MichaelSomething
Legend
That also depends if you're a "scrub" or a "try hard".
This is a false dichotomy smuggling in an unstated premise: "The only way for a game to be interesting is for it to be breakable." That's why @Ruin Explorer brought up very popular games like chess; if having too little control guaranteed an uninteresting experience, people wouldn't play these games.Well, its kind of almost a tautology, that the less things you control about a character, the harder to cook the books on them it is. But the flip side of that is that it decides to block imbalance by forcing you into the game (and random rolls) idea of what your character is like.
Seems too high a price to pay to me.
This is a false dichotomy smuggling in an unstated premise: "The only way for a game to be interesting is for it to be breakable." That's why @Ruin Explorer brought up very popular games like chess; if having too little control guaranteed an uninteresting experience, people wouldn't play these games.
I don't think it does make that assumption. All it says is that we cannot presume a 1:1 connection of the kind asserted, that reliably games that are more "unbreakable" are also less interesting. That doesn't mean there's no connection at all. But it does mean that we can't leap from "this is more unbreakable" to "it absolutely must be less interesting."Well, this also makes the assumption that something like chess's approach would be interesting in an RPG context. That's not an assumption I agree with. Especially since I'm talking about being interesting from a character definition approach. I'm pretty firm in my opinion that the more useful ability you have to define character abilities, the more potential areas you have to create problematic results.
And yes, I'm unconvinced that, at least by my standards, its possible.
I can't speak to your standards, of course. But to blanket reject the possibility seems premature.
My hot take, based on about half that experience: TTRPGs are often badly designed by the standards of other kinds of games, and the culture of play surrounding them has made this normative. When they break, it tends not to be because of the oft-discussed "absurd combinatorial" but because of simple iterated probability. Failure states are generally obvious, and don't require extensive play time at the table, so much as a solid math review.I'll be pretty blunt; when my opinion has been formed by more than 40 years in the hobby, not limited to one system or family of systems (albeit leaning into trad games pretty heavily), its pretty hard for me to consider my view "premature". It may be incomplete (because it hard for that not to be not knowing every game that does or can exist) but that applies to any conclusion one can ever come to. So I'm pretty comfortable saying I don't think the one I've reached is premature in any meaningful sense.
(Though you do reference a legitimate point; there may well be people who's standards of what meaningful character differentiation and choices therein does not produce the result I refer to. But based on my own standards, I stand by my position).
That would be amazing. If only.My hot take, based on about half that experience: TTRPGs are often badly designed by the standards of other kinds of games, and the culture of play surrounding them has made this normative. When they break, it tends not to be because of the oft-discussed "absurd combinatorial" but because of simple iterated probability. Failure states are generally obvious, and don't require extensive play time at the table, so much as a solid math review.
The kinds of errors that crop up in TTRPGs simply wouldn't make it into a published board game, and we're very quick to jump to "this is a unique medium" to explain away why that happens. I'm certain there is a limit of design perfection that's possible, but I'm equally convinced we are not even close and not really trying. I want hours of logged same game tests, I want to hear about iterations across 5 play groups monitored for monthly campaign play, I want game designers coding simulations of monster fights and likely town interactions and glumly staring at spreadsheets, and, given the existing culture of play that so readily encourages tables to modify the rules, I want the second half of the DMG to be design notes on the impact of various likely to be considered house rules.
My hot take, based on about half that experience: TTRPGs are often badly designed by the standards of other kinds of games, and the culture of play surrounding them has made this normative. When they break, it tends not to be because of the oft-discussed "absurd combinatorial" but because of simple iterated probability. Failure states are generally obvious, and don't require extensive play time at the table, so much as a solid math review.
The kinds of errors that crop up in TTRPGs simply wouldn't make it into a published board game, and we're very quick to jump to "this is a unique medium" to explain away why that happens. I'm certain there is a limit of design perfection that's possible, but I'm equally convinced we are not even close and not really trying. I want hours of logged same game tests, I want to hear about iterations across 5 play groups monitored for monthly campaign play, I want game designers coding simulations of monster fights and likely town interactions and glumly staring at spreadsheets, and, given the existing culture of play that so readily encourages tables to modify the rules, I want the second half of the DMG to be design notes on the impact of various likely to be considered house rules.
My rant on this topic has become more unhinged as modern design has tended toward increased simplicity but not actually gotten any better, but this should be the selling point for class-based systems, and even in the case of wide open point buy, I think we've still got a lot of space for more effort to pay off better dividends.This is a separate problem from math that's just bad from the get-go. Naturally, supers is probably the far end of the spectrum when it comes to this (as very few other genres will demand the same degree of customization), but that just says its a matter of degree; the more moving parts a system has in terms of how characters constructed, and the more freely those construction bits can be connected, the harder it is to upfront balance everything in practice.
Its relatively easy to balance a simple modern action game, because there likely are only so many significantly interactive pieces in play. You may get failure states of some attributes being too worthwhile compared to others or excessive breakpointing,, but that should be visible, and if you want to, something you can address up front (this is why you hear relatively little about people "breaking" BRP based games; since about all most of them have is attributes and skills, either they break on misdesign in magic systems, or because of the aforementioned overweighting of a couple attributes and the like). The more special talents, paranormal abilities and other devil-in-the-details there is, the less true that is.
To what end result, though?I want hours of logged same game tests, I want to hear about iterations across 5 play groups monitored for monthly campaign play, I want game designers coding simulations of monster fights and likely town interactions and glumly staring at spreadsheets,
Now here we agree, though I'd go a step further and suggest they actually propose some of what they expect to be common house rules as options, and discuss the design knock-ons on that basis.and, given the existing culture of play that so readily encourages tables to modify the rules, I want the second half of the DMG to be design notes on the impact of various likely to be considered house rules.