D&D General "Hot" take: Aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overvalued

[doctorbadwolf]

To add to this, when it comes to game design... adding rules is EASY. Adding more and more systems for various stuff like in 1e because it's 'realistic' or whatever? That's EASY. Complications? That's EASY. I mean... FATAL exists after all.

Paring your system down to less rules but keeping the feel, the theme and the excitement? In other words, making them elegant? That's where the GOOD designers shine.

Of course, when it comes to RPG you can go too far for certain people's tastes... but the games are still there and still playable. Just look at Lasers & Feelings for exemple.

Lasers and Feelings is playable, IMO, because it's "when there is a conflict between your fiction and mine, we use a coin toss to determine whose fiction is right" layered onto freeform roleplaying to keep things moving. It works for what it is, with its fairly tight theme and game style, but, again IMO, it literally could not support the same kind of play as a more complex system. It is necessarily more limited, by it's extreme simplicity.

My friend is wanting to run a series of games wherein we use a single very simple "system" to run sessions with very different themes and tones, where a player chooses each session if the next game will be Horror, Mystery, Pulp Adventure, etc. His preference at first was to literally just have a discription of a character derived from a 5 part questionnaire, and the basic dice mechanic from pbta games (2d6 with a success ladder). That's it.
However, when I pointed out to him that this would mean that my Constantine style street warlock who is expert in ritual magic, deductive reasoning, and forensics, had no way to actually be expert in anything at all, he agreed that we should at least have some manner of system by which to slightly increase my chance of success on tests regarding my areas of expertise.
I suggested a simple advantage/disadvantage system, wherein I roll with 3 dice and drop the lowest if I am rolling for something I am expert in, and if the check should be extra hard for me I do the opposite (3d6 drop highest). In this way, who my character is is allowed to matter.
This system will probably work just fine for us for this specific experiment, and teach us about our roleplaying and storytelling skills, and help us make better games in the future, but it isn't the seed of a great game. It is very limited. It has large pitfalls. It would fall apart in a context other than playing with people who are fully onbaord and not prone to gaming the system in order to "win".

I wish D&D still had some form of interruption of casters. It makes the need for teamwork that much stronger.

5e characers are somewhat too independent.

In my games, I'm considering a rule that you can use a bonus action on your turn to prepare to interrupt a complex action by someone else on the field, and if you get ot use that Reaction, it interrupts the action rather than happening after it. In this way, you can set yourself up to interrupt casters. If you do, they have to make a Concentration Save to keep the spell.

I've also added counterspell variants like a smite that allows you to move up to 10ft as a reaction while the spell lasts and make an attack that interrupts a spell casting, with a little extra damage.

 

[Umbran]

I suppose if you want or need such frameworks.

I find them unnecessary and an over complication of something I can do more quickly and effectively by making a ruling.

In Fate Accelerated, the framework for Buckets vs fire-orcs is "You are in a Contest. Each of the parties in the contest make an Overcome action (with normal rules for taking that action). Whoever gets a better score on their action wins a victory point. Succeed with style, you gain two victory points. Whoever reached three points first wins."

Not terribly complicated - a series of contested rolls. It takes a few moments, yes. But it allows for a lot of player creativity in the exchange, and can build tension in a way that a quick ruling can't. It avoids the issue of the GM ruling being (or being perceived as) biased toward a preferred result.

If this event wasn't supposed to be interesting enough to engage the mechanics, why is it happening?

 

[Undrave]

Lasers and Feelings is playable, IMO, because it's "when there is a conflict between your fiction and mine, we use a coin toss to determine whose fiction is right" layered onto freeform roleplaying to keep things moving. It works for what it is, with its fairly tight theme and game style, but, again IMO, it literally could not support the same kind of play as a more complex system. It is necessarily more limited, by it's extreme simplicity.

Yeah Lasers & Feelings is kind of the extreme, but its resolution concept (One number covering two opposing concept, one you want to roll below the other above) can be, and has been, adapted to a ton of other tight themes. Heck, you could expend it into a multiple set of conflicting elements like say... Swords & Sorcery, Society & Wilderness, Charm & Subterfuge, and then go from there.

