Why Do You Hate An RPG System?

[Celebrim]

@Arilyn: You are probably not wrong, and it probably does work for your table like you describe, which just makes me want to play for a session or two at your table to learn how you make it work.

But as for why I think it is incoherent, I think you have to go back to a somewhat legitimate complaint made in the early days of GNS theory, which was that often in the course of the game you'd reach a point where the thing that your character would do in this situation ran counter to the idea of winning. In other words, if the goal of the game was to kill the monster and take his stuff, then the best possible play was the play that most ruthlessly accomplished that goal even if that play ran counter to the declared personality and motivations of the character. Thus, in trad games you often see players with the aesthetic of "Challenge" or 'gamist' aesthetic playing their characters in a pure Pawn stance with only the most feeble justification for their actions, or adopting evil characters just so their ruthless actions won't be questioned. I think it was from that sort of observation that they ran with the idea that no game could satisfy more than one aesthetic of play.

The way the FATE designers try to resolve this is remove the motivation to play your character in Pawn stance by rewarding playing the character to the declared type or motivation of the character. So for example, a Compel (a situation where your character behaves in something other than their best interests) is no longer a strict penalty, but something that gives you a potential mechanical reward. In theory this is supposed to remove the need for considering the mechanical rewards or penalties and allow you to focus on just playing your character.

But at least in my observation, that doesn't happen. What actually happens is that it all just becomes another mechanic to leverage toward achieving success and that highly thespian approaches to play are actually deprecated compared to even D&D because they aren't actually approaching the problem from a different angle, but just applying more or less the same levers that the power gamer at the table is pulling. Further, my real standard here is, "If this is supposed to encourage role playing, does this actually encourage in character dialogue?" And so often I see mechanics in the social pillar replacing in character dialogue and any other in character interaction with the fiction with rules jargon and metagame discussions.

I always say that too often instead of producing the experience of Story, Nar games end up producing the experience of being a creative team assigned to collaborate on a screenplay. What is created is not the experience of Story, but the process of creating a Transcript or even just an Outline. Instead of feeling like a participant in the story, you feel like a participant in a business meeting discussing a story. If I watch a podcast like 'Critical Role', I very much get the feeling that they are creating story (in fits and starts) and feel like they are in a story (although obviously it's impossible for me to perfectly get into their head and know what the experience feels like to them). I don't get the feeling that something like FATE better creates a story or the experience of being in a story than a game like D&D with no explicit ambitions of creating a story.

 

[TwoSix]

I don’t think that’s a fair analysis of their problem with FATE. Whether they’re trying to win or not is irrelevant, either way the system inherently disrupts their roleplaying. Whether you’re Aspect-fishing, or just roleplaying your character, there’s a required awareness of how the system interacts with your roleplaying. Which just rubs some people the wrong way.

Well, sure, but that's because of the core of Nar systems is that you aren't playing the game to try to align yourself with the character. You're using the character to generate conflict and drama. Much like how in Gygaxian D&D, you're using the character as a tool to try to solve a dungeon.

 

[Nebulous]

I hate any game that claims to be an RPG, while simultaneously operating by rules that are inherently antithetical to role-playing.

FATE is the classic example. In order to play FATE, you need to engage with the meta-currency of fate points, or else you won't be able to sway the narrative when you need to. The rules encourage you to get in trouble early on; not because it's the smart thing to do, or even necessarily because it's what your character would realistically do, but because you want the fate points. You're supposed to make decisions on behalf of your character, by taking into consideration that this is a game which operates on principles that are unknown to the character. It's pure meta-gaming.

From what I recall, based on an earlier thread about Conan, the 2d20 system works on similar principles. The GM is supposed to actively antagonize you, and you're supposed to make decisions by accounting for a meta-currency which enables them to do so. You aren't allowed to actually think like your character at any point, or else DOOM will bury you.

I'm not even saying that I hate those games as games (although I still wouldn't play them under any circumstances). I just hate that they pretend to be about role-playing, while simultaneously undermining any sort of in-character decision making. It's highly disingenuous of them.

Thanks for explaining that. I have been wondering what the 2d20 system was and it sounds so similar to d20 D&D that I couldn't understand why so many people seemed to dislike it.

 

[billd91]

I don't know that I hate games as much as I find some have annoying features or I don't like them.

I don't like the game putting me too much into metagame elements, unless it's just a question of understanding the narrative conventions of the genre and playing along with or to them. So I don't mind dealing with hero points in Mutants and Masterminds. They help encourage the narrative flow of the superhero genre by compensating the players for drawing the story out with a fiat-laden escape (a typical case for major villains early in a story arc) or complicating things by bringing in innocent bystanders or loved ones like Lois Lane. But I actively dislike systems where the players have to have their characters actively pursue a metagame strategy. Torg, for example, has a drama card system that can modify how the game plays, particularly in combat. The game works best in fights against significant opponents if about half the party pursues bashing the enemy down while the other half, the ones less built around combat, work the deck and generate as many beneficial cards as possible. It's too blatant and too annoying.

