RPG Systems pt 2: Poll!

[rowyn]

[Poll #1809728]

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I found the white wolf system pretty intuitive... unfortunately it was so bound up in the world I could never "export" it to anything original. (Even the White Wolf export of it to the Exalted RPG felt disastrous to me.)

I liked GURPS for allowing me to customize the game system to fit my setting. All the other times I've basically been shoehorning systems into original worlds and it's never really felt right. I often end up ignoring a lot of the rules.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

the new D&D system is confusing as heck. I want to send my fighter to hit the dragon with his axe. Simple in 2nd ed, but today you have to pick which attack method you wish to use. They basically gave "fighting spells" to the fighters and made what used to be the simplest character to learn with more complex than a magic user. It also used to be that buying a DM guide and a player's guide for 20$ each was all you needed. But now there are a dozen books at 75$ a pop you have to purchase. What was once a fun game of the imagination has devolved into owning and memorizing a law library.

[rowyn]

I love the theory of customizing a system to my campaign, but my practice of it has not been awesome. :/

[rowyn]

In retrospect, a lot of what I don't like about gaming systems is that they're so expensive. It's not even that I mind me personally dropping $50 or $100 on a game, so much. It's that with an RPG, all the players pretty much need to have their own copies if they're going to enjoy the mechanics of the game. And when it comes to asking all my players to shell out that cash too, it's kind of ... eyugh. One of the reasons I'd like a simple system is that I'm hoping it'll be CHEAPER. If the rules were $10 I'd be more keen on experimenting.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I don't mind a company making money off of their business. What I object to is the fact that every single company I deal with seems to think my wallet is bottomless and that I'll pay whatever outrageous amount they decree while putting out (imho) shoddy materials. If you can sell a basic kit for 40$, anyone and everyone will play. Make it dozens of books and hundreds of bucks to enter, you'll find lots of folks won't enter -- us old farts will happily play our older versions to death while the noobies find cheaper systems to join.

Make money good. Make so much that few are interested in your product anymore bad.

Also, we play our game using skype and Gametable. If we didn't have the macros in gametable to automate the details, we'd not have a game. While I've not been a RPGer for about 20 years, I'm not a noob. But the new rules sure made me feel like one. I can only imagine how lost a brand new gamer must feel after spending 100$ on stuff and not having the faintest clue how to do something as basic as swing your snicker snak back and forth.

[rowyn]

Yeah, I get that 'I feel like a noob' factor a lot. I've played some systems where I had a computer calculate results for me, or where I didn't really know how to do anything and the GM or another player told me what to roll against which stat, etc. I'm pretty sure I've played some incarnation of late-era D&D that way. It ... works, but it works in much the same way that "because the GM said so" works. If I don't understand the system, it's not adding to the enjoyment factor of the game -- the game may be lots of fun anyway, because the setting, characters, and story are good. But the rules aren't helping with that unless I understand them.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I wonder if an RPG company offered the player guide free or really cheap--under $10--if it would act as a loss leader for the supplements.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but not all companies could do that. RPG books take a lot of art, which makes them relatively expensive to produce --- or at least require a fanatically loyal artist or some such.

[rowyn]

Yeah, I'd be concerned that the market just isn't there. I mean, there's millions of players for RPGs, but it's a pretty fragmented market and a lot of players rarely buy new systems or supplements.

On the other hand, even for a big company like Hasbro, I think the costs of printing a supplement are at least $8 or $10 for the physical book, outside anything else. Selling a stripped-down player's handbook as an inexpensive PDF might work for them.

[rowyn]

I could see that working for a big company like Hasbro or maybe Steve Jackson Games. I'd hate to try to break into the RPG market with a new game, though. They're labors of love for 95% of the market, I think -- hardly anyone makes money on them.

[rowyn]

Er, by "95%" I mean "of all existing RPGs", not "of all RPG sales". There are tons of RPGs with tiny market shares.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Setting books need art. Rulebooks don't, particularly if you keep them succinct. Fifteen to 30 pages at most, maybe.

The idea being to keep the basic game affordable, and turn the setting books into the coffee table art books that they're already trending toward right now with their full-color interiors and $60 price tags.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

That was one of the reasons my group liked 4e -- the character creator was subscription only but it was a program you could install on five different machines, which meant not everyone had to be subscribed... and you could let your subscription lapse and still use the old version. So, for $5, five people could have everything they needed to own personally for character creation.

...they've fixed that since, though. The new character creator is a dumbed-down web app.

[rowyn]

Where by "fixed" you mean "broken". :/

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

+Terrible Butterflies+ had some neat magic rules. I always have fun with constructive magic systems. Actual combat didn't seem to work at all though?

