Why Do You Hate An RPG System?

[Guest 6801328]

I dislike RPGs that:

• Try to be everything to everybody with endless character options.
• Paste setting-specific fluff over generic rules systems.
• Use dice with funny symbols all over them (unless it's simple enough that you can easily use "normal" polyhedral dice.)
• Intentionally reward mastery of complex character creation rules.
• Try too hard to de-emphasize combat.
• Zero-to-hero.
• Use a dice mechanic in which low rolls are good. It just bugs me.

 

[Ratskinner]

I think the problem some people have is that they don’t like being ‘told’ how to role play their character. That the system is, essentially, too crude to reflect how they see their character. They don’t like it when the system tells them ‘you should steal that thing’ when in fact they believe their character would never steal that particular thing.

Yeah, but, beyond that fact that your chosen aspects are supposed to represent the character you wanted to play...you're not forced to, its an offer. Like, "Hey, here's an opportunity to play your character", bonus FP offered up front. Don't like it. You can just buy it off with a Fate point.* You can even have the situation where you have "a wash" where two aspects contradict and you pay nothing in sum. Honestly, its a much gentler way of handling things than "That doesn't seem like an LG act to me, you're character looses all his powers until he repents." (Although much more ubiquitous, in play, to be sure.) Honestly, I have difficulty imagining a system more suited to directly enforce the weight or admixture of advantageous and disadvantageous traits.

Additionally, in the most recent Fate incarnations, that sounds more likely to be a self-compel. So, the player of the mischievous thieving space raccoon suggests to the GM "Hey, so these battery things are probably really shiny and useful, like I, as a mischievous thieving space raccoon would take a couple, yeah?" Boom, consequences generated and paid for with a Fate point.

*For example: You might be a implusive thief but also raised to be a good catholic boy. So the GM compels you to steal the golden cross, then you immediately self-compel/invoke to put it back in a fit of guilt. Heck, if you play it right, you can come away with two FP for roleplaying the conflict between the aspects. e.g. Go to confession to return the cross (and point it out to the GM), then the priest gives you a penance. (Fate examples can get notoriously tricky because it can depend a lot on the narrative.)

Like I said. It just seems like an odd part of the common complaint about Fate points to me. I'm certainly not saying that they must be universally loved.

 

[Celebrim]

@Ratskinner: Your complaint about my complaint has two parts, and I'll deal with the easier one first.

Now...the other part of the complaint which is..."I don't want to think about non-sim mechanics" (Fate points are no more "meta" than HP or XP). That, I get.

Yeah, but it also really has nothing to do with my complaint. As a concept, I don't mind Fate points for example. Nor do I mind the much more interesting mechanically similar concept of Force points in Star Wars D6. It's OK to have a resource that effects the story, and it's even more OK when that resource has an in universe explanation and further is limited enough that the player is motivated to only use it at appropriately dramatic moments.

Nor do I mind abstraction for the purpose of achieving certain design goals or speed of play. The problem with Fate points is how they end up influencing how the players play and how the players think about playing, especially as they gain some system mastery.

I hear this complaint a lot, and I don't quite get it. Its not like in old-school DnD, where you can get stuck with requirements by class with little or no input on how those will be adjudicated (and indeed, I've seen many vastly different interpretations of what counts as "lawful good" over the ....god help me...decades). In Fate, you get to pick/declare up front what your recurrent challenges and defining characteristics will be. So, if you don't want to face compels for stealing things...don't take an aspect that would be compelled that way. Essentially, Fate is asking you to tell me about your character upfront, and then reward you for playing that way...its got Role-playing rewards baked right into the system! You can even "self-compel" by offering one up to the DM, if they overlook the opportunity.

So your comparison to D&D alignment is apt. Essentially you are being asked to construct a mini-set of core beliefs and personality traits that will define your character, and unlike alignment you get to define it. All that is apt, as is you noting that if the DM is heavy handed about how he interprets alignment, and uses it to compel the player with the threat of punishment hanging over there head, that is very much the same sort of problem I'm talking about. Many people have had this bad experience with alignment and so want nothing more to do with it, and I totally get that. But the Aspect system actually sets this up as a core quality of the game, and it's not really the compels that bother me (though those could be heavy handed as well) but the whole system. In other words, it's not even primarily the potential loss of agency here, it's that system encourages bad RPing in my opinion.

