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Pretty simple, what are a few of the game mechanics you dislike? Either purely out of personal distaste, or simply because a given mechanic fails to properly deliver on its design premise.

A few to start (specific examples to begin, then I get kinda vague):

1. Burning Wheel's "Range & Cover". Needlessly complex while also remaining bizarrely abstract, basically just difficult and obnoxious to use. Then again, BW as a system for me mostly falls under that description anyway.

2. "Use to advance" skill mechanics. BRP's system for this is probably the most elegant version of this sort of system I've seen, and I still think it's kludgy, awkward and unsatisfying.

3. Almost all dedicated chase mechanics. They virtually never feel exciting, usually it's some kind of "X successes before Y contested checks" and it always feel like gimmicky gamey bullshit that doesn't even plausibly try to take into account any surroundings, obstacles, etc. It ends up just coming off as extremely shallow and vague, pulling all the excitement out of both the chase and its outcome.

4. Built-in 'plot armor' / 'protag power' for Player Characters. This is mostly personal taste, even hit points tend to fall into this bucket for me (though I wouldn't say they're a "bad mechanic").

5. Dice pools. ORE-based games are the only exception to this for me. I hate them.

6. Mechanics in serious games that completely fight the tone of what they're supposed to be about. Most immediate thing that comes to mind is from the Fate Horror Toolkit where they advise making grim community-based survival scenarios scary and important by giving Players the option to kill off a friendly NPC back at camp instead of take a hit themselves from a zombie in the field ("perhaps a zombie baby crawls through a hole in the fence back at camp and bites the poor NPC while they're off guard!"), because it's 'dramatic and the type of thing that happens in that type of fiction' and it supposedly makes your resource gathering missions real nail-biters. Completely missing the point IMO, but then again Fate is mostly for writer-types anyway I guess.

7. Level-adjusted loot. I understand its purpose, I just think it's fucking dumb.

In the end pretty much ANY mechanic can end up having all the life sucked from it by bad design. Or just improper use.

Roll over? Roll under? Rolling dice at all! Not rolling dice at all? Rolling strange shaped dice? Not rolling strange shaped dice! Levels? No levels? HP? No HP? and so on ad nausium.

People have bitched about every one of those and so much more.

Here. I'll make for you a list of mechanics someone hasnt bitched about.

1:

And there you go.

Oh, and off topic. Great avatar pic. From the 74 movie and novel WHO? by Algis Budrys.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Who%281stEd%29.jpg)

I have a deep-seated, irrational dislike of roll under mechanics.  But I'm aware that it is irrational.  In the right circumstances, I can put it aside sufficiently to enjoy a game that uses roll under, and in some cases even temporarily forget my dislike.  It's the kind of thing that builds slowly over time, similar to how some spicy food is not that strong on the first bit, but by 20 your mouth is on fire.

In general, mechanics that I dislike that much are avoided whenever possible, and thus I'm not around them enough for the dislike to turn into hatred.  That also doesn't give me much of an opportunity to develop an informed opinion on what might theoretically be wrong with them.

1. Hit Points. It's a weird abstraction that needs a lot of mechanics to begin to make sense and makes the any game they exist in a lot harder to balance.

2. Classes. Just having these adds a lot of needless clunk to your game and drastically limits characters options. Furthermore I don't appreciate the niche protection or thematics they provide.

3. D20/D100/etc. Any large dice resolution mechanic necessitates a bunch of rules to handle those mechanics or highly random games or games where you have to repeat actions enough that you average out results. All are not things I desire.

Let's see:
1. Systems that have escalating costs to advance a stat with XP (so that it costs more XP to go from 3 to 4 than from 2 to 3 in a stat) but flat costs at chargen (so that it costs the same to go from 3 to 4 in a stat as from 2 to 3). Horrible newbie trap that can fuck right off.

2. Stick you thumb in your ass and wait for your turn initiative that cycles around predictably. Encourages players to space out while waiting for their turn instead of working as a team.

3. Spending XP to get a temporary benefit.

4. Any mechanics that are easy to reskin.  That means that the fluff doesn't matter, only the narrow mechanical effect. If the fluff doesn't matter and the ability only has one narrow mechanical effect then you can't MacGyver it. MacGyvering you abilities is where so much of the fun of RPGing comes from.

5. Any mechanics that only work on NPCs, especially shitty social mechanics.

6. Anything about level approriate encounters.

Amber has the right amount of explicit mechanics for me, every other game has "too much". I'm being serious...the whole point of RPGs is being able to do anything within some simulated reality; when you start adding mechanics to explain how to do things, you imply limitations. Anything more than GM fiat is limiting, really, and I hate it.

That said, my favorite RPGs are d6 Star Wars and AD&D, so obviously I'm not too married to this notion. To respond in a way that more accurately answers the question, social mechanics are the absolute worst. I am done playing D&D 5th because I was sick of crap like "Okay, I rolled an 18 for Intimidation," with ZERO fucking exposition on what the character was doing. I can understand abstracting some things, but if you can't even give a few words about what your character is doing and just roll a bunch of dice instead, I have no interest at all. I'll play a boardgame if I want that.

1. Escalating hit points by level.
2. Instant video-game style healing, waking up, respawning crap. AKA - injuries don't matter, procedure does.
3. Picking things after resolution that take up more time vs. just picking something and doing it. Stunts (FAGE, Mythras) look like their cool. Every time I try to use something like that at my table, it causes long pauses of analysis paralysis or shopping-gasms.
4. Dramatically escalating numbers in general. Going to from 1 to 10 over the life of a campaign is one thing. Going from 5 - 157 is ridiculous. Not sure why the only thing that turns our cranks is higher numbers, but I'm looking for better/less-math-heavy solutions to character improvement.

Ability scores in every WotC-era D&D. Outside of a few cases the ability scores don't matter... only the ability modifiers do. The only reason WotC-era D&D keeps this clunky "(score-10) x 0.5 = modifier" is because the the scores provide a veneer of the system resembling TSR-era D&D scores on 3d6s; even when they dropped dice for arrays/point-buy and the actual score range before racial mods was limited to 8-18 (i.e. -1 to 4).

Most of the uses of the direct scores could just as easily be based on the ability modifier too if they'd wanted it to be, and the only reason the odd scores became feat prerequisites was just so odd scores wouldn't be completely useless.

Using the scores only to calculate a modifier is just needless extra complexity vs. using the modifier as the score directly (i.e Strength 4 instead of Strength 18).

Heck, even it was "Score = passive value; score-10 = modifier" it would be more sensible (i.e. STR 18 means +8 to STR checks and a DC of 18 for anyone targeting your STR score with their own action).

* * * *

Another one I'm not especially fond of are hit point rules that make a point of saying "hit points =/= meat" but then write every mechanic as if losing hit points were the same as suffering an actual injury (only otherwise unaffected save for hit point loss).

Falling damage is particularly obvious offender here where if hit points also equated to skill, fatigue and luck then being knocked off a 100' cliff wouldn't be 10d6 damage and your PC at the bottom of the cliff (where you should be a broken wreck) but are otherwise unharmed... it would be either you lose hit points based on how hard it would be to catch yourself before you fell (and end up clinging to the edge of the cliff by your fingers instead of down 100') or treated as actual meat points where you hit bottom and suffer severe and debilitating injuries if not outright death if you don't have some ability that allows you to reduce the physical injury somehow.

You could apply the same logic with pools of lava. Any mechanic where it treats a human being without some type of magic or superpower as actually falling into lava and not dying of horrible burns in moments is a ridiculous mechanic. I'll accept "spends hit points to NOT end up submerged in lava" or "instant death if you fall into lava", but not "you fall into the lava, lose 43 of your 105 hit points and climb out of the lava next turn just a bit singed."

Quote from: Brad;1063562Amber has the right amount of explicit mechanics for me, every other game has "too much".

Funny. I'd peg Amber as far too little. When I tried GMing it, I found myself mentally exhausted from all the judgement calls I was required to make. On the other hand, it really gave me an appreciation for using dice in games.

I'll nominate the SilCore system. The d6 just wasn't granular enough for my tastes, despite loving the Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles settings.

MDC. Exploding dice. Storyteller games. Narrative systems. Dice pools. Fate points. Feat trees. Multiple attacks per round. Balance mechanics. Challenge ratings. Prestige classes. Static initiative order. Stacking bonuses. Short rest long rest. Wound mechanics. Attribute damage. Abstract wealth systems ala d20. Jury is still out on 5e's rolling double dice with advantage but I'm pretty sure thats gonna be a no for me as well.

Dice pools. None of them model probabilities worth a damn.

The d20 system blows ass. See XP, leveling up, and Save Rolls.

GM metacurrency - the GM is god. They don't need to spend points to do things.

Classes and Levels - They were what was there when RPGs became a thing, but I personally find classes too limiting and levels too abstract.

Escalating HP - Kinda goes with levels, but I hate it enough to give it its own section. I get that in D&D, HP is supposed to be abstract "bad things don't happen yet" points, but goddammit it's stupid that at level 1 a 1d8 damage longsword can easily put you in the ground and at level 5 its hardly a threat.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1063577MDC. Exploding dice. Storyteller games. Narrative systems. Dice pools. Fate points. Feat trees. Multiple attacks per round. Balance mechanics. Challenge ratings. Prestige classes. Static initiative order. Stacking bonuses. Short rest long rest. Wound mechanics. Attribute damage. Abstract wealth systems ala d20. Jury is still out on 5e's rolling double dice with advantage but I'm pretty sure thats gonna be a no for me as well.

You read my mind! I'd add character levels and stupid amounts of hit points to the list as well.

I'm okay with a short rest idea, if it's done right.

Quote from: RandyB;1063578Dice pools. None of them model probabilities worth a damn.

This.  I'd say 'diceless' or no randomizers but none of them are actually mechanics.

Hit points in non-D&D games. In D&D, they are part of the game system history and have a legacy status. In everything else, they don't make a damn bit of sense.

Roll under dice mechanics. Traveller 5 has a whole chapter complete with probability tables explaining why roll under is better and thus preferred. The only problem is that roll under is counter-intuitive for most people.

Oh and roll and assign stats. It combines the worst aspects of point buy and random rolling while retaining the best points of neither.

Classes.

Levels and, by extension, level-adjusted anything

Most implementations of "zero to hero" (I'm fine with characters improving over time, but when a sufficiently-experienced character can wade into an army of starting characters and massacre them by the hundred without feeling even slightly threatened in return, that's just stupid unless the character is a superhero or a god or something like that.)

Narrative metacurrencies

The entire concept of "balanced encounters" and "standard adventuring days"

Quote from: nDervish;1063626The entire concept of "balanced encounters" and "standard adventuring days"

I'm not a fan of "balanced encounters" as you seem to be using the term.

I AM a fan of a system that makes it easy for the GM to know if he's sending a cakewalk or a slaughter at his party without having to guess and then fudge the dice later because he just wanted a tense fight for the first encounter of the campaign not a TPK.

Properly used the "balanced encounter" mechanics exist to give the GM that feedback. If you throw X at the party they'll burn through about 25% of their resources. If you send 0.5X at them they'll probably not lose any significant resources at all. If you throw 2X at the party there's a good chance one or more of the PCs will be killed during the encounter. If you send 3X then it will almost certainly be a TPK.

I see nothing wrong with providing that information to the GM. They're still the one that decides whether they want to include a 3X encounter in the game or not and whether they want to provide that encounter with obvious clues to warn the party they might not be ready for this fight yet or means of escape if it all goes wrong.

Making the GM GUESS what's going to happen when they put an ogre in a dungeon for starting PCs is just bad design work on the game designer's part (I picked an ogre because whether a starting PC party can handle one varies a great deal from system to system so it would be really hard to guess if having the ogre in the dungeon would be a cakewalk or a TPK unless you understood the game system's actual math).

So actually, put that under hated mechanics for me... system that do not allow GMs to properly assess the threat level of what they're throwing at their party.

-Almost anything that makes injuries and illness a nonissue early in the game.
-3.5's action economy for fighters and descending BAB for iterative attacks.

I would say Thaco. Not os much the mechanic as how TSR explained it in the core books and how they implemented the formula. It works yet t could have been designed so much better.

Systems that do not allow GMs to properly assess the threat level of what they're throwing at their party and leave it as a guessing game. Too much damn hassle imo.

Stars Wars D6 lack of balancing mechanics for high level Jedi. Not really mechanics just suggestions and mostly it's a polite way saying screw over the players because we the DEvs are too lazy to fix a major issue with the rpg.

Not sure if it's a mechanics so much as a play style the way earlier editions of D&D try to push that Joe/Jane Average goes out and and adventures. Nice try both stay behind and farm the land where it's mostly safe. Exceptional people dare I say insane want to go into a Dungeon where one wrong step lands one in a trap or smashed to bits by the Ogre.

Rifts which began as cities being few and far between suddenly became too populated with many cities. Which really kills the post apocalyptic vibe it's author is trying to convince us of exists.

I hate Roll 3D6 keep what you get as rolls systems. Again Joe and Jane average usually do not go out adventuring and stay behind while Joe and Jane exceptional go out and risk their lives. I don't min it so much as how such a system tries to find low stats. They are part of the hobby yet don't try and tell me a Con of 7 is a good thing.

Quote from: jeff37923;1063604Hit points in non-D&D games. In D&D, they are part of the game system history and have a legacy status. In everything else, they don't make a damn bit of sense.

I'm going to go one level more abstract and just say 'Justifying Hit Points.' If you have hit points in your game and say something along the lines of 'hit points are a gamist, simplified wound mechanic. They are like Link/Megaman/whomever's life bar in video game. We are using them because a realistic wound system would by more clunky and complex than we want for this game system,' I'm down for it. TTRPGs are deliberate granularity-reduced reality emulators. We actively choose which ways we simplify things. I just don't want my game system pretending there's more to it than that.

Quote from: Brad;1063562Amber has the right amount of explicit mechanics for me, every other game has "too much".

I love Amber so much...

*Ahem* So for mine, it's "unique" dice, like Genesys or anything FFG is putting out right now. (Which is weird, because there was an era where I loved almost everything they put out.)

Quote from: nDervish;1063626The entire concept of "balanced encounters" and "standard adventuring days"

Quote from: Chris24601;1063639I'm not a fan of "balanced encounters" as you seem to be using the term.
...
Properly used the "balanced encounter" mechanics exist to give the GM that feedback. If you throw X at the party they'll burn through about 25% of their resources.

Yep, that's pretty much what I meant I don't like.

If there's an ogre there, then there is an ogre there.  I don't care whether it will *shudder* "burn through about 25% of [the party's] resources", or whether it will be a walkover (for either side).  There's an ogre there.  I don't want it to mysteriously transform into a goblin if approached by weak PCs or multiply into 17 ogres if approached by strong PCs.  It's an ogre.  It's there.  It's alone.  Period.  No matter who approaches.

If the PCs meet the ogre, it's up to the players to decide whether they want to fight it, plead with it for mercy, try to intimidate it into submission, sneak past, or turn around and run for the hills.  They can make their own assessment of how risky fighting it would be and whether that risk is acceptable to them without needing me to assess what fraction of their resources will be consumed in defeating it.  (And, seriously?  Planning in terms of percentages of "resources" consumed?  "I think I'll fight that bear because it's just going to break my arm and a couple of ribs, which is only 25% of my resources" said no real person ever.)

Which reminds me of one that I meant to include, but forgot:

Instant healing with no long-term consequences

Quote from: Tanin Wulf;1063655I love Amber so much...

*Ahem* So for mine, it's "unique" dice, like Genesys or anything FFG is putting out right now. (Which is weird, because there was an era where I loved almost everything they put out.)

The unique dice are technically not required; you can roll typical polyhedral dice and index a chart to see what come from it. Not entirely unlike Rolemaster in that way, but the feel is very different.

Quote from: nDervish;1063662Yep, that's pretty much what I meant I don't like.

If there's an ogre there, then there is an ogre there.  I don't care whether it will *shudder* "burn through about 25% of [the party's] resources", or whether it will be a walkover (for either side).  There's an ogre there.  I don't want it to mysteriously transform into a goblin if approached by weak PCs or multiply into 17 ogres if approached by strong PCs.  It's an ogre.  It's there.  It's alone.  Period.  No matter who approaches.

No one is saying is HAS to transform into a goblin (or a red dragon). But isn't it, as a GM, good to know ahead of time if the ogre you put in that room is going to TPK the entire party on the first round or not?

A "Balanced Encounter'' is the game equivalent of an ammeter. It lets you know ahead of time whether or not the amount of current your device is drawing is going to fry the circuit or not before you plug it in. You can still connect the power supply anyway and hope for the best, but why does knowing the likely outcome ahead of time hurt anything?

You seem to think that a system with a means of determining a balanced encounter REQUIRES you to use balanced encounters. You don't. Its just a benchmark to be able to judge what's likely to be the result of the encounter so you as the GM can tailor the game to meet your goals without having to rely entirely on guesswork.

