Quote from: Itachi on November 22, 2020, 10:48:03 PM
I have only two criteria for design:

1. Does the game do what the author intends/what it says on the tin? If yes, it's good design.

2. Does it do it with as much economy of rules/ittle complexity as possible for that goal? If so, it's excellent design.

I don't care what tools are used - dice pools, meta-currencies, levels, classes, OOC stuff, etc. as long as the game's design goal is reached.

Agree, mostly.  I don't have any design preferences against tools, but I do have aesthetic preferences against some.  For example, meta-currency is like garlic.  It's really good right up to the moment you get to much, then it's horrible.  And everyone has a different limit. 

Sometimes a game is such that I have no interest in playing it, but that's for other reasons than bad design.  After all, a game designed well to do something your really don't want to do is unlikely to be tweaked to suit.  I can still appreciate that the designer is so clear about the concepts that I learn very rapidly I don't want to play the game.

Along those same lines, I pretty much despise setting masturbation billed as a game system.  Yes,  ideally a system and setting should work in harness, but if the effort from the writer is all in portraying a setting, then the writer should drop the pretense of being a game designer and make the setting for a system designed by others.

Quote from: TJS on November 23, 2020, 04:05:05 AM
Finding a huge amount of positive reviews of a game, but little forum posts about actual play.

The implication from its fans that a game requires the GM to put in lots of work designing encounters or tailoring things to the party - almost always a form of denialism of a games fundamentally flawed nature.

Unfortunately any game with lots of widgets or movable parts or options is usually a bad sign. Why?  Because these need real playtesting and almost never get it to anything like the extent necessary.

Yes.  Also makes it increasingly likely that the game was designed by committee, with the corresponding inevitable loss in vision that results. 

Quote from: Ratman_tf on November 23, 2020, 01:07:36 AM

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on November 23, 2020, 12:02:54 AM
Dungeondelver and I talked about this in his livestream the other day: reducing choices improves accessibility, eg GURPS/Hero vs "3d6 down the line, choose one of the four basic classes, roll for starting wealth, buy gear, start play." Of course, we were thinking more of newbies.

Ideally, a level system means you can slowly introduce complexity as the player gain competence.

Right - class/level systems are great for gating complexity. It's one reason why even 3.x D&D is WAY easier to learn to play than something like GURPS - because most of 3.x's complexity is gated to high level play which most tables never actually use.

A new player only really needs to know how their own low level class functions to play, though they gain enough from understanding the other characters at the table that they'll likely pick that up eventually as well. And a new GM only needs to understand how low level play works - which is still considerably more than the players need to start.

The additional major advantage of classes being niche protection, and often allowing a greater variety of viable characters, especially if the table treats the mechanics as a game to play effectively. For classless systems, there are often only a few really potent builds, and having your character be anything other than a variant of one of them will be gimping yourself. Half a dozen classes each with 1-3 top tier builds allows for a good chunk more real options than a classless system is likely to.

Quote from: TJS on November 23, 2020, 04:05:05 AM
Finding a huge amount of positive reviews of a game, but little forum posts about actual play.

The implication from its fans that a game requires the GM to put in lots of work designing encounters or tailoring things to the party - almost always a form of denialism of a games fundamentally flawed nature.

Unfortunately any game with lots of widgets or movable parts or options is usally a bad sign. Why?  Because these need real playtesting and almost never get it to anything like the extent necesary.

Good one. Play testing is huge, and sign of good game design is a long list of play tester credits.

Also, a shout out to all reviewers who up front admit whether or not they've actually played the game. Both kinds of reviews are fine, I just don't want to have to guess which kind I'm reading.

Quote from: Slambo on November 22, 2020, 10:23:46 PM
What is the problem with dice pools? I dont play any dice pool games. The one i tried (wrath and glory) was ass for many other reasons.

I thought I laid out my case pretty well in the OP, actually. Well, color me embarrassed then.

I'll give it another go.

