Games You Rarely See Played "Correctly"

[Deset Gled]

Monopoly. I don't know a single person who plays it RAW.

I'm here to represent. No money on Free Parking. Auctions when a property isn't bought. Limited houses and hotels.

 

[aramis erak]

accidental duplicate removed

 

[Koloth]

The already mentioned Monopoly. Card game of Spades, every group has its own set of house rules.

A lot of current RPGs are ran as an almost constant combat but with minimal real risk of character death. It seems that we just go through the motions. What ever happened to the social side of things? Or being able to sneak past something? Or maybe it is just groups in my area.

And for games with magic - spell research for new spells? Used to be a thing. Now spell lists are often considered sacrosanct and not to be altered or have things added. I think it is still in many rule sets but it has been a couple of decades since I heard someone ask about researching a new spell.

 

[cbwjm]

The already mentioned Monopoly. Card game of Spades, every group has its own set of house rules.

A lot of current RPGs are ran as an almost constant combat but with minimal real risk of character death. It seems that we just go through the motions. What ever happened to the social side of things? Or being able to sneak past something? Or maybe it is just groups in my area.

And for games with magic - spell research for new spells? Used to be a thing. Now spell lists are often considered sacrosanct and not to be altered or have things added. I think it is still in many rule sets but it has been a couple of decades since I heard someone ask about researching a new spell.

I think the lack of downtime means people don't really think about it, I feel like many adventures instead have a story arc and you follow that, finish it, then start the next campaign.

 

[Fenris-77]

Very few people use the beautiful and magnificently designed Inspiration rules for 5E. Degenerate play!

 

[Lanefan]

And for games with magic - spell research for new spells? Used to be a thing. Now spell lists are often considered sacrosanct and not to be altered or have things added. I think it is still in many rule sets but it has been a couple of decades since I heard someone ask about researching a new spell.

Part of that is there's already so many spells out there it can be hard to come up with a new idea.

 

[Fenris-77]

Part of that is there's already so many spells out there it can be hard to come up with a new idea.

Swarm of Butterflies.

 

[MNblockhead]

You can look at this from the perspective of the designers theme/genre expectations or from a following the RAW. As for the former, there are players who will turn any TTRPG game into slap-stick comedy (or a soap opera, etc.), so I find this to be more of a discussion about table expectations. There are some games I will only run for some players or players who will not be interested in playing in certain games. For most games, it doesn't really matter. If you want to play CoC as a slapstick humor game and the entire table is enjoying it, more power to you. For some games, it may be harder. If your players play Alice is Missing as Who Cares About Alice, I would think that would be a lot harder to pull off satisfactorily.

I would expect, however, that most groups decide to play a specific game because they want to at least somewhat engage in the experience it tries to create. Rules on the other hand often change from table to table, campaign to campaign, even session to session. I usually try to play a game RAW for at least a few sessions so that I can experience the game the designers were trying to create before I drop or change things. With crunchier systems that can be difficult.

Warhammer Fantasy 4e has a good core set of rules but there are many specific modifiers and exceptions that only arise in specific circumstances. The rules are not well organized and often scattered around and hidden in skill, talent, weapon properties, and creature train descriptions. Then you have additional rules spread across a number of books, some (more infamously the magic system) wholly replace the rules in the core book, in part to fix confusion and issues with the core rules. I doubt many tables are fully adhering to the RAW even if they just stuck with the core book.

 

[Umbran]

Okay, just to keep you from coming at me with pitchforks and torches; If you and your group are having fun then you're playing the game correctly. But....are you really playing the game correctly? i.e. As it was envisioned by the creators? There are games where there seems to be a dissonance between how it was set up to be played and how it is actually played.

The most popular game I can think where this was the case was Vampire the Masquerade back in the early 1990s. What was clearly supposed to be a game about personal horror ended up being superheroes with fangs. Instead of an angsty vampire trying to hold on to their humanity or live under the oppressive rules of their elders, we had vampires running around with twin Desert Eagles, katanas, and trench coats.

Yes, well, it would have helped if the game was designed to be angsty personal horror. But, the game design is clearly superheroes with fangs - it is a game in which the supposed intent does not match the rules the players are given.

 

[soviet]

Okay, just to keep you from coming at me with pitchforks and torches; If you and your group are having fun then you're playing the game correctly. But....are you really playing the game correctly? i.e. As it was envisioned by the creators? There are games where there seems to be a dissonance between how it was set up to be played and how it is actually played.

The most popular game I can think where this was the case was Vampire the Masquerade back in the early 1990s. What was clearly supposed to be a game about personal horror ended up being superheroes with fangs. Instead of an angsty vampire trying to hold on to their humanity or live under the oppressive rules of their elders, we had vampires running around with twin Desert Eagles, katanas, and trench coats.

In Cyberpunk 2020, it's suppose to be more important to look good doing something than to be competent. I can't think of many players who adhered to this ethos when it came to their characters. Most of us tried to make the most effective characters, choosing equipment and cyberware that would make us more efficient killers and thieves, and making choices based on what was going to get us the most euros in the shortest period of time. I can only recall one player who tried look cool no matter what. In CP2020, a posergang is a specific gang where members all alter themselves surgically to look like a specific person or persons. For example, the Gilligans were a LGBTQ posergang and they all looked like characters from Gilligan's Island and there was another posergang who looked like members of the Kennedy family. Anyway, I had one player who was a former member of a posergang and they all looked like Star Wars character. His main weapon of choice was a replica that looked like Solo's blaster and he loaded it with tracer shots so it'd resemble a blaster when fired. He's the only player I can remember who spent that much time on how his character looked and chose his equipment on what made sense for his style.

Anyone else player their games "wrong?"

I think what you're describing here is a failure of game design.

Vampire and Cyberpunk 2020 are great games and I love them both but they are textbook (literally) examples of designer aspiration outpacing the available technology. They both have good innovative systems in their own ways but the incentives and outputs of those systems as written run counter to the stated objectives. 'Playing the game right' in your parlance requires the participants to wilfully ignore or actively counteract the very rules of the game itself. It's telling how a lot of the GM advice in Vampire is basically 'fudge like crazy' and a lot of the Cyberpunk GM advice book Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads is basically 'here's how to Calvinball like crazy to kill of invincible characters'.