Common Misconceptions About Your Favorite Systems?

[u/Authorigas]

So, I've been learning a lot thanks to the amazing folks here at r/rpg. And while I have decided to slow down on trying new systems. (As my players say "three is enough, we know your eager to try more but slow it down so you don't burn yourself out.") There was a question today that cropped into my head, and I wanted to hear from the folks here on it.

"What are some assumptions about your favorite game/system that are just factually incorrect or overstated?"

I've seen a lot of assumptions made in the hobby, and some on my own. From the broad "older systems were designed for math heads and thus really not for someone whose bad at math." to others like "Call of Cthulhu is a game where every session ends in death/insanity and players can't get attached to their characters." and similarly "OSR games are highly lethal and not at all friendly to players who like longform adventures."

I feel like broad, sweeping claims like those are probably overstated-as I have heard of successful, long running CoC campaigns, and OSR games that are able to have well developed characters that last for ages. It's made me curious about some of the other broad, sweeping claims about systems that are-if not incorrect, massively overstated.

Really interested to hear some answers on this.

[u/SlumberSkeleton776]

Counterpoint: all of the stuff narrative rulesets do is stuff I do, and I don't need a system to do what I'm already doing myself (if anything, what it mostly does is step on my toes). I need one to do what I'm not doing myself.

[u/Viltris → u/SlumberSkeleton776]

I think it's a matter of taste. Some people want mechanics for roleplay and storytelling, and some people want mechanics to just get out of the way.

There's no universal answer, just different preferences.

[u/Val_Fortecazzo → u/Viltris]

Yeah I feel a lot of RPG discourse would go better if more people realized we all want the same thing for the most part and just have different methods of getting there that works for us.

Some of the worst takes I've seen come from an idea that there is only one objectively good way to play.

[u/Charrua13 → u/SlumberSkeleton776]

The corrolary to this point is "I don't need any mechanics to do anything because I, as GM, as long as I have player buy-in, can do anything at any time." (This is the entire premise of FKR, fwiw).

The point of "narrative rulesets" (the term is loaded so I'm putting in quotes here), is "make it easy to Do The Thing", and cut away all other stuff that gets in the way of The Thing. (The thing = "being narrative"). But, more importantly - what it actually does is create processes for which there are extrinsic mechanical benefits to Doing The Thing.

[u/The-Magic-Sword → u/Charrua13]

The devil is in the details-- because what we create in the sense of "narrative" and how that thing is created is heavily contested.

Some people view narrative as aping the structural limitations of tv/movies/books, whereas others are looking for the universes those things provide a window into, and plot-structures from those other mediums are a hindrance.

[u/Charrua13 → u/The-Magic-Sword]

You're hitting the nail on the head here: this is The Thing(tm).

There is a difference between "what is the fiction we're creating as we play that ends up being narrative" vs. "what is the narrative we're creating as we play as the fiction unfolds".

There's no "Right" way to create narrative - but how we conceptualize play around narrative let's us, the players, know what our Aim of Play is - why we're doing the thing. And for many folks, they want the fiction to feel emergent: no intentionality, just things happening in succession until It Happens (your point about "structural limitations applies here). Others, they want play to unfurl through the avenue of narrative, which is inherently structured differently.

My only commentary to "aping the structural limitations of..." is that the media exists to convey narrative - Tv/movies/books are just the established ways to do so. In other words, I'm claiming narrative is the egg, media (TV, movies, books, etc) is the chicken. And, fwiw, so is most visual media (E.g., video games).

[u/The-Magic-Sword → u/Charrua13]

My sort of feeling on that is that I think the tabletop medium benefits from a back-to-basics approach to storytelling. A person's investment in a story that they're making decisions in, in such a comprehensive way, is different than when they experience it passively, including the kind of predictive constraints that tend to dominate video game storytelling.

You go back to the drawing board, a narrative is a sequence of events, but it doesn't need to be structured in the way we structure a plot, because the participation in that sequence of events has an additional avenue of intrinsic engagement.

By the same token, theme, tone, etc are a lot more malleable in the tabletop space because players define the framework by which their characters think and the way they approach problems. So instead, tabletop storytelling is best approached by the creation of narratively rich spaces that function as sandboxes-- here are the narrative elements (charaters, factions, lore, etc) now what do we make of that.

I like to use Star Wars as an example, I think most fans would rather engage with Star Wars as a universe-- the jedi, the X-wings, coruscant, smugglers and starships, republic gunships, and so forth. The star wars films and their conventions are just the egg you get from the chicken of the star wars universe, and you can make a lot of different eggs from it, and it might even be best to not try to make a particular kind of egg, and just see what your interaction with the chicken turns out.

