Systems

[rowyn]

howardtayler tweeted about Hasbro's plans for a 5th edition for D&D. It's only been four years since the 4th edition.

 

It got me thinking about gaming systems in general. Lut and I quit playing Warhammer 40,000 in part because Games Workshop replaced the rules with new incompatible one every 7 years. (They also eliminated rules for one of Lut's armies, which greatly reduced our interest in investing in more miniatures.) The 'frequent new editions' phenomenon feels like a ploy to sell old gamers new books.  When was the last time Monopoly or Scrabble changed their rules?

 

And yet.

 

In the 90s, I played a heavily house-modified version of Champions Hero System 4th edition, and loved the rules.  Hero System was one of the 'generic' systems, like GURPS, and it was many years before I finally admitted that it was only a really great system for superheroes.  And it required a deep understanding of the system on the part of the GM: koogrr told me about an utter disaster he had playing Champions, where his character had Speed boost/drain powers. The second he said that, I knew why the game was a disaster, but it's not something the rules will stop you from doing.

 

I've played so many RPG systems: D&D, AD&D, Cyberpunk, Champions, Shadowrun, Nightfall, Vampire: the Masquerade, GURPS, World Tree, various simple homebrew systems or non-systems, +Terrible Butterflies+, some d20 games, Savage Worlds, and more that I don't even remember.

 

I used to have strong opinions about what the Best System was: for several years, it was Champions.  Then I decided that the best system was no system, or a very minimal one: the Mirari and Just Trust Me games didn't really have a system so much as list of what the characters were good at.

 

Then +Terrible Butterflies+ made me fall in love with RPG systems all over again, or at least with the idea of having one. I tried to make one of my own, and failed.  I've been running a World Tree game for over two years on FurryMUCK: I love the setting so much, but the rules mechanics are clunky for an online game.

 

And I still don't know what I want out of an RPG system, really.  I want it to be simple, but with enough decisions to make it interesting for the players. I want player choices to matter, and players to feel like they're well-informed about their choices.  I want the system to have a feel and a flavor that matches the setting.  If there's magic, I want it to be flexible and thematic, or quirky and specialized, but at least intelligible: I want players to understand what is and isn't doable by magic. Same of technology in an sf game. I want the system to settle questions, not raise them. I want it to be fun.

 

And you'd think, in the 34 years I've been playing RPGs, I'd know how to do all that, but I still don't. I'm sure there's not a Platonic ideal of an RPG, an RPG that would fit everyone's needs perfectly, but it feels like there ought to be one that fits one particular game and group perfectly.  But even my favorites fall short, sometimes badly so.  Apparently, this is really, really hard.  Maybe that's why they want a 5th edition for D&D: they're still trying to get it right. 

 

What about you? What are your favorite RPGs, and why?  What do they do best?

Comments

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

World Tree, of course, and Ars Magica. Very flexible systems which reveal and explain a well-constructed world view.

I am not sure that there's even a "right" to get, for D&D, in my terms.
There's not a well-constructed world view to reveal and explain. There is a
huge pile of books set in D&D-ish worlds, but they don't have a strong
coherent world behind them; they have a wide collection of worlds with varying
degrees of clarity.

[rowyn]

D&D only seems to be good at representing the D&D setting -- not that D&D has an official setting, but that D&D feels like itself. If you make a setting that uses all the D&D rules and work out how that would effect the people, then D&D will represent that setting well. Like Order of the Stick, for instance. Although the D&D magic system is so odd that sometimes even things that are supposed to be D&D, like DragonLance, don't feel that consistent with the rules.

I don't think it's fair to hold it against D&D that it doesn't do a good job of portraying The Lord of the Rings or ElfQuest or whatever, though. I don't know any good 'generic' magic systems. High magic and high technology do not lend themselves well to 'generic'.

But not liking D&D because it doesn't package itself with a setting you like -- as you said -- makes perfect sense.

I have an odd desire for a magic system which is /not/ flexible or broad, but also not at D&D's level of 'long list of specific spells'. One of the things I liked in +tb+ was the quirkiness of the magic and the way it couldn't do everything. I'd like to see something like that, but with a narrower scope of weaker powers.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't hold that against D&D. I like D&D reasonably well ... or rather, I like core D&D of most editions reasonably well. The none-too-deeply-thought-out dungeon crawl is its own form of enjoyment.

