What's the Next Great Leap Forward in RPG Mechanics?

[Celebrim]

But that also brings up a point --- have we all just accepted the fact that trying to mesh or import competing types of resolution mechanics into different systems just creates chaos? For example, would anyone be willing to import a fantastic social resolution mechanic into D&D if, when using those mechanics, it abandoned the d20 and instead used a 3d6-roll-under* just for that subsystem? I think [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] brought this up earlier; we seem to be very tied to the notion of "unified mechanics" as somehow being the most elegant, or "user-friendly" way of developing systems.

I think you are limiting what I'm saying.

So for example, quite a few modern fantasy RPGs are trying to adopt some form of gridless combat when abstract positioning like "Near", "Far", "Close", "Remote" or whatever. That system creates a game that looks a lot like classic Final Fantasy cRPG combat, where the combatants line up in a line, adjust their positioning abstractly and make moves. It's fully functional as a combat system if you want to remove the grid and are willing to accept the consequences of that. But some people aren't willing to accept those consequences. In their head, regardless of what the rules are saying, they are running a combat that looks to them like what they picture a melee to look like, and it's taking place in a two-dimensional space. For those people, you need a rules system that tracks that position in two dimensional space, otherwise they are always fighting against the system because it doesn't match what they imagine and are content with.

I think were we have gone with mechanics is a push toward elegance that necessarily is creating disconnects where the mechanic doesn't feel like the thing people are imagining. One of the big problems that brought this home to me was early in my 3e play, I had a chase evolve from play. I naturally tried to run the chase using the combat rules, since the chase had evolved out of a combat scenario - someone was running away. Once the combat turned into a chase though, the turn based, discrete, synchronous, nature of the combat resolution where this person did something fully, then this person did something fully, and so forth stopped being believable for me. I was willing to over look the abstraction of the combat system while we are trying to resolve a melee and it was 'good enough' (at least, until someone tries an elvish bucket brigade), but it wasn't 'good enough' for a chase. Because the essential aspect of a chase was that as you were moving, the thing being chased was also moving away from you. What worked as a model of melee combat just didn't work as a model of a chase.

At first I started trying to fix this problem by patching the combat system. But that just didn't work. The turn based nature of the system was too heavily built into the system to fix the problem with patches and tweaks for the 'edge case'. It was all edge case. And if you tried to remove turn based linearity the resulting system while more realistic and versatile was also just too complex to resolve quickly and accurately (simultaneous secret declarations, impulses, speed factors, etc.). Ideas that worked in 1e or BECMI didn't work here, because those ideas were the complexities (often overlooked) of those systems which - unlike 3e - were otherwise simple systems.

I wasn't sure what to do until I bought a brilliant (well, mostly brilliant) pdf called 'Hot Pursuit'. The author of the PDF completely bypassed the problem. Instead of tweaking the existing combat subsystem to handle something it was never designed to handle, with the result of making a combat system that could somewhat handle chases but was now worse in some measures at handling combat, he just invented a completely new chase subsystem. (Ironically, it works something like the gridless combat systems I mentioned earlier, which works pretty well, because usually a chase can be mentally simplified to a linear 'one thing is following' another model.) At first I thought this was both brilliant and rather ugly, but the more I thought about it the more brilliant it seemed. Instead of one huge sprawling uber-game trying to simulate two separate challenges and either not doing either well or doing both super slowly, he broke the problem down into two little minigames each of which on its own would be more simple and elegant than the two combined.

There is of course overlap between the two systems (and needs to be). Both use d20+modifier >= Difficulty as their core fortune mechanic. But each creates a different picture of what is going on in the scene.

And when I accepted that it was ok to be inelegant, I realized that's actually how I wanted things to work. Modeling social interaction like physical combat ends up missing out on the best parts of either combat or social interaction, or both. And trying to have one system that catches all the nuances of things that in real life look vastly different ends up just being an entire system wide kludge. cRPG designers have been ahead on this one the whole time. Because they have to actually model the physical space of their rules to create usable interfaces, they've inherently had to have different minigames for each separate subsystem they wanted to include in their main game if they wanted to make 'play' for that subsystem.

