Jon Peterson: Does System Matter?

Bacon Bits said:

But the biggest problem is still there:

You still don't know what actually playing the game looks like. There's no board. There's no pieces. There's no setup. You sit at a table with a sheet of paper and a pencil. There's monsters and characters and several players and one referee, but there's no actual instructions of how to play.

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I don't know the 5e Starter Set, but this criticism is not true of Moldvay Basic.

Chapter 8 gives step-by-step advice, and a worked example, on how to build a dungeon. The example goes right down to rolling the treasure for a room with some giant crab spiders, and writing it down on the dungeon key. There are step-by-step rules for resolving exploration turns and combat rounds, and examples of both as well.

I don't know what it's like to try and play Prince Valiant from the rulebook with no other experience of RPGing, but I will conjecture that that is possible too. There is an example of play to begin with that illustrates what play is like; the rules for PC gen are step-by-step and straightforward; there is a simple but worked-through example of scenario design.

The rules are longer than Moldvay Basic, but the demarcation of who needs to read which bit for what purpose is pretty clear. What could be stronger (it's not missing, but it could be stronger) is the explanation of when a player can just describe what his/her PC does, and when the GM should call for a check to see if things work out as the player would like them to. One reason Moldvay Basic is able to be particularly strong in this respect is because its field of fictional action is so narrow.

pemerton said:

I don't know the 5e Starter Set, but this criticism is not true of Moldvay Basic.

Chapter 8 gives step-by-step advice, and a worked example, on how to build a dungeon. The example goes right down to rolling the treasure for a room with some giant crab spiders, and writing it down on the dungeon key. There are step-by-step rules for resolving exploration turns and combat rounds, and examples of both as well.

I don't know what it's like to try and play Prince Valiant from the rulebook with no other experience of RPGing, but I will conjecture that that is possible too. There is an example of play to begin with that illustrates what play is like; the rules for PC gen are step-by-step and straightforward; there is a simple but worked-through example of scenario design.

The rules are longer than Moldvay Basic, but the demarcation of who needs to read which bit for what purpose is pretty clear. What could be stronger (it's not missing, but it could be stronger) is the explanation of when a player can just describe what his/her PC does, and when the GM should call for a check to see if things work out as the player would like them to. One reason Moldvay Basic is able to be particularly strong in this respect is because its field of fictional action is so narrow.

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Well, I think Moldvay Basic and Basic D&D in general were developed specifically to handle this exact criticism and spend more time telling people about the procedures of actual play and the actual setup. Even with the much shorter books in AD&D, they were seen as clearly being too complex for their target audience. Like, that's why the Red Box was supposed to be in toy stores and the AD&D hardbacks were not. Basic D&D was specifically an attempt to create a minimal number of rules that could still be used with AD&D modules, the monster manual, and so on.

And I disagree that the rules demarcation is clear when you don't know what a DM even is, because I'm talking about the inertia of switching systems before you know anything about the game. And, well, someone has to read the DM stuff. Even setting that aside, it's not like a 320 page rulebook is somehow a reasonable read to play a game. It's not. It's ridiculous. Even the 64 page player's book in Moldvay Basic constitutes and extremely large amount of reading for a single game.

Bacon Bits said:

I disagree that the rules demarcation is clear when you don't know what a DM even is, because I'm talking about the inertia of switching systems before you know anything about the game. And, well, someone has to read the DM stuff. Even setting that aside, it's not like a 320 page rulebook is somehow a reasonable read to play a game. It's not. It's ridiculous. Even the 64 page player's book in Moldvay Basic constitutes and extremely large amount of reading for a single game.

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I agree 64 pages is long, but I don't think it's as impractical as the 1,000-ish pages you've (correctly, in my view) identified for the more direct descendants of AD&D.

Moldvay Basic expressly tells the new player to read all the rules. It clearly identifies two participant roles - player and DM - but it doesn't make any assumption about rules demarcation. It's the opposite of AD&D in that respect.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a big fan of Moldvay Basic as a presentation of D&D! I think it's actually quite odd that, from the point of view of playability, the presentation of the game peaked about 40 years ago.

Bacon Bits said:

Yes, that is why the Starter Set exists. But it still doesn't help that much. Like can you be expected to just bust out D&D one evening like it's Cluedo or Monopoly, and just figure it out with friends in an evening? The rules for those games fit on a placemat.

There are a bunch of fairly small problems that are all things that need to be overcome:

1. It's $30 and, though it does contain dice, you're looking at $180. Yes, you can just get the $30 Starter Kit, but the end goal if things go well is to pay another $150 at least.
2. You still have a 30 page rulebook to ingest. This is still not a small amount of game rules to learn.
3. You know you're getting a very small subset of the game. Like $30 for just a demo. You have to be because those booklets are so small. The thing is, how do you know you're not just buying a really small part of the game? That is, how do you know if it's a horizontal cross section slice of the game instead of a vertical segment of a much larger game? With some complex board games you often have multiple ways to play them.
4. You don't know how well written the game is. How many times have you read an RPG and gotten through it and thought, even with your experience, that you have absolutely no idea how you'd actually run the game you've just read? That's one of the common criticisms I've seen about Blades in the Dark, Mage, Wraith, Exalted, and so on. Or how often have you started an RPG only to find that the book is so horribly organized that it is only useful as a manual of rules and not as a technical reference during actual play? What if you buy the book expecting Savage Worlds and you actually get Phoenix Command?

But the biggest problem is still there:

You still don't know what actually playing the game looks like. There's no board. There's no pieces. There's no setup. You sit at a table with a sheet of paper and a pencil. There's monsters and characters and several players and one referee, but there's no actual instructions of how to play. Compare it to Magic: The Gathering. You take your deck, shuffle it up, place it to the right or left of the play area, draw 7 cards, etc. There are turns, and a fixed setup, and an order of play. For as complex a game as Magic is, it's still structured like a traditional game. And Magic got a huge boost in popularity with Arena because there was a digital version that knows the rules. There's a tutorial that can walk through. It shows you how to play it and what to expect and when you can do things. D&D didn't have any of that until there were actual plays.

Further, you never know what you're going to get with planned scenarios in a game like the starter set. I remember a friend and I found his dad's copy of the Avalon Hill Starship Troopers war game. We tried playing it, and it took us about an hour to puzzle through the rules, an hour to get one game set up, and about 15 minutes into play to realize that the scenario was so grossly one-sided that it was almost certain victory for one side. The game scenarios had modeled the battles in the book, and it favored that over a balanced confrontation. It was as close to a fixed game as I've seen. We tried a later scenario, and it was the same way with the other side winning. There were no rules that I recall for creating your own scenarios.

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I feel like you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. The onboarding isn’t perfect, but it’s not the insurmountable cliff-face that you’re presenting it as. And D&D is doing really well.

People watch CR, buy the starter set, and give it a try. Maybe later they go full in with the hardcovers, or maybe they don’t.

Morrus said:

I feel like you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. The onboarding isn’t perfect, but it’s not the insurmountable cliff-face that you’re presenting it as. And D&D is doing really well.

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I am being moderately hyperbolic, yes.

The point I'm trying to make is that picking up a new system isn't as trivial as a lot of web forum posters like to say it is. These boards in particular are frequented by a lot of people who just read new games and never intend to play them. That's really weird, even within the hobby. Even if you're a designer, it's moderately weird. Some designers I know do that, but just as many if not more are confident in their designs that they don't feel a need to.

While I 100% am frustrated by players who try to shoehorn every genre, style, setting, and tone into D&D -- because that's a horrible idea that almost always ends badly -- I absolutely understand why there is so much inertia about moving to a different game system. Changing a system isn't as trivial for most players as the posters here would have you believe. Lots of RPG players don't think about, let alone care about or enjoy, game systems. That doesn't mean they're not gamers or not roleplayers.

Morrus said:

People watch CR, buy the starter set, and give it a try. Maybe later they go full in with the hardcovers, or maybe they don’t.

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Now, yes. The point was about before actual plays existed. I've spoken to many people over the years who think of roleplaying as something closer to LARPing. And that's not to mention those who only think of it as something you do in the bedroom.

Understanding why actual plays helped so much gives tremendous insight into what kind of inertia people experience about playing the game. Why something like Magic or World of Warcraft or Warhammer tend to get a lot more players and fans, and how onboarding people into almost every other game than an RPG is easier. It seems strange because all you have to buy is books, but that's exactly the problem. Buying a thick book of rules is intimidating. It's almost like buying a textbook.

And switching to a new system brings that same inertia.

So, yes, system matters. I'm never going to run D&D in a modern setting because I don't think guns work well with D&D hit points. I'm going to run Savage Worlds where you could be very highly experienced and still be taken out by just a few good shots. That's going to be way better to the style of game I'm going to run in a modern setting.

But I also sympathize with people who just don't want to learn another game. Another system that has worse production values and is less complete than D&D is, because of course they are. A game system whose rule books are often terribly organize or have major parts of the rules written in nonsensical or contradictory ways. Having to stop in the middle of combat to figure out something that should be a pretty common scenario that the rules somehow just don't address. Finding out halfway through session 6 that your chosen system is unplayable, unworkable, or just not at all fun. Doesn't matter if it just doesn't work at your table or if it's bigger than that. Finding out that what you wanted out of the new system wasn't actually there in the first place is heartbreaking because you often can't do anything about it except throw the whole campaign away. Choosing a brand new system is choosing to allow your campaign to fail because the game rules just don't function.

It's not as easy as posters here want to argue that it is.

Bacon Bits said:

I also sympathize with people who just don't want to learn another game. Another system that has worse production values and is less complete than D&D is, because of course they are. A game system whose rule books are often terribly organize or have major parts of the rules written in nonsensical or contradictory ways. Having to stop in the middle of combat to figure out something that should be a pretty common scenario that the rules somehow just don't address. Finding out halfway through session 6 that your chosen system is unplayable, unworkable, or just not at all fun. Doesn't matter if it just doesn't work at your table or if it's bigger than that. Finding out that what you wanted out of the new system wasn't actually there in the first place is heartbreaking because you often can't do anything about it except throw the whole campaign away. Choosing a brand new system is choosing to allow your campaign to fail because the game rules just don't function.

It's not as easy as posters here want to argue that it is.

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Which systems to you have in mind?

Cthulhu Dark is a 4 page free PDF. There is no cost, the time required to read it is very minimal, and there is nothing I can think of that the rules don't address.

Prince Valiant is one book that is thinner than any D&D hardback since about 1978. (It's a similar size to the AD&D PHB, but is a complete game that also includes a number of sample scenarios.) And the rules are not less complete than D&D.

While I can see where you're coming from vis-a-vis the accessibility to new players of D&D, and of D&D variants like PF, I think your generalisation across all or even most RPGs is not sound.

I think the biggest obstacle to D&D players picking up systems like Cthulhu Dark or Prince Valiant is that these require them to learn new and unfamiliar processes of play.

Bacon Bits said:

he point I'm trying to make is that picking up a new system isn't as trivial as a lot of web forum posters like to say it is. These boards in particular are frequented by a lot of people who just read new games and never intend to play them. That's really weird, even within the hobby.

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This is fair. When I want to run a new game there are some things I need to take into consideration.

• Will this require my players to purchase new books and will they be willing to do so?
• Will they take the time to get acquainted with the rules?
• Will they take the time to get acquainted with the setting?

I'd like to run Traveller (Mongoose 2nd edition) COVID is no long something to worry about. Of my entire group, only one person (not me) has any experience with Traveller and that was over 25 years in the past. At least they seem receptive to the idea so we'll see how it goes. I've got an easy going group right now, but switching gears to a new game and system is a chore.

MGibster said:

I'd like to run Traveller (Mongoose 2nd edition) COVID is no long something to worry about. Of my entire group, only one person (not me) has any experience with Traveller and that was over 25 years in the past. At least they seem receptive to the idea so we'll see how it goes. I've got an easy going group right now, but switching gears to a new game and system is a chore.

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I only know Classic Traveller, not the Mongoose version. It's pretty easy for players, provided that you as referee know the resolution procedures and subsystems. Players can work out what their PCs are good at just by looking at the skills on their sheets, and they roll the dice when you call for them to based on what they say their PCs are doing.

It's surprisingly close to a PbtA game in that respect, but with even simpler PC sheets.

MGibster said:

This is fair. When I want to run a new game there are some things I need to take into consideration.

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First, I want to say that these are valid questions to take into consideration.

MGibster said:

• Will this require my players to purchase new books and will they be willing to do so?

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Most of the time, IME, this isn't necessary. I think that this again D&D conditioning people that players should/would have a book of their own. Over the past few years, I have run Fate (incl. Jadepunk), Numenera, the Cypher System, AGE (Titansgrave, Blue Rose), D&D 5e, Index Card RPG, and Dungeon World. None of which required that my players buy the book. I even ran and played Pathfinder, and in that case, most of us used d20pfsrd.org or the other online resources. Online resources, in general, are fairly prevalent, particularly among fan communities.

MGibster said:

• Will they take the time to get acquainted with the rules?

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Here, I find that a basic cheat sheet for the rules is all that's typically needed for assisting players get started. I usually print out one sheet per two players. In fact, I wish that more TTRPGs would include a cheat sheet overview of the basic rules, as that sort of aid tremendously helps players (or even the GM) jump into the game quicker.

MGibster said:

• Will they take the time to get acquainted with the setting?

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Again, here is where I go with a one-page write-up of the setting, if such is necessary at all, as this likely would have come up in either Session 0 or in pitching the game to the group. A lot of settings tend to be somewhat light on their toes when it comes to the amount of details necessary to immerse oneself into to play.

Aldarc said:

Most of the time, IME, this isn't necessary. I think that this again D&D conditioning people that players should/would have a book of their own.

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How does D&D condition people to have their own book? I play with three tables of 4-6 and all three have two PHB’s between them.