Game Mechanics You Hate

[erik]

I don't like consumable items/ammo in RPGs. If they renew daily (spells or daily powers) that's ok but I hate having to track that shit on a permanent basis.

Likewise having to track mundane equipment/rations. Bleh.

[Wiseman]

Mass combat systems that are incredibly fiddly and complex.

Choices where you might as well flip a coin.

[Dean]

I've never seen a good RPG mass combat system. Ever.

[Username17]

I've never seen a good RPG mass combat system. Ever.

Actually good mass combat systems are really hard to do. The major players in that arena (such as Warhammer) are actually not very good for the most part. So to make a good RPG mass combat system, you have to design a game that is actually very hard to design, and you have to make it play nicely with another game that was designed to care about very different things.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

I think the best implementation in the abstract for mass combat has been narrative, where the combat is a series of vignettes involving the characters acting at some degree of risk, with success in the vignette scene contributing to overall success.

I don't think I've ever seen a mass combat system that scales up from RPG to mass scale that's ever worth the number crunching and break in immersion.

[Blicero]

I've never seen a good RPG mass combat system. Ever.

The OSR blogosphere has been raving about ACKS' mass combat supplement, Domains at War. Unfortunately, they are the OSR blogosphere.

[Username17]

I think the best implementation in the abstract for mass combat has been narrative, where the combat is a series of vignettes involving the characters acting at some degree of risk, with success in the vignette scene contributing to overall success.

I don't think I've ever seen a mass combat system that scales up from RPG to mass scale that's ever worth the number crunching and break in immersion.

The obvious counter example of course is Mech Warrior, where the mass combat system is basically better than the "regular" combat game. It underlines a more general point, which is that putting roleplaying elements into a mass battle game is no more difficult than it is to put roleplaying elements into a skirmish battle game. King's Bounty is not a worse game than Final Fantasy Tactics, they just have a different scale for their combat minigame.

The issue of having a decent skirmish game and a decent mass combat game at the same time is a pretty big issue, and I can't recall it being done. But that's mostly because getting either one of those even "passably OK" is incredibly difficult and asking a game to get both right is kind of like asking a golfer to hit two holes in one in a row on different holes.

-Username17

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Crusader Kings is something I feel you can roleplay very well in, and the combat there is a very abstract mass combat system. All my friends love to talk about how cool it would be to be a CK2 guy in D&D. The trouble I find is making that into an interesting game where you play a standard TTRPG with 3-7 PCs all of whom demand similar amounts of spotlight. Pendragon and Ars Magica and Rogue Trader handle it by forcing you to go on adventures and kill stuff by hand often enough. It's not a huge paradigm shift, but it's the general approach I would use in these situations; everyone gets a unit of currency representing opportunity cost, call it a "season" or whatnot, you describe what you spend your time doing and the GM MTPs up the results, with domain management and siege warfare and such all falling under this header.

[fectin]

The Exalted mass combat system is decent. It's not good, because Exalted combat has some pretty big pitfalls to start with, but it's workable, flows naturally as an extension of personal combat, and easy to understand.
While I wouldn't recommend exporting it wholesale, there are far worse places you could take your cues from in designing something new and actually-workable.

[Fwib]

How is the Mass Combat system of SIFRP? Just as terrible as (apparently) every other part? I ask because the other members of my group are totally into GoT and are all enthusiastic about playing SIFRP (complete with throwing around house-rules on the spot and stuff) and I don't know a system that has decent social-fu built in to suggest to use in place of SIFRP for a GoT campaign.

[TheFlatline]

How is the Mass Combat system of SIFRP? Just as terrible as (apparently) every other part? I ask because the other members of my group are totally into GoT and are all enthusiastic about playing SIFRP (complete with throwing around house-rules on the spot and stuff) and I don't know a system that has decent social-fu built in to suggest to use in place of SIFRP for a GoT campaign.

I don't remember mass combat rules in my copy. It's buried somewhere in boxes so I can't dig it up fast.

I imagine there *are* mass combat rules because the kingdom simulator portion of the game can actually churn out armies.

[TheFlatline]

Also, I've come to the decision that I hate failing forward RPG systems. Why? Because most of them are lazy copouts and just leave it on the players/DM to come up with all the mitigating circumstances. Which in practice usually means the DM is dealing with triple the creativity workload, in running the entire game, coming up with fail forward interesting shit for every die roll you perform, and more often than not the players letting the DM come up with that shit for all *their* die rolls too.

I'm okay with improv, but for the love of god please don't build an entire game focused around improving off your improv's improv.

[Dean]

The Exalted mass combat system is decent. It's not good, because Exalted combat has some pretty big pitfalls to start with, but it's workable, flows naturally as an extension of personal combat, and easy to understand.

Exalted's system was definitely the best I'd ever seen. That just felt like such an insane thing to write that I decided not too. It is unfortunately completely relegated to working in a die pool system so no use in even trying to port it conceptually into D&D.

