Quote from: Tanin Wulf;1072791Between the time when the oceans drank Dairy Queen and the rise of the sons of FroZenYo, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Coldstone, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Ice Cream upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high sugar!

I'll have that with a waffle cone-an, thanks.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1072840Question for you, to test a hypothesis of mine: Are the games where combat is easy, or PC victory seems too guaranteed, also prone to having very detailed characters and very time-consuming character creation?

I ask because my hypothesis is that the more investment of time, effort and thought players make in creating their characters, the more peeved they are to have this investment wasted by a too quick or too easy death. One of the design decisions I always admired about the (now) almost-forgotten Palladium game RECON, which was about the Vietnam War, was that it knew PCs were very likely to die quickly and without warning and so made the process of generating new ones as quick and easy as possible as well.

I am reasonably certain your hypothesis is correct.

When all you do to create a character is roll 3d6 six times, pick a race/class (sometimes they're the same thing), roll a hit die for your hit points and buy a few things (armor, a weapon or two, a backpack, rope, light source and rations) and you're done (you can record the actual save scores and THAC0 if the character lasts more than a session or two) and these fresh PCs could be among your hirelings who just never got focus until now (i.e. super easy to jump back into the action) then yeah, death is cheap because you could have a new character ready in minutes (magic users had to get some first level spells by rolling for what's in their spellbook, but that's about the only significant increase in complexity). In a big enough game (I've seen some old-school games where 10+ players wasn't uncommon) you might have a new character ready to go by the time your turn comes up again.

By contrast, newer games often use point buy abilities (which takes longer than rolling, though an array is actually faster than either rolling or point buy), then you also have to pick skills (or assign skill points in many cases), possibly some other bennies (feats, racial/class options, background, etc.) and maybe even some other roleplaying things (ex. bonds, flaws and goals in 5e).

Even at one minute per stage (choose race/race options, choose class/class options, choose background, buy abilities, select skills, choose bond/flaw/goal, buy equipment, select spells) you're probably looking at 8 minutes for a rushed PC in 5e. More realistically its going to be 20-30 minutes because the game encourages you to put some thought into the character you're designing; not just throwing the results of random rolls onto a page and calling it done.

Also worth noting is that many modern systems do NOT encourage henchmen/hirelings as part of the adventuring band which also means a readily available pool of replacement PCs isn't right there with you in the dungeon (or at worst, back on the surface guarding your mounts/camp), but requires the party to go someplace where a new PC could be found (often a town) or the GM has to alter the dungeon so that the party can find the new PC while still in the dungeon.

In other words, losing a PC in the first system might mean the player misses the rest of a relatively short battle before they can promote one of the henchmen/hirelings already with them to PC-status, but losing one in a more modern game system pretty much puts you out of action for the rest of the session; both because you need to create a new PC and then the party has to get someplace where the new PC can join them.

While some might just say this is why you need to play the old systems where death is cheap and PCs easily replaceable, for people who want more defined characters out of the gate, that's no more practical than telling someone who wants a nice steak dinner that you can get a McDonald's hamburger in a quarter of the time and for a sixth the price. Both are (technically) beef, but pretending the latter will satisfy someone looking for the former is silly.

Quote from: Chris24601;1072850While some might just say this is why you need to play the old systems where death is cheap and PCs easily replaceable, for people who want more defined characters out of the gate, that's no more practical than telling someone who wants a nice steak dinner that you can get a McDonald's hamburger in a quarter of the time and for a sixth the price. Both are (technically) beef, but pretending the latter will satisfy someone looking for the former is silly.

Yeah, but one is a game and the other isn't.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1072840I ask because my hypothesis is that the more investment of time, effort and thought players make in creating their characters, the more peeved they are to have this investment wasted by a too quick or too easy death. One of the design decisions I always admired about the (now) almost-forgotten Palladium game RECON, which was about the Vietnam War, was that it knew PCs were very likely to die quickly and without warning and so made the process of generating new ones as quick and easy as possible as well.

I think you are right.  I remember Scion where it took me a week to make the sheet and more importantly for the GM the multi page backstory.  Mind you the backstory was never seen again and frankly I forgot most of it.  

Point is my character got killed by a explosion after winning a battle and running away from the explosion.  Wait...  What?  Yeah even though I told the GM I am running the fact is we hadn't figured out the running mechanic.  By the way thank you White Wolf for your "masterful" job in making clear rules that anyone can understand.  

