Quote from: Marleycat;549371But I like finger painting! I do agree with what you're actually saying though.

I'm sure people do, just like I'm sure there are people who enjoy fiddling with dice pools.  But the point of finger painting is more about the fingers and less about the painting.  Fiddly abstract systems that contain mechanics that have little relationship to what's going on in the game setting emphasize the "game" part of "role-playing game" to the detriment of "role-playing", thus such games are more about the game and less about the "role-playing".  I play for the "role-playing" more than the game, so that's a bad trade-off for me.  And when it comes to the flagship game of the hobby, I don't think that's a good idea, either.

Quote from: John Morrow;549374I'm sure people do, just like I'm sure there are people who enjoy fiddling with dice pools. But the point of finger painting is more about the fingers and less about the painting. Fiddly abstract systems that contain mechanics that have little relationship to what's going on in the game setting emphasize the "game" part of "role-playing game" to the detriment of "role-playing", thus such games are more about the game and less about the "role-playing". I play for the "role-playing" more than the game, so that's a bad trade-off for me. And when it comes to the flagship game of the hobby, I don't think that's a good idea, either.

I agree. It's the beginning of "builds" and "optimization" and Charop and if you don't have a certain number in a certain stat or don't do x amount of DPS we don't want you at the table....blah, blah.

I think that we may be in "different strokes for different folks" territory. Some people like moving dice from one pool to another, on the grounds that it keeps them engaged with the game and not drifting off to play Smash Brothers during other peoples' turns. Other people find that kind of thing a "fiddly detail" that distracts from the overall story. Shadowrun in particular started catering more to the second group - in 4th edition you don't divide up dice pools and track spent dice or any of that stuff, the number of dice you roll for a task is fixed. And while I feel that was a positive change (and sales figures indicate that most people did), there are plenty of people who feel it made the game less "tactical" or "engaging" or whatever early-nineties buzzword.

The same can be said of "rules light" versus "rules heavy". Some people feel that rules get in the way of storytelling, some people feel that lack of rules does. Truth be told, I think both are true in the proper circumstances. I like to play a game of Münchausen, and I like to play a game of heavily house ruled D&D. They scratch different itches for me.

But whatever kind of game you're making, I think the rules should actually deliver it. If you're making a game of lumbering Mecha, I expect to be asked to track fuel or ammunition or heat and I demand to track armor damage on different parts of the mech's body and such. But I really honestly find wound points for different hit locations to be too much of a pain in the ass to track when I'm running around with a sword, stabbing dragons in the face.

My problem with the way 5e is going is not that they are providing a game experience that I don't favor. My problem is that the core question they are asking the audience is one I don't think makes any sense. The question "Disregarding the math, does this feel like D&D?" seems like a question that was made up by a marketing department rather than a game designer. How can I even answer that, when the success or failure and even method of resolution of every action in the game is math-based?

To bring things back to 1st edition Shadowrun a bit: that game had style. The backstory didn't make a lot of sense, but it was cool, and I wanted to tell stories in that world. The fact that the rules mostly didn't work well (and in some cases, at all) held it back, but it was the late eighties and I was a child and I was willing to use "Mind Caulk" to fill in all the places where the plot holes and mechanical failures let me down. I'm a lot less forgiving now. It's 23 years later and I'm a married man, and when I buy a product I expect it to work. Now I'm using actual caulk to fix the leaky shower stall and when I grab a game I want it up and running without having to stop in the middle and go "hmm... I guess we'll skip that bit because these chase rules don't seem to function properly". If SR1 was released today, it wouldn't get my money - too many games that work better mechanically have come out since then. Heck, SR4 works much much better, but if it came out today, it would be a pretty tough sell with its non-functional vehicle and matrix minigames. I don't think even players of the buggy 80s and 90s games are really willing to put up with a new game that is as buggy as those games were and are. Fixing Vampire: the Masquerade into a playable state is a lot of work, and I doubt there are a lot of people who would be willing to do it anew today.

-Frank

QuoteBut whatever kind of game you're making, I think the rules should actually deliver it. If you're making a game of lumbering Mecha, I expect to be asked to track fuel or ammunition or heat and I demand to track armor damage on different parts of the mech's body and such. But I really honestly find wound points for different hit locations to be too much of a pain in the ass to track when I'm running around with a sword, stabbing dragons in the face.

