Game Mechanics & Lore

[Thomas Shey]

I think a lot of people on this site will say 5e let them down since it is not Dark Sun or Birthright. But D&D is supposed to be generic like @payn mentioned above. Each world has its own schtick where the flavor is found.

The problem is that its never been generic. Too many of the mechanics are too specific for that (the specifics of classes and spells being the standout here). It may be somewhat broad, but it doesn't even cover all fantasy by any means.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That is interesting. I have never played a Star Wars RPG, but I often have felt (playing things like Gamma World and Starfinder) that sci-fi seems more difficult to attach a rule-base to than fantasy. I don't know why, and I don't know if it is true, but it is just something that sits in my gut. It might also be that I have spent a lot more time thinking about fantasy mechanics as opposed to sci-fi mechanics.

Its not intrinsically harder; if its pulpy, you can handle the problem with luck points and the like. If not, and not having good armor, you just have to avoid much combat. If there is good armor, then its not unreasonable for a lot of attacks to lead to injury, not death.

 

[Flying Toaster]

Keep in mind here I was referring to the 2nd edition of Legend of the Five Rings and not AD&D. While I played some 1st edition AD&D, 2nd edition was the one I bought my own books for and played the most.

If I had a preoccupation with realism I would complain about dragons, magic, and that stupid double bladed sword WotC felt the need to introduce in third edition because of Darth Maul. Part of the problem here is that such behavior breaks immersion. When running Deadlands, a fist fight broke out between some of the PCs and a third player decided to throw a grenade at them. The player's reasoning was the grenade was unlikely to kill any of the PCs so it wasn't a big deal. It's kind of like when I hear players, "Go ahead and cast fireball, I'll be fine." It just takes me out of the narrative.

Oops. Reading comprehension fail.

When I think about my 1980’s B/X and AD&D groups, I remember that we noticed the areas where the rules did not perfectly model real warfare, but after a bit of discussion we would go back to using those rules anyway because we did not really want to pull on those threads and unravel the game. Even fairly casual players sometimes picked up on these things. I remember a friend pointing out that at first he tried directing attacks to all of the enemies in order to wound them and slow them down, but he quickly realized that the rules actually rewarded focusing on one enemy until they went down. I had to agree with him that it did not really make sense that a wounded orc with 1 hp left fought just as well as one with full hp, but adding more realistic rules would have slowed things down, and B/X was already about as much crunch as this player wanted anyway.

We house-ruled away the stuff we didn’t enjoy, mostly low-hanging fruit like demi-human level limits and keeping track of “dungeoneering” stuff like light sources and encumbrance (too much like math homework), but we did not try to rewrite the basic rules because it was just too much work and maybe we sensed that we were not really up to the task. I once got really excited about a Dragon magazine article that introduced hit locations and custom armor pieces. It might have been all right for big set piece duels, but it slowed ordinary combats to a crawl and I quickly gave up on it.

I don’t think we ever used terms like “immersion” but in actual play nobody ever tried stupid exploits like jumping off cliffs or deliberate friendly fire(balls). We had fun critiquing the rules during down time, in much the same way that we would critique the “realism” of the action, fantasy, and science fiction movies and TV that we watched, but once the game actually started we just wanted to play. In the 90’s movies like Clerks had the characters doing that kind of pop culture analysis on-screen and made it mainstream, so I sometimes wonder if it was a hallmark of Generation X, but maybe it was inevitable whenever people stopped to examine their favorite entertainment conventions in detail.

I sometimes toy with the idea of exploring how magic and monsters would affect a “real” fantasy world. D&D evolved out of Chainmail games that swapped out seige engines like catapults and trebuchets for boulder-hurling giants and fire-breathing dragons. In the real world people mostly stopped building castles after cannons made stone walls less effective, so maybe magic and monsters explain why D&D worlds are full of ruined castles and baddies holed up in underground dungeons. But earth elementals and other tunneling monsters might make dungeons obsolete too, so I don’t know where the fantasy arms race ends.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Do the mechanics of a game need to support the lore? Lore, of course, being the primary driver of mood and tone.

I don't know if lore is the "primary driver of mood and tone". I think mechanics can often drive mood and tone as well.

Like, if the lore is saying that the world is grimdark and bloody, like say Warhammer Fantasy, but the actual rules make make combat and recovery from combat a total breeze, you've got a mismatch that is going to change the tone and going to influence the behaviour of the players and thus the PCs. You can keep telling people combat is fatal and scary, but if it just isn't, well... eventually the players work that out. And eventually is probably like session 2.

Whereas if you've got a game that's saying it's very heroic and about defeating evil in combat, but is actually brutal and bloody in combat, and hard-to-survive, you have a mismatch in the opposite direction (indeed, AD&D had this problem a lot of the time, especially with certain adventures/campaigns/settings), which causes the players to have the PCs not behave like fantasy heroes, but more like fantasy thugs and ambushers.

I've been watching a lot of Buffy and Angel recently, and I remember in the 1990s, I couldn't think of an RPG that actually matched how stuff played out in them, even just looking at combat say. But now I'd say these would definitely be PtbA games or similar, with very narrative combat, where Buffy et al are always strong enough to defeat the opponents, but never so strong they completely casually trash them every time (even later on, it's unusual if Buffy et al just casually vape a bunch of vamps, and a normal random vamp will fairly often give Buffy a good fight or knock her down a few times or the like). So if you had a D&D-style system where the PCs powered up so much that it trivialized say "straight out of the grave" vamps or "basic" demons, that would give a very different vibe to those shows, or equally if you had one where it was long and hard to recover from fights, that just wouldn't work, not even for the non-main characters (the actual Buffy/Angel RPGs weren't all that good at handling their own genre as a result, I would suggest).

