How can we sleep while our game is burning? Or, how many problems?

[MNblockhead]

For me at least though, I've never wanted to play those light frameworks for more than say 12 hours with the same characters. I guess everyone has different aesthetics but rules light frameworks to me fill like one shots or short campaigns, whereas if I want to do some serious story telling and stay in a system for 300 hours or more than I'm going to want something crunchier with more meaningful advancement. Also light frameworks tend to have one thing that they do and one thing only with the players expected to stay in the lane and not depart from what the system intends to be the play cycle. I prefer in a long campaign for the players to feel like they can just do whatever and the system won't constrain them.

Yeah, same here. InSPECTREs, Dialect, Grin, Dread, etc. have always been one shots for me. Even Paranoia is a game I only run as a several session mini campaign at most. The best systems for long campaigns for me are medium crunch games like D&D or Warhammer Fantasy. Light enough that players can pick up what they need to during play and which I pick up with a moderate investiment of time into learning the rules. But they have enough complexity to customize and add to.

This conversation has made me realize that complexity really isn't about the volume of text in the rules but more about how streamlined they are and how easy there are to access and engage with. The core mechanics and play loop of D&D, for example, is quite straight forward. Generally, the sub-systems in my 5e game--whether RAW or home‑brew--are only needed for specific situations, are easy to pull up and easy to explain and run without a great deal of friction. Most importantly, it is really easy to explain to players what they need to do in a given situation. There are board games I've played with only a few pages of rules that take a lot longer for a group of players to figure out and start playing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Its hard to answer this, because it depends on how major the problems are and how easy they are to patch.

 

[GMMichael]

Its hard to answer this, because it depends on how major the problems are and how easy they are to patch.

Take a swing. We're just chatting.

. . . I have, however, stopped playing games I used to play (like all previous editions of D&D), because a newer version game out and I chose to play that instead. Not because it was "better" necessarily, but only because it was newer and I like trying new things.

This is the other category of "0" that I decided to leave out: one would abandon ship without any issues. I guess the reasoning is that it's not really someone's favorite game if they'd just walk away? Wait... it might also count as 1 problem: not new enough.

 

[schneeland]

I'm voting 3+, because a) three is the number that we shall count, and the number of the counting shall be three, and b) because, more seriously, it usually takes quite a number of issues before I abandon a game system.

That being said, I agree with @Thomas Shey that it depends on the criticality of the issues and how easy that can be amended. I have also found that over time, my tolerance for issues went down significantly. The two major systems I have abandoned are Shadowrun and modern D&D (defined as 3e and newer), but I played both for years (in case of 3e even more than a decade) and was fine with just house-ruling or omitting what I didn't like.

These days, I tend to play mostly systems where I perceive no major issues. That's not to say they have none, just that the ones they have do not bother me too much. In theory, I also have collected a larger amount of design notes for custom systems, but similar to @el-remmen actually working on turning them into a usable system would come at the expense of game time and that's something I am currently not willing to do.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Take a swing. We're just chatting.


This is the other category of "0" that I decided to leave out: one would abandon ship without any issues. I guess the reasoning is that it's not really someone's favorite game if they'd just walk away? Wait... it might also count as 1 problem: not new enough.

The issue I have with selection 1 is that me not playing older D&D versions are not due to a "problem" that I had. I switch games because I wish to play different games, not because I want to make the active decision to stop playing a game. It wasn't a problem with 4E that made me start playing 5E, I just chose to change.

Suggesting "problems" or using the term "abandon" implies that there was a issue with the previous game that caused the change... rather than just that times change and people move on to something different.

 

[Lanefan]

While this might not exactly square with what the OP was getting at, this is where the words went once I started writing...

