Quote from: Arkansan;843213I went through a phase of trying to design the most Byzantine bullshit simply because I was convinced everything had to be ironed out, and worse I felt like it all needed to be "new and exciting!". I hit a point where I got sick of pointless complexity and I realized that there really wasn't anything new about anything I was doing.

You can't say it any better than that.  Seriously who ever thinks they are innovating the role playing game hobby with their mechanics need to shut up.  Innovation for the sake of innovation is a horrible thing to do with horrible results.

Hell reminds me of Dark Heresy 2.0 when they tried to innovate the combat system.  My group spent a hour trying to figure out the rate of fire rule.  A hour in the middle of combat to figure out how many shots we can fire from our guns.  No surprise when Fantasy Flight got back from a con they swiftly went back to the Only War rules because while it isn't innovated the fact is those mechanics had proven to work well.

In my view tabletop RPGs is in essence a pen & paper virtual reality that uses a human referee using a game as a tool to adjudicate the actions of his players.

Reality even fictional reality is so varied and diverse that the referee has to pick and choose in order to make a RPG campaign even possible. And after that you need the tools so adjudicate what happens when players make their choices as their characters.

It is possible innovate in RPGs sure it is. We haven't exhausted the possibilities, exhausted the ways that even the most popular genres and tropes can be presented and used in a pen & paper reality.

What important is that if you do something different and new that it is for a good reason. That whatever you trying to do is both useful to a referee and that it works as intended in implementing those aspects of the setting or genre the designer thinks is important.

Quote from: estar;843258In my view tabletop RPGs is in essence a pen & paper virtual reality that uses a human referee using a game as a tool to adjudicate the actions of his players.

Reality even fictional reality is so varied and diverse that the referee has to pick and choose in order to make a RPG campaign even possible. And after that you need the tools so adjudicate what happens when players make their choices as their characters.

It is possible innovate in RPGs sure it is. We haven't exhausted the possibilities, exhausted the ways that even the most popular genres and tropes can be presented and used in a pen & paper reality.

What important is that if you do something different and new that it is for a good reason. That whatever you trying to do is both useful to a referee and that it works as intended in implementing those aspects of the setting or genre the designer thinks is important.

Yeah, thats pretty much my thoughts. I always saw the referee's common sense and ability to improvise as an essential, if unspoken most of the time, part of the game mechanics. I mean when you have access to something as powerful as the human brain to take in the variables of a unique situation and adjudicate based on that to optimize the game experience, why not make use of that?

Which is why the modern trend of subjugating the GM to the role of "just another player" always struck me as so limiting and bizarrely self-defeating. It puts the onus on the system to be everything at all times, and in those cases, how is it not going to fall flat when compared to the computing power of a crpg?

A good many games could've been a whole hell of a lot better than they actually were if they weren't trying to very hard to twist their mechanics into a knot either to be O!S!R! and Just Like D&D! or OhHellNoNotD&DNoWay!!

Rules in tabletop are necessary for only three things:

1) What is it I can do and how good am I at doing it?
2) Am I allowed to do something or not? and
3) Did I pull off what I wanted to do or not, and how well did I do at it?

Every dice rolling mechanic ever devised does nothing more than juggle the probabilities.  d20?  Nice and linear in 5% increments.  3d6?  Bell curve in differing, but predictable increments.  Exploding dice pools?  Just a weird way to obscure the probabilities, which nonetheless are something I expect a mathematically inclined person with time on his or her hands could figure out.

No one is ever going to come up with an "innovative" probability-generating mechanic.  It'll be different, perhaps, but all it can possibly do is (a) change the increments and/or (b) make them more or less accessible to the players.

Quote from: Brad;843256You can always innovate, in any field. The problem with rpgs is about 95% of the time, "innovation" is used instead of "obfuscate shitty mechanics".

Innovation for its own sake can be as helpful as devising your own system of spelling.

Quote from: Bren;843221Innovation for its own sake does not benefit the game. There are three benefits to innovation.

(1) If the innovation does something useful in the game that existing mechanics can't do.
(2) If the innovation does something other mechanics do, but does it more simply or more elegantly.
(3) If the innovation somehow enhances the game experience in some other way.

In my system I have various mechanics that I haven't seen before.

For example, I wanted stats to be random, but not to have some characters massively better or worse than others, so you choose a set of stats at random from a table.

