How much math should RPGs require?

[Celebrim]

But you can get to the cool story without all the maths. That's the point. You don't have to have all the modifiers and rules look ups to get the cool story. It's a choice, not a requirement.

Sure, but I can get a cool story without an RPG at all.

 

[overgeeked]

Of course, not everyone playing RPGs is entirely just about the cool story. As an analogy I've made before, most of the time I really do want my chocolate with my peanut butter.

Sure. It takes all kinds. Math heavy, hyper crunchy games are one way to play. They're not the only way. No mechanics and only story is another way to play. Again, not the only way.

My point wasn't about mechanics vs story rather about the "necessity" of crunch. You can get the same effect of all that crunch is smoother, easier ways at the table. You can achieve the same results without the math and rules look ups.

That's what the dice are for. All the math and all the modifiers, etc are just ways to adjust the outcome of the dice. You can map the possible outcomes directly onto dice and skip the math. You can have the referee do the math in their head and give you a target number. Etc.

Big beefy books with lots of rules aren't necessary. People like them, cool. But they're not required.

 

[OptionalRule]

Natural log of e amount of math.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure. It takes all kinds. Math heavy, hyper crunchy games are one way to play. They're not the only way. No mechanics and only story is another way to play. Again, not the only way.

My point wasn't about mechanics vs story rather about the "necessity" of crunch. You can get the same effect of all that crunch is smoother, easier ways at the table. You can achieve the same results without the math and rules look ups.

I think this is only true for certain values of "result". Can I get a good detailed game experience without a lot of GM arbitration and with light mechanics? I'd say (note the whole sentence) the answer is "no". That requires either GM intervention or some at least modestly heavy detail in the mechanics. I've never seen a third case that seems to work.

That's what the dice are for. All the math and all the modifiers, etc are just ways to adjust the outcome of the dice. You can map the possible outcomes directly onto dice and skip the math. You can have the referee do the math in their head and give you a target number. Etc.

You can't, however, have your decisions have varied impacts without any of that unless you're okay with the fundamentally arbitrary decisions the GM makes, and not everyone is.

Big beefy books with lots of rules aren't necessary. People like them, cool. But they're not required.

Again, I think you don't think they're necessary because you don't have all the same priorities. My guess is you're okay with a much heavier amount of GM arbitration than everyone is (but, to be clear, that's a guess just because its not uncommon in the hobby).

 

[overgeeked]

I think this is only true for certain values of "result". Can I get a good detailed game experience without a lot of GM arbitration and with light mechanics? I'd say (note the whole sentence) the answer is "no". That requires either GM intervention or some at least modestly heavy detail in the mechanics. I've never seen a third case that seems to work.

It's a false dichotomy. All RPGs have referee arbitration. Even games that in theory have no referee, the authority is shared among the players or given to one player at a time, as in Fiasco. A crunchy system sufficient to eliminate the need for referee arbitration would be impossibly huge and better done as a video game than at the table.

You can't, however, have your decisions have varied impacts without any of that unless you're okay with the fundamentally arbitrary decisions the GM makes, and not everyone is.

Sure. But again, referee arbitration is not something you can avoid in RPGs. So anyone who really hates the notion of referee arbitration wouldn't be playing RPGs because they all require some level of referee arbitration to even function.

Again, I think you don't think they're necessary because you don't have all the same priorities. My guess is you're okay with a much heavier amount of GM arbitration than everyone is (but, to be clear, that's a guess just because its not uncommon in the hobby).

I'm perfectly fine with FKR style play where the referee runs the show and tells you what happens based on your input.

 

[dragoner]

Lets do the math, if the reply is "someone else likes it" and the falsifiability is "someone else doesn't like it" of unknown yet probably equal quantities, it resolves as x+(-x)=0; or a null argument. The has to be another data point to qualify the statement.

Personally I am more lenient about in play applications of math, rather than background or subsystems. Nonetheless the OP is asking for a value judgement either way.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's a false dichotomy.

Only if you have an all-or-nothing world view. Yes, I can't get rid of all GM involvement--but I can reduce it significantly, and I find that very much desirable from both ends of the table.

A crunchy system sufficient to eliminate the need for referee arbitration would be impossibly huge and better done as a video game than at the table.

Again, this is an all-or-nothing view of the question, and not one I find at all useful.

