WTF is with peoples' objections to a unified power system?

[MfA]

I believe this because I was one of the people who thought that complexity was good when I was younger, but falsified that prediction as I played a broader range of games.

Okay I retract my statement, can't beat that kind of representative sample.

[Username17]

Raw complexity may at times keep a player (temporarily) because they're too bamboozled to see the problems with the game, but that's going beyond mere corner-cutting and flirting with outright fraud.

Ultimately, RPGs are fraud, because of the Elennsar problem. Iterative probability means that if you have any realistically measurable risk, you're dead long before the story is over. You're being "challenged" several times a session and playing once a week (barring holidays) for the whole school year.

RPGs have to generate a feeling of risk without generating the actuality of risk. Which means that yes, they need to be complex enough to be able to perpetrate fraud on the people playing them. There needs to be enough complexity to act as a curtain between the players and the man pulling the levers. Because if the machinery gets too obvious, it'll stop being exciting.

Remember: RPGs are not competitive board games where everyone is supposed to know how things work because anyone can win. RPGs are an unfair game, that needs to keep people playing anyway. Dominion and Die Siedler are exactly th opposite - they can be extremely simple because they are fair.

-Username17

[Maxus]

I view DMing like playing with a bunch of six-year-olds. My job is to let them win without letting them realize I'm doing it. And doing improvisations to make a decent game along the way.

[Bobikus]

Yeah, sometimes letting part of the party die is needed though to keep the risk real. My players though have handled even the couple TPKs they've been through well.

[tussock]

Re: thread title.

Different people like different power systems. A game with more than one system lets more people play together in the same game. It's why people are still playing 3.5 and Pathfinder ahead of 4e, because someone in their group liked one of the systems that got left behind.

Lots of people have a hate-on for the Vancian system, but some people really like it, a lot, enough that spamming 4e at-will Wizard powers for five rounds pisses them off and they don't want to play any more, because it doesn't feel like "magic".

[Psychic Robot]

RPGs have to generate a feeling of risk without generating the actuality of risk.

Unless the point of the game is for you to fail forever, die horribly, and roll up a new character every other session. (See: Dark Heresy.) Which, to me, makes for a bad RPG, but some people seem to like it a lot.

[Shazbot79]

RPGs have to generate a feeling of risk without generating the actuality of risk.

Could you elaborate on this idea a bit more?

[Starmaker]

RPGs have to generate a feeling of risk without generating the actuality of risk.

Could you elaborate on this idea a bit more?

You play the game to be the main character(s) in an awesome story. A story where everything is stacked against you and you win nonetheless. These things happen in real life because probability says so (follow the link for an mp3). For every improbable heroic survivor, there's a thousand who kicked the bucket.

You only hear the songs of those who win despite the odds
But for every one of those there's one of these pathetic sods
Who think that all that's needed is their quick and fancy skill
But soon find out a speeding bullet's even quicker still

Now, a number of games are competitive, that is, you play to see who would get the girl and who would get stabbed in the face. Tabletop RPGs aren't; thus, a good RPG is designed to favor the players, but do so in a way that isn't immediately noticeable.

Thus, for example, 3e has the party's level match the challenge rating and calls it a fair fight. The actual fair fight, a party of four PCs vs. a CR+4 encounter, is described as "a definite slaughterhouse, RUN THE FUCK AWAY". But you're supposed to outnumber the opposition four to one and pat yourself on the back.

[Koumei]

It goes like this: if the game is actually deadly, you get too many PC deaths, which is a problem, or worse still, a TPK with "Game Over".

On the other hand, players need to feel challenged. If they think "We can't actually die here", it loses a sense of danger and excitement. You want them to be in their characters' heads, going "Crap, we need to be careful!"

I mean sure, you want occasional beat-downs where they stomp minions into the ground to show their tricks off. And some players actually want games all about curb-stomps. But generally they want the feeling of danger, even though actual danger means you don't get a long story.

[Murtak]

Of course games with non-combat parts, or with combat that is not necessarily deadly can get away without tricking players. Forcing the party to retreat or come up with an alternative plan or just plain getting kicked out of court is fine occassionally, whereas a tital party kill is not.

[shadzar]

If a person can't be arsed to put in the minimum effort of choosing their own abilities, then they can fuck off. Or they can ask someone else to build their PC. I've done that for people who didn't really know the system but wanted to play, making all of the mechanical decisions (what classes/feats/etc to take) for them and then letting them run the character. It worked out ok, but I wouldn't have done it with a caster.

