Quote from: John Morrow;642394If 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.

I did go back and read some of his stuff during this discussion. Like I said before I do think he is an intelligent guy.

I hate to derail this topic, but here's my red flag (brought on by reviewing yet another news system -- the explosion of amateurs (I include myself) is really staggering): any claim of universality or genericisty. It pretty much guarantees that a) it's not and b) it's boring.

Quote from: Brad J. Murray;642462I hate to derail this topic, but here's my red flag (brought on by reviewing yet another news system -- the explosion of amateurs (I include myself) is really staggering): any claim of universality or genericisty. It pretty much guarantees that a) it's not and b) it's boring.

Interesting as I've found the opposite to be true, very few systems supposely tailored to a specific setting are. At best they have a few pieces of chrome that give that illusion. But they do talk about it a lot.

Thus it's not so much the case that universal systems are bad or don't work- they do and every bit as well as tailored systems (need ingat worse a extra and often very minor subsystem addition you get in a campaign book).

Rather it's that they don't include the fluff to try to convince you they're perfect for just this one setting. In short they fail because they are not works of propaganda.

Do you think strategy should be a part of RPG rules?

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;642464Do you think strategy should be a part of RPG rules?

How are you defining strategy? The reason I ask is that I use a rather specific meaning for the concept.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;642464Do you think strategy should be a part of RPG rules?

I find it best to use strategy as an example in game rules.  Some games have a small example of game play somewhere in the core book (I find most of them are helpful for new games), where there is a good opportunity to give an example of teamwork and strategy.

But to give rules for strategy would be a red flag for me, as it seems to be a bully method of how to play.  

My biggest red flags is poor editing.  Not the simple missed few English errors, or the happened upon misspelling, but the completely blatant unedited writing.  

No flow, no construction, no real attempt at making the writing sound good.  It makes the game hard to read, and turns me off from it quickly.  It could be the most well designed system in existence,  but I'll stop before I ever get there to find out.

Lat flag for me is unexplained abbreviation.  Sure we use XP, GP, and HP in game; even in our writing, but to use them without at least once giving a definition will turn off a new gamer.  They will have little if no idea what is being said.  To me it shows a laziness in construction, and makes me not want to support them.

Quote from: John Morrow;642396For 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.

Yeah really. With stuff like that either you always fail or never fail, because if you have any chance of failure you will fail at least one of a series of many attempts.

QuoteI 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.

Kinda does and kinda doesn't. If you have a high threat game (most of them) but a character is hard to hit usually they'll be fine, but the RNG has a tendency of trolling you by having 2 or 3 high numbers come up, at which point you die anyways. If it's not a game where enemies hit hard, and you're not so likely to get hit in the first place... you have 4th edition D&D. And even in that notoriously low lethality game, a PC can still die fast if enemies use even basic tactics.

The effect is more pronounced on enemies. You can have enemies have a 95% chance of ignoring any attack and they'll still die in 3 rounds or less simply due to attack volume.

Quote from: John Morrow;642396I 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.

Fudge is great for that. I think it's a really good tool to help GMs in trying out options and finding what they're looking for from an RPG.

Although I don't take as strident a view as Brian, it's true to say that looking back over his list of "red flags" there's only two of them that I wouldn't agree are bad things in a game (9 & 10, for the record). It's certainly fair to say that a lot of RPG design operates very much at a "least bad" level.

Currently I'm running Savage Worlds, and one of the things that I like about that system is that the use of Bennies means that as a GM I feel I can make all my roles in the open, knowing that "fudging" of bad results is built in to the system via the bennies rule. But of course it would unarguably be better to have a rule system that never produced outlier results that I wanted to fudge in the first place.

More and more recently I feel like getting some of the older games off my shelf to see whether its just nostalgia or if they really were better aligned to my preferences all along (I'm already very wary of anything published post 2000 anyway).

Quote from: rway218;642474My biggest red flags is poor editing.  Not the simple missed few English errors, or the happened upon misspelling, but the completely blatant unedited writing.  

