or if you want to explore the real societal impact of technology (Shock)
or if you just want to make a Coen Brothers movie (Fiasco)
or if you want to emphasise narrative agency in characters (Fate)
these games are (more or less) focused, tightly designed for one specific purpose. Thus, they are better at it than a general system could ever be, and give lie to the claim that system doesn't matter.
Yeah and similar materials. Setting, characters, frameworks, powers, gear, etc.
I don't want to do the research and fiddling that would require to provide all of that stuff from scratch in a game.
Unless I'm using it for my characters.
I like making unique NPCs and locations and stuff. And I like making one-off things for players. But I don't ever want my players to depend on me to get their characters built.
Laziest GM ever!
I like playing the GM because I constantly get to build and try out new things.
I don't really care that it's narrative-focused or whatever.
@Sohum Yeah, that occurred to me too. But the players can make stuff up on their own without worrying about breaking the game. So they're still not depending on me.
but do you see the point? of course the crunch is the focus of the game, because that's what the designers thought important enough to flesh out.
@BraddSzonye I do strongly recommend you listen to this Actual Play of Dog Eat Dog thewalkingeye.com/?p=1802 to get an idea of how mechanics can matter.
Think back to when the wizard henchman was blasting Sindaria with magic, and was going to succeed with three? shifts had outside forces not intervened.
In that circumstance, I considered whether it might be in Stellata's character to try to leap in and defend Sindaria from the attack. Would that have been possible? Would she need a stunt in order to do that?
@Sohum Don't really have the attention span for a 90-min podcast right now, but I may check it out later. Mostly, I prefer mechanics that are light or flexible, because I want to get at the bits of the game that matter to me, and that mostly isn't mechanical.
@BESW Alright, hm. I kept considering whilst making Stellata how I might take advantage of, well, creating advantages. I might need to do more of that.
@BraddSzonye and I'm saying it's that attitude that is mistaken, because there's nothing else about a game system that could matter except its mechanics. I'm not saying you have to go learn ludic theory :P but do at least recognise that the choice of system makes a huge difference.
If you set up something in advance (could just be positioning) you can use your defense in place of theirs. If you don't, you can simply interpose yourself at the last minute with 0 defense.
@BraddSzonye the only times when it doesn't are when you're shifting between two systems as well-suited for whatever story you're telling as each other...
if that were actually true, again, why are these core rules so constant? yea, sometimes you'll draw twice as many cards, or scry instead of drawing, or bla bla bla - but in the end, you have a library, and you have a hand, and they're different zones that do different things.
You two are standing on either side of, say, a stop sign, looking at its two different sides, and one is arguing it's silver and the other is arguing it's red.
In practice, the RPGs I have played have tons of crunch that is based in exceptions to the rules and examples of them, and that's the part of the game I pay for.
The set of general rules --LIFO, touch attacks, etc-- is the core system. The exceptions are individual mechanics which may or may not appear in any given playset. They color the game but don't change its fundamental nature.
@BraddSzonye I don't know if anyone is saying they're more fundamental... both sides are fundamental. If either side vanishes the other collapses. Except in games which don't have a core system, which we weren't talking about until just now when you brought it up, but that's just because they don't have a core system they need to lean against
(And I would argue, based on my limited understanding of early D&D, that it has a core system. Just that the core is much lighter and the exceptions much deeper.)
i.e. take away MtG's deck, hand, and stack rules, and you're left with a bunch of cards and no idea how to use them. Take away MtG's cards, and you're left with a bunch of deck, hand and stack rules, and no idea what they're supposed to apply to.
And in trad games, the exceptions/crunch are the biggest part of the system and the most work to do myself if I wanted to build a game from scratch or switch to a different core system.
@BESW using what rules? only the ones you invent on the spot. How do cards attack each other? It's in the core rules. Do you have health? that's in the core rules. You can play cards that exclusively refer to other cards, I guess, and can operate exclusively with the rules written on the cards, but then it's... a very strange variety of MtG.
M:tG is a lot more interesting with exceptions, and most of its engagement comes from them, but you can remove the exceptions and still have a recognizable and playable game. Exceptions are interchangeable, removable, and discrete.
So why are you saying that removing cards from the system collapses the system? That's like saying, oh, that removing the d20 from D&D 4e collapses the system. It's a pointless tautology.
On the other hand, you can remove magic items and spellcasting from D&D and still have a recognizable system--boring, imbalanced, and silly, but none of those elements makes it unplayable.
@JonathanHobbs The more important thing to me, because it gives the game much of its flavor, and it's where a lot of the creativity and game design goes.
I definitely didn't mean to suggest that one of core rules or exceptions are more important
By my personal understanding, the core system is that which cannot be stripped away without making the game unplayable. "Extra" bits include subsystems (like spellcasting in D&D 3.5), supersystems (like psioncs in 4e), and exceptions (like Flying in M:tG). They can be removed without making the system unplayable, but they often provide the impetus for wanting to use the system.
