D&D General Styles of Roleplaying and Characters

[hawkeyefan]

Maybe in your games lack romance, personal commitments and things other than the "mission". That's not the fault, nor responsibility of the game rules. My games have plenty.

We play a reasonably heavy RP game. That means relationships and personal interactions of all sorts happen organically based on what the player believes their PC would think and do. Having rules that dictate what a PC thinks or feels is the last thing I would want.

So. Again. What would so called "support" look like?

I've recently started a campaign of Spire: The City Must Fall, and there are a couple of bits that (at least partially) address what you're talking about.

The first is less specifically about mechanics, but is very much about a player's conception of their PC, and it occurs during character creation. Each PC gets a pair of Bonds, which are relationships with other characters. One Bond is with an NPC (more on that below) and the other is with another of the PCs. The specifics of the PC Bond are determined by class, but in each case, the Bond allows one player to determine something about another player's character. A couple of examples right from the book:

• You have a bond with another PC- you know a secret about them. Say who it is, what the secret is, and whether they know you know or not.
• You have a bond with one of the PCs who you recruited to the cause. Say who, and say what it was that tipped them over the edge.

So this game actually has a part of character creation where other players can decide things about your character's backstory, and they are potentialy significant and formative events. Now, this has no mechanical expression in the game in the sense of numbers and modifiers and the like, but it's certainly an example of a game rule that supports character concept not being solely that of the player of that character.

Where there are some more mechanical bits is in the NPC Bonds. Each PC has an NPC Bond, as well. Some person they know and can rely on. The way this works mechanically is that each NPC Bond has an amount of Stress associated with it. When you ask them to do something for you, the Bond will take some Stress, the amount of which is determined by the significance of what's being asked, with that being up to the GM. It varies from 1 Stress to D3, D6, or D8 at the highest. At the end of a Session, the GM will roll a D10, and if they roll under the Stress total for the Bond, then that NPC will suffer Fallout.

Fallout is some kind of complication with the Bond. Maybe they're tired of helping you out and your next request of them will be more difficult; maybe the fact that they help you has been noticed by others; maybe they've been made by the powers that be and they're at risk of being executed (the PCs are members of an outlawed revolutionary organization); maybe they've betrayed you. The severity of this is determined by the Stress level and what makes sense according to the fiction.

Mechanics for relationships or that relate to a player's sense of who their character is are often described in these discussions as being unnecessary. And they actually may be, depending on the goals of play, and what any given participant may consider fun. But what they do....and what those who enjoy them do find fun about them....is that they create risk. Your character may not always turn out the way you want them to.....it will depend on what you do, and how the game goes. That can be exciting. That can be fun.

If it's not your cup of tea, that's understandable....some people want everything about their characters to be entirely up to them without any risk or input from others, and that's fine. I would say that such play is on average not going to be as character focused as a game which does include such rules, but whether that's a good thing or not is a matter of preference.

So I'm happy D&D doesn't "support" romance. I want the story to support it, not the rules.

Would you say that D&D supports excitement or action because of the combat rules and the risk to character well being in that sphere?

​

 

[overgeeked]

On "fun":

I play RPGs because they're fun. I play backgammon because it's fun. I play five hundred, and up-and-down-the-river, and The Crew, because they're fun.

That doesn't mean there's not better or worse play. That doesn't mean that I won even if I lost because I still had fun playing.

Now separate out the difference between winning or losing a hand of poker from playing the game of poker. You can win or lose a particular hand. But you can't win or lose the whole game of poker. The goal of playing poker is, generally, to have fun. You can still have fun playing the game of poker if you lose a particular hand of poker. The hand of poker is the mission. The game of poker is the RPG.

RPGs further complicate matters by explicitly not being the same kinds of games that came before. This is where the hang up seems to largely be. RPGs are a different kind of game. They're not boardgames, not card games, not sports...yet people insist they're just the same and can be won or lost on the same grounds and under the same conditions. It's simply not true.

Can you have fun playing catch if you sometimes miss or drop the ball? Conflating the point of the game (to have fun) with the success or failure of the activity within the game (catching the ball) is to miss the point of the game. That mindset is literally "I only have fun if I win".

 

[Malmuria]

I just read the blog. It's hardly a counterpoint to system matters - it's a huge piece of advocacy for a particular system, namely, descriptor-based drama resolution (using "drama" in the Jonathan Tween/Ron Edwards sense of fortune, karma, drama as methods of resolution).

The use of free descriptors, together with the following passage, actually reminded me of a different RPG:

Have you read Brideshead Revisited? The Wizard of Earthsea? Foundation and Empire? Any captivating novel, regardless of timeframe, setting, or genre? Well now you can run a full FKR game based on that book. You don't need an RPG sourcebook because all books are now sourcebooks. All television shows are sourcebooks. All movies and songs and comics and memes and medical brochures are now sourcebooks.​

This could be lifted right from Robin Laws HeroQuest Revised. Except that Laws's game uses fortune rather than drama as its resolution method, which shifts the dynamic of play away from tactics (to quote from the blog, "The freedom of the Player Characters to attempt any tactic to solve a problem, subject to the adjudication of the Game Master") and onto the narrative qualities of the fiction (especially pacing and success vs failure, which are big parts of HQ rev).

