{"id":34159,"date":"2016-09-03T04:45:04","date_gmt":"2016-09-03T08:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34159"},"modified":"2016-09-03T04:45:04","modified_gmt":"2016-09-03T08:45:04","slug":"rutskarns-gminars-ch6-the-gamesbow-1-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34159","title":{"rendered":"Rutskarn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s GMinars CH6: The Gamesbow 1-4"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rather than come up with more fictional tabletop games to explain mechanical paradigms, why don’t we just look at real ones? For the next two weeks I’ll be drawing up a spectrum of RPGs ranging from the rigid and traditional to wobbly and intangible.<\/p>\n

Don’t take these as suggestions, per se–I include all of these because they make for a good sampling, not necessarily because I adore them. Whenever available, I’ll include links for legal purchase and download.<\/p>\n

MOST TRADITIONAL<\/strong><\/p>\n

1.) BattleTech\/MechWarrior<\/a> (Introduced 1986)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the endgame; as far as I’m concerned, this system represents the tip of the creaking, painstakingly riveted tower of objective design. Very little in MechWarrior’s<\/em> sundry editions <\/em>is left to the imagination of the storyteller. You will not have to guess where your rocket lands or imagine which systems it damages, or how; all of that will emerge conclusively from an exhaustive cross-referencing of dice and rulebook. RPGs exist that are more minute than this franchise, but I’ve never seen anybody play them on purpose.<\/p>\n

It’s not that anything in MechWarrior <\/em>is particularly realistic. Nothing featuring giant chickenlike mechs is going to pass the snarky twitter test of verisimilitude–and frankly, even if the rules were meant to be realistic, they’re frequently incomplete and confusingly presented. Classically, striking a man-sized object with a mech’s melee weapon is nearly impossible…while stomping on them is an automatic hit and kill. And don’t even think about trying out a character who isn’t perpetually wrapped in Mech–the designers realized halfway through they had to make rules for people like you, and, also, that they really hate you.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’d argue there’s two purposes to MechWarrior<\/em>‘s overdesign. The first is to provide as many strategic options as possible, which is one very valid reason to make combat complicated and objective. The second is to provide a sense of simulation. That school of thought runs: playing MechWarrior <\/em>should be complicated because being a mech pilot would be complicated. MechWarrior <\/em>without the dozens of hit locations would be like Papers, Please <\/em>without the fussy fines and regulations; lacking a component crucial to immersion.<\/p>\n

Having said that, this really is the outer limit of what’s considered basically playable. Most will want something several rungs less fiddly–or at least, a little more developed in its design. MechWarrior <\/em>players have never been thick on the ground and they’re harder to come by every year.<\/p>\n

2.) Dungeons and Dragons<\/a> (Introduced 1974)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve covered this game at length–it’s a classic marriage of traditional objective rules and friendly approachability. It started out four decades ago as a wargame that simulated a few things besides battlefields, and that, more or less, remains the soul of the game. D&D <\/em>reasons that the story is the story and that you don’t need much help with it–what you really need help arbitrating is the complicated business of killing and not being killed. It tries to do that in a way that’s tactical, intuitive, reasonably realistic, and interesting. It will serve you for years, and it will not surprise you–and it isn’t supposed to. The rules are predictable and concrete to provide challenges that are predictable and concrete. Defeating a dragon is more rewarding when it’s objectively difficult to do so, which means standards and restrictions have to exist and the rules need to stand on their own.<\/p>\n

3.) FATE<\/a> (Introduced 2003)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In theory, combat in games like MechWarrior <\/em>and Dungeons and Dragons <\/em>can be flawlessly conducted by a computer. The rules are very specific about what you’re doing and when you can do it: You get a bonus to your melee attack when you are flanking an enemy. You are flanking an enemy when you and an ally stand adjacent to a foe on opposite squares. A melee attack is (etc). <\/em>In all other situations–exploring, tunneling, trading, crafting, talking–the limits of a computer inarguably constrain player action, but when it comes to combat, the computer’s got things sewn up to a satisfying degree, and the simulation is only as limited as the programmer’s patience.<\/p>\n

FATE <\/em>is different. You couldn’t trust a computer to run its mechanics to anything but a hollow, unsatisfying degree. The rules provide a somewhat<\/em> objective foundation–characters are clearly good at some things and bad at others–but the game offers tools and license for both players and GM to ignore, redirect, or steer whatever conclusions are arrived at by rolling dice. In some cases, this empowers players to make events feel more <\/em>believable than they might in an “objective” game.<\/p>\n

Consider the following example:<\/p>\n

Alan and Barbara join a fantasy campaign. Alan wants to play his favorite character, a huge-gutted rock-livered freakishly tough dwarf barbarian named Aargar of the Flinty Mountains. Barbara wants to play her old standby, Bohemius the scrawny and consumptive elf beat poet. Both players feel strongly about their characters; their main priority is making sure their vision is backed up by the rules.<\/p>\n

Naturally, they vote to play Dungeons and Dragons, <\/em>because as a well-designed simulationist system they know there will be plenty of ways to represent their characters’ constitutions objectively and mechanically.<\/p>\n