I'm less and less a fan of bloat these days. Not just in spells/feats/nitpicky options but also in modifiers and numbers in general. I'm not that keen on sorting through tables of hundreds of bits of gear, ammunition types, drones, or spells just to get the requisite bonuses to make a competent character that won't be blasted into meat or be useless in the first encounter. I'm OK with maybe tens of options, perhaps even a few dozens. I'm not that keen on being on a treadmill of numbers just to keep up with the Joneses.

 

[Reynard]

Thanks for explaining that. I have been wondering what the 2d20 system was and it sounds so similar to d20 D&D that I couldn't understand why so many people seemed to dislike it.

That description of 2d20 play -- and FATE for that matter -- are not really accurate. Just FYI.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

This, definitely. I will say that Shadowrun Anarchy is just about everything I actually want in a Shadowrun game, without the mess of rules to wade through. And without people spending an hour planning on how exactly they kick down the door and kill everyone, followed by the hour of people rolling a hundred d6's to resolve it.

For my part, and this ties to Shadowrun definitely, is that I can't stand double-indemnity in resolution. That is to say, if I attack a monster and have to roll against their roll to hit, then roll again against their roll to do damage.

One thing I really do hate is when a game makes you take damage or penalties for using every ability. I've played a couple games where we did more damage to ourselves than any enemy.

* Shadowrun. Cumbersome systems with multiple separate subsystems.

Edit: I love the setting of Shadowrun, but I hate the system. I thought FASA was bad at making rules-systems, the current makers are worse.

Hahahahah, my brother and I still joke about d02 and the slamming a fistful of change down as a resolution mechanic.

my hat of d02 know no limit

 

[Celebrim]

One of the things I've most enjoyed about this thread is that it has clarified for me some of my pet peeves. Turns out the systems I don't like have a lot in common.

1) Dice Pools (Mouse Guard, Storyteller, FATE): I don't dislike every dice pool system, but I seem to have a huge dislike of systems that depend on a dice pool and comparing a number of successes to a target number. The basic FUDGE mechanic of flipping a collection of "coins" and counting the number of heads, and all variations of it annoy me. The math here is just not granular, not transparent, and so often involves unintuitive rates of success or failure.
2) Handles scale badly in a setting that handling it well is necessary (Mouse Guard, RIFTS, MechWarrior): Scale is a very difficult concept to handle well. You need results that are plausible despite the huge differences between the two things you are comparing. In many systems, you can just ignore scale - under the cover of being heroic D&D basically ignores the difficulty a 6' high person would have facing an 80' long dragon. But if scale is a major aspect of the story, you have to have a good mechanic for dealing with it.
3) Mechanics are incoherent for the story that the game intends to tell or the game it intends to be (Mousegaurd, MechWarrior, FATE, RIFTS, almost all Storyteller games): I've picked on FATE enough. Read the 1e Vampire:The Masquerade core rule book with a focus on the asides into the games narrative that establish the story goals of the game and in effect the examples of play. The book describes the game as being about exploration of a person's inner demons and the struggle against their monstrous impulses in a desperate attempt to regain their humanity despite a spiraling decent into madness, horror, and brutal violence. This sounds like a really cool game to play! Unfortunately, the mechanics themselves in no way actually create the story described in the examples of play. The game makes purchasing humanity in Chargen vastly too easy, makes losing humanity too easy to avoid and to little the focus of gameplay, and gives almost no rewards for pursuing ones humanity while giving major rewards for being monstrous. Not surprisingly, basically no one who ever played the game played it like the flavor text of the game described, and almost everyone ended up creating games about grimdark superheroes engaged in political machinations against other teams of grimdark superheroes.
4) Terrible Game Balance (Mouse Guard, RIFTS, Storyteller games)
5) Fiddliness that Doesn't Get You Anything Worthwhile (Mouse Guard, Storyteller) - Examples can be Storyteller both having different difficulties and different numbers of required successes (hugely opaque math), and Mouse Guard having each roll be modified by up to 11 different factors that can alter the math in three different ways, including the dramatically fiddly and undramatic 'spend a limited narrative resource' to get an additional chance at success for each 6 you roll (a process that adds on average 1/12th of an additional success per dice you roll), and has a 5 way Roshambo core mechanic that forms a framework for that, in a game that seems to want to be 'rules light' and focus on story. At least D&D or GURPS has reasons for its fiddliness in that they are trying to comprehensively simulate something. Mouse Guard is trying to be 'story first', so what's all this abstract fiddliness actually doing for me?