First, a number of my personal issues with Dice Pool systems comes from my personal approach to gaming, where the rules and mechanics should 'simulate' the reality of the setting, rather than serve a meta-narrative at the player or table level.  This isn't true for all players or groups, but it is true for me, which is also at the heart of my complaints about 'meta-technology' and other complaints, where the rules are operating at "the wrong level" of the game. I don't want a feat or talent or special skill to defenestrate someone, because windows and gravity work the same for everyone. I'm not particularly fond of games that turn guns into nerf weapons to 'force' players to use swords just to capture a particular mood, espeically since there are more elegant ways to push melee over range than to pretend something doesn't do what it actually does.

What does that have to do with Dice Pools?  Well, while dice pools are certainly capable of resolving issues of success and failure they are poor tools for for modelling probability, actually much clumsier than single die or bell curve systems (my preferred resolution method) for that purpose. In real life people don't know they have a 79% chance of successfully pulling into heavy traffic (or what have you), but people do have a pretty good feel for modelling probability, even if they can't put a number on it, yet with dice pools its actually harder to get that 'feel'.  Not that it can't be done, in fact in the 1990's when dice pools first really came into vogue we saw a large number of variations on the theme, from early Shadowrun to the more simplistic White Wolf system, to the Roll and Keep of Seventh Sea and L5R, to the Heavy Gear system, as designers did yoeman's work in trying to make dice pools work. And if that was the state of Dice Pools today, I probably wouldn't have mentioned them. 

However.  While it IS possible for dice pools to be tweaked and worked to create a complex, dynamic model of the in game reality, its actually quite a bit harder and requires a lot more math, and these days, inevitibly, dice pools clearly reflect designers that have no desire to do the hard work and clearly have little grasp of the math. Its not that dice pools, per se, are 'bad', its that upon noting that a system is dice pool based, I know intuitively that the designer is lazy and that next to no effort has been put into designing the system.  Now, if you as a player don't want to care about system, that is perfectly fine, even natural. But I'm not happy paying for someone to do that system work for me with that same half assed attitude.

Now, since I don't want to leave on a mere assertion, allow me to demonstrate how we know these game designers are lazy.  Every single modern dice pool game uses nearly identical mechanics. Every modifier to difficulty or ease involves removing or adding dice to the pool, nothign more. All target numbers are fixed at the start, and only rarely, if ever, do you see anything more complex than counting successes (dice above said fixed number). Even those notoriously rule/system adverse 'storytelling' fucks at White Wolf were more daring back in the early days, with floating target numbers and whatnot (which they eventually abandoned, because: hard).   We don't even see competition in the the equally simple 'add the dice up' form anymore. Its always 'count the successes', and the modifiers are always idiot simple 1, 2, 3, which gives a near meaningless range of variability, especially when combined with the deeply obscured probabilities inherent to dice pools (and the fact that unlike single die and bell curve systems, simply increasing the number of dice usually has a deeply diminishing returns when reaching a threshold of successes is the goal!). 

Given all the things you CAN do with dice pools, the things that have already been done, the fact that they ALL seem to resolve down to this one very simplistic mechanical resolution is, itself, evidence that people designing Dice Pool games have no interest in the mechanics at all, and are grabbing for the least-effort system they can, and that inevitably has consequences down the line, such as the ability for a non superhuman person being able to punch harder (with a few talents) than a transhuman tech Gauss Rifle in Mutant Year Zero. 

That is just Silly.

Quote from: Spike on November 23, 2020, 09:15:18 AMEvery single modern dice pool game uses nearly identical mechanics. Every modifier to difficulty or ease involves removing or adding dice to the pool, nothign more. All target numbers are fixed at the start, and only rarely, if ever, do you see anything more complex than counting successes (dice above said fixed number).

Agreed. To me the entire point of having a success-counting dice pool is to exploit the interaction of the two probability sliders, i.e. number of dice vs. success threshold/target number.  If you're not doing this, probabilistically there's no point not just using a d20, 3d6 or percentile roll as preferred.

