TheRPGSite

You liked the idea at first; but after numerous hours of gameplay, you changed your mind.

For me, it was the 2d6 Mechanic of Dungeon World / PbtA.  I thought it was as neat as could be, at first.  I thought, "Man, this is awesome!!!".  After so many turns of "success with a hitch", I burned out on it.  It's too common of a result.  2 to 6 = Failure.  7 to 9 = Success with a Hitch.  10 to 12 = Complete Success.  Every other turn, some hitch or negative consequences have to be explained and factored in.  Then I realized, why I started to not like it.  It was too much like real life.

I play RPGs for escapism, at least to an extent.  Success with a hitch, or negative circumstances; describes every day of my life.

Success with a hitch is why I dislike PbtA and the BitD games. What should be a quick encounter always turns into a struggle to deal with mounting problems. Even good GMs fall into the trap of just making the situation have more problems.

As for mechanics that I thought I would love. But ended up hating. A few for me. Sorcerer in D&D 5e sounded so neat, I can spend some extra points to cast stronger spells without meta-magic fests? That's awesome, it finally makes the sorcerers feel different then a wizard. And then I realized yea I can do this but I force the party to rest all the time and I have far less utility then the others casters. Nice.

Palladium Rifts SDC and MDC. I like the concept. Let's make certain weapons deal HUGE amounts of damage and show that off in combat. Great! But let's make every weapon but niche weapons and clubs deal that mega damage. So you don't have armor? You just die instantly. Do have armor? Don't worry you can survive a tank cannon. Have fun.

Popcorn iniative. The idea of letting the person who just finished their turn choose who goes next (bad guy of good guy), I like the concept because it makes you think it's tactical like a turn based strategy game say XCOM. But I'm reality it's just side based initiative with the draw back of people procrastinating even more. I would love to find a happy medium with it, but everytime I try it, it just feels like "we choose this order" with sometimes the players choosing to do half of their turn then let the baddies go and it becomes like a war game where you don't want to overextend so you keep swapping sides. It's just. I feel like it has potential.

Shared Narrative control between players and GMs. Like the PbtA and other "Trust me it's a story game bro" games. The idea of players moving the story forward and making bigger splashes is so nice as it saves on prep time. But in practice it never works out like that and instead normally turns into players breaking the narrative flow or just unloading all the work to the GM again and only doing anything when they are in danger.

I'm playing in a game of Forbidden Lands now, and the Willpower Point system is something I thought sounded neat at first, but I'm growing to dislike.

For those unfamiliar, FL uses d6 dice pools. 6s are successes, 1s are fails. 1s don't usually mean anything unless you decide to Push your roll (i.e., reroll the whole pool EXCEPT for any 1s). Any 1s from a Pushed roll cause damage to the Attribute used for the roll. However, each point of damage also awards the character a Willpower Point, which is needed to activate certain abilities. Sleeping heals all Attribute damage (though exceptions exist).

So basically, you need to hurt yourself in order to gain the points needed to use some of your class's core abilities. If you don't have any Willpower Points, you better make some stupid meaningless rolls, Push them, and HOPE you get a couple 1s. But because WP and damage go hand-in-hand, you don't really want the use your character's prime attribute... but the prime is going to have the higher dice pool and better odds of getting 1s. So you want to use your secondary attributes, with their lower pools. But even THAT'S a gamble, since if attribute damage equals the attribute's score, you become Broken and completely useless for at least a full day, which causes everyone to stop and wait for your stupid ass.

FFG's Star Wars games. The dice resolution system sounds good on paper, but having the dice roll "success with a side effect" or "fail with added side effect" the majority of the time gets really tiresome. It's just not fun anymore, either to play or GM. These things should be arbitrated by the GM/DM as and when necessary, IMO.

Quote from: Jam The MF on August 19, 2022, 12:32:11 AM
You liked the idea at first; but after numerous hours of gameplay, you changed your mind.

For me, it was the 2d6 Mechanic of Dungeon World / PbtA.  I thought it was as neat as could be, at first.  I thought, "Man, this is awesome!!!".  After so many turns of "success with a hitch", I burned out on it.  It's too common of a result.  2 to 6 = Failure.  7 to 9 = Success with a Hitch.  10 to 12 = Complete Success.  Every other turn, some hitch or negative consequences have to be explained and factored in.  Then I realized, why I started to not like it.  It was too much like real life.

I play RPGs for escapism, at least to an extent.  Success with a hitch, or negative circumstances; describes every day of my life.

Definitely PbtA. I think it works for short multi-session games or one shots but long campaigns can drag.

The mechanic that really bugged me was the experience system of getting XP points for playing your archetype.

In theory it encourages roleplaying but in practice it makes PCs compete with each other for the limelight. The Barbarian wants to go Berserk while the Rogue wants to solve everything in a stealthy manner. It just got very tiresome. It's a classic example of using an in game mechanic to solve an out of game problem. I.e players "not" roleplaying.

The irony is that in my experience it narrowed the scope of roleplaying and caused an ingame problem that didn't need to exist.

Experience points for failing works quite well though as it can mitigate the misery of a gaming session where you can't roll anything but trash.

The other mechanical system that I liked the sound of but didn't work for me was 2D20 in the Dune rpg.

The combining Skills and Drives (or whichever the two stat blocks are called) always had a bit of negotiating with the GM why the combination made sense which slowed the game.

Assets I liked the idea of but in practice felt far too abstracted and a bit strange.

Luckily the Dune game I played had a great GM so we still had a lot of fun. But the mechanics I was take it or leave it.

Conversely I wasn't convinced by the Numenera GM never rolls and single stat Level Stat for NPC mechanics but I've grown to quite like it, along with the use of Interventions to add excitment.

Incidentally I think Interventions for XP points/spend XP points to avoid gives many of the gaming benefits of Succeed with Complication with fewer drawbacks.

For me it's tactical encounter maps and minatures. I don't have a problem with genral encounter maps and rough positioning with minis (or other markers), but when the EXACT position is absolutely necessary because the mechanics don't allow for interpretation (IOW, why have a GM?), then my mind pulls out of roleplaying mode and switches to tactical boardgame mode. Don't misnuderstand; I enjoy tactical boardgames. but I play them quite differently than I play/run RPGs. When I'm doing tactical boardgaming, I'm very competitive and not very concerned with the fun of others--so not a great situation.

DW on paper is cool and I still quite like it but it does need a good GM that knows when to ignore some of the elements that can slow down the game.

In some of the other PBtA games, one feels like they are traveling through a quagmire. So hard to get anything done.

Attacks of Opportunity/Opportunity Attacks. These just tend to slow the fuck out of play in my experience, and IME they also tend to push play back towards tactical maps.

Hmm, the things that fit "played for hours but no longer like" is too long to list.  I'm not sure many of them fit the spirit of the question though.  It wasn't as if on most of them that was blown away and then suddenly soured.  Rather, it was that the mechanic had pros and cons from the beginning, but for what I was willing to do, it was a good fit at the time.  Nothing wrong with the mechanic, but my preferences changed. For example, I like the Hero System 3d6 roll under skill/attack mechanic for a decade because of the nature of the curve it produced.  I like it much less now--because of the nature of the curve it produces.  It's not the mechanic, it's me.

One mechanic that might fit the bill is the early Rune Quest advancement scheme, built around d100 skills and then rolling over your skill to improve it.  The higher the skill goes, the harder it is to improve.  It's got a lot to recommend, but the pros are all obvious and the cons are somewhat hidden.  Plus, the implementation in the RQ 1E an 2E started characters a bit low, and had the advancement too slow.  (This is one of the few things I can think of where Mongoose analyzed a mechanic and produced something outright superior to the source material--if I'm remembering the evolution correctly, which I might not be.)  Of course, the bigger issue is that a d100 roll under system doesn't work all that well if you let it climb too high into the upper part of the range, with advancement only a part of that problem.  It's also a little tricky to hang onto the simplicity of the mechanic while distinguishing different difficulties of certain skills, though that can be mitigated by careful curation of the skill list.  (Mongoose did a fair job of this.  The Mongoose designers did and even better job when they went their own way with Legends.)

