree. Let me be clear, I'm not a fan of class and level based games, but the one value they do have is clarity as to what and how well someone does something. A "Fey-sworn agent" literally tells me nothing at all about that person's capabilities. Can they cast spells? Or focus on physical combat? Are they sneaky or not? Big and burly? Or weak and wimpy? Heck. Is "Fey" a reference to their race or a group they work for? No useful information is conveyed with that.

Level 12 fighter tells me that this person fights. Presumably is a physical fighter (especially if I also know that there are classes like rogue, cleric, and magic user in the game). This person can probably take and dish out damage in melee. And I know that he's far tougher than someone at level 4 (cause he's level 12, right?). I can guess that I should probably not mess with this person if I"m not near the same level. I don't have to know at all the details of what each level actually means. Only that higher level means more powerful.

That's absolutely more clear and simple. Doesn't mean that's "better", but if our criteria is how descriptive something is? Also, there's nothing to prevent that level 12 fighter from also being described as a "Fey-sworn agent". In this case, we're adding description in the form of "what this person does professionally". Could also say "sheriff's deputy", or "captain of the guard", or "royal executioner" and also get descriptive information. But a game system actually having level and class gives us something else as well.

Classes can work decently enough, if they're written by someone with actual understanding of what a "class" is supposed to be like in the system. For instance, current D&D has almost no idea what their classes are about other than "general flavour", which means that you get a slew of classes like "Ranger" and "Wizard" instead of something that would actually mean something beyond vague general flavour. I have had a discussion on that recently, and believe that at the very point your class system defines a character by what weapon they use or what color their magic sparkles are, you have failed to design a class system.

To provide a basic example, if your system has a class which is primarily defined by using heavy armor and a shield, it's a bad class. If your system has a class that is tanky and can keep the enemies' attention on them, and also can do that while using heavy armor and a shield and that's a solid choice for them, but also can do it in different ways, now that's a good class. Classes are functions, not flavours. Flavour should generally be as free as possible. If there's no functional difference between a shadow mage and a fire mage other than "Shadowball" dealing a different type of damage, you don't need them, you need a Battlemage who can choose their elemental affinity at chargen.

Which sounds like you are in favor of more general classes (like D&D originally had), like "Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Magic User, etc". Add in skills and feats say (which were added over time in various editions), and you have a lot of customization within those broader classes. That system "works" just fine. The problem I think comes in when the demands of commercialization push the game designers to keep creating more and more material, usually in the form of increasingly "silly" classes and sub classes, and whatnot, and basically lose sight of the original concept.

Which, yeah, is why I actually don't like classes. They don't hold up well over time. But if we're asking what is easier to use starting out, in order to form an "iconic game"? Yeah. I can see why they'd be useful for that.

Levels, however, are usually just bad. You don't need levels unless your game assumes a really steep power progression. If your power curve is relatively bounded, as it tends to be for, say, most urban fantasy systems, you don't need levels, they just muck things up. It is not hard for anyone to deal with spending XP on skills and such. I've known people who didn't want to bother with any version of D&D, and they figured out VtM's XP spending just fine.

Yup. Absolutely agree. What you do lose is the ability to easily determine relative difficulty/power. Some systems manage this by having a base point value, and keeping track of additional points added over time/experience. So you're replacing something like "level X character" witih "X point character" instead. And yeah, this allows for a much more granular experience gain path (and usually a lot more customization as well).

I actually have a lot of love for skill point game systems.

It is interesting though, that even though mechanically they are "better" (pretty much in every way), I do wonder about the psychological effect though. There is this odd thing that players have about liking to gain things in lumps. Get a new magic weapon or item that increases what they can do. Gain a level. Players love this stuff. I've found that players sometimes feel like small incremental improvements are less satisfying than occasionally "going up a level". Dunno. It shouldn't be. And maybe it's my imagination, but it sure does feel like players get more exicted about level based progression for some reason.

And I'm suddenly getting a hankering to go play Wizards for some reason...