The things I do hold against D&D (mostly 3.5, the version I know best) include:

* Class system. D&D can be oversimplified to be a story in which you play
Mialee, Jozen, and the other example characters from the books. There is
some difference between two fighters, and more between two clerics, but
the range of sensible variation is only so large. Later D&D versions
introduce a number of systems to fix this (skills, feats, adequate
multiclassing rules, etc.) but they tend to add complication as well as
flexibility.

* Excessive elaboration. There are a zillion prestige classes, variant spells,
variant monsters, variant feats, variant magic items, etc. In most cases,
the differences are pretty finicky --- e.g., you get to use you Wis bonus
instead of your Dex bonus for missiles. This has a couple of problems:

1. It's tedious. A good gaming system is fun to read. D&D 3.5 supplements
mostly aren't.

2-10. It's unbalancing. Someone who's good at poking about in supplements
and fitting things together can make a character who is *amazingly* more
powerful than a character made following the core rules. Like, double your
level more powerful, in one game I played that was pushing on that
phenomenon. I don't mind very powerful characters, but the source of
power should be something more literary than picking two levels of Purple
Dragon Knight and three of Trapsmith and one of Dread Necromancer and
suddenly you get to be amazingly strong due to some surprising combination
of effects that were never designed to go together.

* A number of rules work badly if thought of as part of a world. E.g., the
rules on buying and selling magic items in 3.5 look like a [sensible] effort
to limit how much power characters can get from commerce. They don't lead
to a sensible economy. (The rules for non-magical crafts are utterly
bonkers.)

* It's fricking complicated. I keep thinking I want to do a quick campaign,
and I'll do a dungeon crawl in D&D, but then I think about doing chargen and
trying to walk unfamiliar players through the giant list of feats and spells
and stuff ... If you take it seriously, it's as complicated as World Tree or
Ars Magica, but without the fundamental reality behind it.

That's what comes to mind now.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

I would say that D&D (3.5e especially) can do a fair job of describing drenched in magic, magically transhuman, post-scarcity sorts settings. Like magical versions of the worlds described in various sorts of postcyberpunk literature. Lots of the rules can describe that stuff REALLY REALLY well...

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Using Savage Worlds, I'm not convinced it does anything 'best' but Greywolf is used to it and the rest of us (me, boingdragon, kagetsume) are getting used to it as well! IMO it is missing Champions point spending for allowing players to fine-tune their powers so I would judge it as better for games where players are relying more on skills than on magic or high tech 'powers'. But it is nice to have a 'frame of reference' for 'how hard do things hit', how players scale against each others and against their enemies.

I think no matter what you pick for a base RPG, you still wind up having to make a bunch of rules for setting specific things. For instance if I want to run a mystic martial arts campaign, I have to figure out how to make the rules treat martial art styles as more than just, well, 'Fighting d6' or 'Fighting d8'.

[rowyn]

Yeah, I run into world-builder's disease, where I keep wanting to make a unique setting with its own innate peculiarities. And an off-the-shelf RPG is not going to fit my world. I can't explain the Silver Scales setting in D&D, or Champions, or GURPS, without extensive modding.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

A Silver Scales RPG might be interesting. ^_^

I think there's nothing wrong with modding a system though. The RPG itself isn't as important as that your players are familiar with the system and thus don't need to ask basic questions like 'what actions can I perform this turn' and 'how can I reasonably get through this fight without dying'. Once you have a reasonable RPG, you can whip up whatever mods you want. A setting is the same whether you play it in Champions, GURPS, Savage Worlds, or some berserk hybrid of D&D where you threw out the character classes and introduced new ones suitable to your setting.

That said, I think RPG rules do matter in the sense that they just make certain things easier than other things. Champions encourages characters that are modeled on powers, not on skills. Savage Worlds constraints people to arcane backgrounds the GM has determined, if they want to have powers, and its spell list is pretty confining. D&D is well... D&D.

If I were going to make a mystic martial arts game, I'd write an RPG just because I'd want the conflict of martial art styles to be that heavily ingrained into the whole system. Then again, there are probably martial arts RPGs out there already!

