No More Massive Tomes of Rules

[Celebrim]

1. "Needs" is a bit strong; it may be desirable in many cases but sometimes a lot of different opponent types aren't that varied other than the numbers. How much that bothers someone is in their particularly perspective.

How much bad design bothers anyone in a particular area is subjective, but it doesn't make it less bad design. It's just problems you can live with.

I really don't like generic monsters at all. You can sort of get away with it with very low challenge rating introductory monsters, and you see that in a lot of cRPG design, where they have generic monsters at first to get you used to the mechanics and then start making the monster problems more interesting as you go, but in general its bad design to have generic monsters in either a cRPG or a ttRPG. You need a gimmick. If you aren't bothered by the lack of gimmick, then ok that's fine. But it doesn't mean that the game isn't better designed when it is there.

 

[Pedantic]

I think when you use a genre/setting quite that specific and narrow, you're not proving much, since I still stand by my opinion that if any of those three do come up, a simple task result roll is going to most likely produce a really cruddy result. You're just accepting that cruddy result because the situation is so rare. But few games are going to have such a narrow range of expected actions they can do that without producing bad results more frequently than I think is at all reasonable. And the broader the potential use of the game is, the more true that is.

(Note: This is not saying absolutely everything needs that kind of expansion. But some things just do, and doing without so you can have a smaller game footprint is a false economy).

Right, full on climbing rules for your ER doctor game probably won't come up until your Vigilante Medic and/or Doctor Hobbies 4:The Outdoors supplements. Where you spend that effort is obviously a function of what's likely to actually come up in play, which is further usually a function of genre.

 

[Celebrim]

Right, full on climbing rules for your ER doctor game probably won't come up until your Vigilante Medic and/or Doctor Hobbies 4:The Outdoors supplements. Where you spend that effort is obviously a function of what's likely to actually come up in play, which is further usually a function of genre.

I watched a lot of Emergency! as a kid and I distinctly remember that at least two of the PCs spent time climbing up and down ladders as well as interacting with the characters in the ER.

 

[TiQuinn]

Let me try to explain what I'm talking about with climbing without using it as shorthand. Having some sort of generic athletic or climb check to ascend a wall works really well for short climbs of no more than say twice the height of a typical character. Yay, you got to the top pass/fail or with complications or swiftly as a critical success and everything is good. But this approach starts to lose its utility the more climbing something becomes an extended effort. If a PC proposes to climb a 500 meter cliff, then you've got very few good options as a GM if the only thing in your tool box is that generic athletics check using your core conflict resolution system. Climbing that cliff is an extended conflict of some sort, and whether you approach it as a single die check and just "roll with it" or whether you approached it as extended skill challenge there are problems and tradeoffs. Like if you make it a single die check, how far up the cliff did the climber get before failing and potentially falling to their doom? And does the fact that the climber though strong is Reginald the Short Winded famous for his lack of endurance play a role in the resolution? And if you do it in multiple rolls, are you making too many opportunities to fail, or can you sustain interest in the conflict resolution of you have to spend 50 rolls doing the climb as the core rules might suggest?

Been thinking about this a bit recently, and the way I’d probably approach this next time:

500 feet vs 10 feet - no difference if there’s no expected issue. If they fail, they fail immediately. No damage, they simply can’t get started up the wall with the current approach.

If it’s a challenge, what is the nature of the challenge? The wall is slippery? Loose rocks going to dislodge and fall on the party below? Create a single challenge the you use at the halfway point that the PCs must overcome. Depending how they approach the challenge affects the impact of failure.

Don’t require additional rolls past the one challenge unless it’s a different challenge altogether. Reason is if it’s a 100’ wall and you require a check every 10’ with failure being “you fall”, you’re discouraging the player from making any attempt. A single failure means falling while only 10 out of 10 means success.

Just my two cents.

 

[Emberashh]

Right, full on climbing rules for your ER doctor game probably won't come up until your Vigilante Medic and/or Doctor Hobbies 4:The Outdoors supplements. Where you spend that effort is obviously a function of what's likely to actually come up in play, which is further usually a function of genre.

Sure, so those two things are going to be covered by 95% of hypothetical game systems. But if you are playing a ER medical drama RPG, chances are there isn't going to be a detailed system for climbing and sneaking or swimming. But RPGs being RPGs and players being players, there is a nonzero chance that at some point in a campaign, one of those things comes up. That is what the underlying core mechanic and existing skills/whatever are there for.

That is a far cry from thinking every game needs an expansive list of granular subsystems for whatever things could possibly occur no matter how unlikely.

The thing I think about that example is that there isn't a situation in such a game's scope where any of those activities are something that'd be particularly challenging in any context you could end up in. It doesn't need mechanization because it just isn't important to any sort of story that'd emerge out of that context.

Surely players could go completely off the games expectations, but as the narrativist folk like to say, are you actually playing the game at that point or was it just an excuse to do the freeform improv you actually wanted to do?

You're there to basically be Grey's Anatomy or Scrubs. Why are you swimming, climbing, or sneaking around? Why is it difficult and what gameplay loop is it actually a part of?

You don't need stealth rules to overhear gossip, and thats the only thing of the three where I could even conceive of a possible reason to need rules.

 

[Swanosaurus]

But at the same time you keep confessing your lack of understanding as if the fact that you couldn't tell a battle rifle from a shotgun or your understanding of what a shotgun does based on the worst unrealistic tropes about how a shot gun functions was evidence that I was wrong about the need for rules.