Compare with D6 Star Wars that has a dice pool system with largely functional math, handles scale for the most part really well, and has mechanics that are well suited to the story it intends to tell and game it intends to be. Yes, balance between Jedi and non-Jedi is pretty lousy at high level play, but arguably that's pretty true to the simulated setting. It's not a perfect system but I can think of basically nothing that you could do in FATE that I wouldn't prefer to handle in a slightly modified version of D6. I mean, even if you wanted to do CharGen in FATE because you thought it had really compelling CharGen, I still think I'd prefer using the D6 rules to actually run the game.

 

[Celebrim]

This, definitely. I will say that Shadowrun Anarchy is just about everything I actually want in a Shadowrun game, without the mess of rules to wade through. And without people spending an hour planning on how exactly they kick down the door and kill everyone, followed by the hour of people rolling a hundred d6's to resolve it.

Almost all the games that came out in the late '80s and early '90s had as a design paradigm that no amount of fiddliness was too much, if it brought you closer to the elusive goal of "realism".

For my part, and this ties to Shadowrun definitely, is that I can't stand double-indemnity in resolution. That is to say, if I attack a monster and have to roll against their roll to hit, then roll again against their roll to do damage.

There are games I enjoy that have both a 'to hit' and a 'soak' roll, and I totally get why they do that, but I agree with you that that can quickly turn into a ton of tedious dice rolling.

One thing I really do hate is when a game makes you take damage or penalties for using every ability. I've played a couple games where we did more damage to ourselves than any enemy.

I haven't encountered that. Example?

Hahahahah, my brother and I still joke about d02 and the slamming a fistful of change down as a resolution mechanic.

You laugh but the entire FUDGE family of games...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Role playing doesn't mean "do whatever you would do." it means "do what the character would do." In a game like FATE (and there are lots of other examples) you are supposed to decide what role you want to play, build that character and then play that role.

Sorry, I said I would be out, but there's just one more thing that I should have addressed in my previous response. Thanks for not getting me banned yet.

I was already going to do what the character would do. That's why I'm playing an RPG, and not a board game. I know my character better than anyone else at the table does, and I already know whether stealing that particular thing is what this particular thief would or would not do.

Adding a mechanical incentive can only possibly get in the way of that. If I wasn't going to do it, then bribing me to do so is encouraging me to act out of character. If I was going to do it anyway, then the bribe is entirely unnecessary, but casts doubts on my true motivation.

The only time where a mechanical incentive for making certain choices would do anything, is if the player wasn't planning to role-play in the first place. If they were just trying to win, regardless of who their character was supposed to be, then a mechanical incentive can encourage them to make a sub-optimal choice. But even then, they aren't doing it because it's what the character would actually do; they're doing it because it's the mechanically optimal thing to do.

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Read the 1e Vampire:The Masquerade core rule book with a focus on the asides into the games narrative that establish the story goals of the game and in effect the examples of play. The book describes the game as being about exploration of a person's inner demons and the struggle against their monstrous impulses in a desperate attempt to regain their humanity despite a spiraling decent into madness, horror, and brutal violence. This sounds like a really cool game to play! Unfortunately, the mechanics themselves in no way actually create the story described in the examples of play. The game makes purchasing humanity in Chargen vastly too easy, makes losing humanity too easy to avoid and to little the focus of gameplay, and gives almost no rewards for pursuing ones humanity while giving major rewards for being monstrous. Not surprisingly, basically no one who ever played the game played it like the flavor text of the game described, and almost everyone ended up creating games about grimdark superheroes engaged in political machinations against other teams of grimdark superheroes.

Yeah, that was why, despite it being a great way to meet and hang out with goth chicks, I burned out on V:TM pretty quickly. I read the manual and thought it seemed incredible, especially compared to the AD&D hackfests I was used to...

...and every storyteller I played with pretty much ran it in an even bloodier, more power-gamey fashion than my AD&D games. ::sigh::

I think the rise of The Forge was really a reaction to both the excessive "simulationist" fiddliness of 90s RPGs (which culminated in d20 supremacy) and the failure of Storyteller games to actually deliver what they promised on the box.

Compare with D6 Star Wars that has a dice pool system with largely functional math, handles scale for the most part really well, and has mechanics that are well suited to the story it intends to tell and game it intends to be. Yes, balance between Jedi and non-Jedi is pretty lousy at high level play, but arguably that's pretty true to the simulated setting. It's not a perfect system but I can think of basically nothing that you could do in FATE that I wouldn't prefer to handle in a slightly modified version of D6. I mean, even if you wanted to do CharGen in FATE because you thought it had really compelling CharGen, I still think I'd prefer using the D6 rules to actually run the game.

Yeah, d6 Star Wars is still a paradigm for how to make a game sufficiently fiddly/simulationist to make it interesting to numbers-wonks like me, while remaining highly playable and not detracting from the action.

Though 5E is pretty darn close, too.