Essentially, if you applied this same logic to automobiles you'd say you hate having to drive a car with a fuel gauge. You'd rather just guess how much gas is in the tank and how far you can get on it, because God forbid the manufacturer provide you with a means of measuring how much gas is left in the tank reliably. Better for everyone to just guess. You're still perfectly free to ignore what the gauge is telling you; Lord knows there have been days where the fuel indicator light comes on and I decide I'll fuel up next time I go out instead of stopping on the way home; but there's nothing wrong with being able to tell at a glance if you're going to need to get more gas before the trip you're taking.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1063667The unique dice are technically not required; you can roll typical polyhedral dice and index a chart to see what come from it. Not entirely unlike Rolemaster in that way, but the feel is very different.

It's entirely the feel for me. The "feel" of a game is very important to the total experience I'm trying to create. (Ahh, my moment of self-indulgent pretension at my table...)

Being able to buy a speech impediment as a Disadvantage/Flaw/whatever.

If the player doesn't have to roleplay it, then it's a completely pointless decision. Here, have two Bonus Points for nothing.

If the player does have to "roleplay" it, then every time he needs to speak in character, he has to do a damned stutter/Elmer Fudd voice/Daffy Duck lisp, which is a huge problem in a roleplaying game, where communication between players and the GM is the core around which the entire exercise is built. Here, have two Bonus Points for bogging the game down every time your character opens his mouth and annoying the shit out of the rest of us every single fucking session. All because...you can do a funny voice? But it's not funny. It was never funny.

The number one rule of behavioral psychology is that you do not reward bad behavior. The option to buy a Speech Impediment as a Disadvantage exists for no other reason than to reward bad behavior.

And to sabotage interpersonal communication in an activity based entirely on interpersonal communication, there's also that.

(This is why you playtest games before you publish them. And the playtesters should be the biggest assholes you know, because you need to stress-test that sumbitch, and find where it bogs down under casual abuse.)

Quote from: asron819;1063585GM metacurrency - the GM is god. They don't need to spend points to do things.

This. With no exception.

Quote from: Barghest;1063683Being able to buy a speech impediment as a Disadvantage/Flaw/whatever.

If the player doesn't have to roleplay it, then it's a completely pointless decision. Here, have two Bonus Points for nothing.

It could be expressed purely mechanically, e.g. "you take a -2 penalty to all checks to intimidate others, who are as likely to laugh at you as feel afraid of you."

Quote from: sureshot;1063645I would say Thaco. Not os much the mechanic as how TSR explained it in the core books and how they implemented the formula. It works yet t could have been designed so much better.

That's one thing that annoyed me in the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook. THAC0 is a core mechanic, but they didn't explain how it works in the front of the book, or in the glossary. Instead, they buried it in the middle of a paragraph in a subsection in the combat chapter. On top of that, they described it poorly. First of all, tell people to don't subtract their opponent's AC from THAC0, that's a completely unnecessary inversion. Just add your opponent's AC to your roll. Secondly, for everything except AC, they used general terms like "apply the modifiers", instead of saying precisely what number you're supposed to modify, and whether you add or subtract that number. The whole book was really confusing to read, and unnecessarily so. What they should have done is state specifically whether the numbers are added or subtracted, and whether those operations are performed on the 1d20 roll or THAC0 itself, every time. That constant reinforcement would have made the somewhat backward application of numbers easier to readers to grasp. They also never used alternate methods of conveying the information, like a diagram or a simple equation, nor did they pull it out or emphasize it any way (I remember having to flip through the section multiple times to find, it never just jumped out at me.

THAC0 is simple. Roll 1d20, and add your opponent's AC and any other situational modifiers to the roll. If your modified roll is equal to or higher than your THAC0, you hit. If you have any modifiers to hit that last for a long time, like a bonus from a magic sword or a high Strength, then it makes sense to modify the THAC0 number itself. But in that case, you have to subtract. A +1 sword and +2 to hit from Strength means you subtract 3 from THAC0, before writing it on your character sheet. In equation form, it's 1d20 + opponent's AC + situational modifiers >= your base THAC0 - any permanent modifiers.

Not to mention that THAC0 itself is unnecessary. All you need to do is write down all the ACs from -10 to 10 on your character sheet, and the number you need to hit that AC below them. Presto, no subtracting ACs from THAC0, or adding ACs to the 1d20 roll. Subtraction (or addition) are replaced with a simple one-row table lookup.

Quote from: Malleustein;1063684This. With no exception.

Actually I am a big fan of the GM given a limited number of rerolls per session. You get all the benefits of dice fudging with none of the cheating.

I'm not a fan of card-based randomizers, this goes double if it has intricate permutations for suits and other weirdness (Shadows Over Sol being my primary example).

Quote from: Rhedyn;1063699Actually I am a big fan of the GM given a limited number of rerolls per session. You get all the benefits of dice fudging with none of the cheating.

GM can't cheat, bro.

Quote from: Brad;1063707GM can't cheat, bro.

Sure they can. They tell the players the rules are one thing and then they do something else. Still cheating, especially if you tell the players that you are following a particular set of rules and then just don't.

Dice pools, hate them. They seem like a decent enough concept, but in practice I find they have tons of issues. They scale poorly (big leaps in ability), and they are not intuitive, 3d6 is much less than 1/2 as good as 6d6. At this point as soon as I see a game uses a dice pool mechanic, I lose interest.


In the past I would have said class / levels but I've softened on this one. Class / level systems have developed considerably since the days of AD&D. Still not a preferred mechanic but I no longer mind it.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063685It could be expressed purely mechanically, e.g. "you take a -2 penalty to all checks to intimidate others, who are as likely to laugh at you as feel afraid of you."

Which is actually how most disad systems I've run across work it. I've never seen one that says a player has to act out the speech impediment, and never been in a group that would expect that.

This sounds like an issue with a very specific game. To me this would be along the lines of saying because a PC is illiterate, the player isn't allowed to read his character sheet or look stuff up in the books.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1063710Sure they can. They tell the players the rules are one thing and then they do something else. Still cheating, especially if you tell the players that you are following a particular set of rules and then just don't.

You sure you're playing RPGs and not some sort of double-blind boardgame?

Quote from: Brad;1063718You sure you're playing RPGs and not some sort of double-blind boardgame?

Yes. You sure your playing RPGs and not being read the DM's novel?

Quote from: Rhedyn;1063720Yes. You sure your playing RPGs and not being read the DM's novel?

Nahh man, I play actual RPGs where the game is refereed by the GM and doesn't adhere to some set of immutable rules. If the GM changes something behind the scenes, how am I to know?

Quote from: Rhedyn;1063699Actually I am a big fan of the GM given a limited number of rerolls per session. You get all the benefits of dice fudging with none of the cheating.

That sounds pointless to me.  It is cheating if you accept that the Referee is bound by the dice rolls.  You have simply made it acceptable to cheat by giving the Referee do-overs.

It works for you.  It wouldn't for me.

Quote from: Brad;1063718You sure you're playing RPGs and not some sort of double-blind boardgame?

Look at the getting millennials to play thread. I'm not saying the OP there does it, but that is one way that house rules and GM-created monsters can go, which is one of the things the players there did not like.

I guess the real question is:  Is the table having fun?  And if the answer is Yes, then who cares?

I dislike roll-under mechanics where the lower you roll the better, simply because it seems counterintuitive to me.  (Probably shaped by the fact that I'm old enough to have gotten into gaming with first edition AD&D, and the visceral thrill of rolling the natural 20 has never, ever worn off for me as the greatest adrenaline hit of gaming.)

Something I've come to dislike as a corollary of the above is the wholly separate damage roll.  A 20 to hit and a 1 on damage is almost more frustrating than not rolling the 20 in the first place.  I am now much more enamoured of games which connect degree of hit success to amount of damage in some way.

Classes in themselves, as a character construction model, I hate less than the insane volume of specific capability lists built around most modern iterations thereof, as well as the overcomplicated progress structures.  Designing a single high-level NPC shouldn't take more time than writing the rest of your adventure, and I shouldn't need to have every single sourcebook you've ever published to know what all the listed abilities in a character stat block are.  (Online SRDs help with this, but even there, lookup time and learning can make it prohibitive.)

Initiative mechanics that place the onus on the GM to resolve conflicts. In my experience the single biggest cause of game-stopping arguments ever is the GM ruling that something unpleasant happens to a character before they have a chance to try to react to it or avoid it. Give me a die roll or resource spend I can point at.

Passive defense difficulties in combat, like the D20 AC.  I much prefer being able to roll to save my ass; it gives me the illusion of being more in control of my own fate (a corollary to the above phenomenon).

Probability curves that are too flat and easy to calculate (personally, this is one reason I like die pools, as the opacity of the probabilities reinforces the illusion for me).  I love so much else about the GUMSHOE system that its single-D6-plus-spent-points always annoys me. The only single-die roll I've ever liked was D&D's original single d20.

"Unusual Background" or analogous character ability "surtaxes".  It may be a little spectrum-y of me, but in my view a point is a point is a point; if 100 points' worth of one kind of ability just isn't considered as "powerful" (i.e. potentially in-game effective) as 100 points' worth of another kind, then your problem is with your basic pricing structure, not how "unusual" a particular concept is or isn't.

Quote from: Malleustein;1063725That sounds pointless to me.  It is cheating if you accept that the Referee is bound by the dice rolls.  You have simply made it acceptable to cheat by giving the Referee do-overs.

It works for you.  It wouldn't for me.

Actually that is my point. The issue of "cheating" is whether or not you are lying to your players.

If you tell the players your GM dice rolls matter, and they don't, then you are cheating and lying.

If you tell your players your GM dice make nice sounds when they hit the table and that is all they are meant to do, then you are not lying or cheating.

If you have a mechanic that gives the GM a set amount of rerolls per session, then that is just a rule.

If you lie and cheat as the GM and the players and you are having fun, then you have won RPGs. I don't personally enjoying cheating or lying to my players out-of-character. Ergo, GM meta currency is a fine mechanic.

Quote from: Malleustein;1063684This. With no exception.

Absolutely.  GM metacurrency is ridiculous and contradictory to the concept of roleplaying.

Player metacurrency, that allow characters GM-type control or the power to cheat rules or dice, is just as bad - and probably somewhat more annoying because it is more common.

I really don't like levels, and I especially do not like the escalating HP that usually accompanies them.  

I don't like forced game-balance mechanics like d20 challenge ratings.

I don't like combat mechanics that are heavily tied to maps and miniatures.

I don't like non-variable initiative, and I don't like intricate count down initiative either.

I don't particularly like armor as AC or "armor makes me harder to hit" rules.  I prefer armor as damage reduction.

I generally dislike roll-under mechanics, but make an exception with percentile systems as I find these simple and quite intuitive.

SPD in Champions. It's the most abused characteristic in the game. Always pushed to the max by powergamers. To the point it just breaks every game.

Players buy up SPD because they want to go more often. And not because of what their characters abilities actually should be according to their character concept.

To combat this. I created a SPD characteristics maxima formula based on the Normal Characteristics Maxima. To provide a control that would mitigate players buying up their SPD scores too high. The formula made it so that they had a certain maximum amount of SPD they could go to based on their DEX. And it worked. For the most part.

However, it failed in one very important aspect of running the Hero System. It created more work for the GM.

Quote from: Brad;1063707GM can't cheat, bro.

While I generally agree with the GM is god theory, GMs can cheat the game and cheat the players by pulling punches, lying about die rolls, hiding dice behind a screen to create a "better" result, playing with bias, trying to "win," severe railroading, playing to a pre-decided story, or infringing on player decisions... etc.  A good GM uses his godlike power to facilitate the game from a neutral and unbiased perspective.... and yes, he sure as hell does not need re-rolls.

Builds in D&D and other RPGs.

Such a thing takes players out of the mindset of actively playing in the campaign. And focuses them on making their character the most optimal possible. In other words: They are trying to win the game by having the most optimized and exploitive character they can possibly design.

Taken too its extreme. This hampers playing the game itself. Because it forces the GM's attention away from the story content of said campaign and the other players. And instead focuses it exclusively on the player who is acting up in this way.

The only way this is going to stop lies in the realm of the game designers themselves. To stop designing game systems that reward baked in mechanical exploitation.

No character in any RPG should be mechanically superior to the others. They should all possess the same level of effectiveness. And if you have a player who creates a build of a character that breaks that. Then they are actively trying to cheat everybody else playing and running the game.

Quote from: Madprofessor;1063755I don't particularly like armor as AC or "armor makes me harder to hit" rules.  I prefer armor as damage reduction.

My personal preference is for armor to be both resistive and ablative.  Thats the sweet spot.

I'm surprised to see so much hate for roll under mechanics. Although I do like it when higher numbers beat lower numbers. It's just blackjack that way, everyone understands blackjack.

Damn the math related to armor class & to hit numbers, ala D&D 3.5

Give me no more than 5 or 6 armor class categories for everything in the game; instead of 7 - 47, with all numbers in between.  Just tell me I need a 14 or better to hit monster type a, period.  

Thank you.

Quote from: Daztur;1063820I'm surprised to see so much hate for roll under mechanics. Although I do like it when higher numbers beat lower numbers. It's just blackjack that way, everyone understands blackjack.

Roll Under works great against your 6 Ability scores.

My strength is 15.  Cool; as long as the item, or task doesn't require a 16 or better, I can do it.  Simplicity.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1063806My personal preference is for armor to be both resistive and ablative.  Thats the sweet spot.

So you're saying like armour as Damage Reduction?  Cuz that's what your saying, resisting is minimizing the amount of damage taken, ablative is very rarely modelled because no one wants armour that degrades every single fight.  AC as it works in basic D&D is a binary damage AVOIDANCE, AKA Dodge mechanic.  Either you're hit for FULL damage (Whatever the damage die tells you) or you aren't.  There's nothing in between.

Also, the human brain handles additives better than subtracting, which is why roll under is so counter-intuitive for most people.

I don't like armour as damage reduction; either you get silly results - can never avoid partial armour - or there's way too much book-keeping. Especially in pre-modern settings, armour either did its job or did not do its job, and a hit to armour was typically useless, so armour making the person harder to hit is fine. For a modern setting where people fall down after being shot in their bullet-proof vest, ok have armour as DR if it's also possible to hit the non-armoured bits.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1063844So you're saying like armour as Damage Reduction?  Cuz that's what your saying, resisting is minimizing the amount of damage taken, ablative is very rarely modelled because no one wants armour that degrades every single fight.  AC as it works in basic D&D is a binary damage AVOIDANCE, AKA Dodge mechanic.  Either you're hit for FULL damage (Whatever the damage die tells you) or you aren't.  There's nothing in between.

Also, the human brain handles additives better than subtracting, which is why roll under is so counter-intuitive for most people.

Yep. I'm running an sdc palladium world where AR is replaced with DR.  While armor does ablate (can be damaged) it also has damage resistance, such that  a baseball bat cannot damage the tank pretty much at all unless wielded by superhuman strength. Normally folks that complain about ablative armor dont like having to buy new kit all the time, but damage resistance slows that process down to acceptable levels.  It does bring back the feeling that a big metal brute walkin down the street is well and truly able to take out whatever you can dish out for a long time, and the normally quite squishy police officer with the 50 sdc bullet proof vest arent made worthless after taking  a bullet or two, but still seriously consider whether they want to stick around for a few shots more.  Its going pretty well I gotta say.  Helps little guns seem like little guns and big guns feel like big guns.  The only folks who don't seem to like combat in my game are the ones who prefer killing everything they shoot at and leaving nothing alive in their wake, because that now takes quite a bit more A: ammo and B: commitment and C: time.  Folks who are used to being the quick and deadly murderhobo tend to endure rapid reprogramming or head for the door.  People who hate 'armor as resource managment' on the other hand tend to hate it less because they don't have to do it nearly so often and it feels sooooo much more organic in the heat of battle.  Not always having to repurchase or repair armor after every single fight.

Then you can either handle the partial armor with natural 20's hitting the non armored bits or finding 'chinks' in the armor...  Palladium also has P.V. (armor penetration value) that allows it to bypass armor if you're into that sort of thing, which can be improved by buying armor piercing rounds and such... Gives sharpshooters, snipers and marksmen something interesting to keep themselves busy besides a neverending tide of thump thump thump.

Obviously storyteller folks and folks who dont like hit point systems aren't joining a palladium game in the first place, or they're playing savage rifts.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1063771Builds in D&D and other RPGs.

Such a thing takes players out of the mindset of actively playing in the campaign. And focuses them on making their character the most optimal possible. In other words: They are trying to win the game by having the most optimized and exploitive character they can possibly design.

Taken too its extreme. This hampers playing the game itself. Because it forces the GM's attention away from the story content of said campaign and the other players. And instead focuses it exclusively on the player who is acting up in this way.

