An essay on gamestyles to aid in discussion, and recruitment of like-minded players

[thejeff]

Nope. I've done some stuff that would look like that from outside - Amber has no dice, no character sheets at the table(you start with character building, but advancement is secret enough you won't know your own stats after awhile). Mechanics are rarely mentioned - other than in in-world terms describing powers used and the like.

In even the most freeform game that's not complete improvisational chaos there are some implicit rules - which could be as simple "has to fit the setting". Which might need more explicit rules or discussion for what fits the setting or if the setting is a well known one could just be "we're playing students at Hogwarts". Or the kid's game of cops and robbers - which still has the implicit rule that you're playing cops or robbers, not magical pixies.

[Pan]

Closest I've gotten to that would be Fiasco. It has dice, but they simply serve as a storytelling tools for each participant.

[Haladir]

Interesting Character wrote:

Um, have any of you ever played with no rules at all, no dice, no mechanics, no character sheets, just a circle of chairs and talking through the game? (table rules, such as excluding explicit content, do not count)

As adults in a choose-your-own-adventure style game I mean.

Absolutely. There are many variants of that game.

Some of these story-telling games have been played for millennia. One is more-or-less an "exquisite corpse" game where one player narrates a story for an agreed-upon amount of time, then ends on a cliffhanger. The next player picks up the story and continues it to another cliffhanger, etc, until everyone has a turn. Last player concludes the tale. I've played that game around many a campfire: My grandfather was fond of it! Sometimes the tale might be told first-person, which might make it a role-playing game of a sort, but I'd call it a pure story-game. (My gradfather just called it "The Story Game" if the tale was to be grounded in reality, or "Tall Tales" if it was to skew toward the fantastic.)

I would hestiate to call such games "choose your own adventure": That term (which BTW is trademarked) refers to a published book where the reader gets to various decision-points and chooses from two or three options to see how the story unfolds. The reader is still beholden to the author and doesn't ever really have narrative control.

There are plenty of published story-games that set a structure or parameters to guide the sort of story. For example, in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, you play a character who's an 18th-century nobleman/adventurer who spins self-aggrandizing tales of fantastical derring-do. Your story prompt is from another player, such as, "Ah! Lord Barthingwaite! It's been an age! I've heard tell of your decisive victory against the Turks in the Caucasses! Tell us, how did you defeat a full Turkish cavalry brigage with just four fusiliers, a donkey, and a bushel of fresh aubergines?"

A much darker story-game I am fond of is Long Time Listener, Last Time Caller. In this game, one player is the host of a regular call-in radio show that happens to be on the air while the world is ending. The other players play the role of callers to the show. It starts off normal, and then the callers start to report increasingly dire weirdness. You decide as a group before you start playing what the call-in show is about, and what the nature of the apocalypse is. This game gets raw, emotional, and can be very harrowing: safety tools must be in play. I do consider this one a role-playing game, as all players are in-character speaking first person. (This game was written by a former college radio sports journalist who happened to be hosting a live sports radio call-in show on the morning of Sep 11, 2001.)

[TriOmegaZero]

I started out in freeform play-by-e-mail. I learned a lot from it, but I wouldn't go back to that now.

[Haladir]

So, this was interesting... Justin Alexander and his "The Alexandrian" blog came up this morning on a private RPG design Discord I'm a member of.

The observation was, "Sometimes he's right on-the-money, but sometimes he's so bullheadedly wrong that I just want to punch him in the throat!"

[Haladir]

And I just ran across a very interesting general article about Apocalypse World and the Powered by the Apocalypse family of RPGs. A very good article for people unfamiliar with the PbtA design philosophy.

I believe ardently that a PbtA game make a far, far superior experience as a first RPGs than any game in the D&D family.

[Interesting Character]

thejeff wrote:

CrystalSeas wrote:

Pan wrote:

to recruit players with any solid understanding of expectations.

I would guess that getting into games run by the person who wrote the blog is the best option until he's able to communicate his thoughts more clearly.

Well, he's specifically said that doesn't work except with players who are new to RPGs.

Because we're already too set in our ways to understand how it's supposed to be done, apparently.

I realized a good comparison here, that may also help with the idea of thinking styles.

thejeff says that you guys are too set in your ways to understand. I don't think you are incapable, but there is a barrier there.

Consider learning a language. Someone who grows up as a monolingual speaker, has more trouble learning a language as adult than someone who grew up as a multiplingual speaker. I suspect this is because a multilingual has their form their linguistic foundations around the foundation of there being multiple languages, so as an adult, learning a new one is just plugging in a new language into a framework already established and experienced in translating between languages and working with multiple languages. But a monolingual speaker has more trouble because their mental framework has never had to work with multiple languages and thus never developed the ability and so in learning a new language they also have to form new foundational strategies to handle translations and thinking in different languages but yet tack these additional skills onto a framework that was initially developed with the expectation of remaining a single language speaker.

Of course, we can see that it is possible for monolinguals to learn new languages, it is just difficult.

I think the same applies here to playstyles. If a single playstyle is the only way one knows, then learning a new style will naturally be more difficult than someone who developed their first "rpg" experiences with multiple styles.

This is why I always try to teach new players multiple styles, to set the seed in them of recognizing multiple styles and thinking in an intentionally selected style, and also developing an appreciation for different styles.

Now how does different mechanical systems fit in? Well, an english speaker can learn different rulesets on top of speaking english. For example, being polite, rude, poetic, ceremonial, the auctioneer, the movie trailer narration, etc. All of these are different rules, and yet all are still speaking english.

Likewise, with playstyle, people can pick up a new game system and yet they will still play in the same style they had been playing before.

======
My point in using freeform as a reference is because any freeform games I've ever seen or played had no formal structure at all. None. And that is the point behind them. So how do you decide what to do in a freeform? The answer is key here. You have two major options, think as the character, or think as the author.

PBtA is the latter option when rules are added. Thinking like the author means stepping out of character and making a choice based on the fact that there is an audience outside the narrative world. Whether that audience is only you as the player, the gaming group, or some hypothetical reader of the story, this style of thinking is all about creating something that caters to being perceived by folks in our world. Basically "I'll have my character do this because it'll make a better story."

The other way, the thinking in-character way however, is about putting oneself in the role so deeply, that you are trying to be the character, to experience what the character experiences, the frustration of failure, the joy of success, the surprise of the unexpected. The point here is to experience the narrative world via the character. This simply can not be done when asked to make choices based on arbitrary meta-game rules. Basically, "I do this because I'm curious to see what happens."

Notice how one is thinking about the character in 3rd person, while the other is thinking about the character in 1st person.

This is why I dislike PBtA. Because PBtA is entirely built around arbitrary limitations the character knows nothing about, has no connection to the narrative world itself, and is explicitly about thinking like an author.

Look at Haladir's example,

Haladir wrote:

If this situation was playing in a Powered by the Apocalpyse RPG, the transcription wrote:

Player: Against my better judgement, I drop back in to that discussion forum to see how it's going.

GM: Okay. It looks like the poster you'd been arguing with has taken a different approach and appears to be talking in terms of Ron Edwards' 'GNS Theory of Role-Playing Game Design.' You feel the siren-song of somebody being wrong on the Internet on a subject you hold dear, and desperately want to set them straight. I'm going to call this a compulsion effect. If you give in to the compulsion, and re-engage, mark XP and start typing. If you want to try to resist, you'll need to Gird Your Mind. What do you do?

Player: Ugh. I attempt to resist the compulsion and steel my will to close the forum window and head over to Twitter instead.

GM: Okay! Roll plus Sharp.

Player: [dice=rolls]2d6 plus 1 is a four. Solid miss.

GM: Okay. <reads the Move> 'On a miss, choose one from the list: a) You force yourself away but it's a struggle with yourself: Fill your Stress track. b) You give in to the compulsion and gain +1 ongoing for the scene while you do exactly what it wants, or c) You come to your senses sometime later, not quite sure of what you might have done. What do you do?

Player: With a burst of sudden rhetorical insight, I start typing frantically. I'll show him!

Notice what limitations are being presented. They are not limits based on the physics of the narrative milieu, they are limits centered on the fact that it is a game. That choice presented is more like a creative writing exercise, and the player is expected to shape the narrative beyond the character to fit these arbitrary real world limitations, to create reasons why the character will do what you want the character to do for reasons other than the character's motivations.

[Interesting Character]

Haladir wrote:

...

I believe ardently that a PbtA game make a far, far superior experience as a first RPGs than any game in the D&D family.

That's because it fits your style of thinking.

To me, introducing multiple styles of play is more important than the specific system used.

D20 can more easily be used for multiple different styles, while PBtA is built entirely around one style. Thus for teaching multiple styles, d20 is better because you can introduce additional styles without trying to teach entirely new rulesets at the same, making the differences within the styles the focus rather than the differences in rules. Of course, any system that can handle multiple styles like this will be suitable for this aspect of teaching new players. Savage Worlds is another system that can do a better job of teaching multiple styles, I just don't think it's as good as d20.

[Mark Hoover 330]

Interesting Character wrote:

Um, have any of you ever played with no rules at all, no dice, no mechanics, no character sheets, just a circle of chairs and talking through the game? (table rules, such as excluding explicit content, do not count)

As adults in a choose-your-own-adventure style game I mean.

My next older brother Matt and I played this style of game between ourselves, right up until about a month before he passed at the age of 20. We called them "Matches and Markles" games. Neither of us had any idea that this was an established game system at the time; at age 10 and 8 respectively, we thought we invented it.

We did it out of necessity at first. Our parents split when we were little kids and my brothers and I played D&D as one of many coping mechanisms. My dad was... less than accepting of game books with demon statues on the front of them, so we couldn't bring the game to his house, so we'd hide in our room when we were stuck at his house, imagining whole dungeons and playing together.

Now, we BASED the game motifs and style after D&D at first. As we learned other games, including video games, we incorporated those into our M&M games. And when I say "incorporated" I mean plagiarized.

After we learned Runequest 1e, suddenly we imagined dragonnewts. After Star Frontiers became a thing on our radar, some of our characters became amorphous aliens. We brought in elements of Marvel Super Heroes, Intelevision and Atari games, the Myth series by Robert Lynn Asprin, and so on.

Thing is, these games worked b/c my brother and I were bonded so close, being 2 years apart and surviving the shared trauma of a sometimes abusive dad in part through these games, that basically all we were doing was acting in each other's stories. We were almost a singular mind.

I tried M&M games with my high school friends and only 2 people ever got into them. One, my buddy Dave, is basically like another brother to me and we remain best friends to this day. The other was a guy named Karl who is now a professional stage actor in Chicago.

I have no idea how I'd make these games work now, as a 46 year old man. In order for them to flow the way they used to and play out as seamlessly as they did, my fellow players would have to consent to anything I choose to introduce and me, them. We'd have to all be able to imagine and clearly communicate the exact same scenes and scenarios, and then find a way to mutually agree to some form of conflict resolution.

