Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[The Shadow]

IMO - Criticizing a system as ‘bad’ necessarily criticizes the person that likes it as liking ‘bad’ things.

While I agree that it generally isn't helpful to call something "bad" without further detail - bad at what? - I also don't see it as a criticism of those who enjoy it. If we couldn't enjoy things that have flaws, it would be an impoverished world!

I think AD&D is in many respects badly designed - it has many fiddly rules that don't add anything to the experience of play. (Of course, it has the excuse of being very early in the development of RPGs.) There are systems today that address the experience AD&D is going for in a more satisfying way.

I also had many hours of fun with AD&D. I don't think that makes me a bad person! Yes, I like a thing - am even nostalgic for a thing - that I now consider quite flawed. I can hear it criticized without transferring that criticism to myself.

A person writing down their imagined facts about imagined times and places is not pretending to be anyone. And there is no shared fiction.

The same goes for solitaire PC gen. There is no pretending. There is no shared fiction.

Have you ever done any solo gaming, pemerton? I'm not at all sure there's no pretending going on. Though I will certainly grant that there's no shared fiction, by definition.

Solo gaming feels like gaming to me. It isn't as robust an experience as gaming with other people, to be sure!

Do solitaire card games count as card games?

 

[hawkeyefan]

One thing I’m thinking of today is what kind of system would work best for a rpg focused on comedy.

For this purpose let’s think in the context of comedy that treats its narrative seriously but has over the top characters and situations that cause humor in the real world.

I’d mentioned earlier that about mechanical consequences typically being tied to fictional consequences - and this might be the perfect illustration of a type of game that would most benefit by departing almost fully from that paradigm.

Thoughts?

I just finished a comedic campaign of a game called The 13th Fleet.

The 13th Fleet RPG

It's based on the Forged in the Dark system. It's a kind of spoof of Star Trek, if all the captains were bastards who were scheming against one another while trying to make their way through enemy occupied space. So they have to cooperate, but they're also stabbling each other in the back whenever possible in order to be named Admiral.

I don't normally run games that are purely comedic; most of my games are pretty serious, though there's plenty of joking around out of character. But this game was a nice change of pace.

I'd argue that the consequences are what made the game fun. Things were spiraling in all kinds of crazy ways that added to the antics. Without that element, it would not have been nearly as fun.

 

[pemerton]

Because they feel very connected with "what die rolls they make" and "what their character does". I'm not saying if you come in from another part of the hobby where what I'm about to say isn't as true that it'll be so, but if you come from an at all trad background you make almost no die rolls that don't represent character action and ability to one degree or another. Players are very much not used to making die rolls that don't represent that (in contrast to GMs who, to one degree or another, do them all the time).

I get that if I'm used to having to pull it will take a while to get into the habit of pushing: there's reflexes and habits to be unlearned.

But I don't see that the intellectual grasp of it should create any issues.

 

[Xamnam]

I've read people criticising Rifts and other Palladium RPGs as bad (eg unbalanced; too gonzo). I've read many people criticising 4e D&D as bad. I've read people criticising Rolemaster as bad ("Chartmaster").

Are you seriously saying that these are criticisms of people who enjoy Rifts, or 4e D&D, or RM? To me that's a very strange thing to say.

I think the salient point to take away from that is terms like unbalanced, too gonzo, video game like, or even Chartmaster serve as better criticism than merely calling something bad. If something is just bad, why would anyone choose, let alone enjoy it? Now, if a piece of criticism feels like something fails to achieve a design goal, or doesn't serve a genre well, or even is just personally not that enjoyable to play, those are statements that can be with engaged with. But bad? Unless it's bad at something in particular, as you parenthetically call out for the examples above, it's kind of useless in the context of thoughtful criticism. And yet, I do see that sort of assertion crop up without any context or specification on here on occasion. Maybe the poster thinks those aspects have been established enough in prior that they go without saying, but that then invites someone who doesn't have that understanding to want to attack that point as it stands alone.

If someone said that Runelord of Thiefhaven is a system for babies, I think it's reasonable that fans of that system would take that as a personal criticism. Saying a system is bad, wholesale, as a throwaway/standalone comment is only a small step removed from that. It's a comment I expect to see in a blog or rant, not analysis.

 

[Campbell]

Because they feel very connected with "what die rolls they make" and "what their character does". I'm not saying if you come in from another part of the hobby where what I'm about to say isn't as true that it'll be so, but if you come from an at all trad background you make almost no die rolls that don't represent character action and ability to one degree or another. Players are very much not used to making die rolls that don't represent that (in contrast to GMs who, to one degree or another, do them all the time).

