System matters and free kriegsspiel

[Numidius]

The gameplay loop I cited made no reference to moves or principles. It apportioned authority to say things in a way which gives total authority to the DM to say what happens in the gameworld and hence zero agency to players if the goals of the game are defined in terms of changing the gameworld.

Again, it's a very simple position and one which no-one has even attempted to refute except by whiny appeals to authority about 'trad rpgs'.

I didn't even say it was bad or unenjoyable, yet the defensive, kneejerk whingefest it provoked has been illuminating. It is undeniably a zero agency system.

Well, I'nt gonna argue about a three sentences play loop in a white room. I proposed my own provisional one.

Since my very first Basic dnd game, I know for a fact that Gm Decides All can suck pretty badly. I started game-mastering soon after and advocating for player agency and authority since then.

When asked to run Gumshoe purist/gritty Cthulhu, I rapidly did without any fiddly rules bit, leaving only skill points resources, but enphasizing their expenditure to foster agency and authorship.

So, I as a Gm that does not suck at all and wants to play more than less, find the overall FKR approach useful and easy to teach to would be game-masters.

Start with setting and characters. Go full on diegetic. Foster descriptions, narration and discussion of fictional stuff. Zoom in and out of details on demand. Find ultralight rules that fit in some way, be it D10 dicepool for White Wolf books; D20 etc for D&D related games, Dfudge, opposed 2d6 or vs TN, and build on that as you go if it's not enough. Blend in-character rpg, mass battles wargame, factions intrigues seemlessly following the fiction and ad-hoc resolutions.

Needless to say I found very useful also Baker's principles and agenda in AW. Been following his design since, I don't know, Poison'd maybe? That one was wicked.

Loved Elfs and Trollbabe from Edwards. Quite clunky in actual play, but TB changed the way I run since.

As a side note: wasn't Sorcerer rpg by Edwards using an opposed dice pool and then table agreement on the disparity between the two, to resolve stuff?

 

[pemerton]

Start with setting and characters. Go full on diegetic. Foster descriptions, narration and discussion of fictional stuff. Zoom in and out of details on demand. Find ultralight rules that fit in some way, be it D10 dicepool for White Wolf books; D20 etc for D&D related games, Dfudge, opposed 2d6 or vs TN, and build on that as you go if it's not enough. Blend in-character rpg, mass battles wargame, factions intrigues seemlessly following the fiction and ad-hoc resolutions.

I don't think any of this gets to the player agency issue.

Who gets to frame scenes? Under what constraints?

Who gets to say what happens when a player declares an action for their PC? Under what constraints?

Talking about dice sizes, and opposed checks or target numbers, doesn't touch any of this stuff. Yet this stuff is where all the action is.

 

[Malmuria]

The dungeon crawl games I'm familiar with (Moldvay Basic and AD&D, which many OSR games are based one) do not follow you posted play loop. They go something closer to this:

This is somewhat a matter of interpretation...I would argue (and have been saying) that the loop is like an outline with basic steps that can be expanded upon via resolution mechanics, rules, procedures, worldbuilding/prep, principles/advice, and the somewhat more nebulous play expectations/culture. 5e, which lists the above explicitly as its gameplay loop in the opening pages, follows this up with hundreds of pages of rules which codify how to use dice to resolve uncertainty and outlines specific rules that the dm and player can refer to to help narrate the result of player announcing actions. So I can say, "I would like to stab the guard in the throat," and the rules outline how the dm should handle that declaration (or at least the stabby part; there are no rules for the throat part. Further there are lots of rules for the stabby part, almost no rules for determining how the world reacts, which is then left up to whatever the dm finds reasonable given the situation). So characterizing that gameplay loop as "zero agency" is confusing at best and in bad faith at worst.

My interest is in how many of those rules, procedures, etc, do you really need? I've seen with a game like Cairn, which is 20 pages, mostly random tables, that you can remove an awful lot and still have basically the same play experience (e.g. do you need six ability scores?). Meanwhile some OSR advice argues that players looking at their character sheet or needing to roll dice to determine whether an outcome is successful is a kind of failure state (Maze Rats (12 pages, mostly tables) says that its mechanics are set up so that if you need to roll dice you most likely will fail, so as to avoid players referring to their character sheet).

(btw, the "trad" games that I am familiar with are all the editions of dnd except 4th, Call of Cthulhu, and I guess Vampire and Mage though it's been a minute. I had assumed "trad" was a relatively non-controversial label for those games; let me know if there is a better term)

 

[overgeeked]

What a weird thread.

 

[Malmuria]

I just wanted to address this part. Cthulhu Dark is 4 pages (including title page, so 3 pages of rules) and is a far more complete game in that it establishes who has what say, how to resolve conflicts at all times, good guidance on how to use the conflict resolution system, and some strong genre points of logic (you die if you fight mythos creatures). 6 pages is not a suitable defense. Cthulhu Dark establishes a play loop that is not no/low agency. It does the same thing Dark Empires tries to do and lean on genre logic, but the Cthulhu genre logic is more constrained than what's pointed at for Dark Empire (which goes from detailed period piece to gothic horror to near-fairy tale to spy thriller).

So the length of the set of rules doesn't excuse the incompleteness of those rules. My first thought on reading Dark Empire was that it wasn't a complete game. My second thought was why did they waste space on the tables that don't really matter much when the game isn't complete yet? My first thought reading Cthulhu Dark was damn, that's a very tight, very light, very elegant bit of RPG! My second thought was that the ability for another player to declare a failure didn't fit in well with the rest of the game and I didn't like it.

