Minor game stuff from around the web for commentary...

[mean_liar]

I don't know how anyone can justify banning a Monk archetype.

[ACOS]

I don't know how anyone can justify banning a Monk archetype.

Well, I'm sure that the argument can be made to send it home for humanitarian reasons
But for the reason given? WTF?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Seems like the reasoning is that, while a CoDzilla can be socially cajoled into being a team player, someone who's simply a Fighter+ is stepping on the Fighter's dick AND can't be pressured into playing a support role instead.

[ACOS]

It looks like John Wick (Lot5R, others) has crawled all the way up his own ass

In a roleplaying game, game balance does not matter.

Sure, he does a good job at defining his terms; but then he goes and renders them meaningless.
And then diverts off in to left-field, and never makes his way back.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Riddick killing a guy with a teacup in an eponymous film with no other stars is okay. A PC killing a horde of goblins with a teacup in a campaign with 3+ other players is Captain Hobo bullcrap.

[mean_liar]

John Wick autofellates as a general rule, but that quote is a bit out of context.

In a roleplaying game, game balance does not matter.

What matters is spotlight. Making sure each player feels their character had a significant role in the story. They had their moment in the spotlight. Or, they helped someone else have their significant moment in the spotlight.

He's saying that game balance doesn't matter, but then goes on in the very next sentence to say that it does if your primary metric of balance is his idea of the "best" metric: spotlight.

What he's saying - poorly - is that spotlight matters, but numbers don't. Now, that's dumb, because beating the shit out of things is awesome and central to the vast majority of popular heroic fantasy and therefore you do want in-combat balance and numbers suddenly become important because combat is a bigass spotlight and it needs to be shared. I'd say that what he appears to really be saying is that he doesn't like combat.

You can really see that in the games he creates, where combat is a throwaway minigame largely devoid of meaningful choice other than the number of dice you throw. Blood and Honor is about samurai tragedy and duels in that game are resolved by tossing a shitload of dice at each other. His idea of COOL COMBAT is to include a bunch of mechanically inefficient/suboptimal swordsmanship schools to eat up your XP that are less useful than having a story-derived reputation as "badass swordsman", so it's no wonder that he thinks combat is dumb.

[fectin]

He's not wrong either. High-level wizards are a lot less balanced than high-level fighters, but make for much better stories.

[erik]

He's not wrong either. High-level wizards are a lot less balanced than high-level fighters, but make for much better stories.

Um. "Less balanced than fighters?" As compared to... ? If you compare them to each other then that is a nonsense statement. Like saying 4 is farther from 8 than 8 is from 4.

Wizards being stronger *and* more fun would be a counter example since fighters are not balanced vs wizards and make worse stories/spotlights as a direct result of that.

[fectin]

Individual wizards have less comparable and predictable abilities compared to other wizards than individual fighters do against other fighters.

[ACOS]

mean_liar has the right of it - without some semblance of balance, spotlights will necessarily be asymmetric; and that's bad, for obvious reasons.
Of course, Wick goes on to basically relegate games like D&D to tactical-wargame status, and not an RPG. So fuck him. The whole article reeks of pretentiousness.

[Blade]

You can have good spotlights with unbalanced characters as long as the story is adapted.

If you have a Doctor/Companion situation, you'll need more work to make sure that the Companion gets the spotlight and doesn't just make the Doctor look good, but this can be done.

While not necessary, balanced characters make the work easier for the GM, especially in the case of published adventures.

[mean_liar]

You can have good spotlights with unbalanced characters as long as the story is adapted.

That's almost true - ideally the story and spotlighting is supported by the game as well. Relying on a GM to equally spotlight characters of unequal capability is not a trivial task, and the game should help that along: explicit PC-generated motivations (limited to, say, two per PC or something to confine the narrative space) to aid story-writing, direction on how to manage the inequality in capability, and so on. Wick's point that RPGs aren't RPGs because you're making shit up is sort of true, in that you want the game to support the narrative, but I don't think he'd see it that way.

Otherwise, it's just cooperative storytelling and you don't need a game for that. RPGs are still games, and I feel strongly that the underlying structure provided by games and rules is what gives them their draw.