I think what the designers wanted was to create a system that rewarded the player for playing his character "in character" and in a dramatic fashion. But what they actually created was a system that rewards playing a character in a simplistic exaggerated fashion. A good RPer calls on his character traits (even if he gets no reward for doing so) at dramatically appropriate moments. A good FATE player calls on his character aspects as often as possible and for as flimsy of reasons as possible. You are always on the lookout for tagging every action because if you can tag an action, that adjusts the math so much in your favor that if you don't you almost certainly will fail. As such, what you typically see in a game of FATE is frantically leveraging the Aspect system for straight forward gamist reasons with the result that FATE's primary aesthetic of play ends up not being Nar, but gamist. People compel, call, tag and so forth primarily for "Step on Up" reasons and aesthetics related to Challenge and Self-Affirmation, and not for reasons pertaining to Story. By turning the character into a mechanic that directly relates to success all the time, it turns all the considerations about playing your character into weighing not the character but the need for mechanical success. It's actively undermining its own intentions with the design in the same way that social systems that mimic combat systems in order to make social interaction a pillar of the game are inadvertently undermining the RP that they want to encourage.

 

[macd21]

Yeah, but, beyond that fact that your chosen aspects are supposed to represent the character you wanted to play...you're not forced to, its an offer. Like, "Hey, here's an opportunity to play your character", bonus FP offered up front. Don't like it. You can just buy it off with a Fate point.* You can even have the situation where you have "a wash" where two aspects contradict and you pay nothing in sum. Honestly, its a much gentler way of handling things than "That doesn't seem like an LG act to me, you're character looses all his powers until he repents." (Although much more ubiquitous, in play, to be sure.) Honestly, I have difficulty imagining a system more suited to directly enforce the weight or admixture of advantageous and disadvantageous traits.

Additionally, in the most recent Fate incarnations, that sounds more likely to be a self-compel. So, the player of the mischievous thieving space raccoon suggests to the GM "Hey, so these battery things are probably really shiny and useful, like I, as a mischievous thieving space raccoon would take a couple, yeah?" Boom, consequences generated and paid for with a Fate point.

*For example: You might be a implusive thief but also raised to be a good catholic boy. So the GM compels you to steal the golden cross, then you immediately self-compel/invoke to put it back in a fit of guilt. Heck, if you play it right, you can come away with two FP for roleplaying the conflict between the aspects. e.g. Go to confession to return the cross (and point it out to the GM), then the priest gives you a penance. (Fate examples can get notoriously tricky because it can depend a lot on the narrative.)

Like I said. It just seems like an odd part of the common complaint about Fate points to me. I'm certainly not saying that they must be universally loved.

I’ll not that ‘that wasn’t LG, lose all your powers’ is something DnD has moved away from. Some people feel that attaching mechanics from role playing kills the role playing. There’s a mental disconnect for them - it doesn’t really matter that they’re being rewarded to playing a character appropriately, the fact that they have to think in terms of roleplaying bennies (or whatever) is a distraction.

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

my hat of d02 know no limit

….

just kidding!

Hate is far too strong a word to use, but I have a very strong aversion to games - both RPGs and board games - that use custom non-numerical dice. That's been FFG's thing for the past decade, and it drives me bonkers. I just want numbers, guys. Numbers!

 

[Celebrim]

It's highly disingenuous of them.

Now, pertaining to what I just posted, I don't think that it is actually "disingenuous". I hate this term, but the FORGE speak description of a system like FATE is "incoherent". It sets itself up to achieve one goal, but the mechanics of the system undermine the goal it has set for itself. I don't think the FATE designers did this deliberately, and so I don't think "disingenuous" is the right word. I think that they were very well meaning, it is just I think they were also very naive.

There is a trap hidden in the design of games that want to be Nar that most Nar games have failed to avoid, and that has to do with the nature of simulating a task. Let's assume that we want to play some sort of "Theater of the Mind" type game just to limit the sort of task resolution options we have available, and lets assume that the goal of the game is to create interactive literature. That is to say, we want to create a story telling medium which allows the participants to feel like that they are active participants in a great story in the way a reader of a novel or the audience of a movie is a passive participant in (what can be) a great story. I think that's a fairly safe description of most RPGs and certainly most RPGs with at least some degree of Narrative aesthetic of play.