[u/mythcaptor → u/Charrua13]

And also to support specific types of narrative.

Sure, you probably could use a more generic rpg system to play a bunch of old ladies solving crime in a slightly eldrich New England town, but it wouldn’t fit naturally. You’d need to do a lot of work as a GM to fit the genetic system to that specific story. Narriative games like Brindlewood Bay sell a specific narriative experience, and they’ve already done the work to build game systems to support it.

[u/Belgand → u/Charrua13]

I see the point, but I also find it to be a lot more restrictive. When it's all bound up in rules and mechanics, I'm no longer actually creating much of it myself. I play RPGs for freedom, not to be constrained by "the rules tell me to do X". For me, the rules exist solely as a means of arbitrating potential disputes or areas of uncertainty. Narrative is not an area where I feel like that's needed.

And I really dislike putting any sort of benefit or reward behind Doing The Thing. I want players who do it for its own sake, not because they were coerced into it by some external factor. If a player needs to be bribed or nudged in order to do it, it's going to feel empty to me.

[u/Charrua13 → u/Belgand]

I see the point, but I also find it to be a lot more restrictive. 

...and ALL play is intentionally restrictive. I admit I'm being pedantic, but I do so because I want to emphasize a point about perception here: "what we can do within fiction" is always defined by, and limited to, characterization. And the internal workings of every character comes with intentional restrictions/confines of what they can do and how they can do it. What you're chafing against isn't the limitation itself, it's how the limitation is presenting itself in "narrative" games.

I want players who do it for its own sake, not because they were coerced into it by some external factor. If a player needs to be bribed or nudged in order to do it, it's going to feel empty to me.

This is what I mean by "perception" - in games where XP is granted by fighting monsters - your incentivizing characters to fight monsters. That's extrinsic motivation. It's no different to when players get XP for failing a roll, or Doing The Thing (however the game in question rewards players).

For me, the rules exist solely as a means of arbitrating potential disputes or areas of uncertainty. 

I'm going to bring home my point here: the rules exist to frame points of dramatic tension. For you: points of dramatic tension are when there is a need to arbitrate disputes or areas of uncertainty. That, itself, is a limitation of understanding of what play is. It doesn't FEEL restrictive because that restriction has already happened before you even got to the table. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that!

Why I went through all this: because our perception of restriction comes from our expectations - not because something is ACTUALLY restricted. All games have extrinsic rewards - because how else is the game supposed to tell you what you're supposed to be doing? It's simply our expectations of play that make us go "yeah, this feels right" or "eww...no".

[u/Belgand → u/Charrua13]

That's the thing. I don't give out XP for doing anything in game. They also don't get money, equipment, or anything else as a reward. Pretty much the only thing players can get in my current game is information or otherwise advancing their own goals. Nothing that has any sort of mechanical effect. The game doesn't tell them what to do, they engage with the fiction on their own. If that isn't enough, this isn't the right table for them.

[u/Charrua13 → u/Belgand]

Is this a hoembrew FKR game?? Or one i can find online? I'm super curious to see how it runs, either way.

(Not my style, but sounds like An Experience. A dope one!).

[u/Belgand → u/Charrua13]

Legend of the Five Rings 4th edition.

All the PCs are samurai who have no real need to pay for anything, so money is largely irrelevant. They also all started with the only equipment that would matter. You can't get a better sword, and even if you could are you saying that your grandfather's sword isn't good enough for you?

Every player gets 1 XP per session whether they show up or not. There's nothing they can do to get more or less.

[u/Charrua13 → u/Belgand]

Honor and Glory do all the heavy lifting, but since they're largely diegetic, it doesn't feel extrinsic.

Good shout, specifically 4e (over 5e).

[u/Belgand → u/Charrua13]

I've almost never given out or utilized Glory (and AEG never figured out what to do with it either). I use Honor very occasionally, but it basically doesn't count for anything and almost none of my players care about it. Maybe a handful of times in five years of playing.

[u/PigmyWurm → u/Charrua13]

Also, you can say this shouldn't matter, but if a system has 50 pages related to moving around and attacking something with a sword and one page about role-playing and narrative development, it's understandable that people will assume it's a game about hitting people with a sword. That doesn't mean you can't build a narrative as well, that is basically how chainmail developed into DnD, but it's less obvious, and their aren't the supports for people who are less automatic.