The selling point would be that it's simple and achieves a purpose. I wouldn't sell it as "innovative" though as that has a "wow, look at this!" connotation, whereas the best game mechanics are ones where you're pleasantly surprised that they work nicely, then you stop noticing them and get on with playing the game.

I am always ad-libbing new system mechnaics (i just finished my third boardgame this year) so I am very interested in mechanics.
However, I am always looking for mechnics that drive the game rather than mechanics that are just interesting.

So take the wider game space the idea MtG had for Tapping a card to indicate that it was "exhausted' is great and so intuitive that now it's hard to build a game where things do stuff without just using tapping as the way to incate that. Its simple, inutitive and leads to a host of other mechnaics (untapping this out of sequence etc etc ..)

In RPGs I can think of a few from the James bond chanse system I tout constantly to Advatage/disadvantage which I have taken to extreme use cases in a space ship combat game I made up.

I wrote a mass combat module for my heartbreaker which condensed tactical advantages into poker chips the players could spend to add or subtract from die rolls. So the 6 barrels of gunpower they were able to acquire became 6 poker chips which when released at different points in the combat made their attacks or their oppoents defenses fail.
This linked an abstract intuitive process back to an in game resource.
We were able to have a battle between 2 armies of 1000 + in a complex city enviroment played out in 30 minutes of game time where tactical choices made a difference and without minis or a battle map (outside of a crudely drawn "map"). The battle felt like a battle the outcome felt like it was what should have happened and the players were proud they used resources wisely.
Have other people done it before? No idea. it felt innovative at the time but more importantly it worked.

The innovative ideas -
 
Point buy
Diceless play
Hero Points
Advantage/Disadvantage
Life Path chargen
Sanity
Chases
the logarythmic size scale used in Bunnies and Burrows
the combat sequence and attack model from En Garde

were all invented at some point.

If we could have innovative mechanics that covered

Resource tracking (foraging, hunting, scavenging)
Spell creation
Fear
Mind control
Exploration
Armour

I think they would be welcomed but only if they actually made the game better.

Quote from: danskmacabre;843199An example (to me ) of innovation for the sake of it is "The One ring" RPG.

The combat mechanic is quite clunky and slow and doesn't really add anything.

I thought it was odd they turned traveling from a location to another location into a gaming mechanic, as they felt roleplaying traveling in between locations in game as a waste of time, which I disagree with.

All in all, I was pretty disappointed with ToR, although it was very pretty.

It was REALLY disorganised as well.

The One Ring is probably a good example to show that "gimmicky" is not the same as "innovative" and that different systems for the sake of difference does not create a good game (however, great artwork and production values help to maintain an according illusion).

Of course, sometimes there are good ideas that become more popular nd wide-spread. The advantage/disadvantage system  of D&D 5e for example wasn't completely new, but it felt innovative (at least for me) in comparison to the way modifiers like these were handled before. It might not have been a huge eye-opener, but it was a decently implemented, good idea and that is actually a lot better than something completely new but basically gimmicky.

Innovation.
I claim my system is still innovative, but not really many has bothered taking a look at it.

It seems too simple to some I guess, but if someone looking for something really simple, like barely no skills or abilities at all, and magic and other rules that technically may be defined however the player like, but only really has one rule and one effect, then my rules are too "complicated" for them.

I offer detail where requested, not complications, but as everyone is into their own creations, including me, I guess "i shouldn't complain"".
(Passive-aggressive a lot? Yeah, I guess.)

Quote from: Catelf;843294Innovation.
I claim my system is still innovative, but not really many has bothered taking a look at it.

It might have something to do with the fact that having an innovative system and getting people to pay attention are two separate, mostly unrelated steps;). Sometimes the first one helps the next one, and sometimes it doesn't, really.

Also, just looked at your system, and while it's probably workable, it needs some more work.

As geek-related hobbies become more and more mainstream we'll get more and more fresh blood. That means new or different ideas than usual which means introducing different concepts, for good or ill.

But like any field, I think that basic usability will improve and mature. Technology plays a factor into this: I still see so many PDFs, meant for digital consumption, not print, still being designed with print in mind, which is frustrating and annoying (eg: blank pages to pad out the page count to an even number, huge watermarks, lack of bookmarking etc...). Some designers get it, though, and release their products as a package of electronic formats (eg: print quality, digital version with a smaller file size, landscape, epub etc...). To me, that's innovative for our hobby.

As for rules and dice mechanisms, well, we'll see. I like the Cypher system's idea of reducing difficulties instead of padding bonuses, which, to me, is kind of innovative in the wake of the d20 craze, but I feel that the difficulty number thing (1 to 10, multiply by 3) is a little kludgy. But getting close!

