What Do You Think Of As "Modern TTRPG Mechanics"?

[Neonchameleon]

You can reskin the entire game, sure.

The result will not bear any resemblance to what happens in Pride and Prejudice, however.

Not even Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.

Yeah, but you're still talking about a lot of characters who at second level could die by one sword swing. In fact, once you were dealing with non-FM, probably most of them. There wasn't no difference, but you really had to get to about fourth level before it was really visible to a lot of the non-primary-combatant classes.

In AD&D 1e an orc did 1d8 damage, which is a reasonable benchmark. Your average second level cleric had 2d8=9hp so they could not die to one blow. Just to compare to a 5e orc; a 5e orc does d12+3 damage for a maximum of 15; our level 2 cleric needs a Con of 14 to be safe. As ever I find the grittiness of AD&D to have mostly been vibes; my first main RPGs were GURPS and WFRP

Yeah, but as you say, D&D isn't every game. PF2e, 13th Age and Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard characters can diverge pretty fast depending on which specific class and how they want to go.

D&D isn't every game. But D&D is genre-emulating itself.

I'm jsut far less sure about the "deliberately and intentionally" part of that. To me it seems like a fair bit of that is simply inertia.

The explicit design goal of 3.0 was "back to the dungeon" and the explicit design goal of 5e was to unite the editions. It is one of the many things 4e did that they deliberately ran away from. To me it is overwhelmingly clear that this wasn't so much inertia as the consequences of a choice.

 

[SableWyvern]

Isn't it though?

If I want to get to the same result, theme and intentionality-wise, making a simpler, faster and intuitive calculation is better than a complex, arcane and time-consuming one, no?

Advocating for the later here sounds to me like personal bias, not rational analysis.

I think the bigger point is that simplifying almost always means you are giving up something. In your hypothetical example of simplification without any loss, there will be a vanishingly small number of people who will prefer the complex version for the sheer love of complexity and I'll agree that the simpler version could fairly be described as better. However, I don't believe such there are many such examples where real simplifications have worked like that.

The switch from descending to ascending AC is perhaps one, but in this case the change is actually extremely minor and, while I believe a majority of people do find ascending easier and more intuitive, the difference between the two styles is not actually that substantial. There are a reasonable number of people for whom ascending really isn't any easier or better.

 

[zakael19]

The question might be are you just giving up complexity and time expenditure!

And part of establishing that is really understanding what it is you need your game mechanics to do and then seeing if there's ways to accomplish the same core purpose with a more streamlined mechanic. Perhaps you get there by constraining focus, maybe a more complex game offers a lot more space to do Stuff but you don't care. You're sacrificing scope, but perhaps not outcomes in what remains.

&etc

 

[Tigris]

And part of establishing that is really understanding what it is you need your game mechanics to do and then seeing if there's ways to accomplish the same core purpose with a more streamlined mechanic.

Thsts the point. For me modern game design is exactly getting a low complexity for a given target depth.

Beacon is so good because it is soo well streamlined and this level of strwamlining is possible thanks to modern game design understanding.


The rules are such a breeze to read because it uses modern layout and efficiently uses colours and graphics, because we know from boardgame manuals that this helps a lot to reduce time needed to understand the system.


I mean using stat - 10 / 2 as modifiers and adding from level 1 modifiers to attack rolls is unnecessarily complicated and just s relic of the past (which of courde is hard to get rid of)

 

[Lanefan]

I find the hill diers numbers to be over-exaggerated. ...

Apropos of nothing else, The Hill Diers would make a great band name.

 

[Lanefan]

You are IMO overstating your case. A single game can and often does have mechanics for a wide variety of things that nonetheless are compatible mechanically (if not necessarily thematically) with each other.

Moreover - and perhaps closer to the point you were originally trying to make - a single RPG's rule-set can be (and IMO probably should be) considerably broader than what will actually be used within any given campaign or at any given table. And I don't mean DMs banning stuff, I mean rules that are "allowed" but just not used.

A trivially easy example is classes. D&D has rules for the Rogue class but if nobody ever plays a Rogue (incuding NPCs) in my game, those rules are wasted for me. But that doesn't mean those rules shouldn't still be in the book, as many others will doubtless make good use of them.

Psionics is another one: the rules exist (in some editions, anyway) but if nobody ever plays a psionic character in my game or yours that doesn't mean those rules are a waste of page-space, because tables other than ours might find them to be of great use.

Which means yes, the same game can have rules [edit to add: and subsystems] that support Conanesque head-smashing side-along with Pride-and-Prejudice social intrigues; and it's up to the table/GM/campaign as to which of those rules get used and-or take precedence.

 

[Lanefan]

Isn't it though?

If I want to get to the same result, theme and intentionality-wise, making a simpler, faster and intuitive calculation is better than a complex, arcane and time-consuming one, no?

Provided the same range and granularity of results and-or outcomes can be achieved then sure, simpler is flat-out better.

The problem I often see, though, is that 'simpler' sometimes comes at cost of cutting off or eliminating some possible outcomes and almost always comes at cost of granularity.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Provided the same range and granularity of results and-or outcomes can be achieved then sure, simpler is flat-out better.

The problem I often see, though, is that 'simpler' sometimes comes at cost of cutting off or eliminating some possible outcomes and almost always comes at cost of granularity.

Multiple outcomes and granularity are very important to me, so I can't really see "simple" as any approaching a universal good in TTRPGs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In AD&D 1e

I was talking about OD&D. In case that was before your time, all the main classes except for MUs had a one step smaller hit die than in AD&D. So your typical cleric had 7 hit points, and only a fighter expected to have better. Mages and thieves had 5. At wasn't even particularly difficult for everyone but fighters to have 8 or less at level 3.

I think people don't realize how stupidly gritty OD&D was at the lower level. Though RuneQuest characters maintained more consistent vulnerability over their lifespans, they were actually more likely to survive a hit than most bottom-end D&D characters.

The explicit design goal of 3.0 was "back to the dungeon" and the explicit design goal of 5e was to unite the editions. It is one of the many things 4e did that they deliberately ran away from. To me it is overwhelmingly clear that this wasn't so much inertia as the consequences of a choice.

They may have said so in 3e, but I've got to say, it wasn't true. 3e was, in fact, a pretty poor dungeon crawler in many ways, not the least of which some of the impact of its relatively fast progression compared to earlier editions. I'm not qualified to speak of 5e.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Moreover - and perhaps closer to the point you were originally trying to make - a single RPG's rule-set can be (and IMO probably should be) considerably broader than what will actually be used within any given campaign or at any given table. And I don't mean DMs banning stuff, I mean rules that are "allowed" but just not used.

Eh. I'm a big believer in generic and other broad game systems, but sometimes you're just trying to do a specific set of things, and while in theory other things could happen in the game you don't really want to pursue those anyway in the context of the game, so additional mechanics would just be cruft. That may not be stuff that suits you, but the bottom line is sometimes you want a multitool and sometimes you just want a wrench.