In classic M&M games with my brother, we basically had an unspoken rule that we later termed the Rule of Mel. Mel Gibson was a big figure in our action films as kids and we especially liked how in the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon series his characters were always like an underdog type that would get the snot beat out of him but prevail at the zero hour. And ALWAYS his character would end up looking both horrible and spectacular at the same time, like as if the mud from the puddle he was nearly drowned in clung to JUST the right spots to make him look even cooler!

So... that was our mechanic for conflict resolution: a shared love of Mel Gibson action movies from the 80's. In other words, your proposed solution only worked if it somehow positioned you as some epic underdog, surviving the worst of what was thrown at you and making some "hail Mary" type effort, and only if you would end up looking or seeming epic after pulling this off.

Again, I have no confidence this game would work now.

After Matt passed away, I didn't have the heart to run these games anymore, even with Karl and Dave. I have since worked The Staff of Matches, the Ring of Mel, and the Array of Vic DuChance (one of his last M&M characters, who in turn was based on a combo of Rifts and Cyberpunk 2020) as unique, legendary items into TTRPGs I've run.

Nostalgia aside, I guess my point is that even as kids Matt and I were stealing from other games to build some kind of game mechanic that worked for us. The other diceless RPGs I know, or rather the TWO I know, which are a diceless version of Vampire: the Masquerade and Amber, both have at least SOME mechanics to guide the players to some kind of mutually agreed upon system.

If you want to use the D20 system to do the same thing, you can. Or really ANY system for that matter. You just need to have trust and vulnerability with the other assembled players and a mutual agreement to the shared fantasy you're collectively creating.

[Interesting Character]

Quote:

. We'd have to all be able to imagine and clearly communicate the exact same scenes and scenarios, and then find a way to mutually agree to some form of conflict resolution.

Exactly! This is what d20 does very well, if you can stop looking at it like a combat minis game.

[thejeff]

Interesting Character wrote:

Quote:

. We'd have to all be able to imagine and clearly communicate the exact same scenes and scenarios, and then find a way to mutually agree to some form of conflict resolution.

Exactly! This is what d20 does very well, if you can stop looking at it like a combat minis game.

And if you ignore (or completely internalize) the rules that make it work like a combat minigame.

Or play some hypothetical version of d20 where the rules actually make sense. Because when I try to not think in mechanical terms and just do what makes sense, it tends to run hard into the mechanics not resolving like I'd expect them to. At the very least, you're far less effective than when you play (and build) your character with awareness of the mechanics.

[Freehold DM]

TriOmegaZero wrote:

I started out in freeform play-by-e-mail. I learned a lot from it, but I wouldn't go back to that now.

interesting, toz.

Interesting.

[Haladir]

thejeff wrote:

Interesting Character wrote:

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

We'd have to all be able to imagine and clearly communicate the exact same scenes and scenarios, and then find a way to mutually agree to some form of conflict resolution.

Exactly! This is what d20 does very well, if you can stop looking at it like a combat minis game.

And if you ignore (or completely internalize) the rules that make it work like a combat minigame.

Or play some hypothetical version of d20 where the rules actually make sense. Because when I try to not think in mechanical terms and just do what makes sense, it tends to run hard into the mechanics not resolving like I'd expect them to. At the very least, you're far less effective than when you play (and build) your character with awareness of the mechanics.

Emphasis added.

That is my real-world experience playing OGL/d20 games as well: If you try to play OGL/3.x RPGs in ignorance of the game mechanics, you're going to have a very unsatisfying time. And I have played a LOT of d20/OGL games. D&D 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder comprised at least 95% of the RPGs I played from 2000-2015 or so. Multiple multi-year campaigns. Some as a player, some as a GM.

The only way this game system becomes "intutitive" or the rules "fall away" is if you have internalized them so thoroughly that you can't not think in those terms.

If you're a Pathfinder rogue, you have to move your minifig to a specific square on the map in order to get your Sneak Attack bonus. If you're one square off, the flanking bonus does not apply and you don't get it. If you're a Pathfinder wizard, you have to prepare your list of spells in advance and then you're locked in: You don't have flexibility to create whatever magical effect you want to.

If you're a Dungeon World rogue, you have to describe in the fiction what your character is doing in order to get that advantage. If you and the other players (including the GM) think that it counts, then it counts. If you're a Dungeon World wizard, you can describe what your magic looks like, how it works, and what effects you're trying to bring about... the bigger the effect the harder it is to accomplish (i.e. you must pay a bigger fictional cost.)

If you're a brand-new player of RPGs, and you think "Wizard," you aren't going to think that you have a set and inflexible list of spells that you can cast exactly once each. I have found that the flexibility of a more narrative approach appeals more to brand-new players: The barrier to entry is much lower than for D&D/Pathfinder.

I know I'm the outlier here: A proponent of indie/narrative-focused RPGs on the forums of a company that only makes trad OGL/d20 games. But I have a long history in d20/OGL games, and I've been posting here at Paizo for nearly a decade, so I think I have standing.

Bottom line:

I don't know about anyone else, but I play heroic fantasy games so that I can feel like a fantasy hero: A bigger-than-life badass that can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and save the freakin' day.

I GM heroic fantasy so that I can invoke that same feeling of wonder and wish-fulfillment in my players.

I find that the d20/OGL ruleset puts barriers and limitations to what I want to get out of RPGs, and that narrative-focused games give me far more of what I want in a game.

[Haladir]

Interesting Character wrote:

This is why I dislike PBtA. Because PBtA is entirely built around arbitrary limitations the character knows nothing about, has no connection to the narrative world itself, and is explicitly about thinking like an author.

That is completely false. You fundamentally do not understand the Powered by the Apocalypse design philosophy or how PbtA games really work at the game table.

IC: You assigned us homework to read five or six different articles on The Alexandrian. I did read those articles... and I think that you give them far more weight than warranted.

If you want to know where I'm coming from as an ardent proponent of PbtA RPGs, I would strongly recommend that you read a five-part series on the development of Powered by the Apocalpyse design philosophy. This series is penned by Vincent Baker, designer and author of Apocalypse World, the first PbtA game.

Powered by the Apocalypse, Part 1

Powered by the Apocalypse, Part 2

Powered by the Apocalypse, Part 3

Powered by the Apocalypse, Part 4

Powered by the Apocalypse, Part 5

[Interesting Character]

thejeff wrote:

Or play some hypothetical version of d20 where the rules actually make sense. Because when I try to not think in mechanical terms and just do what makes sense, it tends to run hard into the mechanics not resolving like I'd expect them to.

There are 4 possible reasons for this.

1, failure to understand what the system actually says. This is a very common problem among d20 players, which is the whole point of the Calibrating Expectations article. People who think Conan is lvl 20, because 20 is the highest lvl in dnd (by default). This is wrong, and Conan is nowhere near lvl 20, but if someone tries to stat him up as lvl 20, then naturally the result will not match with literary Conan.

This is not a problem with the system. This is a presentation problem and player problem.

2, failure to understand the real world nature. This happens often. Someone thinks they have a rough idea of what to expect from something in the real world but are actually wrong.

For example, how far can a real world person jump? If all you ever do is measure your own longjump in the backyard and have trouble reaching 10' then you might assume that olympian athletes couldn't possibly jump farther than twice that for around 20', until you actually look it up and find out that olympians actually get low to mid 30s. Someome who doesn't look it up and just makes assumptions can get it very wrong even though the answer feels right.

This can happen even when based on personal experience. Can't give a better example than Alexandrian, in the afore mentioned article, refuting a guy's claim about weight, showing that the guy's personal experience not only matched up with the penalties of a medium load rather than a light load, but the guy's description of what was being carried very likely was also a medium load. The guy that was complaining however, not only thought his bag should be light, but also failed to recognize the system assumes the weight is distributed in the best way, while he was carrying it in a bad way. Both assumptions lead to an inaccurate expectation.

3, focusing on corner cases at the expense of general. D20 is meant to be fun. That means that certain assumptions will be made for the sake of simplicity. This means there will be edge cases and odd situations when the mechanics are off. We can't even model the real world perfectly with scientists whose entire job is to try. It certain can not be modeled perfectly in a format that is fun to play. It can however be modeled accurately in general. However, some folks may find a corner case, or a bad gm, and let the existance of such corner cases be the baseline for their opinion of the whole entire game.

I'd like to share a relevant fact, if you put a frog in boiling water, it'll jump out. If you put a frog in comfortable water and slowly bring it to a boil, the frog will boil to death. This is the slippery slope effect.

Another is my grandmother's refridgerator magnet "Housework is that thing that no one notices unless it isn't done."

There is a ton of stuff that people just don't notice, and if it goes unnoticed, it won't impact their opinion, even if should.

So, if the general working of the system works well enough to go fairly unnoticed, the the bad parts will be the defining features for some even if they rarely come up.

4, structure of expectations. This is a difficult one to explain.

What exactly are the expectations one has or could have?

Expectations could be things based on the world in a more tangible sense, like the impact of gravity.

But there is another kind of expectation, the expectations of conceptual ideals. When cold enough to be liquid, hydrogen will flow up the sides of a glass. This seems like a crazy and wild thing. Why does it seem wild and crazy? Because it defies our common experience with liquids. We expect liquids to behave like water and always flow down. Hydrogen is just following the same rules as everything else, but because those rules so rarely result in liquid flowing upwards, we have this simplified concept in our minds that liquid always flows downwards. Then when faced with proof our concept is false, it is a big thing that will feel wrong and be met with either fear, denial, or wonder.

But other such expectations can apply to our games. For example, if we play a game that seems like a classic good-vs-evil game, we might expect that good always wins, and feel cheated when the good guys unquestionably lose. Or we might expect to survive no matter what because too many gms remove all risk, or we might expect that enemies will always be handed out in penny packets the are supposed to always be faced and defeated in combat because that is how wow and other computer games are structured. (Alexandrian has an article mentioning an early module he wrote where two giants stand guard but are many lvls above the party, and had critics berate the work for unbalanced encounters when the whole point was for the players to talk their way through, not fight)

Or we might expect that wizards work like in lotr because we never heard of jack vance and his wizards that had to prepare spells that would destabilize after use (though in the books they could cast the same spell an unpredictable, if small, number of times rather than merely once, it is still spell preperation)

Some of these expectations may be in the gm's control, or setting dependant, rather than the system, and yet some people may blame the system or module. Others may just be outright wrong assumptions but feel right and thus are hated when it doesn't work out. Because so many gms rely on the system to present setting information instead of building completely from scratch, people come to associate setting with system when they really shouldn't and thus blame things not working right due to setting issues on the system instead of on the setting or gm.