[NichG]

If I were designing this, I'd have something like a 'tier' system rather than a 'level' system. Fewer tiers than levels in D&D, with specific gates about on how and whether or not a given character can pass into the next tier, and with tiers acting as caps or prerequisites for certain abilities coming into play. However, independent of the tier system, there would be a diminishing returns invest-xp-directly system for characters developing new skills, learning, etc. One of the things I find very unappealing about 3.5ed D&D is that its harder for a Lv20 character to decide to dabble in pottery or learn a new language than it is for a Lv1 character, so there's this feeling of the character freezing out as they grow - literally becoming less able to learn new things - rather than a feeling that if you don't consistently commit to growing in a certain direction you might not master it.

As far as making NPCs/opposition easy to generate, I would envision something like having a 'profession' slot that basically every character gets, which determines a certain floor for the character's skills. You can pick up additional professions if you raise other scores to meet those floors, but you're guaranteed at character gen to get those floors for free in one domain of your choice. So the DM could say 'here are three generic mercenaries' and that means something pretty straightforward - they've got (at least) a 3 in Firearms and Unarmed Combat, 2 in Tactics and Dodge, and 1 in Stealth. Profession floors wouldn't increase with your Tier necessarily, but certain starting professions would not be available unless you started the campaign at a higher Tier. So there'd be a distinct 'special ops commando' profession that you'd have to start at Tier 2 to take, which might be 5/4/3 instead. And at Tier 3 it would be like 'mythic hero' with 7/5/5 instead. (Thinking e.g. caps at Tier 1 are 4 to an attribute or skill, 7 at Tier 2, and 10 at Tier 3. Furthermore you add 2*(Tier-1) to all defense thresholds and rolls, so a higher Tier character is just generically going to be more competent across the board.)

So the simplest character generation at Tier 0 would be something like 'here's 7 points, put them in your five attributes to a cap of 4 and minimum 1; pick a job, that gives you a set of skills, then add 7 points to any skills you like to a cap of 4, and you're done'. Then if you end up with a supernatural type they generically give you access to one new attribute starting at 1, five skills starting at zero (of which maybe one or two of those skills are shared with different supernatural types, and three are unique), and a single passive boon and single passive malus each which scale off of the new attribute for each Tier - like vampires getting a Sanguine attribute that both adds to their social rolls but also scales the damage over time they get when exposed to sunlight at Tier 1; then at Tier 2 Sanguine also scales their strength and speed, but sets a willpower threshold they must cross to do things like enter a domicile uninvited or remain within a holy place, etc.

So it'd be more a drop-in extra set of things than something as comprehensive as a character's class, though someone could go all-in on the vampire stuff. And as the Tier of the game increases, so does the potential complexity, but a Tier 1 game even if people are playing supernaturals would have those supernatural characteristics be more of a side-quirk than a big list of features to memorize.

[Quertus]

Its a very D&D mentality to think about the gimmicks behind generics as being important though. Everyone gets to know - really, they know it from scratch - that trolls are big and strong and have a good heal factor.

Getting into a dynamic mode and learning to not feel cramped by that rather than e.g. getting yourself into the mindset of being annoyed when a player has read the Monster Manual because you were relying on them not realizing that red dragons are fire-themed or something seems like a benefit rather than a flaw.

Going back to this... I, personally, love getting to experience learning about Trolls for the first time in character. I love when I don't recognize my fellow PC is a Jedi, and I'm seeing the class/organization for what it really is, unhindered by my preconceptions. It's not, for me, about being annoyed at someone for reading the MM (other than how they're hurting their own or others' fun, if anyone enjoys Exploration), or about idiots structuring adventures that fall apart based on what players/characters know/think/etc, its about the structure of the game killing off that kind of fun until it's more or less extinct, and me saying that that's a bad thing.

Also, I'm kinda comparing, you know, replacing the flagship RPG, so looking at the benefits and pitfalls of the existing flagship RPG - having "a very D&D mentality" - is not only to be expected, but I'll take it as a compliment.