Right. A preference for task resolution is fine. When I make a point like in the fiction these things aren't different I am not making a suggestion anyone should change their preference or start playing some other game. I am making a factual claim about how things work because I think understanding these differences makes for better discourse.

 

[gorice]

re: solo play, there are a couple of things I'd like to point out about Ironsworn.

#1 is that it is very much a game. Certain actions will trigger a move as in Apocalypse World, with a range of different possible outcomes. When all else fails, you can also ask the 'oracle'.

#2 is that the 'inputs' that trigger and constitute moves are fiction invented by the player, but incorporated by the system.

So, what you end up with is a play loop of player imagines something -> system incorporates imagination -> system generates new play state. It's a bit like playing a duet game, but with a quasi-automated GM.

 

[niklinna]

I mean, it kind of does make it incorrect, because it's absolutely not a cultural norm that something being bad means people who like it are bad - almost everyone likes some stuff they consider "bad". There is a small group of weird aloof people who say they don't, but they're essentially just being difficult, because they inevitably do.

I love pineapple on pizza, for example.

I don't love tinned spaghetti on pizza, however. I do have standards!

 

[Aldarc]

I certainly recognize that it's difficult (if it were easy I probably would've done it myself.) But I don't agree that developing jargon is an inherently bad thing. Almost all fields of study develop jargon. I consider game design to be a field of study--indeed, I consider it to be a technology. Hence, developing some jargon is inevitable. We just happen to be people who live at a time where most of that jargon is yet to be defined.

No one would want to have to constantly explain what bildungsroman means or spend a paragraph explaining what a "motif" is every single time they wanted to say anything about novels or music respectively. Yet those are jargon terms.

It is, of course, important to recognize that jargon can be a barrier to entry and address those issues. Actual research mathematics can be practically incomprehensible even to someone with a relatively high level of math education (e.g. someone with a physics or engineering degree) because so many terms go unexplained, but that doesn't mean the jargon is bad for mathematics. It means that there's a lot of it and mathematicians don't really put that much effort into explaining what "rings" and "fields" and "manifolds" etc. are to non-mathematicians. Given there is no such thing as an academia of game design yet, I think we are reasonably protected from that level of impenetrability, but it never hurts to keep in mind that it can happen.

Or even think about video games. Entire genres exist as a form of "jargon" that are absolutely meaningless for those who are unfamiliar with games: e.g., Rogue-like, Metroidvania, etc. These terms are nevertheless useful because they create more refined expectations about how the game plays or whether people may like the game or not. These aren't terms created by Ivory Tower snobs, as per the popular conception of jargon, but, rather, from fan communities who are trying to discuss and understand games and how they related to each other. It makes it easier to sort through games when you know that the game you are looking at is a Rogue-like, deck-building game. Why do you hate CRPGs like A, B, and C but like RPGs like X, Y, and Z? Oh, it's because you realize that the former are Real Time With Pause and the latter are Turn-Based. Now you know better how to sort through and find more CRPGs that you like. This is the sort of practical jargon that I think would be useful for TTRPGs.

 

[niklinna]

It's based on the Forged in the Dark system. It's a kind of spoof of Star Trek, if all the captains were bastards who were scheming against one another while trying to make their way through enemy occupied space. So they have to cooperate, but they're also stabbling each other in the back whenever possible in order to be named Admiral.

So, it's the Star Trek mirror universe? Can you get a tantalus field??!

 

[niklinna]

re: solo play, there are a couple of things I'd like to point out about Ironsworn.

#1 is that it is very much a game. Certain actions will trigger a move as in Apocalypse World, with a range of different possible outcomes. When all else fails, you can also ask the 'oracle'.

#2 is that the 'inputs' that trigger and constitute moves are fiction invented by the player, but incorporated by the system.

So, what you end up with is a play loop of player imagines something -> system incorporates imagination -> system generates new play state. It's a bit like playing a duet game, but with a quasi-automated GM.

But is it, or is any such solo game, a roleplaying game? There's a certain assumption in that term that it requires interaction between people, but you know (and boy do I hope I'm not alone in this) I have conversations with myself as different personas sometimes. But only when no one else is around!

(Also there is a whole thing called Ego State Therapy which is very interesting and involves doing just that for, you know, therapeutic purposes.)