Reaction roles in D&D 5e.  Feels like a ret-con and it lengthens combat, especially at mid and higher levels there are so many more opportunities for reaction roles

Quote from: HappyDaze on August 19, 2022, 09:01:08 AM
Attacks of Opportunity/Opportunity Attacks. These just tend to slow the fuck out of play in my experience, and IME they also tend to push play back towards tactical maps.

Agreed. They also heavily bias combat against retreat or repositioning, so they're a major contributor to D&D combat degenerating into JRPG-style hit trading.

My homebrew rule on it in recent games is that an attack of opportunity is only incurred if you try to move past an enemy that is already alert and paying attention to you.

Quote from: Visitor Q on August 19, 2022, 05:42:07 AM

Definitely PbtA. I think it works for short multi-session games or one shots but long campaigns can drag.

The mechanic that really bugged me was the experience system of getting XP points for playing your archetype.

In theory it encourages roleplaying but in practice it makes PCs compete with each other for the limelight. The Barbarian wants to go Berserk while the Rogue wants to solve everything in a stealthy manner. It just got very tiresome. It's a classic example of using an in game mechanic to solve an out of game problem. I.e players "not" roleplaying.

The irony is that in my experience it narrowed the scope of roleplaying and caused an ingame problem that didn't need to exist.

I don't know if there's a single game out there where the marketing hype matches up less with the actual playing experience than Dungeon World (and possibly other PBTA games). It markets itself as a storytelling game about awesome characters doing heroic things. In practice, it's about characters with extremely static power-levels that fail or partially succeed about 20 times more often than they actually succeed, and it shoehorns players into their class stereotypes more than any other game I've ever played.

Death in character creation.

Classic Traveller grognards (and I've been called an anarchist over this) will swear that it is the One True Way to create characters. I had only been playing for a year, had just gotten Supplement 4 Citizens of the Imperium and wanted to roll up a Belter. After several hours and almost a hundred characters dying before finishing their career - I decided that it was a stupid rule and have hardly used it in the forty years since. You fail your survival roll, you're out of that career and don't get a benefits roll that term. It is far less aggravating.

Quote from: ForgottenF on August 19, 2022, 10:50:53 AM

Quote from: Visitor Q on August 19, 2022, 05:42:07 AM

Definitely PbtA. I think it works for short multi-session games or one shots but long campaigns can drag.

The mechanic that really bugged me was the experience system of getting XP points for playing your archetype.

In theory it encourages roleplaying but in practice it makes PCs compete with each other for the limelight. The Barbarian wants to go Berserk while the Rogue wants to solve everything in a stealthy manner. It just got very tiresome. It's a classic example of using an in game mechanic to solve an out of game problem. I.e players "not" roleplaying.

The irony is that in my experience it narrowed the scope of roleplaying and caused an ingame problem that didn't need to exist.

I don't know if there's a single game out there where the marketing hype matches up less with the actual playing experience than Dungeon World (and possibly other PBTA games). It markets itself as a storytelling game about awesome characters doing heroic things. In practice, it's about characters with extremely static power-levels that fail or partially succeed about 20 times more often than they actually succeed, and it shoehorns players into their class stereotypes more than any other game I've ever played.

I played a Sword and Sorcery PBTA game that worked really well because it was so genre driven and only had a couple of players. But then I played a scifi game with about 6 players and it was a bit of a disaster. Archetypes in stories work best when there's a small focused group of them. After a certain point it becomes clichéd and messy.

Also the Complications mechanics starts to trip up on itself if every player is rolling mid range, again why I think Numenera Interventions works in a better way to produce the same effect.

Quote from: jeff37923 on August 19, 2022, 11:11:03 AM
Death in character creation.

Classic Traveller grognards (and I've been called an anarchist over this) will swear that it is the One True Way to create characters. I had only been playing for a year, had just gotten Supplement 4 Citizens of the Imperium and wanted to roll up a Belter. After several hours and almost a hundred characters dying before finishing their career - I decided that it was a stupid rule and have hardly used it in the forty years since. You fail your survival roll, you're out of that career and don't get a benefits roll that term. It is far less aggravating.

Got to love death in character creation in Paranoia games though.

...hell try death before character creation.

Quote from: Visitor Q on August 19, 2022, 11:27:26 AM

Quote from: jeff37923 on August 19, 2022, 11:11:03 AM
Death in character creation.

Classic Traveller grognards (and I've been called an anarchist over this) will swear that it is the One True Way to create characters. I had only been playing for a year, had just gotten Supplement 4 Citizens of the Imperium and wanted to roll up a Belter. After several hours and almost a hundred characters dying before finishing their career - I decided that it was a stupid rule and have hardly used it in the forty years since. You fail your survival roll, you're out of that career and don't get a benefits roll that term. It is far less aggravating.

Got to love death in character creation in Paranoia games though.

...hell try death before character creation.

Damn near every Eclipse Phase character is assumed to have died during character creation. In EP, that's a feature, not a bug.

Quote from: HappyDaze on August 19, 2022, 11:32:16 AM

Quote from: Visitor Q on August 19, 2022, 11:27:26 AM

Quote from: jeff37923 on August 19, 2022, 11:11:03 AM
Death in character creation.

Classic Traveller grognards (and I've been called an anarchist over this) will swear that it is the One True Way to create characters. I had only been playing for a year, had just gotten Supplement 4 Citizens of the Imperium and wanted to roll up a Belter. After several hours and almost a hundred characters dying before finishing their career - I decided that it was a stupid rule and have hardly used it in the forty years since. You fail your survival roll, you're out of that career and don't get a benefits roll that term. It is far less aggravating.

Got to love death in character creation in Paranoia games though.

...hell try death before character creation.

Damn near every Eclipse Phase character is assumed to have died during character creation. In EP, that's a feature, not a bug.

Fair point. I guess technically a lot of Vampire games have the players as being dead and then raised as undead.

Quote from: Visitor Q on August 19, 2022, 05:42:07 AM
Definitely PbtA. I think it works for short multi-session games or one shots but long campaigns can drag.

The mechanic that really bugged me was the experience system of getting XP points for playing your archetype.

In theory it encourages roleplaying but in practice it makes PCs compete with each other for the limelight. The Barbarian wants to go Berserk while the Rogue wants to solve everything in a stealthy manner. It just got very tiresome. It's a classic example of using an in game mechanic to solve an out of game problem. I.e players "not" roleplaying.

Most PbtA games require a GM who can maintain multiple story threads at once. If they can't, the game fails. I'm in a Blades in the Dark game that is honestly really rough to play because of this. Like you said, Playbooks often have competing abilities, and when players try to earn XP, it screws with someone else's action. The ideal way to play is to have characters split up into groups, either alone or in no more thans 2s. If the GM cannot string these independant actions into cohesive "teamwork," it feels like a bunch of idiots just bumbling around. But if you kept a classic party, one person often stealing the show because the others can't adequately use their abilities.

It's less of a design flaw and more of a learning curve. Also, BitD does a fukken AWFUL job of explaining it's own rules, which doesn't help at all.

Quote from: jeff37923 on August 19, 2022, 11:11:03 AM
Death in character creation.

I disagree.
I never thought this sounded good in theory, let alone in practice. The point of creating a character is to play it. Spending time thinking up a concept, rolling stats, et cetera, just to have the character unceremoniously die is the stupidiest thing I have ever heard. The only time it would be acceptable is if the game was intentionally a mockery of gaming.

Quote from: Effete on August 19, 2022, 02:56:21 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on August 19, 2022, 11:11:03 AM
Death in character creation.