Like a lot of things about a flagship, that's there but you don't have to lean into it, or you could even lean into it in very different ways. Like, this is sort of the point of urban fantasy as opposed to swords and sorcery. In S&S, you have a bunch of effectively 'non-person' adversaries to be slain where the ethics etc of it is pretty simple, so you need lots of generics so you can just plop down a monster of the week in a room. If you're going the urban fantasy direction, one aspect of that decision is that you're going to be dealing with 'characters' far more frequently than with 'monsters'.

If true, that sounds disadvantageous for the flagship RPG from a video game perspective.

So you do have to expect that the players and GM will be coming up with and interacting with people as people as one of the main aspects of play. Meaning that everyone is unique-ish, even if they're not necessarily unique on screen. The exploration and discovery aspects become less about 'here is some fauna we've never seen before and the dangerous or useful properties they have' and more about 'here's something about these people/subcultures/groups/etc that we didn't know about or didn't know existed'.

Yeah, you're losing a lot of the player base there. Also, most hack GMs couldn't manage anything like that. If it had taken off, it would have spawned a very different hobby.

having something where the new players to the game are new hunters and have a grizzled mentor who shows them the website with 1001 beasties on it and their job is to put the clues together 'oh, its not a poltregeist, its a sun spirit' is not a bad way to bring players into the game. Think playing Geralt in Witcher 3 or something - he already knows what everything is, but you get to learn it via his process of investigation.

Huh. Very different approach than I'm familiar with. I'll have to ponder this.

If we're focused on RP, that's not a problem. And frankly, I tend to prefer game systems that focus on individual characters as people, even if there are minor differences between them. But that's what I prefer to pay *today*. I'm reasonably certain that wouldn't match up with an "iconic" RPG though. As several people have stated (accurately IMO), there's a lot of value in easily described yet sufficiently distinct character types. Which is where classes and levels come in and why they tend to work well in that iconic role.

Even the earliest video games generally involved 1 perspective character facing off against lots of lesser beings. And while the worlds have gotten much more detailed, that's still true in games like Skyrim, which is chock full of generic enemies. So unless we're discussing changing the mindset of the populous, I think both "readily supports 1-v-many" and "easily-coded / masses of duplicates" are good for the flagship RPG.

But, yes, during the roleplaying that video games can't have, yeah, not such a problem.

Yup. Pretty much the same as above. It's easier/faster to get new players into a game where "a troll" is just "a troll", and they're all alike (well, most of the time). Having trolls just be a race of creatures, who could themselves then be anything they want, having whatever skills they happen to have, learn whatever spells they want, and wear different armor, carry different weapons, etc makes for a much much more in depth game, but also presents a steeper learning curve for new players.

So yeah. Same for the PCs as for the NPCs.

Although I mostly agree with this, I want to extend it even further. Making the NPCs generic makes the game much more about how cool the PCs are, keeps the focus much more on the PCs. OTOH, making the NPCs so unique often makes the game about the NPCs.

Now, sure, there's movies and anime where the protagonist is so generic, they could be anyone, and it's easy for the viewer to step into their shoes, where the effort really is on making the world and the "NPCs", and the interactions the protagonist has with them, be the things designed to keep the audience's attention more so than the vanilla protagonist themselves. So I'm not saying that it's completely without merit. But, personally, I want the game (especially the flagship RPG) rigged to put the focus on the PCs, and to encourage them to actually, you know, have personalities and character and stuff. Just sayin'.

And that's where the negative of "simple but easy/quick to learn" comes in. Once the players learn what the different types of monsters can do, and what each class can do, there isn't a lot of variation left (other than I guess adding new expansions, with new classes and monsters, I suppose, which is precisely what D&D did. Yes. I'm looking at you 2nd edition...). But hey. That's when you "graduate" to something else.

Which again presents the "iconic" versus "mature?" (not sure if that's the best term) comparison. When the encounter is less about the race/class/levels of those involved, but the less easily described skills/abilities/items/spells, you get even greater variation in the game (and far less predictability). You see a group of orcs. Do you know right now about how tough they are? Or do you have no clue?

I prefer the latter, but that's *not* what's going to work in an "iconic" game IMO. Just the way things are.