 

[Neonchameleon]

To me one area that could use more innovation is in social conflict resolution. I realize there are probably games out there with excellent social conflict mechanics, but none of those have been imported into a "popular" game.

But that also brings up a point --- have we all just accepted the fact that trying to mesh or import competing types of resolution mechanics into different systems just creates chaos? For example, would anyone be willing to import a fantastic social resolution mechanic into D&D if, when using those mechanics, it abandoned the d20 and instead used a 3d6-roll-under* just for that subsystem?

Social conflict mechanics have been the white whale of RPGs since the 1970s - and one thing that's been discovered is that the ones that actually work tend to only work for a specific social environment. For example Monsterhearts' social mechanics are amazing - for screwed up teenage monsters. Leverage has good social mechanics - if you are a team of very competent grifters. Apocalypse World if you are Hard Men in Rough Times works well. But all of them would be utterly unsuited to each others' settings.

And unified resolution mechanics? They are possibly the most overrated fad in game design unless you are purposely building your game round self-simmilarity the way Fate does and is a deliberate decision about world-building. That said, it depends what you mean by unified resolution mechanics; rolling the same sort of dice isn't all it takes and that is generally a good idea so that new people at least know what to roll and don't slow the game down at that point.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Is 'story games' somehow significantly different from the storytelling trend in the 90s, led by WWGS? The classic Storyteller games are also making a come-back, is that part of it, or separate?

Very different - it's time for a history lesson with one corner of RPGs.

A bit of history. The Forge was set up in about 2000 by people (starting with the infamous Ron Edwards) who wanted games that fulfilled the promise of the Storyteller games - but that the Storyteller games were absolutely terrible at delivering because they were large, bulky, clunky, and at times impenetrably written.

The first Story-game was My Life With Master by Paul Czege in 2003 - a deliberately closed-ended game about a gothic horror setting in which the GM plays the Master/Mad Scientist/Evil Vampire/Other Master and the players all play minions (frequently named Igor). And the Master mistreats the minions until one of them snaps - at which point the minion tries to kill the Master. The endgame is playing out the results of that fight, and discovering whether the minion is lucky enough and has learned enough before they snapped to succeed - or whether they have been ground down too far. It's an excellent little game with few mechanics that plays in a few hours and that when it's over you can't continue playing indefinitely.

And people absolutely lost their cool. Claiming that it couldn't possibly be an RPG because it only modelled a few things and because you couldn't continue playing it indefinitely and even that you only ever got variations of one story out of it - so Paul Czege shrugged and basically said "OK. Call it a Story-Game then. I don't care." I'm more interested in inventing cool games than I am discussing what an RPG can or can not be."

And thus started Story Games - small RPGs designed to be playable in a few sessions rather than run forever and be much more tightly focussed about what the game was about and that are designed to set up and play fast and come to a definite conclusion - and because of this more frequently end in tragedy than classic RPGs. Possibly ironically because the mechanics work them towards a conclusion they are less likely to be railroads than trad RPGs - there is no need for the GM to set a story and GMs (when there are any) are really encouraged not to. (Yes, Story Games are normally absolutely RPGs in my book). The one you've probably heard of round ENWorld is Epediah Ravenchol's Dread, using a Jenga tower as its resolution mechanic.

