Sorry but I do not understand, you have to be more clear. Are we talking about court cases where certain laws or rules apply and need to be respected for the court case to be resolved as a court case? I hope not. But perhaps what you have in mind is about the cases where PCs meet with people that have a distinct authority over certain things and these things are objectives of the PCs. If the PCs manage to bent this authority to their favor then PCs get to win these objectives. But aren't objectives better suited by the campaign rules (DM) rather than PC rules? Since the identification of these authorities depend on what the PCs know or do not know, or in other words what their objective is or what they want to achieve?
The Game for Non-Gamers: (Forked from: Sexism in D&D)
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Sorry but I do not understand, you have to be more clear. Are we talking about court cases where certain laws or rules apply and need to be respected for the court case to be resolved as a court case? I hope not. But perhaps what you have in mind is about the cases where PCs meet with people that have a distinct authority over certain things and these things are objectives of the PCs. If the PCs manage to bent this authority to their favor then PCs get to win these objectives. But aren't objectives better suited by the campaign rules (DM) rather than PC rules? Since the identification of these authorities depend on what the PCs know or do not know, or in other words what their objective is or what they want to achieve?
Yes! That was an awesome application of the 4E "skill challenge" formalism -- which in more general application is something I heartily dislike.LostSoul said:
I think the importance of verisimilitude in fiction is too often overlooked in the game context. I see a natural overlap between "story-tellers" and "simulators/explorers". When either leans too much on game mechanics involving numbers, dice and so on, that becomes a wedge between them.
That's been pretty widely recognized when it comes to "simulating" processes with complex models -- the stereotypical "realistic" game that makes filing a tax return seem fun and easy.
As I observed above, dissociated mechanics can be just as tiresome. "It's less like telling a story than like going to a casino" is one response I've encountered.
Pure "gamers" can roll either way -- just so long as they get dice in their hands! What they really don't like are factors they can't manipulate mathematically ... such as GMs.
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resistor
First Post
I don't consider myself an expert on either, but I'll try to give an overview.
Amber is a system that literally uses no random elements. No dice, no cards, no whatevers. The basic idea (it's more complicated in the real game) is that each player has a pot of chips. Players narrate essentially freeform. When two players disagree on what should happen, they have a bidding war with chips, and the winner decides what happens. Add in some mechanism for refreshing the pots of chips, and you've got a basic, deterministic, highly-narrative storytelling game.
Spirit of the Century, based on FATE 3e (I'm more familiar with FATE 2e, so my explanation may reflect that) is a strongly narrative game that still remains within the traditional confines of being a roleplaying game.
Tasks are resolved with dice rolls, like usual, but it uses Fudge dice mechanics, which is to say that the range of the dice is -3 to +3, on a bell curve, added to you base skill. So even with just the rolling mechanic, the success/failure of an action is strongly predictable.
However, FATE also has a system called Aspects and Fate Points. Aspects are freeform tag phrases you choose for you character, reflecting background, personality, achievements, or even signature items: "Born in the saddle," "World's Greatest Ping-Pong Player," "Whip & Fedora." Each Aspect has a weight based on how important it is to you.
After making a roll, you can invoke an Aspect to aid you (if the rest of the group agrees that the Aspect could plausibly aid you in the task) to spend Fate Points to modify the roll up to the weight of the Aspect. Conversely, for Aspects with downsides, the GM can "compel" an Aspect. This means that, in a situation where the Aspect would influence your behavior (imagine someone with a "Dangerously Curious" Aspect), you can either go with your nature to gain Fate Points, or resist it by spending Fate Points.
In FATE 3e there's also some means of scenes having Aspects that are accessible to both the GM and players, but I'm not clear on it.
Basically, it's a low-variance task resolution system tied together with action points on steroids. While some things really are determined randomly, those are mostly the ones that were on the cusp of achievable anyways. And tasks that matter from a narrative perspective are almost always decided by the player (or GM) through Fate Points, rather than by the dice.
resistor
First Post
I (unsurprisingly) disagree with your disagreement.
I think the problem is that non-gamers see boardgames, cardgames, etc. as direct competitors for their time to RPGs as long as RPGs resemble those games too strongly. If they want to play a number-y game with their friends, they'll play Monopoly. Or poker. They already know how to play them, and their vastly simpler.
The question is: what do RPGs offer that traditional games don't?
My answer: narrative control
While true, this has two sides to it. The obvious negative is that most people don't think of storytelling as an activity they should be interested in, but the upside is that it's an activity bracket that is underserved in the market place.
If people want to just "play a game," there's a million choices, most of which they are more familiar with and are easier to get into than TTRPGs.
If people want to tell a story, the competition is much thinner on the ground.
resistor
First Post
You said a lot of good stuff in your post (and I'm glad that at least one other person "got" my theory), but I wanted to call this part out in particular to explain why I think randomization needs to be downplayed.
