Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory

[Campbell]

@Bedrockgames

When it comes to social mechanics, I tend to favor those that impact player decision making rather than choose what they must do. Like when you are Angry in Masks you have difficulty connecting with people but can still try. You can resolve the condition by lashing out violently or one of the other player characters can try to talk you down. This sort of thing basically mimics the sort of difficulties and incentives we deal with in that emotional state (especially the insecure teenagers you play in Masks).

The player still retains complete autonomy, only certain things become more rewarding and others more difficult. You still play everything out. Still choose what your character does at every moment. Just not what they want or how they feel all the time.

I feel these sorts of mechanics do a good job of modeling the impact our impulses have on us, while still acknowledging we still actively choose what we do for the most part.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The innkeeper was unconscious at the time. I did decide how my PC would act - I decided to murder him. But then I found that I hesitated. In the fiction, the hesitation wasn't voluntary - it reflected that my character isn't as cold and ruthless as he thought he was. At the table, the hesitation wasn't voluntary either - it resulted from the failed Steel check.

I'd consider this rather serious violation of player agency. (Though of course as it is part of the game everyone presumably willingly signed up to, it really isn't.) But I really hate mechanics like this, and they are sort of things that make me feel my agency is violated. It is my job to decide what the my character does or how they react, and I won't appreciate the GM or the system, or the GM using the system, telling me otherwise.

I can't recall the details but I don't think dice were involved. As best I recall, she didn't seek to woo them. When NPCs have sought to woo or seduce a PC, then dice have been used. (Hence one of the PCs in this episode married - he couldn't say no to the lady in question, nor to her father - and later on became infatuated with someone else.)

Right, And that I find unacceptable too. Seriously, this is the dice playing the characters. To me this way worse than any other sort of railroading, the GM via the rules is mind-controlling the characters. I would refuse to play a game like this.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

When it comes to social mechanics, I tend to favor those that impact player decision making rather than choose what they must do. Like when you are Angry in Masks you have difficulty connecting with people but can still try. You can resolve the condition by lashing out violently or one of the other player characters can try to talk you down. This sort of thing basically mimics the sort of difficulties and incentives we deal with in that emotional state (especially the insecure teenagers you play in Masks).

The player still retains complete autonomy, only certain things become more rewarding and others more difficult. You still play everything out. Still choose what your character does at every moment. Just not what they want or how they feel all the time.

I feel these sorts of mechanics do a good job of modeling the impact our impulses have on us, while still acknowledging we still actively choose what we do for the most part.

I still don't like it, but yes, this is much better way to do this than simple "you must" or "you can't."

 

[Campbell]

Agency is one of those words we use that actually means different things to different people :

1. It could mean your ability to decide what your characters aims are.
2. It could mean the autonomy to go wherever and do whatever. To decide what your character thinks, does, says and feels if not always their aims.
3. It could mean your ability to make decisions that decidedly impact the shared fiction / game state / game world.

 

[pemerton]

Agency is one of those words we use that actually means different things to different people

For that reason it's not a word I normally use.

I think about who can change which bits of the fiction, using what techniques and processes (eg framing, resolution, by fiat, if the dice go their way, etc), and subject to what constraints.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Agency is one of those words we use that actually means different things to different people :

Sure. That is absolutely true. And different people find different facets of the agency meaningful or important. I obviously don't think that @pemerton is in any way wrong wanting to play games where the players can decide that towers exist but cannot decide who their characters marry. But I don't terribly much care for the former and the latter is an absolute no go.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think it depends on what you want out of play. Or what a game is about. Or some combo of those things.

I typically find with my 5E D&D characters (I’ve made two PCs in the last year or so after previously being the forever GM of my group) that I have a very strong sense of the character before we even really begin play. Not entirely crystal clear…there’s some areas of uncertainty or blank spots to fill in. But between class, background, alignment, and BIFTs, I have a good sense of the person. During play, I’m portraying the character with this picture of them in mind.

With other games, that’s not quite the case. My Stonetop character for example, I had just as many details going in… a class of sorts (the Judge, arbiter and chronicler of the town), a background of sorts (Prophet, his god speaks to him), an alignment of sorts (the Instinct of Harmony), and some connections with other PCs and NPCs (good friends with one of the other PCs, was an orphan raised by his uncle, looked up to a blind town elder, followed around by a young girl who idolizes him). That’s a pretty clear picture. But my concept of him is much less certain than with my D&D characters.

I’m not quite certain exactly why. I think it’s just the way some of these elements are designed. How they’re worded. Like Alignment compared to Instinct. Alignment is more about behavior. A person is good or evil, they observe laws or they don’t, and so on. Instinct is more a goal. Or a means to a goal, perhaps. Instinct is much less about telling you how a character will behave.

Because of that, it invites a certain amount of exploration of the character. How important is the Instinct? What will they do to achieve it? How far will they go?

Such questions aren’t as relevant when we’ve already classified a character as good or evil.

That seems to be a part of it. I expect there’s more to it, though. But ultimately, in one game I’m more depicting my character, and in another I’m more exploring my character. The idea of depiction is somewhat at odds with learning about the character from without.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, I think its fair to say that forgone conclusions are not the sort of thing that we want to come up in play anyway!