Well I was thinking "system" along what I take to be Forge lines. For example, xp. I think some game design takes it as a principle that xp will drive play in a certain direction and is a way of indicating what kinds of activities the game cares about. It seems to me that a FKR game could do away with the concept of xp and allow character "growth" to happen in the fiction along the lines of whatever genre you are playing in. In that way, the genre becomes the "system" more so than any ruleset.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Well I was thinking "system" along what I take to be Forge lines. For example, xp. I think some game design takes it as a principle that xp will drive play in a certain direction and is a way of indicating what kinds of activities the game cares about. It seems to me that a FKR game could do away with the concept of xp and allow character "growth" to happen in the fiction along the lines of whatever genre you are playing in. In that way, the genre becomes the "system" more so than any ruleset.

System is the means by which conflicts are resolved and things are incentivized. You don't have to have XP to incentivize anything, and "Bob says" is as much a system as 5e.

 

[pemerton]

Well I was thinking "system" along what I take to be Forge lines. For example, xp. I think some game design takes it as a principle that xp will drive play in a certain direction and is a way of indicating what kinds of activities the game cares about. It seems to me that a FKR game could do away with the concept of xp and allow character "growth" to happen in the fiction along the lines of whatever genre you are playing in. In that way, the genre becomes the "system" more so than any ruleset.

I'm still not really sure I follow the contrast.

Burning Wheel has various ways of changing a character. Some are based on checks attempted; some on checks successfully attempted; some on table consensus (the "trait vote"); some are unilateral decisions made by the player. These are all parts of the BW system.

A system that says that the character changes in such-and-such a way when such-and-such a thing happens in the fiction (at whatever level of generality or specificity in the description of the "such-and-such") is a system. My first question about it would be who gets to decide. In the sort of game described in the blog you linked to, I would assume that to be the GM. The other obvious alternative is table consensus, but that would seem to depart from the GM authority that is being espoused in that blog.

 

[Malmuria]

So true!

One of the enduring legends from my original junior high gaming group (ca. 1981) was when one of the players (Matt G., are you reading this?) went to a bookstore. The rest of us were wondering what clever plot he had in mind, but he was just browsing. "Any interesting books?" became our shorthand way of saying, "Stop wasting precious D&D time!"

I would feel wildly successful as a dm if my players did that. Like, they are so immersed in the world that they actually think there's an answer to "any interesting books here?" And then you have to improv book titles...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If people are playing a game with the goal of succeeding at the mission, and they have a miserable time playing, then don't they need to revisit their choice of game?

I don't see that RPGs are very different from other games in this respect.

I’ve been a part of many games in which the GOAL was achieved but one or more players walked away from the table unhappy at the end of the night. And few of the examples I can think of were system related.

In most cases, it was because of something that happened in game, like being unable to rescue or somehow being responsible for the death of a particular NPC. (Such as a baby not making a saving throw when the bad artifact went BOOM.)

 

[pemerton]

Believe it or not, displaying your broad knowledge of games does no good if others have not played them.

If you haven't played systems with these sorts of rules, what's your basis for making judgements about them?

I don't want or need a carrot or stick to influence or reward how people run their PCs.

<snip>

So I'm happy D&D doesn't "support" romance. I want the story to support it, not the rules.

What does story mean here? I mean, the story is a sequence of events with a degree of continuity of characters and setting. Does the story mean that PC X has an affair when the opportunity presents itself, or not? How do you adjudicate temptation if the player is in fact never subjected to it?

Also: why can psionic attacks and the like inflict psychic damage, but a character never takes psychic damage from (say) his/her lover or child dying in front of him/her. Or in AD&D, why do dragons get a bonus when fighting to defend their children, but human parents don't?

There are issues here both of internal consistency in the way the fiction and the rules correlate; and also the sort of stuff @hawkeyefan and @Ovinomancer mentioned, of the PC (and hence the player) being potentially vulnerable.

 

[Malmuria]

I'm still not really sure I follow the contrast.

Burning Wheel has various ways of changing a character. Some are based on checks attempted; some on checks successfully attempted; some on table consensus (the "trait vote"); some are unilateral decisions made by the player. These are all parts of the BW system.

A system that says that the character changes in such-and-such a way when such-and-such a thing happens in the fiction (at whatever level of generality or specificity in the description of the "such-and-such") is a system. My first question about it would be who gets to decide. In the sort of game described in the blog you linked to, I would assume that to be the GM. The other obvious alternative is table consensus, but that would seem to depart from the GM authority that is being espoused in that blog.

I'm not sure? Some games take pains to articulate what the role of the gm is and how they can disclaim responsibility. For example, I'm running a game of Blades in the Dark right now. Making a certain kind of roll, whether successful or not, gives players 1 xp. The other xp triggers are things that the player individually or the group as a whole can decide on (for example, if a character approached a problem in a particular way). The gm doesn't have any special, or possibly any role in handing out xp. But that's because there is a fairly codified way of handling the system

Whereas I imagine both gm authority and table consensus in an FKR game would be more high-trust and more free form.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I would feel wildly successful as a dm if my players did that. Like, they are so immersed in the world that they actually think there's an answer to "any interesting books here?" And then you have to improv book titles...

Well, I guess YMMV. I suppose I could take it as a compliment that he thought I would improvise something cool, but the rest of the group took it as "Now we all sit here and watch Matt roleplay until he gets bored...which, knowing Matt, is never...and in the meantime the clock is ticking on our gaming session for the week." (Again, remember that this is junior high, and the year is '81.)