Why Do You Hate An RPG System?

[overgeeked]

Is this thread about rpgs in general or D&D?

D&D is about the only game we can assume the majority of people have played so it's the easiest and closest to a universal example to use for discussion.

 

[pemerton]

But the threat of character death can be a very interesting, recurring point in games like D&D that feature lethal combat as a common challenge resolution.

Both in and of itself, in the tension that risk creates is a spice for combat - which is a length mechanical aspect of the game when it occurs. Add in the simple fact that many/most combats, especially in the published modules, aren't about anything except overcoming in order to move forward in the plot. Leaving either it's foreordained you'll win, or having a DM willing and experienced enough to think of suitable alternatives every time.

One way of reading this is D&D is often played essentially as a railroad through a plot, with the action in play consisting in combats where the stakes are 'do we beat it or do we suffer some sort of loss in the form of PC death?'

I think that's probably true, but maybe a bit candid for the taste of some!

Many games, with D&D being a big example, tend to not have mechanical consequences other than loss of HP, which can lead to PC death. There are some minor exceptions to this across editions that allow for some kind of consequence that lingers, but they’re pretty few and far between. I think this is a big part of why many GMs lean so heavily on PC death.

Of course there can always be narrative consequences…failing to clear the Caves of Chaos or failing to learn what happened to the Carlyle Expedition or what have you. But every game can have those.

So with PC death, what’s the consequence for the player? They lose that PC, yes….but they just replace it with another. Perhaps the lost PC was particularly enjoyable to them or what have you, but the game goes on, and the player continues to play.

This is why I said that death isn’t always the most meaningful consequence. There could be (and in many games are) ways forward from that point that allow the player to continue with that PC but which result in a more meaningful change in the game than simply swapping out a PC.

I think that mechanical consequences does not contrast with narrative consequences very strongly in the context of PC death, at least without adding more: after all, that the PC died is an event in the fiction just as much as it is a (potential) mechanical change to the player's game position.

An example of "adding more" is Epic Tier 4e, where often the dead PC comes back to life via a special ability, and so the PC death is primarily a mechanical event that drains a resource, much like spending a healing surge, with its contribution to narrative being tension and pacing and that's it, unless the table does the work of feeding the death into the narrative in some fashion. (At my table, sometimes we did and sometimes we didn't.)

If the consequence of PC death, for the player, is that they have to play a new PC, is that a mechanical hit or a narrative hit? That will depend on the details of the game and (often) table practices. To be perfectly honest, I don't think D&D really has a coherent conception of what the game effect of a PC dying is supposed to be. It leaves it entirely up to the players at a given table to decide. Different approaches here will have different effects on the mechanic-narrative correlation: if the player gets to bring in a new PC who joins the current party on "the quest" but they are down a level or an item or something, then that is no narrative consequence but the player's position takes an immediate mechanical hit.

On the other hand, in a Classic Traveller game it might be possible to bring in a new PC who is better than the dead one (due to random rolls) and who is just as narratively integrated (depending on how the game is being approached at the table). This is less likely in D&D but not impossible if PCs are low level and being generated via random stat and starting money rolls.

The whole thing is weird and badly underexplained in mainstream PCs.

 

[pemerton]

Is this thread about rpgs in general or D&D?

Yes.

 

[Argyle King]

D&D is about the only game we can assume the majority of people have played so it's the easiest and closest to a universal example to use for discussion.

Fair points.

Though, I think it's also fair to say that a lot of highlighted issues and "problems" only exist because of rules-structures which are unique to D&D. So, while it may be a "universal" example in the context that many people play D&D; I do not believe that it serves as a good universal example in the context of rules-structure, narrative-structure, or how roleplaying games function in general.

Don't get me wrong. Despite the fact that I admittedly make (and have made) posts which are negative toward D&D, I enjoy playing it.

However, I often find it strange that so many complaints about how the game works also coincide with refusals to try different games.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting that behavior fits you as an individual. It's more of anecdotal observation of subsections within the D&D community.

•"I hate the d20, levels, and class-based systems."
-"Have you tried playing [different game] instead of D&D?"
•"How dare you imply that I'm playing the game wrong!?"

 

[Neonchameleon]

I haven't read the whole of HPL's corpus, but have read multiple hundreds of pages. Is there a story where the protagonist dies? Not in Call of Cthulhu itself, not in The Shadow out of Time, not in At the Mountains of Madness, I think not in The Dunwich Horror. Maybe in Shadow Over Innsmouth, depending how you look at it.

So why would I expect character death to be a serious prospect in a CoC game?

Because pop-Cthulhu owes more to CoC than it does to Lovecraft himself. In the writings of HPL Cthulhu was defeated by ramming him with a fishing boat. In pop-Cthulhu Cthulhu is on an unimaginable power scale and the fishing boat would just bounce.

 

[Blue]

One way of reading this is D&D is often played essentially as a railroad through a plot, with the action in play consisting in combats where the stakes are 'do we beat it or do we suffer some sort of loss in the form of PC death?'

Drop the "railroad through a plot" and I'm with you. Combat-unto-death-as-challenge-resolution is a common theme in D&D regardless if it's a railroad, a sandbox, a hexcrawl, or something else.

I say if you take any random group of D&D DMs of reasonable size, 80%+ have expectations that defeat-in-combat to advance is on the table with some regularly. It's not the only goal for combat, as a matter of fact combats are usually more interesting when there are different goals. And it's not the only resolution - a side could retreat, be captured, surrender, etc. But "kill the undead to get the macguffin" or something similar can show up even in the portfolios of DMs who try those, and much more often for DMs who don't. With the notable exception of Witchlight, all of the official adventures expect this a good chunk of the time. And that Witchlight can be run without combat is rare enough to be notable.

