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.

[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]

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.

[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]

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.

[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]

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

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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\

[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...

[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!

[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...

[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.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

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

[rowyn]

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

[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]

In person or online?

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Also, are we all going to be ponies? :) :)

[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.

[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.

[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?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

In person.