There's also "custom content", which ties into my "when Bob makes Fey that cannot start as human, then the game publishes Fey that do start as human, or vice versa" conundrum.

Personally, I'm a fan of custom content, and of systems that encourage such. I saw so much more custom content in 2e D&D than in any edition since.

Wow this is lively enough I couldn't even hope to reply to everything. Well I could but... you know time.

On Setting: I don't thing the other world is such a hard constraint. Especially since the official setting will probably just be a way the system can be used. I expect people will make there own. I have never played in a published setting of a role-playing game. Or though in that the awakening is happening because of the overlap with another world any you can just play in the other world if you want to.

Are you saying that, if the flagship RPG had been Urban Fantasy genre, you would have used it to play in the Mars Colonies, or the Wild West, or (help me Google-wan Kenobi) Aincrad or Pandora or Forsenia or Amestris or Gotham City or Oz? That you would build your own cities if not your own world in which to play this modern fantasy system?

I'd... never really considered making a whole new world for Urban Fantasy. Huh. I've found some of my hidden biases / blinders today.

On Levels: I was going to argue that "Fey-sworn agent" can be just as descriptive as "Level 12 Fighter" but actually I think it is more descriptive, or would be if the former came from a known system. Because "Level 12" doesn't actually tell me anything. I've never made it past level 4, what do I know what the game would look like that far above it. Which is part of the reason I think a linear progression is an incredible waste of content, even though I understand other people have had more luck than me in that regard.

I mean, the old D&D levels had text, like "cut-purse" and "burglar", "apprentice" and "conjurer (of cheap tricks)" to go along with them...

Also what is the point of a "capstone"? Either you aren't done and the character should keep growing and changing or you are about to finish with the character and... why did you get the coolest thing right at the end? Give them some time to play with it.

Lol. It was mostly a reference to just how much flak the D&D class that worked with such a pool, a Tattooed Monk prestige class IIRC, got for that design choice. I hadn't realized it was bad design, until a Playgrounder pointed out that its capstone was something you'd passed up every single other level. It brought "diminishing returns" to a whole new level.

Advancement should be the opposite of "diminishing returns" - players should look forward to new levels having (generally) cooler toys.

I'm going to disagree here. Pure roleplaying has the disadvantage of decision paralysis.
Light crunch gives the player a small number of mechanical options. "You can pull out your sword and charge, you can pull out your bow and shoot or you can try something else" is better for people out of their comfort zone than "What do you want to do?"
It should be simple to see your options, simple to understand how they work but also limited in what it covers

Um... is this against the pure role-playing game or the rules-light, because those are different things.

There's definitely something to be said for both having mechanical buttons to press, and having options that aren't mechanical buttons.

Video games pretty well require that that the entire game be playable exclusively through mechanical buttons that can be coded into the game, with no GM intervention necessary. Even most rules-light games make for bad video games, IMO.

Which touches on something about being iconic.
The game needs to be able to handle newbie/casual players wanting to play whack a monster because that’s all they want to do or all they have developed the skills to do so far.
The game also needs to be able to handle a more mature space for character driven drama, which is where more mature gamers tend to drift. D&D isn’t particularly good at character driven drama, buts lots of tables find ways to make it work.

Certainly some well developed rules about reputation, political influence, competing social constructs and so on would help. The new players will probably gloss over this aspect of the rules and not engage with it, as will beer and pretzels monster whackers. But having it sitting in the core rulebook will help players transition from simplistic campaigns to something they can enjoy as a 10 year veteran of the hobby

As a "10-year veteran of the hobby", I still would have been 8 years away from having a fully-matured brain (stupid male biology).

Regardless, I agree that having certain simplified, unobtrusive social reward rules like that in the core rulebook, and planting the seeds of those concepts in newbies' heads, would be a good thing.

The way I see it the three possibilities for everyone PC starts as a normie human

1) It can happen to anyone.
Classic vampire/werewolf bite.

2) Anyone can do it if they pass through the gate.
Like becoming a wizard, bard or cleric in D&D. Provided you meet the gatekeeping standard you can become a supernatural type.