The only way this is going to stop lies in the realm of the game designers themselves. To stop designing game systems that reward baked in mechanical exploitation.

No character in any RPG should be mechanically superior to the others. They should all possess the same level of effectiveness. And if you have a player who creates a build of a character that breaks that. Then they are actively trying to cheat everybody else playing and running the game.

Builds have two general reasons to exist:

1. Your game has a lot of bad options.

2. The player wants to do something incredibly niche in your game.

Not-sucking isn't the same thing as optimizing "to-win". I have met people online who were playing 3.X era Paladins, Druids, and Wizard, and they would get mad that my Fighter had a preplanned build. Sorry? Maybe I wanted to play a fighter and not be dead weight you narrativist trash-goblin.

Quote from: Chris24601;1063681But isn't it, as a GM, good to know ahead of time if the ogre you put in that room is going to TPK the entire party on the first round or not?

I'm not quite sure what part of "I don't care whether it will *shudder* "burn through about 25% of [the party's] resources", or whether it will be a walkover (for either side)." was unclear.

Quote from: Chris24601;1063681You seem to think that a system with a means of determining a balanced encounter REQUIRES you to use balanced encounters. You don't.

In theory, that's generally true.

In practice, I see a strong tendency of players in games which have rules for "balanced encounters" to expect the GM to give them only "balanced" encounters and complain rather loudly if they run into something that isn't "level-appropriate", sometimes with those complaints including accusations that the GM is "cheating" by giving them something that's "too hard".  It tends to foster a player mindset of "it wouldn't be there if it wasn't expected to be beatable", at which point PCs start dying because the players insist that they must be able to win the fight and refuse to withdraw, even when they're clearly losing to something which has them completely outclassed.

I much prefer to leave mechanical calculations out of this so that the players will engage their minds, assess the situation, and actually think about whether they can expect to win (and at what cost) instead of just saying "we're level X, it should be CR Y, so no problem!"

Quote from: Chris24601;1063681Its just a benchmark to be able to judge what's likely to be the result of the encounter so you as the GM can tailor the game to meet your goals without having to rely entirely on guesswork.

Yes, "tailor the game to meet your goals".  Your comments here are consistent with someone whose goal is to design specific encounters to be faced by specific parties of specific characters to produce a specific result (depleting X% of resources) when (not "if") the party faces them.

That is not my goal.

My goal is to run a wide-open sandbox world which at least appears to exist independently of any PCs and contains things which are simply there because they are, and, if a specific thing is ever encountered by PCs, I have no idea when placing it how many characters will be there at the time, or which PCs those will be, or how experienced they will be at that point.  The only "purpose" of the encounter is to be a part of the world and contribute to making that world feel "real" and alive.  If everything is balanced relative to the PC party (it doesn't matter whether it's balanced at the "difficulty X" level or the "X/2" level or the "3X" level - I'm not talking about making it an "even" fight here, but rather about scaling it relative to the party, regardless of what the chosen relative power level might be) then it fails at that purpose.

But, yeah, sure, I can just place it and not rescale it when it's encountered... but then what's the point in balancing it against some hypothetical party which will likely bear no particular resemblance to the actual party which encounters it?  Much simpler to just place what makes sense for the world, let it be encountered by whoever encounters it, and then leave the players to decide what they want to do about it.

Quote from: Pat;1063688Not to mention that THAC0 itself is unnecessary. All you need to do is write down all the ACs from -10 to 10 on your character sheet, and the number you need to hit that AC below them. Presto, no subtracting ACs from THAC0, or adding ACs to the 1d20 roll. Subtraction (or addition) are replaced with a simple one-row table lookup.

Funny, when my friends and I "invented" THAC0 back in the day, it mostly came about from us saying, "Man, that row of numbers to hit each AC from 10 to -10 takes up a lot of space and it's a pain in the ass to update all of them whenever you gain a level.  You know, it's a really straightforward progression of adjusting the to-hit number by 1 for each point of AC, so it would be really easy to use a little math and only have to record one number instead of 21 of them."

Quote from: Madprofessor;1063757While I generally agree with the GM is god theory, GMs can cheat the game and cheat the players by pulling punches, lying about die rolls, hiding dice behind a screen to create a "better" result, playing with bias, trying to "win," severe railroading, playing to a pre-decided story, or infringing on player decisions... etc.  A good GM uses his godlike power to facilitate the game from a neutral and unbiased perspective.... and yes, he sure as hell does not need re-rolls.

That just sounds like a bad GM.

Quote from: nDervish;1063862Funny, when my friends and I "invented" THAC0 back in the day, it mostly came about from us saying, "Man, that row of numbers to hit each AC from 10 to -10 takes up a lot of space and it's a pain in the ass to update all of them whenever you gain a level.  You know, it's a really straightforward progression of adjusting the to-hit number by 1 for each point of AC, so it would be really easy to use a little math and only have to record one number instead of 21 of them."

I never had a big problem with it either, but it's also clearly the biggest problem people have with THAC0, and UX studies have shown that reducing math like that reduces errors. Not to mention it's every level only in AD&D and only for fighters, and in 1e even that's true only if you use the optional rule in the table's footnote (otherwise, 1e fighters gain 2 points every 2 levels). And I've never seen anyone consider it a chore, because writing a better number on your character sheet is something people tend to celebrate.

Quote from: nDervish;1063861In practice, I see a strong tendency of players in games which have rules for "balanced encounters" to expect the GM to give them only "balanced" encounters and complain rather loudly if they run into something that isn't "level-appropriate", sometimes with those complaints including accusations that the GM is "cheating" by giving them something that's "too hard".  It tends to foster a player mindset of "it wouldn't be there if it wasn't expected to be beatable", at which point PCs start dying because the players insist that they must be able to win the fight and refuse to withdraw, even when they're clearly losing to something which has them completely outclassed.

That fits my experience - unless the whole game is narrowly built around balanced encounters (4e D&D) IME encounter-building/balancing rules tend to harm, not help, gameplay. 5e's rules at least have the saving grace that they are unusably awful. :D

Quote from: Rhedyn;1063859Not-sucking isn't the same thing as optimizing "to-win". I have met people online who were playing 3.X era Paladins, Druids, and Wizard, and they would get mad that my Fighter had a preplanned build. Sorry? Maybe I wanted to play a fighter and not be dead weight you narrativist trash-goblin.

The mindset creates an arms race within the campaign that diverts the attention of the GM away from other aspects of the campaign. Forcing the GM to deal with it, front and center.

My experience isn't just with D&D in these aspects. But also with Champions. In which the behavior is rampant to a far greater extreme than D&D 3.X ever got near.

In Champions, the drive toward cost effectiveness in the character generation system is always an issue. And there is a point where characters become too optimized compared to the rest of the characters in the campaign. This forces an arms race. Which makes the GM and other players have to up the cost effectiveness of their characters to keep up with the hardcore optimizer.

This is not to say that the characters who aren't hyper-optimized suck. Quite to the contrary. You have players who build to a particular character concept, how they want their characters function in play. Not for the reason of extreme optimization. But for what is fun for them to play being their primary reason in design.

Extreme optimizers invariably change the focus of the game. From being focused on and coexisting in a group. To them being the unavoidable center of attention. Which ultimately breaks the dynamic of an RPG being a group activity.

"Not sucking" is an arbitrary definition given by virtuallly every extreme optimizer. No matter the game system they are playing. It usually means, that the optimizer will not settle for anything other than maximum optimization. No matter what the consequences are to the game or group. It's a position of inflexibility. And shows said optimizer only thinks about themselves.

Quote from: S'mon;1063898That fits my experience - unless the whole game is narrowly built around balanced encounters (4e D&D) IME encounter-building/balancing rules tend to harm, not help, gameplay. 5e's rules at least have the saving grace that they are unusably awful. :D

Depends on the group.  I've never run a game in that manner (not even in 4E), and don't run for strangers.  So none of the players in my groups care one way or the other.  Plus, I'm explicit that I'll throw anything at them whether the game says it is a fit or not.  It's up to them to do recon on the danger of what they are dealing with, and evade or flee as necessary.

If the system I'm running has a way of giving me hints on encounter balance, it does simplify my life a little when I give them feedback on what they have found.  It might affect the color of my descriptions, for example.  But as you say, none of those systems really work fully anyway.

Quote from: nDervish;1063861In practice, I see a strong tendency of players in games which have rules for "balanced encounters" to expect the GM to give them only "balanced" encounters and complain rather loudly if they run into something that isn't "level-appropriate", sometimes with those complaints including accusations that the GM is "cheating" by giving them something that's "too hard".  It tends to foster a player mindset of "it wouldn't be there if it wasn't expected to be beatable", at which point PCs start dying because the players insist that they must be able to win the fight and refuse to withdraw, even when they're clearly losing to something which has them completely outclassed.

I think this mentality comes from video games. In video games, nearly all entities in the world fall fairly neatly into one of two categories, NPCs who are there to advance your quest along somehow, or AI-controlled enemies you are supposed to kill. A game that throws you into a cave where the enemies are simply too hard for you to kill given the current level and gear you are likely to have is a bad game.

In my experience, players simply need to be broken out of this mentality. I have discussed with many new players how my D&D game is very unlike a video game in that there is a much higher likelihood that a monster they find in the wilderness is too dangerous to be tangled with. But on the flip side, it means that as the DM, I can't railroad them, and I need to give them means to discover that something is far too powerful for them without actually going up and getting killed by it.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063915I think this mentality comes from video games. In video games, nearly all entities in the world fall fairly neatly into one of two categories, NPCs who are there to advance your quest along somehow, or AI-controlled enemies you are supposed to kill. A game that throws you into a cave where the enemies are simply too hard for you to kill given the current level and gear you are likely to have is a bad game.

In my experience, players simply need to be broken out of this mentality. I have discussed with many new players how my D&D game is very unlike a video game in that there is a much higher likelihood that a monster they find in the wilderness is too dangerous to be tangled with. But on the flip side, it means that as the DM, I can't railroad them, and I need to give them means to discover that something is far too powerful for them without actually going up and getting killed by it.

Ha no. "Balanced encounters" come from the mentality that taking a few Wargame breaks every session really eats up a lot of time and the players seem somewhat engaged by it.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063915I think this mentality comes from video games. In video games, nearly all entities in the world fall fairly neatly into one of two categories, NPCs who are there to advance your quest along somehow, or AI-controlled enemies you are supposed to kill. A game that throws you into a cave where the enemies are simply too hard for you to kill given the current level and gear you are likely to have is a bad game.

In my experience, players simply need to be broken out of this mentality. I have discussed with many new players how my D&D game is very unlike a video game in that there is a much higher likelihood that a monster they find in the wilderness is too dangerous to be tangled with. But on the flip side, it means that as the DM, I can't railroad them, and I need to give them means to discover that something is far too powerful for them without actually going up and getting killed by it.

Yes, but AD&D and Basic had very defined danger levels, tying HD to dungeon level directly, with a little wiggle room to allow for some variance. Wilderness enounters could be much more varied in threat level, but also it's a lot easier to bypass an encounter outside of a dungeon.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1063925Yes, but AD&D and Basic had very defined danger levels, tying HD to dungeon level directly, with a little wiggle room to allow for some variance. Wilderness enounters could be much more varied in threat level, but also it's a lot easier to bypass an encounter outside of a dungeon.

The very earliest modules had areas players could easily wander to where they would die quickly should they charge in with swords drawn. Keep on the Borderlands was definitely not something where you could walk into any entrance and slaughter your way to the end.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1063771Builds in D&D and other RPGs. ...They are trying to win the game by having the most optimized and exploitive character they can possibly design. ...The only way this is going to stop (is to)... stop designing game systems that reward baked in mechanical exploitation.

But then you'd lose half the audience, if not more, for most RPGs to begin with.  The whole point of the wargames from which this hobby is descended was to reward obsessive high-volume learning, capacity for mechanical organization and system manipulation.  If the rules don't require skill and practice to use to their best effect then you aren't really playing a game at all.

Plus, having the same level of effectiveness doesn't mean players have to have the same kind of effectiveness.  Another key part of a challenging game is the combination of dissimilar assets, and part of what makes assets dissimilar is that some are objectively better than others in specific given circumstances.  Maximizing a character's effectiveness in his chosen area only ruins the other players' game if that's the only area the game ever plays.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063943The very earliest modules had areas players could easily wander to where they would die quickly should they charge in with swords drawn. Keep on the Borderlands was definitely not something where you could walk into any entrance and slaughter your way to the end.

Of course not. They expected players to return to a safe haven (the keep) in between multiple forays to the caverns and methodically slaughter their way to the end.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1063944Maximizing a character's effectiveness in his chosen area only ruins the other players' game if that's the only area the game ever plays.

You are assuming a well designed game. Sometimes your options are +1 vs +3, the only reason you don't pick the later option is because you do not know about it.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1063946Of course not. They expected players to return to a safe haven (the keep) in between multiple forays to the caverns and methodically slaughter their way to the end.

Not really. There are several areas where at level 1, you'll just get killed if you charge in with swords drawn. The ogre or the owlbear could easily make short work of a few 1st-level characters.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1063947You are assuming a well designed game. Sometimes your options are +1 vs +3, the only reason you don't pick the later option is because you do not know about it.

Granted, but criticizing bad overall design of a game is different from criticizing a specific mechanic within a game.

Can you recall a specific example from an actual RPG of the kind of thing you're talking about?

Quote from: Rhedyn;1063916Ha no. "Balanced encounters" come from the mentality that taking a few Wargame breaks every session really eats up a lot of time and the players seem somewhat engaged by it.

I'm always amazed at the number of ways you find to be wrong about the underlying dynamics of the RPG market.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1063955Granted, but criticizing bad overall design of a game is different from criticizing a specific mechanic within a game.

Can you recall a specific example from an actual RPG of the kind of thing you're talking about?

There was a feat in 4e that gave you an ascending to-hit bonus of +1, +2, or +3 per tier, as in the bonus increased as your character leveled up. If you didn't notice it, or you hadn't grasped the significant of +3 to hit, you were basically crippled compared to other characters.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063951Not really. There are several areas where at level 1, you'll just get killed if you charge in with swords drawn. The ogre or the owlbear could easily make short work of a few 1st-level characters.

I'm not talking about players charging anything.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1063944But then you'd lose half the audience, if not more, for most RPGs to begin with.  The whole point of the wargames from which this hobby is descended was to reward obsessive high-volume learning, capacity for mechanical organization and system manipulation.  If the rules don't require skill and practice to use to their best effect then you aren't really playing a game at all.

Plus, having the same level of effectiveness doesn't mean players have to have the same kind of effectiveness.  Another key part of a challenging game is the combination of dissimilar assets, and part of what makes assets dissimilar is that some are objectively better than others in specific given circumstances.  Maximizing a character's effectiveness in his chosen area only ruins the other players' game if that's the only area the game ever plays.

I don't believe RPGs in general have to be held back by their wargaming roots. That they can and should develop beyond the negative behaviors that developed because of those roots.

Storygames. As many people on this board like to curse towards. Like it or not. They are the next evolution of the RPG. And it has been a direction the medium has been pushing towards since the birth of original D&D. Succeed or fail in individual implementations,. The direction of development is undeniable. As is the greater importance of story itself in effecting how newer RPGs express themselves.

Losing the old mechanically obsessed audience is an eventuality.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1063849Yep. I'm running an sdc palladium world where AR is replaced with DR.  While armor does ablate (can be damaged) it also has damage resistance, such that  a baseball bat cannot damage the tank pretty much at all unless wielded by superhuman strength. Normally folks that complain about ablative armor dont like having to buy new kit all the time, but damage resistance slows that process down to acceptable levels.

A baseball bat would break before the tank would get damaged no matter how strong the arm is. :P

In my D&D 5e home game, I've made armour as Damage Reductions and gave the Proficiency Bonus as an 'AC' bonus, so not only does AC now scale without the need of armour, it's made Swashbucklers rather doable without needing a special 'path', so Fighters can now play with the light armour set.  In the end, it didn't really change how people played.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1063960I don't believe RPGs in general have to be held back by their wargaming roots. That they can and should develop beyond the negative behaviors that developed because of those roots.

Storygames. As many people on this board like to curse towards. Like it or not. They are the next evolution of the RPG. And it has been a direction the medium has been pushing towards since the birth of original D&D. Succeed or fail in individual implementations,. The direction of development is undeniable. As is the greater importance of story itself in effecting how newer RPGs express themselves.

Losing the old mechanically obsessed audience is an eventuality.

