stonehead
Explorer
A man works as a product designer making kitchen appliances. His latest project is a toaster. It's efficient, it browns the bread perfectly, and it doesn't use up too much counter space. There's just one problem. If someone sticks a knife into it, the toaster painfully shocks them.
The man says, "You shouldn't stick a knife into a toaster, everyone knows that." But he's still fired. Good toasters have shorts to prevent them from shocking you. They have features to prevent bread from getting stuck in the first place, so that you never need to stick a knife in it. A good designer knows that the end user will misuse their product.
The parallels to ttrpgs should be clear, but I'll elaborate anyway. This idea spun out of this thread, and it deserves its own thread. When facing criticism against a system, it's pretty common to see counterarguments of the form "that's not a system problem, it's a gm problem" or "if your players are trying to get an advantage like that, they're playing the game wrong." Just don't stick a knife in the toaster.
Balance is a good example. It's great if a group all decide to make equally competent characters. When player A chooses a relatively weak class, player B voluntarily picks lower attributes to compensate. Basically no group does that though, and the game system has no control over whether or not they do. If DnD had a 1st level spell called "Kill anyone" that lets you kill anyone you can think of, you could defend this choice by saying that a player picking the crazy overpowered option is a player problem. If they were cooperative, they would build characters balanced with the rest of the party. It would be much better though, if that spell didn't exist in the first place.
This is especially worrying when it ignores player incentives completely. If a system rewards players only for killing enemies, they're going to resort to combat more than they otherwise would. If it gives out some metacurrency reward for betraying the party because it adds drama, the players are going to betray each other more than they otherwise would. If your bread keeps getting stuck in the toaster, you're more likely to use a knife than if it never got stuck. You are not immune to incentive structures.
Now, the original argument is still technically true. No system is good enough to protect against a sufficiently dedicated problem player, and a perfectly aligned group can have a fun campaign in even the worst of systems. But I'm not a perfect player (and I suspect you all aren't either). Games need to be made with imperfect players in mind.
The distinction between "problematic behavior" and "honest mistake" is also not clear. It's easy for us super-diehard fans to overlook, but most people don't browse forums discussing rpgs. Plenty of them don't even read the GM advice at the front of their core rule book. What's common knowledge to us, is not common knowledge to the vast majority of players. If an rpg wants to appeal to a market wider than superfans on rpg forums, they need to fail gracefully when played by normal people.
The man says, "You shouldn't stick a knife into a toaster, everyone knows that." But he's still fired. Good toasters have shorts to prevent them from shocking you. They have features to prevent bread from getting stuck in the first place, so that you never need to stick a knife in it. A good designer knows that the end user will misuse their product.
The parallels to ttrpgs should be clear, but I'll elaborate anyway. This idea spun out of this thread, and it deserves its own thread. When facing criticism against a system, it's pretty common to see counterarguments of the form "that's not a system problem, it's a gm problem" or "if your players are trying to get an advantage like that, they're playing the game wrong." Just don't stick a knife in the toaster.
Balance is a good example. It's great if a group all decide to make equally competent characters. When player A chooses a relatively weak class, player B voluntarily picks lower attributes to compensate. Basically no group does that though, and the game system has no control over whether or not they do. If DnD had a 1st level spell called "Kill anyone" that lets you kill anyone you can think of, you could defend this choice by saying that a player picking the crazy overpowered option is a player problem. If they were cooperative, they would build characters balanced with the rest of the party. It would be much better though, if that spell didn't exist in the first place.
This is especially worrying when it ignores player incentives completely. If a system rewards players only for killing enemies, they're going to resort to combat more than they otherwise would. If it gives out some metacurrency reward for betraying the party because it adds drama, the players are going to betray each other more than they otherwise would. If your bread keeps getting stuck in the toaster, you're more likely to use a knife than if it never got stuck. You are not immune to incentive structures.
Now, the original argument is still technically true. No system is good enough to protect against a sufficiently dedicated problem player, and a perfectly aligned group can have a fun campaign in even the worst of systems. But I'm not a perfect player (and I suspect you all aren't either). Games need to be made with imperfect players in mind.
The distinction between "problematic behavior" and "honest mistake" is also not clear. It's easy for us super-diehard fans to overlook, but most people don't browse forums discussing rpgs. Plenty of them don't even read the GM advice at the front of their core rule book. What's common knowledge to us, is not common knowledge to the vast majority of players. If an rpg wants to appeal to a market wider than superfans on rpg forums, they need to fail gracefully when played by normal people.