For example, in one pfs scenerio, I was tasked with destroying a certificate from an office. So I bought an extra folder and parchment, then when we got to the office, I cast silent image on the parchment to swap it with the real certificate. The gm didn't even say no, but just ignored it everytime I brought it up until he shooed us out of the office and I confronted him directly about it. He said he didn't do anything about it "because the book doesn't say how."

It might be easy to blame the system or the module, but it was actually 100% gm incompetance.

Other systems might sound like they'd prevent this, but really what those systems are doing is providing a crutch that the gm never learns to no longer need. Generally the crutch is relying on players to fill the gap, or by shifting the mechanic away from world simulation to such an abstract state of pass/fail, that they don't actually need to think or solve the problem. The first loses the support of simulationism, and the latter is letting the gm remain an incompetant worthless nothing for the rest of their life that they'll spend relying on system designers and module authors to make up their lack.

If you're happy with that, good for you, but I want professional grade gms, like worthy of getting official certification on par with musicians or engineers kind of ptofessional.

Quote:

At the very least, you're far less effective than when you play (and build) your character with awareness of the mechanics.

Wrong. Dead wrong. In fact, most of the time such players that focus on the mechanics are weaker and less effective because they fail to consider anything beyond the mechanics and rely solely on the mechanics to "win," and the stuff beyond the mechanics make for tactics and capabilities far beyond the mere mechanics. Granted, it does require a gm that is actually competant to handle the stuff beyond the mechanics (which is where a casually simulationist system can help).

Look at tucker's kobolds as an example. Nothing at all homebrewed there, but just simply thinking outside the mechanics, tucker set up a group of kobolds far more terrifying than even midlevel monsters. The difference was not mechanical, but rather in realizing there is a whole world beyond the mechanics.

Another example, all the players who will never flip a table over for cover. Why? Because it does not occur to them because there is no mechanic for flipping tables. Because it isn't a mechanic, they simply don't think that way, because they focus so much on thinking in terms of mechanics.

Of course, when the gm has the problem, it undercuts any player's attempts at it. (interestingly enough, this is one aspect that haladir doesn't have a problem with, though it is certainly the most common problem among players of crunchy systems)

Still, anyone who wants to claim that superior mechanical build is important can go stuff themselves in tucker's kobold's lair. See how long it takes for them to get roasted.

[thejeff]

Or 5, D20 is not the one true system of which all others are but shadows. But that can't possibly be true.

1) This might be the problem - but the example you give and the power level thing are definitely not the problem I'm talking about.
Though it does give rise to a side question: If we're supposed to play without paying attention to mechanics and just using our real world references (or genre fiction references like Conan) and those mostly top out at 5th or a few levels higher: how are we supposed to know what it makes sense for high level characters to do?

2) Again, not the issue and we've already talked about the jumping thing. World record is just under 30', for the record. The biggest expectation breaker there is not the maximum distance, but the variation, thanks to the d20. If I can jump 10' reliably, I wouldn't expect my character to sometimes make 20', but also only get 5' and fail to jump the 10' pit.
That's a case where knowing the rules lets you gauge your chances of doing the risky thing much more clearly than any real world experience. (It's also why 3.x has the Take 10 rule, but that doesn't really fit real world experience either.)

3) This is a lot of it actually, but it's far more pervasive than you suggest. The entire system is a massive simplification to make it possible to play. Not just edge and corner cases, but all of it. The most blatant example is probably the whole turn based action system and the action economy with a turn. Nothing in a real fight or in our experiences in genre fights is at all similar. Combatants don't take turns and discrete actions, but we have to do it that way to be able to process it.
Which is fine, but it drastically changes how combats play out. Even with your own turn, knowing how to use the action economy system to your advantage is critical and isn't something you'd stumble onto just by acting naturally without the mechanics. It's not that it doesn't kind of make sense once you know it - though it's far from the only approach that could make sense. It's just that it's a mechanical thing you need to know how to use. Ignore it and you'll never understand why you can sometimes attack multiple times and sometimes only once or even never.

4) Yeah, I've got nothing. Not sure what you're talking about, but I'm pretty sure it's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

Tucker's Kobolds) First of all, you do know this was an AD&D thing, not a d20 thing, right? It's often referenced, but rarely examined closely. First, I suspect it wouldn't work nearly so well in d20 - the power curve is much higher and 3.x characters have far more mechanical tricks at their disposal. Some of Tucker's tricks would let his kobolds punch above their level, but not as many levels above as in AD&D. Second, mostly it's not so much "clever kobolds taking advantage of their environment" as "the GM created an environment for them where the PCs wouldn't effectively be able to strike back". PCs rarely have the ability to completely restructure the area of a fight so they can move freely and their foes are channelled into a kill zone - except by using the mechanical magic abilities on their character sheets.

[Haladir]

Interesting Character wrote:

...yet another wall of text...

Yet again, I fundamentally disagree with nearly all of your points.

And, again, you seem to be basing your argument on Justin Alexander's 2007 article, "Calibrating Your Expectations".

While I skimmed that article a few weeks ago, I decided to take a closer look at it and read it carefully with a critical eye...

I now think I know what a friend meant when he said of Justin Alexander, "Sometimes he's right on the money, and sometimes he's so bullheadedly wrong I just want to punch him in the throat."

Having read this article closely, I find myself advocating (metaphorical) throat-punching.

One thing I should mention before delving in: This article is 13 years old. There has been a LOT of advancement in RPG design space since it was written. This article predates Pathfinder by four years, 13th Age by six years, and D&D 5e by seven years. The Indie RPG scene was still in The Forge era, and few if any of the games in contemporary indie RPG scenes had yet been written.

I reject the premise and underlying assumptions of this article, and fundamentally disagree with his analysis and conclusions.

I think the whole article is bullheadedly wrong about OGL/3.5 play, and I would not grant this article any weight whatsoever.

Where to begin?

The thesis statement of this article is:

On his blog, Justin Alexander wrote:

One of the most impressive things about 3rd Edition is the casual realism of the system... So what I want to do, rather than just making my claim, is to take a look at a few rules, actually run the numbers, and demonstrate how effective D&D really is at modeling the real world.

The underlying premise of this statement is that one can gauge the quality of an RPG by how well it simulates reality. [This is the "S" of GNS Theory, by the way.]

Bullsh*t.

I mean that both to the premise and to the stated thesis. The degree and effectiveness of how well an RPG simulates reality is NOT a mark of its quality, and even if it were, OGL/3.5 does not do a particularly good job of it.

Alexander then goes on to give four examples of how OGL/3.5 effectively simulates the real world: Breaking down a door, lugging heavy things around, knowing/making stuff, and jumping. He then goes into a lot of number-crunching and applies those numbers to his personal lived experience to conclude that the rules square with reality.

I'm not going to call him on his numbers because I've wasted enough time on this, but he's clearly mixing objective and subjective measurements to suit his case. A person with different lived experience may well reach the opposite conclusion... as I have.

Where his argument that OGL/3.5 is "effectively modeling the real world" completely fall apart is at the concept of "character level." There is no such thing in the real world. In order to make his argument work, he must then hand-wave interpretation of famous characters from history and literature as being significantly "lower level" than they are generally perceived to be. Because if they were truly "high level" characters, then the game rules fail to effectively simulate reality, and he disproves his own premises.

From a logical argument standpoint, Alexander moved the goalposts: These characters must be low level because the rules break down if they weren't.

And finally: There's the whole concept of the rules of a fantasy role-playing game "modeling the real world." They don't, because the game-world expressly is not the real world. He uses Conan the Barbarian, Gandalf the Wizard, and dwarven blacksmiths as examples. Hint: None of them exist!

In D&D, there exist fire-breathing dragons that can fly; gods perform miracles before multitudes; wizards etch mystical patterns onto their brains that allow them to hurl balls of explosive fire. None of that exists in the real world. Any attempt to "simulate" them means you're just making stuff up: In a simulationist game, the only thing you have to be is consistent.

Consistency breaks down in OGL/3.5 because of the swinginess of the d20 roll. It doesn't roll on a curve so your chances of rolling a 1 or a 20 are the same. DCs are set arbitrarily, but generally to match the expected character level of the PCs. And that means that you pretty much always need to roll over an 8 to succeed, and the game has no "degrees of success" mechanic.

To keep consistency in play, Alexander concludes, "Instead of fighting the system, I’d rather try to work with it: Target the precise range of levels which form the “sweet spot” for whatever campaign concept I’m working on, and then tinker with the character creation and advancement rules to keep the campaign focused in that sweet spot."

And this completely undercuts his own argument: In order for OGL/3.5 to be an effectively simulationist system, the GM must decide ahead of time what sort of play they want and then to strong-arm the system itself by enforcing arbitrary level constraints to get the sort of play they're looking for.

[avr]

I rather like D&D/PF and despise PbtA, and aren't that impressed by GNS theory. I still think that overhyping the d20 system and ignoring its flaws is unhelpful. It's had a lot of influence on RPG designers which means that you can find little hints and callbacks to D&D systems in apparently unrelated games, but that doesn't make it necessarily the best way to do any particular thing in game.

And professional certification? No! It's wrong conceptually so many, many ways for RPGs. If there were such a thing I'd use it as a way to avoid rigid, stuck-up fools as GMs.

[Interesting Character]

Quote:

Or 5, D20 is not the one true system of which all others are but shadows. But that can't possibly be true.

First, I never claimed otherwise. Never. From the very beginning I've tried to be very clear that there are different ways to play and d20 is the best for one of those perspectives, not for all perspectives. I also have stated that d20 has plenty of problems and issues.

This has never been about d20 being unconditionally better, it has been about the difference in perspective which finds something in d20 useful that is not useful in other perspectives.

If you think I'm trying to say that d20 is ultimately the best for any rpg campaign ever, then you are not even on the same topic as what I've been discussing.

Quote:

1) This might be the problem - but the example you give and the power level thing are definitely not the problem I'm talking about.
Though it does give rise to a side question: If we're supposed to play without paying attention to mechanics and just using our real world references (or genre fiction references like Conan) and those mostly top out at 5th or a few levels higher: how are we supposed to know what it makes sense for high level characters to do?

Seriously? Superman can jump tall buildings. That is far beyond real world humans, but we can easily understand the concept, we can visualize it. We can understand the difference between jumping 40' gaps vs 60' gaps. We naturally can take our experience and intuit what it would be like if extended beyond our own reach. The same can be applied to most any casuallly simulationist system you understand. Travelling beyond the speed of light is something we can understand, after all Star Trek does it and even has multiple speeds beyond lightspeed leading to ships that are unbelievably fast and yet some are faster than others.

Just do the same thing. If you stop looking for why the technique is dumb or stupid, you might actually see it's uses. After all, this aspect is perfectly applicable to any gaming perspective, though some might not value it.