I definitely agree here. But I do like a bit of "finger painting" also. About the math stuff in 5e I am inclined to just trust you given I really don't understand the issue completely, I do understand the overall issue but not the details, but it looks like you do.

Quote from: John Morrow;549365Many years ago, friend and I attended a science fiction convention that had a presentation for a new game called "Shadowrun".  At first, a lot of what we heard sounded interesting and we were excited about it, and then Tom Dowd started talking about the system and moving dice around between pools and said, "This is what we call 'buckets of dice' game," at which point our enthusiasm evaporated.  We considered system a tool to enable role-playing that should be as unobtrusive as possible, not the point of play that we wanted forced into the foreground.  From then on, "This is what we call 'buckets of dice' game," has been shorthand among the people from my group that were there for something that sounds great but gets ruined by a revelation or something in the execution that's a big turn-off.  

What Tom Dowd made clear during that presentation was that part of the point of the system was to have players physically playing with their dice like toys.  Not role-playing their characters but playing with the system like a toy, in much the way that finger painting is less about producing good art and more about the tactile experience of playing with paint with your fingers.  And what's become clear over time (and it's especially true of many of the Forge games) is that somewhere along the line, perhaps as a backlash to 1980s games embraced complexity to improve realism, playing a character has become an incidental, if not ignored, concern and the point for many people has become manipulating numbers, descriptors, and rules in an almost abstract way that need bear little resemblance to what the characters are doing or what's going on in the setting.

If WotC wants me to buy their new edition of D&D, they need to grasp that I'm not interested in finger painting.

That was excellent. Thank you.

In defense of the Pool system of Shadowrun, it does make sense, it is an associated mechanic.

Take the final gunfight scene in Unforgiven.  Clint Eastwood has a high skill, and he uses his Combat Pool purely for offense, basically standing there gunning people down.  The other guys who have way lower skills, are spending their Combat Pools trying not to get shot.  As a result, (because they're not very skilled) they get shot by Eastwood anyway and miss everything they fire at.  That scene plays out perfectly using the Combat Pool system.

Deciding whether to focus on Offense,  on Defense, or try to do both isn't stroking dice, it's making a tactical choice in character.  You can come up with "stances" like Total Offense, Total Defense, Balanced Attack or whatever, or you can just grab the number of dice you want for each.  It's no different then Rolemaster where you decide out of your total Offensive Bonus how much to add to your Defensive Bonus.

I don't remember people saying the Bonus system in Rolemaster pulled you out of your character because you were having a Mathgasm. :hmm:

I have trouble believing there's any part of Rolemaster that someone hasn't called a mathgasm or accused of taking them out of character

The RMSS campaign at my store is going great and we're six sessions in now.  I haven't finished writing up my log for the first session...

Quote from: John Morrow;549365Many years ago, friend and I attended a science fiction convention that had a presentation for a new game called "Shadowrun".  At first, a lot of what we heard sounded interesting and we were excited about it, and then Tom Dowd started talking about the system and moving dice around between pools and said, "This is what we call 'buckets of dice' game," at which point our enthusiasm evaporated.  We considered system a tool to enable role-playing that should be as unobtrusive as possible, not the point of play that we wanted forced into the foreground.  From then on, "This is what we call 'buckets of dice' game," has been shorthand among the people from my group that were there for something that sounds great but gets ruined by a revelation or something in the execution that's a big turn-off.  

What Tom Dowd made clear during that presentation was that part of the point of the system was to have players physically playing with their dice like toys.  Not role-playing their characters but playing with the system like a toy, in much the way that finger painting is less about producing good art and more about the tactile experience of playing with paint with your fingers.  And what's become clear over time (and it's especially true of many of the Forge games) is that somewhere along the line, perhaps as a backlash to 1980s games embraced complexity to improve realism, playing a character has become an incidental, if not ignored, concern and the point for many people has become manipulating numbers, descriptors, and rules in an almost abstract way that need bear little resemblance to what the characters are doing or what's going on in the setting.

If WotC wants me to buy their new edition of D&D, they need to grasp that I'm not interested in finger painting.

I'm with you all the way here.