Well, yeah, there are lots of others, I was just using Burning Wheel as the go-to example for an indie RPG where Roleplaying takes precedence over combat. I would also love to try Prime Time Adventures or Dread.
I could play a different game, but playing a tabletop alone is kinda sad. I don't have anyone around who wants to try a different game.
Well, yeah, there are lots of others, I was just using Burning Wheel as the go-to example for an indie RPG where Roleplaying takes precedence over combat. I would also love to try Prime Time Adventures or Dread.
I could play a different game, but playing a tabletop alone is kinda sad. I don't have anyone around who wants to try a different game.
Burning Wheel has plenty of combat. It's just really dangerous and you'll get killed, so you don't enter into combat lightly.
Kay. In that sense, I prefer Pathfinder because I like being a character who is actually pretty strong and can do cool things. I just don't like the monotony of "You walk into the next room of this dungeon. There's a Redcap. Roll initiative. (20 minutes later). Okay, you win. The next room has....(Puzzle)...Okay, there are some stairs. Okay, next room roll a Perception check. You all failed. You don't see the Dracolich come out of nowhere to attack you. Roll initiative." A lot of DM's make dungeons this way, and my group has learned that it is not really our preference. Combat is boring unless you have a reason to care. We will do a random encounter every once in a while, but we try not to over-use them.
Also, instead of "psudo-larp wankery" please use term "freeform" which is the commonly used term for "ruleless" gaming.
No. Freeform roleplaying is a common and fine thing. This is pseudo-freeform. It's also closer to what happens in most larps. I chose my term carefully.
I recognize what Rym's talking about, but throwing LARP into the description just confuses things.
As I understand it, what Rym calls "pseudo-larp wankery" is really "Yeah, we're playing a roleplaying game, but there's this part we don't like / don't understand / doesn't work so we stop playing the game and do freeform roleplay". Not that there's anything wrong with freeform roleplay—it's just a different game altogether from a RPG with system, rules, and mechanics. It's a sign of either the RPG system either being bad (in some way) or being a mismatch for what the group actually wants to play.
I'm not into LARP, but there's a lot of different games out there in that space, and it shouldn't be confused with freeform roleplay.
Kay. In that sense, I prefer Pathfinder because I like being a character who is actually pretty strong and can do cool things. I just don't like the monotony of "You walk into the next room of this dungeon. There's a Redcap. Roll initiative. (20 minutes later). Okay, you win. The next room has....(Puzzle)...Okay, there are some stairs. Okay, next room roll a Perception check. You all failed. You don't see the Dracolich come out of nowhere to attack you. Roll initiative." A lot of DM's make dungeons this way, and my group has learned that it is not really our preference. Combat is boring unless you have a reason to care. We will do a random encounter every once in a while, but we try not to over-use them.
Well within the specific context of Pathfinder, you don't have to change any rules to fix those problems. That's encounter design and site design. The specific example you're talking about is also a problem of people still designing dungeons for 1e AD&D with Pathfinder rules. Those long drawn out dungeon crawls with 15-20 encounters, about as many traps, and wandering monster tables are fantastic in 1e and fucking awful in games with 3e, Pathfinder, or 4e. Of course, the single encounter adventuring day is a problem with the same systems on the other side of the equation as well.
Yeah, design of the actual sceneario/module is a separate problem from design of the game.
I've been reading the rules for D&D 1st edition. Not AD&D, just D&D. In the rule book is this choose your own adventure solo D&D. A lot of times it gives you the option to talk to the enemies rather than fight. Choosing to talk to rats and rust mosters is obviously stupid. But even talking to the goblin has negative consequences of more goblins appearing. That is a problem of the module discouraging the choice to talk.
A well designed module would ask for a charisma check if you wanted to talk, and on a certain number the goblins would not fight you. That constant fighting is not the fault of D&D the game, but he fault of a poorly designed adventure.