One thing that a well-done dice pool does allow is the tangible representation of character resources in a physical medium.  Representing fatigue, for example, as physically taking dice out of your combat pool is in many ways a far more visceral experience than remembering to apply the -2 or -3 penalty to a number in your head.

Quote from: Slambo on November 22, 2020, 10:23:46 PM
What is the problem with dice pools? I dont play any dice pool games. The one i tried (wrath and glory) was ass for many other reasons.

I admit to have only a little experience with dice pools. The things I noticed: 1) the randomness being sought could be emulated effectively with fewer dice (like simple d20 or d% vs target); 2) the clever stuff like deciding how many dice to roll, adding/subtracting dice for bonuses, exploding dice, etc. just makes the game more about the dice. I have trouble enough getting people into a new system where I had to remind them which of the 7 regular polys to roll. Our latest system is d% and it's been much easier on everyone. So, a dice pool game wants us to learn some complex way of adjudicating what is essentially a unique random event? And then we have to roll a handful of dice and do arithmetic? No, thanks.

1) and 2) combined amount to unnecessary complexity for the sake of being clever. Besides, the whole bell curve philosophy behind dice pools is misguided.

Quote from: rytrasmi on November 23, 2020, 08:57:37 AM

Quote from: TJS on November 23, 2020, 04:05:05 AM
Finding a huge amount of positive reviews of a game, but little forum posts about actual play.

The implication from its fans that a game requires the GM to put in lots of work designing encounters or tailoring things to the party - almost always a form of denialism of a games fundamentally flawed nature.

Unfortunately any game with lots of widgets or movable parts or options is usally a bad sign. Why?  Because these need real playtesting and almost never get it to anything like the extent necesary.

Good one. Play testing is huge, and sign of good game design is a long list of play tester credits.

Also, a shout out to all reviewers who up front admit whether or not they've actually played the game. Both kinds of reviews are fine, I just don't want to have to guess which kind I'm reading.

This is actually potentially one of the better parts of Kickstarter as a tool for Indie RPGs IMO, though a tool which too few seem to actually use.

Now - not all of them do this, but SOME indie TTRPGs use their Kickstarter backers at beta testers. While hopefully the designers would have done significant playtesting already (and math-ing, it's amazing how much bad design can be spotted with some basic math) I've seen a couple Kickstarters use their backers as a wider net of playtesters to catch anything else which may have been missed. (though even they didn't seem to take advantage of it as well as they could have)

Which does tie into a rule I have for Kickstarter TTRPGs. The mechanics should be 99% done and ready for playtesting by the time of the Kickstarter campaign. Needing more art & editing etc is fine (though some art is likely needed to sell the Kickstarter) - as the campaign is likely paying for the art & copy-editing should wait until after the last playtest is done.

Right after the Kickstarter the backers should all get the current mechanics (reasonably clean & 100% playable) and then should be provided with an easy way to give feedback - preferably a message board or some such. A hivemind of playtesters are great at spotting problems (albeit - often bad at coming up with solutions which don't break something else).

Meh, I disagree with every single point in the OP:

• Dice Pools are my favorite dice mechanic after d20+Mod.
• Talents (or Feats, Advantages/Disadvantages, or WTF you wanna call them) are not only the BEST way to handle ability progression, but class-based systems essentially use them, they just sneak them behind class abilities, which are all essentially "talents". All the bad implementation of talents in various system (such as "Feat Taxes" or gating functions everyone should be able to do behind a "talent") is just that--bad implementation of an awesome feature that should be used in every system and is used even in some (class-based) that don't allow you to pick them.
• Item Levels depend on the implementation, but could actually be a good way to handle items in effect-based systems (assuming that effects have levels or "ranks" in that system, such as FASERIP).

For me, the biggest warning sign of poor design is Lack of Modularity or as I like to call it "House of Cards" style game design.  It's why I absolutely HATE DnD 3.5 and Pathfinder with the burning passion of a thousand Foreman Grills.