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I haven't found a system better at making combat fun than D+D. 4e was probably the most fun but they utterly nerfed all the non-combat uses of magic which pissed off the players; they're probably going for a 5th edition so quickly because too many people refuse to play 4th, and the Essentials line wasn't called out as 4.5 strongly enough for people to give it a chance to fix things IMO. Plus, I don't think it fixed the out-of-combat thing which was the main real complaint.

3/3.5e D+D and GURPS both did a good job of simulating a world in the sense that players could make plans and tell whether or not they were going to work without having to get a GM to rule on everything (although of course a GM could screw them up). It encouraged rules-lawyering, but it was a fun kind of rules-lawyering. 4e and, say, World Tree both rely too heavily on handwaving and GM one-off rulings ('Can I come up with a ritual to do X? How hard is it? The rules have basically no guidance for this so I need you to tell me.') for that to work very well.

Champions, Mutants and Masterminds, Shadowrun, Toon, BESM, Ironclaw... not my favorites.

[rowyn]

That's one of the things I'd like in a system: "players can make plans and tell whether or not they're likely to work". The +tb+ system required a lot of GM calls early on, but after a while the butterflies were spell-casting a lot with a high confidence that the character actions were reasonable, which was part of what I enjoyed about the game.

I keep thinking about Dominion and how almost every rules question I've had was resolved (a) in their card interactions and (b) in a consistent way that was what I'd expect from reading the exact card text. I want an RPG that's like that: abilities interact in complex, interesting ways that are still completely predictable. n.n

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Which versions of Ironclaw have you run? Have you run 2.0? How about Usagi Yojimbo? They made the combat systems in the latter versions of those systems much more interesting!

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I haven't run it. I played a few games in... damned if I know which version it is. Probably 1.0? I bought the PDF rules for 'squaring the circle' version which wsa different but it made magic and combat really confusing to read about, although it looked like it might be workable once you actually figured out what it was trying (badly) to say.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Currently, I'm in love with Legend. It's not 100% out yet, but it feels like it takes the best aspects of Pathfinder, 4th Edition D&D, 3rd Edition, etc. etc., and puts it all together.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I'm going to try running it, I think, if I can collect players.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

In person or online?

[argonel.livejournal.com]

I happen to like D&Day because you can generally find people with a basic understanding of the rules and it is easy to resolve an attack or skill check. I prefer 3.5ish rule sets with some stuff backported from 4.0 because I think it gives a better range of player options.

I also am quite fond of the shadowrun setting as well of the sound of pouring a bucket of d6 on the table. The actual system has a too few many warts to be playable without an experienced gm. Particularly when you have both ranged and melee characters acting together.

[rowyn]

I love the Shadowrun setting, but yeah, the rules, not so much. :) I played in at least one game that used the Shadowrun setting but modified Cyberpunk 2020 rules instead of the Shadowrun system.

I really don't have a feel for D&D any more, although I'm pretty sure I've played some variants of it in jordangreywolf's games. The only in-person RP I've done in the last fifteen years or so has been when I'm out-of-town to visit friends, so it's been much too limited for me to pick up a copy of (any of) the rules and read them.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

I've run a *lot* of games over the years. (My gaming shelf is six feet long and four feet high, and full. :) ) I've never yet run into a system that works equally well for all genres. GURPS is OK, but the mechanics are clunky. Champions, Heroes Unlimited, Marvel Super Heroes are all good for their genre but pretty bad for anything else. (But I love that I can run MSH with only *one* table of information required.) My Traveller game (original Little Black Books for the win!) was Firefly before Joss Whedon even conceived Buffy. Cyberpunk 2020 does a great job of portraying an urban dystopia where life can be cheaper than disposable cell phones.

Where am I going with this? I really don't think there's ever going to be *one* system which can do everything equally well; when it comes down to it, it's the minds of the GM and players which really matter, and "the system" is just there for guidance and flavor.

And if anyone wants to play Cyberpunk, or Marvel Super Heroes...my books need a dusting-off anyway. [evil grin]

[rowyn]

I don't even want One System to Rule Them All, anymore. I do kinda wish I knew one system that I didn't have mixed feelings about even for its own genre/setting.