...

Just to riff a bit more on John Wick, I do believe that he has a point in that weapon tables can be shitty distractions. Warhammer FRPG 2e's weapon system feels more alive than ADnD's weapon tables, for example; the complexity of the latter doesn't add much verisimilitude, whereas the simplicity and tags of the former are much cleaner and clearer. There isn't a compelling need for a game's weapons to distinguish between a Speed Factor of 3 and 4; it's enough that you know that some weapons are Slow, some are Fast, and some are neither.

[Stubbazubba]

Sure, he does a good job at defining his terms

I don't even think he does this. He jumps right to defining what a role-playing game is without defining role-playing. And that's why he misses the big point on why balanced rules matter.

His definition of role-playing is apparently story-telling, but he never comes out and says it. If role-playing = story-telling, then yeah, the density of the rules looks pretty quixotic, and you're better off abstracting it more so you can directly balance spotlight time.

But for many, if not most, people, role-playing =/= story-telling. Stories are a product of role-playing, but they are not the point. The point is putting aside your own persona, your own cares, and putting on that of your character, who is awesome and whose cares are power fantasies (or cathartic tragedies or whatever, depending on your game) waiting to happen. You want to see and follow the same incentives your character does. In fact, you want to do only that so the escapism is as complete as it can be.

Being taken out of that to worry about story-telling because the game rules come down and heavy-handedly redistribute spotlight like a bad planned economy is anathema to that definition of role-playing. Weapon tables are a good thing because they indicate choices of tactics that indicate actual differences to your character. A polearm is different than a two-handed weapon is different than dual-wielding is different than sword & board is different than a teacup, and not just cosmetically. Riddick's teacup move is impressive because teacups aren't supposed to be dangerous. When one is, then, it's a surprising reveal. That scene is actually impossible with the kind of approach Wick is advocating.

Think of it this way; it's heroic and extraordinary when an unarmored shepherd boy with no previous combat experience, armed with naught but a sling and some smooth stones, faces the feared giant of the Philistines arrayed in his heavy armor and wielding titanic weapons. But it can only be so if those disadvantages are real, not just fabricated in the narrative. When it turns out Goliath is slow, clumsy, and near-blind, and David has chosen an extremely deadly weapon that everyone knew was extremely deadly at the time, the story is now about David simply exploiting the crushing disadvantages Goliath had. But afterwards you can spin it into whatever you want, because Fox News has a long and illustrious secret history.

The more the rules focus on the meta-aspect of story-telling, the more diluted the role-playing experience is. The more the player can interact with and respond to the indications and incentives in the game the same way their character would, the stronger the role-playing experience. These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but they tend to be at odds. That's why balance matters: to balance spotlight time while actually having a role-playing game, you need balanced rules that actually allow everyone to get spotlight by role-playing, i.e. by following the incentives their character actually has, not incentives or rules constructs that only you, as a player, are aware of.

[mean_liar]

Hope that works. Just seemed an interesting aside.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

John Wick once wrote an "interesting" article on how to GM Champions

Immunity gives a character supernatural immunity to diseases and poisons. It’s a very popular advantage. Of course, Mr. Carter had to do something about that.

I had his scientists come up with a disease that would kill off anyone with the “super gene” that meta-humans had. Carter had a cure, of course. The only problem was all those super fellows who bought Immunity were, well, immune to it.

So it seems he does enjoy rules-heavy, aggressively balanced systems, since he just does stuff like "kills character that's immune to disease with a disease" if he feels like it.

[mean_liar]

I hate that article and its author every time I read it.

I mean, no one took DNPC again? That's a sign of good GMing? Putting someone in prison for 20yrs for aggravated assault to make a point? Using Lucky to inflict Unluck in an effects-based system? A disease that bypasses immunity to disease (which isn't even allowed)? Just go fucking drown Aquaman, you prick.