Most well designed game systems like GURPS or Interlock have a great deal of modularity.  If there's a part of the system  you don't like, it's very easy to go in, houserule things swap out systems ETC. You can easily change the system to suit your group. Not so with games that suffer from House of Cards style design.  In a HoC style game, various skills or abilities or rules are part of a vast, interconnected web.  Seemingly unrelated skills or abilities are, in fact either prerequisites of each other or they are designed to work together.  So if you miss or don't use a rule or character option, your character ends up being sub optimal.  If you miss a rule or decide you don't like it and try not to use it, combat ends up not functioning as it should.  The knock on effect of this is that the system is very unstable. If you change one variable, intentionally or not, the entire system collapses.

DnD 3.5 and Pathfinder First Edition are easily the worst offenders here.  DnD 3.5 is probably the alpha HoC RPG.  It's so difficult to go in and change anything in 3.5 because all of the rules are linked.  To reiterate Pundit's example, let's say there's a certain Feat you don't like.  If you were to try and not use it, you've just upset the House of Cards.  That Feat is probably a prerequisite for a whole bunch of other Feats and there are yet more Feats and rules written with the assumption that the Feat will be there.  So if there's a part of the rules you don't like, tough tits.  You've got to use it all or the House of Cards comes tumbling down.

Pathfinder 1e has exactly the same problems as 3.5, just worse.

Thanks to the OGL, DnD 3.5 had a suffocating effect on creativity in game development for years.  Any other system can accommodate changes to suit whatever story the designer wants to play.  No so 3.5 or Pathfinder for the aforementioned reasons.  Game designers were forced to mutilate their work and their worlds to make it fit DnD 3.5.

5e was such a breath of fresh air by contrast because it keeps a similarly accessible structure to DnD but adds the modularity that 3.5 was sorely lacking.  It's sad that more 3rd party material published for 5e isn't  taking advantage of this modularity.  I think this has less to do with generational politics and more to do with the lingering specter of the OGL years.

Quote from: Torque2100 on November 23, 2020, 10:23:28 AM
For me, the biggest warning sign of poor design is Lack of Modularity or as I like to call it "House of Cards" style game design.  It's why I absolutely HATE DnD 3.5 and Pathfinder with the burning passion of a thousand Foreman Grills.

Interestingly, I'd agree with you that D&D3.5 and PF are examples of this approach done badly, primarily because it's never explicitly acknowledged that this structure exists.

For a contrasting example, Luke Crane, the designer of Burning Wheel, explicitly admits that every rules module is designed on the assumption of working with every other rules module exactly as written for the sake of creating exactly the in-game experience that the designer wants to create, and warns that house-ruling anything is going to have unpredictable and probably disruptive knock-on effects. Not everybody's going to like that experience and so may wish to play a different game, but it's clearly not an example of "poor" game design if it's doing exactly what it was intended to do.

So this goes back to the point that was raised earlier by Itachi: are the effects of the chosen design intentional or unintentional?

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper on November 23, 2020, 08:50:38 AM
Right - class/level systems are great for gating complexity. It's one reason why even 3.x D&D is WAY easier to learn to play than something like GURPS - because most of 3.x's complexity is gated to high level play which most tables never actually use.

I agree with your main thesis, but I don't agree with your concluding statement. Characters in 3.X advance quickly, and the game itself put a lot more emphasis on making high levels playable. So the the tables that didn't fold or didn't make a deliberate choice to stick to low levels (using E6 for example) always reached high levels, surprisingly quickly.

3.X doesn't gate complexity by avoiding the issue, but by having the complexity accrue over the course of the campaign. Players (and DMs) can gradually develop system mastery, instead of having to know everything at the start of the game.

Quote from: Spike on November 23, 2020, 09:15:18 AM

Quote from: Slambo on November 22, 2020, 10:23:46 PM
What is the problem with dice pools? I dont play any dice pool games. The one i tried (wrath and glory) was ass for many other reasons.