D&D (includes Pathfinder) and (historically) White Wolf created huge, sprawling game systems across dozens of books. They devolved into less of a game and more of a toolkit for making games, and they charge the GM with putting together the right game, similar to but not to be confused with a purely generic system. If the game says "You're the GM, use whatever rules you want, what you say goes", it falls into this pile.
Other games, and this includes (the overloaded definition of) "indie" games, have tight rules systems. If you try to hack these games, you will probably screw it up. A common problem with people from the former camp trying indie games is that they immediately hack it, the game falls apart, and then they blame the game.
I'm not saying you should never change the rules of any game. However, you should understand the full ramifications of changing the game, and make sure everyone has buy-in as to why and how the rules are being changed, and be willing to revert the change if it becomes a problem. Everyone should play the game as-is before hacking it.
If the rules say the player should have been crippled, you should have let the player be crippled. You are making the false assumption that a crippled player is unplayable. In fact, becoming crippled is epic! I lost a foot in our last BW game. It ended up being a somewhat important point. I was once going about town doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Now I was hobbling, and people were coming to visit me in my cottage. Do you see how following the rules created drama and awesome story that would not have existed otherwise?
Now I can be a dick and provide more context that makes my solution to be seen in better light.
The thing with that character was that he was leader of group of soldiers and he had a rival, his uncle who had wanted that job. The whole campaign the uncle tried to tell the PC that he was a bad leader.
Now think of the results of PC getting wounded but not crppled. Now he was able to continue to act as a leader, but his uncle was able to use the fact that he got wounded as a argument agaist his leardeeship style.
This is correct okeefe. Something like GURPS is not so much a game as it is components you have to put together into a game. If you want to play GURPS, then the GM must in a way become a game designer.
If you play Dogs in the Vineyard, that task is not necessary. A GURPS GM who has never played anything but GURPS might not recognize that Dogs is a finished game, and not a framework from which to create a game.
I don't really have the time today to join the argument for real, but I'm kinda curious what games the folks arguing against Rym and Scott have actually played to the point of grokking?
I just ask because, around 2006-2007, my gaming group at the time very much subscribed to the "We'll just play the D&Ds and make up rules to make it work and the DM is our autocrat/host/abused-housewife, and Rule 0, and we're having fun, and using dice to convince someone to do something is bad but using dice to murder someone is fine" etc etc. And we really were having fun with that.
And then I was finally like, "Hey, lets give any other game a chance" (excluding the GURPs/M&M/Shadowrun/White Wolf/etc bullshit D&D-alikes). And everything was better in every way forever. In ways that we couldn't possibly have foreseen. We could not have comprehended at the time of playing 2nd/3rd edition D&D what other possibilities there were. And now, looking back, I can't figure out why we played D&D at all. I can't imagine playing it again.
I get offers to play in D&D games, and decline. Decline to roleplaying. That's insane. If you told my high school self that I would ever be declining the chance to play D&D, he'd have some kind of embarrassing conniption.
Was this just me? Have any of you guys played like 5-6 sessions of Mouse Guard or Misspent Youth or Don't Rest Your Head or something, and just... nothing happened? Because, I dunno - maybe people are different. I think I've been, for a few years, mostly unintentionally, looked down on people that cling to D&D as their game of choice. But if someone were to state from a position of superior knowledge and experience in the roleplaying game sphere that D&D is just their favorite game out of the dozens they've played to grokage, I think that stigma would be shattered in me forever. It's almost something I want.
(Unfortunately, I likely won't be able to reply to anything until tomorrow.)
Xefas does raise a great point. I haven't even played that many tabletop RPGs extensively. Not nearly as many as I would like to, or even own. Everyone should list the RPGs you have played to the point of really playing them. Playing once at a convention doesn't count. Which tabletop RPGs do you KNOW? If all you have every played is D&D/Pathfinder/GURPS/White Wolf/etc. then you haven't got many legs to stand on.
