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Interesting Ryan Dancey comment on "lite" RPGs
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<blockquote data-quote="SweeneyTodd" data-source="post: 2387751" data-attributes="member: 9391"><p>ThirdWizard and others,</p><p></p><p>Hey, feedback! Thanks kindly.</p><p></p><p>The setting is something I devised from the setting creation rules in Sorcerer, by Ron Edwards. It's the modern day, in a small college town. The PCs are otherwise ordinary people (a professor, a bartender, and a bouncer who dreams of being a pro wrestler, among others. It sounds odd but it works) who control "demons" (basically djinii). These things give them supernatural powers, for various costs. They've alternated between dealing with their everyday lives (which now include avoiding being held for "study" by the government) with uncovering and dealing with the source of their powers.</p><p></p><p>We were running the system with Sorcerer, which is also rules-light but constructed much more like a traditional experience (pretty similar to the sessions you describe, actually). We've been adding player narration rights gradually, and finally decided to work with a system where they're explicitly part of the rules. (Basically, we were getting pretty close to "freeform with five dice rolls a sesion", and so I thought PTA would better suit our playstyle.)</p><p></p><p>I admit that we're pretty "out there", although interestingly enough we've been that way long before we adopted the system. I remember a time two years ago, in a different campaign using D20 Modern, when a player spent an Action Point on their Drive roll and I said, "Okay, you've cut off your pursuers and turned onto a side street. What's it like?" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></p><p></p><p>We've ranged from games with a traditional party structure to those with parallel and intersecting stories. (Heck, in this campaign, it was the fourth session before any of the PCs <em>met</em>.) We cut quickly between scenes and offer up NPCs for players to run to keep everyone engaged. (Several of those NPCs have become recurring semi-PCs.) We make no attempt to keep player knowledge separate from character knowledge, and interestingly enough the only way that ever gets used is to have a player arrange to have their character get into trouble, never out of it.</p><p></p><p>I can totally understand that this doesn't sound like most people's cup of tea, although I'd love to hear specifics on why. One argument I've heard is that it doesn't seem like player narration rights can coexist with tactical challenges. That's probably true, but it's not an emphasis for our group. Two of our players play weekly D&D, one as DM, so maybe they get that satisfaction elsewhere. Another argument is the unrealism, which as I totally failed to get across in my posts a few pages back, I think boils down to narration anyway. (If people aren't on the same page in how they imagine a scene, it'll feel "off" regardless of rules level.)</p><p></p><p>One more thing about the challenge, or "gaming" aspect: There's not a tactical challenge in engaging the rules per se, but there's certainly a challenge. You've got to maneuver your character into conflicts that allow them to use their traits, limit opposing traits, and come up with compelling actions that "grab" the group. (The latter's true because if you've presented a great idea, and someone else wins narration rights, they may decide you succeed with complications, instead of failing.) It's not crunchy, but it does leave us brain-fried after a few hours. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="SweeneyTodd, post: 2387751, member: 9391"] ThirdWizard and others, Hey, feedback! Thanks kindly. The setting is something I devised from the setting creation rules in Sorcerer, by Ron Edwards. It's the modern day, in a small college town. The PCs are otherwise ordinary people (a professor, a bartender, and a bouncer who dreams of being a pro wrestler, among others. It sounds odd but it works) who control "demons" (basically djinii). These things give them supernatural powers, for various costs. They've alternated between dealing with their everyday lives (which now include avoiding being held for "study" by the government) with uncovering and dealing with the source of their powers. We were running the system with Sorcerer, which is also rules-light but constructed much more like a traditional experience (pretty similar to the sessions you describe, actually). We've been adding player narration rights gradually, and finally decided to work with a system where they're explicitly part of the rules. (Basically, we were getting pretty close to "freeform with five dice rolls a sesion", and so I thought PTA would better suit our playstyle.) I admit that we're pretty "out there", although interestingly enough we've been that way long before we adopted the system. I remember a time two years ago, in a different campaign using D20 Modern, when a player spent an Action Point on their Drive roll and I said, "Okay, you've cut off your pursuers and turned onto a side street. What's it like?" :) We've ranged from games with a traditional party structure to those with parallel and intersecting stories. (Heck, in this campaign, it was the fourth session before any of the PCs [i]met[/i].) We cut quickly between scenes and offer up NPCs for players to run to keep everyone engaged. (Several of those NPCs have become recurring semi-PCs.) We make no attempt to keep player knowledge separate from character knowledge, and interestingly enough the only way that ever gets used is to have a player arrange to have their character get into trouble, never out of it. I can totally understand that this doesn't sound like most people's cup of tea, although I'd love to hear specifics on why. One argument I've heard is that it doesn't seem like player narration rights can coexist with tactical challenges. That's probably true, but it's not an emphasis for our group. Two of our players play weekly D&D, one as DM, so maybe they get that satisfaction elsewhere. Another argument is the unrealism, which as I totally failed to get across in my posts a few pages back, I think boils down to narration anyway. (If people aren't on the same page in how they imagine a scene, it'll feel "off" regardless of rules level.) One more thing about the challenge, or "gaming" aspect: There's not a tactical challenge in engaging the rules per se, but there's certainly a challenge. You've got to maneuver your character into conflicts that allow them to use their traits, limit opposing traits, and come up with compelling actions that "grab" the group. (The latter's true because if you've presented a great idea, and someone else wins narration rights, they may decide you succeed with complications, instead of failing.) It's not crunchy, but it does leave us brain-fried after a few hours. :) [/QUOTE]
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