NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6798744" data-attributes="member: 85870">I brought it up because I found your criteria for a coherent system feedback loop interesting, and I wanted to see how my current system of choice held up against it. In looking at it, my high level of satisfaction with Savage Worlds as rule system seems to tie directly to what you posited. Savage naturally seems to "feed into" the premise it presents. Mechanical resolution naturally drives character positioning toward that premise. For both players and GM it's also intuitive and fast to adjudicate, and makes it very easy to build encounters. And this has been a new experience relative to my "RPG Life" prior. By the time I finished up my last Pathfinder campaign in 2011, I was ready to move on to something else. I've never really liked Vancian casting to begin with, and the overall character building and encounter balancing aspects as a GM were just burdensome. I just finally realized that the RPG experience I really wanted wasn't going to come from D&D. Oh sure, it was an adequate substitute most of the time, and I could certainly work around a lot of it, but it wasn't every going to be really what I wanted. Based on your criteria, the problem that 3.x and Pathfinder have (I can't really comment on 5e, having never played it) is that they're not attempting to emulate a genre, or provide a specific "experience" with mechanics that support a particular style, they're simply trying to replicate "D&D as its own genre." There's no real thought to whether "D&D as genre" is ITSELF coherent or particularly workable, but that's ultimately beside the point as far as the rules are concerned. (4e is the obvious outlier, because it had a very specific, codified, and structured "play experience" that its mechanics were specifically designed to implement.)When I picked up Fantasy Craft shortly after my Pathfinder campaign ended, the difference in feel and texture in its gameplay compared to 3.x was obviously and vastly more coherent. Why? Because despite using the d20 chassis, Fantasy Craft wasn't trying to "be D&D," it was simply trying to be a great fantasy RPG that happened to bear some reasonable semblance to its genetic predecessors. Honestly I'm still a bit baffled why FC didn't become more popular among the "I don't really like 3.x, but don't want to move to 4e" crowd.But back to the topic of fail forward:  @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=42582" target="_blank">pemerton</a> I discussed in a thread a few months ago comparing 4e's and Savage Worlds' approaches to character fictional positioning. One of the commonalities was that both 4e and Savage Worlds assume broad levels of character competency. And I think this adds a strong supporting dimension for a system that wants to support "fail forward." Assumed broad competency makes it easier to tell players, "Hmmm, you've suffered a setback here, but other avenues appear to be open here, here, and here." When your characters feel competent to tackle problems across a broader swath of available options, it's easier as a GM to frame those options into the fiction. The problem with the 3.x fighter is that he's qualified to do exactly nothing that doesn't involve swinging a sword. When that's the case, telling the group that it will be easier to influence the local Bandit King to aid you in your cause against the local tyrant instead of simply invading the castle, the fighter's not got much to add.Burning Wheel, interestingly, seems to take an opposite approach --- your characters are broadly not competent, but are expected to attempt to do things in which they are not competent because they are compelled to by their beliefs and instincts. In this case, I think "fail forward" is a downright necessary component. And D&D 3.x is mechanically not structured to support either the Savage/4e style "fail forward," or Burning Wheel's.</blockquote>

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