For example, levels 6-10 are supernatural, the stuff that is clearly beyond human capacity but not by a lot. Many vampire and werewolf stories fall into this category, where the vampires and werewolves can do stuff that no human could ever do, and yet they are not demigods.

Levels 15-20 are superheroes (in a fantasy setting if using dnd). And I mean that like superman comics or the DCU and City of Heroes MMO games or the movie The Incredibles kind of superheroes. Actually, The Incredibles is a good example of where d20 is useful, you have characters with amazing superpowers, and yet outside their powers, they are still normal people and they interact with normal people. D20 handles this well because it smoothly scales from normal human up to supers. Mr. Incredible for example has amazing strength and yet his diplomacy is terrible, just look at his dealing with his Insuracare boss, a normal human and yet he lacks the diplomatic grace to deal with his boss effectively, or in other words, he had no ranks in his diplomacy skill and therefore was like a normal person in using diplomacy.

In any case, because the numbers are determinate, we can build the numbers to generally match the real world, then extend those numbers indefinitely, and since our expectations are good at normal person standards (not perfect but good), then extending our expectations with the numbers is intuitive and natural. Unless you are too used to separating numbers from meaning anything, such as when playing WoW clones, or PBtA.

Quote:

2) Again, not the issue and we've already talked about the jumping thing. World record is just under 30', for the record. The biggest expectation breaker there is not the maximum distance, but the variation, thanks to the d20. If I can jump 10' reliably, I wouldn't expect my character to sometimes make 20', but also only get 5' and fail to jump the 10' pit.
That's a case where knowing the rules lets you gauge your chances of doing the risky thing much more clearly than any real world experience. (It's also why 3.x has the Take 10 rule, but that doesn't really fit real world experience either.)

I'm not sure why my notes had 31-32' feet listed from my previous research, but 29' is still close enough to not really impact my point.

I also addressed the d20. 3d6 is a really common alternate rule for a reason. The d20 was used because it made the extremes more common, and since the extremes are the "feel good" moments we remember best, making them more common is a good game design choice and since such rolls are only intended to made during critical moments and not every possible chance, it doesn't have that big of an impact. Now for those who think the rules must be followed super tightly like they are laws rather than guidelines, then yeah, the swinginess starts to have an impact, but even then, it isn't so massive an impact as too overshadow everything else the system does.

D20 was clearly designed to be casually simulationist but without forgetting that it is first and foremost a game meant for fun. The authors however, were terrible at writing clearly and concisely (an excellent example of this is Alexander's article on the design utility when analyzes the terribly written flying rules and presents the exact same rules in a much more clear fashion).

Quote:

3) This is a lot of it actually, but it's far more pervasive than you suggest. The entire system is a massive simplification to make it possible to play. Not just edge and corner cases, but all of it. The most blatant example is probably the whole turn based action system and the action economy with a turn. Nothing in a real fight or in our experiences in genre fights is at all similar. Combatants don't take turns and discrete actions, but we have to do it that way to be able to process it.
Which is fine, but it drastically changes how combats play out. Even with your own turn, knowing how to use the action economy system to your advantage is critical and isn't something you'd stumble onto just by acting naturally without the mechanics. It's not that it doesn't kind of make sense once you know it - though it's far from the only approach that could make sense. It's just that it's a mechanical thing you need to know how to use. Ignore it and you'll never understand why you can sometimes attack multiple times and sometimes only once or even never.

You seem to focus on combat here, and while combat is the most detailed part of d20, for understandable reasons, it is also the least important part of d20's design.

Combat being detailed is somewhat influenced by the warfare gaming heritage, but also because combat is when stakes are at their highest in traditional storylines, something that has only become more true on the aaa side of things lately. It is those stakes being so much higher at that point that leads top higher detail, because players keep trying to come with reasons why they should hit and not be hit requiring disproportionate amount of rulings in such situations which is then mitigated by having more detailed rules laid out ahead of time to reduce discussions and arguements during combat. Having a player fall dead or unconscious and not feel cheated is rather important to making a fun game. Combat is the biggest time for characters to maybe fall dead.

Yes, many folks feel that combat being more detailed makes it the focus of the game. I understand that, but disagree with it. Rules focused players naturally gravitate to the most detailed parts of the system, but that doesn't mean the system was designed for those players.

This tendancy naturally encourages those who want to get away from combat being the central focus to want to get rid of the high detail in combat, which leads back to the issue of combat usually having the highest stakes. Getting around that issue is generally resolved by removing the casual simulationism and thus freeing up the ability to be more abstract in rules deciding whether someone dies or not, or even just simply allowing defeat without death.

But that is just one way to take things, the easy way out if you ask me. The alternative comes from the players who don't get focused on the mechanics, a radically different way of thinking, and one that often demands more from the players to make it work.

Quote:

4) Yeah, I've got nothing. Not sure what you're talking about, but I'm pretty sure it's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

Do you know what a metric of measure is? It is basically the type and priority of things you look for to judge something.

For example, when designing a car, you can determine the best car ever by looking at the capabilities and efficiency of the cars (metric one), or you can judge by how cool the cars look and what they can do (metric two). Each metric will end up ranking the cars in radically different way, and the variation from individuals having private opnions will also be radically different. For example, one person might value cargo capacity more than fuel efficiency and someone else might favor the opposite, but both are still using metric one.

My point 4 was about this difference in metrics. If you are judging the system by a very different metric than was used to design the game, then it will very easily fail to meet expectations and yet not make the game a bad design, but rather when this happens, it just means you are looking for something different than the game was designed to provide.

Quote:

Tucker's Kobolds) First of all, you do know this was an AD&D thing, not a d20 thing, right?

Yea, I know, and it doesn't make a difference at all, since the "thinking beyond the pure mechanics" was the whole point.

For example, I used Obscuring Mist with a Silent Image to simulate a tower being on fire once. Obscuring Mist has no mechanical reason to be used in this way, but narratively it looks like a cloud which can as easily be a cloud of smoke as a cloud of water. I used it based on what it is narratively rather than thinking only of what it does mechanically.

I do this all the time. In fact, many of the spells are worded to keep spells from being more useful than is appropriate for their level, and these wordings are almost always based on my style of thinking, which shows that my style of thinking was clearly and well understood by those writing the spells. One might even try to say that it proves the authors wanted a mechanical game, but that arguement falls apart when you consider the lack of mechanical balance overall and my original assertion that the casual simulationism is the basis but the designers didn't forget that this was a game, and a wizard that finds no use for their brand new spells doesn't gain much excitement from leveling up.

Quote:

It's often referenced, but rarely examined closely. First, I suspect it wouldn't work nearly so well in d20 - the power curve is much higher and 3.x characters have far more mechanical tricks at their disposal.

Oh this works in d20. This is almost entirely how I form tactics and strategies, and thus I see firsthand how this can easily be done. I've used Obscuring Mist to simulate smoke from a fire, I've used Shape Stone to collapse pillars and change the battlefield and drop stuff on enemies. Silent Image to manage zombies and provide concealment from ranged fire.

I am generally an effective player despite being mechanically weaker in general, all from thinking outside the mechanics.

Quote:

Some of Tucker's tricks would let his kobolds punch above their level, but not as many levels above as in AD&D. Second, mostly it's not so much "clever kobolds taking advantage of their environment" as "the GM created an environment for them where the PCs wouldn't effectively be able to strike back".

This is an assumption, and likely a wrong one. Consider what kobolds are and their lore. A major aspect of kobold lore is that they never face invaders directly and even footing, they use traps, tricks, and ambushes to even the battlefield in their favor. This is part of kobold lore. To play kobolds any other way is to not be true to what they are. And if you think in terms of how kobolds might defend their lair, Tucker's Kobolds is exactly the sort of lair kobolds would make.

Further, you say this as though you expect the PCs should be able to strike back effectively in the most obvious manner, which is something I consider wrong. Combats should not be gamist affairs. Combat is dangerous, and every character in combat should be acting to achieve their goals, and that includes the NPC enemies. Kobolds do not want intruders and design their lairs accordingly. That is narrative. Making combats with kobolds be the same as with orcs but smaller and weaker enemies, then you are not writing a narrative, you playing a combat game.

Secondly, cases like this are a type of puzzle. PCs can't effectively attack in the traditional fashion, so they must think outside the box and be creative to solve the problem.

Quote:

PCs rarely have the ability to completely restructure the area of a fight so they can move freely and their foes are channelled into a kill zone - except by using the mechanical magic abilities on their character sheets.

So what? You say this like it is fundementally wrong, but that would only be true if you were designing a combat minitures game and not a RPG.

Besides, it is entirely possible to have the PCs structure the area of a fight beforehand to get these kinds of advantages. It happens in storylines where the PCs are the defenders. If you think that should never happen, then you fail to understand the scope of what RPGs can be.

[Interesting Character]

Quote:

I rather like D&D/PF and despise PbtA, and aren't that impressed by GNS theory.

I don't think much of GNS either. Others brought that one up. I wouldn't say it's super bad wrong though, just a poor analysis.

Quote:

I still think that overhyping the d20 system and ignoring its flaws is unhelpful.

I think you might have missed some important points of the topic. I do not say that d20 super bestest ever. I think there is a different way of playing the game in which the rules serve a different purpose than is commonly considered, and in that other way of playing, d20 remains the best at doing certain things that are of value to that other way of playing that other systems do worse or not at all because they are not focused on achieving the same things d20 is trying to achieve.

As for flaws, I most definitely acknowledge those, and in fact I am designing my own rules system to improve upon the flaws.

The biggest one though is making it clear and evident how my system is intended to be used. If people like jeff and haladir come across my system, they would not understand what I'm trying to do with the system and therefore they would just dismiss it as being a terribly designed game instead of just recognizing that it isn't designed for their style of play at all and either try playing a new way or just ignoring it in favor of what their preference is without thinking of it as bad for targeting something other than their goals of play.

But if I can't make it evident to them what a comepletely different way to play looks like, how can I make it clear to random people reading the game's blurb and maybe introduction/overview?

Quote:

And professional certification? No! It's wrong conceptually so many, many ways for RPGs. If there were such a thing I'd use it as a way to avoid rigid, stuck-up fools as GMs.

So you hate the musicians on the radio? You think AAA game devs are stuck-up fools? You think concert pianists and solo violinists are all fools? What about the great painters or writers? Composers? Photographers? Filmmakers? Graphic artists?

There are tons of different fields of art in which people study deeply for decades to become the best at what they do, and you think they are all worthless people to be avoided?

It takes a whole lot of study and practice to become a good artist of any sort. A GM is an artist of many sorts rolled into one. A GM is at once a storyteller (without the benefit of revising drafts of their story to perfection before presenting to audience), thespian, producer, voice actor, and stage magician, not to mention needing to be all of those on the spot without the ability to refine their work multiple times over before showing it to anyone, not to mention needing to be a game designer (to understand how best to implement the rules and handle situations the rules don't cover, if nothing else) and arbiter between people and generally a leader handling group dynamics.