I've always felt sort of the opposite on this.  While I'm as much anti gamist as I am anti storyteller.  I consider simulationist sandboxing to be a comfortable 'middle of the road' between the two.  I consider modern systems gravitating towards pure wargaming a la pathfinder to be just as much a deterrent to me as the advent of storyteller systems.  The prevalence of storyteller systems in the hobby is what ran me out of the hobby for a time, though you're probably right that for every one of me that left, several dozen arrived in my place.  While that may be true, role playing will never lose its mechanically obsessed audience.  Wargaming is where this hobby was born and the wargamers are just as fervent about it as the story gamers are.  There MAY eventually be a hard split where wargamers simply choose to stop calling themselves role players for terminology convenience sake (I highly doubt it though), but moreso I highly doubt there will never be an eradication of wargaming as an element of the hobby.  I'd bet that wargamers are still a larger faction of the hobby than storytellers at this point.

From a publicity standpoint I expect the same to be true. I find a wargame that has interesting story elements crop up to be a much more engaging youtube channel than a youtube channel about storygamers trying to make something worth watching, and they're the one's who put a premium on the story so by all rights that shouldn't be the case... Shouldnt we all want to watch the great story more?

Perhaps the direct comparison of youtube channels built on watching wargamers contextualizing their wargame being so much more popular than storyteller youtube channels adds to my perception that wargamers are the majority still, but then again 5e is still no storyteller system and is soundly and roundly still king of the ring.

I mean, in the largest scheme of things the philosophy is true. There's a much larger audience of people 'reading books' than there is an audience of people 'tuning into youtube channels about particularly exciting games of chess'... but specifically within the hobby itself that paradigm is reversed.  Whether you're playing checkers or chess or some newfangled chess where every pawn is replaced by a new piece that travels the board based on its own new unique laws of travel, that's still a much more popular game to both play and watch than a game of chess where players can move any piece on the board anywhere they want on the board that they find 'narratively poignant for narrative's sake'.  No matter what tv show you like, odds are that show is going to run out of plot material and be cancelled, but football, the world poker tour and the voice just seem to keep raking in the fans in perpetuity long after you'd think every possible football or poker or 'singer looking for their big break' story could have been told.

The trouble with stories is they run their course, but wargaming just keeps rolling on and every so often, something storyworthy happens.  I'd even venture to say that most of the wargames i've played in that 'died' did so because they were no longer producing storyworthy moments, not for any mechanical reason despite knowing there are a lot of gamers out there that stop playing pathfinder because the characters get to powerful and the gm has a hard time (or doesnt enjoy the difficulty of) mechanically challenging them anymore.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1063961A baseball bat would break before the tank would get damaged no matter how strong the arm is. :P

I'm pretty sure that was the reasoning behind MDC. But then Rifts gave us MD vibro-knives that can destroy an SDC car in one swipe.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1063959I'm not talking about players charging anything.

Then I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1063968I'm pretty sure that was the reasoning behind MDC. But then Rifts gave us MD vibro-knives that can destroy an SDC car in one swipe.

John Woo style slo mo swipe followed by Michael Bay style cinematic vehicle detonation... Swiper was at ground zero when that car went hindenburg, but after the flames die down that knife guy still has perfect hair.

Because if the storytellers got one thing right, its that the plot armor on my hair is far more important than the plot armor on that car.  Unless you're bruce willis, jason statham or patrick stewart.... Then you're probably better off not investing any points in hair plot armor.

In the same way that I laughed when 'you punched the blue out of her hair', I'm still waiting for a movie to come out where they hit a guy so hard they punch the manbeard right off his face.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1063960Storygames. As many people on this board like to curse towards. Like it or not. They are the next evolution of the RPG. And it has been a direction the medium has been pushing towards since the birth of original D&D. Succeed or fail in individual implementations,. The direction of development is undeniable. As is the greater importance of story itself in effecting how newer RPGs express themselves.

Losing the old mechanically obsessed audience is an eventuality.

Top selling RPGs in Q1 and Q2 2018:

1.   D&D          
2.   Starfinder    
3.   Pathfinder    
4.   Star Wars    
5.   Genesys      

Is Genesys a story game? Because Starfinder and Pathfinder sure aren't.

Quote from: S'mon;1063847I don't like armour as damage reduction; either you get silly results - can never avoid partial armour - or there's way too much book-keeping. Especially in pre-modern settings, armour either did its job or did not do its job, and a hit to armour was typically useless, so armour making the person harder to hit is fine. For a modern setting where people fall down after being shot in their bullet-proof vest, ok have armour as DR if it's also possible to hit the non-armoured bits.

In Mongoose Conan d20 if you used a standard strength attack then armor was DR (with the potential for it to be halved if you were strong and/or had a big smashy weapon) but if you did a dex finesse attack then armor made it harder for the attack to hit. It had a lot of the standard 3ed warts but d20 Conan (especially 2nd edition) was really the best version of 3ed, great magic rules too.

Quote from: Madprofessor;1063755...
I don't like non-variable initiative, and I don't like intricate count down initiative either.

....

So I've been looking for a clean and easy option to the standard non-variable initiative. Is there a system that hits the  sweet spot between your dislikes??

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063972Top selling RPGs in Q1 and Q2 2018:

1.   D&D          
2.   Starfinder    
3.   Pathfinder    
4.   Star Wars    
5.   Genesys      

Is Genesys a story game? Because Starfinder and Pathfinder sure aren't.

First, I'd agree with you that there is no sign that story games are the future. They are a minority alternative to traditional RPGs as represented by D&D, but they don't appear to be taking over the market at all.

I haven't played Genesys - but from reviews and friend's comments, I'd say it is at least story-game influenced. It's core mechanic is called the "Narrative Dice System", and there is an economy of story points. It seems to be in a similar space as FATE, but again, I haven't played it yet.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063970Then I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Where did I lose you?
I pointed out that D&D has had level appropriate content since 1st Ed at least.
You pointed out that there are a couple of probably too tough encounters in KOTB, which is true, but it's also true that the majority of the caves are orcs and rats and whatnot, and then mentioned tactics, or the lack thereof, (charging in swords drawn) which is irrelevant to what content is in the module.

I'm right there with you on the idea that the game shouldn't shield the characters from adversity, and the players should make good decisions, and sometimes that decision is to not engage. But most of the content in the old modules, as indicated by the level suggestion on the cover, is level appropriate. Otherwise every adventure would be impossible and the characters should just stay home.

Quote from: Daztur;1063975In Mongoose Conan d20 if you used a standard strength attack then armor was DR (with the potential for it to be halved if you were strong and/or had a big smashy weapon) but if you did a dex finesse attack then armor made it harder for the attack to hit. It had a lot of the standard 3ed warts but d20 Conan (especially 2nd edition) was really the best version of 3ed, great magic rules too.

Yes, I ran OGL Conan (1e) several sessions and it worked pretty well, but I generally prefer lower complexity.

I can't remember, was Genesys FFG's Star Wars system as a generic game or was it the Marvel Heroic system someone bought when Margaret Weis dropped it?  I think it's the FFG system, which is certainly narrativist.

Quote from: David Johansen;1064030I can't remember, was Genesys FFG's Star Wars system as a generic game or was it the Marvel Heroic system someone bought when Margaret Weis dropped it?  I think it's the FFG system, which is certainly narrativist.

Genesys is the generic system (they're so damn clever) based on the FFG Star Wars system. It's a conventional RPG in many ways, but there are numerous narrative elements in it, some of which annoy the hell out of me.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1063960Storygames. As many people on this board like to curse towards. Like it or not. They are the next evolution of the RPG. And it has been a direction the medium has been pushing towards since the birth of original D&D. Succeed or fail in individual implementations,. The direction of development is undeniable. As is the greater importance of story itself in effecting how newer RPGs express themselves.

Losing the old mechanically obsessed audience is an eventuality.

Speaking for my circle of friends, yes, it makes sense. Adult lifes made it difficult to cope with the requirements of more complex games, and so we ended up playing titles that run faster and ask less investment from everybody, which happens to be the more narrative ones. Seeing how the new generations attention spans are shorter and shorter, I think the tendency is for these kind of games to eventually take over, or exert so much influence over the more popular brands as to transform them considerably.

I will say it's a middle ground when it comes to rpgs. In that yes traditional rpgs like D&D will still remain and probably never leave the rpg hobby. With more narrative rpgs like the new Star Wars and Star Trek while they will never dethrone the traditional rpgs. I also will not hide my head in the sand on purpose and act like they are not popular nor profitable. Is it the way of the future we will see as I'm not sure. rpgs like Rifts, Harn who never update their mechanics and whose devs and fanbase go "well too bad if you don't like it. Fix it on your own or don't we don't care go elsewhere" are simply doomed to obscurity imo.

Quote from: sureshot;1064033Rpgs like Rifts, Harn who never update their mechanics and whose devs and fanbase go "well too bad if you don't like it. Fix it on your own or don't we don't care go elsewhere" are simply doomed to obscurity imo.

Emphasis mine. I would say such an update should ideally make them faster, simpler and easier to pick & play. Otherwise see the newest Runequest Glorantha: it's an update only visually (it's beautiful) but it's rules are almost the same as first edition RQ with all it's idiossincrasies. My bet? It will bomb. (not a wishful thinking, as I actually like BRP and Glorantha).

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063958There was a feat in 4e that gave you an ascending to-hit bonus of +1, +2, or +3 per tier, as in the bonus increased as your character leveled up. If you didn't notice it, or you hadn't grasped the significant of +3 to hit, you were basically crippled compared to other characters.

To be honest, that sounds less like a problem with the game and more like a problem with the player.  Any game will feel counterproductively overcomplicated to players who just aren't paying attention to its rules.

The original complaint about builds makes more sense to me when I think of the gag concept of, I believe his name was "Pun Pun" or "Bun Bun", which was this kobold PC who'd been designed around some clever recursive interaction of some very specific combinations of Feats that allowed him to become ridiculously powerful in a ridiculously short time.  Now I agree that that sort of thing can be aggravating, but in practice it's simply never happened often enough that it's worth removing the whole element of strategic character development to prevent it.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1063955Granted, but criticizing bad overall design of a game is different from criticizing a specific mechanic within a game.

Can you recall a specific example from an actual RPG of the kind of thing you're talking about?

Well in Pathfinder, original rogues v anything else. One guy showed me how an alchemist with the right doodads did everything a rogue could do and more.

3.X in general has options like this.

5e feats are not equal either, even by the most subjective standards.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063957I'm always amazed at the number of ways you find to be wrong about the underlying dynamics of the RPG market.

Hey it's not my fault balanced encounters in an RPG are just a Wargame match.

There is really no way to argue that D&D 5e isn't like that.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1064038To be honest, that sounds less like a problem with the game and more like a problem with the player.  Any game will feel counterproductively overcomplicated to players who just aren't paying attention to its rules.

If I present something as optional, and you don't do further research to discover it is in fact mandatory, that is not a user error. Trusting the designer to accurately convey utility is never a user error.  Versatile Expertise has the same price as every other feat, and it is one of the last feats listed in the last player's expansion of the game. But the game becomes unplayable at mid levels if you don't have it. The term for this in 3.x/4e culture is "feat tax," which refers to feats that are basically so critical to your class being able to perform as expected that they aren't really "optional."

The problem with builds isn't Pun-Pun, which is a fake character anyway. It's that wasting a months leveling up a character who turns out to be garbage because you didn't read enough online forums or buy enough expansion books and very stupidly took fighter feats that sounded like good ideas because you very stupidly thought Monte Cook was trying to write a fun game instead of punish you for being a n00b is infuriating.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1064046If I present something as optional, and you don't do further research to discover it is in fact mandatory, that is not a user error. Trusting the designer to accurately convey utility is never a user error.  Versatile Expertise has the same price as every other feat, and it is one of the last feats listed in the last player's expansion of the game. But the game becomes unplayable at mid levels if you don't have it. The term for this in 3.x/4e culture is "feat tax," which refers to feats that are basically so critical to your class being able to perform as expected that they aren't really "optional."

The problem with builds isn't Pun-Pun, which is a fake character anyway. It's that wasting a months leveling up a character who turns out to be garbage because you didn't read enough online forums or buy enough expansion books and very stupidly took fighter feats that sounded like good ideas because you very stupidly thought Monte Cook was trying to write a fun game instead of punish you for being a n00b is infuriating.

To be fair, 4E included retraining rules in core specifically to deal with taking feat/power choices that just didn't work out like you expected them to.

Also, the game functioned just fine without the Expertise feats; the original design intent was that buffs you gained from leader powers and self-buffs were meant to counteract the fact that your normal attack bonus fell behind the monster defense increase by about 1 point per 10 levels. The falloff wasn't even notable until about level 15 and even then, just getting flanking on a target would completely counteract the shortfall until about level 25 (where it would be 5% less against an at-level opponent).

Also worth noting is that in the core game the highest level standard monster was only a level 26 and only solos were actually level 30, so if you used stuff out of the book and actually reached level 25+ the odds are you'd mostly be fighting level 24-26 opponents while your bonuses to hit kept going up due to your level.

The actual problem was that the devs failed to actually communicate this very well to the audience (yet another instance of 4E's communication staff killing it). Because it wasn't accurately communicated, the weaponized autism that is CharOps immediately looked at the math and said "these numbers fall behind. That's a math hole and it needs to be fixed" and lit the up the boards with how this was a game wrecking bug and the designers finally relented with the various iterations of the expertise feats.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063972Top selling RPGs in Q1 and Q2 2018:

1.   D&D          
2.   Starfinder    
3.   Pathfinder    
4.   Star Wars    
5.   Genesys      

Is Genesys a story game? Because Starfinder and Pathfinder sure aren't.

Starfinder and Pathfinder are still previous generation games. They are based on D&D 3.5 and its variations.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with them at all. But they are what they are.

D&D 5th Edition has incorporated some storygame aspects. But I think that has been for the better. That those aspects have enhanced that game. Instead of take away from it.

Genesys and Star Wars I have not even picked up when I was in the game store. So I have really no knowledge of them.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1064059Starfinder and Pathfinder are still previous generation games. They are based on D&D 3.5 and its variations.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with them at all. But they are what they are.

D&D 5th Edition has incorporated some storygame aspects. But I think that has been for the better. That those aspects have enhanced that game. Instead of take away from it.

Genesys and Star Wars I have not even picked up when I was in the game store. So I have really no knowledge of them.

I think if you have zero knowledge of two the top 5 products, you're probably not in a good spot to say where the market is going.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1064062I think if you have zero knowledge of two the top 5 products, you're probably not in a good spot to say where the market is going.

That's not even true because the drop off after WotC and Paizo is a cliff.

And Paizo is rapidly sliding towards complete irrelevants.

Quote from: Itachi;1064035Emphasis mine. I would say such an update should ideally make them faster, simpler and easier to pick & play. Otherwise see the newest Runequest Glorantha: it's an update only visually (it's beautiful) but it's rules are almost the same as first edition RQ with all it's idiossincrasies. My bet? It will bomb. (not a wishful thinking, as I actually like BRP and Glorantha).

I think that is the trap that too many companies walk into imo. I'm not saying ignore the old fans. Yet doing nothing to try and appeal to new gamers is both a safe bet and a mistake. Sure the new fans will be happy yet newer fans used to more modern rpgs usually will not be interested. Hero System is a perfect example imo. They just went and marketed to the old fanbase did nothing really to try nad appeal to anyone else outside of their fanbase. Now while not dead are pretty much one life support. As funny enough when one does not offer more than they same previous rpg existing fans have no real reason to buy the same material a second time. Fans that left are nothing to come back for more of the same.

One does not even have to go rules light or narrative imo. Keep the same rules yet present them in a format that any beginner can run with the rpg. Rifts is so poorly organized and written and the default assumption to me at least imo is that one finds a fellow gamer to teach one the system. Not exactly the greatest selling point. Or house ruling and all rules are optional. OK great I bought the core for the work to be done for me. Not do the damn job of the rpg designer. Harn will never be updated which is sad because it's a great rpg setting to me the system sucks balls imo. It's also not helped with the crazy amount of money they ask for PDfs. 30$+ for 30 pages or less PDfs sure can I have what your smoking please.

Even a streamlined version of Rifts written for beginners and with rules clearly written and organized would sell well. As long as rpg companies and some of their fans t oo get lost they will never go anywhere. One time Palladium Books was in the top ten of rpg companies.

Quote from: sureshot;1064069I think that is the trap that too many companies walk into imo. I'm not saying ignore the old fans. Yet doing nothing to try and appeal to new gamers is both a safe bet and a mistake. Sure the new fans will be happy yet newer fans used to more modern rpgs usually will not be interested. Hero System is a perfect example imo. They just went and marketed to the old fanbase did nothing really to try nad appeal to anyone else outside of their fanbase. Now while not dead are pretty much one life support. As funny enough when one does not offer more than they same previous rpg existing fans have no real reason to buy the same material a second time. Fans that left are nothing to come back for more of the same.

