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

[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!

[rowyn]

But I don't wanna mod a system. It's too much work. I just want the perfect system to fall in my lap and do everything for me. /o.o\

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

*tyckles Rowyn* ^_^

Okay, so tell me what you want in your perfect system? What's the setting and how do you want it to play?

[rowyn]

Eek! *giggles*

Okay, I don't have a specific game I want to play right now -- probably the game I'd be most likely to run at the moment is +tb+, and the +tb+ system is pretty good for that. But things I'd want in general:

* Short. Rules should be < 20,000 words. Preferably much less. Setting description can be longer, but actual rules should be simple and flexible.
* Clear. Players should be able to tell how feasible their ideas and plans are without a GM ruling.
* Interesting. Players should have multiple rational choices in play (whether combat or noncombat), the choices should matter, and how they matter should be obvious to the player.
* Magic should be quirky, allowing for player creativity in what magic does, but not unlimited in scope. Again, magic should not require a GM ruling every time it's used: it should be obvious what will or won't work in most cases.
* Magic should be thematic, so that the limitations of magic are obvious from the theme, and that the ways to get creative are also evident.
* Suitable to a PBEM. That's ... probably the hardest part. c.c

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I dunno, do you really want to run a campaign through email? Aren't you running the WT RPG online? There are different constraints, and honestly I don't think email lends itself well to an interactive dialogue or battles, two big elements of RPGs.

The part about magic is really what would add the most word count, I think, if you want to enumerate the major effects. If you recall the Sinai magic system, we analogized cantrips to be about equal to a candle flame -- but that only works for measuring heat and energy, and doesn't scale well. It would be far better to enumerate a set of useful spells and costs thereof, so players have a measuring stick...

I'm not familiar with +tb+ - logically, since I didn't play the game!

I think I need a setting in mind to work up an intelligent rule system, otherwise it winds up being, well, bland and generic. I'll noodle on the subject a bit.

[rowyn]

PBEM has a lot of drawbacks, but my favorite gaming experience was easily in PBEM.

I'm running WT on a MUCK, yes, but to be completely honest: the only reasons I've been able to sustain a weekly MUCK game are:

A) Four incredibly tolerant players who put up with the slow pace of action.
B) Single combats that take multiple sessions to resolve, giving me time where I'm not under deadline pressure to come up with something new.
C) The episodic 'adventurer' format: I don't need to tailor plots to the PCs, making them easier to invent.

None of these factors make for my favorite style of game, it's just one that's much easier to run.

I am not actually sure I am capable of running my favorite style of game any more, but if I can do it at all, it'd be in PBEM.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I see, too bad that Google Wave didn't do better! At least for me, email and LJ both inspire an urge to craft long heavy-duty posts.

For PBEM, you definitely can't have too many interacting parts like rolling for initiative and performing various dice rolls to resolve combat. I would picture something like Amber the Diceless RPG, where if someone has spent more than you on some stat, they are better than you in that stat, and that's all there is to it-- your only chance to beat them is to come up with some circumstance that they hadn't previously anticipated which influences things sufficiently in your favor to let you win.

I understand there've been a lot of experimental story-driven RPGs put out... I haven't tried any myself. *checks emshort's blog*

[rowyn]

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the goals of "simple", "flexible" and "minimal GM interpretation" are mutually exclusive. How would you make a brief set of rules that lets the players get creative WITHOUT requiring the GM to make a ruling on whether or not any given novel idea works?

(I read the Amber rules many years ago, and they relied pretty much entirely on "because the GM said so".)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

This is true! You kind of have to write a set of 'physical laws' to allow players to be creative within those limits, and that directly opposes a simple and short set of rules.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Oh! That was one thing (Lazar's custom RPG system) Shadake tried to do. It did it by making all the 'physical laws' use the same mechanism. Everything was rated on an exponential scale where 'human' was level 0. So from there you could figure out what level of effect you needed if you wanted to do something like 'levitate a battleship' (no matter if you were using magic or antigravity or a rope and pulley) and there were other formulas to convert skill level + equipment + time into effect level.

The rules weren't very long and they did let you figure things out in a players vs. environment scenario, but combat tended to devolve into who could come up with the best instakill. Because it was usually only a little harder to instakill someone than to hit them at all due to the exponential scale.

It also occasionally led to silliness like my crafter mage being locked in prison and thus having all the time he needed to build a directional nuke out of the straw in his bedding.

[rowyn]

*giggles* I begin to grasp why all the shadake games start with the party fighting something like bandits and end with them trying to win intrastellar wars. n.n

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Interesting to see the pitfall-- I'd think of an exponential system right off the bat too, if trying to make an abstract 'physical laws' type of rules, but you're right that if it's easy to boost magnitudes, then people will, and a little increase turns into a huge change of scale when you get up the curve.