I don't know about the lore, but I do think the mechanics of a game need to support the tone and genre the game is going for.

Yeah exactly. Tone and genre are the main thing mechanics typically need to support.

Sometimes lore and mechanics interact, but it tends to be in more specialized and setting-specific games, and not always even then.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I've been watching a lot of Buffy and Angel recently, and I remember in the 1990s, I couldn't think of an RPG that actually matched how stuff played out in them, even just looking at combat say. But now I'd say these would definitely be PtbA games or similar, with very narrative combat, where Buffy et al are always strong enough to defeat the opponents, but never so strong they completely casually trash them every time (even later on, it's unusual if Buffy et al just casually vape a bunch of vamps, and a normal random vamp will fairly often give Buffy a good fight or knock her down a few times or the like).

Monster of the Week (PbtA!) is excellent at modeling this. The game started off as a way to play Supernatural, but it does a great job with its Buffy-inspired playbooks.

It's definitely the game I'd want to use to play a Buffy-inspired game, and maybe only use the actual Buffy and Angel RPGs as sourcebooks -- and even then, I'm pretty sure the various Buffy TV show books or even just the wikis would be better than them.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Monster of the Week (PbtA!) is excellent at modeling this. The game started off as a way to play Supernatural, but it does a great job with its Buffy-inspired playbooks.

It's definitely the game I'd want to use to play a Buffy-inspired game, and maybe only use the actual Buffy and Angel RPGs as sourcebooks -- and even then, I'm pretty sure the various Buffy TV show books or even just the wikis would be better than them.

I’ve also used Don’t Rest Your Head to play Buffy, re-theming the insomnia as slipping into the darkness. It was a darker form of Buffy, but I was quite pleased at how it was able to generate a simialr sort of tone.

 

[Committed Hero]

It's not necessary that the mechanics support the lore, but why wouldn't a designer strive for it? Unless there is a commitment to stay within a particular rules system - not an unwise decision, if that system is 5e - you have the wisdom of five decades of game writing to consider when creating mechanics from whole cloth.

 

[Scott Christian]

I'm sorry, my brain broke at this point.

To be fair, I think the argument revolves around "Do you need lyrics that are good or make sense to have a popular song?" Of course, the answer is no - until you talk to someone that pays attention to words.
(Of course sound and fluidity matter. But for some reason, that part is never brought up.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Monster of the Week (PbtA!) is excellent at modeling this. The game started off as a way to play Supernatural, but it does a great job with its Buffy-inspired playbooks.

Yeah I was looking at that - I've not got the full book, but looking at the consolidated playbooks it seemed like some really strange choices had been made.

For example, there are like 5 (arguably 6) different "spellcasters" with huge conceptual and thematic overlap. There are essentially 3 "detectives" who also have big conceptual and thematic overlap. There are 3 "warrior angels"/"holy warriors", similarly (not even counting the Chosen).

Yet there's no Buffy-type at all! Instead their "Chosen" is all about a special magic weapon which is kind of strange, because whilst "Chosen"-themed characters are not uncommon in modern supernatural stuff, they almost never start with a special magic weapon (albeit they often acquire one later in their career - even Buffy does but in like, what her last season?).

And basic, common concepts which you might to see multiple different ones of are all jammed into "The Monstrous" and "the Expert" meaning like, potentially you might have as many as three PCs with the same playbook and similar mechanics. I could easily see a group where every PC mapped to The Expert or The Monstrous.

I guess what I'm saying is I feel this looks (superficially) like an RPG (again just based on the playbooks) desperate in need of a new, better-thought-through edition. Perhaps not surprising as I believe it was last updated in 2015. Especially as I struggle to see how you'd map many of Buffy, Angel and Supernatural's characters to this! It seems like The Expert, The Monstrous, and the Mundane cover like, 90% of the characters, and then we have this crazy number of other playbooks for a few others (interestingly The Envoy maps to Castiel much better than The Divine, and The Professional is a surprisingly poor match for Riley but is almost a good match for Gunn? Not quite though because there's no option to not have an Agency. The Crooked doesn't map to Gunn at all which is probably a good thing). Feels like maybe they should reconsider that.

I'm guessing there are non-official playbooks out there that take a shot at opening up that space more. Like if you're going to have multiple overlapping playbooks it should be for core concepts/tropes to give players different takes, rather than for weird ones.

Sorry to go on, just very surprised to see this. I was expecting to see very obvious mappings and a focus on core/typical tropes, but the focus seems instead to be on weird edge cases (like, they've got an entire playbook for "Harry from Resident Alien", and an entire one for a concept I've never seen as a good guy in any "Monster of the week"-type show or book/comic, the Interface, though I can think of at least a couple of villains like that). I think that actually illustrates one potential issue with PtbA games - a proliferation of odd playbooks where really just adding some abilities/options to an existing one was all that was needed. That said credit where credit is due - The Expert and The Monstrous playbooks do seem more well-developed than many of the others, which is kind of what you'd hope. A bit funny that it seems like Sam, Dean, Giles, and Wesley would all map to The Expert though lol. I feel like Dean would pretty upset by this!

Also now I've typed the word "map" so many times it has lost all meaning to me lol.

 

[payn]

Was Monster of the Week supposed to be Buffy? It ended up x-files meets Fargo at my table. It's generic playbooks seemed to lend it to whatever you wanted to shape it in supernatural episodic TV sphere.