Actually HERO did the opposite. When they were targeting the existing fan base with 5th ed they were doing quite well. 6E was a significant change intended to bring in new players, and I think it is hard to say it wasn't a massive flop. The existing base had no reason to buy it unless they actually liked the changes (some did, some didn't), but the company was betting on attracting more new fans than the current fans that they alienated.

The 5th Edition years were some of the most productive in the games history. HERO dropped off the map shortly after 6E was released, and it hasn't recovered.

Point-buy stats in D&D style games...random just does D&D better.  If you are worried about player A vs player B balance, then just have the whole table roll a few sets together and pick which one they want to use. (This does not apply to PFS or AL for obvious reasons, but I don't play in those.)

Metacurrency...I don't mind 5e inspiraton or DCC-style luck points, but anything as complex as the Modiphus 2d20 or Genesys Star Wars is just ugly.

FFG Genesys...I like the idea of (Yes/and--Yes/but--No/and--No/but) but the application was godawful.  The dice are a little clunky but the bigger problem was pages and pages of what to spend the results on...It is Star Wars for fuck's sake...If it takes more than 2 seconds to resolve a completely basic combat action then you are doing Star Wars WRONG.

I dislike shoehorning everything into a single system (my only real complaint about 5e). Sometimes you need different subsystems.  Luckily, 5e is easy enough to modify for that purpose.

CR calculation and 'appropriate' encounters...It completely destroys anything that is not somewhat of a railroad...I prefer the "It's called the Trollhaunt Swamp for a reason" approach.

Social mechanics 'as written' in most games...I usually use a some modified combo of "tell me how you approach the situation and what NPC reaction you are shooting for" and then roll the dice if I think it is necessary and I will determine the outcome by DM judgement.

Quote from: Toadmaster;1064070Actually HERO did the opposite. When they were targeting the existing fan base with 5th ed they were doing quite well. 6E was a significant change intended to bring in new players, and I think it is hard to say it wasn't a massive flop. The existing base had no reason to buy it unless they actually liked the changes (some did, some didn't), but the company was betting on attracting more new fans than the current fans that they alienated.

The 5th Edition years were some of the most productive in the games history. HERO dropped off the map shortly after 6E was released, and it hasn't recovered.

6E was a major mistake for HERO, but it wasn't the only one they made around that time. Lucha Libre Hero, selling the Champions Universe IP outright to Cryptic for the MMO rather then licensing it... yeah.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1063972Top selling RPGs in Q1 and Q2 2018:

1.   D&D          
2.   Starfinder    
3.   Pathfinder    
4.   Star Wars    
5.   Genesys      

Is Genesys a story game? Because Starfinder and Pathfinder sure aren't.

This line of analysis presumes that storygames are a type of RPG and not a different type of game that sprang from RPGs the way RPGs sprang from wargaming.

Someone who said in 1979 that "RPGs are the future of wargames" was wrong; RPGs might have been the future of tabletop gaming but they were not the future of wargames by virtue of *not being wargames*. Flames of War is not an RPG. Warhammer 40K is not an RPG. X-Box Miniatures is not an RPG. Heroclix is not an RPG. The hugely successful Axis & Allies series is not an RPG.

Likewise, storygames may be the future of tabletop gaming (I hope not); but they cannot be the future of RPGs by virtue of not being RPGs.

Quote from: Toadmaster;1064070Actually HERO did the opposite. When they were targeting the existing fan base with 5th ed they were doing quite well. 6E was a significant change intended to bring in new players, and I think it is hard to say it wasn't a massive flop. The existing base had no reason to buy it unless they actually liked the changes (some did, some didn't), but the company was betting on attracting more new fans than the current fans that they alienated.

The 5th Edition years were some of the most productive in the games history. HERO dropped off the map shortly after 6E was released, and it hasn't recovered.

   Well, as I recall, the company was already heading into trouble before the 6E announcement, and you could see it in the production values and delays. 6E feels, in retrospect, like a combination of a) changes Steve Long wanted to make, b) trying to leverage the MMORPG deal and c) an attempt to staunch the slow bleeding.

Quote from: amacris;1064087This line of analysis presumes that storygames are a type of RPG and not a different type of game that sprang from RPGs the way RPGs sprang from wargaming.

Someone who said in 1979 that "RPGs are the future of wargames" was wrong; RPGs might have been the future of tabletop gaming but they were not the future of wargames by virtue of *not being wargames*. Flames of War is not an RPG. Warhammer 40K is not an RPG. X-Box Miniatures is not an RPG. Heroclix is not an RPG. The hugely successful Axis & Allies series is not an RPG.

Likewise, storygames may be the future of tabletop gaming (I hope not); but they cannot be the future of RPGs by virtue of not being RPGs.

I don't think people really mean actual Storygames like Baron Munchausen or Universalis when they cite the term around here, but narrative or forgite RPGs instead.

Quote from: amacris;1064087Likewise, storygames may be the future of tabletop gaming (I hope not); but they cannot be the future of RPGs by virtue of not being RPGs.

Judging by what information we have on sales, they're the future of failure.

Quote from: Toadmaster;1064070Actually HERO did the opposite. When they were targeting the existing fan base with 5th ed they were doing quite well. 6E was a significant change intended to bring in new players, and I think it is hard to say it wasn't a massive flop. The existing base had no reason to buy it unless they actually liked the changes (some did, some didn't), but the company was betting on attracting more new fans than the current fans that they alienated.

The 5th Edition years were some of the most productive in the games history. HERO dropped off the map shortly after 6E was released, and it hasn't recovered.

Well to be honest the changes were too minor to warrant the 5E fans from buying imo. The complexity and crunchiness still remained. Fans who would run away at having to look through what look like a dull green textbook now had to go through two of the same. Gurps 4E had two as well yet both were slimmer and looked like a rpg book as opposed to a college textbook. Rereleasing 5E book instead of new books updated to 6E did not sit well with many of the older fanbase. To be honest the company and their more devoted fanbase seriously underestimated the appeal of the system to both newer and ex-hero fans. Those who like rules light and less complex and crunchy games are not going to go into the system as is imo. When they have easy simpler that do the same job.

Even SJG cut back on Gurps support yet they have Munchkin to fall back on luckily. Even then their choice of Mars Attacks and the Disc World books for 4E. The first is not that popular imo, The second is yet beyond source material one can do the same with say Savage Worlds. Their another company who like ignoring the fanase  " we want Gurps Vehicles for 4E  their response "naah were going to give you the above books instead". Hopefully the Fantasy Trip does well for them. Yet it has to be more than just a rehash of older material with better production values. Nostalgia sells products sometimes it's certainly not the best barometer for measuring success. Everyone says the will buy the book so the company publishes it. It's needs to sell well enough for SJG to make profits as well.

A few people here take a dump on Savage Rifts yet it was a success for Pinnacle. The whole "well they will buy the core than use PB books for source material" has merit yet most of the type in my experience it's not the case.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1064111Judging by what information we have on sales, they're the future of failure.

We will see because rpg gamers are not exaclty the best judge of what sells well or not. Simply because they can't be objective and/or simply Grongnardism or both.

"FFG Star Wars won;t sell" it's doing well

" Modiphius Star Trek won't sell " it doing well

"5E will never sell it's too simple and bland " it's doing well.

Out of the above the only one who may run into trouble is Modiphius because they seem to be spending too much money on rpg Ips.
Hating a rpg does not make a objective failure in anyway shape or form and that is why I am so hard on fellow games because when they talk out of their collective asses they come off looking like idiots. Failure means it does not sell well not because me your or someone else hates it on a forum.

I don't have sales figures I do have common sense and rpgs don't do well usually get little to no support. It's just good business 101.

I don't hate story games. I barely even know what they are. I just know the games people point to as examples have miniscule sales.

Quote"FFG Star Wars won;t sell" it's doing well

Anyone who thought a moderately competently executed Star Wars RPG wouldn't sell reasonably well has their head in outer space. There are a lot of people who think "I like this" means "this will sell," which is really dumb.

Quote from: sureshot;1064163A few people here take a dump on Savage Rifts yet it was a success for Pinnacle. The whole "well they will buy the core than use PB books for source material" has merit yet most of the type in my experience it's not the case.

I feel like PB is getting a slice from PEG's Rifts sales. The books and pdfs are slightly more expensive than normal for PEG.

PEGs then benefited from their next core book being on track to be as big of a KS as the Rifts one did.

I have no doubt that most of the Savage Rifts fans of Rifts aren't buying a bunch of PB lore books. But if a handful do, then it's a win for PB because you can make a lot of money off RPG whales. Which PB got to keep their diehard Whales happy by not radically changing their game into some sort of action-focused mid-crunch game, instead they let PEG do that. So PB does benefit from an influx of new people and may pick up a handful of whales (which turns Savage Rifts into advertising PB got paid for to allow happen).

The only potential downside for PB is if, somehow, they had a bunch of fans chomping at the bit to jump ship to a mid-crunch Rifts conversion and immediately lost all interest in PB Rifts books. Somehow, I don't think these people exist.

- Save or die mechanics.
- Though not a game mechanic, the "if the rules don't say you can do it, then you can't" philosophy of game design.
- Inconsequential whiff.
- Static initiative.
- Escalating D&D-style hit points and damage.  Escalation for escalation's sake is a cheap trick when the net effect is the same (i.e. a loss of 27% of your hit points from a sword swing or a magic missile).
- Classes + Level-based systems.  I don't mind templates as a starting point and I don't mind certain level-based systems (like Savage Worlds).
- Disadvantages that give you bonus points but only place a role-playing obligation on you, instead of a mechanical penalty or restriction.
- D&D 5e's design philosophy of placing a massive emphasis on character abilities over universal tactical options (i.e. no bonus for flanking whatsoever unless you have the Pack Tactics ability).

To be fair Flanking in Pathfinder is not that great of a option imo. It's useful to setup say someone like a rogue to Sneak attack or a similar class ability. Otherwise it's useful in that it provides a + 2 to hit provide your flanking. In some cases a death sentence depending on the monster being fought imo. To me at least no version of D&D did flaking correctly. Maybe the versions before as it has been a long time since I played and my books are in storage.

I have to admit - despite having heard it before in similar threads over on TBP, I am always baffled at the people who seem to detest any semblance of a challenge rating or difficulty mechanic.

It's... It's just a tool, innit? I'm all for having organic difficulty spikes in my campaigns - if you go try to kill Red Death the Unmerciful, a great Elder Dragon at first level, you be fucked. Still. CR rating system or not.

How is the book giving you an approximate idea of the difficulty of monsters a bad thing? I very honestly don't get how it could be. It's like hating the existence of the weather report, or something.

I guess my feeling is that Challenge Ratings are fine, but it's best to avoid 'building' encounters.

Quote from: S'mon;1064384I guess my feeling is that Challenge Ratings are fine, but it's best to avoid 'building' encounters.

But that's impossible. You're the GM. Everything that exists in the world, exists because you put it there.

If your PCs wander off into the swamp, someone has to figure out what's in the swamp. If your PCs break into the manor house of a wizard-lord, someone has to figure out what sort of defenses he has. If PCs ask their Mr. Johnson to find them work, someone has to find work for them. That's all building an encounter.

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064385But that's impossible. You're the GM. Everything that exists in the world, exists because you put it there.

If your PCs wander off into the swamp, someone has to figure out what's in the swamp. If your PCs break into the manor house of a wizard-lord, someone has to figure out what sort of defenses he has. If PCs ask their Mr. Johnson to find them work, someone has to find work for them. That's all building an encounter.

"Building an encounter" has developed some specific meanings, though--and not always consistent ones, either.  In the sense of, the GM puts stuff in the world and the players can interact with it, yes, that is all something that could be an encounter.  Usually, though, it means the GM has put something into the game specifically to challenge the players in whatever way makes sense for that game.  This is in contrast to putting stuff into the world because it makes sense in the setting.  The players may "encounter" it, or avoid it, or find some rumors of it (and if they have any sense, stay far away), or any number of other possibilities.  In that sense, the encounter isn't really 'built".  

Some kind of way of estimating difficulties (if only through GM experience in the system the hard way) is necessary to "build encounters" well.  It is not at all necessary to stick things in a setting.  Depending upon how you run the game and what you expect players to do, a means of estimating may be useful when conveying information to players.  I find it reasonably useful the first year or so using a system, and then rapidly not as I gain the hands on experience.

Quote from: S'mon;1064384I guess my feeling is that Challenge Ratings are fine, but it's best to avoid 'building' encounters.

Is there an official rule on how to appropriately combine Challenge Ratings for multiple monsters? When I was first running 5e, it did take me by surprise how (1) multiple low-CR opponents were more dangerous than I expected, and (2) single high-CR opponents were easier than I expected. I've gotten used to it now, enough to wing it by ear, but it seems like something that maybe should be made clearer in the rules - unless I missed something.

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064383I have to admit - despite having heard it before in similar threads over on TBP, I am always baffled at the people who seem to detest any semblance of a challenge rating or difficulty mechanic.

It's... It's just a tool, innit? I'm all for having organic difficulty spikes in my campaigns - if you go try to kill Red Death the Unmerciful, a great Elder Dragon at first level, you be fucked. Still. CR rating system or not.

How is the book giving you an approximate idea of the difficulty of monsters a bad thing? I very honestly don't get how it could be. It's like hating the existence of the weather report, or something.

This was my point earlier as well. It's like saying "I want a car without a speedometer or fuel gauge because those get in the way of my ability to drive like I want to... then is shocked when they get pulled over all the time for speeding and are always running out of gas on the side of the road."

The only thing I can determine, since being able to rank monster difficulty has been standard since even the earliest days (i.e. HD + varying numbers of *'s based on special abilities), is that NOT having such tools gives the GM a chance to be an asshat by throwing someone guaranteed to be a TPK at the party and then be able to blame the system not being clear instead of having to admit "I had a shitty day at work and chose to vent by making you have a shitty game tonight."

It also gives the other players a clear idea of whether their GM is a fuckwad and/or incompetent because he put a dozen monsters clearly labeled "one of these is a challenge for a level 10 party" in the entry hall of the of the closest ruin to the town where the new PC party is starting out and that no one in town knew they were there. Shit GMs hate systems where players can easily tell if they're a Shit GM or not.

Quote from: jhkim;1064401Is there an official rule on how to appropriately combine Challenge Ratings for multiple monsters? When I was first running 5e, it did take me by surprise how (1) multiple low-CR opponents were more dangerous than I expected, and (2) single high-CR opponents were easier than I expected. I've gotten used to it now, enough to wing it by ear, but it seems like something that maybe should be made clearer in the rules - unless I missed something.

Well, there is an official "guideline" in the DMG section on encounter difficulty.  It doesn't work very well even in the basic math, is a pain to manage, and doesn't take into account that the more players at the table, the more sheer variety in competence one will get in the party.  You don't get quite the same effect from sheer number of creatures due to the party usually having ways to manage numbers, but it is still there. (And no, WotC, this does not average out across the party.)  

I've found it better with 5E to think of monsters in terms of what the basic math says will happen with a "unit" of monsters against 4 average characters.  Then extrapolate from there using simple math, and expect the party to adjust their expectations for a mismatch in numbers.

Quote from: Itachi;1064091I don't think people really mean actual Storygames like Baron Munchausen or Universalis when they cite the term around here, but narrative or forgite RPGs instead.

No, I know how it's used, but I am with RPG Pundit in that I don't think most Forge RPGs are RPGs. Any game that actively encourages the player to meta-game against the interests of his in-world character in order to "make a better story" is not a role-playing game.

If you are familiar with Forge theory, then this might elucidate my view: Forge theory has it totally backwards when it says that Stance is secondary to RPGs, with Director, Author, Actor, and Pawn stance all being accorded status based on Agenda.
(see http://indie-rpgs.com/articles/4/) I do think Stance is a valid concept but it's much more important than Forge theory asserts. Stance, I believe, actually determines whether a game is a Wargame, an RPG, or a Storygame more than any other fact.

In some cases, the *only* difference between an RPGs and a Wargame is Stance. Consider Car Wars, or consider D&D 4E played as an RPG versus played as a tactical miniatures game. Indeed, RPGs were born simply by playing Wargames in Actor and Author stance instead of Pawn stance, and Storygames were born by playing RPGs in Director stance.

So I don't think Storygames will ever be the future of RPGs because people who enjoy RPGs enjoy playing in Actor stance (AS their character) don't necessarily enjoy it in Director stance (telling stories ABOUT their character). Some people enjoy both and hence there are hybrid games, in the same way that some people enjoy both Wargames and RPGs so there are hybrid games like Battlestations. But Battlestations is not "the future of wargames".

Quote from: amacris;1064406No, I know how it's used, but I am with RPG Pundit in that I don't think most Forge RPGs are RPGs. Any game that actively encourages the player to meta-game against the interests of his in-world character in order to "make a better story" is not a role-playing game.