I disagree.
I never thought this sounded good in theory, let alone in practice. The point of creating a character is to play it. Spending time thinking up a concept, rolling stats, et cetera, just to have the character unceremoniously die is the stupidiest thing I have ever heard. The only time it would be acceptable is if the game was intentionally a mockery of gaming.

I'll go further: Character creation as it's own mini-game intended to be a group activity taking up a session of its own is a total shit element. This is largely aimed at Traveller (multiple vsrsions) and even many of the 2d20 Modiphius games with life path generation (but they at least have a quick "creation in play" option).

Quote from: HappyDaze on August 19, 2022, 03:22:47 PM
I'll go further: Character creation as it's own mini-game intended to be a group activity taking up a session of its own is a total shit element. This is largely aimed at Traveller (multiple vsrsions) and even many of the 2d20 Modiphius games with life path generation (but they at least have a quick "creation in play" option).

Yup! If character creation takes more than 10-15 minutes, something's wrong.
We were gonna play Lancer, and by the time everyone made the character, chose the mech, picked weapons and loadout, the night was over. Then we never ended up playing anyway.

Savage Worlds, bennies and all; we could never make it work acceptably. We also got hung up in some of the dice mechanic probabilities. Maybe we just had a bad campaign but we did give it a fair shot.

We actually had less issues with Houses of the Blooded, which is as a "story game" with player influence on setting etc. it's just a different kind of game.

Quote from: HappyDaze on August 19, 2022, 03:22:47 PM

Quote from: Effete on August 19, 2022, 02:56:21 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on August 19, 2022, 11:11:03 AM
Death in character creation.

I disagree.
I never thought this sounded good in theory, let alone in practice. The point of creating a character is to play it. Spending time thinking up a concept, rolling stats, et cetera, just to have the character unceremoniously die is the stupidiest thing I have ever heard. The only time it would be acceptable is if the game was intentionally a mockery of gaming.

I'll go further: Character creation as it's own mini-game intended to be a group activity taking up a session of its own is a total shit element. This is largely aimed at Traveller (multiple vsrsions) and even many of the 2d20 Modiphius games with life path generation (but they at least have a quick "creation in play" option).

I'm having slight PTSD of Pendragon character creation and family history charts!

All these apply specifically to D&D, rather than RPGs as a whole:

Skill systems. Seemed like a good idea, but turned out that I didn't like it at all. I like D&D to emphasize class/level, and find it works best for me without a general/cross-class skill system grafted on to the class/level approach. Note that I'm not at all against RPGs that use skills baked into the design. I just don't like skills in class/level based D&D. (I'm also not talking about class abilities that might get called "skills" but are tied to the class.) In my opinion, class, level, and background is pretty much all you need, and I all I want.

Ascending AC. I thought this would be objectively better. In practice I find that it doesn't matter at all. I'm fine with either. (I have a slight preference for descending since all the rulebooks I use make use of it, so it's easier to just use descending.)

"Unified mechanics." Again, my feeling was that this would be objectively better. And again, it turns out that it doesn't matter at all. Sometimes different dice or different mechanics make more sense, in my opinion. I see efforts towards unified mechanics in D&D as being a solution looking for a problem.

Saving throws strongly related to stats. Seemed to make sense. However, with my strong preference for emphasizing class and level over stats and skills and such, I found that I prefer saves that are strongly related to class/level without much (or any) regard for stats.

Critical Hits. I'm not against these in RPGs where they're baked in (e.g., they're an essential element of Rolemaster, for example). I dislike them as a general rule for D&D as I think they undermine the level/HD design (and I like to emphasize class/level), and for other misc. reasons. I think a D&D "critical hit" is when you successfully hit and roll damage that brings the enemy to (or near) zero hp. If a monster has a specific vulnerable place I'd prefer that vulnerability to be modeled separately for that monster (e.g., a different target AC, etc). And if a magic sword has a special ability (like a vorpal sword or a sword of sharpness), that's fine too, but the "critical hit" mechanic should be tied to the weapon.

I can think of two.

5E Advantage and Disadvantage. At first I was all on board with this because it reduces math and emulates the majority of the crunch you get in 3.5, but the one time I actually played it, it proved to be very powerful and undermined a lot of the tactical thought behind stacking modifiers 3.5 had. The fact it's so powerful tends to make gameplay feel sloppy.

Another is the PbtA Move. PbtA is a huge leap forward philosophically in that Vincent Baker very nearly treats it like open source code, but the Move is a pretty ham-fisted tool which always made me feel like the designer was trying to wrestle control of my character away from me and push it down a predesigned path. Which is a big pet peeve of mine.

Quote from: Trond on August 19, 2022, 04:30:55 PM
Savage Worlds, bennies and all; we could never make it work acceptably. We also got hung up in some of the dice mechanic probabilities. Maybe we just had a bad campaign but we did give it a fair shot.

We actually had less issues with Houses of the Blooded, which is as a "story game" with player influence on setting etc. it's just a different kind of game.

This is one of the downsides of Savage Worlds. It's balance requires Bennies to function because it doesn't have particularly effective balance controls. Of course, I think that poor balance control is a problem almost all RPGs have, but it's more apparent in SW because of the exploding damage dice.

Quote from: mudbanks on August 19, 2022, 05:36:15 AM
FFG's Star Wars games. The dice resolution system sounds good on paper, but having the dice roll "success with a side effect" or "fail with added side effect" the majority of the time gets really tiresome. It's just not fun anymore, either to play or GM. These things should be arbitrated by the GM/DM as and when necessary, IMO.

I'm going to speak to the defense of this, because while I actively dislike PbtA's huge window of 'you halfway succeed lol', I don't have an issue with Star Wars/Genesys having similar.  For two reasons:

- FFG's threats/advantages have a super shortcut of 'threats inflict strain/advantages recover strain'.  Are you in a spot where semi-successes or semi-failures don't make much sense or are a pain to adjudicate?  Just slap it on as strain damage/recovery and keep going.
- Unlike PbtA that basically has no modifiers to rolls, FFG has a lot of ways to stack a roll, equipment/environmental effects/teamwork/talents letting you add blue dice or remove black dice or otherwise upgrade the dice pool.  So while in PbtA you can be Jackie Chan and still have a 60% chance of only halfway succeeding at kicking a guy, in FFG if you are super-optimized at a certain thing, your odds of a lot of threat results diminishes greatly.

Players, at this time I think I'm just done with players.

Advantage/Disadvantage strikes me as too "one size fits all" for my taste. I'd rather assign modifiers that I think are appropriate to the specific circumstances rather than fall back on a cookie-cutter approach to such things.

I'll add my name to the advantage/disadvantage crowd. For years I thought it was a great mechanic, one of the highlights of 5e or Whitehack, which used it before 5e.

But there is something missing when you roll twice that takes the element of risk out of the dice. Both for advantage or disadvantage. You always go into it expecting a good or poor outcome.

Quote from: FingerRod on August 19, 2022, 10:40:28 PM
I'll add my name to the advantage/disadvantage crowd. For years I thought it was a great mechanic, one of the highlights of 5e or Whitehack, which used it before 5e.

But there is something missing when you roll twice that takes the element of risk out of the dice. Both for advantage or disadvantage. You always go into it expecting a good or poor outcome.

With 5e's version, there is also the stupidity that one advantage cancels out infinite disadvantage (and the reverse is true as well). This creates dumb situations like long range archery beig no more difficult when the archer is blind.

Vancian magic.

Give me power points or freeform casting anyday.

"Rules as written" I had though having more rules made for a better defined world and provided options, when I really wanted my designs not to be mechanically constrained. Answer "... what do you do?" and let the GM parse the answer for relevant bits before adjudicating and applying the rules and rolls if necessary instead of what options do the rules prescribe or list as available. Some systems love to prescribe when players should roll instead of only when the GM calls for a roll.