A great GM is someone who is good at all of those things. 90% of the GMs I play under are at best terrible GMs, many are outright incompetant.

So heck yes, I want to see more study in being a better GM. Just like movies try to hire great actors, and venues try to get great artists rather than hire just random people off the street.

I'm against rigid and stuck-up people, but quality comes from practice and study. Some random guy is not good enough. Resteraunts do not hire random people off the street to play music, theaters do not hire random people to play characters in their plays.

To me, this an artform, and the GM an artist for the audience of players at their table. Professional study not only makes for great GMs but also improves the artform and results in more material and analysis and such that even amatuers can study up on to improve their private game for their friends. So even if you do stay away from the big time professional GMs, you should still support having professionals so more study and development of the artform as a whole can happen that your small-time nobody of a GM can improve their art and make for a better game for you.

It's bit like how the fashion industry impacts the cheap clothes poor people buy from their local discount store.

[Interesting Character]

And, again, you seem to be basing your argument on Justin Alexander's 2007 article, "Calibrating Your Expectations".

Well, he is a better author than me and has better creditionals, and not many other articles address this issue.

Quote:

While I skimmed that article a few weeks ago, I decided to take a closer look at it and read it carefully with a critical eye...

I now think I know what a friend meant when he said of Justin Alexander, "Sometimes he's right on the money, and sometimes he's so bullheadedly wrong I just want to punch him in the throat."

Having read this article closely, I find myself advocating (metaphorical) throat-punching.

Well, of course you do. You are missing the point I've been trying to clarify this whole time. If you understood my point, you'd then be able to look at his article and see why, for some people it would be totally true. But you can't understand that yet because you can't understand how fundementally different the game can truly be for some and still be satisfying for those of us who like playing this vastly different style.

So instead of trying to tell me how stupid and wrong I am, why don't you try to think of a way someone might actually find value in the way he presents things. What way of thinking could someone have that would lead to his arguements to being true? This might be a more productive line of thinking.

Quote:

One thing I should mention before delving in: This article is 13 years old.

There has been a LOT of advancement in RPG design space since it was written. This article predates Pathfinder by four years, 13th Age by six years, and D&D 5e by seven years. The Indie RPG scene was still in The Forge era, and few if any of the games in contemporary indie RPG scenes had yet been written.

You say this like there is only one direction the industry could go and be "better." This concept is wrong. There are different ways to play, so advancements that support one way to play may not support other ways to play at all. Which is the problem. I'm trying to shed light on a different way to play that I see as having equal value to the popular way of playing and to advance the industry for that other way of playing (hence the system I'm designing), but in order to get others to see what I'm doing, they need to be able to look at my system and see what it is actually intended to do and not simply judge it according to how they play the popular style games, because the difference between these style is not in the mechanics themselves, but in how the mechanics are applied and used in game.

The popular style of play has had a great deal of advancement, the less popular styles of play have had little to none. With the advancement of videogames and people naturally narrowing their view to fit their experience, finding players for this other style is becoming more and more difficult. I want to keep this other style from dying out completely, and that means being to get common people to recognize the difference even if they don't bother trying the other style, because if I can do that, then there will indeed be some who will try something different and some of them may even find they like the other way, a handful might even prefer it.

Quote:

I reject the premise and underlying assumptions of this article, and fundamentally disagree with his analysis and conclusions.

Yea, we established that already. This is the whole point. You are so focused on your "one true way" of how RPGs should be, that you can't see any other way as having validity if it has a different set of foundational concepts.

Quote:

I think the whole article is bullheadedly wrong about OGL/3.5 play, and I would not grant this article any weight whatsoever.

Where to begin?

The thesis statement of this article is:

On his blog, Justin Alexander wrote:

One of the most impressive things about 3rd Edition is the casual realism of the system... So what I want to do, rather than just making my claim, is to take a look at a few rules, actually run the numbers, and demonstrate how effective D&D really is at modeling the real world.

The underlying premise of this statement is that one can gauge the quality of an RPG by how well it simulates reality. [This is the "S" of GNS Theory, by the way.]

Incorrect, it says 3e has done something impressive and that thing is casual simulationism. There is no claim that all RPGs must do this nor that this is in any way better than all other games. It in fact could be talking about the one great thing an otherwise terrible system does.

The quality of any game is in it's ability to support the style of play it is intended to be used for. It does not imply that there is only one true way, only there is one thing that some people out there value and that 3e does that thing well.

Quote:

I mean that both to the premise and to the stated thesis. The degree and effectiveness of how well an RPG simulates reality is NOT a mark of its quality, and even if it were, OGL/3.5 does not do a particularly good job of it.

Quality of an rpg is more complex than just worse or better. Systems can be better at one aspect and worse at another. However, being better at simulationism qould be higher quality in that particular aspect, which some will value and others will not. Simulationism alone is not a universal win condition, nor is it something inherently bad. Some playstyles find it useful, some do not.

Quote:

Alexander then goes on to give four examples of how OGL/3.5 effectively simulates the real world: Breaking down a door, lugging heavy things around, knowing/making stuff, and jumping. He then goes into a lot of number-crunching and applies those numbers to his personal lived experience to conclude that the rules square with reality.

I'm not going to call him on his numbers because I've wasted enough time on this, but he's clearly mixing objective and subjective measurements to suit his case. A person with different lived experience may well reach the opposite conclusion... as I have.

Where his argument that OGL/3.5 is "effectively modeling the real world" completely fall apart is at the concept of "character level." There is no such thing in the real world. In order to make his argument work, he must then hand-wave interpretation of famous characters from history and literature as being significantly "lower level" than they are generally perceived to be. Because if they were truly "high level" characters, then the game rules fail to effectively simulate reality, and he disproves his own premises.

I've already addresseed how perceptions can be inaccurate here. Primarily, people have for some reason taken to believing that if a system has a lvl scale from 0 to X, then all heroes of all stories must be almost X in level when translated to the system. This premesis is wrong, but sadly common, and in a way is the primary driving force behind the article.

Just because the system can handle lvl 20 characters does not mean that every hero character in all stories must be almost level 20 if not actually 20 when translated to the system.

If someone can not accept that statement, they have no business critiquing any design in any field.

Quote:

From a logical argument standpoint, Alexander moved the goalposts: These characters must be low level because the rules break down if they weren't.

Incorrect, 3e is a broad game. PBtA has made it clear that it's philosophy is to make a system specific to a narrow range of stories, and to not bother supporting anything beyond that narrow range. 3e is the opposite approach, and tries to support a wide range of stories, from the lowly LOTR style settings with real world humans all the way up high magic settings with superheroes and demigods running around everywhere with magic common place.

Quote:

And finally: There's the whole concept of the rules of a fantasy role-playing game "modeling the real world." They don't, because the game-world expressly is not the real world. He uses Conan the Barbarian, Gandalf the Wizard, and dwarven blacksmiths as examples. Hint: None of them exist!

No, but you know what does exist? Humans, rocks, gravity, planets, water, weather, rain, etc. Those worlds are basically Earth with a few small tweaks. Model Earth, extend the numbers, and viola you can model things that don't exist. It gives them a structure that fits smoothly with the structure of all the things do exist.

Further is the association between the player's decision with the character's decision. A wizard might not know what a caster level is, but they can indeed know that a more powerful caster can have fireballs that burn hotter and harm things more.

The point is, math can model non-existant things. Understanding the math modelling those things means understanding how those things work, and yes we can understand how things work that don't exist. I believe I mentioned this back when talking about playing Harry Potter. If you are making choices for Harry, you need to know what Harry can do and why he might choose one thing over another. Simulating non-existant things is one possible way of doing that.

Quote:

Consistency breaks down in OGL/3.5 because of the swinginess of the d20 roll. It doesn't roll on a curve so your chances of rolling a 1 or a 20 are the same. DCs are set arbitrarily, but generally to match the expected character level of the PCs. And that means that you pretty much always need to roll over an 8 to succeed, and the game has no "degrees of success" mechanic.

First, I've already said a few times now, that the d20 is a concession to this being a game for fun. The extremes are more fun, and thus making them more common improves fun, even if it is less simulationist, but honestly, the impact is far less than you would believe, especially if using the system correctly and not rolling for every single thing.

And, yes, there is a "degrees of success," it is implicit rather than explicit, but the GM is relied on more heavily than in modern games, and the GM is expected to shape the results based on the dice results.

Heck, "always fail forward" is perfectly usable in 3e. If it doesn't apply numbers, than it is up to the GM to determine precisely what failure and success mean. Failing to break down the door might be anctual failure when the door is not essiential to the plot, or it might be a success at a cost.

Also, you might notice many parts of the system that have additional effects when the check is failed or succeeded by a margin of 5 or 10. Yes those are explicitly in the system and yes those do indeed count as "degrees of success."

Quote:

To keep consistency in play, Alexander concludes, "Instead of fighting the system, I’d rather try to work with it: Target the precise range of levels which form the “sweet spot” for whatever campaign concept I’m working on, and then tinker with the character creation and advancement rules to keep the campaign focused in that sweet spot."

Yea, and how is this any different than looking at your PBtA library and picking the correct one for the story you want to tell that week? The only difference is that 3e is ment to handle that whole library in one system rather than being broken into separate systems.

Quote:

And this completely undercuts his own argument: In order for OGL/3.5 to be an effectively simulationist system, the GM must decide ahead of time what sort of play they want and then to strong-arm the system itself by enforcing arbitrary level constraints to get the sort of play they're looking for.

On the contrary, this isn't strongarming anything, this is communication. Saying "this dnd 3e game is for level 15-20 characters" is funtionally equal to saying "this PBtA game is for demigod/superhero characters in a fantasy world."

It is not strongarming anything, it is using the system as designed. If you fail to understand the system, that does not make the system poorly designed. Might possibly mean the system was poorly presented (definitely true of 3.x), or poorly taught, or that you are stubborn and just feel like everything needs to be shoehorned into your own preconceived notions, but not necessarily poorly designed.

[thejeff]

The point for that first comment was that I said "Because when I try to not think in mechanical terms and just do what makes sense, it tends to run hard into the mechanics not resolving like I'd expect them to." you responded with "There are 4 possible reasons for this." And each of those reasons was why I was wrong and d20 is in fact the perfect game for this style of play. The possibility that my experience was valid and you aren't correct about d20 being the best system for this style of play. At least for everyone.

But since we're talking about a hypothetical d20 system which might not use a d20 (and I don't think that 3d6 actually addresses my issues there, though it's a bit closer) and apparently doesn't really include the detailed combat rules, you can pretty much overcome any objections based on any specific mechanics. I'm not sure there's any point in continuing with this. You're talking about a mysterious concept of "casual simulationist", not any specific game.