Alan is dead serious about being tough–he’s kind of a sickly guy, so a dwarf who’s totally unshakable is his power fantasy. Literally every decision he makes in character creation is aimed at making his vision of the unsinkable dwarf a reality. He sacrifices a lot of versatility to boost his toughness score to its limits–he will add a bonus of +5 to any die roll when his character’s resilience is in question. He picks a class that adds a +2 to any die roll related to resisting disease, poison, or inclement weather. He picks the race that gets a +2 to any check related to ingesting toxins. He even blows his free feat on Iron Fortitude, adding a +2 on toughness rolls instead of picking anything remotely combat-oriented. This adds up to as much as a +11 bonus to certain situations–not only is Aargar the toughest person in the party, he’s already tougher than almost anybody they’ll ever meet. In a low fantasy campaign, he’s already one of the toughest people on the planet.<\/p>\n

When Barbara thinks of her character, the first thing she thinks is frail. <\/em>So she makes him pitifully weak, giving him a CON of 7 for a -2 on all toughness-related rolls. According to the rules, Bohemius is significantly less sturdy than a pet cat.<\/p>\n

To celebrate joining the new party, the freshly-created Aargar and Bohemius clink glasses of Dwarven Kickass Whiskey and roll not to get drunk. In D&D<\/em>, you determine this kind of thing by rolling a die with twenty sides–a die that’s as likely to give a really good result (20) as a really bad one (1) as a precisely mediocre one (10)–and adding any relevant bonuses to the result, hoping the total is equal to or greater than the difficulty number of whatever you’re trying to do. In this case Alan’s die comes up a 4, to which he adds his tremendous poison save of +11 (total: 15). Barbara’s comes up an 18, from which she subtracts <\/em>2 (total:16). The difficulty to not get drunk is 16.<\/p>\n

Aargar, the legendarily robust hard-drinking dwarf, hits the floor, and Bohemius looks around for a bowl of pretzels.<\/p>\n

This feel clearly wrong, but the game offers no recourse; the dice have spoken. There are all sorts of ways to explain what happened, all of which ignore the “objective” situation to introduce external factors (“Somebody drugged Aargar’s tipple,” “Bohemius puked his up,” “Aargar had a stomach flu,” etc). But three problems remain. Firstly, this result is the exact opposite of what Alan and Barbara wanted from their characters. Secondly, both players did everything in their power to prevent it from happening. Thirdly, as they will discover, this sort of weird invalidating situation isn’t even rare.<\/em> In the interest of delivering a more tactically sound and unpredictable game, D&D <\/em>accepts that it will sometimes fly in the face of what you expect from your character. Sometimes the fast guy will go slowest. Sometimes the great warrior will miss the drunk peasant. Sometimes the butterfingered novice will play the flute better than the classically-trained internationally famous bard. C’est le jeu.<\/em><\/p>\n

A little miffed, Alan and Barbara decide to give the same characters a go in the FATE <\/em>system. This time character creation’s a little less like building a PC and a little more like painting a portrait–it focuses less on mechanical parts and more on creatively assembling an image.<\/p>\n

Alan’s still hellbent on being the toughest dwarf around. In the section of the sheet where players write down the parts of their character that are most important in the story, called the character’s “Aspects,” Alan writes down Hard as Mother Mountain. <\/em>Barbara, wanting to emphasize that her elf is delicate, writes down Gentle as the Summer. <\/em>This isn’t just poetry or character description–these Aspects, of which each character will have five, are mechanically hugely important.<\/p>\n

Of course, there’s also Skills. Skills incorporate into one simple mechanic all the nuance of class, race, spells, and build in a game like Dungeons and Dragons. <\/em>Alan doesn’t need to balance three or four different stats, saves, and feat paths in order to be a specific kind of tough–he takes Physique, a skill that makes one both strong AND tough, at the highest possible skill level, 5. Barbara doesn’t care about being strong or tough, so she doesn’t take Physique at all.<\/em><\/p>\n

Alan also creates a Stunt, a kind of specialization that can modify Skill in creative ways, to give him a +2 to Physique checks to not get poisoned or drunk. He calls this stunt Mithril Belly. <\/em>Barbara buys stunts related to things she cares about, like beat poetry and glamour shots and being noticed at parties.<\/p>\n

So what happens when Aargar and Bohemius share a drink in FATE<\/em>? Just like last time, Alan and Barbara roll–hoping that their dice roll, plus their Physique (effectively 7 in the case of Alan, 0 in the case of Barbara), equals or exceeds a difficulty of 4. Since this is FATE<\/em>, they’re not rolling a totally random number between 1 and 20. The four dice used mean they’ll roll something between -4 and +4, either of which would be a super rare and unexpected result compared to the more typical +1s, 0s, -2s, etc.<\/p>\n

So, naturally, when they both roll for sobriety, Alan rolls a -4 and Barbara gets +4. The odds of either<\/em> of those happening is a little more than 1%. This is the most freakishly unlucky\/lucky result they could have gotten, and with Aargar’s result at +3 and Bohemia’s at +4, it looks like it’s going to be a (truly improbable) repeat of the D&D<\/em> situation.<\/p>\n