Quote from: jeff37923 on August 19, 2022, 11:11:03 AM
Death in character creation.

Classic Traveller grognards (and I've been called an anarchist over this) will swear that it is the One True Way to create characters. I had only been playing for a year, had just gotten Supplement 4 Citizens of the Imperium and wanted to roll up a Belter. After several hours and almost a hundred characters dying before finishing their career - I decided that it was a stupid rule and have hardly used it in the forty years since. You fail your survival roll, you're out of that career and don't get a benefits roll that term. It is far less aggravating.

This is very true, and I'm stealing your way of handling it.

I'd like to add the DCC funnel as something neat the first time, but old and lame after that.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament on August 19, 2022, 10:12:37 PM
Advantage/Disadvantage strikes me as too "one size fits all" for my taste. I'd rather assign modifiers that I think are appropriate to the specific circumstances rather than fall back on a cookie-cutter approach to such things.

I like the mechanic.  I dislike the way 5E uses it for everything.  Which is why I'm using it in my system, but reserving it for the big, situational stuff.  It's for the GM thinks, "Hey, this is so overwhelming, you ought it get it."

Quote from: Effete on August 19, 2022, 11:27:05 PM
Vancian magic.

Give me power points or freeform casting anyday.

I don't mind spell levels or spell slots. That's a perfectly workable way of rationing the the wizard's more devastating abilities. But man, do I hate spell preparation. The problem is that the way most campaigns are run, players don't get a reasonable chance to anticipate what they're up against in each adventure. Consequently, a smart wizard is just going to go for high-percentage spells, i.e., the ones that are most useful in the most situations, and what you get is wizards with 30 spells in their spellbook that just prepare and cast the same four every day.

I've been thinking for a while now that I'm just going to start house-ruling that spell preparation is no longer a thing. If you're playing an OSR game, I think they fact that a wizard only gets like 5 spells per day is enough limitation without it.

Quote from: ForgottenF on August 20, 2022, 09:46:07 AM

Quote from: Effete on August 19, 2022, 11:27:05 PM
Vancian magic.

Give me power points or freeform casting anyday.

I don't mind spell levels or spell slots. That's a perfectly workable way of rationing the the wizard's more devastating abilities. But man, do I hate spell preparation. The problem is that the way most campaigns are run, players don't get a reasonable chance to anticipate what they're up against in each adventure. Consequently, a smart wizard is just going to go for high-percentage spells, i.e., the ones that are most useful in the most situations, and what you get is wizards with 30 spells in their spellbook that just prepare and cast the same four every day.

I've been thinking for a while now that I'm just going to start house-ruling that spell preparation is no longer a thing. If you're playing an OSR game, I think they fact that a wizard only gets like 5 spells per day is enough limitation without it.

I agree although I think one of the issues is that you often have spells that are so good that if you have them, you can auto-succeed, and if you don't have them, you auto-fail. From a game design standpoint, this is bad design, and has always irked me when I see it (which is often in D&D).

Although it's good and necessary for the pacing for players to occasionally have astounding, complete victories, rarely would I consider, "I prepared the right spell" to be the kind of thing that warrants it.

Quote from: ForgottenF on August 20, 2022, 09:46:07 AM

Quote from: Effete on August 19, 2022, 11:27:05 PM
Vancian magic.

Give me power points or freeform casting anyday.

I don't mind spell levels or spell slots. That's a perfectly workable way of rationing the the wizard's more devastating abilities. But man, do I hate spell preparation. The problem is that the way most campaigns are run, players don't get a reasonable chance to anticipate what they're up against in each adventure. Consequently, a smart wizard is just going to go for high-percentage spells, i.e., the ones that are most useful in the most situations, and what you get is wizards with 30 spells in their spellbook that just prepare and cast the same four every day.

Yeah, but a properly balanced power point system can achieve the same thing, while also addressing the "oops, prepared the wrong spell" problem. Cast too many lower-level spells and you won't have enough points in reserve for higher-level spells. It's effectively the same as sacrificing higher slots for lower-level spells. Granted, it's more "top down", sacrificing your highest spell levels first, but the tradeoff is being much more versatile from the start.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament on August 19, 2022, 10:12:37 PM
Advantage/Disadvantage strikes me as too "one size fits all" for my taste. I'd rather assign modifiers that I think are appropriate to the specific circumstances rather than fall back on a cookie-cutter approach to such things.

Yeah when I first read about it, I thought "hey that's a great idea"

In practice, it's just really boring. "Huh, so that's it? I spend all this time planning to get an advantage, and I still only roll 2d20?" or "I get a slight disadvantage and roll 2d20, taking the lower? Even when it's a slight disadvantage?"

It's a long list.

How about multiple degrees of success mechanics for starters.

There's no good reason to think the range of degrees of success would sync to the number of identifiable degrees of success within a particular situation. In fact, it usually doesn't. The same could technically be said about a binary mechanic--that it's usually possible to articulate more than just 2 possible outcomes in a situation. However, a binary mechanic does sync perfectly with a question you can always ask about any task in any situation. "Did the character attain the results he or she set out to achieve with the task?"

If you want to do degrees of success seriously, it needs to be dynamic to match the situation rather than tied to the core mechanic itself. The good news is, we have a very ubiquitous and time-tested example of this. Damage in combat. For whatever reason, there's resistance to acknowledging damage as degrees of success. But that's exactly what it is. And systems that do not include degrees of success in the core mechanic have always been able to produce damage numbers. Even if it's just as simple as picking up another die and rolling it.

At the end of the day, I don't know why we need to make things more complicated than they need to be. And why we can't just insert extra detail when and where we want it rather than clutter up the places where we don't need it. I don't know why uniformity of mechanics is held up as a gold standard over and beyond just doing what makes sense.

Quote from: Lunamancer on August 20, 2022, 11:21:34 PM
It's a long list.

How about multiple degrees of success mechanics for starters.

There's no good reason to think the range of degrees of success would sync to the number of identifiable degrees of success within a particular situation. In fact, it usually doesn't. The same could technically be said about a binary mechanic--that it's usually possible to articulate more than just 2 possible outcomes in a situation. However, a binary mechanic does sync perfectly with a question you can always ask about any task in any situation. "Did the character attain the results he or she set out to achieve with the task?"

If you want to do degrees of success seriously, it needs to be dynamic to match the situation rather than tied to the core mechanic itself. The good news is, we have a very ubiquitous and time-tested example of this. Damage in combat. For whatever reason, there's resistance to acknowledging damage as degrees of success. But that's exactly what it is. And systems that do not include degrees of success in the core mechanic have always been able to produce damage numbers. Even if it's just as simple as picking up another die and rolling it.

At the end of the day, I don't know why we need to make things more complicated than they need to be. And why we can't just insert extra detail when and where we want it rather than clutter up the places where we don't need it. I don't know why uniformity of mechanics is held up as a gold standard over and beyond just doing what makes sense.

For clarity is the mechanic you don't like, degrees of success when the range of DoS is uniform across the rules set? I.e all DoS will have 4 levels etc.

I think it's fair enough to argue that the damage rolll is a DoS mechanic. I suppose the reason people don't conceptualise it that way is that the combatant is working towards a definite end state and if the initial DoS isn't reached the player will keep going to each the desired state.

In other situations the DoS sets the parameters of a situation (an NPCs disposition) or sets the players off on a particular path (DoS when gathering information), but often when the DoS has been established there isn't an immediate opportunity to try again, compared to combat and Damage rolls.

Quote from: Effete on August 19, 2022, 11:27:05 PM
Vancian magic.

Give me power points or freeform casting anyday.

Disagree on the basis that I never thought I'd love Vancian magic to begin with, so I didn't need to try it out to know I would hate it.

