Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Pedantic]

I don't know how new you are here, Pedantic, but I can tell you from past experiences over about a decade or more on this forum having been in similar positions as @hawkeyefan, is that we are sometimes damned if we do or damned if we don't. It doesn't really matter how we frame the situation or how we say anything. I can tell you from past experience that if we tried tackling the topic the way that you insist would work, I can guarantee you that it wouldn't. The usual crew would come out and claim that our games can't possibly work or that they are invalid ways of playing. We've been there, done that. Gone around the block numerous times. We have tried it your way. It's never good enough. The games we like, our play preferences, or even discussing them are invalid. I apologize for being somewhat cynical here, but it's hard not feel jaded after awhile with these recurring discussions.

I've got about 15 years across assorted forums in this space, I know how this goes. Generally, it's just a matter of time until the explanations begin that my design preferences are either illusory, really just requests to obfuscate some underlying other mechanic, not descriptive of what's actually happening, or occasionally outright impossible, depending on the angle of my opponent on any given day.

I'm empathetic, but not sympathetic; this kind of argument is not well meant. These things are not that same, do not achieve the same outcomes, and attempting to make them the same removes nuance and cuts off design space (and discussion about what is done with that design space).

Also, this whole discussion about the warehouse scenario is wildly out of hand. We don't need to try and resolve it in a bunch of different systems to evaluate the outcome, my whole point was just that "not getting caught" and "a guard approaches you" would be jarringly incompatible. I don't see a problem with how @Aldarc has framed the set of events above, for example.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But thinking of the goal of an attack is to deal damage is a pure D&Dism. This is my point.

Context still matters. In an environment where almost no fight is resolved in one roll, progress toward resolving the fight is still a success. When a result is impossible to get in one roll, not getting that is not failure. Arguing otherwise is trying to reframe the context to your convenience.

The character is not thinking "I want to take away some of this beastie's hit points", the character wants to eliminate an enemy.

And doesn't expect to do so with their first attack, since they've never managed to ever do that before in comparable situations. Its not an expected or reasonable result either in or out of character.

All I'm saying is that partial successes shouldn't be as alien to trad players as we may think because they happen all the time... we just don't tend to think of them that way because the system that causes it is simply accepted as "truth". The system makes us think "I can't kill this guy in one shot, I can only do some damage".

I think comparing situations where you're doing a multiple roll process to ones where a action can finish its process in one is not a reasonable comparison. No one expects to build a house with a swing of a hammer. Its not possible. Partial success isn't partial if its all that can be done. Then what constitutes success if progress. Partial means something different.

They're both RPG systems. We can certainly compare them. I'm not saying they are the same. I'm saying they both involve situations where partial success is achieved. They don't do this in the same way, certainly. I'm not saying that.

I'm trying to offer a take that maybe helps bridge the gap a bit. It needn't be as hard an adjustment as many seem to think it must be.

I think even if what you said was true (and I don't really think it is), this still disregards the "complication" part that normally goes with "partial" in those systems.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's the thing. They primarily challenged my question about the Cypher System weaknesses in terms of what genres it could handle. But what genres a system can do isn't really all that useful, IMHO, when it comes to understanding a system's strengths or weaknesses. Most of the time genre amounts to the color of lipstick on the pig. I'm not impressed when someone says that a system can do any genre. This is why some claims about 5e as an omni-system that can do anything also bounce off me. It doesn't really get to the nuts and bolts about what sort of games 5e was designed to do or even designed around (see Bounded Accuracy).

I've occasionally referred to this as "Game X can do anything for some values of 'do'" rather sarcastically. It relates to my frequent comment that the fact you can pound nails with a wrench doesn't make it a hammer.

There were also the usual assertions that the Cypher System was a "story game" meaning that the GM could focus on "story" (see your earlier point). A few even argued that the Cypher System's mechanics meant that it was even more of a "story game" than games that are commonly called "story games": e.g., Fate, PbtA, FitD, etc. But again, I think that their understanding of "story" is heavily rooted in the aforementioned sense of the meaning where it is GM-authored fiction and even some GM-Force mechanics (i.e., GM Intrusions).

Yeah, as I noted in that post, you can get that a lot from people who have (to my view) an impoverished sense of "story".