I thought I laid out my case pretty well in the OP, actually. Well, color me embarrassed then.

I'll give it another go.

First, a number of my personal issues with Dice Pool systems comes from my personal approach to gaming, where the rules and mechanics should 'simulate' the reality of the setting, rather than serve a meta-narrative at the player or table level.  This isn't true for all players or groups, but it is true for me, which is also at the heart of my complaints about 'meta-technology' and other complaints, where the rules are operating at "the wrong level" of the game. I don't want a feat or talent or special skill to defenestrate someone, because windows and gravity work the same for everyone. I'm not particularly fond of games that turn guns into nerf weapons to 'force' players to use swords just to capture a particular mood, espeically since there are more elegant ways to push melee over range than to pretend something doesn't do what it actually does.

What does that have to do with Dice Pools?  Well, while dice pools are certainly capable of resolving issues of success and failure they are poor tools for for modelling probability, actually much clumsier than single die or bell curve systems (my preferred resolution method) for that purpose. In real life people don't know they have a 79% chance of successfully pulling into heavy traffic (or what have you), but people do have a pretty good feel for modelling probability, even if they can't put a number on it, yet with dice pools its actually harder to get that 'feel'.  Not that it can't be done, in fact in the 1990's when dice pools first really came into vogue we saw a large number of variations on the theme, from early Shadowrun to the more simplistic White Wolf system, to the Roll and Keep of Seventh Sea and L5R, to the Heavy Gear system, as designers did yoeman's work in trying to make dice pools work. And if that was the state of Dice Pools today, I probably wouldn't have mentioned them. 

However.  While it IS possible for dice pools to be tweaked and worked to create a complex, dynamic model of the in game reality, its actually quite a bit harder and requires a lot more math, and these days, inevitibly, dice pools clearly reflect designers that have no desire to do the hard work and clearly have little grasp of the math. Its not that dice pools, per se, are 'bad', its that upon noting that a system is dice pool based, I know intuitively that the designer is lazy and that next to no effort has been put into designing the system.  Now, if you as a player don't want to care about system, that is perfectly fine, even natural. But I'm not happy paying for someone to do that system work for me with that same half assed attitude.

Now, since I don't want to leave on a mere assertion, allow me to demonstrate how we know these game designers are lazy.  Every single modern dice pool game uses nearly identical mechanics. Every modifier to difficulty or ease involves removing or adding dice to the pool, nothign more. All target numbers are fixed at the start, and only rarely, if ever, do you see anything more complex than counting successes (dice above said fixed number). Even those notoriously rule/system adverse 'storytelling' fucks at White Wolf were more daring back in the early days, with floating target numbers and whatnot (which they eventually abandoned, because: hard).   We don't even see competition in the the equally simple 'add the dice up' form anymore. Its always 'count the successes', and the modifiers are always idiot simple 1, 2, 3, which gives a near meaningless range of variability, especially when combined with the deeply obscured probabilities inherent to dice pools (and the fact that unlike single die and bell curve systems, simply increasing the number of dice usually has a deeply diminishing returns when reaching a threshold of successes is the goal!). 

Given all the things you CAN do with dice pools, the things that have already been done, the fact that they ALL seem to resolve down to this one very simplistic mechanical resolution is, itself, evidence that people designing Dice Pool games have no interest in the mechanics at all, and are grabbing for the least-effort system they can, and that inevitably has consequences down the line, such as the ability for a non superhuman person being able to punch harder (with a few talents) than a transhuman tech Gauss Rifle in Mutant Year Zero. 

That is just Silly.

Quote from: VisionStorm on November 23, 2020, 10:12:15 AM
Meh, I disagree with every single point in the OP:

• Dice Pools are my favorite dice mechanic after d20+Mod.