I know, to the point I could run that shit right now, Advanced/Deluxe Recon, Palladium (though it's awful), Mutants and Masterminds, D&Ds 3.5/d20 and 4, Pathfinder, Warhammer and 40k RPG, Cortex via Serenity, New World of Darkness via Genius the Transgression and Savage Worlds via Deadlands. I've run these systems through some pretty weird paces; the aformentioned cyberpunk D&D, Mass Effect-based Cortex, Red Alert based Recon, and I once ran a Recon game for 16 people at once. For the most part this is stuff I played in high school or immediately after.
I've played a good chunk of Burning Wheel thanks to Geeknights, some Victoriana, a few of the more RPG-like GW specialist games like Inquisitor and Mordhem, and right now I'm playing a quirkly little low-sim Homestuck RPG I found on the MSPA forum. With few exceptions, I've played a session of something at least once a week since I played my first game of System's Failure in 2003, and in high school I was playing every week day at lunch plus weekend sessions. Sometimes when we didn't have dice for whatever reason we just did freeform. I'm working on my second homebrew system.
In rough order of first play, only counting games I've played numerous times or had campaigns involving.
Heroquest D&D (Cyclopaedia version) Shadowrun 2nd Edition AD&D 2nd Ed Freeform LARP Guns (a shit game some friends and I wrote and tested together) BESM 2nd Ed L5R D&D 3rd Ed (and 3.5) D20 L5R D20 Star Wars Burning Wheel Lacuna Inspectres A Thousand and One Nights Mouse Guard
So, not counting games I've played only a handful of times or once, like Fiaso, Shock, Changeling, Apocalypse World, etc... Also not counting games I've read and understood but not actually played like Dread or all that Palladium bullshit. ;^)
Not counting pseudo-RPGs like Mafia either (obviously).
In terms of played extensively, pretty much just DnD 4th, but I've always been willing to admit I have an RPG micropenis. Let this color your reading of my words as you see fit.
My first game was a quasi-free-form LARP with my friend Mark when we were kids. I was the GM effectively, making all the bad guys, treasure, and acting out the fights. We had a bungie pool set we used the pieces from to fight each other. We tried to get other kids to play, but they (1) had problems losing, and (2) had no problem with taking a really serious swing at another kid.
Hero Quest was a kindergarten christmas present. While we played through the whole first book, I wouldn't say we had any degree of mastery. It's a simple game, but from playing it again now I think it's poorly constructed in various ways.
At some point, my friend Jordan's older brother let me borrow his Moldvay basic D&D books for an extended time. We ran multiple campaigns. I think we only ever used the basic books and some items from the expert books, we didn't ever complete the progress through this.
There was some other board game as kids that had a video that came with it that we played extensively, but we played it wrong extensively because we followed the video and not the rulebook.
In early High School (2000) D&D 3e dropped. I would say I have a relatively high mastery of the basic game and the basic 3.5 game, but given the huge glut of products I only know maybe 20% of the content well.
Built a Final Fantasy Tactics based set of D&D classes. They were never particularly well developed but I still get random emails from people trying to find the old documents.
Over ~5 years I became the Play by Post moderator at Enworld and probably played ten thousand hours in some sort of d20 game. Created Living EN World which is apparently still going on. Spycraft and Star Wars were both excellent. Modern and Cthulhu less so. Also dabbled in a number of other games to various lesser degrees.
There was some random BRP/White Wolf/Paranoia games in high school and college.
I've played 10 levels of Pathfinder and 20 of D&D 4e, but not much else yet there.
Since then I've expanded to include playing a couple sessions of a lot of different games. BRP/Call of Cthluhu, Paranoia, Dragon Age, d6 Star Wars, Dread, Tri-Stat, Warhammer Fantasy, various retro-clones like Castles and Crusades, some one-shot story-adventure games, some White Wolf, Mouse Guard, etc. Some games like Dragon Age are incomplete (still waiting for the release of the final level range) and I'd say I know what there is to know about the base set. I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of random crap games on my bookshelves.
