The Five Worst Ideas in Role-Playing Gaming

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That may not be your kind of enjoyment. But perhaps it makes a little more sense that "getting to play a really dramatic scene" could be a source of pleasure for some people?

I've had those same type of scenes in my games as we've discussed before, always giving the players the option of cutting to black when they get too graphic, which some groups opt for vs. others, but roleplaying dramatic scenes has nothing to do with point value at all.

I know you're not saying that you need to play 25 point rat-catchers in order to have dramatic scenes, in fact I'm sure you'll agree that having rich and varied characters means we have richer and more varied opportunities for dramatic scenes.


As I said, I don't find playing 25 point useless characters to have any redeeming value and in my personal opinion people who go on and on about playing such low point settings are generally simply displaying a poser mentality about dramatic scenes and not any actual ability to play such scenes.

In other words, not being capable of true roleplaying excellence these posers run low point characters as if that somehow demonstrated some roleplaying excellence, but in reality they're just irritating posers who couldn't roleplay themselves out of a paper bag.


Worst idea in RPGs - equating drama with low point loser characters.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

In other words, not being capable of true roleplaying excellence these posers run low point characters as if that somehow demonstrated some roleplaying excellence, but in reality they're just irritating posers who couldn't roleplay themselves out of a paper bag.

You know, I'd judge that not by the point value of the characters people chose to play, but by the attitude they took about playing them.

That said, I don't really know much about people playing low point characters. I mostly don't offer that option, and my players mostly favor playing in fantastic campaigns where their characters are at least somewhat impressive: mages, supers, skilled fencers. Even in my Call of Cthulhu campaign, the PCs included some fairly talented people . . . though the combat monster of that campaign was a black granny midwife who carried a sawed-off shotgun in her black bag. I think that rpgs tend to what Northrop Frye calls the romantic and high mimetic modes, where the characters have somewhat more freedom of action than ordinary people; most people play characters who have more interesting choices to make than they have in their own lives.

Bill Stoddard

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

The other is to use more sophisticated arithmetics.

Honestly, I can't see how that helps. If there are two routes to increasing a final value (increase an attribute or increase a skill) and I can write equations linking all the final values I care about to points spent on attributes and skills, I can find the necessary derivatives to mini-max.

Just about the worst thing an RPG designer can do, with synergy between inborn talent and acquired ability, is to divide inborn talent into only two categories, e.g. physical inborn talent and mental inborn talent. That constitutes asking for trouble.

This works better, but in the limit leads you back to the first solution - that is you end up with one talent per skill, at which point the distinction between talent and skill is unnecessary.

Personally I don't see anything wrong with that. It may feel a little odd not to have a connection between attributes and skills that seem related, but there's no particular reason the game system has to automatically generate that link, you could just as well blame the players for not designing characters with a sensible relationship between, say, Dexterity and Lockpicking as blame the game system for not forcing them to.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I think that rpgs tend to what Northrop Frye calls the romantic and high mimetic modes, where the characters have somewhat more freedom of action than ordinary people; most people play characters who have more interesting choices to make than they have in their own lives.

I think he was referring specifically to Warhammer in which starting characters have a randomly rolled starting profession which includes such romantic options as ratcatcher (is there a village idiot profession I wonder, and if not, why not?). Said characters seem to have a less than 10% chance of performing any given adventuring task, at least in the few times I've been cajoled into attempting to play.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

As I said, I don't find playing 25 point useless characters to have any redeeming value and in my personal opinion people who go on and on about playing such low point settings are generally simply displaying a poser mentality about dramatic scenes and not any actual ability to play such scenes.[/I]

I usually run games starting in the 150-250 range, but running a campaign where the PCs are 25-point average folk caught up in events much larger than themselves, and having to deal with such things, could be interesting. Not "more" or "less" interesting, but interesting.

[RevBob]

One of the games I've wanted to run for a few years now involves deliberately starting the PCs as average people who witness something important. The only option the big They have is to recruit them into a secret world that the PCs are not only unprepared for, but not competent in.

I envision Phase One of the game as an IOU campaign, where the PCs are sent there both to learn how weird the world really is and in hopes Something will happen to make them more useful to Them. Alternating between silly, strange, and horrific, this is a way to transform the PCs into agents of some sort. Maybe supers, maybe black ops, maybe some other option. Point rewards and powerups will be generous; after all, that's the POINT.

When they graduate, Phase Two starts, in which they become field agents. The powerups and point rewards become much more typical, and the world becomes less silly...it is, after all, a version of our world, which is often stupid but seldom silly. The concept here is much less clearly defined, as so much of it will depend on what happens at IOU; a covert supers game is much different from an X-Files campaign.

I'd really like to see how the first part of the saga plays out, as average people take those first steps into a wider world. That has its own epic value, but IMO we don't see enough of it in gaming. There's a distinct tendency to start a character off already competent, thus depriving everybody of the fun of MAKING him competent. It's part of what I like about the TV show "Chuck" - and "Jake 2.0" and "Buffy" before it. By joining the Hero's Journey a few years in, you just miss so much...

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

What if you were running a useless rat-catcher, everyone else was playing useless rat-cathcers and dumpster divers and the most you'd accomplish was becoming known as one of the best rat-catchers in your dump?

Ever play Aftermath? As Andy Slack put it in White Dwarf 34, "I found it a depressing game. You can actually see yourself crouching in the radiation-blasted rubble of Stoke-on-Trent (or wherever), fighting another survivor to the death over a can of rotten dogfood 20 years old."

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I think he was referring specifically to Warhammer in which starting characters have a randomly rolled starting profession which includes such romantic options as ratcatcher (is there a village idiot profession I wonder, and if not, why not?). Said characters seem to have a less than 10% chance of performing any given adventuring task, at least in the few times I've been cajoled into attempting to play.

Sounds like a clash of 'Play to Win' vs. 'Play to Play' philosophies.

[pnewman]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Sounds like a clash of 'Play to Win' vs. 'Play to Play' philosophies.

Not really, it's more of a question of Warhammer FRP failing as a simulation, and ruining willing suspension of disbelief. In WHFRP (1st/2nd ed) starting human average for a stat is about 31. Thus an average person doing an average task that they're trained in has a 69% chance of failure. Task difficulty is modified by arithmatic modifiers, thus an easier task might give a +10% and a very easy task might give a +20% modifier.

Thus in Warhammer your typical blacksmith might have a 51% chance to make a nail and a 41% chance to make a horseshoe. Real blacksmiths don't fail to make nails 49% of the time. If they did they'd have been drummed out by their Master during apprenticeship. Asking the players to believe in magic and gods is one thing. Asking them to believe in nigh universal human incompetence is another thing.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by pnewman

Not really, it's more of a question of Warhammer FRP failing as a simulation, and ruining willing suspension of disbelief. In WHFRP (1st/2nd ed) starting human average for a stat is about 31. Thus an average person doing an average task that they're trained in has a 69% chance of failure. Task difficulty is modified by arithmatic modifiers, thus an easier task might give a +10% and a very easy task might give a +20% modifier.

Thus in Warhammer your typical blacksmith might have a 51% chance to make a nail and a 41% chance to make a horseshoe. Real blacksmiths don't fail to make nails 49% of the time. If they did they'd have been drummed out by their Master during apprenticeship. Asking the players to believe in magic and gods is one thing. Asking them to believe in nigh universal human incompetence is another thing.

Ah, so it's a failure of TDM scaling. Still, I stand as before with my comment in regards to the overall objection to low-powered PCs.