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Vampire's new "three-round combat" rule
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7592732" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>So, I'm going to do something that I normally don't like doing and fork the thread. You call this out as a personal soapbox, so I know before hand that challenging this stance is going to cause a bit of a clash, but one of my personal soapboxes is that this claim or assumption you are presenting - logical as it sounds on the surface - is spurious, and that a ton of bad design has been generated by assuming this false claim is true and running with it.</p><p></p><p>Games do not revolve around combat because they emphasize combat in the rules, whether in character creation or process resolution. The reverse is true. Games emphasize combat in the rules, whether in character creation or process resolution, because physical combat is a uniquely dynamic cooperative activity that uniquely involves meaningful decision making by all parties. Too many designers have assumed without I think a lot of play testing, that problems can be made to share the properties of combat, when in fact most if not all other problems either lack the need for cooperation, or lack the need for meaningful decisions to be made, or lack the property of being dynamic and that this in inherent to the problem and as such not one that can be overcome by the rules. </p><p></p><p>Typically what you see in such attempts is examples of play which turn out to be toy examples. That is, they turn out be fairly rare cases where the difficulties have been carefully smoothed over, and not in fact typical examples of the problem.</p><p></p><p>It turns out, if you try to go beyond the nice sounding theory, that there are not a lot of scenarios where a group is required to work together on the same problem, where the process of working on that problem involves making different decisions by the player from moment to moment, where everyone has the opportunity to equally contribute, and where imagining and being part of that process is compelling. And to the extent that there are, it requires also ensuring that everyone is as equally focused on and capable in that field of endeavor as they are in combat.</p><p></p><p>There are a lot of different proofs of that, but one example is that even though a computer game can potentially address aesthetics of play that a pen and paper game cannot (think about certain rapidly timed puzzle games, or games where the beauty of the graphics are a major aesthetic of play), you'll be hard pressed to find many examples of multiplayer computer games that aren't focused heavily around combat. And to the extent that you can, with something like EVE Online having a major economics/production focus, potential for grind in combat doesn't begin to cover the potential for grind in an economics/business simulator. If you think combat is potentially grindy, imagine the lack of dynamism in the simulation of a production assembly line where each player is an assembly line worker.</p><p></p><p>Or consider raising a barn or working on some other joint construction project. Yes, now numbers do matter and now the construction is cooperative. But how many meaningful choices are there to make? How dynamic is the process of building the barn? What would the pen and paper simulation of this process be in order to make it compelling? And how much would the GM or system have to know about barns to in any way resolve this problem?</p><p></p><p>Feel free to provide counter examples, where you think that the problem does have the unique characteristics that combat has in a cooperative and social game, but I'm pretty confident now that attempts to apply this idea that everything can be made as fun, cooperative, and crucial as combat generally fail to simulate the thing that they are simulating, and/or fail to actually be fun in practice, and/or fail to capture what actually makes solving that particular sort of problem fun and memorable. </p><p></p><p>As you said yourself, "How many trackers do you need?" "How many lockpickers do you need?" And we could continue out that complaint to most anything. We notably don't have the same answer to the question, "How many soldiers do you need?"</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7592732, member: 4937"] So, I'm going to do something that I normally don't like doing and fork the thread. You call this out as a personal soapbox, so I know before hand that challenging this stance is going to cause a bit of a clash, but one of my personal soapboxes is that this claim or assumption you are presenting - logical as it sounds on the surface - is spurious, and that a ton of bad design has been generated by assuming this false claim is true and running with it. Games do not revolve around combat because they emphasize combat in the rules, whether in character creation or process resolution. The reverse is true. Games emphasize combat in the rules, whether in character creation or process resolution, because physical combat is a uniquely dynamic cooperative activity that uniquely involves meaningful decision making by all parties. Too many designers have assumed without I think a lot of play testing, that problems can be made to share the properties of combat, when in fact most if not all other problems either lack the need for cooperation, or lack the need for meaningful decisions to be made, or lack the property of being dynamic and that this in inherent to the problem and as such not one that can be overcome by the rules. Typically what you see in such attempts is examples of play which turn out to be toy examples. That is, they turn out be fairly rare cases where the difficulties have been carefully smoothed over, and not in fact typical examples of the problem. It turns out, if you try to go beyond the nice sounding theory, that there are not a lot of scenarios where a group is required to work together on the same problem, where the process of working on that problem involves making different decisions by the player from moment to moment, where everyone has the opportunity to equally contribute, and where imagining and being part of that process is compelling. And to the extent that there are, it requires also ensuring that everyone is as equally focused on and capable in that field of endeavor as they are in combat. There are a lot of different proofs of that, but one example is that even though a computer game can potentially address aesthetics of play that a pen and paper game cannot (think about certain rapidly timed puzzle games, or games where the beauty of the graphics are a major aesthetic of play), you'll be hard pressed to find many examples of multiplayer computer games that aren't focused heavily around combat. And to the extent that you can, with something like EVE Online having a major economics/production focus, potential for grind in combat doesn't begin to cover the potential for grind in an economics/business simulator. If you think combat is potentially grindy, imagine the lack of dynamism in the simulation of a production assembly line where each player is an assembly line worker. Or consider raising a barn or working on some other joint construction project. Yes, now numbers do matter and now the construction is cooperative. But how many meaningful choices are there to make? How dynamic is the process of building the barn? What would the pen and paper simulation of this process be in order to make it compelling? And how much would the GM or system have to know about barns to in any way resolve this problem? Feel free to provide counter examples, where you think that the problem does have the unique characteristics that combat has in a cooperative and social game, but I'm pretty confident now that attempts to apply this idea that everything can be made as fun, cooperative, and crucial as combat generally fail to simulate the thing that they are simulating, and/or fail to actually be fun in practice, and/or fail to capture what actually makes solving that particular sort of problem fun and memorable. As you said yourself, "How many trackers do you need?" "How many lockpickers do you need?" And we could continue out that complaint to most anything. We notably don't have the same answer to the question, "How many soldiers do you need?" [/QUOTE]
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