Thinking About the Purpose of Mechanics from a Neo-Trad Perspective

[AbdulAlhazred]

The reason it isn't (always) easier to RP a thief when the game provides rules for what thieves do is because there's more than one way to depict a thief, so if the given rules enforce one conception of thief-hood it might clash with another conception of thiefhood. For example, it might be harder to roleplay persona 5-esque phantom thieves using BITD because it migth feel off for the kids to have vices that bring problems into their lives that way. In your swimming example, it might be a requirement to do a front crawl preventing you from doing your breastroke or butterfly (though the analogy is tortured.)

Another classic problem is simply that a lot of systems, especially skill and ability centered systems like WotC D&D, or a lot of, usually trad/classic oriented ones, simply don't depict the character in action very well. A simplistic example might be a classic TSR D&D thief, who at low levels will basically suck at most of the things you might want your character to be good at, or just not be good at the right ones (note how 2e changed the rules so you got to decide which thief abilities to focus on). Assumed incompetence, caused by some skill systems, can lead to similar issues. Or 3e's skill system where you have a choice of being competent enough to function effectively in play, OR develop the skills you want for your character concept.

It could also manifest in terms of simply build inflexibility, I want to be a certain thing, but game X simply doesn't do that thing. I can kinda ham it and get the appearance and background of what I want, but in play I have to do something that is not that thing, or else do a ton of reflavoring.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I didn't feel that my character in Blades in the Dark was intensively remade. Oh sure he racked up a few traumas, but I didn't really make all that much use of them and they fit pretty well into the general personality I'd already come up with. If anything, he became ever more like I'd originally envisioned him after a very confusing first session. Except for the whole becoming a demon leviathan thing at the end, that was a fun surprise!

Yeah, MOST of the time my character didn't change a vast amount, or the changes were in the direction I was aiming for (or at least decided myself in the moment, like seducing the Inquisitor). OTOH there was the time I suddenly started calling down She Who Slays in Darkness, lol. I never thought of that, and kinda had thought of my character as hating the very idea of all these demonic/god sort of things, but oh well! And then he killed his old buddy turned rival. That was also kind of an uncontrolled event. So I guess it just entirely depends on how seriously the player is determined to be in complete control of the PC concept. Also I expect that the GM can be a pretty big factor there in some sense, but honestly I don't think @Manbearcat either pushed that much nor gave us a ton of leeway to write things our way either, stuff 'just happened'. I guess he could have latched onto our traumas or something, which didn't happen. Interestingly I didn't really see anything hinting at GMs doing that in BitD...

 

[niklinna]

Yeah, MOST of the time my character didn't change a vast amount, or the changes were in the direction I was aiming for (or at least decided myself in the moment, like seducing the Inquisitor). OTOH there was the time I suddenly started calling down She Who Slays in Darkness, lol. I never thought of that, and kinda had thought of my character as hating the very idea of all these demonic/god sort of things, but oh well! And then he killed his old buddy turned rival. That was also kind of an uncontrolled event. So I guess it just entirely depends on how seriously the player is determined to be in complete control of the PC concept. Also I expect that the GM can be a pretty big factor there in some sense, but honestly I don't think @Manbearcat either pushed that much nor gave us a ton of leeway to write things our way either, stuff 'just happened'. I guess he could have latched onto our traumas or something, which didn't happen. Interestingly I didn't really see anything hinting at GMs doing that in BitD...

Yeah a lot of that seems left up to the player. I did have Skewth quietly avoid further entanglement with She Who Slays in Darkness, and for good reason—as essentially a necromancer, he didn't want spirits slipping away to the afterlife! But he was also an eminently pragmatic little killer and managed to find ways to take certain benefits even when that did in fact happen. I'll freely admit to not having creating a particularly compelling character to begin with—I had bought in a little too much to "play to find out what happens" rather than "have an agenda". I had the hints of an agenda, what with the murdered parents and all, but it didn't get traction for entirely too long and I could have done more about that.

Edit: Fixed a typo.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

What were some of your (general audience of this post) favorite characters ever?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What were some of your (general audience of this post) favorite characters ever?