3) You were born special, but didn’t know it + triggering event.
The classic bloodline trope. You can dress it up with some fancy PSB about recessive genes and DNA or however you like. Then you add in a triggering event like getting a bucket of pig’s blood dropped on you at the prom and your latent powers get activated. There’s a lot of work going on in epigenetics that support this framework. From a fiction/world building point of view this is probably the most difficult to sell properly.

As superhero movies have shown everyone loves a good origin story. It’s a hook for new players to play out their character’s origin story in their first introduction to the game.

That still presents the problem that, if Fey were never human, they cannot be PCs without destroying the "start as a human and become your splat of choice". Best you can do is, you're the human who let the Fey you're now playing into the world or something... which just isn't quite the same as actually getting to play your character from the beginning, especially if there's IRL months of prequel story time.

And yes, getting normies-superpowered-through-tech is a quite noble goal for the game, as well as inventing a good reason why this tech doesn't really work well for "natural" supers.

I prefer if anyone can use a Grapple Gun, but you look like those dorks in Star Wars. However, some Agents, like Batman, Roger Smith, and Kim Possible, can do more with them, because "training" or something.

What I meant is a mechanics-backed gimmick. Having hyperspecialized so much in a certain skill that you are, in-universe, are inhumanly amazing at it, is cool. My 5e Monk who has never had less than a 23 on Perception and eventually had a passive Perception of 32 had a gimmick. Was it amazingly useful or build-defining? Probably not, but it was memetic and it did give the character some spice. That sort of thing.

Ah, as "an amazing help in bringing character concepts to life"... yes, I agree that it's nice when the mechanics help you breathe life into a character by providing support for such unique gimmicks.

Classes can work decently enough, if they're written by someone with actual understanding of what a "class" is supposed to be like in the system. For instance, current D&D has almost no idea what their classes are about other than "general flavour", which means that you get a slew of classes like "Ranger" and "Wizard" instead of something that would actually mean something beyond vague general flavour. I have had a discussion on that recently, and believe that at the very point your class system defines a character by what weapon they use or what color their magic sparkles are, you have failed to design a class system.

To provide a basic example, if your system has a class which is primarily defined by using heavy armor and a shield, it's a bad class. If your system has a class that is tanky and can keep the enemies' attention on them, and also can do that while using heavy armor and a shield and that's a solid choice for them, but also can do it in different ways, now that's a good class. Classes are functions, not flavours. Flavour should generally be as free as possible. If there's no functional difference between a shadow mage and a fire mage other than "Shadowball" dealing a different type of damage, you don't need them, you need a Battlemage who can choose their elemental affinity at chargen.

Hmmm... you seem to believe that class is often implemented as "gear", and should instead be implemented as "role", have I got that right?

Personally, I think it's fine for a Paladin to be a class, and for a character who is a Paladin to have a primary role of smiting the wicked (Striker), defending the weak (Tank / Support), or prestigious knight (Face). Or even some other role, if an unusual build or rare artifact or some such supports it (or they just like having a role unsuited to their statistics, like an Ogre Scout or something).

Levels, however, are usually just bad. You don't need levels unless your game assumes a really steep power progression. If your power curve is relatively bounded, as it tends to be for, say, most urban fantasy systems, you don't need levels, they just muck things up. It is not hard for anyone to deal with spending XP on skills and such. I've known people who didn't want to bother with any version of D&D, and they figured out VtM's XP spending just fine.

Have you played with 7-year-olds? Played video games with automatic advancement? Would Mario have been better if, whenever Mario acquired a power-up, he was taken to a screen with a complex build tree? Would Civilization have been better if all the units each tracked their own advancement choices separately? Would Brigandine have been better if the characters got build points, and Cai could equip Zemeckis's crossbow, or Umimaru's beam or unique mana cadence could be given to Talia? Why/why not?

Levels make the game much easier in many ways, which is good for casual gamers, video games, comparisons for groups / modules, making an informed guess at a glance whether Talia could take Zemeckis, and much more.