[Longes]

The Exalted mass combat system is decent. It's not good, because Exalted combat has some pretty big pitfalls to start with, but it's workable, flows naturally as an extension of personal combat, and easy to understand.
While I wouldn't recommend exporting it wholesale, there are far worse places you could take your cues from in designing something new and actually-workable.

Oh dear god, no. Exalted mass combat system is one of the worst part of Exalted. Allow me to explain.

In Exalted, the troops are abstracted via "You wear them" system. Each unit has a leader, and the troops add attack and defense bonuses. Since this is Exalted, and you have excellencies, those bonuses are negligible. It alsom makes the soldiers and their equipment negligible. Genetically enginiered Yu-Shan Marines in power armor with lightsabers don't add much more than peasants in furs with pitchforks.
Additionally, all your charms extend onto your unit, so a Solar using Leaping Dodge Method can jump with his hundred soldiers away from the enemy attack, or use his perfect defense to protect them all. This isn't bad, per se, but it's very weird, and makes AOE attacks absolutely useless, since there's no area to hit - you are fighting a single target.
Additionally, your skills in mass combat become capped at the level of your War skill. This creates a weird situation where enemies that wouldn't be able to scratch you if fought in normal combat, become a horrible exalted-killing monstrosity when they go into Mass Combat (which trumps normal combat).

The biggest problem though, is "You wear them" abstraction. You can't play a genius strategist who isn't that good with a sword, because your army is your equipment, and you fight with your Melee or Martial Arts skill, not with your War skill.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

The biggest problem though, is "You wear them" abstraction. You can't play a genius strategist who isn't that good with a sword, because your army is your equipment, and you fight with your Melee or Martial Arts skill, not with your War skill.

Seems like a good fix would be to let two PCs combine their efforts. Griffith does the Tzuing, setting the skill cap, and Guts does the chopping, determining the pool size.

[Longes]

The biggest problem though, is "You wear them" abstraction. You can't play a genius strategist who isn't that good with a sword, because your army is your equipment, and you fight with your Melee or Martial Arts skill, not with your War skill.

Seems like a good fix would be to let two PCs combine their efforts. Griffith does the Tzuing, setting the skill cap, and Guts does the chopping, determining the pool size.

The problem here is that you are still not in mass combat. You have two dudes, wearing +1 amulets fighting other dudes wearing +1 amulets. It just so happens that the amulets are in a form of a hundred guys.

[Longes]

Exalted has a similar problem with its giant enemy crabs robots. Warstriders function like armor. EXACTLY like armor. They have relatively big soak (damage reduction), give bonus to strength and penalize your agility. Agility is a god stat you use to hit people. Reducing your agility is bad. Strength is a useless stat, because weapons have massive damage that makes high strength fairly irrelevant. Big soak is pointless in Exalted, outside of a few splat-specific builds (lunar soak monster and malfean soak monster), because weapons have massive damage that makes soak irrelevant, and you have a tiny health pool that prohibits you from ever allowing an attack to connect. And there are no penalties for fighting big things. All this means that in every situation possible you are better fighting naked, than in a giant robot.

Also, because giant robots function like armor, mech pilot is not a valid concept.

[fectin]

You are mistaken, in both posts.

Warstriders have a fairly high hardness, which means most attacks just bounce off of them, and completely fail to interact with the soak system.
While they do suffer somewhat on attack from reduced dexterity, you can solve that by not letting yourself get kited about. Either take the giant shotgun, or focus on mass combat. I have no idea why you think you can't have mech pilots, and so can't address it. It's a stupid concept, in the same way that "sword guy" is stupid, but you totally could do that if you really wanted to.

On mass combat, it already works as Sakuya suggested. Guts takes up a hero slot, and Griffith is commander.

Your specific descriptions are likewise mistaken. Dice cap varies by exalt type, but solars are representative, and are limited to doubling their [attribute + ability] pool, which caps at 10 dice (equivalent to 5 successes) for any power level where you're likely to care about mass combat. Genetically engineered marines in power armor with lightsabers probably have a close combat rating of 8, and add more successes to your pool than excellencies can. Peasants with pitchforks likely add 3. Not only is the difference between them as much as maxing your excellency each time, even the peasants are a significant improvement over nothing. Each other stat plays out similarly.

I don't know where you get that you can just declare "mass combat!" and have it trump everything. That idea is not supported by the rulebook. Even if you could, any unit that could threaten an exalt is likely to be more dangerous individually than as a unit, even if you have no war and they have all the war.

[rapa-nui]

Thanks for the responses. A few thoughts...

The IV system in Pokemon adds nothing to the game besides making it a chore to raise monsters and disincentivizing keeping your original monsters around - which contradicts the themes of friendship. For that matter natures and EVs too.

This is an excellent example of the incentives in the crunch/mechanics directly contradicting the stated goal of the fluff/story. I've never been too fond of the Pokemon games (as implemented... the concept is awesome), and this one of the reasons. It also amplifies the amount of damnable grinding you have to do.