If our key selling point over boardgames, card games, etc. is the addition of narrative control, that means we actually need to GIVE the players some. Handing that power to the dice is not the same thing.
For players who are brought in with the "It's like Cops & Robbers with a referee!" line, I've observed it being jolting when they first encounter randomized resolution systems, especially in systems where heroic characters are awesome.
To cook up a contrived example:
Bob designs Olaf the Barbarian for his first character, and envisions him as kicking ass and taking names with a giant axe. He gets into his first fight, and is crestfallen to realize that kicking ass and taking names is contingent on rolling decently on a funny shape die. In essence, every time Bob has a night of rolling poorly, he is being forced to play a character other than the one he envisioned. Now, Bob is OK with Olaf failing sometimes, but it should be narratively significant failing. He misses the blow that would have killed the villain because it builds tension for the villain's return. He loses because an ally backstabs him. Not "he misses because apparently he just couldn't hit anything with his axe today."
Silvercat Moonpaw
Adventurer
So how would a system model this?
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
xechnao said:
We're talking about the fundamental unit of drama and tension: Conflict. So more in the "PC's meet with people that have a distinct authority over...things (that) are objectives of the PC's" camp.
The PC's objective should be fairly clear at most times. The whole "what do you do?" question that is at the center of DMing is answered by the player stating how their character peruses their objective.
When something stands in the way of the PC achieving that, that's where rules come into play.
They come into play mostly because DM judgment calls aren't a very satisfying method for conflict resolution, especially when that's the main method used over the course of multiple conflicts.
The D&D game right now (and historically) has been pretty good at one kind of conflict resolution: the armed kind; the resolution of a violent conflict in the context of heroic fantasy. This is great, but we can't leave every other type of conflict up to DM Fiat to resolve, because not every game should need to focus on violent conflict resolution.
There's hundreds of thousands of millions of types of conflict that are not best resolved by beating up the other side. There are millions of people who are interested in those kinds of conflict more so than violent conflict, or who want to use it alongside violent conflict. Violent conflict is superbly entertaining, but it is not exclusively entertaining, and broadening the types of conflict that D&D can resolve well is a relatively simple and unobtrusive way to say: "Yes, now you can play a game of Politics and Princesses with the D&D rules."
It faces two big hurdles:
#1: The perception that everything that isn't combat is best resolved by DM Fiat
#2: The perception that everything that isn't combat requires copious amounts of specific detail to resolve.
Mostly I've spent time trying to show that neither of these are true -- as hundreds of TTRPGs, indie and otherwise, have shown. Even videogames do moral conflict better than D&D, and all they are is binary switches that make pretty colors.
Of course, videogames don't do those very well -- they are at their best as combat engines.
D&D has a lot of capacity to be good at a whole host of game styles, but I'm pretty sure it won't ever beat videogames for combat potential.
Physics is mathematical, and so are computers. Conflict is social, and so are D&D groups.
Heh, I guess I got a bit preachy there, so I'm sorry for that.
But the big thing to take away is this:Rules for resolving conflict do not have to be limited to hitting people with swords, and if you're going to use those kinds of conflict a lot in your games, you are better served rules than with the DM's judgment call.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Oh, and for the record,
The players' power comes from selecting skills, abilities, classes, resources, items, etc. that affect the dice rolls.
Just as it does in combat.
Ariosto said:
The players' power comes from selecting skills, abilities, classes, resources, items, etc. that affect the dice rolls.
Just as it does in combat.
I think the ideal would be something in the middle -to find the golden line among the two. The dice can be useful to drive the suspense of risky situations. And luck is something real and I guess rpgs need some dose of it. Then, Fate has some awesome method that D&D seems to lack. To me, this method seems rather a must as rpgs need narrative control too. So far, in D&D it has been served by the campaign settings and locales and adventure modules. OTOH Fate seems more helpful to direct the players of the game create their own stories and worlds without needing to study developed products for this purpose. It sounds as an ultimate generic rpg that gives the tools for the players to create whatever they want.
So perhaps an idea of a mix of D&D and Fate mechanic philosophy will be a good one to try to develop a game upon.
resistor
First Post
Either of the two I explained above (Amber and FATE) would do pretty well, as would pretty much any conflict resolution (vs task resolution) system.
In conflict resolution, you change the question from "Does my character succeed at X?" to "Do I have the narrative authority to succeed at X?"
Then, the only times when Olaf fails are when someone (possibly even his player) is exerting narrative control to make him fail, which by definition means that it's a narratively significant failure.
FATE achieves a similar end by giving players such powerful narrative controls (Aspect/Fate Points == Action Points of Steroids) that most significant actions are decided by those rather than by the dice.
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