Give me a mystery - but not too mysterious!

QuoteGive me a mystery - but not too mysterious!

Well yes indeed, unironically this.
By not too mysterious - I understand - I can plausibly suspect mystery is not here only to titilate readers and cover holes in worldbuilding.

Quote from: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 21, 2021, 04:54:12 PM
Well yes indeed, unironically this.
By not too mysterious - I understand - I can plausibly suspect mystery is not here only to titilate readers and cover holes in worldbuilding.

Another benefit to not definitively answering certain mysteries is that you also prevent unintentional metagaming (and also players getting themselves into pickles because they metagamed off something the GM changed from the usual canon).

One of the jokes I've heard about Forgotten Realms is that it's actual name is "The Fully Mapped Realm" since the years and years of material has left few, if any, mysteries or even places on the map that haven't been fleshed out. It is quite common in my experience for superfans of the Realms to end up referencing things that are supposedly deep secrets of the setting as if they were common knowledge because they were common knowledge to them.

Multiple-choice (and mutually exclusive) answers to various mysteries means the uninspired can still just pick something and yet the players won't know the truth selected any more than the PCs themselves would.

Gonna ignore the multiple walls of text and answer the question directly...

AD&D is my favorite edition, but followed closely by BECMI for nostalgic reasons; I think B/X might be a bit better overall. Oddly enough, I prefer to just run Advanced Labyrinth Lord now, or Castles and Crusades, depending on my mood (usually boiling down to ascending/descending AC).

I am currently playing in a 5th edition game after the inevitable TPK that occurred in a C&C/Castle Zagyg game I was running, but honestly it's too fucking fiddly for me. A LOT of things that I forgot annoyed me about 5th became very apparent, and I also realized nearly all of them were 3rd edition elements. I'll never run 5th again, but playing it...it's okay. I get to drink quite a bit more than when running, so it's tolerable.

I would happily play AD&D 2nd, and keep trying to convince the current DM to run that instead as that is his favorite edition. Gonna keep pushing the issue. I've never played 4th and gave the books away after a quick perusal. Pre-ordered, read through, gave away, maybe two weeks total of ownership. 100% pure trash. Should have been called "The Diablo Emulator RPG" or something. I'll also never play 3rd again, even though I own every single book published for it. Been considering selling them all, might free up some space for more OSR stuff.

Quote from: Brad on February 21, 2021, 07:48:12 PM
A LOT of things that I forgot annoyed me about 5th became very apparent, and I also realized nearly all of them were 3rd edition elements. I'll never run 5th again, but playing it...it's okay.

Yeah, I'm at the same place. But to riff off the popular mantra, I'm starting to wonder if no gaming is better than okay gaming.

Quote from: Aglondir on February 21, 2021, 08:12:45 PM

Quote from: Brad on February 21, 2021, 07:48:12 PM
A LOT of things that I forgot annoyed me about 5th became very apparent, and I also realized nearly all of them were 3rd edition elements. I'll never run 5th again, but playing it...it's okay.

Yeah, I'm at the same place. But to riff off the popular mantra, I'm starting to wonder if no gaming is better than okay gaming.

I'm friends with the group members, so that makes it okay. If it was just acquaintances I would never have played in the first place. Also they're not that serious about it, so again tolerable.

Quote from: ShieldWife on February 10, 2021, 02:39:56 PMAs for the particular issues you bring up, some of them are just making the rules simpler and more consistent.

Simple and consistent rules are always best, as is game balance. Chess would be so much better if all the pieces moved the same way. The queen is so overpowered, and pawns are just useless! All the pieces should be queens who can also move like knights.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on February 22, 2021, 03:51:24 AM
Simple and consistent rules are always best, as is game balance. Chess would be so much better if all the pieces moved the same way. The queen is so overpowered, and pawns are just useless! All the pieces should be queens who can also move like knights.

False analogy. The players of chess don't just control one piece.