If you are familiar with Forge theory, then this might elucidate my view: Forge theory has it totally backwards when it says that Stance is secondary to RPGs, with Director, Author, Actor, and Pawn stance all being accorded status based on Agenda.
(see http://indie-rpgs.com/articles/4/) I do think Stance is a valid concept but it's much more important than Forge theory asserts. Stance, I believe, actually determines whether a game is a Wargame, an RPG, or a Storygame more than any other fact.

In some cases, the *only* difference between an RPGs and a Wargame is Stance. Consider Car Wars, or consider D&D 4E played as an RPG versus played as a tactical miniatures game. Indeed, RPGs were born simply by playing Wargames in Actor and Author stance instead of Pawn stance, and Storygames were born by playing RPGs in Director stance.

So I don't think Storygames will ever be the future of RPGs because people who enjoy RPGs enjoy playing in Actor stance (AS their character) don't necessarily enjoy it in Director stance (telling stories ABOUT their character). Some people enjoy both and hence there are hybrid games, in the same way that some people enjoy both Wargames and RPGs so there are hybrid games like Battlestations. But Battlestations is not "the future of wargames".

Heh. You're actually agreeing with me here.

See, the games people usually refer to as Storygames around here are the likes of Fate, Apocalypse World, Cortex, Burning Wheel, etc which are played primarily in actor and author stances. None of those have director stance (that is, directly editing stories) as a prominent mode of play.

And I totally agree with you on Stances characterizing the type of game.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1064403Well, there is an official "guideline" in the DMG section on encounter difficulty.  It doesn't work very well even in the basic math, is a pain to manage, and doesn't take into account that the more players at the table, the more sheer variety in competence one will get in the party.  You don't get quite the same effect from sheer number of creatures due to the party usually having ways to manage numbers, but it is still there. (And no, WotC, this does not average out across the party.)  

I've found it better with 5E to think of monsters in terms of what the basic math says will happen with a "unit" of monsters against 4 average characters.  Then extrapolate from there using simple math, and expect the party to adjust their expectations for a mismatch in numbers.

The first thing I do with CR systems is throw them away and eyeball the encounter difficulty like I've been doing for the past two decades.

I'm ok with a CR system in theory. In practice, they have all sucked.

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064385But that's impossible. You're the GM. Everything that exists in the world, exists because you put it there.

If you don't know what Building an Encounter means, read the sections in the 4e or 5e DMG.

Rolling 1d6 orcs on the wandering monster table is not Building an Encounter. It has a specific meaning, as Steven Mitchell says.

Quote from: amacris;1064406No, I know how it's used, but I am with RPG Pundit in that I don't think most Forge RPGs are RPGs. Any game that actively encourages the player to meta-game against the interests of his in-world character in order to "make a better story" is not a role-playing game.

If you are familiar with Forge theory, then this might elucidate my view: Forge theory has it totally backwards when it says that Stance is secondary to RPGs, with Director, Author, Actor, and Pawn stance all being accorded status based on Agenda.
(see http://indie-rpgs.com/articles/4/) I do think Stance is a valid concept but it's much more important than Forge theory asserts. Stance, I believe, actually determines whether a game is a Wargame, an RPG, or a Storygame more than any other fact.

In some cases, the *only* difference between an RPGs and a Wargame is Stance. Consider Car Wars, or consider D&D 4E played as an RPG versus played as a tactical miniatures game. Indeed, RPGs were born simply by playing Wargames in Actor and Author stance instead of Pawn stance, and Storygames were born by playing RPGs in Director stance.

Interesting point, thanks. I think you're right.

Quote from: S'mon;1064432If you don't know what Building an Encounter means, read the sections in the 4e or 5e DMG.

Rolling 1d6 orcs on the wandering monster table is not Building an Encounter. It has a specific meaning, as Steven Mitchell says.

Except the DM is the one deciding to put 1d6 orcs and not 3d6 ogres (or 10d6 ancient huge red dragons for a ridiculous example) on the wandering monster table for that dungeon you're running 1st level PCs through.

I'm quite familiar with 4E (its bar none my favorite edition of D&D) and all "Building an Encounter" does is let you know whether this encounter you're dropping into the dungeon (placed in a room or on a wandering monster table) is going to be easy, moderate, hard or an almost certain TPK based on the total XP of all the monsters you've got in the encounter relative to the party's level.

I does not mandate that encounters only be of X level. Its a tool to let the GM know how difficult the encounter is going to be so, if you don't want a certain TPK on level one you know to use 1d6 orcs on the wandering monster table and not 2d6 trolls.

You may say "Well obviously you wouldn't put 2d6 trolls on the wandering monster table for level one of a starter dungeon unless you want a chance for a party wipe." But that's only because you've internalized the relative threats of various D&D monsters. The point of the "Build an Encounter" sections in 4E are so that new DMs don't have to rely on (likely incorrect) guesswork to put together encounters in their dungeons. Instead, there's a way to measure the relative threat of opponents and a section describing what to expect if you throw threat level X against party level Y.

Quote from: Chris24601;1064454Except the DM is the one deciding to put 1d6 orcs and not 3d6 ogres (or 10d6 ancient huge red dragons for a ridiculous example) on the wandering monster table for that dungeon you're running 1st level PCs through.

Well that makes the assumption that "you're running 1st level PCs through" a certain set of encounters and the DM is choosing who the PCs will meet and not the PCs choosing who they will meet. If you run things sandbox then there's all kinds of places the PCs can go to and all kinds of things they can meet and fight and if they fight something too hard then it's on the PCs not on the DM.

That's why it's often good to make up a hex map and random encounters ahead of time so that what the PCs run into isn't based on what level they are. Of course you can't plan out the whole world ahead of time but it's a general philosophy: put in what critters make sense to be there without taking into account what levels the PCs are.

Also PCs can interact with the same encounter in different ways depending on their level for example if the PCs run into an encounter that some giants on patrol then:
- Very low level: run away!
-Somewhat low level: ambush the patrol.
-Mid level: wipe out the patrol and then raid the giant's home.
-Higher level: wipe out the patrol and then clear the giant's home.

Quote from: Daztur;1064461Well that makes the assumption that "you're running 1st level PCs through" a certain set of encounters and the DM is choosing who the PCs will meet and not the PCs choosing who they will meet. If you run things sandbox then there's all kinds of places the PCs can go to and all kinds of things they can meet and fight and if they fight something too hard then it's on the PCs not on the DM.

That's why it's often good to make up a hex map and random encounters ahead of time so that what the PCs run into isn't based on what level they are. Of course you can't plan out the whole world ahead of time but it's a general philosophy: put in what critters make sense to be there without taking into account what levels the PCs are.

I'm going to make the assumption that even what you describe as a sandbox game is more than just the PCs moving from one hex to the next randomly, making a role in the random encounter table each time. I'm going to assume the PCs occasionally do things. They stop in a tavern and look for work, or they stand on the side of the road with a sign "Will hack 4 gold", or they bothered to create backstories for their characters that occasionally motivate them to do more than kill 1D6 kobolds per 24 hours. That they go in towns and cities, interact with NPCs, take jobs, go on the odd quest, get revengence on their father's killer, whatever. The sort of things PCs generally get up to.

Assuming that is true, the idea that there is this meaningful hands-off-ness of the GM in determining what the PCs run into just doesn't ring true for me.

"Put what critters make sense to be there without taking into account what levels the PCs are"? Very rarely is there any specific thing that is the only thing that makes sense. Are there 5 goblins or 10 camped out in the woods? Depending on the system and the characters, that might be the difference between an easy encounter and a TPK, yet from a verisimilitude perspective either 5 or 10 goblins is perfectly sensible. Ok, sure, that's a simplistic problem, you could leave that up to dice. How about breaking into a ? What's in the building? Well, that's up to the GM, too. Who owns the building? Also up to the GM. How much does whoever owns it cares bout it, and what sort of defenses are there? A vast, vast array of possibilities could all make sense. Again, unless you're going to roll for who owns the building, what's in it, how much they care, and then finally roll for the guards... At some point you're making choices.

Quote from: Daztur;1064461Also PCs can interact with the same encounter in different ways depending on their level for example if the PCs run into an encounter that some giants on patrol then:
- Very low level: run away!
-Somewhat low level: ambush the patrol.
-Mid level: wipe out the patrol and then raid the giant's home.
-Higher level: wipe out the patrol and then clear the giant's home.

Why did the PCs encounter giants in the first place?

Quote from: Chris24601;1064454I'm quite familiar with 4E (its bar none my favorite edition of D&D) and all "Building an Encounter" does is let you know whether this encounter you're dropping into the dungeon (placed in a room or on a wandering monster table) is going to be easy, moderate, hard or an almost certain TPK based on the total XP of all the monsters you've got in the encounter relative to the party's level.

There is a huge difference - which you are wilfully ignoring - between

1. building to a budget to get an easy/medium/hard/deadly fight and
2. Taking a naturalistic or status quo approach

This is so even though it is possible for the GM to look at the 5 orcs rolled up under the #2 approach and judge whether they'll kill the PCs. In #1 - encounter building - the decision on threat level comes first, and is decided at the tactical/encounter level. In a status quo game, the GM likely knows that the zone the PCs have entered is a '1st level dungeon' or a 'wilderness suitable for 7th level PCs', so there may be design at the adventure level, but there is no ENCOUNTER BUILDING at the encounter level.

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064472How about breaking into a ? What's in the building? Well, that's up to the GM, too. Who owns the building? Also up to the GM. How much does whoever owns it cares bout it, and what sort of defenses are there? A vast, vast array of possibilities could all make sense. Again, unless you're going to roll for who owns the building, what's in it, how much they care, and then finally roll for the guards... At some point you're making choices.

I normally prefer to use published material or roll on a random table for this kind of thing, not just decide it. But it's far more common for the PCs to go looking for a specific type of building than to be entering random ones. So then the choice is whether the building type exists - which may be obvious from the circumstances - or else roll for it. Defaulting to 3 in 6 chance works well.

Quote from: S'mon;1064484I normally prefer to use published material

Like many people, I don't. But that's just offloading the job to someone else, the job still has to be done by someone.

Quote from: S'mon;1064484or roll on a random table for this kind of thing, not just decide it.

The world isn't random. That makes as little sense as the world being custom-tailored to the PCs. Random charts have their uses, but they aren't a substitute for a GM. There's a reason the GM exists.

I feel like "just roll on random tables" is antithetical to the "put stuff there that makes sense" answer Daztur suggests, and yet neither are a fulfilling answer.

Quote from: S'mon;1064484But it's far more common for the PCs to go looking for a specific type of building than to be entering random ones. So then the choice is whether the building type exists - which may be obvious from the circumstances - or else roll for it. Defaulting to 3 in 6 chance works well.

But that's not the end of the story. Assuming the PCs aren't breaking into a random building, there's got to be a reason they're breaking in. Who came up with that reason? How does that reason impact what would be in the building? A thief guild could have anything from a couple of low-level thief NPCs holding down the fort, to a small army of high-level thieves gathered for a conclave of guild masters, to a master assassin specifically there to guard a treasure, to priests of a thief-god, or tamed dire wolf guard dogs, or who-the-hell-knows what else. And all points in between.

So either someone has to decide what's in there, or we just come back to random. And again, the world isn't random. That's just as bad as over-designed.

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064383How is the book giving you an approximate idea of the difficulty of monsters a bad thing? I very honestly don't get how it could be. It's like hating the existence of the weather report, or something.

Didn't you grow up with people getting pissed off at the weatherman when the forecast turned out to be wrong?  I don't want to be that weatherman.

In my experience, when you have a system which contains rules for building a "balanced" or "level-appropriate" encounter, then many (not all, but many, and probably most) players will expect every encounter to be "balanced" or "level-appropriate".  Why?  Because it's right there in the name!  If they have an encounter that doesn't conform to those guidelines then it is, by definition and according to the rules, "unbalanced" or "inappropriate".

So, when I place a hill giant family in hex 1234 and a party of 1st-levels wander into that hex, they assume "this wouldn't be here it if wasn't level-appropriate - CHAAAAAAARGE!!!" and then cry and accuse the GM of "cheating" or being a "killer DM" when the giants (predictably) TPK them.  Or I place a trio of goblin scouts in hex 4321 and a party of 12th-levels wanders into that hex, and then they bitch about how the goblins weren't challenging to their godlike abilities.  The world can't just be the world because that's what it is, they expect every single thing they ever see to be "balanced" to provide them with a "challenge", but only just enough of a challenge to look difficult, while actually being something they can reliably overcome by expending 25% of their daily resources and no actual risk of dying or losing anything meaningful.

And, yes, I know the rules don't actually say you have to do that... but there are a lot of players who expect that you will and will declare you to be a crappy GM if you don't.

Quote from: Chris24601;1064454Except the DM is the one deciding to put 1d6 orcs and not 3d6 ogres (or 10d6 ancient huge red dragons for a ridiculous example) on the wandering monster table for that dungeon you're running 1st level PCs through.

I'm quite familiar with 4E (its bar none my favorite edition of D&D) and all "Building an Encounter" does is let you know whether this encounter you're dropping into the dungeon (placed in a room or on a wandering monster table) is going to be easy, moderate, hard or an almost certain TPK based on the total XP of all the monsters you've got in the encounter relative to the party's level.

This is all predicated on the idea that the dungeon is being built for a specific party of specific characters of specific levels.

What happens when you create a dungeon which exists independently of any particular party, and isn't expected to be entered at any particular time, so you don't know what the relative level will be and can't calculate an appropriate XP budget?  How do you "build balanced encounters" when you don't know at the time the dungeon is populated whether it will be discovered and entered by three 1st-level characters or five 12th-level characters?

I'll tell you what happens:  That entire method of encounter building falls like a house of cards and you just put in what makes sense without worrying about "XP budgets" or "level-appropriate encounters".

Quote from: Daztur;1064461That's why it's often good to make up a hex map and random encounters ahead of time so that what the PCs run into isn't based on what level they are. Of course you can't plan out the whole world ahead of time but it's a general philosophy: put in what critters make sense to be there without taking into account what levels the PCs are.

Also PCs can interact with the same encounter in different ways depending on their level for example if the PCs run into an encounter that some giants on patrol then:
- Very low level: run away!
-Somewhat low level: ambush the patrol.
-Mid level: wipe out the patrol and then raid the giant's home.
-Higher level: wipe out the patrol and then clear the giant's home.

Exactly!

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064472I'm going to make the assumption that even what you describe as a sandbox game is more than just the PCs moving from one hex to the next randomly, making a role in the random encounter table each time. I'm going to assume the PCs occasionally do things. They stop in a tavern and look for work, or they stand on the side of the road with a sign "Will hack 4 gold", or they bothered to create backstories for their characters that occasionally motivate them to do more than kill 1D6 kobolds per 24 hours. That they go in towns and cities, interact with NPCs, take jobs, go on the odd quest, get revengence on their father's killer, whatever. The sort of things PCs generally get up to.

Depends on the campaign style.  Even in the campaign style you describe, it's nothing unusual in my experience for the three 1st-level guys to get told to stay away from The Deadly Forest of Certain Death because it's infested with black dragons and say "It wouldn't be there if it wasn't level-appropriate.  Let's go!" if they're playing in a system where level-appropriate encounters are a thing.

But there's also the West Marches campaign style, where the PCs are exploring unknown and untamed wilderness.  Nobody is giving them jobs or quests, they're just going out looking for fame and fortune.  No NPCs can tell them what to expect out there, because the PCs who have gone out there and returned to tell the tale know more about it than anyone else.  They take what they know, and use it to make their own plans to scout new areas or to more thoroughly explore a previously-discovered site with little or no NPC guidance.

Outside of West Marches, it's still common for PCs (particularly those with "backstories for their characters that occasionally motivate them to do more than kill 1D6 kobolds per 24 hours") to pursue a personal goal without depending on quest-givers to point them in a certain direction, and there's a good chance they'll run off in some unpredictable direction in pursuit of that goal.

PCs absolutely can be self-directing without needing the GM to shepherd them in a specific direction.

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064472Again, unless you're going to roll for who owns the building, what's in it, how much they care, and then finally roll for the guards... At some point you're making choices.

Well, first off, I absolutely would roll for those things, unless it was a building I'd prepped at some point in advance, probably prior to knowing which (if any) PCs might be visiting it, or when they might do so.

Even in the case where I did deliberately set it up instead of rolling, though, there's the additional element of when the choices are made.  If, as I said, I made those choices before knowing which or how many or what level PCs will end up going there, then the things I chose were independent of the PC party, which means that I can't have calculated whether it's level-appropriate for some as-yet-unknown party.  (And, because I'm a firm believer in the world being what it is and not constantly morphing itself to meet some out-of-game criteria, then I'm not going to go back and change those decisions to make it all level-appropriate once I do know what party will be visiting.  This isn't Skyrim - and, incidentally, I considered Oblivion and Skyrim to be completely unplayable until I modded them to turn off the godawful "the entire world levels up along with you" crap.)