[gbaji]

Yeah. We do something similar in our RuneQuest game (though I wouldn't suggest it would work well as an "iconic" game design, but if we're just talking about game concepts...). The base game rules itself is pure skill driven (and super granular, which is why it can be problematic and compex). While any character can theoretically have any skills at any levels, there is the concept of professions, which affect starting skills.

Where the tiers come in is in magic progression (which everyone has). There are three main branches of magic: Shamanic, Sorcerous, and Divine. Shaman's don't have much in the way of tiers. You're an apprentice, or you're a shaman (at which point you gain a fetch, which has some serious benefits though). I suppose we could track things like how powerful your fetch is, or how many spirits you have bound to you, etc. But yeah. Tough to clearly define power levels here. Divine tiers are easier, since the cults you join actually have them. Lay members (get some training and spirit spells, but nothing else), initiates (gain one use access to rune magic, which is quite powerful), priests (gain reusable rune magic). We actually added back in Rune Lords and High Priests, as kinda "uber powerful folks". We also allow different spell casting levels based on the "tier" you are at: anyone can cast 8 point spirit spells and 4 point rune spells if they have them, priests can cast 10/5 point, rune lords cast 12/6 point (and get special Divine Intervention odds), high priests cast 14/7 point spells (and get some enhanced power and DI chances as well).

Sorcery is where we made the most changes (cause the base rules just kinda suck). We made actual manipulation based on total skills used in casting the spell instead of the Int stat of the spell caster (which just doesn't work or scale). We fixed the manipulation skill (original sucked. Errata version was even worse). The game originally had the concept of tiers (kinda), with apprentices, adepts, and magus levels. We somewhat formalized those even more, and added in some additional benefits. I think there's some bonus manipulation at adept, and we gave magus' the ability to cast spells quicker (which is seriously necessary given how looooong it can take to cast sorcery in RQ).

The idea works, and can be tacked onto almost any game (or built in by design). It also gives players that "next level" thing to strive for, while also allowing (ideally anyway) for more gradual point based progression over time.

The only negative is that it can also "funnel" character progression. If you're trying to increase your tiers in some profession/description/whatever, and the requirements are some specific set of skill points spent in a list of things that are in that area, and there are additional benefits outside of mere skill progression to be gained by increasing your tier in <whatever>, you're going to tend towards focusing on those skills and only those skills that apply.

I suppose you could come up with some sort of tier system that wasn't tied to normal experience based progression though (off to the side somehow?). An interesting concept is to have advancement in some sort of achetype/virtue concept and base advancement on achievements during the game. Could also create an additional motivation in game for different characters to want to take certain actions or approaches in the game. Uh... Could also create additional conflict as well. I remember well the elan system in Stormbringer and the... uh.. "fun" things that could happen. Things like "I get rewards for lighting things on fire", or "burying things (or people)", or "flipping a coin when making any decision". Yeah. In hindsight, they really probably should not have let my agent of chaos join the group that one time.

So yeah, there are a few games that have used this kind of concept in different ways. I'm not sure if any of them really fill the same "feel" that level progression does though. Would be an interesting thing to try though.

[NichG]

I suppose you could come up with some sort of tier system that wasn't tied to normal experience based progression though (off to the side somehow?). An interesting concept is to have advancement in some sort of achetype/virtue concept and base advancement on achievements during the game. Could also create an additional motivation in game for different characters to want to take certain actions or approaches in the game. Uh... Could also create additional conflict as well. I remember well the elan system in Stormbringer and the... uh.. "fun" things that could happen. Things like "I get rewards for lighting things on fire", or "burying things (or people)", or "flipping a coin when making any decision". Yeah. In hindsight, they really probably should not have let my agent of chaos join the group that one time.

So yeah, there are a few games that have used this kind of concept in different ways. I'm not sure if any of them really fill the same "feel" that level progression does though. Would be an interesting thing to try though.

