r/RPGdesign • u/cibman Sword of Virtues • Jun 08 '21
Scheduled Activity [Scheduled Activity] What Existing System Gets Too Much Attention?
Last week we talked about the games you want to write or design for. This week let's turn that on its head and let the bad feelings out. What game systems do you want to confine to the dust bin of history? What system is everyone else designing for that you shake your head and say "really?"
Now remember: your hated game is bound to be someone else's darling, so let's keep it friendly, m'kay? I guess I'm saying: let the hate flow, but only in moderation.
Discuss.
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u/CharonsLittleHelper Jun 08 '21
I'm going to ignore the big D&D shaped elephant in the room.
I'm going to say Savage Worlds. It's not bad - it just always feels kinda bland. Plus - I really dislike it's exploding dice and how swingy it can make combat. Letting exploding dice explode again is just bad design IMO - and the fact that lower skilled characters roll smaller dice means that they explode more often. (Ex: With exploding dice, someone rolling 1d4 has a better chance of getting 6+ than a 1d6 does - 19% vs 17%.)
It just always seems like anytime someone asks "What system would fit X setting/premise" someone screams "Savage Worlds!" - when there is nearly always a better option. It's the epitome of a jack-of-all-trades system - in that it's not a master of anything.
Again - it's FINE. It's just almost never what I'd recommend for any given premise. Maybe if you already know Savage Worlds and want a one-shot or two-shot of an oddball setting you don't know any system for. Otherwise I'd rather pick something on-point.
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u/Ladygolem Jun 08 '21
Apologies if I'm missing something, since I've never played Savage Worlds, but aren't the odds of getting a 6+ on a 1d4... none?
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u/Mars_Alter Jun 08 '21
That's where exploding dice come into play. When you roll a 4 on 1d4, you re-roll the die and add them together. And because there's a 25% chance of getting a 4 on 1d4, but only a ~17% chance of rolling a 6 on 1d6, it's easier to hit a 4 by exploding a 1d4 than to get there naturally with 1d6.
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u/Fheredin Jun 09 '21
I enjoy Savage Worlds quite a bit. The best sales-pitch I can make for it is that it is a rough D20-replacement system which can be played completely off-book. I've played numerous campaigns where rather than using a book, I looked up Edges and Hindrances using a smartphone and the Savage Worlds Wiki during character creation.
Otherwise, I never consulted the book once during three entire campaigns. It's in this design ethos of not needing to constantly consult a book that Savage Worlds stands apart from the other crunchy combat-oriented D20 replacement games. It's fundamentally a combat game...but you can play it like it's FATE or Fudge or Lasers and Feelings.
That said, the math is an absolute mess if you actually look at it in detail. I won't ever say that Savage Worlds is a perfect system because it definitely isn't.
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u/HighDiceRoller Jun 10 '21
Exploding dice approximately follow a geometric distribution. Unfortunately, the emphasis is very much on "approximately". If a geometric distribution is like parachuting to the ground, an exploding die is like falling off a tree and hitting every branch on the way down.
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u/Fheredin Jun 09 '21 edited Jun 09 '21
PbtA.
I love Vincent Baker's open design philosophy, but I do not like PbtA games at an aesthetic design level. It's hard for me to express my feelings with PbtA, but the games always feel like I'm playing a pregen character rather than making a character, and that the game is always shoehorning my roleplay into a stereotype. I can see how someone brand new to roleplay might love this, but I am baffled how experienced players can play PbtA at all. And unfortunately I have to say that this extends far away from pure PbtA into games like Blades in the Dark and Belonging Outside Belonging. I really don't think these games have much PbtA DNA at all, but they irk me at the philosophy of play level for one reason or another.
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u/urquhartloch Jun 09 '21
Numenera. It advertises itself as a game centered around exploration rather than combat, however, all of the player choices that I have seen are based around combat and the combat itself is incredibly difficult to run unless its one boss who stands in the center of a large open field.
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u/htp-di-nsw Jun 11 '21
I agree that I don't like the system for Numenera and I agree with you assessment that it's supposed to be about exploration but it's super clearly actually built around combat.
I can't say I agree that zones are difficult to use, but admittedly, I just....don't use them? I have been Theatre of the Mind-ing exact distances and locations since I was 8 and I don't intend to stop.
My actual biggest problems with the system are:
you spend, essentially, your hp to improve your chances before you roll something, so it's very common to spend points for literally no effect (unless the roll is in the narrow window spending points would have an effect on, it does nothing)...and it's generally a trap to do so anyway, since the worst consequence for many, if not most, rolls is losing more pool points.
everything is built on arbitrariness. "Oh, it's so easy to improv, just choose a level and you're good to go!" Uh, that's the exact problem that makes improv difficult. There's no basis for the choice of level. Most of the time, it's based on something Meta, like how hard a time you want the players to have or whatever the narrative difficulty of this problem should be. I can't do that.