Champions is kind of bizarre. All the arrays and power pools, the stats that mean almost nothing in the new version, the homogeneity of the powers that aren't completely broken, but they made a really good attempt at letting you stat up arbitrary superheroes. I think I like Mutants and Masterinds better since it's basically a copy of Champions based on d20 rules, but they're both playable.

World Tree has some interesting things -- initiative weirdness, combat maneuvers, some of the things you can do with magic -- but also has some serious flaws. Making spells build as the mechanic to let people respond to their casting just doesn't work, for one thing. The nouns-and-verb skills thing is neat at first but gets really frustrating, and making spells so expensive in money and time to learn is a real downer.

D+D... 4e has better combat, but there's a lot of dross to sort through to get to the interesting character options. Once you have a character it's pretty easy to play if you developed him organically, but if you pick up a 21st level character you never played before the options can be overwhelming. And the out of combat mechanic ('skill challenges') fails SO HARD. Skill challenges are *really hard* to set up -- the DM can't just wing it (well, they CAN, but it'll be an unsatisfying mess and worse than just winging it without trying to build a skill challenge). Which means that they can't be used to handle anything that happens because of player initiative. Which can lead to players feeling like they have no alternative but to follow a plot set on rails.

3.5 (or Pathfinder, they are the SAME DAMN GAME) is my favorite because the noncombat rules are 'there' enough to mostly work with, a lot of the spells and skills and especially magic items do relevant things aside from killing enemies, and combat is 'good enough'. I mean, it's fun. Most of the time. It's not *balanced* exactly and at high levels the rules completely break down...

GURPS... oy. Character creation is overly complex, the 'roll attack, roll defense' mechanic makes combat cumbersome, and I really don't see how anyone could possibly play the game without Excel. But it's a more generic generic system than Champions, and the best at being generic that I've seen.

White Wolf is the worst system ever. I hate it. The base mechanics are merely bad, but when you layer the specific mechanics for the monster of the week on top it gets truly awful. WHATEVER YOU DO don't run a crossover game, because the monster mechanics go from 'truly awful' to 'outright nonfunctional' when you attempt to combine them.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

The teaser that you're using to market your product needs to look good, and have setting information and fiction to get people hooked.

Having a cheap, no-frills players' guide with just the rules (for people other than the GM to buy) might work. D+D 3.5 did this for free with the SRD, and in 4e the subscription was supposed to be the equivalent (but $X per month was too expensive for many people to buy in).

The SRD was *really popular* and made it much much easier to get people to play. I don't know how it affected the system's overall profitability though.

[rowyn]

I think what makes +terrible butterflies+ for me is that it lets the players do a whole lot of weird non-combat things that follow from the rules without being specifically spelled out by the rules. The combat wasn't and I don't know if it even could be, but I know so many games that simulate combat that I'm not really impressed by the idea anymore. Whereas a game system that does noncombat in a way that's interesting and not totally reliant on GM interpretation/invention/permission is much rarer. I just loved the spell casting versatility in +tb+:

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I don't think I can point to ANY campaign I've run where my usage of house rules has been completely glitch-free ... but then, I can't think of a campaign where I've run things "rules-as-written" completely glitch-free, either. ;)

My experience with White Wolf's d10 system was cursory at best, but I liked the idea of the basic mechanic. Plus, it shared something I liked with Advanced HeroQuest and WEG Star Wars: Having several of just ONE type of die to roll makes the "dice pool" a lot easier to manage. (Far better than, say, Ironclaw or Deadlands Classic in that regard, from my experience, even though each system has its own strong points.)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Hey, Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition is $10. =D Just sayin'.

(Yes, there's a new hardcover "Savage Worlds Deluxe" out that costs more than that, but the changes introduced are fairly minor, and a lot of it is really geared more toward giving the GM more tools to work with, and a few new character-creation options.)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Champions/Hero System: This was the first "generic" system I'd run into, and the first time I'd been exposed to the idea that I could basically come up with a character concept and make it happen, rather than shopping through a choice of races and classes and finding what was "close enough." However, it seemed it just wasn't a game that could be played without a calculator, and I hated dealing with END costs ... so much so, that I would routinely buy everything for my character (even running) to "0 END" just so I wouldn't have to deal with it, and I stayed well away from "pools." (I came in at 4th edition, so it might've changed significantly since then.) The phase system made me think of Car Wars, except that it wasn't designed to divide action smoothly across a round vs. moving in halts and starts. Rather, it seemed to be a mechanic mostly there just to handle the phenomenon of "Speedster" characters, but when it was generalized to all characters, it added a new level of complexity I'm not sure the game really needed. (As a GM, I'd routinely build all NPCs to go on the same Phases, just so I wouldn't have to deal with aberrations, except for whatever odd phases the PCs would go on.)


