Quote from: Archangel Fascist;707780Savage Worlds.  

I like how gamerGoyf is ignoring my posts in this thread, looks like he wants to nitpick with the other posters.

You need to be more tribalistically gibberishtic with your posts.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;707726... (a) However "Rulings"/MTP can produce any result you can imagine and that's kind of lame. Because of their adhoc nature and and high variability it's hard for PCs to make meaningful choices, ... (b) but you can't claim it encourages player skill because player decisions don't actually matter.

(a) - High variability of outcomes =/= limiting player choices. That is some serious conversation steering there. :-P GMs react to player choices. The GM should be making a reasonable or informed ruling based on various factors like setting, rules, previous actions, previous similar situations, etc. A particular PC may not appreciate a GM's rulings, but this does not mean the choice wasn't meaningful. This is clearly a perception issue. Just play. Stop worrying about "what will you decide GM person?" and simply play and react as you see appropriate.

Take your typical movie action scene. Our hero walks into the warehouse and is ambushed by ninjas. He starts kicking ass and ninjas die everywhere. He gets beat up. Does he stop mid-battle look at the screen and decry "who the fuck attacks one character with 20 ninjas?!?!? My choices have no meaning!!!"? Unless it's a comedy, probably not. Most of this "my choices have no meaning" nonsense comes from players who want to play a POWER FANTASY that centers around them. This is why baby-Jesus invented video games. Seriously. When the GM describes something happening, do something. React. In character. Stop worrying about stupid shit and play the fucking game.

(b) - Huh? How did you draw the lines here? I'm baffled.

Say our intrepid hero (a green wet-behind-the-ears never-played-before newbie) walks into a store with only three things for sale. Three unmarked boxes on a single shelf. They all look identical. The shop keeper asks "what box would you like to buy?" He decides on the middle one. He leaves the store, opens his purchase and flames erupt from the box, killing the poor character.

Next week, that same person finds the same store with a new character. What will he do? Maybe ask 20 questions? Perhaps talk to the shop keeper to find out why they are only selling 3 things? Ask the shop keep to open the boxes? I mean, a good player won't use OOC knowledge, but as far as "player skill" goes, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the player learned something from the previous experience. Now that he understands not to take anything for granted, maybe he'll "engage" more? Maybe not treat the game like some simple choose-your-own-adventure? Why would an experienced player have responded to this differently than our newbie?

The player has a myriad number of options. If he chose not to buy a box, something different would have happened. Hitting the local tavern to drum up rumors about the strange shop may have yielded some clues. Each choice they make could have myriad outcomes. What if he took the box to his wife as a present? :-) Lots of options. Lots of outcomes.

Unless you are suggesting that all adventures have some ill fated premise where no matter what he chooses he's getting a flame in the face? I certainly don't run games like that...

Quote from: gamerGoyf;707777If this is true then the only thing we really disagree about is how much "rules framework" a game needs.

Indeed, which is a matter of preference only. I'm perfectly fine GMing a game of Risus, the rules of which I have printed in thier entirety on a coffee mug. Other GMs may not feel comfortable or confident w/o the support of a system like Hero. There's no objectively correct answer to this though, and to a certain extent comes down to experience and age I think.

Quote from: trechriron;707782Most of this "my choices have no meaning" nonsense comes from players who want to play a POWER FANTASY that centers around them. This is why baby-Jesus invented video games. Seriously.

That would have made milk shoot out my nose... if I'd been drinking milk... which, thankfully, I was not.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;707777I believe I've said in the past that solution is to have more elegant rules, ones that cover more cases with less page count. I've been reading up on After Sundown lately and it's 224 pages including background fluff, and it's probably more comprehensive than some games that are twice it's length.

I can't comment on After Sundown specifically (you should probably review it or something if you think its great). In general I would expect a rule that handles A, B, and C is going to cover all three in less detail or less accurately (worse results) than a rule that just covers A.

Quote from: trechriron;707782Unless you are suggesting that all adventures have some ill fated premise where no matter what he chooses he's getting a flame in the face? I certainly don't run games like that...

This is my argument

a) in order for "player skill" to be a thing "meaningful choices" have to be enabled. Or in other words what players chose to do has to directly lead to successes or failures.

b) in rulings heavy games meaningful choices are impossible because

c) the parameters of success and failure are determined on the spot by the GM in response to player declarations.

The analogy I usually use for this is the Monty Hall problem, if Monty get's to decide if the door contains a car or goat after you pick it then that decision obviously wasn't meaningful. That's how ruling based resolution works because your success or failure is more the result of how much the GM likes your decision than the decision itself.

That's only true IF the GM's decisions vary widely from the reality of the situation and there's no mechanism to determine success or failure in place such as a dice roll. Meaning the problem is effectively, bad GMs. Which isn't a rules issue.

Quote from: Haffrung;707691Thing is, I can't fathom playing an RPG with a referee I didn't trust to make sound judgements. I'd either GM myself, or not play.

