RPGs

I thought about putting up a second post on the Star Wars game, but I don't want to hammer a dead horse.

So I thought I'd talk about rocket propelled grenades...

No, wait. That's not right.  I mean... Role Playing Games, specifically the design of


I've noticed a trend in recent years for Game Designers to get all quirky and gimmicky, and for fans of various games to talk up the quirks and gimmicks as if they are 'good things'.

My first real experience with this was "Weapons of the Gods", which  was hyped on RPG.net for months, maybe years. They talked specifically about The River mechanic and... um... Sheets.

It was all a bunch of hooey.

Actually, my first experience with this was Harn, which came in a three ring binder so you could add and remove pages, but Harn is/was a functional game with some serious thought behind it. (and TSR's AD&D 2nd Ed did that with the Monster Manual even earlier, but I digress...)

Weapons of the Gods was a terrible game.  The River was a really crappy 'pool' of dice you built throughout the game session by taking dice out of previous rolls so you could end the session with super-badass moves at the end of the session.  In order to make it work, it meant that most of the kung-fu mechanics had to be essentially impossible to do using randomizers so that you had to draw on this river of pre-rolled dice to actually pull them off.  In other words, all those cool powers and moves you gave yourself in character creation? You won't be using them hardly ever, instead you'll be stuck using the dull and underdeveloped 'regular fighting' all night while you build up your 'river'.

The Sheets thing? That was just another bit of hype, as each Kung Fu had its own mini-chapter/sheet describing it.  Part of the hype was that, as I recall, some were written by R. Sean Borgstrom, a triumph of style over substance, if ever there was one.

Further compounding my troubles with WoTG was how garishly UGLY the book was.

But this isn't about Weapons of the Gods, its about game design.

Lets talk Edge of Empire again, briefly.  So you have to have special dice, right? In fact the entire book is written as if the designers had an aversion to numbers.  This is simply a gimmick. Its not a selling point (quite the opposite), but I'm sure the corporate masters thought it was great, since they can squeeze their customers for even more bucks, but it doesn't really work like that.  

At their hearts, all Role Playing Game systems are nothing more than flawed Reality Emulators. They serve, essentially, to recreate a Reality, and things in that Reality, in a way that makes them not only understandable, but useable at a table.  They serve, in essence, to provide an agreed upon framework for solving basic disputes.  This is why almost every successful RPG includes an Initiative Mechanic... not because Initiative is something that 'real world' people discuss and use, but because the rules of the game require some method of determining 'who goes first' that is consistent and understood.   These rules don't have to be incredibly flexible, realistic or manipulable (for example: I recall one game that simply insisted that initiative is resolved in seating order around the table...), or they can be all of the above (Shadowrun's entire Combat seems dedicated to Initiative, or so it seems sometimes...), but the rule itself must still be there. When it isn't, people notice (Serenity the RPG fell down and went BOOM in part because someone forgot to include initiative rules...)

Gimmicks get in the way of that.   Weapons of the Gods, or the designers of the game anyway, forgot that one appeal of RPGs is that players love to question why someone doesn't use 'awesome power X' all the time, or why people in horror movies do such dumb things, like go walking into scary, serial killer infested woods, at night, alone.

Since Kung Fu Movies (and presumably, the Weapons of the Gods comic books that the game was based on) tend to have the Hero and Villains holding back from using their 'doom kicks' right at the beginning, the game had to force this mentality on players.

Forgetting, of course, that Players play RPGs so they don't have to make the same dumb mistakes people make in the fiction sources.

Take Call of Cthulu, for example.  It is the single longest running, most successful Horror RPG out there, and that isn't because HP Lovecraft is the go-to source for all horror in the world.  One interesting thing that separates out Call of Cthulu from other horror games, such as Chill, is that it doesn't try to cram horror tropes down the players throats.  The long running gag is that CoC players never, ever, read a book. Any book. Not even the bible.

But, of course, in HP Lovecraft's Mythos people read books all the time. Then they go insane. Because literacy is SPARTA!

So, Call of Cthulu has rules about going insane, and a frequent source of insanity is, well, reading books full of things Man Was Not Meant To Know!

But you don't have to read the books to 'win' at the game.

Its a subtle difference. Players can chose, or not chose, to read the books... to buy into the setting tropes whole heartedly or subvert them.  Weapons of the Gods doesn't leave you that option. Your powerful Kung Fu demigod will spend an hour punching the villain in the face uselessly before he unleashes his Doom Kick of Doom!. And if that doesn't work, he's back to another hour of mindless face punching before he tries again. Why? Because fuck you, that's why.


That's not the only sort of gimmick. I have Cthulutech, a game I dearly want to love.  Its fucking Pacific Rim, for god's sake! The rules are reasonably simple on the face of it... then you get to their gimmick.

See: They weren't content to be the one game that let you punch Cthulu in the face while wearing a fucking Evangelion suit (an Engel in the game's terminology), they decided they had to stand out from the pack by having the most incomprehensible dice mechanic this side of WotG.  You have to build winning poker hands out of dice rolls.  There are different rules for pairs, straights and flushes and how they interact...

In short, its a fucking mess.  Look: The original (and superior) Deadlands played with Poker tropes, and they even had you use fucking Cards for shit (like... Initiative!!!!), but they didn't try this level of insanity, and they at least had a good reason for it to be there. Cthulutech? What the hell does giant mechs vs. Elder Gods have to fucking do with Poker???

The point is, after a few abortive attempts to run Cthulutech, it sits alone and unloved on my shelf... wasted potential. All because someone thought being able to punch Cthulu in the face wasn't enough to distinguish his game.