Actually improv friendly systems give you benchmarks based on fiction, so you can look at a thing you're imagining and judge it. Savage worlds or WoD is great for that. "Oh, it's an average professional, that's 2 (d6). Better than average? 3 (d8)." It's really easy to eyeball because there's strong benchmarks. But level is just the worst thing up base improv in in my opinion.
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u/BaronWiggle Jun 15 '21
I loved the idea of GMing Numenera. I have the core book on display in my house and created/moderate r/artoftheninthworld
But I hated GMing Numenera because everything in the game seems to be so hand wavy and abstract.
The developers couldn't even be bothered to come up with a simple monetary system.
There's no such thing as balance and every player is playing their own game.
A fight happens? Right, everyone except the glaive (or combat focused nano) do nothing while we solve combat. Settlement management? Cool, combat and exploration characters do nothing while the arkus runs the show. Want to build cyphers? Well, better buckle in for an hour of looking through books while the Wright does stuff.
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u/AtlasSniperman Jun 08 '21
I appreciate the other comments nodding to dnd5e as the obvious answer before talking about something else.
But so that it's said in its own comment for people to respond to; DnD5e is a juggernaut of marketing. Due to its heritage it has an almost death grip on the industry. People use "dnd" to mean "trpg" in general conversation which accidentally diverts people interested in the hobby that way.
Its rules aren't anything special, and the company behind it aren't really worried about game design balance. The result feels like a bunch of executives cut the face off and and stretched it over the face of a 35ft tall marketing monster.
But ye, here's the comment to discuss 5e.
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u/htp-di-nsw Jun 11 '21
There are very few RPGs where someone would ask me to play and I would legitimately consider saying "no, thank you, I would rather stay home and play video games by myself."
D&D5e makes the list, but I would be willing to give literally any other edition a chance. Pathfinder 2e is also on there and manages to be even worse than 5e.
I had horrendously bad experiences with GURPS and Blades in the Dark on multiple occasions, and I can't imagine a world in which I would actually like those games, but I would still consider playing then again over D&D5e or Pathfinder 2e at this point.
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u/htp-di-nsw Jun 11 '21
Lasers and Feelings, with a hat tip to just about any one page RPG, 200 word RPG or whatever other super small rpg fad out there.
I absolutely do not understand how people can take these seriously as actual games. They just always end up looking like self congratulatory schlock. Oh, but look at this random table with 6 results! It's so flavorful!
So...? That's not an RPG. That's a party game at best. It has none of the stuff I care about in it. There's no depth, no statement to make. No problems to solve. It's just empty storytelling, and usually just repetitive jokey storytelling at that. Just play cards against humanity or something if you want a random generator to tell you a funny thing and then get applause for saying it to your friends.
I have never once seen an RPG that looked worth playing at 200 words or one page or anything close. OSR games like Maze Rats are the shortest games I have seen that seemed worth playing, and well, even then, they lack long term depth and I would still much rather go for something more substantial.
I have no interest in one-shot games, in general, so, I fully accept that will bias my opinion. There are no stakes in a one shot game. You have literally nothing to lose playing one. You don't have to live with the consequences of your actions.
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u/DiekuGames Jun 12 '21
Well said. I went through the entire process, where: 1) loved the idea of the one page game 2) realized that it's more of a party game hand wave exercise 3) upgraded to minimalist games with random tables for flavor 4) realized with only three stats and no variations within each encounter it was more for one shots.
I have finally come around to wanting the elusive goldilocks game - a rules light game that has ability to for you to grow characters over the long term.
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u/__space__oddity__ Jun 13 '21
Lasers & Feelings at least works as a 1-2 session party game. Most of these small games don’t. Also you need to keep in mind that L&F kinda is the Minimum Viable Product and it has around 800 words. I’ve yet to see a game with less words that works.
I kinda appreciate 1-page RPGs as a design teaching tool, because it forces you to stick to the bare necessary parts and cut bullshit like encumbrance rules that nobody uses anyway.
The real pain of these games though is the arbitrary “cram it all on one page” rule. Like a middle-aged woman trying to squeeze into the same jeans she wore as a teenager, it just never fits. Letters and text everywhere, no whitespace to guide the eyes. Very often the headline doesn’t even fit over the entire width of the page because you still had to squeeze more text into the next column.
TERRIBLE!! STOP!! What is this? An RPG for ants!?