I personally love dice pools. Though there are a number of ways they have been done that I don't like. I like them so much, I insisted on them for my own games and my co-designer at the time, who rather disliked most dice pools, made clear he would only do dice pools if we approached them a certain way. I think though if you like dice pools and if you make games with them, you have to acknowledge and accept that criticisms like the ones Spike puts forth are prevalent in the hobby, and that dice pools automatically have a very negative connotation to many gamers. I know for example, the moment I mention that my games are run on dice pools, I lose at least half the audience, if not more. And while you can change those numbers by pointing out where your system maybe doesn't have the problem of some dice pool systems (ours for example doesn't just rely on players dice changing but also has shifting target numbers, and it has a soft cap of 6d10 and hard cap of 10d10; and you don't count successes, you just take the single highest result and use that), at the end of the day it is still a dice pool and people who prefer rolling a single die are going to have that as their preference.

What I can say for me is the two big attractions for me as a player when I first encountered dice pools was the feel of having a bigger pool in your hand to reflect your skill and how intuitive it was to know if you have three ranks in something, you roll three dice. I didn't really care for some of the fiddliness you saw in some dice pool systems, and systems where the numbers of dice became excessive never quite worked for me, but overall I liked it. I also liked that it was more intuitive in terms of the player knowing their chances. It just felt very gut level eye balling. And I think all that emphasis on 'feel', which is why I like them, helps explain why some people don't. Fundamentally for me it comes down to the feel of your power growing in your hand.

We did actually put together a probability chart (which appeared in like our first two books I think), and they mostly scale like you would expect them, but the shifting of the number of dice being thrown and the shifting of the target number, make that hard to know off the cuff the probability. When you start counting successes (which we do in an edge case in our games called Open Damage----which is supposed to be rare), then calculating gets quite difficult.

Gotta agree on the analysis of most modern dice pool systems.

My primary experience with them involved a rebuild of Mage the Ascension where I retained the sliding difficulty scale, but with a sort of clamp on extremely easy (diff 3 or less) or hard (diff 9 or more) that added or subtracted dice only at those extremes.

If the modified difficulty of a task was less than four, you keep the difficulty at 4, but add one die per point of difficulty below it... i.e. difficulty 2 is rolled at difficulty 4 with two extra dice. If the modified difficulty was more than 8 you kept the difficulty at 8, but subtracted one die per point above it... i.e. difficulty 10 is rolled at difficulty 8, but with two fewer dice.

This was done expressly because of the probability breakdown at the extreme ends of the difficulty/target number ranges. I also worked out the odds of success for an average unskilled (2 dice), average skilled (4 dice) and extremely talented and skilled (8 dice) for difficulties ranging from 2 to 10 just to make sure my probabilities were working out (2-10 is the range for just about everything except spells... the highest of which I ever saw used was difficulty 37 with a group cast that left them with about four dice at difficulty 8 by the time it all shook out).

That said... making a Mage clone (where the feel of rolling all the dice was important) is literally the ONLY time I've ever delved into dice pool mechanics and, if I had it to do all over again I probably would have switched out to a 2d10+mods vs. TN system regardless of the change of feel (2d10 being my concession to the old d10 mechanics vs. using 2d6 or 3d6).

Quote from: BedrockBrendan on November 23, 2020, 11:24:15 AMWhat I can say for me is the two big attractions for me as a player when I first encountered dice pools was the feel of having a bigger pool in your hand to reflect your skill and how intuitive it was to know if you have three ranks in something, you roll three dice.

Building on this, one of the things that I think a dice-pool system needs to really max out its potential is to introduce the element of pool splitting: i.e. the dice themselves become tactical resources that you have to allocate, when you're using them, between mutually exclusive commitments, like attack vs. defense in a combat pool, or effect on subject vs. caster's endurance in a magic/power pool. (Unsurprisingly, The Riddle of Steel is one of my all-time favourite games.)

That said, I always like to back up dice pool systems with an option to buy successes with pool dice at low TNs, so you have an effective equivalent of the Take 10 or Take 20 rules.  As always, if the stakes or the odds aren't high enough to be interesting, the roll isn't really worth making.