Shadowrun is a great setting (if we get one 2012 prophecy that comes true, let it be that one!) but yeah, the system is ... didn't they forget to have chargen at all? You just picked an archetype and were done. I think I played one game where the GM invented a chargen system, and one or two where the GMs used the Shadowrun setting but modified Cyperpunk rules.

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

Ya know, my two favourite systems of all time include ElfQuest, which is based on the Chaosium percentage system and West End Game's first edition Star Wars RPG. Neither system is perfect; in particular, the Star Wars system, whilst awesome for character play and combat, never did quite get the handle on a reasonable star ship combat system, but the things both have in common point to, for me, excellent game system strengths. Chief among them is a simple, but flexible stat/skill system where everyone has base skill levels derived from stats, but develop them individually. This makes for unique characters that are balanced overall, but vary widely in particular functions. Both systems also have well handled combat and wound effect systems. ElfQuest is particular strong in this area with an elaborate seeming, but easy to manage wound effect system based on regions of injury (head shots really, really count). Both of these combat systems have a very realistic feel to them; when you get hit, you get hurt and that generally affects you for the rest of the battle. Star Wars, though, despite being fairly serious with wound effects, also allows for some dramatic heroics through the use of Force Points to dramatically enhance a character's ability for a short period of time. Finally, the backgrounds for both RPG environments, while very well developed, also allow for a lot of flexibility for the character adventures. Being well thought out story universes, the gaming worlds possess an internal consistency that allows them to 'make sense'.

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

Of course, I'm also still working on making a good system to be used for PBeM games. Big Trouble in Little China WANTS to be played. :)

[rowyn]

I'd love a good system for PBEM. :)

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

In terms of general-purpose role-playing game rules, I do not believe that the base rules underlying all of the pre-Apocalypse World of Darkness books has been beaten. I can teach it to anyone in 5 minutes, it plays extremely quickly, it depends on almost no table lookups. You just bolt onto it one or two equally simple rules to cover the current game setting, and you can do anything with it.

But the best piece of advice I ever got on this subject came from Dev, aka Brock Hanke, way the hell back in the early '80s, when I was still starting out gaming. I asked his advice as to what game system to use for a campaign setting I had come up with, and started to explain the setting, and he cut me off halfway through the first sentence and said, "Don't tell me what your campaign setting is. Just tell me why you can't use (SJ Games') Toon. The answer to that question will tell me what system you should use."

He was right, you know. Games that require volume after volume of rules are for people (a) who have no common sense, no sense of what would or wouldn't "work" in the campaign setting, and (b) who cannot get along with each other well enough to agree on something when one of their number asks a question or makes a suggestion. You know: people I have no intention of gaming with, if I can avoid them; hell, that's why I dropped out of the Vampire LARP after 2 sessions.

(Of course, my days of tabletop roleplaying are long behind me: too much commuting, too many scheduling hassles, too much math to do by hand every time somebody wants to do something other than talk. Not only do online 3D roleplaying games beat all of those problems, it's easier to "draw" my character, so everybody can see what it looks like. Star Trek Online goes F2P on the 17th, btw.)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't the answer always be 'because I want the game and the world to make even the slightest bit of sense'?

[rowyn]

I played in a few Vampire campaigns, but they were conversation-heavy so I never really got a feel for how the system itself worked in play. I do remember not liking chargen -- one of my personal preferences is for systems that do chargen the same way they do xp, so that you don't end up min-maxing your character creation based on how long you guess the campaign will last. But that's a matter of taste.

Did you play the new Star Wars MMO at all?

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Sorry, forgot to check back. Answer: No, I have this rule of thumb about MMOs that are less than a year old. Unless the design knocks my socks off, I won't go near an MMO until I find out if the studio is laying off all the programmers, which typically happens around 6 to 9 months after release. And nothing about the design of SWeaTOR impresses me: it's City of Heroes' combat model with less content, livened up by fully animated mission briefings, dragged down by the total lack of a looking-for-group tool, built on top of a new and unproven (albeit local to me, oddly enough) game engine. I'll wait to see how it looks this time next year.