Rewords "Beds Are Burning" (Midnight Oil) - DE 13 23

PLAYER REVOLT (MAKE IT FAIR)

Out where the story's wrote
The blood flows 'neath the forest smoke
Empty wrecks and boiling tempers
Dreaming wipes us out again

The time has come
To say who cares
We've paid the price
Let's make it fair
The time has come
A fact's a fact
The game is ours
Let's get it back

How can we sleep when our game is burning
Seventeen deaths and we're still not learning

The time has come
To say who cares
We've paid the price
Now let's make it fair

Ten once played where four remain
Adventure ends in endless pain
The western marches live and breathe
And wipe us out again

The time has come
To say who cares
We've paid the price
Let's make it fair
The time has come
A fact's a fact
The game is ours
Let's get it back

How can we sleep when our game is burning
Thirty-nine deaths and we're still not learning
How can we sleep when our game is burning
Forty-three deaths and we're still not learning

The time has come
Let's see who cares
We've paid the price
Now let's get our share
The time has come
A fact's a fact
It belongs to us
We're gonna take it back

How can we sleep when our game is burning
Seventy deaths and we're still not learning

 

[Thomas Shey]

Take a swing. We're just chatting.

The problem is, for some problems your numbers seem very small; it takes a lot of accumulated problem areas for me to toss in the towel in a lot of cases if they're not common or easy to patch, but even one can do it if its too baked into the system and too important.

At a point in my life, games in the D&D sphere landed into this because there were just too many things (the hit point model, armor effecting to-hit rather than damage, levels, classes...) that had come to bother me, but they were individually things I could tolerate (and do again these days), but they pushed it over the edge when I realized how much the relatively limited and constrained mechanical character definition annoyed me.

On the other end, I put up with with certain annoyances in the Hero System for years and years because they didn't quite hit that threshold and I liked enough other things.

So...

 

[GMMichael]

I switch games because I wish to play different games, not because I want to make the active decision to stop playing a game.

This says to me 1) you don't have a favorite game, and/or 2) you prefer newer games to older games. But if you haven't made a decision to stop playing a game (or avoid one), then I guess "0" would be your poll choice.

At a point in my life, games in the D&D sphere landed into this because there were just too many things (the hit point model, armor effecting to-hit rather than damage, levels, classes...) that had come to bother me, but they were individually things I could tolerate (and do again these days), but they pushed it over the edge when I realized how much the relatively limited and constrained mechanical character definition annoyed me.

On the other end, I put up with with certain annoyances in the Hero System for years and years because they didn't quite hit that threshold and I liked enough other things.

Hmm. Abandoned D&D for too many problems, but Hero didn't hit "too many." Did one replace the other? Did you consider either a favorite?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Hmm. Abandoned D&D for too many problems, but Hero didn't hit "too many." Did one replace the other? Did you consider either a favorite?

Well, its complicated by the fact that at the period when I was most heavily using Hero, I wasn't using it for fantasy, so there was a genre change to boot. If you wanted to look at what more directly replaced D&D for me, it'd have been RuneQuest (non-Gloranthan) and for many years I had very, very few problems with it (and when I did, that was partly change of taste, and partly that it ended up lacking some tools for character definition, too and really still wanted to be done in semi-random character gen fashion, something I'd really come to dislike and was pretty intractable to fix).

Hero was probably my go-to game for the single longest period any game system was, but that was also in a period where I was probably running superheroes more than any other genre, so its hard to directly compare. I will say it out-competed a number of other superhero systems for me, and parts of that were definitely for system-based reasons. It also had a few persistent issues I arguably ignored for onto two decades.

 

[Laurefindel]

Have you abandoned a favorite game? How many issues did it take to seal the deal? What are they? If you're still playing your favorite game, what would be the turning point for you to go to a new one?

Voted 3+ because I have yet to come across any game that would have less than three problems.

For me, the number of problems doesn't really matter compared to how disruptive they are, which depends on groups, campaigns, ans styles of play. A single big and disruptive problem, even if it isn't inherent to the game itself such as "I don't have anyone to play that game with", or "we've played enough of this, let's try something else", is still more likely to push me toward another game than a number of smaller, less disruptive ones.

Thinking about it, we have abandoned a few games in the past, but usually it was more because we didn't "feel" like it, or couldn't wrap our minds around it well enough/soon enough to really enjoy ourselves. So basically, I abandon a game when the cons outweigh the pros, no matter how many there are. But even then, "abandoned" rarely means "I'm never ever going to play this again".