Every piece with its unique moves comprises their options with the only difference between the other player being which side goes first and the position of the king and queen.

QuoteBut to riff off the popular mantra, I'm starting to wonder if no gaming is better than okay gaming.

Without lot of OK-experiences man rarely can achieve any excellent ones.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 22, 2021, 08:26:50 AM

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on February 22, 2021, 03:51:24 AM
Simple and consistent rules are always best, as is game balance. Chess would be so much better if all the pieces moved the same way. The queen is so overpowered, and pawns are just useless! All the pieces should be queens who can also move like knights.

False analogy. The players of chess don't just control one piece.

Every piece with its unique moves comprises their options with the only difference between the other player being which side goes first and the position of the king and queen.

Not really addressing either one of these statements except in an oblique way: the notion of a "unified mechanic" being superior to a set of disparate mechanics is 100% bullshit. In AD&D you roll initiative low on a d6, thief skills use d% under, and attack rolls are a high d20. In 3rd edition everything is a high d20. Which one is better? While I dislike 3rd now, it's perhaps EASIER to grasp at first, but the fiddly bits with the thief skills actually make the class feel mechanically different. So while you gain ease of immediate understanding you tend to lose some flavor. As with anything in life there's a trade-off, so you have to decide exactly what you're trying to achieve. The perfect game doesn't exist except as the ephemeral "fantasy heart-breaker" that nearly everyone who has run games for any length of time eventually tries to create.

This is probably why I waffle between AD&D and Castles and Crusades...I get enamored with the easier mechanics of C&C, but then end up missing some of the flavor provided by AD&D's opaqueness.

Quote from: Brad on February 22, 2021, 09:30:36 AM
Not really addressing either one of these statements except in an oblique way: the notion of a "unified mechanic" being superior to a set of disparate mechanics is 100% bullshit. In AD&D you roll initiative low on a d6, thief skills use d% under, and attack rolls are a high d20. In 3rd edition everything is a high d20. Which one is better? While I dislike 3rd now, it's perhaps EASIER to grasp at first, but the fiddly bits with the thief skills actually make the class feel mechanically different. So while you gain ease of immediate understanding you tend to lose some flavor. As with anything in life there's a trade-off, so you have to decide exactly what you're trying to achieve. The perfect game doesn't exist except as the ephemeral "fantasy heart-breaker" that nearly everyone who has run games for any length of time eventually tries to create.

This is probably why I waffle between AD&D and Castles and Crusades...I get enamored with the easier mechanics of C&C, but then end up missing some of the flavor provided by AD&D's opaqueness.

It's situational, except in the most ivory tower design examples.  Unified mechanics simply to have unified mechanics is a bad idea.  Different mechanics simply to make everything different is a bad idea.  Moreover, different mechanics modeling essentially the same thing is a bad idea.  Unified mechanics modeling essentially different things is a bad idea.

What makes it situational is that "essentially" the same or different in the model is where the design meets all kinds of issues, including handling time, feel, complexity limits, opportunity costs, etc.  For example, the secret door search mechanic is right for AD&D, but not necessarily the best mechanic to extrapolate into a general search option.  Depends on what you want to achieve.

My preferences will generally be met if there are 3, 4, 5, or so standard mechanics which are reused where they make sense.  Or at least come close enough that I don't mind a little loss of the quirky behavior in order to not have 20 or 30 different mechanics.  For a given game, might be a little higher or lower.  Depends on how broad the game is.  There's always a point where N mechanics was fine and N+1 crosses the line into "We really didn't need that last mechanic when at least 1 of N was close enough." 

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on February 22, 2021, 12:05:33 PM

It's situational, except in the most ivory tower design examples.  Unified mechanics simply to have unified mechanics is a bad idea.  Different mechanics simply to make everything different is a bad idea.  Moreover, different mechanics modeling essentially the same thing is a bad idea.  Unified mechanics modeling essentially different things is a bad idea.

