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]

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.

[rowyn]

Yesssss ... I don't know any systems which are both simple and good at the 'players can make plans and feel like they know whether or not they will work' aspect. That last is the biggest part of why I want a system in the first place -- if you and your players don't mind GM rulings for everything, you don't really need one.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

That's why I keep pushing Legend, guys. Well, that, and I just helped design a teeny tiny little bit of it. It feels like 3.5e done right...

[rowyn]

Hundreds of pages of rules is not really what I'm looking for when I say 'simple', though. O:)

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Well, okay, true I get that. But if you are going with 'a re-imagining of 3.5e', it will end up with a lot of pages, you know? There are the occasional 8 page version of 3.5e out there, I think I may have linked you to a few!

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Like Microlite20? http://www.forum.koboldenterprise.com/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=47 There's the download for it, it's a highly simplified version of 3.5e?

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

I would posit that a huge variety of broken combinations are in Core D&D -- and noncore just gives you ways of gaining access to those broken combos *more quickly*. Remember, a full three of the Big Six are in the player's handbook, and the others are only powerful because they have access to the tricks that the core three do. Also remember that most of Natalya's power came primarily from her class as it happened in the player's handbook and the monster manual, AND we were using a goodly number of house rules for how Thli made her stuff.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when you add in all the splatbooks it gets really messy. I think it's just not a good way to expand a system.

4e had the character creator as the grand repository of all options available which worked *much* better because everything was in one place, but the list of magic items was still mind-bogglingly huge and unwieldy when compiled like that. Also, they charged a subscription to use it. Gah.

And that's ignoring the balance problems.