This is where those Aspects come in.<\/p>\n

Aspects are all about letting the important parts of the character overrule what the dice say. Alan’s not happy with his character passing out drunk, so he spends one of his renewable-yet-valuable character points to invoke his Aspect Hard as Mother Mountain. <\/em>He says, “Aargar’s liver should curl up and die at this, but somehow, with the spirit of Mother Mountain in his veins, he remains standing.” Because he has an Aspect to explain why he doesn’t pass out, and a character point to invoke it, he can purchase either a reroll or a +2 bonus to his result. In this case, he might as well reroll, since he’s virtually guaranteed to get a much better result than the hideously improbable -4 if he does. Basically, through the expenditure of a character point justified by Aspect choice, the strength of Aargar’s characterization wins out over freakishly bad luck.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Barbara sees an opportunity to leverage her unexpected success. In FATE, <\/em>you get the aforementioned character points whenever an Aspect gets you into trouble you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten into. Barbara says to the GM: “Bohemius is still standing and all, but he’s never been this drunk before and he’s handling it poorly. He’s completely oblivious to danger and starts trying to make friends with those scarred, hook-handed pickpockets in the corner.” Barbara gets a character point for acting out the consequences of Gentle as the Summer.<\/em><\/p>\n

Alan and Barbara are happy; the rules allowed their vision of their characters to trump flukes of the dice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The system’s more interesting and robust than I have time to get into, but the main point is this: FATE <\/em>is designed to let you play any kind of character consistently, productively, and well. Rarely if ever does a “feel-bad” die result foul up the story. Among other things, the system encourages GMs to sometimes turn “you roll too low and fail” into “you roll too low, so you succeed, but something goes extremely wrong,” which is the kind of suggestion traditional games strongly eschew and story games thrive on. Failures are fun, but I’ve met few GMs who can’t do more damage with a skillfully-chosen Success With Consequences.<\/p>\n

Of course, not every group wants what FATE<\/em>‘s selling. D&D <\/em>didn’t arrive at its unpredictable, wide-rolling d20 by accident. Uncertainty and unreliability are perfectly good sources of tension–it’s thrilling to know nobody’s safe from a wild, unlucky result. The threat of Aargar losing a friendly drinking contest is just annoying, but when Aargar accidentally drinks a poisoned broth, suddenly the fact that he can’t count on a success is exciting<\/em>. Games like FATE <\/em>can feel too safe, too catered, for some players’ tastes.<\/p>\n

Plus–when you get right down to it, some groups don’t want subjective considerations like “is this Aspect relevant” to factor into mechanics. And for a not-inconsiderable percentage of groups, Aspects and declarations and all the other built-in ad hoc mechanics start to wheedle down a slippery and unlovely slope. When the story can influence what happens mechanically, what are the mechanics actually there for?<\/p>\n

I like FATE <\/em>a lot, and every time I think I’ve thought myself out of liking it I’m surprised by a new and exciting campaign which rekindles my affection. I’ll have a longer post weighing pros and cons before long.<\/p>\n

4.) octaNe<\/a> (Introduced 2003)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

octaNe <\/em>pitches itself as the Trash Culture RPG. It’s fascinated with pulp science, grindhouse, kitsch, bucketloads of gore, bras with knives on, knives with bras on–anything really garish and full-throated has a spot in its milieu. Whereas D&D <\/em>is specifically a heroic fantasy game, and FATE <\/em>is built for any kind of game at all, octaNe <\/em>is designed more for a feeling than any kind of specific setting (though it has one, a modest pastiche of B-movie tropes). octaNe <\/em>chases the anarchic thrill of no-holds-barred, unpretentious, self-indulgent imagination, and achieves this by way of a rather drastic step: it outright rejects objectivity. There is no sense at all that specific actions obey specific rules to obtain specific results.<\/p>\n

All the dice do, once the player declares an action, is determine whether a.) the player gets to narrate what happens, b.) the GM gets to narrate what happens, or c.) the two have to compromise. Players aren’t even more likely to succeed at things they’re supposed to be good at; instead, they have “favorite” ways of doing things that give them points they can spend on future rolls. Basically, the game bribes you to roleplay your character without penalizing failure to.<\/p>\n

octaNe <\/i>will never have the lasting appeal of a game like FATE <\/em>or D&D<\/em>, or reach indie darling status like some of the games that’ll bring up the bottom of this list, but it’s a good example of an RPG that delivers good times without the pretense of simulation.<\/p>\n

However, just because it’s not much a traditional game doesn’t mean it’s much of a story game. The rules actually do very little to drive or focus the storytelling–the dice rolls randomly shift the authorial power around, which can be fun in short bursts but isn’t hugely compelling. Next week, when I start reaching the other end of the Gamebow, we’ll look at how shifting around authorial power in directed ways can create truly memorable experiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rather than come up with more fictional tabletop games to explain mechanical paradigms, why don’t we just look at real ones? For the next two weeks I’ll be drawing up a spectrum of RPGs ranging from the rigid and traditional to wobbly and intangible. Don’t take these as suggestions, per se–I include all of these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}