Quote from: ForgottenF on August 20, 2022, 09:46:07 AM

Quote from: Effete on August 19, 2022, 11:27:05 PM
Vancian magic.

Give me power points or freeform casting anyday.

I don't mind spell levels or spell slots. That's a perfectly workable way of rationing the the wizard's more devastating abilities. But man, do I hate spell preparation.

The problem with that is that spell levels in D&D are completely arbitrary and not always indicative of how powerful spells actually are. Don't have a fundamental issue with spell slots and levels, though.

I was reading the 5th level 5e spell "Dream" the other day, for example, and I was thinking to myself "WTF does this need to be 5th level spell for?" All the spell does is let you (or someone else) enter someone's dream to converse with them and change up the dream's environment—that's it! And if you change their dream into a nightmare the spell does a whooping 3d6 psychic damage on a failed save.

Woopie fucking do! Why do I need a 5th level spell slot to do that? Only reason I can think is that they ran out of ideas for how to stretch the simple concept of illusion magic across 9 freaking spell levels, so they needed to fill that slot with an illusion spell somehow to give specialist wizards something to cast.

QuoteThe problem is that the way most campaigns are run, players don't get a reasonable chance to anticipate what they're up against in each adventure. Consequently, a smart wizard is just going to go for high-percentage spells, i.e., the ones that are most useful in the most situations, and what you get is wizards with 30 spells in their spellbook that just prepare and cast the same four every day.

I've been thinking for a while now that I'm just going to start house-ruling that spell preparation is no longer a thing. If you're playing an OSR game, I think they fact that a wizard only gets like 5 spells per day is enough limitation without it.

That's pretty much the way I always handled it when I started DMing. I'm still to this day not sure what balancing issue spell preparation is supposed to solve.

Quote from: Visitor Q on August 21, 2022, 06:26:36 AM
For clarity is the mechanic you don't like, degrees of success when the range of DoS is uniform across the rules set? I.e all DoS will have 4 levels etc.

The litmus test is if the mechanics are pushing degrees of success not relevant to the situation.

I'm generally fine with hit, miss, crit, fumble. I can still come in with my binary question "Did the character attain the results he or she set out to achieve with the task?" and it's usually not that hard to come up with something on the spot that adds to it or maximizes the result for crits, or some special setback in the case of fumble. Beyond that, if the mechanic is to be applied universally or without regard to the specific situation, that's where I have a problem. Whether it's fixed "there are four possible degrees of success" or whether it's variable, like a dice pool where you could potentially have a degree of success for each die, if mechanic doesn't fit the situation, I consider it a bad mechanic.

QuoteI think it's fair enough to argue that the damage rolll is a DoS mechanic. I suppose the reason people don't conceptualise it that way is that the combatant is working towards a definite end state and if the initial DoS isn't reached the player will keep going to each the desired state.

In other situations the DoS sets the parameters of a situation (an NPCs disposition) or sets the players off on a particular path (DoS when gathering information), but often when the DoS has been established there isn't an immediate opportunity to try again, compared to combat and Damage rolls.

Eh. This is just playing games with scale and abstraction.

I've had this conversation like a hundred billion times. What I point out is that we don't have a "do adventure" skill that we roll where there could easily be a dozen different outcomes. Usually some shit stain complains I'm developing some kind of straw man. I'm not. I'm saying we don't do that. We don't consider that a serious perspective. We understand that this is something that's going to come down to a series of decisions, a series of skill rolls.

So I'm not sure why take seriously seeing "do combat" as one thing. You make choices every round. Run. Attack. Who to attack. What weapon to use. Or maybe you opt to use a spell or magic item. Maybe the game system also allows for defensive actions as well. Each of these actions might call for a different skills. Some of those skills may also be applicable outside of combat as well. It couldn't possibly be any clearer that what we call combat is a series of different actions aimed at working towards a sequence of different states. It's a straight-up analytical error. Perhaps it was more obvious when morale checks were more common. Maybe it's harder to see you're aiming at a series of different states when all those states are set to "obliterate the enemy."

Whatever the reason, we know full well the "to hit" roll is the elemental skill check in combat. That we usually don't resolve it in that single roll. And so combat is inherently not a single act. It's not like forcing open a door or searching a corner of the room. Those things don't require extra detail in the mechanics just to keep up. We haven't absent-mindedly in our lust for violence treated non-combat activities as red-headed step children of our evolved-out-of-wargaming hobby. "Combat" is simply closer to "adventure" than "action" in scale.

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 21, 2022, 08:34:42 AM
That's pretty much the way I always handled it when I started DMing. I'm still to this day not sure what balancing issue spell preparation is supposed to solve.

There's a lot more involved in Vancian-style D&D magic than it first appears, and part of what makes it such that some people love and some hate it is that the way it is does addresses those multiple issues.  Whether a person wants some or even all of those issues addressed is another question.

There is, of course, doing a game version that pays more than a little homage to the Dying Earth magic.  It's already diluted for game play purposes in AD&D, and by the time we get to WotC versions, this aspect is practically gone in all but name.  It's a handful of powerful, sometimes encounter-ending, spells, for which the caster must carefully save for just the right moment and select with some care and thought of what will be encountered.  If one assumes that some of the slots that, say, an AD&D or B/X caster has at 5th to 7th level are representing magic baubles and/or sandestin capabilities, then you can kind of stretch it to the point.  When you get up into 11th level range, we are thinking some of the Dying Earth earlier age casters, with their vats and laboratories and libraries.  Or you could assume a mild Renaissance of sorts from that earlier age, which is breaking from the Dying Earth tone but has a little of a logical, if tenuous, connection.  While the flavor necessarily dies into the mechanical side in the next two points, the "Save or Die" part is very much here in this first one.

Then there is the game side of the mechanic of preparation in a slot.  This is very much an "operational" resource game.  Not surprisingly, it fits the best in a game where husbanding hit points, choosing your fights carefully when possible, encumbrance is a real, enforced issue, a lot of resources are magical items with limited charges, and even the non-casters often can be worn down from less than full capability or have limited shots at things.  Consider AD&D thief low numbers on many skills or the paladin cure abilities.  Not surprising, again, the fighter stands out for being least limited in this respect, simply trying to maintain adequate hit points as long as possible.  If you aren't playing an operational game, or if you think you are but take all that other stuff out or neuter it--and are thus only paying lip service to an operational game--then slots also don't make a whole lot of sense.  There might be a niche where you want to deliberately force casters into the operational role that no one else has, but I doubt it would work very well.

Finally, there is the aspect of gating D&D spells behind different spell levels, while having the capacity for casting each spell level be a separate thing.  This is the aspect most likely to be useful separated from the other two.  That's because while it is true that spell slots/spell levels  in the D&D original can suck in some ways, all the alternatives also can suck in some ways.  Very much depends on what you want.  In particular, "mana points" or any of their varieties, when cast as a replace for different levels of slots--nearly always suck.  The exceptions are game that don't have spells of widely different power levels, where the need to handle that distinction doesn't arise, and thus mana points work as well as anything else and better than many options.  Various mana point alternatives proposed, even semi-officially, as a replacement dropped straight into a D&D game otherwise unchanged--are some of the suckiest options ever contrived.  That's because the original spell levels build on a geometric power level. So straight level to mana points (e.g. 1 point for 1st level spells, 2 points for 2nd level spells, etc.) are doomed out of the gate, while mana point systems that try to capture the real curve become so contrived that they lose much of a mana point system's main reason, simplicity. 

As for spells in the books being the "wrong" level--that's a setting concern.  Don't like the implied setting, move the spell.  For example, I nearly always want invisibility to be more impressive, and usually more like a 3rd or 4th level spell in D&D terms.  That just reflects the way I think it fits in the pecking order of the setting's abilities. 