[Haladir]

Interesting Character wrote:

If you understood my point, you'd then be able to look at his article and see why, for some people it would be totally true.

We're 173 posts into this discussion, you have written multiple walls of text, and I still have absolutely no idea what you're trying to express.

It seems that every time I think I that understand what you're trying to express, you tell me that I have it wrong.

I'm out. I'm hiding this thread. Have fun playing whatever RPG you want in however manner you wish to play it. And I'll do the same.

[thejeff]

IC wrote:

The biggest one though is making it clear and evident how my system is intended to be used. If people like jeff and haladir come across my system, they would not understand what I'm trying to do with the system and therefore they would just dismiss it as being a terribly designed game instead of just recognizing that it isn't designed for their style of play at all and either try playing a new way or just ignoring it in favor of what their preference is without thinking of it as bad for targeting something other than their goals of plaY

My style of play isn't much like Haladir's from what I can tell. It's actually probably closer to yours, I just don't find d20 particularly useful for it. My preference is to not think of my character's actions in terms of mechanics, but simply in terms of what the character wants to try. I find this doesn't work well in 3.x or in PF for me.

Because, other than a few, relatively trivial things, I don't find d20 particularly simulationist.

[Interesting Character]

thejeff wrote:

IC wrote:

The biggest one though is making it clear and evident how my system is intended to be used. If people like jeff and haladir come across my system, they would not understand what I'm trying to do with the system and therefore they would just dismiss it as being a terribly designed game instead of just recognizing that it isn't designed for their style of play at all and either try playing a new way or just ignoring it in favor of what their preference is without thinking of it as bad for targeting something other than their goals of plaY

My style of play isn't much like Haladir's from what I can tell. It's actually probably closer to yours, I just don't find d20 particularly useful for it. My preference is to not think of my character's actions in terms of mechanics, but simply in terms of what the character wants to try. I find this doesn't work well in 3.x or in PF for me.

Because, other than a few, relatively trivial things, I don't find d20 particularly simulationist.

The way I see it, the system's core is very well simulationist based on the real world, then extended out to cover all the way up to demigods, but so many assume that high level play is meant to be attainable by characters of real world ability, that they never catch on to how the numbers match the real world.

But examine the little bits that most people ignore, such as the environmental effects. These are where the simulation is. For example, in d20 dnd 3e, you can last around 1.5 days without water, and around 5 days without food. Of course, that is a bit short and assumes lvl 1 commoner, but also just kills you shortly after going unconscious which can easily be taken as a gameplay factor since you'd be relying on someone finding you and helping you at that point, which means either the gm says you got found in time or not, so no point worrying about how long you lay there sleeping before you actually die. Air is pretty good, giving you around 2-3 minutes. Granted that assumes continued if calm activity and having trained to hold breath that long, but is there really a need to differentiate between someone who has and has not trained in holding breath? Probably not. None of these are super accurate, but they are not terrible either.

If you look only at combat, then you are looking at the least simulationist part of the system.

But also consider how it all flows around a numerical structure that makes it easy to see where undefined things should be to fit well and feel like natural parts of the system. For example, I added haggle rules, basically, haggle is a skill check (usually cha based) vs the merchant's haggle skill (the npc takes 10 to determine DC), by every point you exceed the DC you get 10% the cost in your favor, and every point of failure is 10% in the merchant's favor. It adds detail to buying and selling and making it matter to have a skill for those groups tending towards mercantile pursuits, yet it fits in perfectly with the rest of the system and doesn't feel like a tacked on subsystem, especially if you are using the 3d6 variant. But more than just fitting in, it is easy to translate the numbers to narrative impact, each point is 10%. A skilled merchant can easily get 200% the item's value when selling or buy for as low as 10%, just like the real world.

But the key here is translating to the real world. Take PBtA, there is no connection to the narrative world, so it doesn't matter what the result is, the result gives nothing upon which to determine how much above/below book cost to trade the item, that is arbitrarily determined by the player or gm depending on who wins. But d20 is a basis that you can use to determine percentage of cost. It doesn't need to be perfect at it, just good enough.

I'll get my system posted on my discord. It's very rough and incomplete right now but if you feel inclined, you can take a look and see where I'm going with it. Maybe that'll help, I doubt it, but maybe.

[thejeff]

Interesting Character wrote:

thejeff wrote:

IC wrote:

The biggest one though is making it clear and evident how my system is intended to be used. If people like jeff and haladir come across my system, they would not understand what I'm trying to do with the system and therefore they would just dismiss it as being a terribly designed game instead of just recognizing that it isn't designed for their style of play at all and either try playing a new way or just ignoring it in favor of what their preference is without thinking of it as bad for targeting something other than their goals of plaY

My style of play isn't much like Haladir's from what I can tell. It's actually probably closer to yours, I just don't find d20 particularly useful for it. My preference is to not think of my character's actions in terms of mechanics, but simply in terms of what the character wants to try. I find this doesn't work well in 3.x or in PF for me.

Because, other than a few, relatively trivial things, I don't find d20 particularly simulationist.

The way I see it, the system's core is very well simulationist based on the real world, then extended out to cover all the way up to demigods, but so many assume that high level play is meant to be attainable by characters of real world ability, that they never catch on to how the numbers match the real world.

But examine the little bits that most people ignore, such as the environmental effects. These are where the simulation is. For example, in d20 dnd 3e, you can last around 1.5 days without water, and around 5 days without food. Of course, that is a bit short and assumes lvl 1 commoner, but also just kills you shortly after going unconscious which can easily be taken as a gameplay factor since you'd be relying on someone finding you and helping you at that point, which means either the gm says you got found in time or not, so no point worrying about how long you lay there sleeping before you actually die. Air is pretty good, giving you around 2-3 minutes. Granted that assumes...

But if you ignore combat, you're only looking at tiny part of the system. "the little bits that most people ignore." Which does not mean that we ignore everything but combat, but that the examples you keep pointing out are edge cases that are not only a small part of the rules text, but also just don't come up that often even in the non-combat parts of the game.

Even so, half the examples are flawed enough you have to use variant rules to make them close to "casually simulationist" or add on entire house rules to do so. Any system that allows rolls vs a target and/or opposed rolls would work just as well for your haggle system. This isn't a unique feature of d20.

Basically there are a handful of features in edges of the d20 rules that tie into real world numbers (often in a very handwavy fashion) and you (and the Alexandrian) have extrapolated that into the whole rest of the system - and then somehow concluded that other systems don't do this.

[Interesting Character]

Quote:

Even so, half the examples are flawed enough you have to use variant rules to make them close to "casually simulationist" or add on entire house rules to do so.

No you don't, you just have to stop expecting all lvls 1-20 to be a fit for all games.

Quote:

Any system that allows rolls vs a target and/or opposed rolls would work just as well for your haggle system.

This is also wrong. Take Savage Worlds for example, every roll is to beat the target number 4, always four. A character's chances of success are altered by changing the die size, or getting additional rolls, but the number 4 is meaningless to the narrative.

Gurps and Rolemaster are similar and might be bent into this, but they are also more limited in scope, harder to use, and feel far more complex. But they are roll under (gurps) and percentiles (rolemaster), so the dice is still about success chance and not directly related to the narrative world.

Let me put it like this, in d20 a lock that barely rates as masterful construction is DC 20, always DC 20. It doesn't matter who is trying to pick it, it is DC 20. Some newb that never picked a lock before, DC 20, a master locksmith that has been picking locks for 500 years, still DC 20. In other systems, the DC is either always the same (like SW's always DC 4), is based on an arbitrary concept of how challenging the task is for the character (like easy is DC 2, hard is DC 6), or is based on the character (like roll under stat). None of them have the DC directly reflect the narrative world separate, objectively, and distinct from the character making the attempt. That is what makes d20 truly simulationist, and that is what separates d20 from other crunchy "simulationist" systems like gurps and rolemaster. And d20 has this trait, no matter how well or poorly it uses it.

[thejeff]

Interesting Character wrote:

Quote:

Even so, half the examples are flawed enough you have to use variant rules to make them close to "casually simulationist" or add on entire house rules to do so.

No you don't, you just have to stop expecting all lvls 1-20 to be a fit for all games.

No it doesn't. It has nothing to do with that. So completely off I wonder if you're even reading the posts you reply to.

I'm talking about things like using 3d6 instead of a d20 so the probability and range come somewhat closer to reality or patching opposed roll contests onto binary success rules (like your sword crafting contest).

Interesting Character wrote:

Quote:

Any system that allows rolls vs a target and/or opposed rolls would work just as well for your haggle system.

This is also wrong. Take Savage Worlds for example, every roll is to beat the target number 4, always four. A character's chances of success are altered by changing the die size, or getting additional rolls, but the number 4 is meaningless to the narrative.

Gurps and Rolemaster are similar and might be bent into this, but they are also more limited in scope, harder to use, and feel far more complex. But they are roll under (gurps) and percentiles (rolemaster), so the dice is still about success chance and not directly related to the narrative world.

Let me put it like this, in d20 a lock that barely rates as masterful construction is DC 20, always DC 20. It doesn't matter who is trying to pick it, it is DC 20. Some newb that never picked a lock before, DC 20, a master locksmith that has been picking locks for 500 years, still DC 20. In other systems, the DC is either always the same (like SW's always DC 4), is based on an arbitrary concept of how challenging the task is for the character (like easy is DC 2, hard is DC 6), or is based on the character (like roll under stat). None of them have the DC directly reflect the narrative world separate, objectively, and distinct from the character making the attempt. That is what makes d20 truly simulationist, and that is what separates d20 from other crunchy "simulationist" systems like gurps and rolemaster. And d20 has this trait, no matter how well or poorly it uses it.

In GURPS at least differences in difficulty are represented by modifiers to the roll. This is mechanically equivalent to using a higher DC for harder tasks. If a masterful lock in d20 is a DC of 20, the same lock in GURPS might have a penalty of 4. Mechanically this gives you the same simulationist trait. "d20+skill under target" is no differentthan "d20-target under skill". A little more awkward maybe, but it represents the world no differently.

Still, this is the most coherent explanation of what part of d20 you're talking about and why you think it's special, so I guess that's progress. You're wrong about how other systems work and it still isn't reflected in much of actually playing a D20 game, but it's still a bit of progress.

[Interesting Character]

Quote:

I'm talking about things like using 3d6 instead of a d20 so the probability and range come somewhat closer to reality

Lol, okay, but as I said, some aspects are accepted that reduce the simulation's accuracy to improve other things, such as to be more fun. Now, 3d6 is an official variant and makes things more accurate, but at the expense of making extreme results rarer and those extreme results are more fun.

However, like how I ended my last post, it isn't the level of accuracy that makes it simulationist, but we'll get to that further down.

Quote:

or patching opposed roll contests onto binary success rules (like your sword crafting contest).