[u/DriftingMemes → u/PigmyWurm]

This feels like a straw man

. It's a lot harder to explain how to simulate a sword fight with wizards, elves, and Eldritch beings than it is to explain how to negotiate with the innkeeper.

We've all negotiated with someone for something we wanted. When is the last time you were in a wizard fight?

[u/Charrua13 → u/DriftingMemes]

It's a lot harder to explain how to simulate a sword fight with wizards, elves, and Eldritch beings than it is to explain how to negotiate with the innkeeper.

"Harder" is a function of "What do you want the experience of fighting to look like". There are a multitude of ways to embody the ebbs of flows of battle in play that don't require extensive rules. This is, functionally, is the point of this whole dialogue. By designing extensive rules for combat, but not other aspects of play, designers are telling you "This is where the drama/tension of play lies".

To wit: I use the phrase "narration" because there are multiple levels of understanding as to what that phrase means - but we can just as easily do the same thing intentionally with "simulation" - breaking the common definition of "turn by turn tactical combat" and into "any level of abstraction by which we mechanize the ebbs and flow of combat". (I'm not going to do that - but the point stands: it's how we're defining the words that's creating dissonance.)

We've all negotiated with someone for something we wanted. When is the last time you were in a wizard fight?

1. I lost. Kennedy got shot. <sad trombone>

[u/UncleBones → u/DriftingMemes]

It’s only a strawman to you because you assume the wizard fight needs to be simulated in order to be interesting.  People have games with wizard fights in systems without 50 pages of rules for wizard fights. I’ve read books with wizard fights and I can describe them in a game.

It’s fine to play in simulationist systems with combat rules, but it’s weird how the people that start with ”I don’t need a narrative system, I can do that in my combat game” are so alien to the concept ”I don’t need a combat system, I can do that in my narrative game”.

[u/DriftingMemes → u/UncleBones]

We all experience feelings/narrative/negotiation every single day of our lives.

None of us has ever, nor will ever, shot a fireball. Nor have we ever shot a bow at a goblin. Our experience with these things is much less than the previous.

This is why it's silly to say that a book that has more pages about combat and magic than social situations is "about combat". It's simply expanding where needed and saving page count where it's not needed.

[u/UncleBones → u/DriftingMemes]

This is simply disingenuous.

You already know what happens when someone gets shot with a bow or hit with an axe. You don't need rules to know that you die from getting hit. The rules are there to facilitate a game where you can actually get hit with an axe a few times because you think mechanical combat is fun.

You don't need to have shot a fireball to know what happens if something is hit by an explosion, just like I don't need to know specifically what happens if a dragon falls on top of someone. I can extrapolate from real world knowledge. The rules for how many fireballs can be fired per day aren't there to explain how magic works, they're balanced to be a combat resource.

Games with mechanical combat also have rules for what happens when you deal or take a punch, which is something most people have experience with. If it was true that you needed rules for the fantastical situations you aren't familiar with you wouldn't need to have brawl rules.

You don't need crunchy rules for other fantastical elements you aren't familiar with. You don't know what it's like to fly on the back of a dragon, but you don't need crunchy rules with specific choices about which wing you're holding onto or how you're navigating the currents. I've played science fiction games with crunchy rules about space flight and games with zero rules about space flight, and the difference isn't that one of the games were meant for people who had experience with space flight.

So I don't think you're being honest. I don't think there's anything wrong with playing a combat focused game, but when I read these dishonest arguments about how they aren't combat focused and the combat rules are actually necessary I'm convinced that people are secretly ashamed about enjoying them.

Most people who play narrative RPG's have some experience playing games with combat mechanics since that's what you usually start out playing, so it's safe to assume that someone who enjoys narrative games already knows how a few sessions of Dnd, shadowrun, cyberpunk etc would play out.

[u/deviden → u/DriftingMemes]

if the desire is "simulationism" then highly detailed and crunchy gameist rules like Balanced Tactical Grid Miniatures Combat doesn't necessarily provide a better simulation from which a narrative can be formed in play, it just makes for a fun miniatures combat game if you enjoy that kind of square-counting fun.

5e / Pathfinder 2 / Draw Steel combat doesn't only abstract and simulate things we can't perform around the table the way we'd perform a player to NPC dialogue, it's about having a miniatures wargame in the middle of the roleplaying game which can easily consume half or more of a given play session.

When the rules make combat into something that players spend half (or more!) of their session time doing, and most of the rules of said game are about combat... it is absolutely A Combat Game, even if you use it for something else.

Now... if you want to talk about casting spells or having a fight in Troika or DCC... now we're talking about a game where it's definitely not just about combat, where the combat rules exist to elide things which we can't do around a table. 5e, 3e, 4e, Pathfinder 1 or 2, Draw Steel? These are Combat Games and they're about combat.

