Martial arts affecting your GMing style

[Galloglaich]

Take guns for example. You can take any weapon in the world and break it down piece by piece to come up with maintence and reliability rules with differing factors for which oil you used in what enviroment. And your players will never use it. You can come up with a table listing every possible weapons malfunction,

But Andor knowing all of these things does not therefore correlate into putting all that nit picky detail into your game!!! It (hopefully) means that you could paint a pretty accurate "big picture" at whichever level of abstraction you chose. I really think you are missing the point!

Lets say you Andor, using the technical knowledge you have described above, decide to come up with simple rules for a combat game. You make a table of guns which shows which ones jam a lot and which ones dont, what their effective range is, their rate of fire. You make an abstract rule roughly showing the difference in accuracy between aimed fire and a snap shot. Like say, the gun rules in Shadowrun. This corresponds to real life and is a fun game.

Another guy named Dilbert who has never been out of his mothers basement is designing a game too. He makes the guess that automatic weapons never jam, and based on bad action movies he's seen, that it's pretty hard to shoot somebody across the street with an assault rifle and relatively easy to dodge the bullets if you do a cartwheel, so he makes up his rules accordingly. So then in his game, certain players figure out that if they get a hand weapon like oh I don't know, a spiked chain and buy a few points of cartwheel skill, they can easily dodge gunfire and charge other players armed with Ak-47s and kill them right and left. Which is pretty confusing to the players with the Ak-47s and they complain loudly. To balance this out Dilbert quickly makes another rule that spiked chains can only be used to attack once per day. This annoys the spiked chain advocates requiring him to make another rule. Pretty soon he has a complicated mess on his hands, wheras you Anders, have made an elegant, fast paced game which sells well... so well that you quit your day job and invest in a company making forclosure signs, clear a million dollars in two months, then meet Jessica Alba at a Ski resort while vacationing in Vale, and she is so smitten she takes you to her pad in Tahiti. You pack nothing but viagra. Isn't realism awesome?

G.

 

[outsider]

[ So then in his game, certain players figure out that if they get a hand weapon like oh I don't know, a spiked chain and buy a few points of cartwheel skill, they can easily dodge gunfire and charge other players armed with Ak-47s and kill them right and left.[

This is only a problem if the game designer didn't intend for spike chain wielding acrobats to be able to easily defeat AK-47 wielders. The problem isn't that it's unrealistic, it's that the person writing the rules doesn't understand the consequences of the rules he has created, and the effect those consequences will have on the stories told within his system. A system that makes it easy to dodge bullets clearly isn't realistic, but isn't neccessarily a bad system.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

To the OP, in my eperience ones real life experience deeply affects how one thinks about stuff in general and will be reflected in in game reaction to that kind of stuff.

That said, I am very uncomfortable with bring that to the table to the point that the existing rules are bypassed or sidestepped. It is in the nature of things that people have different areas of expertise. If the player is an expert but the DM is not, then that is a problem. I have found this to be a problem, and I have been guilty of this in the past as a player. It is unfair to other players that do not have the expertiese and so cannot take advantage. It is also unfair to the DM. This is before one gets into arguments about player and character knowledge.

On the other hand there is a lot to be said about desginers doing this kind of research when designing systems to handle these kinds of situations.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

I'm still confused about this whole "it's a good idea to do research": do you who are saying this expect that everyone knows how to do it?

Researching is a skill, and like other skills it's very difficult to learn on your own. Some people are never taught and therefore just aren't good at it, are in fact really bad at it. Would you rather these people never try to design a game just because they don't possess this skill that's all-important to you?

 

[Galloglaich]

This is only a problem if the game designer didn't intend for spike chain wielding acrobats to be able to easily defeat AK-47 wielders. The problem isn't that it's unrealistic, it's that the person writing the rules doesn't understand the consequences of the rules he has created, and the effect those consequences will have on the stories told within his system. A system that makes it easy to dodge bullets clearly isn't realistic, but isn't neccessarily a bad system.

Yes but I am arguing that having a realistic understanding of how things actually works helps you make a game system which is functional. Weapon systems, countermeasures to them, training etc. were all designed to counteract each other out in real life. This is a very complex and subtle interplay, especially when you are talking about pre-industrial combat. I think it is very hard* to as you say "understand the consequences of the rules you create" if you create them without any knowledge of the Historical reality or physics of what you are trying to portray.