 

[FrozenNorth]

So... I'm just wondering, does anybody know what this thread is about any more? (Or, for that matter, what it was about in the first place? At first I thought I sorta understood what the OP was getting at, but I have become less and less certain of that.)

Son, it’s meta-aesthetics. It’s meta-aesthetics ALL the way down

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah Lasers & Feelings is kind of the extreme, but its resolution concept (One number covering two opposing concept, one you want to roll below the other above) can be, and has been, adapted to a ton of other tight themes. Heck, you could expend it into a multiple set of conflicting elements like say... Swords & Sorcery, Society & Wilderness, Charm & Subterfuge, and then go from there.

Sure, but you have to create a new game every time around a dice mechanic, it isn't one game that works for those themes.

 

[Monayuris]

In Fate Accelerated, the framework for Buckets vs fire-orcs is "You are in a Contest. Each of the parties in the contest make an Overcome action (with normal rules for taking that action). Whoever gets a better score on their action wins a victory point. Succeed with style, you gain two victory points. Whoever reached three points first wins."
Not terribly complicated - a series of contested rolls. It takes a few moments, yes. But it allows for a lot of player creativity in the exchange, and can build tension in a way that a quick ruling can't. It avoids the issue of the GM ruling being (or being perceived as) biased toward a preferred result.

If this event wasn't supposed to be interesting enough to engage the mechanics, why is it happening?

Don’t ask me, the bucket brigade orcs thing isn’t my idea... I have no idea where it came from or why it is even relevant, lol.

My only point is that general resolution mechanics aren’t universally superior and GM rulings is a perfectly acceptable method and is not to be assumed to be biased or oppositional.

 

[Campbell]

So... I'm just wondering, does anybody know what this thread is about any more? (Or, for that matter, what it was about in the first place? At first I thought I sorta understood what the OP was getting at, but I have become less and less certain of that.)

So generally designing to what looks good in the text or what is nice to think about instead of what works best for play. Obviously not everyone will agree what fits here.

Some examples include:

1. Treating abstractions like turn by turn initiative, PC build rules, experience points and the like as if they were physical laws of nature leading to things like monsters built like PCs, NPC classes and the like.
2. Unnecessary bundling and consistency even when it causes severe gameplay problems. See how 3e's handling all attributes in some way for all classes without accounting for their impact helped lead to the dominance of the Cleric class. See also putting all feats or maneuvers into a single bucket.
3. I would add designing to a static adventure day here as well. General attempts to lock play down too much and like try to have too much control how things should go.

 

[Lanefan]

I disagree that mainstream appeal is an inherent good when discussing the quality of any given game.

Perhaps, but it's still a factor: what's the point of the perfect game if nobody plays it?

Personally ease of recruitment is not something I need to solve for. Particularly if it is indiscriminate. What I am looking for are games that contribute to play rather than just get out of the way. Ease of recruitment only matters so far as finding the right players to play a given game. If a given game is attractive to a mass of people who want to play in ways I do not wish to than I have a selection rather than a recruitment issue. Even worse if it does not appeal to the players I wish to play with.

I'd far rather have selection issues rather than recruitment issues. Too many potential players is always better than too few.

My critiques will always be creative critiques rather than ones based on appeal, but I think you can aim for both quality and appeal at the same time to a certain degree. I think you can have clear rules that are still evocative by more directly calling out where GM judgement is required. There are many ways to write rules. Arcane natural language and dry technical manual are not the only choices.

I wonder if some people aren't so concerned with how well the rules call out where GM judgment is required as with wanting the rules to either a) not require GM judgment at all or b) stipulate what that judgment should be and why.

 

[Lanefan]

So, where Gygax propounded rules SYSTEMS as toolkits, most modern RPGs propound PROCESS as a toolkit, which the rules simply enact and support.

Hmmm...interesting point.

Maybe that's why 3e-4e-5e are so much harder to successfully kitbash than earlier editions: changing the rules doesn't change the underlying process in the newer versions, where it did (or could) in the older.