There are only so many ways to resolve dice rolls, people.  There is no shame in using a tried and true resolution mechanic rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

So, the very first rule of thumb when designing an RPG is to leave gimmicks and quirky tricks alone. They will not improve your game, and may even destroy it.  (The second rule of thumb, the WotG rule of thumb is that while pretty and colorful books do sell better than boring cheap books, you still have to be pretty, not just colorful. Ugh...)

So that takes us to the meat of the matter.

There is a ill defined Sweet Spot in game design between heavy and light rules.  A game that is too light with the rules is too simple, too easily mastered, and the players grow bored with it.  The poster child for this is Big Eyes Small Mouth, also known as Tri-Stat, because you only had three stats to manipulate.  Later Editions tried to play up the idea that there was more to the game that the three stats, but it was too little too late (rumors that exchange rates between Canada and the US leading to the demise of the company are entertaining, but miss the point: If the game was selling well the exchange rate wouldn't matter so much. Someone would have bought the property and kept it going).

GURPS does well with only Four Stats, but then GURPS has a hell of a lot more going on under the hood than Tri-Stat ever did.

A game that is too heavy handed with rules becomes too complex to play. D&D often drifted into this territory. 3rd Edition D&D was heavier with the rules than AD&D, but AD&D had 'micro rules' for everything, while 3E had a unified mechanic, which simplified play despite the heavier rules.

Of course, even 4E D&D sold well, so we have to look elsewhere for our poster child.

How about FATAL, which is an acronym. Never heard of it? Well, it has been well and truly savaged by sharper tongues than mine on the internet, but they focused on how... evil... the game is. A sort of banal, juvenile evil, but evil.  They got caught up in how fucked up it is for a game to detail how wide your fist is, so that you will know if you rupture someone else's anus while fisting them, and overlooked the fact that someone, somewhere, actually thought it was necessary to resolve this with detailed measurements of fists and assholes to begin with.

One of the more illustrative, and less controversial, examples is in 'stat generation'. FATAL uses random generation, which is fine. Apparently the process goes something  (depending on editions and updates, with the later example being even more... more) like 'roll seven D1000's, divide by seventy'...

In case you struggle with math, this is a very long winded way of trying to arrive at a number between 1 and 100.  It is also very likely to produce extremely average results across a large number of rolls. Apparently it wasn't average enough, as I noted that later versions were reputed to be even more 'averaged', as in rolling ten d1000's (adding them together) and dividing by 100 and going up from there.

Aside from an amazingly fetishistic dedication to preventing unusually high or low rolls during character creation, what is so fascinating about this method is how very unnecessary it actually is to produce the desired results.  It is, to be blunt, crunch for the sake of crunch.

More mainstream, and related to the Star Wars post, is the entire line up of 40k RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games. Here you have reasonably sensible resolution mechanics (percentile based, using the Stats as the core testable values), saddled with a massive list of exception based mechanics (the talent system) that made generating 'bad guys' improbably hard, and pregenerated villains difficult to evaluate or use.

The point is simple: A too light game gets boring very quickly, a too heavy game tend to bog down play and eventually get discarded... either entirely, or piecemeal.  Thus: The vague Sweet Spot of crunch.

Too light a game is simple death, so we won't dwell further upon it.  Its the various permutations of failure of Heavy Rules that are interesting, even educational, to look at.

So, back to 3E D&D for the moment.  There are any number of people who view 3E D&D, in some form or another, as perfect. This is disregarding the various permutation (3.5, Modern, and Pathfinder), and sort of lumping them together.   But why were there so many permutations?  Why is D&D essentially competing against itself?  Why did WOTC essentially stop producing new, quality game books to spend most of a decade reprinting and rewriting older game books for a new version of the same game, choking the fandom for years until they exhausted themselves and turned to 4E? Why is Pathfinder so different from 3.5 while still being essentially the same game?

Crunch.

Oh, we could look at the money. Shadowrun has gone through much the same cycle, and people love to talk about money, but I don't quite buy it. RIFTS is twenty odd years old and its still selling new books and making money instead of producing new editions. The life cycle of a game isn't so easily fixed.  We can argue that the QUALITY of RIFTS books has dropped noticeably in the last few years, but then again, Palladium/Seimbeda may surprise us with something awesome... who knows?

Money may explain why companies find it attractive to produce new editions every few years, but it doesn't explain why they are necessary, why they become necessary.

However, when you are writing big, massive rule sets that try to cover every eventuality, it is inevitable that you will produce a few bad rules. Sometimes those rules are truly broken, sometimes they merely seem broken when you forget Rule Zero.

Pun-Pun is one example of the later.  It is vaguely possible, using a combination of rule synergies never intended by the designers, to create a self reinforcing power loop (Pun-Pun). However, to do so requires a very permissive Game Master, as most of the in-question rules are not simply available to players under normal circumstances.

On the other hand, having a single, mid level spell that is available to any player character of a main class that is far more powerful than even the highest level combat spells is an example of the former.

So, bad rules and bizarre synergies creep into large, complex rule sets. Eventually the weight of the errors becomes too much to ignore and a new edition is born.

More: Such large, growing, rule sets often are too big, too crunchy, to be released all at once, so new rules are scheduled for later down the line, the game is released piecemeal, and as new parts are developed it occasionally occurs that the new stuff doesn't quite work with the existing rules. This seems to be more Shadowrun than D&D, mind you... not that Shadowrun is necessarily 'rule heavy'.. though the third edition was reputedly just that (I skipped three...).

So, if I may be so bold, the rule of thumb here is that if your rule set is too big/long to be developed and released holistically (as one piece)... even if you only develop it holistically, and chose to release it piecemeal, it is too heavy.   Chances are, your customers will wind up ignoring half of what you write though they may never admit it.

So, there you have it. Two good rules of thumb for any budding game designer. Avoid gimmicks and keep your ruleset small enough to fit in a single, decent sized game book.