In short, the D&D system as originally contrived addresses very well the flavor, operational aspect, and desire to have a huge scale of different power levels in spell effects.  If you want one of those things without the others, then D&D Vancian is unlikely to be a good fit, but you'd need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water.   If you don't care about any of those things, then D&D Vancian magic is a bad fit.

In general, I like point buy systems for character generation, but almost every time it grinds down to point buy accounting.  Add to that disadvantages that cripple characters so the players can squeeze in just a few more points.  I remember some Champions characters that had so many powerful enemies that there was a nearly 100% chance of one or more villains popping up to throw a monkey wrench into the adventure.

If I were to write up such a system these days, it would based it on categories.  Choose two primary powers/abilities, three secondary powers/abilities, and one disadvantage and call it done.  Perhaps some tweaks allowed to make those choices a little more distinctive/colorful.

Quote from: zircher on August 21, 2022, 10:32:42 AM
In general, I like point buy systems for character generation, but almost every time it grinds down to point buy accounting.  Add to that disadvantages that cripple characters so the players can squeeze in just a few more points.  I remember some Champions characters that had so many powerful enemies that there was a nearly 100% chance of one or more villains popping up to throw a monkey wrench into the adventure.

If I were to write up such a system these days, it would based it on categories.  Choose two primary powers/abilities, three secondary powers/abilities, and one disadvantage and call it done.  Perhaps some tweaks allowed to make those choices a little more distinctive/colorful.

I still tend to prefer some flavor of point buy, but this is probably the closest thing I can think of to an actual mechanic I thought I'd love, but hated in practice. Pure, unguided point buy tends to be a major drag on character creation, and disadvantages that grant extra points tend to get ridiculous, specially if they're some sort of bullshit "RP/Background" disadvantage. I simply do not allow RP/Background disadvantages, and outright reject the notion that they're necessary in the game, beyond a simple note in your character's background.

Having an "Enemy" is NOT a real "disadvantage". That's just extra XP/play opportunities waiting to happen (IF the GM ever even brings them up, which there's no guarantee they will). If you wanna have some enemies go for it, but you're not getting extra points during creation. Wait till those enemies show up for your XP handout.

Same with RP "disadvantages". PROVE to me that you can RP your character that way in a meaningful way during actual play and MAYBE you'll get extra XP for good RP. But you don't deserve to get extra build points during creation on the promise that mayyybe you'll RP your character as a greedy bastard someday (like that would EVER be a real disadvantage even if you did).

I've seen people defend this on the basis that "Well, in my game players have a lot of fun RPing their characters blah, blah, blah..." BULLSHIT! You don't need to get extra build points during creation to RP your character a certain way, or to have some notes in your character's sheet about their personality. You just DO it. Having RP "disadvantages" that grant extra points doesn't encourage RP, they encourage point hoarding during character creation to beef up your character. If you truly care about RP you just play your character that way, you don't expect bonus build points in advance as a precondition to play them that way. RP/Background disadvantages are just idiotic.

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 21, 2022, 08:34:42 AM
That's pretty much the way I always handled it when I started DMing. I'm still to this day not sure what balancing issue spell preparation is supposed to solve.

There's a rumor that Gygax just hated wizards and wanted to make them unappealing to play. No idea if there's anything to that.

The real truth is probably just that Gygax was a big Vance fan. There's three problems there. 1) in Vance's novels, spells are generally a good deal more powerful than they are in D&D. 2) the protagonist in a story can always have the right spells prepared, because the author knows what is going to happen, and 3) Vance's wizards tend to also be capable fighters and/or thieves. Whereas the classic D&D wizard is next-to-useless at anything other than magic.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 21, 2022, 10:12:02 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 21, 2022, 08:34:42 AM
That's pretty much the way I always handled it when I started DMing. I'm still to this day not sure what balancing issue spell preparation is supposed to solve.

There's a lot more involved in Vancian-style D&D magic than it first appears, and part of what makes it such that some people love and some hate it is that the way it is does addresses those multiple issues.  Whether a person wants some or even all of those issues addressed is another question.

There is, of course, doing a game version that pays more than a little homage to the Dying Earth magic.  It's already diluted for game play purposes in AD&D, and by the time we get to WotC versions, this aspect is practically gone in all but name.  It's a handful of powerful, sometimes encounter-ending, spells, for which the caster must carefully save for just the right moment and select with some care and thought of what will be encountered.  If one assumes that some of the slots that, say, an AD&D or B/X caster has at 5th to 7th level are representing magic baubles and/or sandestin capabilities, then you can kind of stretch it to the point.  When you get up into 11th level range, we are thinking some of the Dying Earth earlier age casters, with their vats and laboratories and libraries.  Or you could assume a mild Renaissance of sorts from that earlier age, which is breaking from the Dying Earth tone but has a little of a logical, if tenuous, connection.  While the flavor necessarily dies into the mechanical side in the next two points, the "Save or Die" part is very much here in this first one.

Then there is the game side of the mechanic of preparation in a slot.  This is very much an "operational" resource game.  Not surprisingly, it fits the best in a game where husbanding hit points, choosing your fights carefully when possible, encumbrance is a real, enforced issue, a lot of resources are magical items with limited charges, and even the non-casters often can be worn down from less than full capability or have limited shots at things.  Consider AD&D thief low numbers on many skills or the paladin cure abilities.  Not surprising, again, the fighter stands out for being least limited in this respect, simply trying to maintain adequate hit points as long as possible.  If you aren't playing an operational game, or if you think you are but take all that other stuff out or neuter it--and are thus only paying lip service to an operational game--then slots also don't make a whole lot of sense.  There might be a niche where you want to deliberately force casters into the operational role that no one else has, but I doubt it would work very well.

Finally, there is the aspect of gating D&D spells behind different spell levels, while having the capacity for casting each spell level be a separate thing.  This is the aspect most likely to be useful separated from the other two.  That's because while it is true that spell slots/spell levels  in the D&D original can suck in some ways, all the alternatives also can suck in some ways.  Very much depends on what you want.  In particular, "mana points" or any of their varieties, when cast as a replace for different levels of slots--nearly always suck.  The exceptions are game that don't have spells of widely different power levels, where the need to handle that distinction doesn't arise, and thus mana points work as well as anything else and better than many options.  Various mana point alternatives proposed, even semi-officially, as a replacement dropped straight into a D&D game otherwise unchanged--are some of the suckiest options ever contrived.  That's because the original spell levels build on a geometric power level. So straight level to mana points (e.g. 1 point for 1st level spells, 2 points for 2nd level spells, etc.) are doomed out of the gate, while mana point systems that try to capture the real curve become so contrived that they lose much of a mana point system's main reason, simplicity. 

As for spells in the books being the "wrong" level--that's a setting concern.  Don't like the implied setting, move the spell.  For example, I nearly always want invisibility to be more impressive, and usually more like a 3rd or 4th level spell in D&D terms.  That just reflects the way I think it fits in the pecking order of the setting's abilities. 

In short, the D&D system as originally contrived addresses very well the flavor, operational aspect, and desire to have a huge scale of different power levels in spell effects.  If you want one of those things without the others, then D&D Vancian is unlikely to be a good fit, but you'd need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water.   If you don't care about any of those things, then D&D Vancian magic is a bad fit.

One of the many issues with Vancian magic is that it emulates a specific book series I never even read or was aware of till years after I got into RPGs, and I doubt anyone in my gaming circle was aware of it either. I'm not sure why D&D needs to emulate such a specific literary source.

I can sorta get the "operational" resource management side of things, but even then it's such a situational thing that relies on a level of foreknowledge characters rarely even have—on top of having such limited spell slots, at lower levels specially—I just don't see the point of dealing with the extra hassle.

Quote from: ForgottenF on August 21, 2022, 11:26:51 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 21, 2022, 08:34:42 AM
That's pretty much the way I always handled it when I started DMing. I'm still to this day not sure what balancing issue spell preparation is supposed to solve.

