Quote from: David Johansen;641940And Tunnels and Trolls is the first story game.

um...seriously? what definition are you using of storygame that that comment makes sense?

Quote from: TristramEvans;642119Yeah, your inability to actually contend with any of the arguments I've put forth in that regard pretty much invalidate that statement.

I'm of the opinion that not only have I contended with it nicely, I've wasted more time than necessary to do so.

Restate your desire to control people's role-playing all you wish, I not only unimpressed- I'm bored with it and see no need to answer you on this point any further.

Quote from: gleichman;642125I'm of the opinion that not only have I contended with it nicely, I've wasted more time than necessary to do so.

Okay, please point out the post where you contended with it, because I must have missed that. Or does "avoiding my points", "creating strawman arguments" and "failing to address any criticism made" count as "contending with it" for you?

QuoteRestate your desire to control people's role-playing all you wish, I not only unimpressed- I'm bored with it and see no need to answer you on this point any further.

Now you're being quite disingenuous. Its not simply that you present your preferences in moralistic terms, or that you cannot debate with someone without making personal attacks, its that you are frankly dishonest, as this recent post shows.

Anyways, I do at least agree, its a waste of time trying to engage you in any form of debate.

So I'll just go back to ridiculing you when I'm bored I suppose. But heck, you show up to this forum with a troll, get a long thread with plenty of the attention you crave, and you provide an easy target for posters to blow off steam at someone so obviously wrong that their self-deception borders on the cartoonish. So I guess its a symbiotic relationship.

Leaving aside questions of who killed who and such...

Of the 14 things in the OP I don't like (but can tolerate) escalating hit points, really don't like diceless games, prefer hero points in moderation if at all, strongly dislike 'personality control' systems in games. I don't like ooc player-controlled elements, and I double-facepalm when I see things that are player-controlled but also strongly character limited for no particular reason e.g. FantasyCrafts' "activate an opponent's error if they're within line of sight of your character" - which is to say its an ability thats not just entirely metagame, but attempting to be both in-game and metagame at the same time.
I found the 'Simulation of Process' one interesting - I've heard the complaints against D&D hit points before of course (e.g. http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/RPG/wrong_adnd.php ) but this puts the idea into a slightly broader context that may be useful for seeing other examples. The problem in general seems to be where multiple things are melded together, based on assumptions that work badly for corner-cases (healing damage that's meant to be abstract, combat skill helping against  being immersed in acid, etc.).
In contrast the Age of Heroes system where there's some sort of tactical advantage being slowly gained sounds quite interesting - I haven't really seen that elsewhere in a useful way.

Quote from: David Johansen;641940And Tunnels and Trolls is the first story game, beating Toon by about ten years.  

Likewise, odd seeing Tunnels and Trolls described as a storygame although I know Edwards likes it for whatever reason. I've seen CRKrueger comment that its combat system could be considered a form of 'Conflict Resolution' rather than 'task resolution', I think since it works fairly abstractly by rolling dice and then getting PCs to describe afterwards what they did, but I don't 100% agree, if only since many combat manuevers such as spells, missile, or Dodge rolls when giants are involved do require a choice of action before the dice are rolled.

(Certain solitaires like Mike Stackpole's terrible City of Terrors also get story-ish, but I blame the author moreso than the system.).

I'm only familiar with Toon very vaguely. From what I know of it, it seemed likely to give more predictable and sane results than many other systems like D&D, just since it rolls (IIRC) N d6 rather than a d20 or d100.

Tunnels and Trolls represents the line of thought more than the mechanical structure.  It's the point of divergence where mechanical structure gets thrown under the bus in the name of expedience.  No, Tunnels and Trolls doesn't have the various railroad switch mechanics of modern story games but it does follow the key conciet.  The Game Master sets the difficulty of tasks based on the results they want to see.  It also imposes a steep death spiral on the common monsters that doesn't apply to player characters and npcs that are important enough to generate as characters.

It is, in fact a game that focuses on getting out of the way so the GM can tell their story.  Even if it is a story about foolish adventurerers dying horribly in death traps.

OK thanks for explaining. Shall ponder. I guess there's some truth in this.
I wouldn't directly modify Saving Roll levels just to give results that are more hilarious, but power curves between characters can be so extreme that the GM is stuck designing the adventure to match the PCs capabilities (something even the solos do when they set a SR equal to character level), and without rules you are just picking numbers out of a hat anyway.

I think my only criteria for bad game design is math that goes beyond addition and subtraction (I'm looking at you, Twilight 2000 2nd edition)

Quote from: Sacrosanct;640999I only have one red flag:  Does gleichman think it's a well designed game?

Seriously, I think it's a good general rule that if you think a game sucks, it's worth checking out.

He's the Rex Reed of the RPG industry.

JG

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;642156I found the 'Simulation of Process' one interesting - I've heard the complaints against D&D hit points before of course (e.g. http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/RPG/wrong_adnd.php ) but this puts the idea into a slightly broader context that may be useful for seeing other examples.

When most people think Simulation, they only consider outcomes. But Simulation of Process is a rather big deal for me and is my make or break for a lot of game design and/or approaches.

Quote from: gleichman;642214When most people think Simulation, they only consider outcomes. But Simulation of Process is a rather big deal for me and is my make or break for a lot of game design and/or approaches.

