Quote from: Fheredin on June 08, 2023, 10:53:56 PM
The core problem with D&D is that it takes absolutely no regard for the time it takes to implement a mechanic at the table. Ttable time is the biggest opportunity cost there is, so every saving throw and missed attack and confirmed crit roll which didn't need to happen burns time which players could have spent roleplaying out of combat or in another encounter. This is why all editions of D&D are at least somewhat slow. With this in mind, I would discard most saving throws in favor of forfeiting actions. You wouldn't be "on fire" and need to roll to save, you would have "tier 3 fire" and need to spend a major action to clear it or a minor action to reduce it to tier 2 fire. Because this both gets rid of the saving roll and the player loses actions to reduce or remove the effects, the system's speed will notably increase. I would say that saving throws should be for spectacular and memorable events, like death saves. If it doesn't make sense to penalize the actor at least a minor action just to make the save, it doesn't make sense to make a saving roll.

I've found table time in D&D is mostly an issue at higher levels. Lower levels go about as fast as most RPGs, which is the deign space I'm interested in. I'm aiming for classic design, evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

You might like FATE. One feature is "aspects" where you can declare "You are on fire!" and it has mechanical meaning. Tried it a few times, not my cup of tea.

I'm good with games where chargen is wide open or very constrained, with the caveat that it has to be done well.

On the highly constrained end, I love LBB Traveller chargen.  The player has little input on what comes happens, but I've always enjoyed the results.  I think it helps that the system is very sparse with skills, so the skills are important.  At the end you just get stats, a few skills, and a professional history.  It's like a Japanese painting – I see the few things there and my imagination fills in the rest of the picture.  It's never something I would have decided to play on my own, but it's always something I'm intrigued to try.

On the wide open end there are things like TOON, Torg, or GURPS.  All fine games with enormous customizability, but the setting fits with that.

With few exceptions, I don't think there are problem games with respect to chargen, just problem players.  Customizability is very nice, but it always opens the door to system abuse.  If you have players who are willing to refrain from abusing the system, which I think is an aspect of maturity, then highly customizable games are fine.  If not, then not.  As a working definition of system abuse, I'll say that it's making chargen choices that interfere with the experience the rest of the group wants to have.  I can think of a couple of easy examples.

There's the guy that just has to have a character that doesn't fit the intended genre of a game.  The group decides to play a game of Arthurian chivalry, and he rolls up a sneak thief, an Eskimo, or and aardvark.  All of those can work if the group is happy with it, but sometimes you just want to play a game of pure chivalry.  Or the group wants to do stealth ops and he rolls up a gun bunny who can't sneak his way out of a paper bag.  He'll blow every single op, then complain that the other characters can't keep up in fighting out of the messes he makes.

There's the guy that overspecializes.  Frex he puts all of his skills in melee in a game with a variety of challenge types.  Then he's bored in non combat activities because he can't do anything, and the other players are bored in combat because he does all of the fun stuff.  This is usually the guy who says "It's not my fault you don't know how to build a strong character."

There's the guy that looks for combinations of choices that are massively stronger than the typical power of characters.  Any sufficiently complex system will have these no matter how hard the designers try to remove them.  This is the guy that will tell you that if you don't specialize in the halberd and trip skill then you're lousy at character design.  SOL if you just want to play a sword and board guy because that's your character concept.

Basically for any complex system there are going to be chargen choices that screw up the play experience of the rest of the group.  If you do those you're doing it wrong.  It's a player issue not a system issue.

Quote from: Fheredin on June 08, 2023, 10:53:56 PM
The core problem with D&D is that it takes absolutely no regard for the time it takes to implement a mechanic at the table. Ttable time is the biggest opportunity cost there is, so every saving throw and missed attack and confirmed crit roll which didn't need to happen burns time which players could have spent roleplaying out of combat or in another encounter. This is why all editions of D&D are at least somewhat slow. With this in mind, I would discard most saving throws in favor of forfeiting actions. You wouldn't be "on fire" and need to roll to save, you would have "tier 3 fire" and need to spend a major action to clear it or a minor action to reduce it to tier 2 fire. Because this both gets rid of the saving roll and the player loses actions to reduce or remove the effects, the system's speed will notably increase. I would say that saving throws should be for spectacular and memorable events, like death saves. If it doesn't make sense to penalize the actor at least a minor action just to make the save, it doesn't make sense to make a saving roll.