Yeah, what I was going for was that tier advancement is 'at the speed of plot' only. You can't go up a tier by buying skills or attributes, period. In-character, there might be explicit recognition of tiers in some sense and ways to advance, but those ways would either be something tightly connected with external factors that would make them the subject of uptime play rather than how you spend your xp. Like, going up a tier might involve: gaining the recognition and sponsorship of a divine entity, surviving for 200 years as a vampire or consuming the soul of a vampire at least 200 years old, gaining explicit rank in the courts of the fae, etc - mostly either for villains or for groups that start at a higher tier. And of course there should be the free pass version of 'sometimes people just have the potential worthy of a higher tier, which gets unlocked by the act of making momentous decisions that impact the fate of something much larger than the person' to excuse the DM just saying 'you all go up a tier!' and keeping thing synchronized.

Would be a good sidebar: "Ways to keep the group together when advancing a tier"

[Ignimortis]

Which sounds like you are in favor of more general classes (like D&D originally had), like "Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Magic User, etc". Add in skills and feats say (which were added over time in various editions), and you have a lot of customization within those broader classes. That system "works" just fine. The problem I think comes in when the demands of commercialization push the game designers to keep creating more and more material, usually in the form of increasingly "silly" classes and sub classes, and whatnot, and basically lose sight of the original concept.

Which, yeah, is why I actually don't like classes. They don't hold up well over time. But if we're asking what is easier to use starting out, in order to form an "iconic game"? Yeah. I can see why they'd be useful for that.

It's part of why I'm convinced that some sort of urban fantasy game would be best for newcomers. Instead of meddling with classes, you just build a human, then slap the supernatural template powers/bonuses onto them, and you're done. Even WoD games have managed that - there are guidelines for building human characters, who usually get a couple less attribute points than starting supers, but are pretty much equal in terms of skill points and such. All you need is a decent explanation of what the values actually mean - whether your policeman needs two dots in Firearms or can scrape by with one, whether 3 INT is enough to be smarter than the average, etc.

Yup. Absolutely agree. What you do lose is the ability to easily determine relative difficulty/power. Some systems manage this by having a base point value, and keeping track of additional points added over time/experience. So you're replacing something like "level X character" witih "X point character" instead. And yeah, this allows for a much more granular experience gain path (and usually a lot more customization as well).

I actually have a lot of love for skill point game systems.

It is interesting though, that even though mechanically they are "better" (pretty much in every way), I do wonder about the psychological effect though. There is this odd thing that players have about liking to gain things in lumps. Get a new magic weapon or item that increases what they can do. Gain a level. Players love this stuff. I've found that players sometimes feel like small incremental improvements are less satisfying than occasionally "going up a level". Dunno. It shouldn't be. And maybe it's my imagination, but it sure does feel like players get more exicted about level based progression for some reason.

And I'm suddenly getting a hankering to go play Wizards for some reason...

It's more about the effect of power-ups and their regularity. Suffice to say, I was far more excited to get some cool Discipline combo power for 15 EXP than I usually am to get a level in a D&D-like. In general, sure, gaining +1 to a skill is usually not as impactful as it is to gain a whole level, but that can be solved by giving XP in large packs instead of dripfeeding it between each session. Spending 40 XP in Vampire is pretty much equivalent to going up a level.

I prefer if anyone can use a Grapple Gun, but you look like those dorks in Star Wars. However, some Agents, like Batman, Roger Smith, and Kim Possible, can do more with them, because "training" or something.

Everyone can use a Grapple Gun. Not everyone can have it be implanted in their cool mechanical arm alongside a machine gun. Alternatively, if the "tech powers" angle needs to be more subtle - while everyone can use a Grapple Gun, Super Soldier Serums don't work on supernaturals.

Hmmm... you seem to believe that class is often implemented as "gear", and should instead be implemented as "role", have I got that right?

Personally, I think it's fine for a Paladin to be a class, and for a character who is a Paladin to have a primary role of smiting the wicked (Striker), defending the weak (Tank / Support), or prestigious knight (Face). Or even some other role, if an unusual build or rare artifact or some such supports it (or they just like having a role unsuited to their statistics, like an Ogre Scout or something).

