I've been looking a lot harder at my gaming this last year or so and I've decided to codify what I think, in essence, is the perfect game.

Feel free to disagree if you like.

First, I find module play deeply unsatisfying. The current D&D game I'm in is dying of Modulitis. The most fun is had when we dither around 'wasting time' between prepackaged bits of 'fun'.  We spent one entire session getting involved in an S&M orgy at a temple to (insert name of Goddess here...) in Sigil, compared to the five to ten minutes completing 'part one' of the chain adventure quest that involved getting a 'cool prophesy'. Maybe its the GM, but past expirences lead me to believe that Modules lead to crappy play. Thus the perfect game will have, at best, very loose and very limited 'modules' to kick start further gaming.

Okay, that one was really just a freebie.

Fer Realz this time.

Weight:  I have found a handful of games that have the 'perfect' balance of light and heavy.  All too often, when looking into a much loved game from the forae, I find it lacks any substance at all.  On the other hand, I find the games that are too complex are often less enjoyable... too much time spent looking things up or too difficult to find players for.   Ironically, I don't mind the weight in Character Creation (GURPS!!!!) as long as the basic resolution is simple. That said, I can point to serious flaws in GURPS character creation as well, highlighted by my recently having made a Gurps Traveller character for an upcoming game... too many worries about what skills are going to be useful vs useless, making sure I have a good enough mix of skills that I don't come across as some sort of Idiot Savant (what? You can rebuild a T-13 JumpDrive from scrapmetal but you can't fix the faulty wire in my door control?!?).

More in depth, I think that many of the 'light' games get this right, or more right than the 'heavy' games. Simple, easy to understand, rules work best. A player shouldn't have to ask 'how do I swim', and a GM shouldn't have to consult a chapter on 'swimming' to answer.   Of course, neither should the GM have to make up swimming rules on the spot.

Definition:  This is where some of my otherwise favorite games fall down, defining what a character can and can't do.  I am a firm believer that a character, regardless of overall potential, should be roughly as competent as the characters in fiction. Note that I don't define fiction as 'action movies' any more than I do 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest'.  Here is the thing: If a character, in fiction, can drive a car, he can more or less drive all cars (and most car related things) more or less equally. No character in fiction has ever been handed a gun and badguys to shoot and responded 'No thanks, I am only proficient in Webley model revolvers and this is clearly a colt!'  they may express preferences, certainly, even derive bonuses.  This is where many 'light' games fail miserably, however: They chose to not define anything, or define it so loosely that it becomes meaningless.  Think Wushu's 'Be a Cool Jedi' type of Skill, where as long as you can relate something you are doing as vaguely 'Jedi like' you get to use that skill. Really, it defines nothing.  Ditto Dogs.

I am increasingly convinced that the standby '20-30 skills' or so that some promote is more or less 'IT'.  More accurately: All the available skills in the game should be preprinted on the character sheet, and this sheet should (typically) remain a single page in size.   This actually leaves a fair amount of room for defining a character in regards to 'what they can do'. For example, White Wolf has 24 skills as standard, yet can distinguish between academia, science, the occult, and computer use... all variously typified as 'brainy scholar stuff'. The Soverign Stone system (Serenity, Battlestar Galactica) has about this range and manages to seperate driving cars from flying spaceships, and unarmed combat from shanking a bitch.

In regards to attributes, I can see the appeal of 'less is more', down to three or so, but every time I try such a system I find it lacking.  Of course, once you get above half a dozen (and really, even there...) you start getting redundancy.  This varies, of course. White Wolf manages 9 with serious aplomb by dividing three (Physical, Mental, Social) into groups of three (power, finesse and resistance).    I find that I don't have a right answer, just a list of 'do nots'.

I find that defining a character's ability primarily through skills works best of all.  Classes, with attendant specialized methods of 'accomplishing stuff' tend to break down over time when players start looking for ways to 'cross over'. More, they are tied strongly to Levels, which I find repugnant.  Levels are the most artificial method of defining ability that I can imagine, they barely work in video games, and in truth many of my favorite video games don't actually involve 'powering up'.  

