Quote from: goblinslayer;1122027page count is objective

There have been several rpg's that I won't even look at because I know there's no damn way I'm reading a 600 page rulebook.

Looks at Hero System.

Pretty sure there is little hope of getting agreement about what an objective measure of goodness would be.

I mean, I have long thought that White Box D&D was an utterly incomprehensible bad joke, as without knowing how to play D&D already, it was clear as mud WTF half of it was talking about. Forty years later, people hear also explained to me that I had the one printing that didn't even mention what to roll for weapon damage. However I was mightily unimpressed that the answer was that all weapons except like one magic axe do 1d6. It seems like good inspiration to make up your own rules, because you sure won't find a complete game in those three books. And yet... an large chunk of folks here will say it's a great version of D&D (though what they mean is, with added knowledge and probably various other books added, plus a good GM).

i think even sales is subjective as a measure, i've bought all kinds of material that turned out to be imho a waste of money, and many times because the guy behind the counter said "i sell a lot of these it must be good". no, rifts is half good, great setting idea, great art, didn't like the system. Vampire? just no, did not like.

For me it's got to clearly communicate what it wants to do and then mechanically do it well, the art can suck, the setting can suck, and i'd still stay its worth it. It needs to be semi-fast to learn and play, no hour or more character creation, it needs to be flexible, and i do like a small measure of simulationist take or flexibility to it, a sort of math consistency where if you know what a sword does you can scale and extrapolate to abrams tank and it still works as it should. I dislike abstraction in a game unless such is proportional to the scale; for example; abstraction in axis & allies is fine, since a a single round of rolling represents weeks of an invasion with thousands of casualties, but abstraction as you move to the individual scale becomes an irritant.

Quote from: Brad;1121939https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjHORRHXtyI

There you go.

O Captain, my Captain!

Quote from: goblinslayer;1122027page count is objective

There have been several rpg's that I won't even look at because I know there's no damn way I'm reading a 600 page rulebook.

But think of all the arm-workout you'll get while flexing your eye-muscles gorging on that monstrosity? You'll be JACKED once you're done.

Quote from: goblinslayer;1122027page count is objective

There have been several rpg's that I won't even look at because I know there's no damn way I'm reading a 600 page rulebook.

Hmm, but what do you count for page count? Burning Wheel Gold is almost 600 pages but a good portion of that is life paths which you don't need to absorb all of. They are also smaller pages than AD&D 1E (which clocks in at about 350 pages for the 3 core books) so isn't necessarily much different in overall size. Or how about small type like Chivalry & Sorcery 1e which was only 130 pages but due to tiny type may be close to the content of AD&D 1e.

People complain when the page count is low.  People complain when the page count is high. People always complain about the price.

You don't sit down and read HERO or PF2e. You take it in bits. You start playing with the basics (I think HERO Basic is all of 98 pages?) then you dig in. The nice part is you can dig in, because there's a lot of meat on them bones.

The bigger question, the one that will help nail this conversation down nice and tight is... why do we want to come up with objective criteria for evaluating RPGs? Is the current method of evaluation not working? For example, there are TONS of free quick starts, primers and even full books available for people to kick the tires on a game...

But ultimately there are just too many differing tastes, with too many RPGs, with too many approaches to nail this down. Unless you plan on electing someone on the forum God Emperor of Tabletop Roleplaying. It will still be subjective, just more official.

Quote from: ffilz;1122026Yea, you could have an objective measure there as long as you took care with the parameters of the measurement.

Yeah, it's pretty easy to see when, say, swapping between different editions of D&D. My old 1ed group often had 5 fights in a three hour session. My 5ed group often has 1-2.

QuoteCan you play without knowing the rules is going to end up being subjective I think just because it's going to rely on a subjective measure of if the player who doesn't know the rules is contributing in a way that makes you still want to play with them.

Yeah it's a bit fuzzy but it's often cut and dry in practice. Even with the most biased fans if you ask them "can people who suck at learning rules play this game" and you'll usually get a straight answer. Although you sometimes get weird edge cases. Like one player I had who was fine with 3.5ed but simply could not wrap his head around fate points in FATE and just ignored the fate point economy and just rolled his skills, which really doesn't work in that game.

Quote from: Skarg;1122047It seems like good inspiration to make up your own rules, because you sure won't find a complete game in those three books. And yet... an large chunk of folks here will say it's a great version of D&D (though what they mean is, with added knowledge and probably various other books added, plus a good GM).

I had the original brown box. I liked it. It made sense to us as high school students who did not have anyone around who had already played the game. But there was a presumption that DMs would create their own settings and, like most wargaming rules for miniatures that were published back then, the rules were terse and expected the reader would already have certain knowledge e.g. rules for an English Civil War game expected you to have some understanding of how pike & shotte warfare had been conducted and that a battle would progress and conclude like an historical battle of that period so a battle in Cavaliers & Roundheads would be different than one in Tractics regardless of what the miniatures used looked like. Similarly, D&D expected you to know something about medieval warfare, arms, and armor and to be familiar with the underlying fantasy fiction and movies that were later codified somewhere in Appendix N.

Quote from: trechriron;1122113The bigger question, the one that will help nail this conversation down nice and tight is... why do we want to come up with objective criteria for evaluating RPGs?

