The Dilemma of the Simple RPG

In my experience with contemporary college game clubs, there are many younger people who have not yet tried tabletop RPGs. I was also told that many of the players coming to the evening games at a local shop have been new to tabletop RPGs. This is different from my pre-Internet, pre-video gamegeneration (Boomers), where most game-minded people were exposed to D&D because it had so little competition for leisure time.

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Another reason for the difference may be the “crunchiness” of many contemporary RPGs. That is, the fiddliness and time needed to generate a character and start actually playing the game is offputting. Then there is the difficulty of running a character because there are so many details and numbers (such as skills) involved. The rules interfere with the adventure.

Yet we continue to see the most popular RPGs loaded down with vast rulebooks. Unfortunately, the seeds of long-range destruction of any RPG edition are built into the capitalist economy.

You don't need a Ph.D. in history to know a lot can be explained if you "follow the money". To make money you need to sell product. If your primary business is RPGs you have to produce a game that is not only large but very extensible, so that you can sell additional rules. In the long run, that makes the game crunchy and unwieldy, dooms it to become too complex to appeal to the less than hard-core players.

Complexity may be a boon for some players. 3rd Edition D&D (3e) became "find rules somewhere that give me an advantage." This is a complete contrast to my advice to GMs dating back to the 70s: prevent players from gaining unearned advantages. When I GMed 3e I said "core rules only, no add-ons." When the highly-tinkered-by-additional-rules "one man armies" are present in a game, the more casual players are left behind in several ways.

"Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstien

Complex games also make the GM's job harder. As there are more rules, there's more work for the GM. The biggest problem of tabletop RPGs, compared with other games, is that GMing is work, not play. We need more GMs to "grow" the hobby, yet complex games with constant rules add-ons lead to fewer GMs available.

The typical course of events is that RPGs get more complex as more rules are added, until the entire edition is abandoned and a new one comes out. While D&D Second Edition wasn't much different than 1e, and many more or less ignored 2e (I did), each succeeding edition has changed the game drastically to help persuade players to buy the new version, coming full circle with 5e. In each case, a new edition led to lots of sales. And each was then subjected to the rising pyramid of additional rules.

Money talks. Unfortunately for RPGs, money argues for complexity, not simplicity.

contributed by Lewis Pulsipher

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[thzero]

You know what I mean.

Amateur game designer as in something you do on the fly, without a whole lot of input from anyone else, and no testing. I.E. what a GM has to do when the rules don't cover some aspect of play. And it brings with it all sorts of issues - any time you have a divergence of expectations at the table, the fact that it's that person sitting to your left telling you "no, you fail", even though you think you should have a chance of success, is always going to cause friction at the table and no amount of "trust your GM" advice is going to erase that.

Yes, I do know what you mean. And actually with what you meant I do agree with.

 

[S'mon]

any time you have a divergence of expectations at the table, the fact that it's that person sitting to your left telling you "no, you fail", even though you think you should have a chance of success, is always going to cause friction at the table and no amount of "trust your GM" advice is going to erase that.

IME it only causes friction if the GM does not tell the player the odds before the player makes the attempt. If my GM follows Moldvay's simulationist advice and tells me that jumping into the chasm gives me a 1% chance of survival before I jump, I know not to do that. If the GM follows cinematic tropes and gives me a 50% or better chance to survive, maybe I do that. Neither is a problem. It's a problem if I jump expecting cinematic tropes and GM gives me 1% chance or auto-death.

 

[Celebrim]

IME it only causes friction if the GM does not tell the player the odds before the player makes the attempt. If my GM follows Moldvay's simulationist advice and tells me that jumping into the chasm gives me a 1% chance of survival before I jump, I know not to do that. If the GM follows cinematic tropes and gives me a 50% or better chance to survive, maybe I do that. Neither is a problem. It's a problem if I jump expecting cinematic tropes and GM gives me 1% chance or auto-death.

One big problem is if the system gives no concrete guidance as to what success actually means, then it becomes very likely that unconsciously the GM will scale the degree of difficulty to the ability of the player. In other words, with no way of knowing 'A success of the degree means you cleared 8 meters', a GM asked to resolve a proposition, 'Jump this canyon', will tend to often without realizing it, set the difficulty of the jump based on the player getting a better than expected result. Instead of setting the difficulty as 'better than average result' the difficulty becomes 'better than average roll'. But the result of that is that clearing the obstacle whatever it is, becomes a coin flip no matter how skilled your character is. This may not even be immediately obvious to all players, because often players are each facing there own obstacles rather than competing with each other against the same obstacles.

Even your own example implies that there is a subconscious expectation that everyone, regardless of skill traits, has the same 1% chance of surviving jumping into the chasm.

This also tends to happen whenever there is no myth in the game. Without prep, the skill of an enemy tends to be, 'whatever would be a challenge for the particular character facing the enemy'.

In D&D 3e or later, this is most commonly seen in things like the difficulty of disarming a trap or opening a lock. How hard is it? Hard enough to require the rogue to make a good throw, regardless how the rogues aptitude for disarming traps or opening locks. DC scales with ability, meaning that there is little to be gained in investing in the ability.

 

[Hussar]

IME it only causes friction if the GM does not tell the player the odds before the player makes the attempt. If my GM follows Moldvay's simulationist advice and tells me that jumping into the chasm gives me a 1% chance of survival before I jump, I know not to do that. If the GM follows cinematic tropes and gives me a 50% or better chance to survive, maybe I do that. Neither is a problem. It's a problem if I jump expecting cinematic tropes and GM gives me 1% chance or auto-death.