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064472Why did the PCs encounter giants in the first place?

Most likely because, four months ago, before any of the current PCs were even rolled up, I determined that a family of 4 hill giants live in a stone hut in hex 1234, and then the PCs went to that hex and two of the giants were at home (with the other two returning 1dN hours after the PCs' arrival, where N is the number of hours remaining before dusk).

Or, if they're in hex 1236 at the time, it's because I rolled a wandering encounter of "meet creatures from a lair two hexes north of their current location" and the giants' hut was the selected lair.  (Yes, that's how I do wilderness encounters - instead of encounter tables, I randomly select a nearby hex and a potential lair site within that hex.  If the lair is occupied, you meet something that lives there.  If it's not occupied, then there's no encounter.)

Time for a reaction roll in either case - maybe the giants will be friendly, or at least non-hostile?

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064505I feel like "just roll on random tables" is antithetical to the "put stuff there that makes sense" answer Daztur suggests, and yet neither are a fulfilling answer.

If you're just rolling on random tables found in the rulebook or someplace else which has no connection to your particular world, then I tend to agree.

Tables customized to your setting are another matter entirely.

"Random generation" doesn't have to mean "you're just as likely to meet an ancient dragon or a common rat", after all.  The tables you roll on model the world, they just model it probabilistically rather than modeling it statically.  (If you want to be pedantic here, I suppose we could call it "procedural generation" rather than "random generation", but I think the meaning is clear without needing to resort to that.)

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064505Assuming the PCs aren't breaking into a random building, there's got to be a reason they're breaking in. Who came up with that reason?

In my games, it would generally be the players who made that decision.  I rarely give them quests or tell them where to go or what to do.

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064505How does that reason impact what would be in the building?

It doesn't.  If there are three thieves inside the building counting out the cash from their latest take, then that's what's inside the building regardless of the reason why the PCs are breaking in.

If there's any connection, it's the other way around - what's inside the building impacts the reason why the PCs decided to break in (or to avoid it).  If the players believe there to be three thieves inside who just got back with a serious haul, then they might decide to go in and rob the thieves.  If one of the thieves is known to have killed one of the PCs' love interests, then they might break in to take revenge on him.  If there's a master assassin guarding a treasure, then smart players will decide not to break in and stupid ones will say "he wouldn't be there if it wasn't a balanced encounter, so let's steal that treasure!" and get themselves killed.

Quote from: Bruwulf;1064505And again, the world isn't random. That's just as bad as over-designed.

The world is a lot closer to being random than it is to being ubiquitously level-appropriate.

Quote from: nDervish;1064506This is all predicated on the idea that the dungeon is being built for a specific party of specific characters of specific levels.

What happens when you create a dungeon which exists independently of any particular party, and isn't expected to be entered at any particular time, so you don't know what the relative level will be and can't calculate an appropriate XP budget?  How do you "build balanced encounters" when you don't know at the time the dungeon is populated whether it will be discovered and entered by three 1st-level characters or five 12th-level characters?

Allow me the counter of "Who the fuck not living in their parent's basement has the free time to design all these dungeons they never expect to see the light of day until some undetermined point in the future?"

I design dungeons because I expect the current party in the campaign to be going into them in the very near future (i.e. the next session or the session after that if they get sidetracked). If there are other dungeons on the current map the PCs are aware of I'll have notes of what the PCs know about them so that if they ever do head in those directions I can have something built that doesn't contradict those notes (or contradicts it in ways that make sense) for the session they get there.

I think you've got some serious rose-colored glasses on where you're transposing the amount of free time you had as a teenager to do that level of design work for the sort of level-agnostic dungeons you describe onto adults who really do not have anything like the amount of time required to do that. When you're juggling a job, kids, taking care of aging parents, church, etc. just finding a free hour or two to prep an adventure for game night is a luxury.

I'd also suggest that if you want something where you want level agnostic dungeons that you pick a system with a much flatter progression curve than ANY edition of D&D. Because dropping a random CR 12 monster into a dungeon there's a chance level 1 PCs may be adventuring in is just an exercise in futility, particularly if the CR 12 critter can outrun the PCs in addition to dropping a PC with each hit.

"I decided a Chimera lived in this dungeon next to the small hamlet you grew up in and from which you launched your first adventure... everyone roll up new PCs for next time" is crap DM work and always will be.

Quote from: Chris24601;1064516"I decided a Chimera lived in this dungeon next to the small hamlet you grew up in and from which you launched your first adventure... everyone roll up new PCs for next time" is crap DM work and always will be.

That probably is a crap DM job, but not because of a lack of encounter building.  (Well, not automatically.  It is bad encounter building, too, in a game with those expectations, but that is not all it is.)  It's crap from a "naturalistic" perspective because it doesn't explain why the hamlet is still in existence, and thus even for a group of experienced players with new characters in a sandbox game, is not giving them a fair shake.  

We know the chimera is tough--whether due to the system giving us a semi-solid means of estimating toughness or through DM experience.  Therefore, in a naturalistic game, if it has been in the area for some time, there will be evidence of it.  Thus players that make an effort to scout and think will probably try to avoid it.

Quote from: Chris24601;1064516Allow me the counter of "Who the fuck not living in their parent's basement has the free time to design all these dungeons they never expect to see the light of day until some undetermined point in the future?"

This is why I prefer to buy stuff. With Michael Curtis' Stonehell Dungeon alone I have a couple thousand dungeon rooms and material for lots of different PC groups of level 1 to 10+. But I also have lots of other placed dungeons PCs can go to.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1064527That probably is a crap DM job, but not because of a lack of encounter building.  (Well, not automatically.  It is bad encounter building, too, in a game with those expectations, but that is not all it is.)  It's crap from a "naturalistic" perspective because it doesn't explain why the hamlet is still in existence, and thus even for a group of experienced players with new characters in a sandbox game, is not giving them a fair shake.  

We know the chimera is tough--whether due to the system giving us a semi-solid means of estimating toughness or through DM experience.  Therefore, in a naturalistic game, if it has been in the area for some time, there will be evidence of it.  Thus players that make an effort to scout and think will probably try to avoid it.

Yeah the chimera beside the starter town is fine if the PCs have an opportunity to know of it and that it needs to be avoided. In fact having such stuff early on can be useful to immediately break the 'balanced encounter' mentality.

Quote from: S'mon;1064543Yeah the chimera beside the starter town is fine if the PCs have an opportunity to know of it and that it needs to be avoided. In fact having such stuff early on can be useful to immediately break the 'balanced encounter' mentality.

I've done that, with the tarrasque.

You want to fight it? Go right ahead, callow fighter. I won't stop you. I'll even roll dice.

Quote from: Itachi;1064412Heh. You're actually agreeing with me here.

See, the games people usually refer to as Storygames around here are the likes of Fate, Apocalypse World, Cortex, Burning Wheel, etc which are played primarily in actor and author stances. None of those have director stance (that is, directly editing stories) as a prominent mode of play.

And I totally agree with you on Stances characterizing the type of game.

Crazy, I've never agreed with someone on the internet before :)
Cheers!

QuoteSo, when I place a hill giant family in hex 1234 and a party of 1st-levels wander into that hex, they assume "this wouldn't be here it if wasn't level-appropriate - CHAAAAAAARGE!!!" and then cry and accuse the GM of "cheating" or being a "killer DM" when the giants (predictably) TPK them.

This is the real problem, the one I feel has been enculturated by video games. They expect the world to adjust itself to their level.  Think back to common thieves wearing glass armor in Oblivion.

Of course it's useful to have a decent estimate of how powerful a monster is (in 5e, a CR N monster is typically capable of knocking out an Nth-level wizard in 1 round, so at least it's something). But I hate the player expectation that if they come over a rise to see a giant eating sheep, with a shepherd hollering in the distance, I must have scaled the giant down to their level.

Quote from: Chris24601;1064516"I decided a Chimera lived in this dungeon next to the small hamlet you grew up in and from which you launched your first adventure... everyone roll up new PCs for next time" is crap DM work and always will be.

This is a strawman. If I put a Chimera in a dungeon, there is some way of finding out that he's there, or at least that the dungeon is full of excessively scary things, besides charging in and dying.

I barely prepare at all. I have tons of modules, adventure compilations, random tables, and the like, that I pull stuff from. I once rolled an encounter with 50 trolls. The party was level 3. So I put 50 trolls in a destroyed village deep in a nearby forest, and had 1d4 of them attack the party, who had to cast off gold and rations to escape.

The key to running campaigns where the world doesn't adjust itself to the players is to give the players the means to assess a threat and avoid it if it outclasses them. Just having a flight of white dragons randomly show up and eat them isn't what anyone is talking about.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1064719This is the real problem, the one I feel has been enculturated by video games.

I would say videogames are so wide and diversified a medium at this point that saying that doesn't really say anything. While there's a parcel of games that follow the logic you criticize, there are others which do not.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1064721The key to running campaigns where the world doesn't adjust itself to the players is to give the players the means to assess a threat and avoid it if it outclasses them. Just having a flight of white dragons randomly show up and eat them isn't what anyone is talking about.

Sure. I think the argument is that the GM is still modulating the content based on the character's levels. Giving ample warning and clues about a lame kobold mushroom farmer is not nearly as important as warning the players about the ancient red dragon that lives in the mountain pass.
It would be perfectly serendipitous for said dragon to mistake the party of 1st level characters for the party that just stole his gem, and go gunning for them full bore, no prisoners. But I doubt any GM would find that kind of scenario appropriate for their level.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064735Sure. I think the argument is that the GM is still modulating the content based on the character's levels.

Hmm. I tend to give warnings of powerful monsters regardless of PC level. Exception would be in a megadungeon where level depth already keys to threat level.

I think the thing with high level PCs is that they tend to generate powerful enemies - THAT is when the 3 Assassins or the ancient red dragon may attack them unannounced. But usually the 20th level PCs still have to go seek out the high level monster foe, who they will usually have heard lots of stories about beforehand.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064735It would be perfectly serendipitous for said dragon to mistake the party of 1st level characters for the party that just stole his gem, and go gunning for them full bore, no prisoners. But I doubt any GM would find that kind of scenario appropriate for their level.

If the 1st level PCs encountered an adult red dragon IMC I'd probably roll a 2d6 reaction check - if I got a 2 - Hostile - then I'd interpret it something like your suggestion, back luck PCs. But the chances of any PCs just randomly running into an adult red dragon is pretty low - big monsters have a big footprint.

Quote from: S'mon;1064744Hmm. I tend to give warnings of powerful monsters regardless of PC level. Exception would be in a megadungeon where level depth already keys to threat level.

I think the thing with high level PCs is that they tend to generate powerful enemies - THAT is when the 3 Assassins or the ancient red dragon may attack them unannounced. But usually the 20th level PCs still have to go seek out the high level monster foe, who they will usually have heard lots of stories about beforehand.

Me too.  I even take it to the next fun step:  Some creatures and organizations are deliberately full of bluster, and thus set out to create the impression that they are more capable than they are.  One of the very best things about breaking the "encounter appropriate" mindset is not setting up the PC kill.  You could do that anytime.  When you get them to run in terror from something that they could easily handle?  Gold, Jerry, Gold!   Sometimes it happens almost by accident.

The pinnacle was when I had them running from a werewolf.  They completed two adventures and were well on their way to finishing a third, over about 20 hours of play and weeks of game time. The whole time they were spooked by found remains (not all from the werewolf's victims), distant howling, seeing the werewolf in the distance, and the hysterical ravings of some NPC guards that had blown the threat all out of proportion.  The werewolf had been hired by one of their many enemies, but the party stayed on the move.  When the werewolf finally cornered them in a small dungeon, they were convinced they were dead.  After one anti-climatic round of ranged combat, the players were a bit miffed.  "I can't believe we've been dodging this guy for days!"

I had a party TPK themselves when they decided to wade into a nest of wyverns. Not softening them up with ranged attacks first, just wade into melee. Because "Obviously Dave wouldn't have put them there if we weren't supposed to be able to kill them."  Wrong. Dave put the wyverns there because it was a wyvern nesting ground.  They spotted the beast from far enough away that they could easily have avoided them.

I don't do "challenge ratings". Things are where they are because that is where it makes sense in the world for them to be. Monsters do leave spoor. Monster den is quite likely to have the remains of victims near it. It may be a wolf kill or may be a dragon kill. To have a chance at determining which examine the remains. Is it a deer, an elephant, or several armored knights?

The crippled old kobold will leave kobold tracks. Of course there is always a slight chance that he is also a powerful shaman or wizard.  This is why it can be a good idea to talk to intelligent creatures when you encounter them.  It helps that I give experience for "monsters overcome", not just for "monsters killed".  If you manage to talk your way past the monster, or sneak past it and rob its treasure I believe you should earn experience.  Not all characters are Fighting Men after all.

I tell people about how the game works before we play. In a sandbox fantasy game, you can die if you poke the wrong bear. I don't customize to character capability. And as stated above by several of you savvy GMs; I give them clues, foreshadowing and plenty of opportunity to figure out what is going on. The whole kick in the door, kill shit we is supposed to kill, get the pie... does NOT appeal to me. Also, why not just play a video game that does that WAY better? Could you imagine Frodo's quest buffed into a "level appropriate quest"?

"You must destroy the ring Frodo"

"But how?"

"You must wrestle that chicken and force it to swallow the ring. It's belly contains the fires of Mordor!"

"Whew. I thought I was going to have to go somewhere."

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064735Sure. I think the argument is that the GM is still modulating the content based on the character's levels. Giving ample warning and clues about a lame kobold mushroom farmer is not nearly as important as warning the players about the ancient red dragon that lives in the mountain pass.
It would be perfectly serendipitous for said dragon to mistake the party of 1st level characters for the party that just stole his gem, and go gunning for them full bore, no prisoners. But I doubt any GM would find that kind of scenario appropriate for their level.

The ideal is to not modulate the world to the players. The easiest way to doing this is to make up enough shit ahead of time that how hard the critters are that the PCs run is already set. Of course that's impossible in practice, you can't write up the entire world but you can work towards that as a default by having a bunch of hexes with snippets of info and by having random tables. A large dungeon works this way in miniature which is party of the reason why dungeons are popular. You really CAN stat out every last thing in a dungeon ahead of time so that what order the players run into things is out of your hands and up to them.

If you look through the 1ed DMG there's all kinds of percentage chances of this or that. They can't cover anything but they encourage a kind of Crom mentality:

Quote from: R.E. HowardHe dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man's soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?

Even if you can't be perfectly impassive you try your best and set things up so that you don't care if the players live or die and try not to modulate things to their situaton. Getting that feeling across to the players of their just being a small part of a big world that doesn't give a shit about them and that will stomp them flat if they're not careful is the goal and you do that as best you can.

Or to put it another way there's two kinds of rules in RPGs: scene setting rules and scene resolution rules. The first rules describe that did the players just meet and the second rules describe whether the players' actions succeed or fail. Scene setting rules include balanced encounter building, a whole lot of the more out there Story Game rules and a whole slew of older D&D rules from ecounter rolls to random hex stocking tables. Those rules can be as important to the game as the scene resolution rules. The right kind of scene setting rules can convey the feeling of "this world doesn't give a crap about what level you are" so that meeting a warband of 500 orcs is just something that happens just like rolling a one when you're trying to hit something is just something that happens, not something that is the DM being a jerk to you.

Quote from: Itachi;1064728I would say videogames are so wide and diversified a medium at this point that saying that doesn't really say anything. While there's a parcel of games that follow the logic you criticize, there are others which do not.

Video game RPGs largely fall into one of two categories:

1. The world levels up with you (most Bethesda games)

2. The world is gated or guided such that the monsters you meet are nearly always close to your level in difficulty (most JRPGs, Divinity: Original Sin, etc).

Exceptions are rare. You are probably going to list several of them in response.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064735Sure. I think the argument is that the GM is still modulating the content based on the character's levels. Giving ample warning and clues about a lame kobold mushroom farmer is not nearly as important as warning the players about the ancient red dragon that lives in the mountain pass.
It would be perfectly serendipitous for said dragon to mistake the party of 1st level characters for the party that just stole his gem, and go gunning for them full bore, no prisoners. But I doubt any GM would find that kind of scenario appropriate for their level.

The argument is missing the point, by preferring to haggle over the true meaning of "modulate the content based on the levels" instead of substantially understanding what people are actually talking about and addressing that. Everyone in this conversation now knows there's a difference between running a linear adventure of finely-tuned encounters where the players can reasonably expect, "If the DM put it here, I can kill it," and an open-ended scenario where you can't assume that just because you're 4th level, that witch in the forest isn't an accomplished 18th-level warlock whose pet pig is a polymorphed nalfeshnee. Complaining that one shouldn't refer to the latter as "not modulating the content based on the character's levels" accomplishes nothing and informs nobody of anything interesting whatsoever. You know what people are talking about. Since everybody knows what everybody means now, complaining about word choice is more about needing to be right about something irrelevant than actually making an argument.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1064795Video game RPGs largely fall into one of two categories:

1. The world levels up with you (most Bethesda games)

2. The world is gated or guided such that the monsters you meet are nearly always close to your level in difficulty (most JRPGs, Divinity: Original Sin, etc).