I have, however, looked at making 'advantages' the primary focus of character design, but have found damn few games that actually use that, much less with any pizzaze.  

Attribute focused definition places, in my opionion, too much focus on inherent ability and worse, often leads to 'character improvements' that make damned little sense.  

Mechanics: Just a bit ago I talked about the weight of the mechanics, but I didn't actually go on about the mechanics themselves.  

As a general rule, I dispise dice pools. Dice pools are not fun, not their ever increasing nature, not the difficulty of guaging ability or challenge, not even the difficulty of holding all the requisite dice in one's hand and tossing them on the table... nothing about them is fun.  I'll make exceptions for certain iterations, mostly because they are clever (Alpha Omega gets this pass from me).

I also don't really like systems based on changing die sizes. Alpha Omega does this, Soveriegn Stone does this, Alternity and Earthdawn did this.  Its obnoxious and often leads to wonky metamechanics and you always wind up with a painful jump/cap around the d12/d20 mark, a jump that often leads to less than satisfactory compromizes.  That said, the smaller simpler systems are often intuitive and fairly smooth, which ofsets alot of lesser sins.  Despite having played Earthdawn I could never have told you how it actually works, due to the oddity of the mechanics... though this could be a sin of presentation or memory or both.  

Here is the gist of it: I want to be able to go to a game with nothing more than some dice in my pocket and a character sheet and be good to go. I want to be able to run the game from memory if need be, as a GM.   I DO want the ability to add more detail by reference, sure... but for the main, if a character wants to do something it should be 'roll, result, presto!'.  

That doesn't mean that the rules should be utterly non-existant. Far from it. In fact a certain minimum of completeness/complexity is demanded, see above; I just feel that the overall grasp of 'how the game plays' should be simple enough to hold in memory. Things should work alike, with few exceptions to clutter up the landscape.

However, I do rigorously demand that they also work, and well. White Wolf's system is a notorious failure here, at least as I'm concerned.  Aside from the baggage carried by being a dice pool system, quite frankly they've never quite got a handle on how combat should actually work. Previous iterations suffered from 'one ring to rule them all' in multiple action (celerity) being the 'I win' button, Exalted suffers from Ping vs. Instant death syndrome, Scion suffers from Dex Monkeys getting more or less immune to combat, and the current WoD rules make it virtually impossible to kill little old ladies with assault rifles at point blank range.  Of course, it could be that this is a side effect of dice pools, maybe they are just really hard to design around.  Another notable rules failure is Serenity, with its lack of initative mechanic... or any suitable explanation of why it didn't have one... no, seriously folks, I'm not hidebound, I don't NEED your game to work like any other, but if you decide to leave something out that most of us think is essential (like, determining who goes when...) you at least owe it to me to tell me why its not there.  Maybe you work from the assumption that all actions in a given round occur more or less simultaniously... I'm cool with that, really I am... just TELL me so I know what I'm expected to do when the players ask 'so... who goes first?'.  Look at GURPS: they don't have an initiative roll and they STILL tell us 'who goes first'... it can be done, I tell ya.


Flexibility:  I often feel unique in that I think a game should be able to convincingly convey a wide selection of play styles while still being able to convincingly convey whatever it is sold as.  I LIKE portability.  Lets take a look at Fading Suns here.

Fading Suns seems to have it all as far as I'm concerned. The rules are reasonalby simple to grasp, the skills are fixed and printed on the sheet, there are 8 attributes and it uses a single die resolution (well, pool damage, but this is so minor its not even worth mention... so forget I said anything).

But while the SETTING is eminantly flexible in some regards, I find the Fading Suns rules are so explicitely tied to the existing setting that it is one of those few games I just don't feel works outside of, well, itself.  That, and at least in regards to the supernatural its pretty solidly tied to the setting to the point of pain in removal.  In short, while I love Fading Suns to death, I just don't feel comfortable trying to hack it apart to make a modern world superhero game out of it.  Sure, nothing in the mechanics makes me think it COULDN"T be done, just that I shouldn't.  Fading Suns is only a goto game for, well, Fading Suns.  I feel much the same about Shadowrun, actually, only with less love of the system and only slightly more for the core conceit.



