RPG Pet Peeves
Feb. 7th, 2017 07:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynEveryone ends up with their own pet peeves in tabletop gaming. One of mine, which has annoyed me since I started gaming 38 years ago, is "character creation choices that require the players to bet on how long the game will last."
Most games are short-lived. I haven't made up as many characters for games that never started as I have for ones that have, but the ratio is probably no better than 1:3. Many games that make it to one session do not get more than one. The campaign that goes on for years is the outlier. Moreover, you never know which you're going to get when you're making up a character. Plans for epic story arc campaigns often die after a few sessions. The game where my character gained the most power, from starting level to finish, was advertised by its GM as 'a half-assed playtest that will peter out after a week or two.' Mirari and Game of October were both intended to be short-term games and both ran for 2-4 years and had more than a hundred sessions each. The only sense in which they were "short term" was that they each ended at the completion of the game's full story arc. ("Just Trust Me", which took several months to finish, was as close as I ever got to running an actual short-but-complete game).
My point: I can tell you many things about a game during character creation, but "how long will it last" is SO not one of them. And yet many games have things which are in place nominally for "character balance" but in practice are only "balanced" if your game is lasts for exactly X sessions. In original AD&D, the nonhuman races generally had stat advantages but in most cases had harsh level caps. If your game didn't last past level 5, the elves and half-orcs were clearly better. If your game lasted to level 18, they were at a vicious, hideous handicap. (If your group actually played with level caps. I don't know anyone who did.)
Most of D&D descendants don't take approaches quite this dramatic, but I still know many systems where you can take a short-term handicap to get a long-term advantage. "Your character is a Quick Learner: pay 10 xp now and get +1 xp per session." Or conversely: "You are a Slow Learner but you've studied hard to get this far: you get an extra 10 xp to spend now but will get -1 xp per session". Sometimes the abilities themselves are like this: "the skill is useless at the starting level but it's great once you've built it up." "This skill starts out great but it doesn't improve at all with experience, unlike other skills." Vampire: the Masquerade did this thing where your max power was entirely determined by your generation. If you didn't buy the lowest possible generation at game start, your character could never become powerful -- but if you did, you had few points left to be competent at the outset.
It's like the designers think "well, you can trade being great now for being great later, that's balanced." Except that I don't know if later exists, and if later does exist, I have no idea how much later there will be. It's like being told "plan for your retirement: you have about a 40% chance of dying tomorrow and a 1% chance of living 2000 years, and we're not going to tell you the odds of the possibilities in between, and no, you can't get a job again later if you don't save enough. GOOD LUCK." Systems like these always make me feel like the game hasn't even started yet and I've already lost.
I usually make the bet that the game will last for years, when some system makes me do it. I don't think I've ever been right.All my games that lasted for years weren't in systems that did this.
That may not be coincidence, come to think of it.
Nothing in particular motivated this, just thinking about game systems. So what are your tabletop peeves or preferences?
Most games are short-lived. I haven't made up as many characters for games that never started as I have for ones that have, but the ratio is probably no better than 1:3. Many games that make it to one session do not get more than one. The campaign that goes on for years is the outlier. Moreover, you never know which you're going to get when you're making up a character. Plans for epic story arc campaigns often die after a few sessions. The game where my character gained the most power, from starting level to finish, was advertised by its GM as 'a half-assed playtest that will peter out after a week or two.' Mirari and Game of October were both intended to be short-term games and both ran for 2-4 years and had more than a hundred sessions each. The only sense in which they were "short term" was that they each ended at the completion of the game's full story arc. ("Just Trust Me", which took several months to finish, was as close as I ever got to running an actual short-but-complete game).
My point: I can tell you many things about a game during character creation, but "how long will it last" is SO not one of them. And yet many games have things which are in place nominally for "character balance" but in practice are only "balanced" if your game is lasts for exactly X sessions. In original AD&D, the nonhuman races generally had stat advantages but in most cases had harsh level caps. If your game didn't last past level 5, the elves and half-orcs were clearly better. If your game lasted to level 18, they were at a vicious, hideous handicap. (If your group actually played with level caps. I don't know anyone who did.)