The problem with 4E martial types isn't that you get a choice of powers. It's that all of the choices are the same boring shit. That's a problem with 4E, not the resource management system.

Funny, when i was asked to fill a seat so a party would have enough people, they kept bitching at me to learn the rules to create the character, when i didn't even want to play 3.x, and was just helping my friends continue their game.

I have DMed games, and probably said this here before, where the players have nothing but names, race, class, and gear. I handled all the rest and it worked great. Lots of people liked it because they could play, and not worry about the rest, but left it up to me...surprising when people bitch about DM fiat, when the game runs best like that and people dont get confused by poorly written crap in the book, or a system that doesnt make since to the like getting confused over THAC0 because they don't understand why AC a lower number is better, or how to calculate it; or why a fighter has to have a spell list under 4th....

So it comes down to things like why have a spell list or play in a game where a fighter must have one. I dont want that crap so lets play the edition that doesnt force garbage like that on someone? One where you play the wizard/cleric if you want a spell list.

Ah player empowerment, how you have screwed over the game and ability to just play it... no wonder the games are trying to compete with instant gratification of sticking a dvd into a console and playing right away after the loading screen, there is too much crap in the hands of players to have to deal with while the computer handles all that for you.

[Manxome]

Ultimately, RPGs are fraud, because of the Elennsar problem.

And yet you claim that you are aware of this fact, and also that you like RPGs. So obviously there is no requirement to genuinely convince the players.

Even if there were a complexity floor, that doesn't change the fact that there is also a complexity ceiling, so you still might as well demand as many other features as you possibly can for every bit of complexity you add to the game. You still want an efficient design. It's not like you are going to run out of ways you can add complexity.

Plus, most of this dicussion carries straight over into the design of fair games, too. Since there are multiple people on this forum (including you and me) known to design and play those as well, we might as well benefit from that spillover as much as possible.

[Manxome]

RPGs have to generate a feeling of risk without generating the actuality of risk.

Could you elaborate on this idea a bit more?

Suggested Reading

[Username17]

Ultimately, RPGs are fraud, because of the Elennsar problem.

And yet you claim that you are aware of this fact, and also that you like RPGs. So obviously there is no requirement to genuinely convince the players.

This is wrong. I am aware that people in action movies are not in any real danger. It's still exciting. But it's immersion breaking if I can see the wires and the mattresses during jumps. I am aware that WWE matches are fixed, but it's still immersion breaking when the ads for next week's matchups give away who is going to win the current one.

Just because the game is unfair and you know it is unfair doesn't mean that that unfairness is fun to contemplate. Your enjoyment is still predicated on you pretending that the danger is real. And that only works when the game is complicated enough that you can voluntarily not see those wires and mattresses and pretend that people are actually falling.

Even if there were a complexity floor, that doesn't change the fact that there is also a complexity ceiling, so you still might as well demand as many other features as you possibly can for every bit of complexity you add to the game. You still want an efficient design. It's not like you are going to run out of ways you can add complexity.

Yes, there is both a complexity ceiling and a complexity floor. Which is exactly the point. If someone tells you that doing away with a particular piece of complexity is necessarily good, they are wrong. Getting rid of complexity is contingently good. Because you do need some levels of complexity.

Complexity is only a priori bad if it doesn't get you anything. But since players like feeling different than other players and different players like different resource management systems and hate others, you obviously are getting something by having different abilities on different resource management systems. So going from THAC0 to a target number system is a universal good, but going to a universal ability system is only contingently good.

Which is the bottom line. Lago challenged us to find a reason why someone might object to universal ability systems. And that has been found. Universalizing ability systems is a simplification that comes with a genuine cost in character sameness and choice limitation. That makes it something that you might or might not want to do depending on how otherwise complicated your game was and what other choices were available to players and how much design time you had and stuff.

-Username17

[name_here]

Alternately, you could attempt to locate the longest thread on the forum and see if that's the one where we elaborated on it to Elennsar at great length.

[Username17]

Alternately, you could attempt to locate the longest thread on the forum and see if that's the one where we elaborated on it to Elennsar at great length.

Good Idea

-Username17

[Shazbot79]

Okay, here is where the disconnect is for me...I play RPG's for the whole game aspect, rather than story. Don't get me wrong, having a cool story to interact with is great, but for me it's just icing. My primary motivation for table top gaming is to sit around a table with friends rolling dice.

I agree that numbers should skew a little bit more in the player's favor than the oppositions', but what I'm taking away from this is that some people here think that player characters should be operating under some secret invincibility clause?