My point was in part about the ease with which one can add such patches when they are needed/desired. How easy you can patch something is important, especially if consistancy is a goal as well.

Quote:

In GURPS at least differences in difficulty are represented by modifiers to the roll. This is mechanically equivalent to using a higher DC for harder tasks. If a masterful lock in d20 is a DC of 20, the same lock in GURPS might have a penalty of 4. Mechanically this gives you the same simulationist trait. "d20+skill under target" is no differentthan "d20-target under skill". A little more awkward maybe, but it represents the world no differently.

Ah, something easy to refute here.

I will address what you sort of did right. Mod the roll vs mod the dc is generally the same functionally, but there are two considerations that muck up the works in this regard. First is a trait that matters extensively to the concept, and that is the perception of the modifier. For example, WoW's rest experience started off as a penalty which was hated so they flipped the math and called it a bonus, which was met with joy even though the mathematical result was identical. The presentation is very important and whether you mod the roll or the dc can sometimes have a big impact on the presentation.

Second, gurps can not handle what d20 does because gurps is a roll under stat, it therefore can not translate directly to the world, the result of a check can not be given objective meaning.

Consider a group of characters, an awkwardly incompetent kid, next an olympian in their field, then a werewolf, then superman, then an avatar of a god. D20 can handle all of them at the same time and still be simulationist, and do it smoothly and easily. Gurps can't because while you bend things to accomplish this, it would be so fundamentally against the design that actual gameplay breaks down and anything outside the intended scope will feel awkward and janky to try to play even if you could do it by technicality.

D20 however can scale indefinitely, you could have a modifier of 4*10^432 and the mechanics still work, might be ridiculous and no longer fun but the mechanics would still work without being bent or janky. D20 can easily handle the real world incompetent beside superman, smoothly and without breaking.

One must consider two ranges for results, the range of the random element and the range of the random element plus modifiers. D20 easily handles having the random element range being significantly smaller than the random+mods, but Gurps only works well when mods are smaller than the random range.

[thejeff]

Interesting Character wrote:

Ah, something easy to refute here.

I will address what you sort of did right. Mod the roll vs mod the dc is generally the same functionally, but there are two considerations that muck up the works in this regard. First is a trait that matters extensively to the concept, and that is the perception of the modifier. For example, WoW's rest experience started off as a penalty which was hated so they flipped the math and called it a bonus, which was met with joy even though the mathematical result was identical. The presentation is very important and whether you mod the roll or the dc can sometimes have a big impact on the presentation.
Second, gurps can not handle what d20 does because gurps is a roll under stat, it therefore can not translate directly to the world, the result of a check can not be given objective meaning.

Consider a group of characters, an awkwardly incompetent kid, next an olympian in their field, then a werewolf, then superman, then an avatar of a god. D20 can handle all of them at the same time and still be simulationist, and do it smoothly and easily. Gurps can't because while you bend things to accomplish this, it would be so fundamentally against the design that actual gameplay breaks down and anything outside the intended scope will feel awkward and janky to try to play even if you could do it by technicality.

D20 however can scale indefinitely, you could have a modifier of 4*10^432 and the mechanics still work, might be ridiculous and no longer fun but the mechanics would still work without being bent or janky. D20 can easily handle the real world incompetent beside superman, smoothly and without breaking.

One must consider two ranges for results, the range of the random element and the range of the random element plus modifiers. D20 easily handles having the random element range being significantly smaller than the random+mods, but Gurps only works well when mods are smaller than the random range.

I can agree with the perception argument.

But the math is the same. skill check in d20: D20+skill > DC which is equivalent to d20 > DC-skill
Skill check in Gurps: 3d6 < skill-modifier.
The actual numbers differ, since the sign is reversed, but other than that it doesn't matter. If there's a modifier of 4*10^432, that's fine. I subtract that from my skill and if the result is less than 3, I auto fail. If it's greater than 18, I auto succeed and if it's in between I see if I roll under it.
Similarly with d20: I can do the math first and then roll, except here a subtract my skill from the DC and see if I can roll the result on a d20.

Roll under your stat of 510 with a penalty of 500 is exactly the same as roll over 520 with a +510 bonus.

And no, neither system handles that group of characters well, since in any system most of them will auto fail or auto succeed at everything while only the one or two in the middle where a particular task is aimed will have to roll. That's not really a system problem though.
Gurps does actually work just fine for most of that range - I've played it with superheroes, with heroic fantasy and with normal jamokes. It's got flaws as a system, but scaling to different power levels isn't one of them.

[Mark Hoover 330]

… what?

I'm in the same boat as Haladir: I'm at post 180 and I have no idea what we're talking about except for the vague notion that the d20 system is on many levels superior to other systems.

I don't know how anyone could ever posit such a debate. Other systems exist. Those other systems, mechanically, do some things better and some things worse. That's WHY there's other systems.

However its ever a matter, in anyone's posts in this thread that they "believe" something or "feel" a certain way about any different game system, this inherently makes it an opinion and thus not subject to debate or a burden of proof.

Some in this thread might believe that D20 games are great, for whatever reasons. Others might feel that other systems are just as good or better. You're ALL correct.

As far as how this relates, as in the title of the thread, to recruiting or retaining players... that's subjective, based on your players' opinions as well.

I got 2 kids and one loves black licorice. Like, are you kidding me? But whatever; just cuz she's a fan of one of the least-enjoyed flavors of licorice these days, that doesn't mean Twizzlers are superior. If I want my older daughter to keep coming back to the candy bowl I have to throw in some black licorice once in a while.

Beyond this extremely simplified version of what's happening in this thread, what am I missing that DOESN'T boil down to some people like d20 b/c reasons, and others don't or like it less b/c other reasons?

[thejeff]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

… what?

I'm in the same boat as Haladir: I'm at post 180 and I have no idea what we're talking about except for the vague notion that the d20 system is on many levels superior to other systems.

I don't know how anyone could ever posit such a debate. Other systems exist. Those other systems, mechanically, do some things better and some things worse. That's WHY there's other systems.

However its ever a matter, in anyone's posts in this thread that they "believe" something or "feel" a certain way about any different game system, this inherently makes it an opinion and thus not subject to debate or a burden of proof.

Some in this thread might believe that D20 games are great, for whatever reasons. Others might feel that other systems are just as good or better. You're ALL correct.

As far as how this relates, as in the title of the thread, to recruiting or retaining players... that's subjective, based on your players' opinions as well.

I got 2 kids and one loves black licorice. Like, are you kidding me? But whatever; just cuz she's a fan of one of the least-enjoyed flavors of licorice these days, that doesn't mean Twizzlers are superior. If I want my older daughter to keep coming back to the candy bowl I have to throw in some black licorice once in a while.

Beyond this extremely simplified version of what's happening in this thread, what am I missing that DOESN'T boil down to some people like d20 b/c reasons, and others don't or like it less b/c other reasons?

You're missing that the Alexandrian is the one word of truth and that it's not really the d20 system but the "core" d20 system, with house rules.

Honestly, I don't dislike d20, I just don't see it as the be-all and end-all of systems, even for the style of play he's advocating.

And black licorice is tasty.

[Mark Hoover 330]

Ok thejeff The Killer, now it's you, my daughter and my late mother who are the only humans I've ever known for the black licorice. I'm sure there's more of you, like a support network somewhere, but you three are the only ones I know.

The Alexandrian blog posts... aren't they, like, 15 years old now? I vaguely remember seeing stuff about megadungeon design there back in 2011 and at the time it was already a bit old and dated.

Lookit, the bottom line is that the D20 system is a good, solid base to build games in a lot of genres on. So's GURPs; so's 5e D&D, or Savage Worlds, or heck, even my second fave-rave, Marvel Super Heroes! You could grab an old 1e Rifts book from Palladium and, with a bit of tweaking (in my opinion) on megadamage you'd have a great any-kind-of-game system there too.

Do they all have mechanical flaws? Certainly - there is no perfect game system, which is why there's SO MANY GAME SYSTEMS out there to choose from!

If anyone in this thread is trying to tell me that purely using the D20 system is the ideal game engine, I'd point you to D&D 3x. It spawned 3.5 which in turn earned Pathfinder 1e. None of these were perfect games, and all were built with the d20 system as their nougaty core.

If you're prefacing any of your logical, factual arguments with "I believe", "I feel", "I think" and so on, then you're talking about your opinion on the matter and you're 100% right. For you.

[Freehold DM]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

Ok thejeff The Killer, now it's you, my daughter and my late mother who are the only humans I've ever known for the black licorice. I'm sure there's more of you, like a support network somewhere, but you three are the only ones I know.

The Alexandrian blog posts... aren't they, like, 15 years old now? I vaguely remember seeing stuff about megadungeon design there back in 2011 and at the time it was already a bit old and dated.

Lookit, the bottom line is that the D20 system is a good, solid base to build games in a lot of genres on. So's GURPs; so's 5e D&D, or Savage Worlds, or heck, even my second fave-rave, Marvel Super Heroes! You could grab an old 1e Rifts book from Palladium and, with a bit of tweaking (in my opinion) on megadamage you'd have a great any-kind-of-game system there too.

Do they all have mechanical flaws? Certainly - there is no perfect game system, which is why there's SO MANY GAME SYSTEMS out there to choose from!

If anyone in this thread is trying to tell me that purely using the D20 system is the ideal game engine, I'd point you to D&D 3x. It spawned 3.5 which in turn earned Pathfinder 1e. None of these were perfect games, and all were built with the d20 system as their nougaty core.

If you're prefacing any of your logical, factual arguments with "I believe", "I feel", "I think" and so on, then you're talking about your opinion on the matter and you're 100% right. For you.

I love licorice.

And I love d20 with house rules.

I maintain that Paizo should have perfected the ruleset before moving on the 2nd edition, and wotc/Hasbro/whomever has a system based on a mechanic that they invented.

[Planpanther]

Not a fan of black licorice, but I do love me some Ouzo. I think the OP wants an old school rulings over rules feel to their game, while having a consistent rule system that D20 offers. If that is correct, how does the OP succinctly say that to attract the best type of players to their table?

[Haladir]

Re: Licorice: I'm quite a fan of absinthe!

[CrystalSeas]

Salted licorice.

Dutch salted licorice in particular.

[Freehold DM]

Haladir wrote:

Re: Licorice: I'm quite a fan of absinthe!

Let's go out and chase the green fairy!

[World's most interesting Pan]

Now I want a Sazerac.

[Haladir]

Freehold DM wrote:

Haladir wrote:

Re: Licorice: I'm quite a fan of absinthe!

Let's go out and chase the green fairy!

Hell to the yeah!

[Freehold DM]

I FOUND AN ABSINTHE BUDDY!