One of the ugliest things about the modern approach to RPGs is the notion that players are entitled to have a GM who runs the game the way they like. It's particularly ugly when expressed by guys who have been playing for years. If you're an experienced enough player that you've memorize whole books full of rules and can build super powerful characters with the expectation to play them to high levels, you're experienced enough to step up and run the fucking game yourself if you don't like how your GM runs his game.

it was always thus.

I played a game when I was 16 or so and the GM started by running some you are all captured and put in prison thing, after 10 minutes it was an obvious railroad so I played through the session politely and next week started up my own game in the same club that played the way I likes my games run.  

I didn't like the way he was playing I expect a GM to play games the way I like or I will leave.

If you don't the way a GM runs a game you keep playing and shut up or you gripe about it or you leave.

Nothing has changed from the start of the hobby. There are many different RPGs because people didn't like the game that was being run. There were monty haul games , meatgrinders, railroads, sandboxes, cookie cutter takes on Lord of the Rings and all sort of crap it was always thus.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;707793"meaningful choices" have to be enabled

Is there a precise rigorous mathematical definition of "meaningful choice"?

Quote from: gamerGoyf;707793The analogy I usually use for this is the Monty Hall problem, if Monty get's to decide if the door contains a car or goat after you pick it then that decision obviously wasn't meaningful. That's how ruling based resolution works because your success or failure is more the result of how much the GM likes your decision than the decision itself.

The secret to ad libbing , both rules and content, is that you decide what is behind each door before you tell the players there are any doors.

In general if you have a core mechanic. d20 + modifiers v target number, or dice pool or whatever then its easy to make a ruling that falls into the structure of the rules and it will be just as valid as a rule that the designer had written down in the rule book.

PC jumps for a chandalier attempting to swing out and then leap through the rose window and down into the lilly pond outside. Skillwise the PC has Acrobatics +1. So we decide that that is very difficult manuver, we decide this as a ruling there is no list that will tell us how to rule for this example.  So before the PC roles we tell them he needs a total of 17 on 2d10 + skill. He roll 8 +1 for a total of nine... we decide that means he misses the chandalier and takes damage for a 20 foot fall onto the floor of the main hall.
In a game with only AD&D secondary skills we decide the PC's sailor background will give him some skill on swinging on ropes and like, hey its a swashbuckling kind of a game, so without a skill system we deciede that its a d20 + dex but as its very difficult he will need 18 on a d20 (without the sailor skill we would have made it a natural 20 only) he rolls a 9 +s 2 for 16 Dex, and ... we decide he falls to the ground etc ... rolled a 12 and we decided he managed to grab the chandalier and ends the turn swinging from it ...

This isn't rocket science.
The mistake would be getting the guy to roll and then letting him try to explain how his acrobatics skill or sailor background should help , and then letting them argue over the relative difficulty. At the point where you are trying to explain the result of the roll after its made and you haven't set clear parameters you are likely to be swayed by player charisma, how much you like the idea etc etc

So as with all good ad-libbing be 2 steps ahead of the players

I didn't grow up playing old school DnD, or fantasy games for that matter, but the conventions explained in the Old School Primer is how I learned to play the games I did play back in the day.

It was a bit of culture shock when I first met other gamers who had to have rules for everything. If the game designer didn't figuratively use finger puppets to explain everything that a decent GM with common sense could figure out and rule on, then the game was "broken."

I generally only hear people say that who started playing games in the 2000s. It's probably a generational thing, as older games weren't preoccupied with rules, while newer games are. People are comfortable around what they are familiar with.

Part of the generational thing seems to be just the power levels people seem to want in their games. If everyone is Just A Guy we have some idea what should be reasonably possible. When the characters start being superheroes or demigods, you need more guidelines since people's expectations don't match up anymore (cf. all the arguments about tripping gelatinous cubes or grabbing swarms in 4E).

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;707802Part of the generational thing seems to be just the power levels people seem to want in their games. If everyone is Just A Guy we have some idea what should be reasonably possible. When the characters start being superheroes or demigods, you need more guidelines since people's expectations don't match up anymore (cf. all the arguments about tripping gelatinous cubes or grabbing swarms in 4E).

Again not generational it was always thus.
Some people want to play Dave and Fred exploring the local caverns some want to play Lord David and St Frederick exploring the outer planes of existance.

We all know tales from D&D lore of old where players have Balrog PCs or Vampire PCs .... some people want more power justthe way of it.

Yeah "an idea of what's reasonably possible" has pretty much always been a problem. Wizards and Dragons don't exist in reality so it's hard to say what's "reasonably possible" for them.

Heck speaking to the power level thing, D&Ds level scaling has basically always been far more bananas then most people assume. In AD&D you're 8th level fighter is a superhero, that's literally the official title for a fighter of his level. Then he can potentially level up 20 more times.

I'm not a big fan of a 1, or a 96+ in a percentile rollunder game, having the GM take control of my character and have them pull some monumental blunder. A zero-sum failure seems a bad enough punishment for an event that has a 5% chance of happening (meaning a good chance of happening at least once a session to every player at the table). No, I didn't cut myself with my own fucking sword. I failed to deal damage to the goblin, who now has the opportunity to cut me.