Exceptions are rare. You are probably going to list several of them in response.

Rare?

Ultima 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Ultima Online, Darklands, Daggerfall, Fallout 1, 2, New Vegas, Arcanum, Gothic 1, 2, Underrail, STALKER SoC, CS, CoP, Neo Scavenger, King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages, Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeons, etc.

And that's just from the top of my head. Hehe I think you have a point that the more mainstream titles (Bethesda, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasies) indeed tend to follow that formula (which probably explains their popularity, as it makes them more accessible), but generalizing the whole industry is a stretch.

Quote from: Itachi;1064829~gives exactly the response I predicted~

That's really not a big list (I can easily write a much longer list off the top of my head). By the way, the Souls games do in fact guide the player to level-appropriate, linear paths. They just expect you to figure out via trial and error which railroad is the one you've got a ticket for. There's also another element of video games, which is that death isn't a big deal. You either reload your game or start back at a respawn point. Games with permanent character loss aren't popular (I expect you now to point out there are several popular games with a "hardcore" mode with perma-death, which of course hardly anybody plays).

QuoteAnd that's just from the top of my head. Hehe I think you have a point that the more mainstream titles (Bethesda, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasies)

Indeed, games that people have actually played have more influence over what they expect than games they've never heard of. Several of my players were born in the 1990s. The youngest was born in 1998. I can assure you that Apple IIe games like Ultima IV play absolutely no role in what they understand by "RPG."

Quotebut generalizing the whole industry is a stretch.

It's really not.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1064752Me too.  I even take it to the next fun step:  Some creatures and organizations are deliberately full of bluster, and thus set out to create the impression that they are more capable than they are.  One of the very best things about breaking the "encounter appropriate" mindset is not setting up the PC kill.  You could do that anytime.  When you get them to run in terror from something that they could easily handle?  Gold, Jerry, Gold!   Sometimes it happens almost by accident.

The pinnacle was when I had them running from a werewolf.  They completed two adventures and were well on their way to finishing a third, over about 20 hours of play and weeks of game time. The whole time they were spooked by found remains (not all from the werewolf's victims), distant howling, seeing the werewolf in the distance, and the hysterical ravings of some NPC guards that had blown the threat all out of proportion.  The werewolf had been hired by one of their many enemies, but the party stayed on the move.  When the werewolf finally cornered them in a small dungeon, they were convinced they were dead.  After one anti-climatic round of ranged combat, the players were a bit miffed.  "I can't believe we've been dodging this guy for days!"

This is an interesting point. You can't always trust the information at hand. The fabled "Dire Swamp of Instant Death", might just have a reputation spread by a grumpy ogre who wants to be left alone. Or even better, a 20th level halfling assassin who intentionally acts like a neophyte in order to put people off their guards.
The problem is complicated by the fact that D&D really doesn't use a system that tracks to "real world" evaluations. HD are not linked to anything concrete, like size or shape. It's an abstraction and a 1 HD warrior without equipment looks like a 20 HD warrior without equipment. But if the two got in a bar fight...

Quote from: Fearsomepirate~gives exactly the response I predicted~

Except not? How is three of the most popular RPG series of all time - Ultima, Fallouts, Dark Souls - an exception? If you and your players don't know those series or their influence to the medium, then it's a case of ignorance on your part.

What's next, you'll also generalize that tabletop RPGs are resumed to faux-medieval class-based monster-bashing because that's what Pathfinder, the best-selling game of the last decade, does?

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064870This is an interesting point. You can't always trust the information at hand. The fabled "Dire Swamp of Instant Death", might just have a reputation spread by a grumpy ogre who wants to be left alone. Or even better, a 20th level halfling assassin who intentionally acts like a neophyte in order to put people off their guards.
The problem is complicated by the fact that D&D really doesn't use a system that tracks to "real world" evaluations. HD are not linked to anything concrete, like size or shape. It's an abstraction and a 1 HD warrior without equipment looks like a 20 HD warrior without equipment. But if the two got in a bar fight...

I see that as a feature, not a bug.  Some things are dangerous, some things are not, and many are muddled.  Information is useful, but not fool-proof.  Caution is a good idea, but if you want to get anything done, sooner or later (probably sooner) you need to go with your best guess.  Meanwhile, the world displays some consistency most of the time.  If after all that, leaping in turns bad, then trying to find an alternate means out (escape, surrender, bribe, etc.) is a good idea.  Still, you play the odds, by doing the best you can on that front, and usually it will work out OK.

Granted, this is much easier to achieve with a regular group of players.  Also, my groups have players that thrive in that environment, where getting 5 or 6 pieces of information on one thing is very useful, in part to more easily spot the bad pieces.  They constantly seek information, but don't automatically trust any of it.  

Moreover, while I'm not anywhere close to an "encounter-based" world, where if the GM places it you are meant to tangle with it, I'm not exactly a pure sandbox either.  Closer to the pure sandbox extreme, but not all the way there.   Generally, I would classify my style on that continuum as I am using encounter/challenge ratings and experience to build a setting that is slightly biased to PC success IF they are aggressive with gathering information, but somewhat biased against them if they dash in with no clue.  It's casual-friendly (as long as they gather info), but completely willing to let them crash and burn if they play it that way.  I tell new players the rules are just enough in their favor that they have a better than average chance of surviving being unlucky or stupid, but not both together, and not so great a chance that they'll want to draw from that well any more than they can help it.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064870This is an interesting point. You can't always trust the information at hand. The fabled "Dire Swamp of Instant Death", might just have a reputation spread by a grumpy ogre who wants to be left alone. Or even better, a 20th level halfling assassin who intentionally acts like a neophyte in order to put people off their guards.
The problem is complicated by the fact that D&D really doesn't use a system that tracks to "real world" evaluations. HD are not linked to anything concrete, like size or shape. It's an abstraction and a 1 HD warrior without equipment looks like a 20 HD warrior without equipment. But if the two got in a bar fight...

That's why front-loaded campaign prep can be helpful, you make all of those decisions ahead of time and then don't have to be put on the spot and decide if what the PCs are blundering into is going to be hard or easy. Not that hard if you make/buy a simple hexmap and then scatter some module/one page dungeon content about and start with something Wales-sized.

What also helps is that instead of deciding something when the PCs go into a blank bit of the map decide on the probabilities. So quickly brainstorm some of the possiblities of what the Dire Swamp of Instant Death contains and then roll a dice. Or just roll a d20 and decide that "high is really nasty" and "low is flowers and puppies" and go from there. 1ed DM I played with a while back would roll dice even for simple stuff like "is there a decent blacksmith in this little town" or "are there good-sized throwing rocks nearby" and that helps with the kind of detachment that's useful in sandbox games.

In principle I like the idea of an uninvolved world which is independent of the PCs. In practice, it seems difficult for the standards and structure of D&D in particular. Partly this may be from a history of having played a lot of AD&D modules (and later editions) which are rated for a particular level range, but I'm curious about others' takes.

FWIW, most of my play over the years has been in non-D&D play. Sometimes encounters were designed (like when playing Monster of the Week or Buffy the Vampire Slayer with episodes tailored for the characters); but usually there was more of a living world. On the other hand, my D&D play has usually been either modules or patterned on modules, so the encounters were designed for particular levels for the most part.

Quote from: Ratman_tfThis is an interesting point. You can't always trust the information at hand. The fabled "Dire Swamp of Instant Death", might just have a reputation spread by a grumpy ogre who wants to be left alone. Or even better, a 20th level halfling assassin who intentionally acts like a neophyte in order to put people off their guards.
The problem is complicated by the fact that D&D really doesn't use a system that tracks to "real world" evaluations. HD are not linked to anything concrete, like size or shape. It's an abstraction and a 1 HD warrior without equipment looks like a 20 HD warrior without equipment. But if the two got in a bar fight...

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1064895I see that as a feature, not a bug.  Some things are dangerous, some things are not, and many are muddled.  Information is useful, but not fool-proof.  Caution is a good idea, but if you want to get anything done, sooner or later (probably sooner) you need to go with your best guess.  Meanwhile, the world displays some consistency most of the time.  If after all that, leaping in turns bad, then trying to find an alternate means out (escape, surrender, bribe, etc.) is a good idea.  Still, you play the odds, by doing the best you can on that front, and usually it will work out OK.

If everything usually works out OK, that implies that their information sources are pretty good. In terms of dungeons, though, often it doesn't make sense that there is good information.

If the dungeon is an active enemy fortress - like Steading of the Hill Giant Chief - then there may be some good sources of information about what is in there. For example, interrogating some escaped orc slaves or capturing a giant on patrol. But a lot of dungeons are more insular, with little traffic in and out. If there is an ancient tomb with undead, say - what are the sources of information by which the PCs can tell what's in there?

Quote from: jhkim;1064937If everything usually works out OK, that implies that their information sources are pretty good. In terms of dungeons, though, often it doesn't make sense that there is good information.

If the dungeon is an active enemy fortress - like Steading of the Hill Giant Chief - then there may be some good sources of information about what is in there. For example, interrogating some escaped orc slaves or capturing a giant on patrol. But a lot of dungeons are more insular, with little traffic in and out. If there is an ancient tomb with undead, say - what are the sources of information by which the PCs can tell what's in there?

In the case of an ancient tomb, maybe with an entrance they just found out in the wilderness--there isn't much in the way of information.  The lack of information is itself a warning, though.  The players will be hesitant to go in, unless they have a really good reason why they need to.  If they were searching for the tomb specifically (or at least something very much like it), then they probably spent some time researching it before the "adventure" really started.  I tend to run several overlapping "adventures" at once, and not all of them will be finished.  It's perfectly acceptable for the players to find the tomb and not go in.  Or at least not go in now.

Now, part of what I meant by not running a pure sandbox is that there are exceptions.  The mode of play I've described is explicit.  If I've been really pressed by real-life pressures, and am not adequately prepared, such that it would be very convenient for all of us if the players bit on the obvious hooks, then I make that explicit, too.  As in, "Hey, I'm railroading everyone to the start of the adventure, which you are expected to tangle with in some fashion, but then we revert to our usual ways."  In that case, there's no automatic party killing demon or dragon or lich or whatever.  That's part of the deal when I said they had to do tangle with it.  There are still potentially killer things in place, but also opportunities to negotiate, scout, etc. to get information at the location.  

The only place it gets really tricky is when I appeal to their better natures.  Say an NPC they knew was in trouble is taken into the ancient tomb they just found with no idea what is there.  Usually, they'll bite.  Every now and then, it works out that such a thing happens in a place I don't think they can handle.  I make a point of telegraphing how bad it is, and don't have the teleport with no way out but through type of traps.  It's an ancient tomb, with shriveled wildlife in a 1 mile radius around it, and the first few rooms are bad.  I tend to do that more often than not anyway.  But remember, even though I had the ancient tomb there all along, it was my decision to have the NPC taken there now.  The players know from past experience that sometimes they just lose.  Sometimes they accept that.  Sometimes they go heroic on me with not much chance and get lucky.  Sometimes they try and fail.  Sometimes they try and die.  Usually, they realize pretty quick that they are in over their heads and start running for the hills.  We've got a group of 8-9th level characters doing that now, after foolishly trying to take a short-cut across an uninhabited region.  Their last advice from the locals in town was if they were going that way to make sure they had their last will and testaments all in order before setting out. Heh.

OD&D modulated the content by dungeon levels; stay on a lower dungeon level and get monsters you are more likely to be able to deal with. For any game that like D&D has characters advance from wounded mosquito to godlike power, I think there has to be some way of modulating content: providing the characters enough information to choose opponents they can deal with, stratifying areas of difficulty (whether this is informational or low level characters cannot open up more dangerous areas), or giving low level characters an out from overly powerful opponents. (Munchkin doesn't modulate the content - no matter what your level, you draw from the same deck of cards - but some of the more powerful monsters do not pursue low level characters, so the last thing kind of applies, although it's not really anything like an RPG anyway.)

In games where player characters do not increase in ability very significantly, or depend entirely on things like equipment that comes and goes, this is less needed.

Quote from: jhkim;1064937If the dungeon is an active enemy fortress - like Steading of the Hill Giant Chief - then there may be some good sources of information about what is in there. For example, interrogating some escaped orc slaves or capturing a giant on patrol. But a lot of dungeons are more insular, with little traffic in and out. If there is an ancient tomb with undead, say - what are the sources of information by which the PCs can tell what's in there?

Coupla things to consider. The first is I think there is sort of an implication that very powerful things are remote. If the land was just swarming with Death Knights, for example, the kingdom wouldn't currently be standing. Personally, I rarely have the characters just stumble upon dungeons. They get them via maps and quests. What they do stumble upon are random encounters. The second is basically putting a "You Must Be This Tall To Ride" sign somewhere that isn't blatantly that, but one which rewards recon. Like the first room or the entrance has a rather powerful guardian, some beast that the players have heard has ripped greater men than they in twain.
And just your luck, it's sleeping. (Players might continue to be morons here, but well, them's the breaks.) A third thing is I'm pretty generous with escape attempts. Maybe some people would say I shouldn't be, but it gives me a chance to introduce powerful monsters and some tension without a TPK.

Mechanics I hate most:)?
Quickly-escalating "ablative" HPs.
Challenge Levels.
Classes.
Those should be the main ones;).

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1064795Video game RPGs largely fall into one of two categories:

1. The world levels up with you (most Bethesda games)

2. The world is gated or guided such that the monsters you meet are nearly always close to your level in difficulty (most JRPGs, Divinity: Original Sin, etc).

Exceptions are rare. You are probably going to list several of them in response.

1. Exceptions include some of the best-selling CRPGs.
1.1. It seems that you're right that combined, the rest of them are more numerous.
1.2. Possibly because that's the lazy approach.
2. And that's why most CRPGs suck compared to at least decent TTRPG sessions!

Quote from: AsenRG;1065139Mechanics I hate most:)?
Quickly-escalating "ablative" HPs.
Challenge Levels.
Classes.
Those should be the main ones;).


1. Exceptions include some of the best-selling CRPGs.
1.1. It seems that you're right that combined, the rest of them are more numerous.
1.2. Possibly because that's the lazy approach.
2. And that's why most CRPGs suck compared to at least decent TTRPG sessions!

The problem in bringing up the videogame medium is also that, at this point, "RPG" is more of a factor that's been applied to a bazillion titles that wouldn't fit exactly the delineated box of the genre but that portray key characteristics of it as immersion, simulation systems, choices & consequences, etc. sometimes even better realized than what the so called "RPGs" do.

The STALKER series being a good example here. It's basically a first person shooter only with a myriad systems for simulating survival in a harsh environment, like trackers for sleep, thirst, hungry, radioactive contamination, etc. Besides portraying a setting whose people/fauna act by seeking their needs and goals dynamically/in a non-scripted way. All this result in an emergent environemt that, frankly, puts most so called "RPGs" - both in electronic and tabletop format - to shame in regards to simulation.

D20 (ancestral and modern)
Classes
Levels

Quote from: HorusArisen;1065178D20 (ancestral and modern)
Classes
Levels

I hated those once too. These days though, I don't hate any individual mechanic. Instead, I hate games that says something on the tin but don't back it up in actual play, regardless of mechanics used.

Quote from: Itachi;1065176The problem in bringing up the videogame medium is also that, at this point, "RPG" is more of a factor that's been applied to a bazillion titles that wouldn't fit exactly the delineated box of the genre but that portray key characteristics of it as immersion, simulation systems, choices & consequences, etc. sometimes even better realized than what the so called "RPGs" do.

The STALKER series being a good example here. It's basically a first person shooter only with a myriad systems for simulating survival in a harsh environment, like trackers for sleep, thirst, hungry, radioactive contamination, etc. Besides portraying a setting whose people/fauna act by seeking their needs and goals dynamically/in a non-scripted way. All this result in an emergent environemt that, frankly, puts most so called "RPGs" - both in electronic and tabletop format - to shame in regards to simulation.

Haven't played that, but sounds a lot like a decent Traveller campaign:)!

Quote from: Itachi;1065184I hated those once too. These days though, I don't hate any individual mechanic. Instead, I hate games that says something on the tin but don't back it up in actual play, regardless of mechanics used.

Yeah, those too;)!

Quote from: Chris24601;1064516"I decided a Chimera lived in this dungeon next to the small hamlet you grew up in and from which you launched your first adventure... everyone roll up new PCs for next time" is crap DM work and always will be.

If there was a Chimera anywhere near the hamlet where the PCs grew up, they would have been hearing about it all their lives.