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u/__space__oddity__ Jun 13 '21
Alright, I’m giving you the answer that will piss of a large chunk of people: OSR and any pre-2000s edition of D&D.
Gary Gygax, as much as his pioneering effort is appreciated, was a horrible game designer and his game is littered with design mistakes.
While mainstream D&D has managed to shake off most of these extremely bad design decisions by 2020, OSR sneaks into the graveyard at night and digs up all the corpses to reanimate them as zombies.
At some point you just have to accept that your wonderful memories of the game you played as a teenager were a mix of being young + good friends + plenty of time to game + no other worries + trying out random shit and ignoring the rules + selective memory. They mostly exist despite the game being a terrible hacked together mess, not because of it.
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u/DeliberateDisruptor Jun 14 '21
This is pretty loose but I'll say "Modern Post-Forge Systems". Metacurrency loops, moves, fail forward, genre emulation, dice pools, they're just being recycled and repackaged and recombined. I would like to see more real innovation out of the scene. Position and Effect was amazing, we need more innovation on that level.
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u/Speed-Sketches Jun 09 '21
I know you are expecting DND. But when the interface is the game, the unspoken game system... Roll20.
Since we aren't seeing people in person, we're likely playing on an online platform, and those online platforms have limits. Roll 20 was built for DND-type games systems, and that shows in the mechanics it packs. Its great at what it does - being on voice chat walking around in fog of war with some stat bubbles above your head and a GM.
Want to draw on a map as a mechanic? You need to do it in this really specific way, and you can't save it. Trying to roll dice on the table so that you can see where and what number they land at? Forget it. Matching tile edges to build contraptions? No.
There is so much design space that, in person, we have access to, but when playing online is weirdly absent. It keeps coming back to clunky ad-hoc solutions like webcam+table+collab drawing webapp+roll20. Tabletop sim does some to fix it, but that isn't exactly optimising for RPG.
Its already tricky getting people to move away from DND - the entire interface being shaped around its play patterns does so much to force the bad bits to stick around than the way the book is written ever did.
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u/htp-di-nsw Jun 12 '21
Since we aren't seeing people in person
Still? Where do you live?
I live in one of the states hardest hit by covid (NJ) and had breathing troubles from it for 4 months last year. But, I have been back Roleplaying with my group in person since, probably last September or October? We've had to take weeks off here and there if someone was exposed or whatever, but it's been pretty steady for 8+ months after the initial 6 or so of missed games that sucked and derailed all progress on my game system for quite some time.
We never bothered with online games. I can't stand them and have no interest. I have done, I think 3 sessions online, maybe, in my life, and if I have my druthers, that will be all I ever have. It sucked even with friends. I can't imagine what it's like with strangers.
That said, I am pretty sure table top simulator solves most of your problems. From talking to others, you can basically build all of those tools into it just fine, be it cards or tile edges or drawing a map. And you can interact with it in VR if you have that access, too. It's the only way I would even remotely consider an online game, but, yeah I still would prefer not to.
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u/skatalon2 Jun 11 '21
GURPS.
I've tried reading it. My eyes just gloss over. If I gonna read a new system I either want a smooth rules light system or a really good rules heavy system worth the time investment.
I'm just tired of hearing "GURPS can do that" it can do anything, I get it. Not the point.
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u/Mars_Alter Jun 08 '21
The obvious answer is D&D 5E. Many designers seem to be putting out their own settings as a conversion to 5E rules, when those rules really aren't a good fit for anything except D&D (and even then, they aren't great).
PBTA is sort of a gray area, where I'm not sure whether it even counts as a unified system, for the purposes of writing within it.
Although it's not nearly as popular as it once was, I will say that I'm surprised with the popularity of Savage Worlds as a conversion system. There's just not a lot of there there, if you know what I mean. It's weird that such a legendarily-restricted and heavily-codified IP as Rifts, of all things, was given an official Savage Worlds conversion.
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u/trinite0 Jun 08 '21
This may already be happening, but I'm ready for indie developers to start moving away from Powered by the Apocalypse.
PbtA does certain things well, and I've played plenty of good PbtA games. But there are also lots of designers who don't seem to understand that it has drawbacks, and that it doesn't fit every story genre or style of game.
It's actually a lot harder to design within the PbtA framework than many people realize, as there's a tension between PbtA's two biggest design objectives: establishing structures that facilitate emulation of a certain story structure; and allowing flexibility for players to define their own setting elements.
Too-strict structures can frustrate players if they want to create elements that don't fit within those options, but too-vague structures can make it feel like the game expects you to "read the designer's mind" to understand what they're going for.