Well, I liked my BitD Cutter, Takeo Takeshi, only known survivor of the mysterious realm/island of Shimayama. I mean, the character is a bit of a fairly straightforward cliche, the warrior dude with the mysterious background, complete with Japanese style cutlery and such. OTOH it was a fun game and BitD supplied enough stuff to insure that he wasn't just a total cardboard cutout. It was a mechanically fun game, with a decent amount of skill required to RP in the "many moving parts" milieu of Doskvol, plus getting some chances to see how the character thought about some of his entanglements and see where his nature would take him.

Now, I had, WAY back starting in the early '80s, this 1e AD&D Ranger that got mauled by demon worshipers and all his friends killed (like as we were walking towards the 'here is where you find adventure' village). So I was a bit miffed at the GM for that, and so the character got really mad and started going after these cultists and even anyone that wouldn't do anything about it, etc. So this character persists for YEARS and YEARS in our extended series of AD&D campaigns, and just, for some reason even though I wasn't really TRYING to do it, gets more and more fanatical and warped by this revenge fixation, until he's like, clad in undead treant bark, wielding a sword of life stealing and a ring of vampiric regeneration, and all the other players are like "no, no we wish you wouldn't play Cargorn this time! That guy is crazy, he'll get us killed!" That was amusing. Finally the character sees Demogorgon, his nemesis, on the other side of a vast plain filled with demons, legions of them, and goes crazy, and starts slicing a way through them, and vampirically stealing their life force and pumping up his hit points to some stupid godlike level. So eventually he makes it all the way to this demon lord and kills it! So, now there's a NEW demon lord, my character! lol.

OK, so that was a very one-dimensional character, but it was still very fun because not much like your typical trad AD&D characters, even higher level ones, in my experience.

 

[niklinna]

What were some of your (general audience of this post) favorite characters ever?

The one multi-year 4e campaign I played in I created a star pact warlock, who'd been conceived under inauspicous circumstances. He had a horribly mutated twin brother who'd been whisked away by the midwife. His mother went crazy, and he himself was kept in the basement by his father and had no social skills or learned morals. I role-played him by staring past other players' faces and talking in monotone. He started out routinely asking the others if he should kill so-and-so who was an obstacle or had something they wanted, but gradually learned a little about living with people. He also got whispers from his patron constellation of stars (notes from the DM), that led him to behave very erratically as far as the other player characters were concerned.

At the start the DM told me one of my extra powers (from being human?) was an additional gift from the stars and they'd taken something in exchange but I didn't know what. Much later during the course of play, we had a prophecy that if I went to a particular dungeon, all would be lost, and so I had to sit that one out! The others said they encounted an eldritch being that ate names. The kicker was at the big climax, when Venger (yes that Venger*) tried to activate an ancient artifact of 12 parts, by speaking the names of my patron stars. When he got to the last one it fizzled. Now it had been years of play, right, but the penny dropped and I walked up to the artifact, spoke the names of the first 11 stars, and my own name, and the artifact activated, allowing us to fix the world that had been kinda broken the last time Venger tried to get at the artifact. That one star had swapped our names!

* The whole campaign revolved around collecting legendary magic items, six of which were the items from the 80s cartoon. We didn't figure that out until we had several of them, even though one of the NPCs we'd been getting advice from was a crusty old fella with a club and a pet unicorn. We also met adult Michael (who died when he gave us his life-preseriving magic ring), and undead Eric (well I didn't meet Eric, he was in that name-eater dungeon, and might even have had his name eaten).

Edit: Fixed typos, added a clarification.

 

[Voadam]

I never had the problem a lot of people had with 4e not being conducive to roleplaying, my games in 4e were absolutely lush with roleplaying. We just did it, and whenever we needed to play out a fight, or even pick a lock or whatever, we turned to the ruleset-- we reverse engineered powers to figure out what our characters could do in the fictional space (my swordmage, could in fact, teleport every six seconds, and did so frequently).

The key I think, was that my background had primed me to not use mechanics to anchor my roleplay, and instead the system fit neatly to emulate physical space and conflict and answer the question of "should my character be able to do the thing." But it also needs to be said that despite a lack of mechanics that explicitly support roleplaying, my games were very much about roleplaying.