There's a rumor that Gygax just hated wizards and wanted to make them unappealing to play. No idea if there's anything to that.

The real truth is probably just that Gygax was a big Vance fan. There's three problems there. 1) in Vance's novels, spells are generally a good deal more powerful than they are in D&D. 2) the protagonist in a story can always have the right spells prepared, because the author knows what is going to happen, and 3) Vance's wizards tend to also be capable fighters and/or thieves. Whereas the classic D&D wizard is next-to-useless at anything other than magic.

Yup, plus in a book there's a lot of dramatic elements involved that are also under the control of the author and can add to the excitement of the story. But in the game, these are purely game mechanics, so they just become extra complications in practice.

D&D has been moving subtly away from pure Vancian magic ever since they introduced the sorcerer back in 3.0. It must have proved pretty popular, because "spontaneous casting classes" started to proliferate in the expanded books, 3.5, and Pathfinder. Not sure what 4th edition did with it, but I would expect there to be even less of a Vancian tone to that game.

If I'm not mistaken, there are now at least three "spontaneous casting" core classes in D&D (sorcerer, warlock, and bard). And cantrips strike me as being something that was done at least partially to alleviate spell preparation.  I believe 5th edition also slightly tweaked the way spell preparation works, so that you no longer prepare a certain number of each spell, but instead just prepare a list of spells, which you can then use more or less of depending on circumstances.

I would guess that the designers of 5e would like to have ditched spell preparation entirely, and that its continued existence was meant as an olive branch to the old guard. For better or worse, Vancian magic is pretty central to the identity of D&D, so totally overhauling it would be a big step.

I hated the chase system in Savage Worlds with a burning white hot passion. It felt like a kludge and it dragged out an encounter far longer than it should've lasted.

Quote from: Lunamancer on August 20, 2022, 11:21:34 PM
It's a long list.

How about multiple degrees of success mechanics for starters.

There's no good reason to think the range of degrees of success would sync to the number of identifiable degrees of success within a particular situation. In fact, it usually doesn't. The same could technically be said about a binary mechanic--that it's usually possible to articulate more than just 2 possible outcomes in a situation. However, a binary mechanic does sync perfectly with a question you can always ask about any task in any situation. "Did the character attain the results he or she set out to achieve with the task?"

If you want to do degrees of success seriously, it needs to be dynamic to match the situation rather than tied to the core mechanic itself. The good news is, we have a very ubiquitous and time-tested example of this. Damage in combat. For whatever reason, there's resistance to acknowledging damage as degrees of success. But that's exactly what it is. And systems that do not include degrees of success in the core mechanic have always been able to produce damage numbers. Even if it's just as simple as picking up another die and rolling it.

At the end of the day, I don't know why we need to make things more complicated than they need to be. And why we can't just insert extra detail when and where we want it rather than clutter up the places where we don't need it. I don't know why uniformity of mechanics is held up as a gold standard over and beyond just doing what makes sense.

I wouldn't say it's automatically bad so much as usually time and tedium consuming.

The way I address this with my homebrew system is that by default it's a Pass/ Fail success count system which has partial success rules the players (including the GM) may invoke. This is generally faster than forcing it to be a default always-on mechanic and lets players do things like veto a failed lockpick attempt triggering an alarm. It's not that these mechanics are bad...it's that when you do want to have them, it's a solid bet that one of the players will think to invoke the optional rule.

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 21, 2022, 11:18:12 AMHaving an "Enemy" is NOT a real "disadvantage". That's just extra XP/play opportunities waiting to happen (IF the GM ever even brings them up, which there's no guarantee they will). ...Same with RP "disadvantages". PROVE to me that you can RP your character that way in a meaningful way during actual play and MAYBE you'll get extra XP for good RP.

That's a requirement of all disadvantages, though. If the GM doesn't create situations which enforce their effects, or doesn't have rules support on how to enforce them, they're unlikely to cause the PC enough problems to justify the character-power reward that taking them gave the player.

Now that I think about it, it strikes me that all character creation should really be taken as a blueprint for the GM on designing the campaign, rather than (as is traditionally done) the other way around. A player who takes a particular class, or set of skills, or range of powers for his PC is telling the GM, "These are the abilities I want to use in the game." A player who takes disadvantages is saying, "These are the things I'm agreeing to have my PC endure as problems in the game." A GM who isn't going to shape his campaign to the players' choices undermines a lot of the effect of giving them such choices in the first place.

I suppose I should chime in on Vancian magic.

Ever since I first read the rules when I stared playing 3.5, I never once thought this was a fun mechanic. The mechanic which surprised me by being unfun was Hero System's Endurance system (I think it was 4E at the time, but I don't remember) which I would describe as "Unified Cooldown," although I don't know if that's actually a word anyone else uses.

Hero System is really fidgety with the bookkeeping, so in retrospect I can understand why D&D uses Vancian. I still don't like Vancian, and I would absolutely prefer a better way to manage unified cooldown. The best I've come up with to date is to put a counter on one side of a character sheet and slide a paperclip along it like it's an abacus. Ideal? No, it's still fidgety. But I think a paperclip slider abacus is way better than Vancian (damning with faint praise, I know.)

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 21, 2022, 11:29:15 AMOne of the many issues with Vancian magic is that it emulates a specific book series I never even read or was aware of till years after I got into RPGs, and I doubt anyone in my gaming circle was aware of it either. I'm not sure why D&D needs to emulate such a specific literary source.

The system that Dave Arneson originally used in his pre-D&D game was to allow each wizard a limited number of spells but each of these spells had to be crafted before casting. You would then expend these "spell balls" in order to cast the spells. To craft a spell required a certain amount of money or rare resources. The cost and rarity increasing with the spell's power (there were no spell levels at this time). When Gygax was simplifying the game for publication as OD&D, he removed the crafting requirement for spells and simply replaced it with the "memorization" idea from Vance. So the spell system wasn't really designed as Vancian originally.

I kinda like the idea of forcing players to spend resources to prepare their allotment of spells as it prevents most of the "I cast this spell every day and destroy the economy" situations. Also, not having spell levels means that the player has fewer overall spells, but all these spells are higher in power so are more significant.

Note that much of Arneson's idea for pre-crafting spells got transferred into the rules for spell scrolls. Something that also doesn't have much in common with fantasy fiction.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on August 21, 2022, 03:29:02 PM
Now that I think about it, it strikes me that all character creation should really be taken as a blueprint for the GM on designing the campaign, rather than (as is traditionally done) the other way around. A player who takes a particular class, or set of skills, or range of powers for his PC is telling the GM, "These are the abilities I want to use in the game." A player who takes disadvantages is saying, "These are the things I'm agreeing to have my PC endure as problems in the game." A GM who isn't going to shape his campaign to the players' choices undermines a lot of the effect of giving them such choices in the first place.

This 100%.

Savage Worlds has been one of my primary systems over the last 10 years, and it heavily encourages taking Hindrances for your character. Some are mechanical, such as slowing your Pace or imposing penalties on certain skills, while others are purely roleplay. In either case, if the GM doesn't introduce (or even impose) opportunities for those Hindrances to come into play, the game is all the worse for it.

Several years ago I was at a FLGS trying to get some people interested in SW. One kid took the Curious Hindrance, but then ignored every "mystery hook" I threw at him and just wanted to be a murder-hobo. So I told him if he continues to ignore his Hindrance, he'll receive penalties on all his rolls for being mentally distracted. He shouted that I couldn't do that! That his character has agency! Blahblahblah. I responded by saying if he was playing a paladin that went around killing innocent people, I would absolutely be in the right to revoke his character's abilities, and that this was no different. He created a character with certain traits and an expectation to play them, and I as GM have an obligation to see that through.