For a quick list of recommendations:

• The aforementioned Dread.
• Fiasco - which lets you make a Cohen Brothers movie in the time it would take to watch one. The Tabletop playthrough is excellent.
• Dogs in the Vineyard - Vincent Baker's first breakout game about Mormon Paladins in a wild west that never was. Which is a weird hook.
• Montsegur 1244 - have we crossed the boundry into freeform LARP yet?
• Apocalypse World - 2nd Edition now on Kickstarter. Vincent Baker taking everything learned from Story Games and feeding them back into an improv-heavy RPG that can be made ongoing and otherwise fits most Trad RPG patterns, other than a circumscribed GM. Most notable is how fast and freely it plays, the fact the GM never rolls, the characters growing and changing over time, and that it's possibly the first new truly class-based RPG since oD&D.
• Monsterhearts - Avery McDaldno's brilliant hack of Apocalypse World to first deconstruct then reconstruct the teen horror genre of fiction. There's teenage sex in it (because that is so central to the genre) so I wouldn't recommend it for or with everyone, but I have never read or played a better game about growth and growing up and learning to overcome the ways you are broken.

 

[Tony Vargas]

For a quick list of recommendations:

• The aforementioned Dread.
• Fiasco - which lets you make a Cohen Brothers movie in the time it would take to watch one. The Tabletop playthrough is excellent.
• Dogs in the Vineyard - Vincent Baker's first breakout game about Mormon Paladins in a wild west that never was. Which is a weird hook.
• Montsegur 1244 - have we crossed the boundry into freeform LARP yet?
• Apocalypse World - 2nd Edition now on Kickstarter. Vincent Baker taking everything learned from Story Games and feeding them back into an improv-heavy RPG that can be made ongoing and otherwise fits most Trad RPG patterns, other than a circumscribed GM. Most notable is how fast and freely it plays, the fact the GM never rolls, the characters growing and changing over time, and that it's possibly the first new truly class-based RPG since oD&D.
• Monsterhearts - Avery McDaldno's brilliant hack of Apocalypse World to first deconstruct then reconstruct the teen horror genre of fiction. There's teenage sex in it (because that is so central to the genre) so I wouldn't recommend it for or with everyone, but I have never read or played a better game about growth and growing up and learning to overcome the ways you are broken.

I haven't noticed any of these climbing the RPG charts, do they maybe get counted as board games or something? Is there any way to compare how 'big' they are relative to the top RPGs? (ie: board games are supposed to be huge right now, so an obscure boardgame could be big compared to a leading RPG, no?)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I wasn't sure what to do until I bought a brilliant (well, mostly brilliant) pdf called 'Hot Pursuit'. The author of the PDF completely bypassed the problem. Instead of tweaking the existing combat subsystem to handle something it was never designed to handle, with the result of making a combat system that could somewhat handle chases but was now worse in some measures at handling combat, he just invented a completely new chase subsystem. (Ironically, it works something like the gridless combat systems I mentioned earlier, which works pretty well, because usually a chase can be mentally simplified to a linear 'one thing is following' another model.) At first I thought this was both brilliant and rather ugly, but the more I thought about it the more brilliant it seemed. Instead of one huge sprawling uber-game trying to simulate two separate challenges and either not doing either well or doing both super slowly, he broke the problem down into two little minigames each of which on its own would be more simple and elegant than the two combined.

The problem with using two different models is that the outcome is going to depend on the model you use. As an example, if someone would escape while using the chase subsystem, but be caught/killed while using the combat subsystem, then you're essentially determining the outcome of the encounter by your choice of which subsystem to use. That's going to be an issue in any circumstance where you have two different subsystems that could apply to a situation - and few things are really as clear cut as we'd like them to be.

It's like having two different formulas for calculating something, so they're both worthless; or a person who owns two clocks, so they never know what time it is. The system is over-constrained.

 

[Celebrim]

The problem with using two different models is that the outcome is going to depend on the model you use. As an example, if someone would escape while using the chase subsystem, but be caught/killed while using the combat subsystem, then you're essentially determining the outcome of the encounter by your choice of which subsystem to use. That's going to be an issue in any circumstance where you have two different subsystems that could apply to a situation - and few things are really as clear cut as we'd like them to be.