To echo what another poster said, at low levels every edition of D&D other than 4e runs pretty quick. Things slow down at higher levels for different reasons depending on edition. In 2e and prior the slowdown was fairly minor because there weren't all that many options, so it was mostly spellcasters or magic items that slowed things down. In WotC editions it's the same problem plus all the fiddliness, crunchy bits, weird exceptional pieces of rules you get for your one weird ability on your animal companion and how it interacts with a feat or a spell...

It's worth noting that saving throws were long ago something fairly exceptional. It was 3.5 and onwards IIRC that integrated them (and opposed checks in general) into what felt like every aspect of the game (needed to show off the new unified saving throw rules). You see this also in the designs which followed 3.5 - it became a sort of received "wisdom" that nothing bad can happen to a character unless they have a chance to roll a saving throw first (even if the DC is high). I agree that Fire and things like that shouldn't always get a saving throw and it's faster just to say "you're on fire" and let the players react by spending actions or spells or items or whatever cleverness to extinguish the flames. I do that in my game and it works fine.

There are numerous slowdowns in D&D but they're of a fundamental sort that is widespread in most RPG systems I've played. Consider how many times you need to exchange information across the table to resolve an attack roll. The assumption in D&D (and really, most games with a variable DC or target) is that you'll roll the die, do the arithmetic (remember all your bonuses and penalties which different people around the table might recall), ask the GM for the outcome, and then depending on the answer you might then resolve a subroutine like rolling for damage (which uses its own distinct set of dice) to get the real desired outcome (is the critter dead or not). Even by distributing the process and the arithmetic around the table, there's more overhead than I think most people consider, since people like us learn to be very snappy about it and soon it's second nature. The friction points become really obvious when you play with people who are new to TTRPGs. People can't figure out which dice are which. People can't do arithmetic right or forget bonuses or penalties. They ask questions about the process itself and get lost. They forget when they need to follow up with a subroutine and don't roll their damage dice at the same time as their attack. They don't understand why some info is public and why some info is hidden. Just the ability to know your test's DC and your bonuses/penalties without asking around the table is such a huge quality of life improvement. Systems with large variance in DCs IMO can be a headache to GM for inexperienced players.

Quote from: Fheredin on June 08, 2023, 10:53:56 PM
I make no secret I absolutely revile having both ability scores and modifiers, but I really don't know what to do about that because WotC baked both of them into the game so deeply. If the game used ability scores properly you wouldn't need modifiers at all and vice versa.

I think most D&D variants I've seen for a while now use modifiers directly rather than the score. It's a nice streamlining for games that make the same assumptions as a WotC flavors of D&D. For TSR editions, the growth of modifiers isn't quite so formulaic so it's not quite so obvious that there's little/no loss or change from dropping the score itself.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on June 09, 2023, 03:47:29 AM

I think most D&D variants I've seen for a while now use modifiers directly rather than the score. It's a nice streamlining for games that make the same assumptions as a WotC flavors of D&D. For TSR editions, the growth of modifiers isn't quite so formulaic so it's not quite so obvious that there's little/no loss or change from dropping the score itself.

Yes.  In WotC designs, the ability scores are vestigial.  As soon as they went to +/- 1 for every 2 points of ability score, it's use went away.  They slapped a few bits here or there at times to pretend that it hadn't, but those could have been easily worked around.

There is, however, value in scaling the modifiers unevenly, as earlier D&D does.  As soon as you do that, the scale is useful outside its expression.  At least it is when there are reasons for the scaling baked into the design. It can also happen, depending on the math, that the scale is a much easier way for players to deal with the thing, than if it was reduced to a formula, just because.

One can, of course, deliberately design the scale out of the system, thus taking us back to no need to have it.  Depending on other aspects of the design, this could be a good or bad thing, and shouldn't be assumed.  That's in the realm of the art of design and testing to validate a design, rather than theory, though.

Quote from: Aglondir on June 09, 2023, 01:05:38 AM

Quote from: Fheredin on June 08, 2023, 10:53:56 PM
The core problem with D&D is that it takes absolutely no regard for the time it takes to implement a mechanic at the table. Ttable time is the biggest opportunity cost there is, so every saving throw and missed attack and confirmed crit roll which didn't need to happen burns time which players could have spent roleplaying out of combat or in another encounter. This is why all editions of D&D are at least somewhat slow. With this in mind, I would discard most saving throws in favor of forfeiting actions. You wouldn't be "on fire" and need to roll to save, you would have "tier 3 fire" and need to spend a major action to clear it or a minor action to reduce it to tier 2 fire. Because this both gets rid of the saving roll and the player loses actions to reduce or remove the effects, the system's speed will notably increase. I would say that saving throws should be for spectacular and memorable events, like death saves. If it doesn't make sense to penalize the actor at least a minor action just to make the save, it doesn't make sense to make a saving roll.