But do any of these count if you havn't played the entire level range/spectrum? Including seeing various campaigns with various different groups? One of my biggest problems with some "experts" is that they may have played ~10,000 hours of some game, but only with their one home group with a set roster of players over the years. I'm not sure if that's sufficient. Part of actually having mastery of a game involves exploring the possibilities presented by various sets of people.
Just as a test, was it page 137 for encumbrance in the 3e Player's Handbook? That's what comes to mind. :P
Looking at the Living ENWorld games (which now appear to be mostly L4W and LPathfinder) does my heart good. I did a thing that still exists long after I left. :P
Games I've ran (campaign or multiple one-shots): - Burning Wheel Revised and gold - Solar System - Don't rest your head - Shadowrun 3th and 4th (my first game) - Lady Blackbird - Mouse Guard - Hero Quest 3th(?) Edition
Been player in (same rules no duplicates): - Zombeja! Ovella! (Finnish version of Zombie Cinelma) - wod Hunter (the latest one) - Call of Ctulhu - Bliarion (beta version) - Dogs in the Vineyard - Amber (my only actually long campaign) - couple of friends homebrews - Runequest
There is probably games missing on that list but it gives a picture of my gaming history. Also there are some borderline cases like Prime Time Adventures that I've ran few times but never full season and Penny for your thoughts that I've played once but because I own the game I know the rules and game.
Looking that list now I'm little sad. I could and should have bigger gamer penis.
I read the first OOC thread from the LEW game. Apparently started that at the end of my summer vacation before going to college. It will have lived 10 years next August. I'm going to celebrate that somehow.
Edit - I can already respond for you to save you the effort, "Then the game is fundamentally broken, and it's therefore a shitty game and you shouldn't play it."
Lots of games say this, or say things such as "feel free to modify the rules whatever way you wish." I would strongly suggest either erasing those lines from the book, or not playing those games. All a game has to offer you are its rules. I fit is so lazy as to tell you to make up your own rules, or come to your own judgement, what good is it? You paid money for the game. The game works for you. If you're making it all up yourself, just throw the game out and make up the whole thing yourself.
If the rules say the player should have been crippled, you should have let the player be crippled. You are making the false assumption that a crippled player is unplayable. In fact, becoming crippled is epic! I lost a foot in our last BW game. It ended up being a somewhat important point. I was once going about town doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Now I was hobbling, and people were coming to visit me in my cottage. Do you see how following the rules created drama and awesome story that would not have existed otherwise?
Now I can be a dick and provide more context that makes my solution to be seen in better light.
The thing with that character was that he was leader of group of soldiers and he had a rival, his uncle who had wanted that job. The whole campaign the uncle tried to tell the PC that he was a bad leader.
Now think of the results of PC getting wounded but not crppled. Now he was able to continue to act as a leader, but his uncle was able to use the fact that he got wounded as a argument agaist his leardeeship style.
Seems to me by rule bending you told the story you wanted to tell, rather than the story the dice revealed. Where is the tension of the combat if your group is just going to make up a compromise to keep the two sides fair? Wouldn't it be more challenging (and, therefore, more fun) to try arguing with this uncle as a cripple, sticking with your guns and striving to prove your worth or (gasp!) changing as a character?
Comments
But yes, I know that there are games that are better for this (Burning Wheel and whatnot), and I would like to try them with people some other time.
Also, what is stopping you from playing a different game? Just do it now.
I could play a different game, but playing a tabletop alone is kinda sad. I don't have anyone around who wants to try a different game.
As I understand it, what Rym calls "pseudo-larp wankery" is really "Yeah, we're playing a roleplaying game, but there's this part we don't like / don't understand / doesn't work so we stop playing the game and do freeform roleplay". Not that there's anything wrong with freeform roleplay—it's just a different game altogether from a RPG with system, rules, and mechanics. It's a sign of either the RPG system either being bad (in some way) or being a mismatch for what the group actually wants to play.
I'm not into LARP, but there's a lot of different games out there in that space, and it shouldn't be confused with freeform roleplay.