Isn't that obvious? So we can prove that the game we like is objectively the best.

Objective criteria for games is always conditional.  Until all participants in the discussion understand that, is it irrelevant.  Once they do, it may be useful.

If we agree for sake of argument that for a particular discussion that number of combats that can be done in an hour is something that correlates to a better experience for some subset of defined people, then we can talk about how games measure on that.  If we can set a threshold for number of combats in an hour that is acceptable, for sake of argument, then we can say whether a game hits it or not.  Of the games that barely hit it, we can discuss what special cases may cause them not to (e.g. number of players, attention level, etc.).  For the ones that barely miss it, we can discuss how the game might be changed in order to hit it.  Whether those proposed changes are overall an objective "good thing" is, of course, nonsense.  To go there is to change the premise of the conversation.  Subjectively, it might still be useful and interesting, but to make it objective will require more conditions.

That some people are bad at objective discussion and/or unwilling to engage in it (for whatever reason) says nothing about what objective discussion is possible or useful--only limits the times and places and groups where it may be possible and useful.

Quote from: trechriron;1122113People complain when the page count is low.  People complain when the page count is high. People always complain about the price.

You don't sit down and read HERO or PF2e. You take it in bits. You start playing with the basics (I think HERO Basic is all of 98 pages?) then you dig in. The nice part is you can dig in, because there's a lot of meat on them bones.

The bigger question, the one that will help nail this conversation down nice and tight is... why do we want to come up with objective criteria for evaluating RPGs? Is the current method of evaluation not working? For example, there are TONS of free quick starts, primers and even full books available for people to kick the tires on a game...

But ultimately there are just too many differing tastes, with too many RPGs, with too many approaches to nail this down. Unless you plan on electing someone on the forum God Emperor of Tabletop Roleplaying. It will still be subjective, just more official.

Do you even lift, bro?

Quote from: tenbones;1122125Do you even lift, bro?

What? I have both Volume I and Volume II in the porcelain throne room for two fisted curls during my regular constitutionals!! I also read them sometimes!!!

Sales and popularity are very subjective from my point of view. I don't respect the taste of the market very much. Most RPGs, and the most popular RPGs, I do not want to play, because they do little that I like, and way too many things I don't like and/or hate. For the things I care about, they are incompetent and mostly useless to me.

Page count is subjective, and depends on what's in those pages, etc.

Combat time is subjective. Some people love some combat systems, and are happy to do hours of fun combat. Some people just want the combat to be over quickly. Some people want no combat, or no combat system.

Narrativism and player-agency are subjective, unless you can hold a categorization that non-trad games start to not be RPGs but something else, which people can't seem to agree on either.

Can the people in this thread all agree any particular game is objectively bad? Do we even want to mention or think about the games that are that bad?

Quote from: Mishihari;11218983)  The rules are clearly written and well organized.

Shadowrun 5e's horrible rulebook turbocharged me thinking about whether this actually does have some potential for objective improvement.

I've been wondering for a bit now if it'd be possible to apply ideas out of programming languages and computability to RPG rules and rulebooks as a minimum scaffolding to improve comprehensibility.

Programming languages have to be computable, and can be quite expressive and close to written languge.

Could we build computable RPG rules to machine enforce that they actually come together to make coherent sense?

One of the things I think this could certainly tackle is editing errors where terms/symbols/abbreviations are used before they are defined, or lack any definition at all, for example. As well as generating more useful indexes automatically.

And if it helps (probably not), this is not a new discussion. I wondered why some of the posts seemed familiar until I realized: the thread reminds me of a column about evaluating campaign supplements back in Dragon #126.

(Yes, I was into D&D then. Don't ask how old this makes me.)

From Ken Rolston's initial commentary (before he begins reviewing some aforementioned supplements):

QuoteSo, what's first on your shopping list when you go looking for a campaign supplement?

"Uh ... it's gotta be yuh know... complete.."

Nope. The last thing in the world you want is something complete. Way too much detail. Maybe you know one of those lost souls who can tell you the name, age, and weight of every person in his fantasy city, or the three principle exports of every one of his fantasy nations. What you want is the illusion of completeness. You want to feel like the whole campaign worlds in there. But exhaustive detail is no guarantee of that sense of completeness  nor is it much of an indication of how useful the package is going to be. My mildew herds graze contentedly on rich pastures of exhaustively detailed campaign supplements in my deep, damp basement.

"Naw. C'mon, you know what I mean. It's gotta feel big. . ."

Yes, indeed. A quality campaign supplement has a sense of scope and grandeur. But sheer size may be a poor indicator of its epic vision. Unfortunately, the first test we game fans use to test campaign supplements for quality is heft.

"Hey, feel this! Hea-vy, man!"

Another similar and slightly more sophisticated test we make is to check page count.

"Wow! 144 pages, and only $10."

I will not pretend to be above such simplistic evaluations. Poundage and page count still make a good first impression on me, even though experience has shown that, more often than not, the more text you get for your money, the less thought and skill into presenting it effectively.

Any of this look familiar? What am I saying, of COURSE it does!

Honestly, I think the best measure of a rulebook is 'how easy is it to find X rule at any given time?'. Which makes Bren's comment probably the best for what we're looking for.