This seems contradictory to me, as people here constantly deride "magical tea party" resolution schemes for noncombat situations, claiming that these things need rules. However, as far as I'm concerned there needs to be an actual risk of failure, or there is no game. If player characters are essentially immune to bad die rolls, then the rules governing such things have no real meaning, and the perilous sections of the game have become their own magical tea party with arbitrary numbers attached.

Yeah, TPK's suck. However, having the real threat of character death in the minds of the players is a necessary thing. It adds an element of risk and lends weight to player decisions. In all of the groups that I've gamed with over the years, I've noticed that they are never having as much fun as when they think a TPK is imminent. If you remove the actual risk from the game, then players will lose this sense of harrowing suspense. Even if you try to hide it from them, they will wise up to it, eventually. This is why I never, ever fudge rolls.

[Username17]

This seems contradictory to me, as people here constantly deride "magical tea party" resolution schemes for noncombat situations, claiming that these things need rules. However, as far as I'm concerned there needs to be an actual risk of failure, or there is no game. If player characters are essentially immune to bad die rolls, then the rules governing such things have no real meaning, and the perilous sections of the game have become their own magical tea party with arbitrary numbers attached.

Yeah, TPK's suck. However, having the real threat of character death in the minds of the players is a necessary thing. It adds an element of risk and lends weight to player decisions. In all of the groups that I've gamed with over the years, I've noticed that they are never having as much fun as when they think a TPK is imminent. If you remove the actual risk from the game, then players will lose this sense of harrowing suspense. Even if you try to hide it from them, they will wise up to it, eventually. This is why I never, ever fudge rolls.

Fudging rolls is indeed basically the end of the game being able to generate give-a-shit. The moment it becomes clear that the players are going to be declared the winner no matter what they do, then people are going to stop putting in the effort to do good things and the story derails. However, it is also true that if the players have an especially perceptible chance of being killed, that they inevitably will get TPKed over the course of a game of any length.

The goal then is to have death be an entirely plausible outcome and the dice to be incredibly fair (preferably rolled in the open), but to have player choices available which reduce those chances of death to essentially zero. The ideal situation thus, is when TPK is imminent but a mass heal is available to save everyone's bacon (or whatever). The players should be able to see that they would probably die if X and Y didn't happen, and yet still have X and Y happen without having to invoke DM interference (Deus Machina in this case).

-Username17

[Shazbot79]

Fudging rolls is indeed basically the end of the game being able to generate give-a-shit. The moment it becomes clear that the players are going to be declared the winner no matter what they do, then people are going to stop putting in the effort to do good things and the story derails. However, it is also true that if the players have an especially perceptible chance of being killed, that they inevitably will get TPKed over the course of a game of any length.

The goal then is to have death be an entirely plausible outcome and the dice to be incredibly fair (preferably rolled in the open), but to have player choices available which reduce those chances of death to essentially zero. The ideal situation thus, is when TPK is imminent but a mass heal is available to save everyone's bacon (or whatever). The players should be able to see that they would probably die if X and Y didn't happen, and yet still have X and Y happen without having to invoke DM interference (Deus Machina in this case).

-Username17

Ahh. I get what you're saying.

I still don't agree that the chance for character death should be essentially zero, but I do agree with giving players what amounts to "get out of death free card" mechanics to make judicious use of. D&D has these in the form of resurrection spells, Warhammer FRP has them in the form of fate points. "Whoops...mulligan", rules are a good thing, but this should be a limited resource because spamming unlimited game cheats is just as bad as fudging die rolls for the purposes of players actually giving a wet shit.

[tzor]

I don't really get the whole notion that a priori, TPK suck. I'm even going to throw in a convroversial notion here: Min maxing killed the dungeon crawl.

Here is my argument: Dying (and TPK is mass dying) sucks because players have "invested" in their characters. This started around the 2E era. Back when you rolled a few dice and got a new character up in a matter of five minutes (less than the time it took to find a spot in the game to bring a new character in) being killed in a particularly glorious matter was as much fun as killing in a particularly glorious manner.

The more time you spend on character creation, the more you are personally invested in your character and the more dying is a "loss" to you as a player. To make things even simplier back in 1E, most DMs had the "standard adventuring pack" to make character creation even faster.

As the line went in the old DMG "What do you mean we have to talk to this thing? The last thing we talked to ate half the party!"

