Does everything about gaming HAVE to be fun?

[BiggusGeekus]

You can have fun with any rule set. Other players can ruin the fun, or the DM can ruin the fun.

The classic Palladium example of a mech pilot (Glitterboy?) being in the same party as a homeless dude (I forget what this was called) comes to mind.

I was also in a Shadowrun 2e game where I took skills first and another guy took tech. I had lots of skills, but he had bought skill chips, and a better cyberdeck, and cyberware that made him tougher than me, and a better gun, and more contacts, and .... you get the idea.

If you have a ruleset that means one character is better at everything than another character, that isn't so much fun. True, you can make it fun. But that's in spite of the ruleset not because of it. The ruleset is basically asking that the "shafted" player be a really good sport about things.

Oh, and don't get me started on the orignal Traveler rules where you could die during character generation.

 

[Tanstaafl]

As I read the examples of games that are/were not fun, both in this thread and others, it seems that in each not-fun situation the cause of the problem was a person & not the rules themselves.

When I game, I look at the rules as guidlines... and a way to help give everyone a ballanced character. Making a character with a focus and then having someone else in the party steal your thunder is never fun and can usually be avoided by a combination of good players and good communication - my pnp group is getting better at this, but we've had some inadvertant irritations of this type in the past.

Overall, I'd say that every session, encounter, campaign, or whatever should have the potential for fun.

 

[KB9JMQ]

I dont think it is rules issues that can end up causing a game not to be fun so much as a player doing something that does.

I can play with anyones interpretations/house rules and still have fun but if a player/dm/character themselves makes the game bad then that is when I stop having fun.

That is only happened a couple of times so I feel lucky compared to the number of threads which pop up here about bad players/dms and how they ruin a game. (Clarification - Not bad players but players who disrupt the game/gameflow.)

 

[Seule]

Might as well take up knitting. That way, even if it's not fun, you still end up with a muffler.

My wife knits /during/ games, and I've met other gamers who do too, including one yesterday at Origins.

Back on topic, the rules don't make things fun or not, as indicated by others, the people do. For example, I've played D&D and had a terrible time even though I like the game (never playing with the DM again) and had a great time playing MET LARP, although I consider the system a mess. If the people are good, anything can be fun.

--Seule AKA Penn

 

[infax]

To me it is usually the people at the table, their attitudes and eventually how they see the rules that determine the fun.

If a GM allows a group with a Glitterboy Pilot and a Vagabond, it can be because it will be mostly a political game or an adventure in a city's slums. If not and the players knew about it, perhaps it was the Vagabond's player that wanted to challenge himself. In either of this cases the game could still be fun. However, if the adventure constantly veered to make the Vagabond useless (lots of combat, the political situations were high-class and the vagabond barred from them...) then the game is no fun.

The same thing goes for the Shadowrun 2e game. I played in several games with such discrepancies and still had fun (the character with the chips didn't select the same skills as I did, my second option was magic and with all his implants he couldn't use it...).

However, I had more than once the bad luck to go to games were people were very heavy on the rules, almost boardgame heavy, so if you didn't make a munchkin character with powered up stats, ultra-specialization and didn't plan every move of yours as if in a chess match you ended up dead very fast or were despised. So that was no fun.

Even dying doesn't have to be unfun. A fellow gamer once died during an adventure and had later his soul bound to a small dagger. He could manifest his spirit from time to time but not much more than that. He had a blast out of it, still the character he talks about the most ... many people only refer to the character as "that dagger character", though.

 

[Holy Bovine]

A fellow gamer once died during an adventure and had later his soul bound to a small dagger.

One of your fellow gamers died and you continued to finish the adventure? I thought our group was hardcore

Gaming has to be fun. It is my release from everyday worries and when it ceases to be fun I cease to play. I had to leave RPGs for about 3 years at one point because gaming had ceased to be fun for me. I have more than enough (bad) stuff happening in my life to waste what little downtime I get on something I don't have fun with.

 

[Sanackranib]

So where's your breaking point? what rule being used would have to be changed for you not to say that you just can't play under those conditions because it isn't fun that way?

for me it was my 9th level necromancer taking 44d6 - reflex save for half. the epic level handbook has absolutely no place in a mid-level game.

 

[ThoughtBubble]

I've never quit a game because of the rules. When I have quit, it's been either because of the dealings with the other players, or because the idea doesn't hold my fancy.

Admittedly, I got close once, when I wound up on the bad end of the game system, but the group dissolved before I was able to make up my mind.

 

[Celtavian]

re

I hope not. I like to run encounters that aren't very fun for the players at times. Very few players like to have to run from an enemy, but I'll be damned if I am going to make every encounter I run defeatable on the first try. Players should know fear and mortality at times, not play in a watered down world where they defeat everything and walk away happily with the girl. I don't even like those kind of movies.

 

[Impeesa]

I voted option 4 - in theory I should be more like #3, but that's not how things are going at the moment. Though I'm not sure it's really a rules thing... whatever.

--Impeesa--