I'm not sure they were necessarily worse for that reality either which I know is one of the canonical answers to statement, instead it feels like it taught me a key lesson, that mechanics don't always need to provide a game with focus, but instead they need to step in to support the areas of the game that need the most support, when doing them without support creates friction. In that sense DND 4e's combat rules fit neatly into applying a ludic lens to fight resolution, and allowing us to demonstrate our character's elaborate powersets, while still allowing us to perform roleplaying in a way that was very natural to us (being me, and mostly people I taught how to roleplay.)

I started in 81 with Moldvay B/X Basic D&D and 1e AD&D so there were very few non-combat mechanics. Mostly thief skills, charisma reaction adjustment, and some specific racial abilities. It was years of playing D&D before non-weapon proficiencies were introduced in Oriental Adventures.

Social interaction was generally first person perspective talking. Challenges included a lot of player skill. Groups could be very into social interaction stuff as part of play experience or almost none at all.

In the 90s in college I was in a long term 1e campaign with a heavy primary emphasis on first person roleplaying and politics, mostly with no mechanics.

I never really got the criticisms that 4e D&D was just combat and therefore no roleplay compared to other D&D editions, I was doing the same fairly roleplay heavy stuff in 4e as I was in other editions.

It just wasn't as granular on its skill allocations as 3e, and encouraged more narratively cinematic results plus introducing a skill challenge mechanic to give an option to get mechanical skill use into more of a group multiround activity instead of a straight one character one roll situation that was 3e's default.

 

[Voadam]

How do rules designed to inform a player of their character's abilities 'get in the way' of RP?

Another classic problem is simply that a lot of systems, especially skill and ability centered systems like WotC D&D, or a lot of, usually trad/classic oriented ones, simply don't depict the character in action very well. A simplistic example might be a classic TSR D&D thief, who at low levels will basically suck at most of the things you might want your character to be good at, or just not be good at the right ones (note how 2e changed the rules so you got to decide which thief abilities to focus on). Assumed incompetence, caused by some skill systems, can lead to similar issues. Or 3e's skill system where you have a choice of being competent enough to function effectively in play, OR develop the skills you want for your character concept.

It could also manifest in terms of simply build inflexibility, I want to be a certain thing, but game X simply doesn't do that thing. I can kinda ham it and get the appearance and background of what I want, but in play I have to do something that is not that thing, or else do a ton of reflavoring.

In D&D it can even be at the ability score level.

If your conception of how you want to play your fighter is they are like Hannibal, a soldier who is a leader who works up plans then in D&D there can be arguments about whether they should be roleplaying the stats on the sheet and what is the character's int, wis, and cha. Did they roll high on these to roleplay a smart leader? Did they assign points there instead of str and con in a point buy to sacrifice effective fighter build for roleplay concept?

If your concept is you are the A-team soldier Face who fast talks and you are a 3e fighter, Charisma does not synergize with fighter stuff, and even more relevantly diplomacy and bluff are both cross class skills combined with the fighters' low number of skill points. If you are playing to the numbers then Fighter face mechanically maxxed out for the concept is going to be at best half as into fast talking as Rogue or Bard face who maxxed out those two social skills, with bard getting class spell effectiveness synergy from a high charisma.

In B/X without the skill mechanics in these areas you just generally roleplay your conception of the character how you want whether that is dumb crude thug, fast talking charmer, or clever plan making leader.

 

[pemerton]

What were some of your (general audience of this post) favorite characters ever?

A PC in my first long-running Rolemaster campaign was a sorcerer, which is the RM version of a dark-but-not-necromantic wizard. He would cast acid bolts and acid balls, scour opponents' souls, sometime take command of them by "banishing" fragments of their souls into soul objects (a bit like a reverse "magic jar"), and he could also disintegrate pretty large structures.

Xialath had been born into slavery, but at a certain point (in his backstory) had bought his freedom, and was a lawyer in his home city. Mechanically, he had noticeably high social and perception skills for a mage, which he had traded off against meditation skills. This proved to be (part of) his undoing.

