Lots of old-school D&D players bought very strongly into the idea that role-playing and social conflict is something you can resolve “live” just by talking about it.
Because lots of role-players are convinced that they know well enough how to do it themselves.
And they don't want some game designer telling them that they know better.
We can objectively say how well a game provides mechanics for something, but whether the mechanics (or lack of them) “encourage” or “discourage” is a matter of taste and quality of implementation.
For some people, the system staying out of your way is encouraging.
Some systems can please no-one, however. For example, a very weak social mechanic (like in D&D3) upsets both the people who want to free-form it and the people who want solid mechanics.
Like how you describe that you had to ignore the game or dismantle it, to get it to work for you.
I'm speaking as someone with a very strong personality and the ability to persuade a GM to allow truly ridiculous things that he shouldn't even consider, and who has played in groups with people on the far opposite end of the spectrum.
As such, I feel very strongly that --while no playstyle is "Doing It Wrong" if the people involved are safe and happy-- it's important to recognize that such dynamics make it just as unfair to use IRL skill to determine in-game social success as it would be to determine the winner of an in-game sword fight by IRL fighting prowess.
I just feel that, as a general social engineering issue, if you spend all your time in CharGen defining one aspect of the character, and it's all that's on the sheet, and everything you get as you advance and level goes to that aspect, that's what's going to come out.
I think that's largely because physical combat necessarily requires abstraction for physical conflict, but lots of people think they can do without it for social conflict.
Yes, that's “all you have is a hammer” mentality. But many old-school players put as much attention into social aspects as mechanical ones – they just do it through “backstory” rather than rules.
Plenty of old-school players made that kind of character detail mandatory. Just like our workshops here about developing characters.
But where we end up translating it to mechanics in Fate, old-school games just leave it in the “character description” freeform text on your character sheet.
@BESW I personally agree that your RL social skills should not determine your character's social skills. But many people prefer the opposite, so they see it as a feature, not a bug.
My time in 3.5 ignored the social mechanics almost entirely, but my group could happily spend a month of sessions without rolling initiative. But I'd hesitate to say we were playing D&D in anything except the loosest sense of the term when we weren't actually in combat.
The engine you choose defines the game you play in many significant ways, and the extent to which it doesn't is a measure of the group's willingness to modify and ignore the system. Which indicates to me that the system does matter.
When people tell stories about their game play (like you do), they rarely even mention mechanics, except for a few edge-case type things, like that big critical hit you got in a crunch moment.
I've never met a GM who didn't treat the system like a toolkit that you customize to your own purposes. There is a difference, but it's largely in the degree that you need to tinker to suit your tastes.
@BraddSzonye I cannot play CoC in a d20 System without losing the sense of dread, because the system is designed to define its inhabitants. Even if I cannot defeat Cthulhu because he's too high level, I can define him and imagine something that could defeat him.
Yeah, let me introduce you to Zachiel some time. He came to the rpg.se chat originally because he thought he could use game mechanics to replace the social contract.
The degree to which the system is general is the degree to which it is uninteresting to me. The degree to which the system enforces the things it wants to deal in mechanics with is the degree to which the system works for me.
@BESW That was the old argument used for dropping deity stats in D&D for a while. The counterargument was that it's helpful to describe things that you would never want to actually fight, and if it makes you want to fight them then stop doing that!
and a large part of what it's going for is the feeling of having to depend on fuckers who would backstab you if and when convenient in a world where scarcity is everything
so one of its mechanics is the "History" system, which tracks how much, well, history you have with people. And it can be used to either help or hinder them, which is cute, and it occasionally rolls over and gets you xp, which is cute...
but it's absolutely true that History is one of the more confusing bits of AW
(And I would argue that the very act of defining the level of ability required to defeat Vecna is, by human nature, going to spark the desire to acquire that level of ability and do so.)
@BraddSzonye Yes, I'm well aware of D&D's long history of flirting with the Mythos. My 4e campaign was a Far Realm game, and I had to work very hard to maintain the dread required.
what with advancements and experience literally tracking your progress from bitchy teen who blows up at people to mature adult who handles situations responsibly
Existential horror is one of my favorite campaign themes, actually. Used it in D&D and Mage both.
It works well because the games both make it possible to defeat individual threats, giving you a sense of progress and hope, but you can easily set up the campaign so that ultimate victory is impossible.
So basically, you use the mechanics for the scenario, and the mechanic-less part of the game for the horror.
Which is related both to the way that horror games like Storyteller work, and a fundamental disagreement between me and the tactical guy in my group (Mike)
I think I had two points in my 4e campaign where the party legitimately, at-the-table went "Oh, shit, we cannot win this by hitting things with sticks." Both of them involved infinite spawn points.
He's all about making the tactical challenges as hard as possible in RPGs. Whereas I see that as kind of pointless, because while on one level GMs need to be fair, so that the players have hope – on the other hand, the GM always stacks the deck.
In particular, everything in RPGs is an infinite spawn point at some level. :)
But you usually need to hide that fact, so that the players don't feel pointless or depressed
Ah, correction: there was a third, which featured a boss solo six levels above them after they'd just run a hard gauntlet, and it was in a position to throw them off very high towers into damaging terrain.
another one of my favourite examples is Dog Eat Dog, which is a tightly focused game about colonialism and its effects on a native people. It's by Liam Burke, who is clearly an Intelligent Person Of The Highest Order, because the very first rule of the game is: the person who in real life makes the most amount of money plays the Colonials.
@BraddSzonye Yeah, the GM can always kill the party, and every win is at the mercy of the GM. The trick is in making them feel like the win was legitimate.
Bad guys getting away is a thing where you must carefully manage the tone and consequences. Done well and the players look forward to running into the bad guys again. Done poorly, and they kill all survivors.
It's funny, if you do it right, you can set the players up so that they know they have no hope of finishing off a villain, and they like it that way
They just need to really like the villain.
Basically, tropes are not bad (but they can be)
Likewise for that Far Realm game. The players were doing things that they knew would set up the end of the world in 2,000 years. But it was stuff they needed to do to survive now
(Also, the characters didn't know about the timeline. It was dramatic irony.)
@BraddSzonye Fundamentally, I'm not interested in hacking the system. I will if I have to, but I'm much more interested in trusting the designer to have done his job and have given us mechanics that emphasise whatever he wants his game to be about.
Yea, that means I can't play DnD in Monsterhearts, but if I want to play Monsterhearts, I'll play Monsterhearts instead of trying to hack together a poor replica in DnD.
Like, I think Shadowrun has a terrible, terrible system that has only gotten marginally playable in recent versions. And yet it's one of my favorite games to play, because the system ultimately isn't that important. It's all the material that goes with it.
If I want to play dystopian sci-fi fantasy (and I do), I play Shadowrun because it has all the goodies to do that, even though the crunchy bits of the system are kinda terrible.
I'm a very, very lazy GM. So if I have a choice between statting out everything myself in a flexible system that I love, and using well-developed material in a mediocre system, I'll usually do the latter.
Because I don't care about how the system works nearly as much as I care about spending hours in prep every Friday night.
Having stuff “on file” like the big lists of magic items and monsters in old-school games also eases my workload by letting players just choose stuff without needing specific approval from me.