 

[Thomas Shey]

Rob Donoghue made a Twitter thread a while back about how one of D&D's strengths is how it (in combat) combines the excitement of swingy d20 rolls with a fair amount of overall predictability by making each individual roll fairly low stakes (the effect is usually "deal some damage", not "win"). The issues with D&D's swinginess are usually places when too much weight is placed on a single roll (save-or-die, skill checks).

In other words, it's often a good thing to resolve tasks not with a single check but with a series of them, where each individual check helps with the eventual outcome but one or two failures does not mean disaster.

I usually refer to this as "slow pace of resolution". The problem with fast paces of resolution (i.e. resolving things with a single roll, including games that have significant chances of one-shot take-outs in combat against a PC) is there's often little time to figure out things are going badly before they've already, well, gone. The trade-off is a lack of urgency, but, well, you pays your money as they say.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I talked about cognitive/intellectual grasp. Someone can grasp it even if it doesn't "feel right".

I think this is separating their assessment of this in a way that is not going to be natural for a lot of people.

So if a person is not introduced in thinking about various approaches to RPGing, that deploy different techniques, different structure of authority over the fiction, etc, then why would they care about criticism or theoretical frameworks.

Because you're lumping in multiple things in "approaches". There may be value in some but not in others. I'm interested in criticism and theoretical frameworks because its helped me address things I consider subpar in trad games, but that does not mean I'm interested in changing the basics of the approach; I'm simply not doctrinaire about all parts of the trad framework. Similarly, you can have people who might find value in some parts of analysis but are absolutely not interested in doing the heavy lifting to reframe their approach to play in general.

Your position seems to be that unless you're willing to reassess everything in your style you can reassess nothing. I don't think that's well founded.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This post is prompted by @Aldarc's remark.

The claim "chess is the proper tool for all boardgames" seems like nonsense to me. Or else just obviously false: chess isn't the proper tool for backgammon, or for go.

So how could "Fate is the proper tool for all RPGs" possibly be any more plausible? It's likewise either nonsense, or just false.

Contrast: chess is the best boardgame is perfectly coherent. Likewise chess is my favourite boardgame.

And if someone asserts that Fate is the best RPG, I might disagree with them but I can see they're making a coherent claim. And if someone asserts Fate is their favourite RPG that's not only coherent but probably true, unless there's reason to think they're lying or self-deluded.

Its usually been closer to "Fate is the best choice for all possible campaign ideas" in the wild.

 

[Thomas Shey]

These sound like the backgammon players who, when invited over for a game of chess, just can't help rolling the dice for each move.

It may be, or more likely its an explanation as to why those players are unlikely to enjoy chess.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The consequence, in D&D combat, is that the failure to remove the enemy from the board means that you take damage and/or deplete other resources (hp, arrows, whatever). In a more complex combat scenario maybe other stuff happens too. (Eg the not-yet-dead Gnoll sacrifices the prisoner; the Goblin pulls the lever that drops the portcullis; etc.)

I assume the above is what @hawkeyefan had in mind.

Yeah, but as I said, this only seems relevant if the potential for success there is even in the design space; i.e. there's any possible action/roll that can remove that figure right out the gate. Because of the way speed-of-resolution is baked into elevating hit point systems (and similar things like the bomb disarm system in SW) it isn't. As such, almost no one will perceive it as a partial success, but simply a success. Now, there can be some question about whether the combat resolution as a whole (i.e. how the whole fight plays out) is a success, partial success or failure, and sometimes people do, indeed, frame it that way, but a lot of times the only significant consequences there are loss of one or more characters, and that's not common enough outside of certain OS style games to be an issue usually.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Oh, I see what you're saying. Sure, I can see that. I'm not entirely sure I'd frame it that way, but it does make sense.

Yeah, it's not typically framed that way, I know. But if we just look at it in that way for the purpose of comparison, it can help see the similarities instead of just the differences.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter because even with the notion of partial success, there are no negatives, or at least direct negative consequences to the PC for dealing damage. Your success, even if it isn't a complete success as you say, doesn't come with any "opportunities" or consequences other than the monster can still attack. But, even then, that's not a consequence of your success. It's largely divorced from your success.

In other words, the monster would never gain a bonus to hit your character because you dealt damage to it. It's not even obligated to target your character.

