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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7900687" data-attributes="member: 4937">One of the things I've most enjoyed about this thread is that it has clarified for me some of my pet peeves.  Turns out the systems I don't like have a lot in common. 1) Dice Pools (Mouse Guard, Storyteller, FATE): I don't dislike every dice pool system, but I seem to have a huge dislike of systems that depend on a dice pool and comparing a number of successes to a target number. The basic FUDGE mechanic of flipping a collection of "coins" and counting the number of heads, and all variations of it annoy me. The math here is just not granular, not transparent, and so often involves unintuitive rates of success or failure.2) Handles scale badly in a setting that handling it well is necessary (Mouse Guard, RIFTS, MechWarrior): Scale is a very difficult concept to handle well. You need results that are plausible despite the huge differences between the two things you are comparing. In many systems, you can just ignore scale - under the cover of being heroic D&D basically ignores the difficulty a 6' high person would have facing an 80' long dragon. But if scale is a major aspect of the story, you have to have a good mechanic for dealing with it.3) Mechanics are incoherent for the story that the game intends to tell or the game it intends to be (Mousegaurd, MechWarrior, FATE, RIFTS, almost all Storyteller games): I've picked on FATE enough. Read the 1e Vampire:The Masquerade core rule book with a focus on the asides into the games narrative that establish the story goals of the game and in effect the examples of play. The book describes the game as being about exploration of a person's inner demons and the struggle against their monstrous impulses in a desperate attempt to regain their humanity despite a spiraling decent into madness, horror, and brutal violence. This sounds like a really cool game to play! Unfortunately, the mechanics themselves in no way actually create the story described in the examples of play. The game makes purchasing humanity in Chargen vastly too easy, makes losing humanity too easy to avoid and to little the focus of gameplay, and gives almost no rewards for pursuing ones humanity while giving major rewards for being monstrous. Not surprisingly, basically no one who ever played the game played it like the flavor text of the game described, and almost everyone ended up creating games about grimdark superheroes engaged in political machinations against other teams of grimdark superheroes.4) Terrible Game Balance (Mouse Guard, RIFTS, Storyteller games)5) Fiddliness that Doesn't Get You Anything Worthwhile (Mouse Guard, Storyteller) - Examples can be Storyteller both having different difficulties and different numbers of required successes (hugely opaque math), and Mouse Guard having each roll be modified by up to 11 different factors that can alter the math in three different ways, including the dramatically fiddly and undramatic 'spend a limited narrative resource' to get an additional chance at success for each 6 you roll (a process that adds on average 1/12th of an additional success per dice you roll), and has a 5 way Roshambo core mechanic that forms a framework for that, in a game that seems to want to be 'rules light' and focus on story. At least D&D or GURPS has reasons for its fiddliness in that they are trying to comprehensively simulate something. Mouse Guard is trying to be 'story first', so what's all this abstract fiddliness actually doing for me?Compare with D6 Star Wars that has a dice pool system with largely functional math, handles scale for the most part really well, and has mechanics that are well suited to the story it intends to tell and game it intends to be. Yes, balance between Jedi and non-Jedi is pretty lousy at high level play, but arguably that's pretty true to the simulated setting.  It's not a perfect system but I can think of basically nothing that you could do in FATE that I wouldn't prefer to handle in a slightly modified version of D6. I mean, even if you wanted to do CharGen in FATE because you thought it had really compelling CharGen, I still think I'd prefer using the D6 rules to actually run the game.</blockquote>

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