I guess that I truly believe that we're in very interesting times, and things are changing, albeit gradually, as the hobby "gene pool" broadens.

Quote from: Ravenswing;843267A good many games could've been a whole hell of a lot better than they actually were if they weren't trying to very hard to twist their mechanics into a knot either to be O!S!R! and Just Like D&D! or OhHellNoNotD&DNoWay!!

On one hand you are right and on the other hand you are wrong. I think that the focus of the rules should be on implementing what important to adjudicate in a setting and should reflect the particulars of how that works in that setting.

However the design of the rules is of huge importance when it comes to personal preference and enjoyment of the game or creating things for the game. So I am not going to knock any author's choice of rules as the alternative would likely be that the work wouldn't be produced in the first place.

Quote from: Ravenswing;843267which nonetheless are something I expect a mathematically inclined person with time on his or her hands could figure out.

or just go to Any Dice
http://anydice.com/

Quote from: Ravenswing;843267
No one is ever going to come up with an "innovative" probability-generating mechanic.  It'll be different, perhaps, but all it can possibly do is (a) change the increments and/or (b) make them more or less accessible to the players.

Perhaps I would have agreed with your circa 1995 and then I ran into Fudge Dice which are distinctly different. Rolemaster exploding percentile with pretty nifty when it first came out back in the day.

My opinion that it not impossible to come up with new ways of rolling the dice but it is hard and not likely be better than other similar methods.

Quote from: TristramEvans;843262Which is why the modern trend of subjugating the GM to the role of "just another player" always struck me as so limiting and bizarrely self-defeating. It puts the onus on the system to be everything at all times, and in those cases, how is it not going to fall flat when compared to the computing power of a crpg?

My view is that there is adjudication and there is adjudication. Does there has to be a referee with the final say on things like hitting a monster with a sort, rolling to see if you made the wand of fireballs? No. There are other types of roleplaying games, like LARPS, that work fine without having a referee adjudicate specific actions of the PC.

My view is that making the referee "just another player" destroys the point of the game; which is to be some character interacting with a setting doing something interesting. You need a referee is because the players as their characters are not omniscience. Somebody has to decide how the unseen elements of the setting interact with the characters and that person is the referee. If you make the player omniscient then they won't ever act as if they are there as their character. The meta-game knowledge will distort their behavior.

You can't completely escape this as player will and can master the game like knowing what every spell, magic item, and monsters does. However trying to add more on top of this is just stupid in my opinion.

Yes, very possible.  Some things I started working with have now been used by published systems, but not all.  

And very useful.  Maybe not to everyone, but to my players.

Good mechanics represent better the setting and the type of game you want to play.   Every GM, setting and game match is different.  Ergo, the need for a slightly or radically different ruleset for each.

It's entirely possible to make new game mechanics. Look:

"Your character's attribute scores are determined by running your cell phone serial number through a hashing algorithm..."

And, since we all have different tastes, and even good proven mechanics can be picked, chosen, recombined, and applied to different settings, and many of us even like variety or to try new things, in general I think we always will be creating at least variations.

I think though that focusing on whether something is new or not rarely matters. Doing what's fun, appealing, and interesting is what matters. People still compose classical music, and write stories, even if most of the themes and so on have been done before. It seems to me a peculiar and unfortunate obsession to quest for the new and avoid doing something that's been done before.

Within my own peculiar tastes as a lifelong gamer, I do find myself dismissing most games I encounter, but not because I've seen similar things before, unless I know from experience I'm not interested in that thing. In fact, for many new mechanics I see, I compare them to others I know, and often think the innovative ones are cute (or ugly) but will turn me off if I know a different old mechanic that I can tell I'd like better. As others have written, newness for its own sake might be semi-interesting, but seems more likely to make me not want to play that game.

In RPGs in particular, I've seen quite a few designs that seem like they are trying to be clever and fresh, but from my perspective just seem worse than what I already know how to do, or as a GM with decades of experience, I could do better by just making up mechanics or even rolling dice and intuitively dictating what they mean. It doesn't help me to see a new lightweight game system that claims to be about something fantastic, but actually reduces to a very low-grain low-detail low-content super-rough arbitrary offering, which feels like I'm a chef being offered the latest McDonald's novelty meal.

I've heard that the jenga tower use in Dread is supposedly very appropriate for the horror and suspense genre. It sounds gimmicky though.