I get your point about metagame artifacts effecting the outcome of the game, but I'll one up that by saying that the outcome of an encounter in 3e depends on how you orient and align the 5'x5' grid with the walls of the room. You can change an outcome completely by rotating the grid on a room that lies diagonally across the grid lines of the rest of the dungeon so that the encounter now lines up with the walls... of course this now cause artifacts if a chase suddenly develops out of the room. Without dropping to using protractors and dividers - which in 1e I have used before - you can't actually avoid the fact that the battle grid doesn't actually exist in the game world.

Also, the same basic issue occurs more subtly whenever a DM says, "Roll for initiative." In practice, most DMs are encouraged to have 'combat' and 'non-combat' minigames, something like the old Ultima IV system where movement was handled as a party until combat began, and then as individuals once combat began. And yes, in Ultima IV and many similar systems you could manipulate the outcome of the fight by timing how you went in and out of combat. And as has been shown in prior threads, the outcome of an encounter in 3e D&D depends powerfully on whether or not combat is assumed to began and can only begin when initiative is rolled for.

The clocks analogy falls apart because it assumes that there is an objectively right answer. The answer is always dependent on decisions we make when applying the rules, and this is particularly true because there are always situations not covered by the rules or which the table collectively agrees the rules ought not to apply to (because the rules are silly).

There are numerous problems with attempting to apply the combat rules to a chase. If for example a character spots another one at a distance of 120', by the combat rules if the character loses initiative - even if he is not surprised - he can't do anything but watch the other character run across the intervening distance. The character is frozen in time. The AoO system is supposed to handle this, but it's designed for fights occurring in a small area, not for fights ranging over hundreds of yards.

Equally bad is that running is a full round action that causes you to lose your threat zone and during which you may not attack. What this means is that a very fast character may be able to catch a foe that is running away, but they can't attack them. They can run up next to them; they may even be able to run over them. But nothing really allows them to catch the person. The only way to catch someone in 3e RAW once a chase is underway turns out to require bracketing them such that they cannot move without being in someone's charge range. Because of the large gap in speed between charging and running, this is hilariously difficult.

It's worth noting that it wasn't the PC's being chased that brought this to my attention. I wasn't concerned that the PC's were 'unfairly' getting away. I was concerned that the NPC's were tediously hard to catch without resorting to magic and that the whole scene was horribly unrealistic and immersion breaking, since the outcome of it depended again on metagame artifacts of the system like the big bag between the charge speed and the run speed and the fact that you can't attack anything at a run.

However, if you really are going to worry excessively about this sort of thing, it would be fairly easy to ensure that the two systems never overlapped simply by creating a rule that determined which subsystem applied. For example, we might say something like, "If at the beginning of the round, a character is not within the charge range of any other character, that character may declare their intention to evade combat. Resolve that evasion as a Chase scene, until either the character successfully evades or any chasing character is at melee range with an evading character and the evading character has the Checked status."

Interestingly, 1e AD&D has exactly this sort of rule, which determines whether or not the remainder of an encounter is to be resolved by the Evasion subsystem or the Combat subsystem. The two systems give wildly different answers, allowing slow PCs to successfully run away from monsters which - if we were still using the combat subsystem - they would never be able to retreat from.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I haven't noticed any of these climbing the RPG charts, do they maybe get counted as board games or something? Is there any way to compare how 'big' they are relative to the top RPGs? (ie: board games are supposed to be huge right now, so an obscure boardgame could be big compared to a leading RPG, no?)

All of them are independently published and generally sold via the internet and the publisher's webstore (or occasionally Lulu) - the only game of the group to really make it to the ICV2 charts is Dungeon World. Oddly enough this means we have better sales figures for most of them than for trad RPGs.

So. How have they sold? We know that as of Q2 2012, Fiasco managed over 10,000 sales. Apocalypse World only 4000 direct webstore sales (not including retail or mail order - or its time as part of the Bundle of Holding).