I've found table time in D&D is mostly an issue at higher levels. Lower levels go about as fast as most RPGs, which is the deign space I'm interested in. I'm aiming for classic design, evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

You might like FATE. One feature is "aspects" where you can declare "You are on fire!" and it has mechanical meaning. Tried it a few times, not my cup of tea.

Fate isn't really my cup of tea, either. It's not terrible, but it's also lovelessly crunchless. I have a high opinion of Savage Worlds precisely because it carries the most important parts of the crunch from 3.5, but is a leaps and bounds faster system, so the crunch that's lacking can usually be added back without too much of a hassle and the end game is still playable...provided you're a competent homebrewer.


My experience with D&D was that even at the low levels it was at best a kinda slow system, but my experience is also colored by GMs who would start campaigns off at Level 3 or Level 5. At that point the system slowdown has already begun. It just hasn't gotten bad.

Quote from: Old AegidiusThere are numerous slowdowns in D&D but they're of a fundamental sort that is widespread in most RPG systems I've played. Consider how many times you need to exchange information across the table to resolve an attack roll. The assumption in D&D (and really, most games with a variable DC or target) is that you'll roll the die, do the arithmetic (remember all your bonuses and penalties which different people around the table might recall), ask the GM for the outcome, and then depending on the answer you might then resolve a subroutine like rolling for damage (which uses its own distinct set of dice) to get the real desired outcome (is the critter dead or not). Even by distributing the process and the arithmetic around the table, there's more overhead than I think most people consider, since people like us learn to be very snappy about it and soon it's second nature. The friction points become really obvious when you play with people who are new to TTRPGs. People can't figure out which dice are which. People can't do arithmetic right or forget bonuses or penalties. They ask questions about the process itself and get lost. They forget when they need to follow up with a subroutine and don't roll their damage dice at the same time as their attack. They don't understand why some info is public and why some info is hidden. Just the ability to know your test's DC and your bonuses/penalties without asking around the table is such a huge quality of life improvement. Systems with large variance in DCs IMO can be a headache to GM for inexperienced players.

Yeah, I can see that. D&D doesn't handle wide power differences as well as it thinks it does.

I think the problem I am reacting to is that D&D has a lot of placebo mechanics. Sure the designer can see that 2d4 damage is less than 2d6, and that a DC 15 check is harder than a DC 13 check, and the player can tell that picking up the dice, but you can't actually tell that these are different if you were just looking at your pass-fail rate or your average damage from 3-4 swings. It's needlessly granular, and the quest for trivial amounts of granularity costs the system a great deal of usability.

Quote from: Fheredin on June 08, 2023, 09:16:50 PM
Drunk? You were drunk for six hours on a week day? On a time difference which either means you were day-drinking or which put you somewhere between Turkiye and India?

Might I suggest alcoholics anonymous?

This is either a bot or an extremely autistic person with no sense of humor...or both.

Quote from: Brad on June 09, 2023, 08:38:35 AM

Quote from: Fheredin on June 08, 2023, 09:16:50 PM
Drunk? You were drunk for six hours on a week day? On a time difference which either means you were day-drinking or which put you somewhere between Turkiye and India?

Might I suggest alcoholics anonymous?

This is either a bot or an extremely autistic person with no sense of humor...or both.

Welcome to the Internet! Take your coat?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on June 06, 2023, 03:47:31 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 06, 2023, 03:20:35 PMBut the whole thing about totally random vs freeform selection supremacy in TTRPGs is a false dilemma.

Yes, but it does mean the type of play that was once the sole type of play, is now one among many, and that comes as a bitter pill to swallow for the people that like that sort of play.

It was not even the only type of play back then.
 
Players could and did recruit monsters into their hirelings with intent to play them.
 
And even with O and BX D&D players still had the freedom of choice and the ability to shuffle points around if they did not like the rolls. At a 2 for 1 cost. But if you rolled a 9 for STR but really wanted to play a fighter you could shuffle some points from INT to bump it up a little.
 
Or just play a fighter with 9 STR, back then stats were not as be-all-end-all. Not even in AD&D were exact stats a must have past a point.

Quote from: Grognard GM on June 06, 2023, 05:36:09 PM
Meanwhile, inside the delusions of some GMs...

GM: "So what do you say?"
Player: "Huh?"
GM: "Were you even listening to the King's speech?"
Player: "No, sorry, the dazzling range of options available to me demands my full attention, and I'm
           unable to focus on the narrative, for constantly flicking through the rulebook seeking power."
GM: "Curse you, choices! If only I'd enforced strict randomness, my players would be focused and
        attentive!"