And I think this is true whether you are trying to create a realistic system, a genre based one, or something completely abstract.


G.

* though not necessarily impossible

 

[Galloglaich]

I'm still confused about this whole "it's a good idea to do research": do you who are saying this expect that everyone knows how to do it?

Researching is a skill, and like other skills it's very difficult to learn on your own. Some people are never taught and therefore just aren't good at it, are in fact really bad at it. Would you rather these people never try to design a game just because they don't possess this skill that's all-important to you?

Well not everybody knows how to write either, do you think they should be designing games?

But look, there is more than one way to skin a cat, if you want to design a game based on no research be my guest, let me know how it turns out. I'm certainly not saying it's impossible. I just think good research helps.

G.

 

[Andor]

Ultimately whether people should or shouldn't design games will be determined by the market I think, certainly not by me. I'm just suggesting something rather obvious that most people can in fact do to make a better game if they make an effort (and also to make a better campaign setting). I know from experience good research helps a lot in this industry, I'm a game designer myself and know a few other designers far more experienced and successful than me.

You'll never in life hear me suggest that research, and understanding fully the topic are bad things. I suggest no such notion.

I am saying that trying to fully capture any field of endevour within the rules of a game system is a false goal and leads to poor and overly complicated rules. Reality is so complex that looser rules are often a more accurate portrayal than detailed rules that still will inevitably fail to grasp the whole.

However it is absurd to suggest that those loose rules are better designed by an ignoramus than by someone who actually has knowledge of what the rules are supposed to suggest.

 

[Galloglaich]

Because of that false dichotomy you describe: they think "real = having to account for every detail". I'm still not entirely sure myself how you can have something that's both simple and is still based around realism because I would think at some point the abstraction would critically dilute the realistic elements.

Think of it like a Google Map. If you are zoomed out to a scale where you see the whole city, it's still a realistic map, right? You can zoom in to where you see detail of individual streets, or out a bit more where you only get the major boulevards and highways. But either way the map of the city is real, the relationships between where one neighborhood is and the other are the same. You can still Navigate around the town, and people expecting to find the airport in one place won't end up in the ghetto.

Could you name some? I don't think I've seen more than a few. I see more games with realism.

To me, I see almost nothing but unrealistic games with a few realistic elements badly tacked on, but those are probably the same ones you think have realism.

Have you tried Paranoia? I really like that game and I don't think you could begin to call it realistic. How about all of those Superhero games? Or Kobolds Ate my Baby?

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I think there are a lot of indy games on the Forge which are designed to be very abstract and don't care about realism at all.

And I believe that's because the people doing that don't realize what they already have works just fine. Or because they don't actually want unrealism.

Perhaps partly, but I also think it's because most of these systems are broken along the lines of my spiked chain vs. Ak-47 analogy.

G.

 

[Galloglaich]

You'll never in life hear me suggest that research, and understanding fully the topic are bad things. I suggest no such notion.

I am saying that trying to fully capture any field of endevour within the rules of a game system is a false goal and leads to poor and overly complicated rules. Reality is so complex that looser rules are often a more accurate portrayal than detailed rules that still will inevitably fail to grasp the whole.

I quite agree, I think hypercomplex tabletop RPG systems rarely work. I personally believe if you want that much complexity you should use a computer.

But I don't agree that designing a realistic system means designing a complex system, or that encompassing the reality of something in a game system is a false goal.

However it is absurd to suggest that those loose rules are better designed by an ignoramus than by someone who actually has knowledge of what the rules are supposed to suggest.

What makes you think that realistic has to be hypercomplex? I don't get why this is such a persistent cliche.

G.

 

[ArghMark]

Galloglaich: I think the point they are making is that life, itself, is complex and made up of a multitude of factors.; an abstract system can theoretically reduce the about of complexity, where a realistic system theoretically tries to keep a track of all of the factors; or at least this is my understanding of that. I don't necessarily believe it.

A more abstract system says that I have + 3 to hit and do + 3 to damage. This is the same until I have gained enough experience to do more. It tries to be a game.

A more realistic system on the other hand functions on how I'm feeling that day, did I get much sleep the night before, and so on. It tries to be 'real'.

I'm not sure if this really is a false dichotomy. What do you think?