The context is that the game was an Ironman campaign in university, where PCs who were eliminated were removed from the pool, and he was trying to run through as many PCs as possible - and these events were at the climax of the campaign and the general fuck-you-it's-the-Iron-Age tone was set early. It's still bullshit, but he was being a dick for a reason and not just in an average game. And that's precisely the kind of contextual information you want at the header of the article since anyone who thinks this is generic good GMing advice from a published RPG designer of some fame is going to learn a lot of shitty lessons about the IMMENSE POWER of fiat GMing:

[Longes]

https://app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/1817 ... nary-monks
In case someone suffered brain damage feels strange, there's an all-monk game starting on roll20.

[OgreBattle]

In case someone suffered brain damage feels strange, there's an all-monk game starting on roll20.

do eet

[Longes]

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2014/08/8_r ... finder.php

[Username17]

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2014/08/8_r ... finder.php

That was just sad.

"3rd edition is old!"
"5th edition feels old!"

You can't have it both ways. Either a "classic feel" is good or bad, it can't be a selling point in both directions.

-Username17

[ishy]

Sure you can.
Lets grab cars for example.

A classic look and feel on a car can be a great thing, but you still want 'modern stuff' like airbags* etc.

Or say you really like AD&D but fuck that THACO shit.

- edit:

Though when the author was talking about 'classic feel', he was actually talking about how much of a 'kitchen sink' the setting should be.

And while he stated that his reason was that 3e is old, his actual reason:

However, it's getting to be more of a niche thing for me because I've played it so much that it's become more nostalgic than exciting.

Still, I can't deny my urge for something new and

Having played a lot of X and wanting to try something new is a legitimate reason, even though it says absolutely nothing about the products


* note: Airbags are not exactly modern, but you get the point.

[nockermensch]

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2014/08/8_r ... finder.php

That was just sad.

"3rd edition is old!"
"5th edition feels old!"

You can't have it both ways. Either a "classic feel" is good or bad, it can't be a selling point in both directions.

-Username17

It's worse than this. It literally starts one of the bad points with "At this point, we've all seen elves and orcs and whatnot done to death." and finishes it with we should totally return to elves and orcs.

[Longes]

I found this one to be the most hilarious.

Both D&D and Pathfinder use classes as one of the primary identifiers of your character and what he or she can do, i.e. Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, etc. The prime gaming party is supposed to be one sneaky person who finds traps and hurts things real bad, one who is tough, one who heals everyone (or "leads" them when they got a concept facelift for D&D 4th) and one who blows up your enemies. So you have this team of people who run around murdering things and stealing stuff. It works great!

It is a little limited, though. It's not like everyone who steals for a living is the same. So, Archetypes come in to make your Rogue a Scout. This is a good thing, but Pathfinder has an awkward way of doing it where you replace little pieces of your character one at a time. You can have more than one Archetype, but only if they don't replace the same class feature. So get ready to put them side by side and read line by line for overlap. More dangerously, they require you to trade character abilities you shouldn't trade. A Poison Master Rogue might not be able to find traps any more in exchange for learning how to poison stuff. So now no one can find traps. This is a bad thing, especially since poison sucks in Pathfinder. D&D 5th's solution? Well, everyone gets a single free Archetype and no one can trade away their essential class features. Much, much easier.

"Rogue is a bad class, and you can make poor choices to make it worse. So we took out the ability to make choices, and now everything is good!"

[mean_liar]

Reading that reminded me that Pathfinder did some pretty cool stuff.

5e is some stolen shit, some old shit, and nothing new. I get the impression their design aesthetic was "we better not fuck this up" rather than "let's do something novel and awesome". That's wiser, since they probably couldn't handle anything novel and that's not their target demographic anyway, but it's still disappointing. 3e multiclassing and prestige classes are awesome; the multiclassing could've been better (spellcasting fuckery, really) but they were neat innovations for DnD. 5e doesn't really seem to have much of that.

[ACOS]

3e multiclassing and prestige classes are awesome; the multiclassing could've been better (spellcasting fuckery, really)

I see this a lot; and I can't say I disagree with the sentiment.
The question I have is: how do you fix it within a 3.x-type paradigm?
I'm sure this has been talked to death; and I'm not interested in the rehashing the whole thing - the bumper sticker answer will suffice.
I've toyed with the idea of working in something resembling how ToB handles Initiator Level. Yes/no?