Every RPG has rules to adjudicate actions within the story, and most players find rules aesthetically pleasing if for a given level of complexity and interruption of the game, those rules help the players concretely imagine the events occurring in the story. In other words, a set of rules is compelling if the results of play encourage the imagination and leave a memory in the player of a story that resembles that created by a reader of a novel (or the audience in the movie, but with much less demand on the imagination).

Consider the case of 'combat' which occupies the central place in the rules of most RPG systems. For now, I'm not going to give an explanation why combat typically occupies a central place, but instead I'm going to address combat rules need to be detailed to achieve the above result. The answer is that every bit of granularity you add to combat rules makes it just a bit easier to imagine what is happening in the combat and to simulate those combat actions in a satisfying way. This is why some people are unhappy with abstract systems like HP, where the events of the combat aren't really concretely specified compared to a system with active defenses like Parry and Wound locations and Armor as Damage Mitigation. If the rules systems helps you see the combat in your mind, and creates a plausible set of results, then it will - if you can put up with the bookkeeping - be satisfying. And this is in fact the best we can do to simulate combat in Theater of the Mind.

A lot of Nar designers fall into the trap of assuming that every game activity works the same. So they naively assume that if they want to make a game centered around social interaction and RP, that you'd go about establishing that as a pillar of your game in the same way you'd go about establishing combat as a pillar of the game. And the problem is that while it's requires a lot of rules to simulate combat in a reified manner in Theater of the Mind and the more rules you add the more like combat the simulation becomes in the mind, conversation is nothing like that. The most reified manner to have a conversation in Theater of the Mind is to simply have a conversation. Nothing you can do is more like having a conversation or a social interaction in Theater of the Mind than actually having the conversation. Nothing is more like an actual conversation than a pretend conversation. So it turns out that setting up a Pillar of social interaction doesn't look anything like setting up a Pillar for combat. Where more rules make the combat more reified, the more depth you add to your rules, the less the conversation will be reified.

 

[Undrave]

Games that use D100 tables.

Though randomly generating power sets in the ol' Palladium superhero game was funny.

* Shadowrun. Cumbersome systems with multiple separate subsystems.

I tried to play a Rigger once in a game of Shadowrun. The world and concept were cool... but you needed to consult like five different frickin' tables to make your flipping drones it was a huge PAIN! Even a car needed to pick a ton of stuff... It really would have been useful to have a couple of standard drones as basis and exemple. Augh.

 

[prabe]

Sorry, I'm kinda new here. What is "Nar," please?

 

[Celebrim]

Hate is far too strong a word to use, but I have a very strong aversion to games - both RPGs and board games - that use custom non-numerical dice. That's been FFG's thing for the past decade, and it drives me bonkers. I just want numbers, guys. Numbers!

I have a strong aversion to this as well. And it's become a weaker but real aversion to any dice pool system.

The absolute basic thing that a game system has to have is math that works. If we didn't have to have math that works, we would never need a system more complex than Celebrim's famous "World's Simplest RPG", which has only one rule - basically, "Flip a coin". The reason that system is not satisfying is the math doesn't work. In the world's simplest RPG, the odds of Superman jumping over a puddle is the same as odds of Lois Lane leaping a tall building in a single bound (and vica versa). And both also have the same odds of leaping the Atlantic ocean. So the very basic thing all systems are trying to achieve is plausible task resolution.

And the problem I have with custom non-numerical dice and dice pools is I almost always find that the designers didn't pay much attention to whether or not the math of their system actually works. They didn't set things according to an idea like, "I want this sort of task to succeed 2/3rds of the time, and this sort 1/5th of the time, and this sort 9/10ths of the time." They set up the system based on an aesthetic ideal and not based on a pragmatic examination of the math. It's very hard in a system with wonky math to know as a player or as a DM what odds you are actually setting on a task succeeding or failing. Games like Storyteller and FUDGE and FATE and Mousegaurd all have in common that they have hideous math in the general case and that they strongly hide from the participants the odds of the outcomes.

Matters only get worse when you hide the math further by replacing the numbers with symbols.

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Games that use D100 tables.

I'm not a fan of those either, but I don't mind them so much because all you have to do is divide everything by 5 and voila, it's a d20-based system.

Those silly FFG dice, though... grr....