Most of D&D descendants don't take approaches quite this dramatic, but I still know many systems where you can take a short-term handicap to get a long-term advantage. "Your character is a Quick Learner: pay 10 xp now and get +1 xp per session." Or conversely: "You are a Slow Learner but you've studied hard to get this far: you get an extra 10 xp to spend now but will get -1 xp per session". Sometimes the abilities themselves are like this: "the skill is useless at the starting level but it's great once you've built it up." "This skill starts out great but it doesn't improve at all with experience, unlike other skills." Vampire: the Masquerade did this thing where your max power was entirely determined by your generation. If you didn't buy the lowest possible generation at game start, your character could never become powerful -- but if you did, you had few points left to be competent at the outset.
It's like the designers think "well, you can trade being great now for being great later, that's balanced." Except that I don't know if later exists, and if later does exist, I have no idea how much later there will be. It's like being told "plan for your retirement: you have about a 40% chance of dying tomorrow and a 1% chance of living 2000 years, and we're not going to tell you the odds of the possibilities in between, and no, you can't get a job again later if you don't save enough. GOOD LUCK." Systems like these always make me feel like the game hasn't even started yet and I've already lost.
I usually make the bet that the game will last for years, when some system makes me do it. I don't think I've ever been right.All my games that lasted for years weren't in systems that did this.
That may not be coincidence, come to think of it.
Nothing in particular motivated this, just thinking about game systems. So what are your tabletop peeves or preferences?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2017-02-07 04:02 pm (UTC)Then again, if a game didn't even go to one session I wouldn't count it as existing. Not that I can think of any of those.
A lot of the fiddling with recent versions of D+D that people hated was to try to make it stay balanced throughout the whole game. This meant nerfing wizards since by default they become all-powerful gods. 3.5 and Pathfinder aren't *that* bad? Pathfinder in particular made sure that everyone became an all-powerful god around level 10. But they have a lot of 'take useless thing A now so that you can take useful thing B later'. It's generally not enough to make your entire character useless but it does mean you've got feats and skills you have no intention of ever using for a while.
So, let's see... what annoys me about RPGs in general...
(1) Disadvantages that require the GM to remember about them in order to do anything. I especially hate these when I'm the GM.
(2) Systems that force you to actually use your disadvantages, like the Victoriana game I'm in where if you don't have every disadvantage hit every session you're not earning fate. Some of my disadvantages are *literally impossible to hit* because the game took a weird turn or because I *solved the problem* and the system has no facility for changing your disadvantages or earning new ones (that give you fate) ever.
(3) Actually, I kind of hate point-based systems in general because you never feel like you're advancing, even if you are. Part of it is probably that point-based systems tend to be *incredibly* stingy with advancement. In D+D you expect to double your power after three or four sessions by levelling up to 2. In a point-based game you expect to double your power after something like 50 sessions since you get 3 xp per session and important things cost 20.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-07 04:17 pm (UTC)* They simulate the kinds of stories I prefer better. Most books I like are about characters who start out competent and become better but not enormously more powerful.
* Moreover, even if characters start out wimps and become gods, the whole world doesn't look like that. I have a hard time making sense of the level system when it applies to every NPC. Xp in World Tree, though, is built-in to the setting design, so I can see how it applies and interacts easily.
* It's more flexible, and again, the kinds of stories I like are not usually about character classes where characters of the same class & experience are interchangeable.
+tb+ and Bard's systems in general do make me think about ways to integrate the flexibility of points systems with very fast progression, though. I really liked the way the characters in +tb+ became logarithmically(sp) more powerful, while that progression was a feature of the game that didn't apply to most NPCs. You could have godlike PCs and some godlike NPCs and not have to worry about why the rest of the population wasn't also progressing towards godhood.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-07 08:26 pm (UTC)But it's really boring to have all townsfolk be level 1 commoners. I'd usually use something more along the lines of:
level 1: apprentices and starting characters
level 3: run of the mill members of a profession. Generic city guards would be level 3. Characters who have some backstory usually make more sense starting at level 3.
level 6: elites, or leaders of a small group (in Pathfinder at least there are a lot of 'neat tricks' that come into play at level 6)
level 8-10: commanders of a city-wide organization
Also... I don't really find point-buy systems more flexible. You usually only really have a few kinds of characters you can make, with all the details being meaningless and homogeneous especially over time as everyone covers their weaknesses since it's usually much much cheaper than improving their strengths.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-09 07:44 pm (UTC)I guess the D&D equivalence of a point-based system would be, you're starting your character at level 3 or level 5, rather than at level 1, so you'd get to pick some feats and skills and a bit more in the way of starting gear.