Death spirals. Any system that makes you continuously weaker as you lose health sucks incredibly hard. Combats become an endless whiff fest as everyone flails about like weaklings.

Overall I agree, but there can be OK implementations. One recent one was The Banner Saga, where your damage and health were the same stat. The interesting thing though, is that heavily damaged characters can still attack the opponent's armor stat with no drawback. Also, the game has this weird turn system where each side take a turn, and not each character in the combat. It creates all sorts of weird incentives and tensions. Not sure if I really like it though.

Having an MP Meter AND Cooldowns for abilities, it seems ok to have one or the other, but pointless to have both.

Depends. In a tabletop game... yeah probably too much bookkeeping. But in videogames, this opens up a lot of design space, specially if the resources of cooldown time and MP are fungible to some degree.

permanent character death

Probably a matter of taste. I agree it shouldn't be the default in videogames. It just makes me reload my last save (Fire Emblem!!!). But playing Diablo isn't fun unless you do it on Hardcore. As for tabletops gaming... well obviously gritty survival horror games don't work if characters have mega plot armor.

I also hate mechanics designed to waste your time. Like the amount of walking back and forth you have to do in certain games.

Any mechanic that enforces waiting. When I can't skip a cutscene, I can't skip dialogue, etc.

Yeah, these should not exist: it's a problem that has been identified and known for a very long time in the game design industry. Even very small waits add up if they are right before a tricky or lengthy section. Recently, I was playing Cave Story (which is an excellent indy sidescroller) and got to an encounter near the end where you have to fight 3 bosses of increasing difficulty in a row. In between the fights there are little cutscences. You cannot save between fights. How did the person making the game not realize the frustration that would entail?

I think stun locking and turn skipping also fall into the same kind of frustration: you just want to make decisions and take actions. These things don't let you!

So follow-up question: what tabletop RPG has the fewest number of egregious design flaws? Not "what game is the most fun"... it could be a very boring lackluster system with the saving grace that it has few underlying problems of the ones discussed here.

[Longes]

You are mistaken, in both posts.

Warstriders have a fairly high hardness, which means most attacks just bounce off of them, and completely fail to interact with the soak system.
While they do suffer somewhat on attack from reduced dexterity, you can solve that by not letting yourself get kited about. Either take the giant shotgun, or focus on mass combat. I have no idea why you think you can't have mech pilots, and so can't address it. It's a stupid concept, in the same way that "sword guy" is stupid, but you totally could do that if you really wanted to.

The highest possible hardness for them is 30, and that comes with -10 dex penalty. Attacks with pre-soak damage of 31+ are not rare in Exalted.

I have no idea why you think you can't have mech pilots, and so can't address it. It's a stupid concept, in the same way that "sword guy" is stupid, but you totally could do that if you really wanted to.

Because you fight in a warstrider the same way you fight without it. In the land of Exalted Kratos is the master mech pilot, and Shinji is a chump.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

So follow-up question: what tabletop RPG has the fewest number of egregious design flaws? Not "what game is the most fun"... it could be a very boring lackluster system with the saving grace that it has few underlying problems of the ones discussed here.

The most recent edition of Savage Worlds doesn't really have a lot that sticks out to me. It's a generic game, with the only conceit being that mooks can get extremely lucky. Advancement is extremely boring "the GM decides when you level up" stuff, and the skill system just barely passes the "is this better than MTP" test. But you can quickly throw together a one shot in whatever setting you want (its sorta like Champions in that it's good for infringing on IP wantonly without making that a bullet point on the back cover). It's like you describe, boring and lackluster, but playable.

Nobilis 3e is a game I like a lot, with its biggest glitches being unrelated to mechanics. It's related to layout; it's not written like a manual or handbook, but like a book, showing the author constructing a narrative that, like Slaughterhouse Five, is adaptable to the viewer jumping around the chapters in the wrong order, but still requires a good number of the puzzle pieces to start getting a picture out of it. Also, the artwork is, as one of my group describes it, akin to that of "Sonic the Hedgehog original character spreads on Deviantart". I consider this a feature, not a bug; this is stuff that invites you, the reader, to create content for the world, whereas a beautifully rendered spread of Drizzt or a squad of Ultramarines invites you to be a passive consumer of commercially media. Feature or not, however, it does make for a difficult elevator pitch.

[Neurosis]

Everything silva loves.

[Concise Locket]

With a few exceptions, d20 based games.

[fectin]

Warstrider max hardness is 15. And it is very unusual to find a mundane threat that puts out that much damage pool.

If your gripe is that Solars can chew through warstriders, you're making a cupcakes argument.

[Longes]

Warstrider max hardness is 15. And it is very unusual to find a mundane threat that puts out that much damage pool.

If your gripe is that Solars can chew through warstriders, you're making a cupcakes argument.

Who cares about mundane threats? Chargen exalted can ignore any attempts by mortals to wound them ever, without even using perfects. Mundanes are not a credible threat in this game.