New Legends & Lore: Player vs. Character

[Sammael]

Incidentally, why don't you also remove dice rolls for combat and the "occasional jump or lock pick?" Why do those things require special mechanics, since they can be also role-played or surmised from the character's basic stats?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Building up a rough-and-ready "default" set of "rules lite" procedures and mechanisms is easy, but producing a coherent set of interlocking rules that all make sense with one another and support a coherent agenda of play is hard. I want to pay WotC to produce the coherent, consistent and interlocking set, not the "here are some neat mechanisms to noodle with" set. I already have rule sets that amount to the latter, in actual fact.

But then, I wonder...what is the value of the interlocking set?

D&D is played by lots of different people playing lots of different campaigns. No one interlocking set of rules is going to be able to encompass them all. No one who wants, say, a narrative combat system is going to be happy with a minis grid, and if you make that minis grid combat system central to the game, you have effectively said, "We only want to attract people who are interested in this." No one who wants a grim-n-gritty system is going to be happy with wahoo levels of HP. No one who wants a magic-light game is going to be content with a game that depends on frequent and ever-increasing magic items. It's stuck. It can't be modified. It's inflexible. And because it takes so much time and effort and development cash to get right, it's not something you want to go back and re-visit very often.

Perhaps the closest we've been to this ideal is during the heyday of the d20 System, with its hundreds of variants on everything from hundreds of different publishers. Even then, D&D was only D&D, and they only used the core tightly interlocking system, without branching out themselves very much at all.

No one set of complex rules is going to be good for every group, so it would seem, at the level of publisher, that the ideal would be to produce a huge ecosystem of modular rules, variants, and custom content, none of which goes very "deep," but which is more easily cherry-picked. The "depth" can be added with bonus content (like Dragon and Dungeon magazines), or from house rules, but it would seem that breadth would be the more valuable thing, from the perspective of someone with limited resources to spend on developing rules.

 

[Rolflyn]

Incidentally, why don't you also remove dice rolls for combat and the "occasional jump or lock pick?" Why do those things require special mechanics, since they can be also role-played or surmised from the character's basic stats?

Fun. We find it more fun to have randomness and a chance of failure in combat or something dangerous like a jump over a ravine.

Also, these things are harder to describe. "I search the statue" is an easy substitute for "I roll a 18 search" "You found a secret panel in the statue". I don't know what the description would elicit a reply of "you hit him" vs. "you missed him".

For lock picking, I have to admit that isn't a very good example. Unless there's a risk of failure, rolling dice for this doesn't really fit our style.

Picking pockets would be a better example. The risk of failure via the dice feels more satisfying.

 

[The Shaman]

I find it more fun to have player skill tested. More fun to figure out a riddle myself than roll a skill check. More entertaining to check the statue for secret compartments than just roll a check for the entire room. More enjoyable to come up with a good argument for the titan to aid us than roll some dice and add a modifier.

Worth repeating.

 

[Rolflyn]

As I said before, I have no problem with that if the style is shared by all the people around the table.

We appreciate your concern about the players at our table. Have you considered that there might be a player that prefers our style at yours?

 

[I'm A Banana]

I find it more fun to have player skill tested. More fun to figure out a riddle myself than roll a skill check. More entertaining to check the statue for secret compartments than just roll a check for the entire room. More enjoyable to come up with a good argument for the titan to aid us than roll some dice and add a modifier.
...
We find it more fun to have randomness and a chance of failure in combat or something dangerous like a jump over a ravine.
...
The risk of failure via the dice feels more satisfying.

So my big question here is: what determines when you go with the first kind of fun, and when you go with the second kind of fun? And what if you flipped them around, using dice rolls to find secrets and figure out riddles, and just describing a jump over a ravine or a sword strike in combat?

The determining factor to me, on the outside looking in, simply that the consequences seem different. Fail to jump over a ravine, you might die. Fail to talk to the titan, you might find some other way to succeed.

This is what seems kind of arbitrary to me, though my gut says that it can't just be arbitrary. Why is avoiding injury the only time we break out the complex mechanical framework? What for? A ravine you fail to jump across is no less of a failure than a titan you can't convince to help you.

Perhaps it's a legacy thing. In early D&D games, life was so fragile and expendable that the DM needed more to justify their whims to kill or cripple you than just their say-so. They could point at the dice and go, "See, you had a fair chance!" This would perhaps keep players from walking out on them.

That's less relevant in today's games of characters who rarely die permanently, of course. As we've moved from characters who are assumed to fail (an overtly gamist/sim idea) to a notion of characters who are assumed to succeed (a more narrative idea), the distinction between a failure to jump over a cliff and a failure to find the treasure are nearly meaningless.

I wrestled with this a while ago when doing some FFZ design, about where the challenge in the game lies. When do you suffer the consequences for your failures, and what consequences can those be, to encourage you to keep playing? Especially in a more narrative game, where outright character death is not much of an option, how do you measure the degree of success? Or is this the tabletop version of an easy JRPG, where you're just pressing the A button over and over again when you roll the dice to watch a story unfold, perhaps with minor variations?

Maybe we're just trained and habituated from 30+ years of "You roll to hit, but you talk to convince" and we think it's somehow natural, the way things should be. But the game clearly does not have to be this way. There's fun in both modes for most players. When do you do one and when do you do another, and can they all coexist in the same system?