You are not wrong about your need for rules. You are wrong about my need for rules.
Because I actually don't care about shotguns beyond the worst unrealistic tropes about how shotguns function, I have no need for a rule that produce believable shotgun results.
If you care about these things, I certainly won't begrudge you detailed rules, and I applaud you for using them to create a satisfactory experience for you and your players.

I certainly don't mean to say you seem clueless in any general way. But you do seem clueless to me about how different people can approach role-playing differently. And if someone says: "You know, I realized I'm fine with just a 100 pages, to me, everything beyond is just a burden", it is kind of rude to tell them that their preference is for something incomplete and deeply lacking that really couldn't stand the test of time and that therefore they must be deluding themselves if they're thinking it works for them.

 

[Celebrim]

Been thinking about this a bit recently, and the way I’d probably approach this next time:

500 feet vs 10 feet - no difference if there’s no expected issue. If they fail, they fail immediately. No damage, they simply can’t get started up the wall with the current approach.

If it’s a challenge, what is the nature of the challenge? The wall is slippery? Loose rocks going to dislodge and fall on the party below? Create a single challenge the you use at the halfway point that the PCs must overcome. Depending how they approach the challenge affects the impact of failure.

Don’t require additional rolls past the one challenge unless it’s a different challenge altogether. Reason is if it’s a 100’ wall and you require a check every 10’ with failure being “you fall”, you’re discouraging the player from making any attempt. A single failure means falling while only 10 out of 10 means success.

Just my two cents.

I mean, it's not an unreasonable approach. As I said, I don't think this is a problem with one right answer because everything is a tradeoff. What I do think is important is having more than one tool in your tool bag to fit the approach to the importance of the problem.

One of the tradeoffs you get with your approach is that it is reasonable and even likely that a person would fail at climbing a wall somewhere other than the bottom. It's convenient to protect a PC from the consequences of their failure, but depending on the goals of play that might not be the best resolution. There might really be fun in finding yourself in a situation where you need to make this die roll or die, even if there might not be as much fun or reasonableness in doing that 50 times in a row.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't understand your reasoning that it is going to produce a "cruddy result." Can you elaborate on what you mean by "cruddy" and explain why you think it will be so?

Celebrim actually did a pretty good example with climbing above. So let's do stealth.

Let's say your group of ER docs is trying to sneak into a warehouse because they know there's an injured fellow in there being held by criminals and he may die if they don't get to him (since presumably since its a medical drama RPG there's a lot of mechanics involving what happens if you don't get to people in time and various complications related to that, unless its entirely focused on the interpersonal elements).

Now, you've got three people trying to sneak across 50' of cluttered space to get to the back door of the warehouse, then get into the warehouse, all without being seen or making enough noise to attract attention.

Assuming you actually care enough to get dice involved in the first place (because if you don't, the question was moot right out the door), a bunch of questions your basic system isn't going to be set up for have to be asked. How many rolls are going to be needed? Do they each roll individually? What does a failure mean? Is there a recovery chance after failure, and does your system have any built in matter-of-degree that helps here? Is there any rolls involved on the other side?

There are a lot of ways the combination of answering those questions can go off the rails; its not an uncommon place for designs to produce really bad results, and that's in cases where someone hasn't had to make this kind of decision on the fly, with a core resolution method that isn't really designed by itself to handle it.

So, yeah, I think there's an awfully good change that the result will be pretty cruddy, and that's if someone is even trying to adapt the system to the matter at hand, let alone if they're just trying to do something quick and dirty with a single roll.

 

[overgeeked]

You are not wrong about your need for rules. You are wrong about my need for rules.
Because I actually don't care about shotguns beyond the worst unrealistic tropes about how shotguns function, I have no need for a rules that produce believable shogun results.
If you care about these things, I certainly won't begrudge you detailed rules, and I applaud you for using them to create a satisfactory experience for you and your players.

I certainly don't mean to say you seem clueless in any general way. But you do seem clueless to me about how different people can approach role-playing differently. And if someone says: "You know, I realized I'm fine with just a 100 pages, to me, everything beyond is just a burden", it is kind of rude to tell them that their preference is for something incomplete and deeply lacking that really couldn't stand the test of time and that therefore they must be deluding themselves if they're thinking it works for them.

Exactly.

"You don't get to like what you like, you must like what I like."

I've had a lot more fun with "eh, just make it up" than I ever have with massive rules tomes. If that bothers someone who's not at my table, that's their problem.

 

[Thomas Shey]

How much bad design bothers anyone in a particular area is subjective, but it doesn't make it less bad design. It's just problems you can live with.

But that's where you lose me. I don't think its bad design. Its just design that hasn't bothered to serve needs it doesn't expect its users to have.

Most mundane RuneQuest animals are a set of stats and skills and nothing more. Sometimes they may have a special attack form outside that. But that's about where it ends, and I rarely saw anyone bothered by that. That wasn't just something they could live with; it was something where anything beyond it would have been pointless.

I really don't like generic monsters at all. You can sort of get away with it with very low challenge rating introductory monsters, and you see that in a lot of cRPG design, where they have generic monsters at first to get you used to the mechanics and then start making the monster problems more interesting as you go, but in general its bad design to have generic monsters in either a cRPG or a ttRPG. You need a gimmick. If you aren't bothered by the lack of gimmick, then ok that's fine. But it doesn't mean that the game isn't better designed when it is there.

I think this still means you're assuming a set of needs that just isn't there a lot of time. Frankly, it kind of strikes me as a little D&D-centric as phrased, far as that goes.