[Interesting Character]

Planpanther wrote:

Not a fan of black licorice, but I do love me some Ouzo. I think the OP wants an old school rulings over rules feel to their game, while having a consistent rule system that D20 offers. If that is correct, how does the OP succinctly say that to attract the best type of players to their table?

That is mostly true, but there is also one specific trait that d20 has that I haven't seen in other games and one trait that remains largely misunderstood or unnoticed and I rarely see in other games.

The first trait is the two way mainly objective translation between dice and the narrative milieu. Yes the jump example is old at this point but it is the most easily understood. Not only can the world milieu be easily translated into a DC for a jump check, but the jump check result can just as easily be translated into jump distance. Other games boil this down into vague categories of success and and can't be translated directly instead leaving it to the gm or player to decide what the result means in terms of how far they jumped.

The second trait is the scaling. D20 smoothly scales from real world commoner level of power to demigods and beyond. Others systems focus on a small range and style of power, for example superhero games can do supers well, but not normal commoner people, and a noir game can do gritty mostly real world people but not superheroes. D20 can do the whole range inherently and smoothly scale, and does not need to change the meaning of DCs to achieve it nor make a separate booklet to adjust things to the desired scale.

Random People paraphrase wrote:

Someone says d20 is bestest ever!

I am not saying this and never have. Not sure why everyone thinks this when they pop in. I'm talking about specific traits that d20 does that I don't see elsewhere and a style of play in which those traits are the main reason for using a system at all and thus why other system fail for that style of play. That is very little opinion and mostly fact.

Whether said style is better, well that is an opinion, as is my belief that experiencing multiple styles instead of playing thirty systems in one style is better for most individuals and the community at large as it promotes exploration of the what can be done with rpgs in a direction orthogonal to the current concept of rpg.

[Interesting Character]

Quote:

You're missing that the Alexandrian is the one word of truth and that it's not really the d20 system but the "core" d20 system,

Not true, but Alexandrian is the only person who has written anything along the lines of the style I'm trying to present.

Also, there is a difference between the mechanics of a system and the player options of a system, and most people don't understand that difference.

Quote:

Roll under your stat of 510 with a penalty of 500 is exactly the same as roll over 520 with a +510 bonus.

There is one line in the post this was responding to that I thought I deleted, (probably got put back in from pasting something). Numerically, this seems true, but how you use the result is seriously impacted and becomes subjective because the specific result now depends on your stat instead of an objective scale. For example, rolling an 8 vs stat of 12 is a magnitude of 4, but rolling an 8 vs a stat of 14 is a magnitude of 6, so if jumping 20' is a dc 15, well that result you need to beat depends on your stat, thus 8 can not be used to objectively mean anything. Unlike in d20, where 8 as a result can indeed be objective.

[Mark Hoover 330]

Interesting Character wrote:

Planpanther wrote:

Not a fan of black licorice, but I do love me some Ouzo. I think the OP wants an old school rulings over rules feel to their game, while having a consistent rule system that D20 offers. If that is correct, how does the OP succinctly say that to attract the best type of players to their table?

That is mostly true, but there is also one specific trait that d20 has that I haven't seen in other games and one trait that remains largely misunderstood or unnoticed and I rarely see in other games.

The first trait is the two way mainly objective translation between dice and the narrative milieu. Yes the jump example is old at this point but it is the most easily understood. Not only can the world milieu be easily translated into a DC for a jump check, but the jump check result can just as easily be translated into jump distance. Other games boil this down into vague categories of success and and can't be translated directly instead leaving it to the gm or player to decide what the result means in terms of how far they jumped.

The second trait is the scaling. D20 smoothly scales from real world commoner level of power to demigods and beyond. Others systems focus on a small range and style of power, for example superhero games can do supers well, but not normal commoner people...

Well, in Advanced Marvel Super Heroes a "common person" would have Typical or less on all their 7 stats, no powers, one Talent and maybe some Contacts. Within the system, this block translates pretty well to being able to do only "typical" things like run for a few blocks to a mile, drive cars, shoot guns, and so on.

Also, you talk about the translation between dice and the narrative milieu. With that wording and the example you give, I'm guessing you are referring to the fact that a dice roll can easily approximate things in the really real world we all live in. Two things:

1. Some systems are specifically designed as an escape from the Real - if that's not your jam, cool, but that doesn't mean that the d20 system is unique in either it's approach to fantasy or reality

2. D20 isn't the first game engine to try and bring gritty realism to a die roll. GURPS is an acronym that stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System. They do, with 3d6, what D20 does with, well, a D20.

There are a LOT of games out there. Some of them were universal character build games with tons of rules and a decent approximation of the real world before D20 came along (GURPS, Palladium games, Rolemaster supplements). The D20 engine is another way of doing the same thing. It has flaws and merits.

Quote:

I'm talking about specific traits that d20 does that I don't see elsewhere and a style of play in which those traits are the main reason for using a system at all and thus why other system fail for that style of play. That is very little opinion and mostly fact.

I bolded those bits to show you that this is one hundred percent your opinion. STYLE of play is entirely dependent on the people assembled at the table. STYLE of play is subjective. STYLE of play is not mandated by the rules.

Look at Monopoly. There are houserules that lots of families in the US have played with for so long they are assumed as part of the ruleset. These houserules a deviation from the main rules, based on a personal preference from someone decades ago and they just stuck around. The STYLE with which people play Monopoly is not dependent on the rules of the game, but what the assembled players perceive as the best way of getting through the game.

The D20 system doesn't mandate a single STYLE of play. It mandates that you use a D20 to resolve conflicts, alongside other rules. GURPS mandates you use 3d6; Palladium mandates you use Percentile dice. All three have subsets of rules that do a decent job at approximating real life. All three ALSO can be adapted for noir/super spy games, dark fantasy or horror, high magical fantasy, mega tech, super heroes, or a mix of these genres.

The STYLE of play in any of these game engines will be determined by the folks sitting down to the table. When they do, they will be asserting their OWN will on the game engine they've chosen. This will be a subjective act, specific to them. In other words, the assembled group playing the game will form an opinion of HOW the game engine should be used and play accordingly.

Style = opinion. It is that simple.

Now some games are genre-cyclopean. Call of C'Thulu couldn't easily accommodate a group of cape-wearing super heroes flying around, beating up cultists. Similarly, I don't think Runequest 1e was built for the Cyberpunk crowd. However, you don't pick up those games unless you're interested in the genre they portray.

D20, Gurps, Palladium and probably multiple others that Haladir is WAY better at expounding on can handle lots of different genres. If that's what you're down for, go off then. But the STYLE that you ultimately bring to the table in those games is your own, not a mandate from the game.

And if I've once again missed the point of this thread then I guess I'm just not real good at reading.

[thejeff]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

Interesting Character wrote:

I'm talking about specific traits that d20 does that I don't see elsewhere and a style of play in which those traits are the main reason for using a system at all and thus why other system fail for that style of play. That is very little opinion and mostly fact.

I bolded those bits to show you that this is one hundred percent your opinion. STYLE of play is entirely dependent on the people assembled at the table. STYLE of play is subjective. STYLE of play is not mandated by the rules.

Look at Monopoly. There are houserules that lots of families in the US have played with for so long they are assumed as part of the ruleset. These houserules a deviation from the main rules, based on a personal preference from someone decades ago and they just stuck around. The STYLE with which people play Monopoly is not dependent on the rules of the game, but what the assembled players perceive as the best way of getting through the game.

The D20 system doesn't mandate a single STYLE of play. It mandates that you use a D20 to resolve conflicts, alongside other rules. GURPS mandates you use 3d6; Palladium mandates you use Percentile dice. All three have subsets of rules that do a decent job at approximating real life. All three ALSO can be adapted for noir/super spy games, dark fantasy or horror, high magical fantasy, mega tech, super heroes, or a mix of these genres.

The STYLE of play in any of these game engines will be determined by the folks sitting down to the table. When they do, they will be asserting their OWN will on the game engine they've chosen. This will be a subjective act, specific to them. In other words, the assembled group playing the game will form an opinion of HOW the game engine should be used and play accordingly.

Style = opinion. It is that simple.

I will quibble with this though. Style of play is partly driven by the people at the table, but system has a big effect on it too. Different systems don't mandate specific styles, that's true. Not everyone playing a given game plays in the same style. But at the same time systems encourage styles - The same group playing in different systems generally play in very different styles.

Even games aimed at the same genre like 5E and PF wind up playing differently. A group very set in one style can try to force the other system to adapt, but that generally leads to frustration. Generally it works best to shift towards the game, while keeping something of your own group's spin.

[Mark Hoover 330]

Games will play differently from one another, of course. The Zombicide board game feels a bit different from the Descent board game, even though they're board maps with hazards and monsters you gotta grind through, while acquiring useful items, in order to achieve a scenario goal.

However, and I know how nit-picky this sounds... the CHOICE to use every rule in a game or diverge from those rules is personal, its subjective. If a TTRPG has 5 rules or 500, the folks at the table can choose to use them or not. So while PF 1e versus Dungeon World have a different feel in and among themselves, 2 games of PF 1e will have 2 completely different STYLES, based on the players and GMs involved.

Now, if by "style" you're saying the feel of the game itself I agree - this will be dependent on the game engine used.

When I say "style" in my post above, I'm specifically referencing PLAY style; the way that the assembled players utilize the rules of a given game engine in order to gain their personal satisfaction with that game. That's why I suggest this is 100% opinion.

I gotta get better at defining my terms first before making blanket statements... :o

[Interesting Character]

Style is a bit like genre, there are subjective elements and objective elements. You might quibble over whether a film is a romcom or not, but whether a film is animation is totally objective.

When it comes to rpgs, if I need a system to do X, then all sysyems can be lumped into three objective groups, 1) those that inherently do X, 2) those that can be tweaked easily or with difficulty to do X, and 3) those that can not do X witjout fundamentally breaking the system.

At the moment, for the style I've been trying to describe, d20 is the only system in group 1, while gurps is in group 2, savage worlds is in group 3.

Most players and thus systems are about metaphorically playing live action, while I'm trying to encourage more metaphorical animation.

Also, I already said what d20 does that gurps does not do.

[Quark Blast]

Interesting Character wrote:

Style is a bit like genre, there are subjective elements and objective elements. You might quibble over whether a film is a romcom or not, but whether a film is animation is totally objective.

Three words:

A Scanner Darkly

Boom!
:D

[Interesting Character]

Quark Blast wrote:

Interesting Character wrote:

Style is a bit like genre, there are subjective elements and objective elements. You might quibble over whether a film is a romcom or not, but whether a film is animation is totally objective.

Three words:

A Scanner Darkly

Boom!
:D

Tue ugliest animation I ever saw. The suits were a neat trick but I couldn't finish the movie, it was just that terrible (in my opinion of course).

Still, it was animation. They may have done some really complex methods to get that animation, but it is still animation.