World Tree: I'm afraid that my eyes started glazing over when I was just trying to get through the big prologue about the world setting. Too ... bizarre. It's the sort of level of weirdness I'd be more inclined to introduce PCs as "visitors" to this universe rather than natives. It just seemed like too much of a learning curve just to figure out how to play a native inhabitant of this universe, to whom this weirdness shouldn't be weird.

And the initiative handling is mind-boggling.

Hmm. I had a lot of trouble with the initiative system in Champions, too. For whatever reason, it seems that initiative is often a stumbling block for me in systems I don't get along well with. ;)


D&D 4e: This is exactly why I'm wary of this game. More so than any previous edition of D&D, it seems like so many things are JUST TOO STRUCTURED. With certain game systems, it's pretty easy to extrapolate how I can handle odd PC actions; I just pick the closest relevant characteristic test, assign some sort of penalty or difficulty rating, and be consistent about it from that point on. 4e, however, feels so much like ... I dunno, a VIDEO GAME. If I go meddling too much in the mechanics, I might make the game "crash," or at the very least the play balance is likely to go out of whack in ways that I'm not sure I can anticipate.


D&D 3.5/Pathfinder: I've had a few issues with running D&D 3.5, and even more running d20 World of Warcraft (which suffered severe play balance issues, but was a third-party product anyway), and I could go into extreme detail on those ... but by and large we had fun, and it was playable. I'd just like to institute a rule that if anyone is going to play a spellcaster who can summon creatures or polymorph into them, you bring your OWN Monster Manual to the table (no, you can't borrow the DM's), and you do the calculations BEFORE the battle. No bringing combat to a halt and making us wait while you take a base creature and modify its levels because of some special Feat you got, etc.

It's not so great for "winging it," but that's not really what it's for; it's really for going through a dungeon that the DM has carefully plotted out ahead of time, used pre-fab monsters and magic items, or taken the time to carefully work out on his own.


GURPS: Actually, I think "you need Excel" could be applied to Hero System/Champions as well. (And I think one of the players in my Champions group actually DID use Excel to plot out his character, though this was before the time when we could bring laptops to the game to use Excel right there, on the spot, in the middle of a session.)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Setting information, exactly! Mutant Chronicles really won me over precisely because of the SETTING, cheesy as it was, and it had some pretty nifty art in places, too. Artwork wasn't solely devoted toward showing what a totally cool character you could create in this system, but giving a sense of WHERE you would be adventuring.

I remember "old-school" D&D books that had really elaborate black-and-white artwork that might've had some pretty ugly-looking heroes and monsters, but they put a lot of detail into the dungeons and traps and treasures -- inspiring me to think of what sort of places I might EXPLORE (so to speak), through my alter ego character. I also remember some modules having some pretty evocative narratives of dungeon chambers, which did a marvelous job of painting pictures in my mind.

One thing that disappointed me with D&D 3.0, was when the artwork was mostly focused on people, creatures, and weapons floating in white space. I remember how the "archetype" characters were all dressed in golds and browns, with asymmetrical outfits and low foreheads (the artist seemed not to realize that brains take up space in the skull), and very little to distinguish their classes. Certainly no "Gandalf" archetype wizard in robes and pointy hat, or paladin-knight warrior in gleaming pseudo-medieval armor. Rather, all the characters looked very "leatherpunk," in scales, belts, patches, etc., and I could've easily mixed and matched several of the class illustrations and they could've still fit.

Plus, there was nothing, really, about what sort of wondrous world these sepia-toned heroes would be exploring. No scenes of dark enchanted forests, crumbling castles, cliffside temples, floating cloud-fortresses, glittering crystal caverns ... nothing of the sort. I think that was the first time I realized that illustrations of the PLACE where an RPG was set really helped me to envision the setting (and be interested in fleshing it out further and describing it to the players).

I'm glad to say that after flipping through 4th Ed D&D books, they seem to have gotten over that bland leatherpunk look and "figures floating in white space," and then some. The DM's manual actually has some very good tips on running games and designing your own game world -- many tips which could be applicable for just about ANY system you could run. I've also seen some positively gorgeous artwork, including quite a few where I'm quite sure who the paladins and warriors are, and who are the mages and clerics. I might even buy some of those dungeon tiles sometime, even if I'm not leaping at the chance to try out "D&D the RPG That Pretends to be an MMORPG" anytime soon. ;)

[rowyn]

I think the World Tree game may be the only time I've consciously tried to run a game without making house rules for things just because I didn't like the sound of the book's rules. And I still ended up with house rules. c.c

[rowyn]

The first time I tried to read the World Tree rulebook, I had the same problem.