Sure, but so what? I mean, just looking at a d20, you have a possibility of 20:1 against you and 1:20 for you. If one single toss of the dice decides everything, that's still 94% defeat, 5% victory, and 1% ties (roughly). That seems FAIRLY lop-sided. I mean, a requirement to toss 3 dice and get 3 sixes would mean you would win 1 in 216 times, less than with the d20, but still in terms of what games care about both are "you won't do this often." So, I agree in principle that a plain old d20 can't produce very low success probability outcomes on its own. I'm just not sure it matters, and I'd generally think you want more chances than one anyway.

The issue is that people feel compelled to actually use all those steps, so you rarely see the actual degree of imbalanced success you were talking about. I'm not sold that's a deliberate choice so much as a side effect of using a big linear die, since you don't get it to nearly the degree with other systems, and they seem to be fine with that.

So, yes, D&D models things with 2 numbers, but it still gets to the same point. Beyond that, offense generally DOES grow for fighters, though usually in a more step-wise fashion (IE you get a magic item that adds a big increment of damage bonus at some point). Obviously D&D fighters are a bit of a bodge too, they really don't have a very good incremental damage increase mechanism that is built in (there are bonus attacks, but they too are very big discrete steps at only a few levels).

But the point is that compared to the other models I mentioned, they grow very slowly relative to a static number. That's largely a historical accident of the choice of die resolution as much as anything else. But its what people in that sphere are used to now.

I'm not sure what it is in your RQ example that wouldn't be very similar in many D&D fights. I mean, I will agree with you that some systems model things such that modest changes in a skill (or something similar) will produce non-linearly better odds of success. This should be pretty easy to achieve in a d20 or similar system, you simply need to apply it through some sort of mechanics (IE a non-linear skill bonus or something like that).

Sure. But the point is, you don't see it done there. And a large part of that is because people who actually want that aren't, for the most part, playing D&D. RQ's resolution being quite as swingy as it is is every bit as much a historical accident of die choice as D&D, far as that goes, it just makes the fact more visible because of the lack of the elevating hit point buffer as a defensive method.

 

[Thomas Shey]

@Bedrockgames

When it comes to social mechanics, I tend to favor those that impact player decision making rather than choose what they must do. Like when you are Angry in Masks you have difficulty connecting with people but can still try. You can resolve the condition by lashing out violently or one of the other player characters can try to talk you down. This sort of thing basically mimics the sort of difficulties and incentives we deal with in that emotional state (especially the insecure teenagers you play in Masks).

The player still retains complete autonomy, only certain things become more rewarding and others more difficult. You still play everything out. Still choose what your character does at every moment. Just not what they want or how they feel all the time.

I feel these sorts of mechanics do a good job of modeling the impact our impulses have on us, while still acknowledging we still actively choose what we do for the most part.

This, by the way, is the model I prefer for such things; I think of it as putting the proper thumb on the scale rather than totally bypassing the player/GM input to the matter. Of course like a lot of things, it depends on people playing in good faith (a GM or player who is very resistant to having such things apply can stubbornly decide they're going to ignore those effects come hell or high water) but there's no help for that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The issue is that people feel compelled to actually use all those steps, so you rarely see the actual degree of imbalanced success you were talking about. I'm not sold that's a deliberate choice so much as a side effect of using a big linear die, since you don't get it to nearly the degree with other systems, and they seem to be fine with that.

As a game designer, my feeling is that if I'm giving you one chance in 216 of success, its almost like a fraud, because people are optimistic and they will expect that they will pay off on that sometimes, but they won't, not in any reasonable finite amount of playing. So no, I don't even want those to exist, and I ESPECIALLY don't want them to be non-obvious (and believe me, dice pool odds are mostly very obscure to people!). I mean, I'm a math guy and I am not going to tell you off the top of my head what the odds are of winning an opposed check in TB2 where I have 8 dice and the other guy has 12 dice (all 4-6 contribute one success to each side). Is it one chance in 3? I bet, without resorting to some online dice odds calculator, that nobody has that answer on a first reading (sure, we can all probably figure it out if we really want to, but at the table?). OTOH everyone knows the odds yielded by a d20, and at least 5% chance of success, while not great, WILL come up now and then.

For all these reasons I stuck to a d20 based design for my own game. I'm not pooping on dice pools or anything, I just think their virtues are overrated. PbtA's 2d6 always rolled straight up by the player is not bad either. I think people are pretty likely to understand that a 7 is 6 times more likely than a 12, for example.

But the point is that compared to the other models I mentioned, they grow very slowly relative to a static number. That's largely a historical accident of the choice of die resolution as much as anything else. But its what people in that sphere are used to now.

Meh, again, 95% of the time you want odds in the 25-75% range anyway. Now and then you want something as low as 5% perhaps. I don't really see the growth curve of D&D and such as a bad thing, personally.

Sure. But the point is, you don't see it done there. And a large part of that is because people who actually want that aren't, for the most part, playing D&D. RQ's resolution being quite as swingy as it is is every bit as much a historical accident of die choice as D&D, far as that goes, it just makes the fact more visible because of the lack of the elevating hit point buffer as a defensive method.

I don't know about that. I mean, TSR's FASRIP basically did EXACTLY that (admittedly its a d100 system, but in a practical sense it is the same issues). People love that thing, it works great, they still play it and hack on it, and its been out of print for 30 years! I mean, sure, it isn't a super common technique (though other games certainly have used it) but my point was just that it is very doable, you don't need dice pools. They are OK, but the math is kind of a PITA, actually.