[Manxome]

I still don't agree that the chance for character death should be essentially zero

It depends what you mean by "essentially," of course. A better way of saying this might be that most people have incredibly bad intuitions for statistics, and therefore what seems to them like a reasonable chance of death when presented in the abstract (say, 10% per encounter) in actual fact produces gameplay far deadlier than they want (e.g. 65% of parties TPK some time during the 10 encounters before even reaching the boss).

There's a long list of well-studied reasons for that disconnect, and a similarly long list of techniques for compensating by exaggerating the players' sense of danger.

You already touched upon one, which is to forgive a certain number of failures (via, e.g., limited-use healing, rerolls, etc.). This works because it improves the player's odds more than he thinks it does, because he overestimates the chances of failing many times in a row (thereby overcoming the safeguard) just like he overestimates the chances of winning many times in a row (and thus not needing it).

Which is the bottom line. Lago challenged us to find a reason why someone might object to universal ability systems. And that has been found. Universalizing ability systems is a simplification that comes with a genuine cost in character sameness and choice limitation.

Oh, I entirely agree with that. There are completely valid reasons for not universalizing ability systems. I'm not remotely suggesting a universal ability system for every single game ever.

But you repeatedly made the additional claim that the only reason that you would want to universalize it is to make the game easier to design. And that's bullshit. If complexity is even contingently bad, then there are times when you could improve a game by reducing complexity, even if you had to cut non-essential features at the same time.

And your whole argument about how you need some complexity is really beside the point. Even if it were as simple as "all games with complexity < X are transparent and unfun, and all games with complexity >= X support compartmentalized thinking" -- which I still think is utterly ridiculous -- the practical effects of that are nil.

Adding complexity with no material changes to a game is easy, and the reverse is very hard. If there is the remotest chance that you might possibly hit the complexity ceiling, you should still focus on minimizing complexity until the game includes every feature you care about, and then add arbitrary complexity at the very end, in the (highly unlikely) event that you have less than you want.


Now, if flexible multiclassing across a lot of different resource management systems is extremely important to you, then maybe you'll put that in first and try to keep it at all costs. But that's an impressively inefficient use of a given complexity budget, due to the way those things interact, so you'd better be ready to give up an awful lot to get it.

[Fuchs]

Failure doesn't have to mean character death. That means you can remove the risk of losing a character, and still have the risk of failure in a game.

[Roy]

This is relevant to your interests.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Which is the bottom line. Lago challenged us to find a reason why someone might object to universal ability systems. And that has been found. Universalizing ability systems is a simplification that comes with a genuine cost in character sameness and choice limitation.

I think that this got lost earlier in the thread with Kaelik's weird trolling fit, but in addition to page count reduction/ease of play/etc...

You have a game system, right? And you have a huge list of possible resource management systems to use. Now while some games don't noticeably suffer from having different kinds of resource management systems (like Shadowrun, but because even the most complicated ones are simple and powers aren't game-breaking anyway), it seems that more complicated ones like D&D have an optimal resource management scheme you could use and using something else makes the game worse.

Let's go back to Winds of Fate for a second. I don't know how it happened, but as far as D&D is concerned I'm completely sold on the fact that it's the way to go for the future. It allows people a lot of powers without implementing option paralysis or people using Five Moves of Doom or having to track a jillion charges/timers.

But the thing is... once you have some people using WoF, why would you allow other people to use other schemes? There will be some beginners like Trevor who can't be trusted with anything more complicated than 'you full-attack 85% of the time and sometimes have a pinch-hitter manuever', but they're on those simpler systems because they're beginners, not because it's a good system. We're so intimately familiar with all of the failings of the other systems to the point where I don't think we can use them anymore with a straight face unless we're doing a QuikFix (like Tome) or we're designing something for beginners.

So. Forgetting things like reducing complexity, is having variety in character building worth the cost of some characters being outright inferior in design? Yeah, Factotums definitely feel different than other classes, but even if you got the numbers working right their base mechanics would still suck compared to using WoF. Same for Wizards, Psions, Warblades, and Crusaders.

I personally think not. Again, if someone could point me to systems about as good as Winds of Fate I'll rethink my statement, but WoF is so ahead of the other proposals that the fun you gain from variety you lose from playability. It's like feeding a dog its own tail; it won't fatten the dog.

[MfA]

Yeah, Factotums definitely feel different than other classes, but even if you got the numbers working right their base mechanics would still suck compared to using WoF.

The only metric for testing taste is democracy ... so the question becomes, how many of us insane grognards are there and how badly do you want us to buy your game?

You're not selling me on WoF I can guarantee you that.