On the other hand I'm running the teen superhero game Masks: A New Generation and there isn't any mechanical support for character death, with the exception of The Doomed playbook, which is around a character like Raven from Teen Titans who has a lingering doom coming for them in the future. Even the conditions which one could think of as "HP" if you squint hard enough are things like "Angry" and "Insecure" and are RP guides as well as adjusting down the chance of success of some Moves in order to make the mechanical choices that are in line with the character more appealing without dictating anything.

Each game has real stakes for the characters. For ones like D&D where lethal combat is common, I like those stakes preserved as opposed to the DM taking them away by protecting the characters with plot armor, so that I can have a sense of accomplishment for succeeding as opposed to being handed it. As a player in D&D games I have asked multiple DMs to increase the challenge of combat because it wasn't challenging and that made it boring, while still taking up a good chunk of session time. As a DM of D&D games I've had plenty of characters go unconcious and death was close. But in my current campaign (1.5 years) and my last completed campaign (4.5 years), there were no deaths in combat. Not that there couldn't be, if the players were foolish or if luck was particularly against them, but because they were successful in preventing them. Which makes me cheer - that's the line I enjoy DMing D&D at: fear of death, but because of how played no actual death.

 

[overgeeked]

Because pop-Cthulhu owes more to CoC than it does to Lovecraft himself. In the writings of HPL Cthulhu was defeated by ramming him with a fishing boat. In pop-Cthulhu Cthulhu is on an unimaginable power scale and the fishing boat would just bounce.

In the H. P. Lovecraft story the Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu was rammed in the head by a steam-ship...and he instantly started regenerating. Like hitting a troll with a rock. So temporarily “defeated” by taking a steam-ship to the face. We should note that at the time the story was written, the steam-ship was the most powerful bit of water-borne technology invented by humans. The effect is different on modern readers from the original intent. Then it was meant to convey the horror that even our most powerful water-borne invention was only a split second reprieve, now it reads like “LOL, Cthulhu was taken out by a boat.” The ignored context matters.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Fair points.

Though, I think it's also fair to say that a lot of highlighted issues and "problems" only exist because of rules-structures which are unique to D&D. So, while it may be a "universal" example in the context that many people play D&D; I do not believe that it serves as a good universal example in the context of rules-structure, narrative-structure, or how roleplaying games function in general.

Eh. There are few problems I've seen in D&D and adjacent system campaigns I haven't seen in others. I'm willing to accept that you're going to have different problems in trad games and some non-trad, but I don't think the random body of players is not going to have some of the same sociodynamic issues that I've seen time and again over the years in different group.

Don't get me wrong. Despite the fact that I admittedly make (and have made) posts which are negative toward D&D, I enjoy playing it.

However, I often find it strange that so many complaints about how the game works also coincide with refusals to try different games.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting that behavior fits you as an individual. It's more of anecdotal observation of subsections within the D&D community.

•"I hate the d20, levels, and class-based systems."
-"Have you tried playing [different game] instead of D&D?"
•"How dare you imply that I'm playing the game wrong!?"

Well, there's always the issue of hating on only one or two of those sorts of things (say, big linear die rolls of the D20/D100 stripe) while liking the rest of the feel. You can probably find games out there that avoid the one while still having the others, but there's always the "finding players/GMs" problem then. That sort of D&D heartbreaker can sometimes be harder to find others to play with than systems radically different like the Hero System or Runequest.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think that mechanical consequences does not contrast with narrative consequences very strongly in the context of PC death, at least without adding more: after all, that the PC died is an event in the fiction just as much as it is a (potential) mechanical change to the player's game position.

Sure, I mention the two as types of consequences, but didn’t really mean to set them in opposition. My point was more that consequences of a narrative sort can be present in just about any RPG. So D&D can indeed have these.

But once you move beyond that, there’s very little other than PC death. Some editions have incorporated alignment change, and that could certainly be meaningful for certain classes. Level drain or loss, but that’s temporary, akin to HP loss but more severe. A sword of sharpness might result in a lost PC limb or two is used by an enemy NPC. Then certainly there were the kind of arbitrary consequences of things like the Deck of Many Things and similar items. “You’re now a dwarf” and all that.

D&D relies almost entirely on HP loss for any/all danger, and no matter how many HP you may lose, there’s nothing that happens as a result. As long as you have 1 HP you’ll function the same as if you had 100, and the missing 99 will always come back given a bit of time and or healing magic.

I think this is largely why you see folks claim that of you remove this consequence from the game then you’re taking away all of the challenge. It’s because in D&D and similar games, that’s largely true….you’d be taking away the consequence of losing your HP, and almost everything revolves around that.

But that’s simply not the case for games that don't rely on HP/character death as the sole (or even primary) consequence for PCs.

 

[Beleriphon]

In the H. P. Lovecraft story the Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu was rammed in the head by a steam-ship...and he instantly started regenerating. Like hitting a troll with a rock. So temporarily “defeated” by taking a steam-ship to the face. We should note that at the time the story was written, the steam-ship was the most powerful bit of water-borne technology invented by humans. The effect is different on modern readers from the original intent. Then it was meant to convey the horror that even our most powerful water-borne invention was only a split second reprieve, now it reads like “LOL, Cthulhu was taken out by a boat.” The ignored context matters.

Context now would be ramming Cthulu with the USS Nimitz and then having all of its reactors go super critical and explode on impact.