He leased a house in his city, with a servant to deal with the riff raff, and in the basement a pit of acid that he would use to dispose of enemies of the need arose.

The other PCs were also mostly wizards. They all had meditation, which allowed them to regain their power points more quickly. On one occasion, Xialath needed to recover his power points quickly to keep up with his comrades, and so he purchases a mind-affecting root - Hugar (statted out in the RM herbs and drugs list) - from a shadowy character at the local market. It did the job, but the player failed the addiction roll, and so he spent more and more of his money on Hugar. When his annual lease payment on his home fell due he couldn't pay, and was evicted.

Around this time, one of the other PCs was reaching an agreement with Vecna (in this campaign a lich who had been in torpor for a long time, but had been returned to "life" by the PCs) to join with him, and with the forces of a neighbouring empire, to conquer the city he and Xialath hailed from. This PC persuaded Xialath to join in this effort, in exchange for a promise of restoration of his house, and the granting of a magistracy. So Xialath betrayed his home city out of greed. The other PC arranged for healing (Cure Mind Disease True, and probably also some Organ Healing) to end the Hugar addiction.

At the same time as his personal life was collapsing in these ways Xialath also suffered misadventure "in the field". That other PCs was a demon summoner, and on one occasion the two characters were flying through a great mountain range in a demonic skiff (under the control of the summoner PC). Sky giants spotted them, and hurled boulders at them; one of these struck Xialath and he fell to earth, suffering terrible injuries and having to be restored to life by a different faction of wizards.

In RM there is always a risk of losing control of a summoned demon, and on a subsequent occasion the two PCs were standing on a conjured floating platform above the abandoned castle they were investigating (at Vecna's behest, as best I recall) with a summoned demon that went rogue, and pushed Xialath from the platform. I think it was agreed that this would cause Xialath to suffer a Depression crit, and the roll for this was terrible. He collapsed, catatonic, in the wilderness outside the castle.

Xialath was recovered by a (NPC) Valley Elf scout, who had been spying on the PCs at the behest of the Mage of the Valley. She brought him back to consciousness, and abandoned her loyalty to the Mage in order to return with him to his home town. She was a shapechanging mage (a Mystic, in RM terms) and the two of them would shapechange into griffons and frolic in the skies above the city.

She accompanied the PCs on a mission to the minotaur-ruled caverns beneath another mountain range. Another summoned demon escaped control, and cut her in half (RM crits vs RM mage defences and hit points can be quite severe). As a result, Xialath once again spiralled into depression, addiction (alcohol at least, and maybe Hugar again - I don't remember now). He had to be magically restored to health again to head off on the final mission of that campaign, his goal being to recover sufficient money to pay for the mighty magic that would be needed to restore his beloved to life. Unfortunately, that mission was fatal for all the PCs, who died to a fireball in another dimension.

That player came up with other memorable PCs, but Xialath is the one I remember best.

 

[Aldarc]

Butting in a bit.

With BitD--I've never played it, although I've read through the book. To me, the world is so interesting I want to do things other than have heists in it. But, for people who want to play a heist game, having a game dedicated to heists is actually really good. If it were D&D and I'm playing a thief, I might never get a chance to actually do the heist I wanted. D&D (and many other similar systems) is built for a larger number of things, and quite frankly, has options that make heists unimportant; they become smash-and-grabs, or at higher levels, games where you teleport in, grab the loot, and teleport out. With BitD, you don't become so powerful that you can just teleport in (I don't think), and while you may be the sneaky thief who can sneak in (edit: in D&D), your companions very likely aren't built in the same lines. It's hard to have a heist with a barbarian in the party.

So anyway, it's not that BitD isn't needed when you already have another game where you can do the thing, it's that you have two games that take different approaches to the same thing.

FYI, BitD is not really a heist game despite how people talk about it, which I think does a huge disservice to the game. It's a criminal gangland game that may or may not have heists in it depending on how the player characters choose to go about expanding their turf. Heists may not be appropriate, for example, if the characters were part of a gang of mercenaries, drug dealers, or even cultists. You could use BitD, for example, to play something more akin to Gangs of New York. However, Leverage RPG is a game dedicated to heists.