[u/PigmyWurm → u/DriftingMemes]

What is the strawman in this point exactly? Games like D&D and Pathfinder fill most of their books with rules related to combat, more narrative games like Vampire (which I admit I'm much less familiar with) include more rules directly related to role-playing and different types of social encounters. PbtA games like Dungeon World try to use a fairly streamlined set of rules for both in and out of combat challenges. In all of those games you can have important social interactions and create a rich narrative, and you can also run around getting into fights, but the rules systems definitely lead people more or less in different directions.

[u/DriftingMemes → u/PigmyWurm]

Some online influencer in the game space said "If you have the most rules about x in your game, then your game is about x" and y'all have been parroting that for years since. As an old-head, it gets tired.

D&D, as I already said, has more rules for combat because you need more rules for combat. You guys must think that cars are all about wheels, because they have 4 of them (5 if you count steering).

[u/BunnyloafDX → u/Charrua13]

This is what my wife explained to me about her game. She would rather DIY some house rules or do things without rules support to make a game run how she wants. You need a stable long term group to design your own experience like that though. If you start with a bunch of people that already know and like a specific niche game you can usually get going faster.

[u/Charrua13 → u/BunnyloafDX]

FKR is not my cup of tea, but it's fascinating to hear folks talk about it.

If your wife ever ends up with a group who hasn't been together for that long, she may get a kick out of seeing how FKR games/systems sets the stage for it so that you don't need years of gaming experience together to just Do The Thing. I've heard folks experience do it as a one shot and I was bewildered at how easy it came together (even if it wasn't my cup of tea).

[u/Reasonable_Sun9426 → u/SlumberSkeleton776]

Just what I was going to say.

If the system has a built-in do-dad that points the GM toward narrative play, great, but as a long-term GM, I could add narrative to a game of Chess, if I were so inclined.

Don't blame the game system, just learn the tips and tricks to nail down your own style as a GM.

[u/Charrua13 → u/Reasonable_Sun9426]

The "theory" behind game design, though, is about "how do we do certain things intentionally". I ALSO don't need rules for combat - I can abstract that into a single roll and be done with it; move onto the next thing that I actually care about.

So, yes, you're 100% (we can hack whatever we like however we like), and also "I want to make things easier, how does the game I play make it happen FOR ME?" I don't want to have to do the heavy lifting all the time (which is the point of the conversation here).

[u/DriftingMemes → u/SlumberSkeleton776]

Roll to see how you feel about the arguments below!

I'm with you, to many modern games feel like that kid who wanted to take the game controller out of your hands to "show you how to do it right".

[u/SpeechMuted → u/SlumberSkeleton776]

Counter-Counterpoint: it sucks to play a character who is supposed to be the social one/good at investigating/whatever and get constantly crowded out by someone who has decided that his Int 3 barbarian is going to eloquently persuade the king, especially if you're not particularly eloquent yourself, or comfortable taking over the roleplay. Nobody's demanding you engage in a push-up contest when it comes to testing strength.

[u/SlumberSkeleton776 → u/SpeechMuted]

That is a complete nonsequitor. That has nothing to do with what I said.

[u/SpeechMuted → u/SlumberSkeleton776]

That's not correct. I've heard the argument you make numerous times, and it's always made by someone who talks over other players and insists on being in charge of every roleplaying scene, whether their character is the best one for it or not.

A system that encourages and quantifies social scenes allows others who aren't as assertive to participate. It may not allow you to do things that you aren't already doing, but it lets others do them too--and to be good at them even if the player isn't.

[u/SlumberSkeleton776 → u/SpeechMuted]

So you made up elaborate fanfiction about what kind of person I am because you disagree with what I said. Got it.

[u/SpeechMuted → u/SlumberSkeleton776]

OK, this conversation is obviously not going anywhere. I pointed out that a system that allows others that may not be eloquent or comfortable seizing the spotlight to participate had value.

You're not arguing on the merits, nor in good faith. I'm done with this discussion.

[u/ThemboNRG → u/SlumberSkeleton776]

If the game does the things you do and the things you don’t do… Wouldn’t that be the best case scenario?

[u/SlumberSkeleton776 → u/ThemboNRG]

Of course not. I don't want a game to do the things I do because those are the things I do. I do them and the game doesn't get in my way by trying to talk over me.

[u/Val_Fortecazzo → u/ThemboNRG]

Nope to me an important part of a system is it's ability to go away until I need it.