I could go on, trying to isolate various ways a game can try to measure up, but as the topic said, I'm chasing a pipe dream here, the 'perfect' game.

Instead I'll go over some of the games I've mentioned, and a few others to boot, and try to establish where they've failed me in my quest for perfection.

D&D: Aside from being a level and class based game, and an utter lack of flexibility (though this is remedied by the professional hacks already on the market to a large degree), its silly things like having two hiding skills and three detection skills, its massively codified combat rules that are hard to memorize completely, and remove the portability of the game (you have to be able to reference grapples to resolve grappling checks more often than not).  I just tossed this in to diss it, moving on.

White Wolf: Already mentioned that it's got dice pools. Sometimes great honkin' dice pools of death. Then there is the sad fact that they've never quite got combat just right.  On a more kvetchy side, often their 'superpowers' seem more like Stupor-powers... lots of boring, sub-useful abilities capped by one game breaking god-power.

Dream Pod 9: Low dice pools with a creative twist makes up for a lot, but the d6 hinders them in that the bonus from the attributes seriously unbalances play, which then influences character creation, where granularity suffered to reduce instances of gamebreakingly good characters.

Alpha Omega: Overwhelmingly attribute centric with a creative fixed dice pool.  That and the game seems like its missing some serious peices for what it's telling you to do with it (you know, stats for the Seraphs and Ophanum, stats for critters/monsters in general.... Even something as simple as telling me the ascendancy level of some of the named NPCs might go pretty far towards telling me how you expect the game to progress....)

SLA Industries: Workable, even good character creation and definition (not without flaws, mind you, but workable) and a simple, easily graspable resolution... hindered by an absolute lack of anything resembling details. By the rules, shooting someone from a mile away is the same as shooting them while in the closet with them...

Sovereign Stone: Aside from mildly horrific failures to complete their products (lack of initiative in Serenity), they do manage to put out a decently sturdy game. Yes, I dislike the dice system, and I REALLY dislike the overall look of BSG (particularly the future space guns that look just like stuff in the local pawn/gun shops....).  I own three iterations of this rule set and differ in various ways... sadly, not because they are being improved.  One failure is their attempt to keep 'in genre' or what have you tend to result in otherwise usefully generic 'qualities' becoming too specific. Still, this does sit on a 'go to' list...

Shadowrun: Blech dicepools. The recent streamlining actually seems to have created as many problems as it solved. I won't detail all the various flaws that keep it from being perfect, but at least unlike WW products, it actually WORKS when put to use fully. Its just a bit crumbly around the edges.

Warhammer Fantasy: Mostly here to provide a contrast to the system that follows in my list. This is a class system done right. It is fast, workable and very much fulfils most of my needs... for gritty fantasy. Its pretty tied to the setting (as Fading Suns), but the setting itself is slightly more generic. Still it does lack a certain flexibility. Higher fantasy falls flat, and taking it out of fantasy requires too much work.

Dark Heresy: This proves the utterly unasked question: Can WHFRP be ported to sci fi and work? Sure it does. However, the game fails to deliver on its own premise worth a damn (as in: you can't become inquisitors in the existing rules, nor can you bring in many of the stuff in 40k that fans want (Eldar, Tau, Space Marines just to name three) even, really, as bad guys. In that it is somewhat incomplete. Finally, its saddled with a levelling class system that has to be one of the ugliest I've seen.  Workable? Sure. Fun? Not so much.  There isn't even much to distinguish it as a niche protection scheme.  You've got some four or so combat classes, two magical classes (psychers and tech priests) and an also ran intellectual class, with a few inbetweeners (Clerics are somewhat combatty...as are scum...), and few of the benefits... okay, aside from psycher powers and techpriest abilities almost NO benefits to chosing one class over another.  Ironically, this gives it a somewhat boon over its fantasy predecessor: it may be LESS tied to its own setting, being too generic despite the setting trappings on everything...


Bah. I've wasted too much time on this. Discuss. :pundit: