Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7092758" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think the Decker is the archetypal example of this, but it's a universal problem with specialists in any Sci-Fi campaign and one of the things that pulled me away from point buy and back toward class based systems.   As I said in my essay, I think that RPG's are practically defined as being games made up of diverse mini-games.  That is to say, they are attempting to "simulate the world" and everything in it.  But you run into a problem of playability if one of the expectations of play is that each character specializes in a particular different mini-game, because then you end up with no real interaction between the players in what is supposed to be a social game.  The same problem that plagues Deckers plagues for example star fighter pilots.  If you put your chargen resources into being a great star fighter pilot, you end up in a situation where you only excel in a mini-game that comes up (relatively speaking) rarely.  If you commit halfway though, then you don't get to shine in the very area you defined your character in - you'll always get beaten by specialists with fewer points but greater commitment to the mini-game.   Meanwhile, at the time you character shines, the other characters often have little or nothing to contribute.The same is true of just about any specialist character - you can build a great 'face', but then you are really only valuable in port when negotiating something (and the rest of the team mostly just watches or does their own thing when you do).  Most science-fiction systems seem to push characters into what in game context are NPC roles, and most science-fiction shows have a trope of 'team of specialists' but rarely have all the characters working on the same problem in a useful way which sets a bad example when you want to convert your favorite property to being an RPG (in an RPG you can play Spock as a PC, but you shouldn't play Scotty as a PC).  Worse, you are at the mercy of the DM offering your mini-game to you in a way that resolves the conflicts he presents.  You can't really know from campaign to campaign what a PC build is going to look like.  Are there going to lots of problems that can be resolved by hacking into systems?  One area that D&D really excelled in early on that few of its competitors excelled in was presenting what it's play was about, presenting examples of play, and getting everyone thinking about what the game was in the same way.   D&D may have never had the best rules, but it always did the best job of explaining what the rules were for and what it's core game play was supposed to be like and what it was about.  This combined with its class based system, meant that everyone was more or less prepared for and available during its core gameplay and contributed jointly to it.   You could complain that the balance wasn't as good as it could have been, resulting in some classes being more important overall than others, but everyone was involved (and some groups didn't even notice the balance issues in all the fun they were having).</blockquote>

Verification