Oddly, I think the reason my WT game works is that all of my players have read sythyry. I think about half of them started reading Sythyry because I was going to run the game. The journal is much longer than the rulebook, but it's entertaining and tells a story, which makes it easier to read than a pile of world-building exposition. But you get the world-building information bit by bit as you read the journal, so that by the time you're done the setting doesn't seem that strange any more.

The biggest downside is that, while early Sythyry was low-power, mid-to-current Sythyry involves lots of high-powered individuals, which makes the magic system look like it can do all kinds of great stuff that your PC in a standard-level game will never ever have the skills/money for. :/

[rowyn]

I used to make Champions characters on paper -- and we were even using the old-school endurance rules which made end WORSE, if you can believe it. >:) But I eventually gave in and used a chargen spreadsheet one of the participants put together in Lotus 123. Most of the group did use the spreadsheet. I actually still have a directory full of character spreadsheets on my current computer from those days, 20 years ago. I have no idea how they survived so many system changes when lots of other stuff didn't. :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Re: Reading Sythyry:
That makes sense. If I run a Star Wars campaign vs. a "generic space opera" campaign, the [i]benefit[/i] in doing so is that my players will have a common view of what sorts of things to expect in the Star Wars universe, if they've all seen the movies. It wouldn't work if I had anyone who was totally unfamiliar with Star Wars, and we might run into a few problems if we had very different levels of exposure to some of the "Extended Universe" material.

I COULD simply try to give a new, un-Star-Wars-familiar player a big info-dump on the Star Wars setting, but watching the movies would probably be more fun.

Anyway, this is one reason why I tend to gravitate toward settings where I can sum up what new players might know about the universe by pointing to some familiar genre (e.g., "this is a Wild West former gold-rush boom-town-that's-gone-bust, in the 1860s"). I don't expect the players to be history experts (though Wikipedia and other resources make it awfully easy to look these things up), but to at least have a rough idea of what to expect based on pop-culture representations. (E.g., dusty towns, cowboy hats, stagecoaches, trains, telegraphs, six-shot revolvers ... but NOT beehive haircuts, or '70s polyester shirts with big open collars. Curse those anachronistic '70s cowboy TV shows! ;) )

I might intend to introduce some strange element (ghosts and zombies, "Wild-Wild West" type weird-science steampunk gizmos, alien invaders), but that's something I can introduce over the course of the adventure -- though an individual PC might be "in on" some of the details (a "mad scientist" who has made some of his own gizmos, or a "huckster" who plays at just being an ordinary gambler but is secretly a spellcaster hunting supernatural artifacts). If I were to run another Classic Deadlands campaign, I WOULD NOT bother introducing players to all the weird "alternate history" stuff in that setting that was built up originally over a whole slew of supplements (California broke up and became "The Maze," the South won the Civil War, various foreign powers have laid claim over parts of the continental US, parts of the Dakota Territories are under control of the Sioux Nations, etc.). It's too much to take in all at once, and quite a lot of it might not even be relevant to an adventure that takes place in some dusty old former boomtown with tumbleweed blowing across the street by day and an undead revenant gunslinger haunting Boot Hill at night.

If, however, I ran a game where everyone was already well-versed on the extended Deadlands mythos ... you bet, I'd just run with it as written. In THAT case, it'd be more trouble than it was worth to "undo" all those alternate-history details to get to a common ground with the players.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Why don't you use attack cards? That helps a lot. And the thing with the fighter types is that, to be able to do the same sorts of things as those who DO have attack options of various sorts, they NEED to have, you know, a large number of named options. And even in 3.5e, the previous edition, there were TONS of maneuvers and stuff you could do in melee: Bull Rush, Trip, Overrun, Withdraw, Standard Attack, Full Attack, Disarm, Five Foot Step, Feint, Intimidate to Demoralize, Tumble, etc. etc. etc.

D&D is, and has always been a game about tactical miniatures options.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Really, with your list of issues... you should try Legend. REALLY. She mentioned it because I fell in love with it and have been preaching it... but it's free (well, pay what you want). But the reason I fell in love with it is it seems to get everything right that 4e, Essentials, 3.5e, Pathfinder, Trailblazer, etc. didn't get... and it feels like D&D...