I've been reading the rules for D&D 1st edition. Not AD&D, just D&D. In the rule book is this choose your own adventure solo D&D. A lot of times it gives you the option to talk to the enemies rather than fight. Choosing to talk to rats and rust mosters is obviously stupid. But even talking to the goblin has negative consequences of more goblins appearing. That is a problem of the module discouraging the choice to talk.
A well designed module would ask for a charisma check if you wanted to talk, and on a certain number the goblins would not fight you. That constant fighting is not the fault of D&D the game, but he fault of a poorly designed adventure.
Other games, and this includes (the overloaded definition of) "indie" games, have tight rules systems. If you try to hack these games, you will probably screw it up. A common problem with people from the former camp trying indie games is that they immediately hack it, the game falls apart, and then they blame the game.
I'm not saying you should never change the rules of any game. However, you should understand the full ramifications of changing the game, and make sure everyone has buy-in as to why and how the rules are being changed, and be willing to revert the change if it becomes a problem. Everyone should play the game as-is before hacking it.
The thing with that character was that he was leader of group of soldiers and he had a rival, his uncle who had wanted that job. The whole campaign the uncle tried to tell the PC that he was a bad leader.
Now think of the results of PC getting wounded but not crppled. Now he was able to continue to act as a leader, but his uncle was able to use the fact that he got wounded as a argument agaist his leardeeship style.
If you play Dogs in the Vineyard, that task is not necessary. A GURPS GM who has never played anything but GURPS might not recognize that Dogs is a finished game, and not a framework from which to create a game.
I just ask because, around 2006-2007, my gaming group at the time very much subscribed to the "We'll just play the D&Ds and make up rules to make it work and the DM is our autocrat/host/abused-housewife, and Rule 0, and we're having fun, and using dice to convince someone to do something is bad but using dice to murder someone is fine" etc etc. And we really were having fun with that.
And then I was finally like, "Hey, lets give any other game a chance" (excluding the GURPs/M&M/Shadowrun/White Wolf/etc bullshit D&D-alikes). And everything was better in every way forever. In ways that we couldn't possibly have foreseen. We could not have comprehended at the time of playing 2nd/3rd edition D&D what other possibilities there were. And now, looking back, I can't figure out why we played D&D at all. I can't imagine playing it again.
I get offers to play in D&D games, and decline. Decline to roleplaying. That's insane. If you told my high school self that I would ever be declining the chance to play D&D, he'd have some kind of embarrassing conniption.
Was this just me? Have any of you guys played like 5-6 sessions of Mouse Guard or Misspent Youth or Don't Rest Your Head or something, and just... nothing happened? Because, I dunno - maybe people are different. I think I've been, for a few years, mostly unintentionally, looked down on people that cling to D&D as their game of choice. But if someone were to state from a position of superior knowledge and experience in the roleplaying game sphere that D&D is just their favorite game out of the dozens they've played to grokage, I think that stigma would be shattered in me forever. It's almost something I want.
(Unfortunately, I likely won't be able to reply to anything until tomorrow.)
I've played a good chunk of Burning Wheel thanks to Geeknights, some Victoriana, a few of the more RPG-like GW specialist games like Inquisitor and Mordhem, and right now I'm playing a quirkly little low-sim Homestuck RPG I found on the MSPA forum. With few exceptions, I've played a session of something at least once a week since I played my first game of System's Failure in 2003, and in high school I was playing every week day at lunch plus weekend sessions. Sometimes when we didn't have dice for whatever reason we just did freeform. I'm working on my second homebrew system.
Go ahead and measure.
Heroquest
D&D (Cyclopaedia version)
Shadowrun 2nd Edition
AD&D 2nd Ed
Freeform LARP
Guns (a shit game some friends and I wrote and tested together)
BESM 2nd Ed
L5R
D&D 3rd Ed (and 3.5)
D20 L5R
D20 Star Wars
Burning Wheel
Lacuna
Inspectres
A Thousand and One Nights
Mouse Guard
So, not counting games I've played only a handful of times or once, like Fiaso, Shock, Changeling, Apocalypse World, etc... Also not counting games I've read and understood but not actually played like Dread or all that Palladium bullshit. ;^)
Not counting pseudo-RPGs like Mafia either (obviously).