The suggestion that wanting to craft characters to your specifications makes one a snowflake is also a nice touch. Is this the fabled OSR fart-sniffing I've heard of?

Pretty much.
The usual wah wah wah D&D is for teh RUINED because mean ol players want to play different things! The horror the horrrrrrorrrrrrr!"
News at 11.

For fucks sake people 5e still has probably the least number of races and classes of any edition short of O and BX. Possible AD&D as well.

2e still has hands down the most races and classes of any edition. Complete Book of Humanoids added 25 races all on its own. AND 19 new class kits.

As much as I dislike 5e in general, it also has the option to roll ability scores alongside array and pointbuy options and no one is stopping anyone from just using the stats in order and picking your race and class off the results.

Hell, I threw in some optional rules for randomly generated attributes, races, backgrounds and classes into my own system just because I know some players like that.

But this claim of "if you don't do random rolls you're doing it wrong" just reinforces my impression that some people are less mad about the SJWs enforcing their views onto other peoples' games, but rather, they're mad they're not the ones with the power to tell other people how to play.

Immersion is something entirely player dependent and, surprise, players aren't all immersed by the same things.

Case-in-point, a friend of mine considers me a Star Wars fan (and I am, of the OT and EU). So when he found out I hadn't watched Andor insisted I watch it with him... because it's so amazing.

He's engrossed and what I see is the supposed hero of the piece accidentally kill a guard accosting him when he decides to fight back, then murdering the second in cold blood to keep the second guard from being able to ID him, and then recruiting his friends to lie for him about an alibi... SO heroic. So much like Star Wars. [/sarcasm]

And SO glacially paced. Stormtroopers were mowing down Rebels on Leia's ship before Andor even made it out of the bar. Needless to say, I checked out because I had no immersion in the property at all. To be fair, it was probably better than I would have found Obi-Wan (which is what he wanted to watch because I hadn't watched it either before he found out I hadn't watched Andor too).

Some people like random rolls for character generation, others don't. There's no right answer, just preferences in this area. Trying to claim anything as objectively better for all people is just silly.

Besides the moral and philosophical issues, randomized character generation vs. some variation of point buy has very different mechanical implications.  Making some classes more difficult to qualify for adds an additional balancing mechanism. 

In 1e, Paladin, Monk, Ranger, Barbarian, and Cavalier and objectively superior to a standard fighter.  However, if ability scores are determined randomly, dozens of standard fighters will live and die or every 'elite class' that shows up at the table.  If you allow players to select their class, relative parity among classes is at least theoretically necessary. 

I don't find that this makes one objectively superior to the other, but it does create a different set of considerations from core mechanics and the way down through adventure design.  This potentially becomes a real problem where the rules allow from both, something I noticed from 2e on. 

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 06, 2023, 07:23:20 PM
Restricted choices is a well-known means of making the choices that remain meaningful.  Restrict too much, such that the person choosing dislikes all the remaining choices equally, they'll disengage.  Give them too many, they'll miss the forest for the trees.  The art is in finding the fertile middle ground. A big part of finding that middle ground is removing fake choices, which have no real effect, thus encouraging the participants to zero in on the ones that matter.

The flip side of this is being wiling to engage with the game/setting/system on the grounds for which it is presented.  The oft-cited player who insists on playing Merchants and Moneylenders in an otherwise standard D&D adventure game illustrates the issue.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 08, 2023, 02:20:55 PM
That limits can be good for imagination is a learned appreciation.  In order to learn it, it is almost necessary to have personally experienced a good limit in action, seen the result, and then tied the result to the limit.  Not everyone gets those experiences.  Some that do don't make the connection.  In fairness, it's not always an obvious connection.

For me personally, I don't find that I have a medium sweet spot.

If I'm going to do randomized creation, I prefer it as highly random -- roll for race, sex, attributes in order, etc. -- and possibly a lifepath or similar. I enjoyed HarnWorld and Traveller, say. Often I'd create 3-5 characters - pick one as my PC, and then have the others around as backups or give them to the GM as NPCs.

If I'm going to do character design, I'd prefer to avoid random roll. In D&D, I dislike roll-and-arrange, as it gives no inspiring details to base on.

---

Regarding appreciation being learned...  Back in the 1970s (especially prior to the DMG in 1979), everyone was introduced to D&D as roll 3d6 in order. Despite experiencing this introduction to restricted choice, most D&D players abandoned 3d6 in order in favor of other methods with more choice, especially roll-and-arrange.