I believe that classes are often implemented as "what I want to look like" instead of "what I want to do". This leads to things like Barbarians being a separate class, because the image of a half-naked musclebound warrior with a great whopping axe doesn't fit into "Fighter" somehow, even though they do pretty much the same things - get out there on the frontline and hit things hard, with very minor differences at the end of the day. Paladins are similar, but at least they fill the niche of being half-Cleric, half-Fighter.

Have you played with 7-year-olds? Played video games with automatic advancement? Would Mario have been better if, whenever Mario acquired a power-up, he was taken to a screen with a complex build tree? Would Civilization have been better if all the units each tracked their own advancement choices separately? Would Brigandine have been better if the characters got build points, and Cai could equip Zemeckis's crossbow, or Umimaru's beam or unique mana cadence could be given to Talia? Why/why not?

Levels make the game much easier in many ways, which is good for casual gamers, video games, comparisons for groups / modules, making an informed guess at a glance whether Talia could take Zemeckis, and much more.

I do have to note that Civilization does have all the units track their own advancement choices separately. At least CIV 4 does, and that's the last one I play regularly.

As for build points vs levels, it all depends on the game's complexity. Like I said, VtM in particular was simple enough that everyone I know to have played TTRPGs has grasped it pretty easily.

[Pauly]

About dang time, Shadowrun is about 20 years past its' prime (people praise the setting, but it brought out the best stuff early on, and pretty much everything past 3e has been rehashing old concepts without advancing the setting well).

And yes, getting normies-superpowered-through-tech is a quite noble goal for the game, as well as inventing a good reason why this tech doesn't really work well for "natural" supers.

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That still presents the problem that, if Fey were never human, they cannot be PCs without destroying the "start as a human and become your splat of choice". Best you can do is, you're the human who let the Fey you're now playing into the world or something... which just isn't quite the same as actually getting to play your character from the beginning, especially if there's IRL months of prequel story time.
re.

I’m putting these 2 together because they address the same thing from different angles. The issue being is it core rules material or expansion material?

I’m approaching this on the basis that the core rules have a simple easily explainable hook. In the example we’re working on I’m assuming “normal humans become supernatural” is the hook. There is sufficient inspiration out there for a complete game to be launched with this as the core rules.

The always magical Fey and geared up humans make obvious expansion material to me. I think for iconic status room to expand is a good thing. It gives the hard core player base things to look forward to, while at the same time allows the less devoted to enjoy the game as it comes out of the box.

As for geared up humans there are a few issues the fiction needs to clean up. Firstly I assume 6 million dollar man type cyborgs that level up by getting more body parts replaced or their existing implants upgraded. The issues I see are
1) Organizational support. The sheer cost and specialized R&D required implies backing from government, organized religion or tech billionaires. Which makes an organization supporting the geared up human PC mandatory. Similar that seen in the 1998 Ultraviolet series starring Idris Elba and Jack Davenport. (NB this series is a must for anyone interested in the genre). Shadowrun gets around organizational support/cost by saying future tech made is accessible and affordable to anyone, but that doesn’t gel with the ‘today’ setting proposed.
Do the other PCs in the party then have to belong to the same organization as the geared up human? If not why not?
2) Location. It forces geared up humans to be either in very large cities are some tech hub such as Tsukuba. The supernatural characters have no such restriction on location, and I can see that a lot of campaigns will be set in small towns.
3) why tech upgrades are denied to supernaturals.

For the Fey there are world building issues, but they are more easily resolved.

But having either of these in the core rulebook will make the game harder to explain to people who’ve never heard of an RPG before.

On Iconic there is a bit of a needle to thread. It needs to be a complete game out of the box, but it also needs to have room for people to be enthusiastic about expanding the game into.

[CharlieDouglas]

I agree with the accessibility issue and above all I'd say it should: have multiple levels of possible complexity, so you can basically 'add' to the game as people feel more comfortable. In addition, it should be designed to have a structural subset that is very adaptable to other vehicles. An apk mod application that specializes in providing attractive role-playing games with the fastest updates for you to experience the game in an authentic way. Join us at getmodnow.com