 

[ExploderWizard]

That's less relevant in today's games of characters who rarely die permanently, of course. As we've moved from characters who are assumed to fail (an overtly gamist/sim idea) to a notion of characters who are assumed to succeed (a more narrative idea), the distinction between a failure to jump over a cliff and a failure to find the treasure are nearly meaningless.

Poppycock

Assuming failure OR success pulls the game right out of rpg and should be avoided altogether.

Failures and successes have always had variable meaning. Not everything is life or death.

 

[prosfilaes]

No one set of complex rules is going to be good for every group, so it would seem, at the level of publisher, that the ideal would be to produce a huge ecosystem of modular rules, variants, and custom content, none of which goes very "deep," but which is more easily cherry-picked.

One of the big advantages of D&D is that it's a known set of rules. You want to play Nobilis or In Nomine, or even GURPS or Rifts, there's a good chance some or even all of your players won't have books and won't be familiar with the system; they'll need help in creating a character, and you'll constantly have deal with misunderstood rules and rules you need to look up in game.

With D&D? Many, even most, of the players have their own book. The players all know the rules; if someone forgets how crits work, almost anyone else can explain, without going back to the book. It gets run sometimes just because that's the fallback default that everyone knows.

With your system? What if you want your character to be able to swim? Is it a straight Strength check? Are we using the optional skills rules? What about the advanced swimming rules? Oh, I see, we're using the variants from Dragon 451, so all those points I put in swim are wasted because I'm a dwarf. Why don't we just play GURPS where the swimming rules are clear?

From the other side, I'm not a bloody game designer. If I wanted to have to consider two dozen different variants to make my game, I'd be one of the people with a 3-ring binder full of house rules. I want a nice set of balanced, workable rules, not to constantly be making decisions on what set of variant rules to be using. As a DM, I want a system that works out of the box.

 

[Rolflyn]

So my big question here is: what determines when you go with the first kind of fun, and when you go with the second kind of fun?

I think it is very subjective, but I know when I'm having fun and when I'm not. Rolling to answer a riddle is not fun to me. Rolling to hit a demon in combat is fun. Your reversed game would not hold my attention for very long.

For example, imagine playing Trivial Pursuit. I do this occasionally and find it fun. Now imagine playing Trivial Pursuit, but instead of answering the questions, you roll a skill check and succeed or fail. I wouldn't make it through a single game. Now what if maybe you first build a character to play with who is good at Entertainment but sucks at Science. This might be worth a game or two, but still not as fun to me as the original game.

On the other hand, take a pure combat game like Warhammer Quest or Castle Ravenloft and make it about description and it similarly falls apart for me.

And what if you flipped them around, using dice rolls to find secrets and figure out riddles, and just describing a jump over a ravine or a sword strike in combat?

This would be a game I would stay far away from. I play games to enjoy them and reversing the parts I find fun into their to-me-less-fun counterparts wouldn't work for me. But I would wonder if it works for someone else.

This is what seems kind of arbitrary to me, though my gut says that it can't just be arbitrary. Why is avoiding injury the only time we break out the complex mechanical framework? What for? A ravine you fail to jump across is no less of a failure than a titan you can't convince to help you.

I don't think danger is quite it. You could describe touching an object and have the results be damage.

I think it could come down to the adequacy of the description.

When you "I search the statue," there is definitely a chance of success to that action (something on the statue) and failure (nothing there). When you describe "I jump the ravine" or "I hit it with my sword" there isn't anything to go off of to determine the success or failure.

Similarly, when I try to convince the titan to stop working as a guard for the prison of the very gods that previously imprisioned him, I could succeed (good point) or fail (he doesn't see it that way).

I suppose some could find describing jumping techniques or fencing moves adequate for combat, but I would probably not.

 

[Nightson]

So my big question here is: what determines when you go with the first kind of fun, and when you go with the second kind of fun? And what if you flipped them around, using dice rolls to find secrets and figure out riddles, and just describing a jump over a ravine or a sword strike in combat?

Generally I'd say it comes down to two factors. Ability to model the action and directly conflicting actors.

When talking to NPCs we can model the game very closely in real life. Characters say things, NPCs say things, if you had players capable of being 100% in character and a DM 100% in the NPC character then you'd be able to model it perfectly. Obviously those percentages are not at 100% but I haven't found it too hard to get high enough to be believable.

What follows is my personal experience and I don't claim it holds for everybody. When you toss skill checks into social situations I find you run into both ridiculous situations and a lack of connection to NPCs. You propose some sort of favorable plan to an NPC, but oh you rolled a 1 on your diplomacy check, so I guess you messed it up somehow, or the NPC is crazy and hates you for no apparent reason. You ask the NPC for every last penny and roll a natural twenty so they hand it over. It lessens the feeling that you're interacting with real people.

But when you have something like combat, you can't model it closely enough to have a fair deterministic system, it's a chaotic mess of stuff happening, and further it's a place where people take opposing actions. The orc tries to hit my character with his axe and I try to dodge out of the way. Now, in real life, this would be determined my muscles, speed, angles of attack, reaction times, etc. etc. Instead of trying to model all of that, we use a simplified and abstract system that has things like strength and dexterity. Because most people are far less familiar with dodging orcish axes then they are with talking to people, the flaws of the simplified system compared to a real model are less apparent.

Exploring the environment falls in between both things, it's much easier to construct a mental shared model, but it's harder to do so then talking with NPCs and you occasionally run into direct conflict, if one person tries to disguise tracks as best as he can and another person is trying to follow those tracks for instance.