OTOH, it also causes friction when the GM and the player have differing ideas of what those odds should be. The DM gives you X chance of success and you think that X is unreasonable, you get friction at the table. Again, it comes down to simply differing ideas about what's going on in the game.

And, again, the more often that the GM has to step in and make that determination, the greater the odds that there will be a misalignment of expectations.

Of course, all this rolls back around to the idea of simple vs complex RPG's. In a simple RPG, the DM steps in and says you have X chance to jump Y distance. Well, that's now pretty much a rule of the game. He shouldn't be changing those odds for the next guy, unless there are pretty good circumstances for doing so. If both characters are more or less similar (a fighter in chain mail and a cleric in chain mail, both with similar Strength scores) then the odds should be either very close or the same.

Thus, now you have a rule. Play long enough and you wind up having precedence set rules for that table for most things. IOW, over a long enough span of time, that simple RPG will become a complex RPG, simply through accretion of table rulings.

Think about how people talked about the changes from 2e to 3e. How many people mentioned their binder thick set of table rules? It was hardly rare. And, also not rare was the breath of fresh air that people talked about when they talked about 3e and how their 3 inch binder of house rules became a 3x5 index card. Of course, now you have a 3 inch set of rule books to plow through for answers, but, the end result is pretty much the same. The big difference though is standardization between groups. It became a lot easier for people to talk about the game mechanics simply because so many people were coming from the same baseline.

That is much more difficult if everyone is singing from a different hymn book.

 

[S'mon]

OTOH, it also causes friction when the GM and the player have differing ideas of what those odds should be. The DM gives you X chance of success and you think that X is unreasonable, you get friction at the table.

Well no, I think that's an issue specific to you and your group.

 

[Hussar]

Well no, I think that's an issue specific to you and your group.

Seriously? You've NEVER had an argument with a player over an adjudication? Never? Not once in all the years you've gamed? You've never seen a DM and a player have a disagreement over any DM adjudication?

I'm having a tough time believing that.

 

[S'mon]

Seriously? You've NEVER had an argument with a player over an adjudication? Never? Not once in all the years you've gamed? You've never seen a DM and a player have a disagreement over any DM adjudication?

I'm having a tough time believing that.

Has a player ever argued with me about the rules when I GM? Mmm, no. Not that I can recall. If a rules issue is raised (usually it's how exactly a particular spell works) we look up the text, I adjudicate, play continues. Nobody argues.

As a player I am a bit rules-lawyerly, and have a tendency to ask "Is that a house rule?" if the GM gets it wrong. But I don't argue.

If it's a non-rules adjudication (how an NPC would react, say) then certainly there's no argument.

Edit: I recall one time in 2011 one of the players in my 4e game looked a bit miffed that I hadn't
rolled a Bluff check for captured dwarf slaver Kazon Kul lying to the PCs vs their Passive Insight (he offered to
escort the PCs out into the wilderness to his fellow slavers' base & help the PCs vs his friends), but had roleplayed out what he said in character ("Oh yeah, I'll help you fight them, you can trust me...") and had expected them to request Insight checks if suspicious. They gave him back his crossbow. When they reached the slaver base & the dwarf slaver then started shooting at the PCs she seemed annoyed at me for not having rolled the dwarf's Bluff or told her to make an Insight check earlier.
I thought this was a bit silly - if I'd checked their Passive Insight or requested a check then they would have known he was lying, and I don't think Insight works like that. There was a disagreement, but I wouldn't say she argued about it.

(It might be significant that player is an Ethics professor, they have some odd notions.)

 

[Hussar]

Wow. Now there's some seriously different experiences.

I spent most of my 1e and 2e experiences fielding arguments (and sometimes making them) with players. Even in 3e, I saw it frequently, although, that tended to be a single player whose grasp of the mechanics was less accurate than he believed it to be.

But, seriously, I'm stunned to be honest. You've had a much, much more cooperative group(s) than I ever saw. Must be nice.

 

[Von Ether]

I've had experience all across the board; helpful players and argumentativeness ones both in rules light/narrative and crunchy/tactical.

It all boiled down the players -- and nothing is sweeter than a player who groks both the rules and your style, helping you in both in front of the screen and behind it.

 

[S'mon]

Wow. Now there's some seriously different experiences.

I spent most of my 1e and 2e experiences fielding arguments (and sometimes making them) with players. Even in 3e, I saw it frequently, although, that tended to be a single player whose grasp of the mechanics was less accurate than he believed it to be.

But, seriously, I'm stunned to be honest. You've had a much, much more cooperative group(s) than I ever saw. Must be nice.

OK now I remember one (now bear in mind I have 4 groups on the go at once & have GM'd for a couple hundred people)! Around 2013 I was running 1e AD&D online and I applied the DMG movement rules as written. It says if you Charge you lose your DEX bonus, if you don't charge you can't move more than 10' and still attack. A veteran D&D player (playing since mid 1970s) who's since become a friend had Opa the DEX 18 Elf PC and absolutely would not accept this, he kept saying "I want to move in to melee, attack & keep my DEX bonus". I think he'd just never seen the RAW applied before, and ended up quitting my game for awhile. We're good now though - we
play 5e.

I think basically I was in the wrong there, in that while I was using the 1e rules as written, that is a very deviant thing to do with 1e. Whenever I'd run 1e in previous campaigns I'm pretty sure I always let everyone move their
listed move rate and attack at +2/-2 but keep DEX bonus. If I ever run 1e again I'll likely use
Moldvay/5e style movement.