Quote from: jhkim on June 09, 2023, 01:32:42 PM
Regarding appreciation being learned...  Back in the 1970s (especially prior to the DMG in 1979), everyone was introduced to D&D as roll 3d6 in order. Despite experiencing this introduction to restricted choice, most D&D players abandoned 3d6 in order in favor of other methods with more choice, especially roll-and-arrange.

Not exactly the point.  Each restriction only "works" for a subset of people.  Everyone that played early D&D got to experience restricted choices.  Not all of them got to experience restricted choices that fit them, and thus sparked their imagination through those restrictions.  (Not to be confused, by the way, with other ways D&D might have sparked imagination in ways that has nothing whatsoever to do with restricted choices.)

If every time you hit a restricted list, it doesn't fit you, then it becomes very difficult to appreciate what a better fit might accomplish.  On the other hand, if you didn't like, say, B/X wizards not using swords, but did appreciate that fighters and wizards had their own things, and the interaction of those things had an effect on the party dynamics in ways that you did appreciate, you might still gain an appreciation for the limits in the abstract--despite still being firmly in the camp of not liking the wizard/sword restriction.  You'd just prefer that the particular limitation be replaced with something you found more interesting.

Some people think the wizard not using a sword is a sign that classes don't work, or that limits don't work, or other throw the baby out with the bathwater thoughts.  Others realize that there's nothing inherently wrong with classes or limits or any number of similar ideas--just that they'd pick a different place to put the boundaries. 

This is hardly restricted to D&D, either.  There are limits in Fantasy Hero that I don't particularly care for.  No, really, there are.  There's some classic fantasy bits that are ludicrously complicated and over-priced in Hero, probably because those things are seldom found in 4-color comics and/or are priced appropriately for that genre.  Others are just inherent in the core design of Hero.  That's not a criticism of the system.  Every system has limits somewhere.  It's merely a statement that were I motivated to build something like Hero from the ground up, I'd do a more limited design catering to a subset of the Fantasy genres, and put my boundaries in different places.

Quote from: jhkim on June 09, 2023, 01:32:42 PM
If I'm going to do character design, I'd prefer to avoid random roll. In D&D, I dislike roll-and-arrange, as it gives no inspiring details to base on.

"Inspiring" is a good word for what's going on. The goal here is to inspire the player to create the character without providing too much handholding. As a matter of personal preference, I don't like limiting players entirely to the results of RNG, but there can be a case-by-case exception in that regard.

I think the basic idea for original Roll-in-Order was to determine your stats, use your stats to figure out what class your character could reasonably be, and then go from there. Roll-and-arrange adds freedom to become whatever class you want, but that in turn removes the roleplay information your pseudo-assignment of class gave you, so you're exposing yourself to all the things which can go wrong with RNG character creation and receiving none of the benefits.

The core fallacy of any of these designs is that your attributes don't make your character. Roleplay vices are probably at least as important as a character's attributes.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 09, 2023, 02:13:16 PM

Quote from: jhkim on June 09, 2023, 01:32:42 PM
Regarding appreciation being learned...  Back in the 1970s (especially prior to the DMG in 1979), everyone was introduced to D&D as roll 3d6 in order. Despite experiencing this introduction to restricted choice, most D&D players abandoned 3d6 in order in favor of other methods with more choice, especially roll-and-arrange.

Not exactly the point.  Each restriction only "works" for a subset of people.  Everyone that played early D&D got to experience restricted choices.  Not all of them got to experience restricted choices that fit them, and thus sparked their imagination through those restrictions.  (Not to be confused, by the way, with other ways D&D might have sparked imagination in ways that has nothing whatsoever to do with restricted choices.)

OK, fair - but Pundit's video from the OP is talking specifically about D&D roll-in-order restrictions. That's the thing that he says works objectively better than arranged or point-buy attributes.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 09, 2023, 02:13:16 PM
Some people think the wizard not using a sword is a sign that classes don't work, or that limits don't work, or other throw the baby out with the bathwater thoughts.  Others realize that there's nothing inherently wrong with classes or limits or any number of similar ideas--just that they'd pick a different place to put the boundaries.

On the one hand, sure, nearly everyone could broaden their tastes by trying a greater variety of games. But taken too far, this argument is a generic defense of any game feature. i.e. People who say they don't like classes just haven't played the right class-based game for them. Or people who say they don't like point-buy just haven't played the right point-buy game for them. etc.

I'd say most people have a decent handle on their own tastes in games. I'll sometimes pitch things like "c'mon, give it a try" - but I don't push very hard.