So. Can we work out what sort of numbers it takes to make it to fourth place in the ICv2 rankings? (i.e. behind D&D, Pathfinder, and Star Wars) Indeed we can. Fate Core made it to third place with current lifetime sales of 24,000. But of those 24,000 we need to take off 10,000 kickstarter backers as they certainly weren't in the ICv2 rankings so 14,000 at most.

But we've better figures than that for dead trees - in Q3 2013 (when Fate Core made it to #3 on the ICv2 rankings) Fate Core sold 1600 books through distribution and a further 1300 copies of Fate Accelerated so between 1600 and 3000 sales to get to #3.

In short the ICv2 sales figures are barely relevant for Indy games (and that includes the OSR) and if they were selling dead trees rather than mostly in PDF they'd show up pretty strongly. (I just wish most of the discussion hadn't moved to Google+ of all things).

 

[Celebrim]

I haven't noticed any of these climbing the RPG charts, do they maybe get counted as board games or something? Is there any way to compare how 'big' they are relative to the top RPGs? (ie: board games are supposed to be huge right now, so an obscure boardgame could be big compared to a leading RPG, no?)

They are definitely not board games. They in fact move in the opposite direction from RPGs wargaming roots away from elaborate board game. At the extreme end, something like Montsegur 1244 or even Fiasco, they are more like structured theater games. But something like DitV is definitely an RPG in all its particulars, all be it a very innovative one. And Apocalypse World and its variants might even feel pretty familiar to someone with a Traditional RPG background.

Apocalypse World has I think been reasonably successful. Many of the others are more well known and influential and admired than well played. I think they'd make very good Convention games, since they play quick and often have built in resolutions or end of game conditions that traditional RPGs lack.

 

[Neonchameleon]

They are definitely not board games. They in fact move in the opposite direction from RPGs wargaming roots away from elaborate board game. At the extreme end, something like Montsegur 1244 or even Fiasco, they are more like structured theater games. But something like DitV is definitely an RPG in all its particulars, all be it a very innovative one. And Apocalypse World and its variants might even feel pretty familiar to someone with a Traditional RPG background.

Apocalypse World has I think been reasonably successful. Many of the others are more well known and influential and admired than well played. I think they'd make very good Convention games, since they play quick and often have built in resolutions or end of game conditions that traditional RPGs lack.

I'm going to object that the ones I mentioned to look into are ones that do get played (I wasn't for example going to mention for example the diana Jones Award winning Grey Ranks, which is far more admired than played - and I suspect Dog Eat Dog likewise). And yes, many of them are good con-games (Dread being an especially good con game because player elimination in a home group is a problem). Other than that spot on

 

[Tony Vargas]

They are definitely not board games.

My question wasn't whether they were boardgames (they're clearly 'story games'), but whether they might not be slipping through the cracks and not being counted as RPGs in the few rankings we see now and then...

All of them are independently published and generally sold via the internet and the publisher's webstore (or occasionally Lulu) - the only game of the group to really make it to the ICV2 charts is Dungeon World.

I had heard Dungeon World mentioned in passing. It is not in any way an OSR game, then?

So. How have they sold? We know that as of Q2 2012, Fiasco managed over 10,000 sales. Apocalypse World only 4000 direct webstore sales (not including retail or mail order - or its time as part of the Bundle of Holding).

So really pretty small compared to D&D or PF (PF boosters are always going on about how much PF sells on the Paizo site, on top of in-store sales), but maybe nipping at the heels of Dragon Age (which is, what, a video-game licensed RPG) or whatever's popping into the 3-5th place slot of the IcV2 charts behind classic-feel 5e and retro-clone PF in a given quarter.

(And, no I'm not quite buying some of the implied numbers you came up with, here. IcV2 are rankings of what IcV2 measures, FWTW, and that may not be much, but trying to Ouija-board our way from some specific reported instance of something in one quarter to a general idea of the volumes involved is really, really tenuous.)

But, if there's a number of such games, they might, collectively, be a significant trend. But, then, there are a lot of smaller OSR games, too, and kickstarter re-boots of old games.