So instead of just saying we ran away and survived the GM thought we should walk away.  Yes walk away.  Which amazingly enough the group managed to speed walk their way out of danger except for my character who had low epic dexterity.  I got blown up so hard even my character's soul got killed.  My character was deader than dead.

I am ashamed to admit this, but I fucking cried.  I guess out of frustration because character creation took so damn long and I didn't even last two months.  Just some random battle which I won, made the right moves, and it was a mechanic fuck with GM stupidity that killed my character.  Not my best moment and thankfully the game was played over on the internet.

Quote from: Chris24601;1072850While some might just say this is why you need to play the old systems where death is cheap and PCs easily replaceable, for people who want more defined characters out of the gate, that's no more practical than telling someone who wants a nice steak dinner that you can get a McDonald's hamburger in a quarter of the time and for a sixth the price. Both are (technically) beef, but pretending the latter will satisfy someone looking for the former is silly.

What this doesn't explain is why the steak eaters glommed on to those McD burgers when they hit the market, and why they've bitched about the meat ever since even after a steak house opened down the road.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1072840Question for you, to test a hypothesis of mine: Are the games where combat is easy, or PC victory seems too guaranteed, also prone to having very detailed characters and very time-consuming character creation?

How does WFRPG 1st ed. fit into that hypothesis? Relatively involved character creation, but still quite deadly.

Quote from: Chris24601;1072850By contrast, newer games often use point buy abilities (which takes longer than rolling, though an array is actually faster than either rolling or point buy), then you also have to pick skills (or assign skill points in many cases), possibly some other bennies (feats, racial/class options, background, etc.) and maybe even some other roleplaying things (ex. bonds, flaws and goals in 5e).

In terms of general RPG design, things like skills and point buy were already common by 1980. I have trouble conceiving about Traveller, RuneQuest, or TFT as a "newer games".

I think the trend over the last 10 years has been towards more streamlined, faster character generation. Powered-by-the-Apocalypse and FATE are pretty quick, and within D&D editions, 3rd edition is probably the slowest.

When I think of actually newer games, I would think more of something like Dungeon World - which has actually very quick class-based character creation. Grab a sheet, pick and array and fill in a few details.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1072840Question for you, to test a hypothesis of mine: Are the games where combat is easy, or PC victory seems too guaranteed, also prone to having very detailed characters and very time-consuming character creation?

I ask because my hypothesis is that the more investment of time, effort and thought players make in creating their characters, the more peeved they are to have this investment wasted by a too quick or too easy death. One of the design decisions I always admired about the (now) almost-forgotten Palladium game RECON, which was about the Vietnam War, was that it knew PCs were very likely to die quickly and without warning and so made the process of generating new ones as quick and easy as possible as well.

I think you have that backwards. I would agree that games that have a good probability of a high casualty rate do tend to favor faster chargen. War based RPGs in particular often follow your thinking, not only Recon, but also Behind Enemy Lines, Delta Force and Merc.

At the high degree of success / low casualty rate you find both simple chargen and detailed chargen. There are tons of rules lite games that don't expect bad things to happen to the PCs.


On the other end though, going against your theory is no shortage detailed chargen games with a high casualty rate, Call of Cthulhu high among them, but even regular Runequest has a fairly high body / maiming count. Rolemaster and Warhammer were not super simple and crits could easily take out a character. Many modern day GURPS settings can have a fairly body count and it is not a quick or easy chargen system.

Quote from: Chris24601;1072850I am reasonably certain your hypothesis is correct.
By contrast, newer games often use point buy abilities (which takes longer than rolling, though an array is actually faster than either rolling or point buy), then you also have to pick skills (or assign skill points in many cases), possibly some other bennies (feats, racial/class options, background, etc.) and maybe even some other roleplaying things (ex. bonds, flaws and goals in 5e).

Agree with jhkim on this. You are referring to concepts used by some of the earliest RPGs following D&D, Runequest 1978, Bushido 1979, Space Opera 1980, The Fantasy Trip 1980 (1977 if you count Melee as an RPG), Hero System / Champions 1981, Aftermath 1981.

Pretty much everything you mention was in common use by the mid 1980s, more than 30 years ago.

Quote from: RoyR;1072864How does WFRPG 1st ed. fit into that hypothesis? Relatively involved character creation, but still quite deadly.

Total speculation, but I would guess that was why the Fate Point mechanic was added. WFRP1E was the earliest game I recall reading where that was formally incorporated into the rules.