Well, the consequences would be anything that potentially happens in subsequent turns... the enemy deals damage, or gets away, or harms a captive, and so on.... as @pemerton mentioned.

Again, we don't think of it that way because trad games tend to break these things all up into different rolls for different characters. But story now games tend to resolve a lot more with one roll. A partial success or success with consequence in many PbtA games means that you hit the enemy, but they also hit you. It's less "how did I do" and more "how did this go".

It's a matter of perspective.

Consider this... when an enemy hits a character in D&D, we don't generally consider it a failure, right? It's more that the enemy succeeded in hitting us, not that we failed to defend ourselves. But what if D&D worked differently; what if rather than enemy attack rolls, players instead made defensive rolls? How would that alter our perceptions? We'd almost certainly start looking at a low defensive roll that results in an enemy hitting us as a "failure" and not categorize it as the enemy's success.

You're doing precisely the opposite. The thing that everyone gets up in arms about is when you attempt to frame the underlying thing we're all doing as part of a unified theory that can fit comfortably on your terms alone. That's the thing that makes it look like you're claiming a monopoly on the truth about what roleplaying is, and makes all the trad gamers who are still in the room after the jargon has come out growl.

That's not what I'm doing. I have no problem with there being more than one way for games to function. I play and enjoy both kinds of games. And yes, they do things differently, but often the goal is the same.

I'm also not really relying on a lot of jargon here.

If you wanted to offer a bridge, then you'd do it backwards. Explain how success at cost is really equivalent to hit point ablation, or really, how you can map everything that happens in Story Now framing to a map and key model with just a bit of effort (both things I do not think are true, nor worth doing). Or, you could not do that, and accept the two play loops are not the same. We will all get along better if you don't attempt to frame them as equivalent, and instead focus on what is achieved and desired by people doing different things, or if you move your analysis back up a level and find commonality at a more fundamental trait of the activity, like @clearstream has been trying to do.

You're wrong about my goal. I'm not trying to say that they are the same. I'm trying to explain why the idea of partial success should not be that difficult for traditional players to grasp by comparing it to the combat in D&D.

I say this because it's one of the things that helped me get my head around different ways to play than the one I'd always known.

This is a red herring, and you're smart enough to know that. If a player can kill a monster with one attack, the decision space they're playing in changes, and now they're gambling based on their actual odds of doing so (and attacking has increased significantly in value). 4e's minion rules are built entirely around exploiting the effect this has on player decision making.

It's not a red herring. It's an example of how the mechanics of a game influence the way we view the game, or approach the game. Which I'd think is pretty straightforward. How does a player know which enemies can be killed in one hit? Obviously in a game like 4e that has minion rules, this may be more obvious. But in other games, it may be far less clear. The player will be more certain of removing the enemy with one hit in the game with minion rules.

Obviously, the different methods will result in different play experiences. What I'm saying is that when we're talking about multiple games, approaching the discussion with only one such experience in mind is an obstacle.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But Gavin is safe.

@hawkeyefan , did that feel like "a failure?" Did the Tracking move of 7-9 feek like "a failure?" Did the Struggle As One (collective Defy Danger) move of 7-9 feel like "a failure?"

Did the rest of the play of our evening feel like it was downstream of/a signature of "failure?"

I'm confident some folks here would feel "failure" (all the way down). But that is just an autobiographical idiosyncratic component of their mental orienting and processing. Its not an objective outgrowth of the system or the play.

No, it didn't feel like failure. My goal was to protect Gavin, which I did. That there was some kind of consequence doesn't take that away.

None of it felt like failure. It felt like things were happening.

In a traditional game, the threat of the clashing bucks and the corrupted one wouldn't have happened as the result of a player roll. It would have happened as the result of a wandering monster check in some systems, or simply at the whim of a GM in many others. I'm sure there are more than those two methods, but they're likely the most common. If the GM in another game indicated a random encounter was rolled, or otherwise introduced an encounter because he decided it was time, no one would consider it a failure.

As I just said in my last post, I think it's because in trad play, each roll is very tied to the character's performance at the given task. Each roll in PbtA and FitD (and similar games) is less about that and more about how the overall attempt goes. It's factoring in many elements rather than just the character's skill (stats) and effort (die roll).