Take Dungeon World as an example. There is no variation in its mechanics at all. Everything follows the "make a move, resolve the move, GM responds with hard or soft move in response" cycle. Every move involves the same toss of dice. The available moves are situational, and the outcomes vary depending on the nature and purpose of that move, but the core rule is very simple and basic. The problem is, if a rule system doesn't do that, if all the different parts don't speak the same language, or make music in harmony, then the focus of the players and GM shifts back to this sort of Gygaxian tension of GM as 'school master' and players as 'unruly children' where the GM's 'job' becomes to reign in the players attempts to 'achieve victory' through interpreting the rules in their favor. Even if this is not a major thrust of play, it muddies the waters in terms of the narrative sort of process that is being aimed at.

The rather enormous assumption here, of course, is that a "narrative sort of process" is the desired end goal.

I didn't find the analysis of @Bacon Bits terribly compelling because it doesn't seem to be cognizant of this. They are analyzing (at least 4e) as if the goal was some sort of perfect rules coverage, which is of course a unicorn. That wasn't the goal. Instead if you read it as a Story Game (which it certainly at least partly is) then you come to understand the rules, things like keywords, etc. more in terms that would make sense in a game like Dungeon World. That is, system as platform upon which story is writ. It cannot be biased or incomplete, because it forms the agreement upon which that process happens, the paper so to speak. It is at least best if that paper is robust and provides some pretty strong process for any situation. Hence the existence of powers, skills, skill challenges, keywords.

Perfect rules coverage is a 'unicorn' no matter what.

And maybe that was part of why 4e didn't end up doing so well: the mainstream demand just isn't there for a Story Game type of system. I suspect there's a whole lot (maybe even a large majority) of players out there who, like me, see the game as something of a competition pitting the PC party (the players) against a game world (the DM) which is out to kill them as and while they explore it.

Obviously, unless the system is very closed-ended*, those players are going to gently push against the rules until they push back and if there is no rule are going to fairly quickly break the game.

* - by this I mean the system takes the position that a player/PC cannot try anything unless a rule specifically allows it; as opposed to open-ended where anything can be tried unless a rule specifically bans it.

 

[Lanefan]

Apocalypse World uses keywords ("tags") in places, and expressly flags when they are about the fiction ("cues" and "constraints") and when they are mechanical. But it also uses unmediated fictional positioning - eg consider the Seduce or Manipulate move:

When you try to seduce or manipulate someone, tell them what you want and roll+hot. For NPCs: on a hit, they ask you​

to promise something first, and do it if you promise. On a 10+, whether you keep your promise is up to you, later. On a 7–9, they need some concrete assurance right now.​

Concrete assurance isn't a keyword. It's an unmediated description of the fiction that the player must bring about for his/her PC, if s/he wants the NPC to do whatever it is that s/he wants him/her to do.

Ironically, perhaps, I've bolded one bit of jargon (or a keyword?) in there that to a non-AW player makes no sense. Roll I get, but what's '+hot' mean?*

* - I can think of many things, each more off-colour and probably less-accurate than the last...

This isn't "natural". It's an artifice of a particular orientation in play - roughly, "husband resources and outwit the GM" - combined with a particular approach to resolution systems - roughly, a series of highly individuated subsystems each associated with a particular ingame process (eg the open locks subsystem, the spying subsystem, the sage subsystem, the loyalty subsystem - all of these can result in the discovery of secrets, but it's not clear which one to use as a model when a player wants to discover a secret by interrogating a prisoner).

Here I'd use the "role-play it at the table" subsystem, meaning the interrogating player(s) speak in character as the interrogators and I-as-DM speak in character as the prisoner, and we see where it goes from there.

I certainly don't see it coming up in RPGs that don't use sub-system based resolution. In these games there literally isn't such a thing, at least from the mechanical point of view, as "the game not being set up to handle it". And players invoke the rules, they don't push against them.

I'd be fairly confident, were I to ever end up in one of those games, in my ability to within a rather short time do or try something that the game isn't set up to handle...