AD&D 2nd, 3rd, various D20(Star Wars)
Burning Wheel Revised, Gold
Freemarket
Inspectres
Lacuna
Kobolds at My Baby
Pokethulhu
Played only one time, but still know the rules a lot
D&D 4th
Thousand and One Nights
Mouse Guard
Paranoia
Fiasco
Kill Puppies for Satan
HeroQuest (and friends)
Any other game I might own, have read, played maybe sort of once, don't really know the rules all that well, etc.
My first game was a quasi-free-form LARP with my friend Mark when we were kids. I was the GM effectively, making all the bad guys, treasure, and acting out the fights. We had a bungie pool set we used the pieces from to fight each other. We tried to get other kids to play, but they (1) had problems losing, and (2) had no problem with taking a really serious swing at another kid.
Hero Quest was a kindergarten christmas present. While we played through the whole first book, I wouldn't say we had any degree of mastery. It's a simple game, but from playing it again now I think it's poorly constructed in various ways.
At some point, my friend Jordan's older brother let me borrow his Moldvay basic D&D books for an extended time. We ran multiple campaigns. I think we only ever used the basic books and some items from the expert books, we didn't ever complete the progress through this.
There was some other board game as kids that had a video that came with it that we played extensively, but we played it wrong extensively because we followed the video and not the rulebook.
In early High School (2000) D&D 3e dropped. I would say I have a relatively high mastery of the basic game and the basic 3.5 game, but given the huge glut of products I only know maybe 20% of the content well.
Built a Final Fantasy Tactics based set of D&D classes. They were never particularly well developed but I still get random emails from people trying to find the old documents.
Over ~5 years I became the Play by Post moderator at Enworld and probably played ten thousand hours in some sort of d20 game. Created Living EN World which is apparently still going on. Spycraft and Star Wars were both excellent. Modern and Cthulhu less so. Also dabbled in a number of other games to various lesser degrees.
There was some random BRP/White Wolf/Paranoia games in high school and college.
I've played 10 levels of Pathfinder and 20 of D&D 4e, but not much else yet there.
Since then I've expanded to include playing a couple sessions of a lot of different games. BRP/Call of Cthluhu, Paranoia, Dragon Age, d6 Star Wars, Dread, Tri-Stat, Warhammer Fantasy, various retro-clones like Castles and Crusades, some one-shot story-adventure games, some White Wolf, Mouse Guard, etc. Some games like Dragon Age are incomplete (still waiting for the release of the final level range) and I'd say I know what there is to know about the base set. I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of random crap games on my bookshelves.
But do any of these count if you havn't played the entire level range/spectrum? Including seeing various campaigns with various different groups? One of my biggest problems with some "experts" is that they may have played ~10,000 hours of some game, but only with their one home group with a set roster of players over the years. I'm not sure if that's sufficient. Part of actually having mastery of a game involves exploring the possibilities presented by various sets of people.
Just as a test, was it page 137 for encumbrance in the 3e Player's Handbook? That's what comes to mind. :P
- Burning Wheel Revised and gold
- Solar System
- Don't rest your head
- Shadowrun 3th and 4th (my first game)
- Lady Blackbird
- Mouse Guard
- Hero Quest 3th(?) Edition
Been player in (same rules no duplicates):
- Zombeja! Ovella! (Finnish version of Zombie Cinelma)
- wod Hunter (the latest one)
- Call of Ctulhu
- Bliarion (beta version)
- Dogs in the Vineyard
- Amber (my only actually long campaign)
- couple of friends homebrews
- Runequest
There is probably games missing on that list but it gives a picture of my gaming history. Also there are some borderline cases like Prime Time Adventures that I've ran few times but never full season and Penny for your thoughts that I've played once but because I own the game I know the rules and game.
Looking that list now I'm little sad. I could and should have bigger gamer penis.