No More Massive Tomes of Rules

[Thomas Shey]

If you expect to climb, swim or sneak, those things will be covered by the rules. If that isn't part of the expected play activities, making a Fitness check (or whatever) should be sufficient.

I quite disagree. What happens when you fail the Fitness check when climbing? How many times do you have to make it when sneaking? Do multiple people have to make it separately, and what happens when some fail and some succeed?

It doesn't matter whether its "expected" it matters whether it will cover the ground when it comes up, and a simple check notoriously does a poor job of doing so in all three of those cases. You may argue that if its going to be rare enough offloading it on the GM is an acceptable cost for the space savings, but you shouldn't kid yourself that's what you're doing and you've increased the chance that the answers to the above questions the GM gives are fairly likely to produce dumb or otherwise bad outcomes.

Edit: To make it clear, there may, indeed be games where these situations are so rare that the space and cognitive overhead is not justified. I have to say given the two primary ones I listed (climbing and stealth) that they'd have to be extremely far off the beat path for typical adventure gaming, however.

 

[Celebrim]

Indeed. This is why I came up with the Quantum Enemy, which I now just call the Enemy Block.

Generic stat blocks that let you improvise a fully mechanized enemy, from lowly mooks to full on Boss level mobs, on the fly. They're not as bespoke as a dedicated stat block, but if the partys fighting something that never had a Stat block in the first place, well there you go.

They'll also pull double duty as a canvas for people to design their own bespoke Blocks without having to learn any convoluted math.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, and it's a really solid start to designing a system. Like, particularly if your planning your game to get so successful that you're going to end up being a brand manager and delegate writing out to contractors or employees, having that sort of core framework to say, "This is the math my game is balanced around" is so important.

I'm running WEG D6 Star Wars right now and it's so freaking obvious that the brand manager never established anything like baseline stat blocks and guidelines and there was no real oversight. It's ironic that the game system that became the world's most valuable IP's system bible itself had no system bible. So I'm being forced to redo virtually every stat block in the game and build all those basic design building blocks in order to have a coherent game, and it's annoying how much work it is.

But at the same time, any game that is featuring combat with monsters needs more than just stat blocks. Every monster combat is a narrative puzzle, and so every monster needs some sort of unique gimmick that goes beyond just stats. It could be a particularly nefarious combination of core abilities, or it could be some uniquely thought out ability that makes interacting with that monster memorable. And as a designer, you don't want to leave the creation of what makes your monsters fun up to the GMs that are purchasing your system, because there is a good chance many of them will fail that, your game won't be fun to that table, and you'll lose customers. So that's why designers write 100-1000 pages of monster manuals, even if the core underlying design of monsters fits on 1 to 10 pages.

 

[Swanosaurus]

IIRC, I called those two specific skills out as well so it sounds like you and I both have a lot of real world GMing experience.

[...]

But I'm not even really getting into the questions of how you really design a robust challenge resolution system. We can assume for these purposes that such a robust complete challenge resolution systems exists in about 30 pages of space. I'm not going to complicate the discussion by getting into even why that can be a bad idea.

I'm saying that you've barely begun to build a game at the point that you have some sort of generic fortune mechanic.

Okay, at this point, I don't even remotely understand what you're saying anymore or if you're saying anything at all ... I'll leave it at that you're obviously a very experienced GM and should continue with what you're doing, because it seems to work for you. As I will, however inferior and incomplete my attempts may be. Luckily, I'm in it to have fun, not to fulfill your standards of excellence.

 

[Emberashh]

But at the same time, any game that is featuring combat with monsters needs more than just stat blocks. Every monster combat is a narrative puzzle, and so every monster needs some sort of unique gimmick that goes beyond just stats. It could be a particularly nefarious combination of core abilities, or it could be some uniquely thought out ability that makes interacting with that monster memorable. And as a designer, you don't want to leave the creation of what makes your monsters fun up to the GMs that are purchasing your system, because there is a good chance many of them will fail that, your game won't be fun to that table, and you'll lose customers. So that's why designers write 100-1000 pages of monster manuals, even if the core underlying design of monsters fits on 1 to 10 pages.

Exactly what I was speaking to about not being bespoke. A proper stat block is about making a Dragon feel like an actual big damn Dragon.

The Enemy Block is about not losing mechanical depth just because some enemy got unexpectedly conjured into the gameworld by the game's sandbox and improv focus.

 

[Celebrim]

Exactly what I was speaking to about not being bespoke. A proper stat block is about making a Dragon feel like an actual big damn Dragon.

The Enemy Block is about not losing mechanical depth just because some enemy got unexpectedly conjured into the gameworld by the game's sandbox and improv focus.

Ok, we're on the same page then.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But at the same time, any game that is featuring combat with monsters needs more than just stat blocks. Every monster combat is a narrative puzzle, and so every monster needs some sort of unique gimmick that goes beyond just stats. It could be a particularly nefarious combination of core abilities, or it could be some uniquely thought out ability that makes interacting with that monster memorable. And as a designer, you don't want to leave the creation of what makes your monsters fun up to the GMs that are purchasing your system, because there is a good chance many of them will fail that, your game won't be fun to that table, and you'll lose customers. So that's why designers write 100-1000 pages of monster manuals, even if the core underlying design of monsters fits on 1 to 10 pages.

Well, a couple things here:

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.

2. I think you're using "stat block" a bit more narrowly than I commonly see it used, since that usually involves things beyond just a creature's attributes and skills.

 

[Reynard]

I quite disagree. What happens when you fail the Fitness check when climbing? How many times do you have to make it when sneaking? Do multiple people have to make it separately, and what happens when some fail and some succeed?

It doesn't matter whether its "expected" it matters whether it will cover the ground when it comes up, and a simple check notoriously does a poor job of doing so in all three of those cases. You may argue that if its going to be rare enough offloading it on the GM is an acceptable cost for the space savings, but you shouldn't kid yourself that's what you're doing and you've increased the chance that the answers to the above questions the GM gives are fairly likely to produce dumb or otherwise bad outcomes.

Edit: To make it clear, there may, indeed be games where these situations are so rare that the space and cognitive overhead is not justified. I have to say given the two primary ones I listed (climbing and stealth) that they'd have to be extremely far off the beat path for typical adventure gaming, however.

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.

 

[Celebrim]

Okay, at this point, I don't even remotely understand what you're saying anymore or if you're saying anything at all ... I'll leave it at that you're obviously a very experienced GM and should continue with what you're doing, because it seems to work for you. As I will, however inferior and incomplete my attempts may be. Luckily, I'm in it to have fun, not to fulfill your standards of excellence.

It's really weird interacting with you because right from the start you held this seemingly solid conviction that I didn't know what I was talking about and whatever opinion I had must be held in ignorance and that I might like what I know rather than knowing what I like.

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.

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?

If you are interested in this design problem, you might check out the writing of Luke Crane. He's not my favorite designer, but questions like this did inform the design of Burning Wheel, and so he's obviously thinking hard about these problems.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

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).

 

[Reynard]

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.

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?