@Sohum Some of the 3.5 classes found in the PHB are truly abysmal and should be avoided by people interested in mechanical viability at even moderate levels of optimization.
When I said that system doesn't matter, I strictly meant that I mostly care that the game offers enough crunch to the players so that I don't need to make up everything for them.
As I understand your position, @BraddSzonye, you're saying that you care much more about the goodies: the lists of magic items, the individual classes, than what I would call the mechanics: the compel mechanic, the fate economy, aspects
Trad games are general enough that you can use just about any of them interchangeably to play whatever game. Some things will always be clunky, but I'm experienced in dealing with that.
Because I feel like there are vast swathes of the RPG landscape that the game systems known as "traditional" are unequipped to cover... well. D&D in all its iterations just isn't suited to certain game experiences.
@BraddSzonye yep. but there's some dynamics that would actually push the theme of shadowrun, I bet you; it's just that the game isn't published with it.
Thus, I choose Shadowrun to play in that setting, not because it's the best core system for that setting, but because that's the ruleset that all the gear and stuff is written in.
As we discussed before, there are wide areas of RPG experience that "traditional" game systems don't even try to address, leaving them instead as an exercise for the group to figure out on their own.
@BESW I agree, although I'd state it more like, trad games are usually very rules heavy in some areas (like physical combat) and rules light in other (like social conflict)
However, I don't feel that heavy vs light is a strong indicator of suitability for a task
@BraddSzonye While I'm fine with that as a gamestyle choice, I find it disingenuous to say that "figure the situation out yourself" is actually "applying" to the situation.
M:tG is extremely rules light in the domain of thwacking my opponent with a physical sword during the game, but my M:tG group never plays it without our fencing gear on
It's a personal peeve: the d20 System went out of its way to make the active claim that their system was capable of accommodating any desired gameplay experience, when it is demonstrably not. I spent years frustrated because of this.
Actual RPG history is kinda similar, although it was more like “We want to adapt our wargame characters into something we could tell stories about.”
But it has the same spirit, in that the didn't feel they needed rules for the part about telling stories and acting out their characters, just the wargamey bits.
The stories are a core part of the experience, just not a rules-heavy one.
And of course the early RPGers varied a lot in how much story vs wargaming they wanted.
I'm okay with that until claims are made that either a) just because the people it was originally intended for have those skills and inclinations, the system inherently supports the experience; or b) because people can accommodate the system, the system is accommodating.
I'm saying that storytelling is such a subjective thing, and not something you can do systematically, that there's a reason that games tend to go very light on the storytelling rules.
People's tastes vary dramatically on what they like in stories, even within a gaming group, let alone across the hobby.
Some RPGs do offer cool hooks for storytelling (like Fiasco), and some offer some light mechanics for resolving social conflict (like most modern RPGs)
But they all do it with a pretty light touch, and while you might prefer one flavor over another, there's nothing particularly awesome or special about one system over another
I have not played a lot of modern RPGs, but I have read many, and I would not characterize any of them as “heavy” in the sense of having many rules or strict rules
Fiasco is actually one of the strictest
And I still would not call it remotely “heavy”
Everything is left up to the players' discretion except whether the outcome is generally “good” or “bad”
(even by quantity of rules - Burning Wheel's artha system is majestic and complicated and insane, and Mythender's one of the strictest game systems I've ever come across.)
but it's how much the rules affect play that's important.
The Fate Economy is extremely rule-efficient, in this regard, in that it changes the entire shape of gameplay with just a few simple rules about invoking and compelling
I didn't say that games aren't different, just that the differences aren't “important.” Just like Monopoly and Dominion are very different, but you can have a great time playing either.
it doesn't help that you added statements like "while you might prefer one flavor over another, there's nothing particularly awesome or special about one system over another"
@BraddSzonye While I agree that there's no such thing as D&D,, there is a point (probably impossible to define precisely, though) at which the game has been houseruled to the point that it's something other than D&D.
I mean, it's going to be pretty hard to tell a story in DnD that's not fundamentally Heroic. You can't tell the story of Dog Eat Dog in DnD very well. You can't tell the story of Dogs in the Vineyard in DnD very well. You can't tell the story of Don't Rest Your Head, or Monsterhearts, or even Fiasco very well in DnD.
I think it's a pretty silly way to go, weighing an important outcome on a single swingy die roll in a system where rolls are swingy because there are so many of them.
I wouldn't say that ignoring or changing the Diplomacy construct in D&D 3.5 would make it not D&D, but it is actively opposing the system as presented.
Yeah, that's a quality of implementation issue. Which you can work around by doing things in stages (basically what turned into the D&D4 skill challenge system)
@Problematic Sorry, I'm just twitchy about people who insist that their standards for discussion are the only ones which apply. If that wasn't your intent, then I apologise.
If anyone wanted to use the room to play FATE, I'd happily stop or move the discussion elsewhere. But until then, what's the harm of using an otherwise empty chatroom?