Tannhauser, you're giving too much credit to rpg authors/designers. History of the hobby proves success/popularity is not really related to the kind of coherence you postulate. For each game with coherence like that there's double that number as a huge mess. See Palladium and Shadowrun, for eg.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1072880Total speculation, but I would guess that was why the Fate Point mechanic was added. WFRP1E was the earliest game I recall reading where that was formally incorporated into the rules.

Just to fill in about this - WFRP came out in 1986, I think. It was preceded by Top Secret in 1980 that had optional rules for Fame Points and Fortune Points that could save a character. James Bond 007, published in 1983, had Hero Points as a core mechanic.

As for the general premise - I can think of a bunch of low-fatality games that still have simple character creation. Toon, Ghostbusters, and some other comedy games have low fatality but still simple character creation.

But for high fatality games, there is a trade-off. If character creation is too easy, then death just becomes a minor inconvenience that players brush off - which could eliminate the impact of being high fatality in the first place. I think Call of Cthulhu is an example of having relatively involved characters creation for a reason. It's not supposed to be that easy to jump back in.

Something the modern era has birthed is Kickstarter RPGs with massive founding budgets such that ideas can be fully developed in ways they never would be if they had to work up to that level of money the old fashion way.

We have "one-shot" RPGs now, rather than all the highly funded RPGs being games with decades of History and well established fan bases.

On one-hand subpar mechanics get pretty art and great writing, on the other-hand subpar mechanics get pretty art and great writing which is just fascinating to see an idea like that fully formed.

Quote from: Itachi;1072881Tannhauser, you're giving too much credit to rpg authors/designers. History of the hobby proves success/popularity is not really related to the kind of coherence you postulate. For each game with coherence like that there's double that number as a huge mess. See Palladium and Shadowrun, for eg.

History has shown that it is far more important to be First in a particular RPG genre niche. So long as the mechanics are "good enough", and the game line is halfway competently managed, It almost doesn't matter what the competitors do.

I really have to unpack my answer to the OP.  I think RPGs have reached a sort of plateau, they've peaked and are probably going to enter, or have entered a stagnant/decadence phase.  We really aren't seeing new designs anymore. Even the 'fresh new ideas' seem to be a decade or older, and as a result 'new' games tend to quickly fall into a handful of successfully established rule sets, which is why almost everything out there is Savage Worlds, Fate or D&D, with a much smaller second tier of 'Traveller' 'BRP' and so-on.

So I pick up a 'New' Game like 'Witchhunter' and it turns out to be a near exact rip of of The White Wolf House engine, or I pick up Genisys and it turns out to be a generic (skinless?) version of the Star Wars games, or Wild Talents, which is just a rehash of Godless from 10+ years ago...

When a truly new game comes out it inevitably falls into one of three catagories: An utterly simple take on common mechanics usually in a narrow take on existing genres, too fucking weird to live, or a parlor game full of meta mechanics (the player to your left controls your left hand!) and barely constituites and RPG at all (FAITH is a card game with RPG mechanics skinned on top, as an example).

Because we've done it all. Every easily imagined, and a few not so easily imagined, mechanic has been tried and battle tested. Innovative ideas died in the fires of actual play because they were too awkward, and we've distilled it all down to the workable essences, and frankly few designers and fewer players really want to keep redesigning the wheel. Even settings are largely done. How many takes on spacy-future do we really want?  How many ways can you twist the simple idea of Elves and Dwarves before they become unrecognizable and unlikeable?  Dragons in Space? I can name four different games off the top of my fucking head.

So we're down to polishing the apples. In one sense its great, games are better designed, more smoothly built than ever before. On the other hand, its dead as disco... you'll never find anything new and exciting on the shelves, just endless takes on existing rules and existing settings, and the less familiar they look, the worse they play because 'innovation' comes at the cost of reinventing the wheel, or stripping out usefull, even necessary 'kludge' to try and make it 'lighter' and 'faster'... not better, just... hollowed out.

And it will stay that way until some mad genius does what is impossible for the sane and practical and comes up with something that changes the paradigm, that has a mechanic that we've never seen, but can't imagine how it never occurred to us to try it before.  And then the cycle will take another spin, but that could be a decade away, or tomorrow.


And chances are that the hobby is dead already, that its just us lonely old fucks who grew up before video games got better than the movies, when spending a long afternoon with friends was the normal and not the exception, who keep it going until, one by one, we all take the long sleep, with no one remaining to pick up our dice for the next throw.


Or I could be a jaded curmudgeon...