What makes it situational is that "essentially" the same or different in the model is where the design meets all kinds of issues, including handling time, feel, complexity limits, opportunity costs, etc.  For example, the secret door search mechanic is right for AD&D, but not necessarily the best mechanic to extrapolate into a general search option.  Depends on what you want to achieve.

My preferences will generally be met if there are 3, 4, 5, or so standard mechanics which are reused where they make sense.  Or at least come close enough that I don't mind a little loss of the quirky behavior in order to not have 20 or 30 different mechanics.  For a given game, might be a little higher or lower.  Depends on how broad the game is.  There's always a point where N mechanics was fine and N+1 crosses the line into "We really didn't need that last mechanic when at least 1 of N was close enough."

Not going to disagree here. I think a lot of modern gamers look at OD&D and point out all the "stupid" design choices, failing to realize most of them made perfect sense within a wargaming context. They get mad that hit points don't actually represent real wounds, or that you need a table for attack rolls, or movement is in inches. None of those things were out of the ordinary for a wargame, and in fact were probably seen as the correct implementation.

To me it seems like the more narrativist the game, the more you can get away with a single mechanic. Simulationist games tend to require more mechanisms, I think. The DM has to interpret the rolls more in the previous case, which puts even more onus on them, in which case you sort of end up arriving at the original referee model of absolute DM fiat. And then you can actually have a simulationist game because the DM can create any sort of mechanic they need to determine the outcome of any situation. So basically make your own game.

Dunno.
Many heavy-skill based games are definitely closer to Sim corner of SGN triangle - and yet they usually use same mechanics for skill resolution for everything - whether it's d100% in Cthulhu or Warhammer or 3d6 in Gurps

The benefit of unfied mechanics is they're easy to learn and easy to remember. 

If you're game is simple enough, like for example, B/X it doesn't matter.

If you have 1000 subsystems and they're all different then you have a problem.

There's a dominant core resolution mechanic in AD&D, and that is a % probability with a most likely outcome and a least likely outcome

This is expressed differently for action types by using varied dice, and also whether high/low is "good" from the players POV for reasons of:

1) aesthetics, which analytical philistines largely ignore since it touches them not or very little.  It is not an accident that as we've become obsessed with rationality and systems that an overripe banana tacked on to a plain canvas is acceptable as fine art.
2) our mind already associates good with low sometimes, and with high sometimes, on context alone
3) compressing the % into different pip ranges sometimes allows one roll to convey more than one piece of info because the dice expression correlated with a rule having less than one hundred possible outcomes; e.g., the surprise roll result indicating both whether a state of surprise exists, and if so for how long

You do not want to roll percentile dice for attack rolls.  It works just fine but doesn't feel right as compared to that rock of hope that rolls pleasingly around the table.  Why did top secret never catch on?  % dice.  Why did Runequest mainly serve as the darling of RPG aficionados instead of 8th grade lunch rooms?  % dice. 

Likewise, what die have you rolled most often in your life?  The d6.  What die is the most associated with win-lose gambles of chance?  The d6.  When daddy needs a new pair of shoes from the craps game in the back alley, what is being rolled?  D6.  What is the only die that feels right for the opposed gamble that is initiative and surprise?  The d6.

When you're at the county fair showing off your muscles to your girl, and trying to win her a giant panda bear at the mallet meter, does it seem right that the plug goes higher if your strong, or that it descends from a height a farther distance toward the ground?  It feels right that you make it climb that bitch and ring the bell at the top.  The bell is a natural 20, and rolling higher feels right for an attack

Likewise, if someone says "the chance of success is 85%" does your mind think in terms of 01-85, or 16-100?  It thinks in terms of 01-85.  Higher does not seem better, unlike the mallet meter.  You're trying to beat an odds, not do the biggest and best that you can.  You're not trying to succeed, you're trying to not fail.

People obsessed with unified mechanics forget they're trying to appeal to brains having bifurcated hemispheres.