No flow, no construction, no real attempt at making the writing sound good.  It makes the game hard to read, and turns me off from it quickly.  It could be the most well designed system in existence,  but I'll stop before I ever get there to find out.

Yes, the rise and rise of wikipedia-style VCR instruction manual text. That site is almost completely unusable at this stage.

Quote from: rway218;642474Lat flag for me is unexplained abbreviation.  Sure we use XP, GP, and HP in game; even in our writing, but to use them without at least once giving a definition will turn off a new gamer.  They will have little if no idea what is being said.  To me it shows a laziness in construction, and makes me not want to support them.

Also yes, any game that requires people to consult the acronymicon, goateed evil twin to the necronomicon, before it becomes useful is not well put together.

Quote from: gleichman;642466How are you defining strategy? The reason I ask is that I use a rather specific meaning for the concept.

in the sense of player resource elements, like plot points, or drama points, or resources that can be spent to get more dice etc and are refreshed in some fashion.

I think it's good design either (A) to use methods that make it pretty easy to figure odds, or (B) to give GMs at least benchmark information so they don't need to be well versed in statistical maths.

The "doubles add and roll over" saving rolls in Tunnels & Trolls are an example of something pretty tricky -- the more so if what someone else suggested about GMs not even getting cumulative chances is correct!

Since the designer ought to have so firm a grasp of what is in fact being designed, it should not be too much to expect reasonable sharing of that knowledge.

Regarding one of Gleichman's pet peeves, "hit points":

If damage dealing accelerates too rapidly with experience, there is a tendency for duels between fencing masters to resemble gunfights -- over quickly, and often in favor of whoever got off the first shot.

The RuneQuest approach of adding a parry chance on par with the attack chance introduces mathematical effects that may not be quite what we want, either. 60% vs. 40% goes from 3:2 odds to 9:4, 90% vs. 45% from 2:1 to 11:1, 80% vs. 20% from 4:1 to 16:1, and so on.

Likewise, when masters clash, a 4.75% chance to hit with 95% skill, or 1.96% with 98%, might be less than desired.

"Critical hit" chances and the like can modify the spread somewhat, at the cost of more complication.

"Hit points" (by whatever name) provide a separate factor that need not progress by such a rigid function, a factor that is pretty straightforward to use.

The goal of facilitating long-term character development despite combat is one that a great many players appreciate. For my part, I value it chiefly in proportion to how long it takes to generate a character, although the D&D concern for how long it has been played also figures.

If one desires sudden, random deaths, that is simply enough catered to! Try an auto-kill per 200 attacks, and you may see one reason why 10th level is a more notable attainment in EPT than D&D.

Quote from: Phillip;643674Regarding one of Gleichman's pet peeves, "hit points":

While you did well for explaining why you prefer hit points systems compare to other more well known RPGs, there are two serious flaws that effectiving mean you weren't talking to the point of this thread.

Of all the posters here, I believe Myself and John Morrow may be the only ones who actually play in this style. Neither of us were able to do so using a published game. In my case I had to create a whole new home grown ruleset, while John uses a modified and heavily optimized of FUDGE.

So using RuneQuest as an example to refute my "pet peeve" is dodging the issue and refuting your own strawman.


The second point I have to make is even easier, if you want a game where characters don't die- don't have them die. The concept is called script immunity, a half way measure are things like Hero/Fate/etc. points.

Quote from: Phillip;643674Regarding one of Gleichman's pet peeves, "hit points":
.

Well, its his "pet peeve" in that everything he's wrote leads me to believe he doesn't understand that hit points =/= wounds.

Quote from: TristramEvans;643689Well, its his "pet peeve" in that everything he's wrote leads me to believe he doesn't understand that hit points =/= wounds.

Actually I think that is his entire point.
How can I hit you with a sword and not wound you.
I have bypassed your armour and landed an effective blow behaps even landing the perfect blow the rules allow, with a 3 foot length of sharpened steel but you are still not wounded.