I don't think it's a matter of "excusing" something or not. It does seem that qualities like completeness (by whatever metric), or elegance, or even design are very important to some people who play or create rpg content, and not that important to others. I would imagine the fkr games/content would be more concerned with being evocative than being complete. I would agree that Dark Empires leans into a genre that it also sort of invents...I'm not sure I understood what it was going for. By the same token, Cthulhu Dark is a complete and elegant game...but how much of the work is being done simply by the inclusion of the the word "Cthulhu"? Just by referencing Lovecraft, we already know so much about what the game is fundamentally about.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I don't think it's a matter of "excusing" something or not. It does seem that qualities like completeness (by whatever metric), or elegance, or even design are very important to some people who play or create rpg content, and not that important to others. I would imagine the fkr games/content would be more concerned with being evocative than being complete. I would agree that Dark Empires leans into a genre that it also sort of invents...I'm not sure I understood what it was going for. By the same token, Cthulhu Dark is a complete and elegant game...but how much of the work is being done simply by the inclusion of the the word "Cthulhu"? Just by referencing Lovecraft, we already know so much about what the game is fundamentally about.

A complete game is one that tells you how it plays and doesn't leave bits out for your to have to invent yourself or guess. It's not a high bar -- in an RPG is about who gets to say what and how conflicts are resolved. This can be extremely simple -- the GM presents the scene, the players declare what their characters do, and if a consensus cannot be achieved on the outcome between all parties then a roll off of d6's occurs, with the highest getting the say. Reroll ties as often as needed. Bam, complete game. Dark Empires doesn't even get this far.

Now, if you're coming at this game from a particular viewpoint and expectation that the GM just does whatever they want to fill in the blanks -- ie, anything not detailed by the game is up to the GM and anything detailed by the game is also up to the GM, then the lack of a complete game is, as you note, trivial because the completeness is just the GM says. That's complete already. But, if I'm a new player and looking to understand how to play Dark Empires, I don't know how it works because the game as presented is incomplete.

As for the amount of work genre does for Cthulhu Dark -- very little. The system doesn't really care what scenario you put it up against, it will work to generate an answer. If you play a game with CD with NO mythos, it still works, although I'd feel you'd be missing a good bit of fun. Dark Empires doesn't even present a coherent set of genre inputs (some of the suggestions are not well aligned in tropes at all) AND the game isn't complete. This makes it a game that only works via bringing in the understanding that the GM says is the final and only system needed. It reads more like a set of suggestions and loose ideas for a game rather than a game -- it's more of a setting supplement than a distinct game because it does so heavily rely on the unspoken system of GM says. And, even there, as I noted above, it's not very coherent in what's it's about.

 

[Campbell]

When I look at Dark Empires I see a text that is dependent on a pretty set view of what roleplaying games are. A view that is interested in roleplaying as an activity, but not really as a game. It pretty much lacks the core features of a game. Combined with a lot of the surrounding rhetoric of play worlds, not rules it almost seems somewhat cynical of game design's value. That's a substantial departure from OSR at least, where the idea that we are playing a game is central to our understanding of play.

I appreciate the appeal of freeform roleplay. I just wish these assumptions were spelled out more clearly. I especially wish the rhetoric surrounding it did not feel the need to appeal to being part of a truer, more ancient tradition. I also really do not like all the rhetoric around trust that seems to imply that the rest of us value game design out of a lack of trust for each other.

What it does is cool for people that are into it. The justifications put forward kind of suck from my perspective.

 

[Numidius]

Dark Empires is a mini setting written for a Mini Setting Challenge.
Simple as that

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

When I look at Dark Empires I see a text that is dependent on a pretty set view of what roleplaying games are. A view that is interested in roleplaying as an activity, but not really as a game. It pretty much lacks the core features of a game. Combined with a lot of the surrounding rhetoric of play worlds, not rules it almost seems somewhat cynical of game design's value. That's a substantial departure from OSR at least, where the idea that we are playing a game is central to our understanding of play.

I appreciate the appeal of freeform roleplay. I just wish these assumptions were spelled out more clearly. I especially wish the rhetoric surrounding it did not feel the need to appeal to being part of a truer, more ancient tradition. I also really do not like all the rhetoric around trust that seems to imply that the rest of us value game design out of a lack of trust for each other.

What it does is cool for people that are into it. The justifications put forward kind of suck from my perspective.

I appreciate what you are saying.

Then again, from the perspective of people looking at this thread who might not share your perspective, it does seem like there are people who have a very narrow view of what "good" roleplaying games are, an extreme view of "player agency", and that use jargon and little-known games for their examples in order to exclude other people from their discussions (aka, gatekeeping).

There is certainly a lot to be said about different styles of games. I think you might be unaware of how off-putting a lot of the justifications that have been put forth to rubbish games seem.

Put simply- people are making all sorts of different rules-lite games right now, and exploring with the form. It almost seems like there are people who are standing athwart the gates of "indie games" saying, "Sorry, you aren't cool enough and using the right words."

 

[Aldarc]

I appreciate what you are saying.

Then again, from the perspective of people looking at this thread who might not share your perspective, it does seem like there are people who have a very narrow view of what "good" roleplaying games are, an extreme view of "player agency", and that use jargon and little-known games for their examples in order to exclude other people from their discussions (aka, gatekeeping).

There is certainly a lot to be said about different styles of games. I think you might be unaware of how off-putting a lot of the justifications that have been put forth to rubbish games seem.

Put simply- people are making all sorts of different rules-lite games right now, and exploring with the form. It almost seems like there are people who are standing athwart the gates of "indie games" saying, "Sorry, you aren't cool enough and using the right words."

"I appreciate what you are saying but I will passively aggressively insult you and your position in a not-so-subtle way that depicts you as a smug, elitist a-hole."