Its not exactly something I'd thought about in those terms but I wonder what other examples are out there (of systems that fail this) and how they fail?

BTW: this seems relevant so bringing up for discussion...

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?226856-Simulationists-Black-Boxes-and-4e

If I'm understanding correctly the 'black box approach' described here as a feature of 4E D&D design is more or less the opposite to simulation of process, used largely for simplicity. Or gameability as with D&D hit points - though perhaps it could still be said to be a simplicity issue since a more complex system could give similar results with largely fixed hit points, i.e. where combat skill adds to damage only against weaker opponents.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;642342Its not exactly something I'd thought about in those terms but I wonder what other examples are out there (of systems that fail this) and how they fail?

BTW: this seems relevant so bringing up for discussion...

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?226856-Simulationists-Black-Boxes-and-4e

If I'm understanding correctly the 'black box approach' described here as a feature of 4E D&D design is more or less the opposite to simulation of process, used largely for simplicity. Or gameability as with D&D hit points - though perhaps it could still be said to be a simplicity issue since a more complex system could give similar results with largely fixed hit points, i.e. where combat skill adds to damage only against weaker opponents.

Well... this is going to get interesting. Let me start a new thread on it because I think it's worth highlighting on it's own and it would be lost in this thread.

Edit: New Thread

One of the locals likes to say "The worst thing ever to happen to this hobby was calling it a game".

I agree with the HP beef.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;641315I didnt find your response convincing. Realisitc combat is going to be, on the whole, more lethal than D&D combat, and you are saying your game is realistic but not as lethal as D&D. That is what I am having trouble squaring.

If you want to understand where Brian is coming from (and I do think there is a worthwhile pay-off for doing so), I recommend reading his old Elements of Gaming articles on RPG.net or the revised versions on his blog as well as his other "Core Theory Articles" (for example this one talking about his problem with hit points) on his blog.

Quote from: Piestrio;641311I swear I'm tempted to buy Age of Heroes and review it, simply because I suspect it'll be hilarious.

As Brian has mentioned, I own a copy and I've read through it (a mix of skimming and detailed reading).  I think it's well written and has extensive designers notes describing his goals that were one of the reasons why I bought a copy.  Of course if you aren't interested in the sort of game that it is (a detailed game designed to be played by the rules, primarily for Tolkien-based fantasy), it's probably a waste of your time to get a copy because you aren't going to get any entertainment value because it's not Spawn of Fashan bad enough to be amusing.

Quote from: Sommerjon;642368One of the locals likes to say "The worst thing ever to happen to this hobby was calling it a game".

I tend to fall into camp that wants the rules to be unobtrusive and I prefer my games quite a bit lighter than Brian does and am more tolerant of fudging and subjective GM judgement.  That said, I think the key value in Brian's criteria, as well as in the critiques made by others who look closely at the mathematics of systems and how things work in reality is that at lot of RPG designers aren't actually carefully crafting their games to produce an intended result so much as they are tossing out a resolution mechanic they think is fun (regardless of how badly broken it is or how badly it matches the results one might expect from the genre of the game) and expecting the GM to fudge a lot to make it work.  If you design a system well to produce sound results, you really don't need to fudge the results to get what you want out of it and can play RAW.

When my group used Fudge for a D&D-type fantasy game, I had a long discussion with the GM about how to produce the desired results (everything from how fast the characters should progress to the balance of opponents players should face) and worked several values back from the desired results.  We allowed each player to get one Fudge Point per session and to use up to two per session.  For the most part, we followed the rules, played with open rolls, and the players generally didn't use their Fudge Points because they didn't have to, even without escalating hit points to keep the PCs alive and create the slow pace of decision that D&D has.  Why?  Because we were using a system that actually produced the sorts of results that we wanted and that made everyone happy without having to fudge to make that happen.  It's a wonderful thing to be able to use the rules as written and be happy about how they work.  Really.  And even though I personally downplay the "game" aspect of role-playing games (I play to think and experience the game from my character's perspective), it helps to think about the rules when writing them and helps for the GM to understand how the rules actually work so they work properly in play.

For example, lots of games have things like Stealth rolls but a lot of GMs seem to have no clue how to make those rolls to produce the desired result.  What I mean by that is that the more rolls the players make, the more likely they are to eventually roll a failure (or success, if the odds lean toward failure), especially if the minimum failure rate is something like 5%.  If the GM asks a part of 4 PCs to each make 5 Stealth rolls to sneak into the enemy castle, the odds are very good that someone is going to roll a failure in those 20 rolls, making sneaking in that way almost guaranteed to fail.  I get the impression that a lot of GMs don't grasp that sort of thing because they don't really understand the mathematics behind the system they are using or how odds really work, and the problem is only made worse by opaque dice system that hide the true odds from the participants like dice pools.

[ADDED]

I suppose I should add that I've also played a deliberately designed hard-to-hit character in Fuzion that performed as expected.  The character, when confronted with a seized office tower full of armed me, charged the tower and made it inside without being hit.  Unfortunately, the other PC with him at the time, who followed him in, wasn't designed that way and spent the rest of that session bleeding at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

Hard-to-hit characters as an alternative to hit points works quite well in practice, in my experience, so long as the players and GM are not opposed to making a lot of rolls that don't hit.