Sure. But again, referee arbitration is not something you can avoid in RPGs. So anyone who really hates the notion of referee arbitration wouldn't be playing RPGs because they all require some level of referee arbitration to even function.

You can, however, reduce it considerably.

I'm perfectly fine with FKR style play where the referee runs the show and tells you what happens based on your input.

And I'm very much not. I want to play the game, not the referee.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Personally I am more lenient about in play applications of math, rather than background or subsystems. Nonetheless the OP is asking for a value judgement either way.

Though rereading the OP, what he actually asked is "How much can it expect of its players", and I'm not sure that can be answered except in the context of what the system is trying to do and who its aimed at. A game trying for a fast-paced broad strokes cinematic experience that expects the GM to do a lot of the lifting to handle routine cases can be expected to demand less math than a game that's aiming for a detailed, semi-simulationist system expecting the system to do a lot of the lifting; the system for either one would be poorly suited for the other.

So in practice, people looking for the latter can be expected to be willing to tolerate--or even expect--more math than those doing the former. People wanting the Champions experience are not liable to find Supers RED acceptable and vice-versa; they're purchasing the right to expect the system to do certain things with the math overhead, and not getting the system to do those sort of things is not going to be justified by the lower overhead. Likewise the people wanting the latter are going to find those systemic things not worth the extra overhead.

I think the OP needs to define what he thinks the players are expecting out of the system before it can be answered, because, as an example, what Overgeeked expects out of a system and I do are quite different things generally.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I have felt, with several games in the past, the the extra math was "for nothing" insofar as the math was supporting a level of granularity that did not make a meaningful difference in play.

It depends whether that math stops there or totals up. The Hero System deals with multipliers as small as a quarter. That's unlikely to be relevant by itself except when dealing with large base numbers. But its entirely possible to be dealing with multiples of those multipliers, and at the point you've accumulated those, the final result can, indeed, be significant, but you'd only have gotten there by paying attention to those quarters.

The Hero System is my penultimate example of math in an TTRPG game that once brought me joy, but now I find "for nothing" (the ultimate example being the GURPS 3e: Vehicles rulebook).

When I had much more time and less uses for my mental capacities, I built complex Hero System characters for campaigns that did not even exist (and likely wouldn't). I'd carefully weigh the difference between a 40 x [(1.00+ 0.25)/(1+0.75+0.50+0.25+0.25)] attack power verses a 25 x [(1.00+0.50+0.25)/(1+0.50+0.50+0.25+0.25)] one for hours (one costs 1 more END to use, after all).

As my time has shrunk and my uses for my limited cognitive endurance have grown, there is less direct satisfaction from the exercise. Likewise, as my experience with games have grown, I've realized that Hero System's point economy is at least significantly an artificial economy more than a measure of effectiveness, balance, genre emulation, or anything else I in which I have personal investment. That's not really a ding against Hero System -- we're playing friggin' elfgames, it's mostly arbitraries all the way down. However, I'm now much more selective about my investment in engaging with the arbitrary whatsits than I once was (not playing HS now, but my most recent GURPS campaign we aren't building out to a set point value, but instead making the characters that fit the roles), so it is hard to be as attached to highly-involved math in service of those points.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Just a note, since its a common mistake: the point budget in Hero is not to set everyone at the same capability level. There's a reason there are secondary limitations in most versions.

What its there for, is to set everyone at the same starting point and thus able to arrive at the same result if that's what they want. You can't really set everyone at the same capability, because even what that means is not clear in Hero (or any other game). The power build system (which, its to be noted, is not the whole of the system and in non-superheroic games is often far less part of building a character) is set to at least theoretically making a power of the same cost of the same overall value, but that doesn't describe the character as a whole as there's a lot of other factors (you can, of course, argue whether that power balance entirely works, but its still not about the character as a whole).

However, my point in bringing it up is that the math in Hero serves the purposes of the kind of people who want to use it, because making the fine distinctions it does matters to them. People who don't care about those kind of fine distinctions are of course not going to find it worthwhile, because its extra effort for something they don't care about.

I mean, you can get to that by just letting everyone list the abilities they want and define them potentially to suit themselves, but I'm not sold even a significant minority of players and GMs would find that satisfactory on various grounds.

So barring that, I think if you try to ask "how much math is acceptable" without asking about how detailed people expect characters to be, your question is functionally nonsensical.