On a more general note, this speaks to a problem I've seen with pre-written adventures. Many times they have obstacles that can only be navigated in one way. If the party is composed of classes ill-equiped to tackle the situation, the adventure usually becomes more difficult than intended. The better-written adventures simply state a goal, then leave the path to that goal up to the GM and players to discover.

Quote from: Fheredin on August 21, 2022, 03:37:46 PM
I still don't like Vancian, and I would absolutely prefer a better way to manage unified cooldown. The best I've come up with to date is to put a counter on one side of a character sheet and slide a paperclip along it like it's an abacus. Ideal? No, it's still fidgety. But I think a paperclip slider abacus is way better than Vancian (damning with faint praise, I know.)

As long as you remember to slide the clip.
I remember playing Pictionary as a kid, and there was always someone who forgot to flip the timer before they began.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on August 21, 2022, 04:06:28 PM

Note that much of Arneson's idea for pre-crafting spells got transferred into the rules for spell scrolls. Something that also doesn't have much in common with fantasy fiction.

There's a Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story ("The Lords of Quarmall" if memory serves) where the Mouser ---who has some magical training, but isn't really a wizard-- has a single ultra-powerful spell on a scroll that he uses. I always took that as an inspiration for the spell scroll system. If nothing else I'm pretty confident its the origin point for the idea that thieves can use magic scrolls and other wizard tools.

Quote from: Effete on August 21, 2022, 04:28:48 PM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on August 21, 2022, 03:29:02 PM
Now that I think about it, it strikes me that all character creation should really be taken as a blueprint for the GM on designing the campaign, rather than (as is traditionally done) the other way around. A player who takes a particular class, or set of skills, or range of powers for his PC is telling the GM, "These are the abilities I want to use in the game." A player who takes disadvantages is saying, "These are the things I'm agreeing to have my PC endure as problems in the game." A GM who isn't going to shape his campaign to the players' choices undermines a lot of the effect of giving them such choices in the first place.

This 100%.

Savage Worlds has been one of my primary systems over the last 10 years, and it heavily encourages taking Hindrances for your character. Some are mechanical, such as slowing your Pace or imposing penalties on certain skills, while others are purely roleplay. In either case, if the GM doesn't introduce (or even impose) opportunities for those Hindrances to come into play, the game is all the worse for it.

Several years ago I was at a FLGS trying to get some people interested in SW. One kid took the Curious Hindrance, but then ignored every "mystery hook" I threw at him and just wanted to be a murder-hobo. So I told him if he continues to ignore his Hindrance, he'll receive penalties on all his rolls for being mentally distracted. He shouted that I couldn't do that! That his character has agency! Blahblahblah. I responded by saying if he was playing a paladin that went around killing innocent people, I would absolutely be in the right to revoke his character's abilities, and that this was no different. He created a character with certain traits and an expectation to play them, and I as GM have an obligation to see that through.

On a more general note, this speaks to a problem I've seen with pre-written adventures. Many times they have obstacles that can only be navigated in one way. If the party is composed of classes ill-equiped to tackle the situation, the adventure usually becomes more difficult than intended. The better-written adventures simply state a goal, then leave the path to that goal up to the GM and players to discover.

@both

Applies+Oranges

You get XP for every combat encounter and you can (and IMO should) also get XP for every meaningful social encounter (or just about any challenge or accomplishment in the game), but you don't get XP from taking extra damage cuz you have Fire Vulnerability or for failing a resistance check cuz you got Poison Vulnerability. And everyone can easily and naturally acquire "enemies" as a normal, direct consequence of play, but suddenly acquiring fire or poison vulnerability would be very unlikely and is not a normal part of play.

Even if they all rely on the GM actually bringing up those circumstances during play, they're not really analogous at all. You can easily handle and properly compensate characters for having RP "disadvantages" by simply giving them XP when they come up, the way GMs have always been able to do before the concept of Disadvantages was introduced into RPGs. And you don't even need to coerce players into RPing their characters or threaten to penalize them or take their character's abilities away*. You simply don't give them the XP award if they don't. The entire thing just automatically sorts itself out without the GM adjusting their game or holding the judgement hammer over the player's head.

But the same cannot be said for purely mechanical disadvantages; just about the only way you can compensate characters for those is extra points or some other benefit, like +1 advantage per disadvantage taken.

I also don't like the idea of GMs bending circumstances in play to fit the character's sheet. Just because someone got fire vulnerability that doesn't mean that the GM should alter their scenarios around the idea that that character specifically has to face a fire hazard at some point during play. That's just a metagaming and roundabout way of doing things.

Could GMs use background details about characters to spice things up from time to time? Absolutely. Would that make the game better? You betcha...at least some times. But just because a player wrote something down in their character's sheet that doesn't mean that the GM "should" build their adventure or base all improvised scenarios around that one character just to justify them getting extra build points that they don't need as compensation when XP awards have always been able to solve that problem (for RP stuff at least) since before "Disadvantages" were even invented.

*which might make sense for a paladin, cuz their abilities are expressly tied to certain RP preconditions with specific stipulations that the player knowns in advance cuz they're written in the game book (and even then it isn't perfect), but not for every random personality trait, like being "curious" (which don't specify that you get a penalty for not RPing, and have no clear consequence to them).

Re: Vancian magic

I'm a fan of Vancian magic in D&D. To me, it's one of the distinctive elements that makes D&D feel like D&D, along with things like an emphasis on class/level over general skills, et cetera.

That said, I'm perfectly fine with other magic systems in other RPGs. I guess I don't have a strong preference for any specific magic system, but if I'm playing D&D without Vancian magic it makes it feel less like "D&D" and more like something else. That's not necessarily bad, but it could be. Usually if I choose D&D I want it to feel like D&D.

With all that said, I've also run D&D-based campaigns or mini-campaigns that replaced Vancian magic with something else because of the setting. I look on that kind of thing more like a "variant," and I'm fine with tailoring the rules to suit a specific setting. But discarding Vancian magic isn't something I'd do for a "standard" kind of D&D campaign.

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 21, 2022, 10:02:35 PM
@both

Applies+Oranges

Just to be clear, my post wasn't intended to be a response to you. I was remarking specifically on what Stephen wrote about how to address games that use Disadvantages/Flaws/etc.

I understand your point and I would agree that some systems do not need such a mechanic. But for other systems, they're more integrated and serve a wider purpose than just making the character interesting. I'm not looking for a debate, since I can honestly see it go both ways.

The biggest issue with Vancian magic is that at levels beyond, say, 6-7, managing your spell selections becomes a chore without some sort of assistance (whether it's cards or an Excel spreadsheet).

I do like how DCC muddles things up a bit (where you only 'lose' the spell if you botch the casting check), as well as the spontaneous caster system from 3E onwards.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on August 22, 2022, 08:25:03 AM
The biggest issue with Vancian magic is that at levels beyond, say, 6-7, managing your spell selections becomes a chore without some sort of assistance (whether it's cards or an Excel spreadsheet).

I do like how DCC muddles things up a bit (where you only 'lose' the spell if you botch the casting check), as well as the spontaneous caster system from 3E onwards.

Yeah. I don't really mind "spells per day" as a limiting factor, what I hate is spell preparation and "losing" spells. 5e (amongst other systems) went a direction more to my liking, where you no longer need to prepare multiples of spells; you prepare THE spell and can cast it as many times as your spell slots allow. I'd go a step further and just remove the need to prepare entirely (like the sorcerer class does). I don't think I'm alone in this, since sorcerer and worlock are far more popular options than the wizard.

Vancian magic never fit any fantasy archetype I was familiar with, but is iconic to stock D&D. I see spellbook caster as being able to quick cast from memory or taking longer to cast from the book. Thus, my preference would be that spells take an action to ready out of the book and an action to cast once ready. A caster could preload up to a days worth of spells ahead of time and cast them in one action each, read and cast taking two full round actions, or unload a ready spell to load a different one. Limited spells per day does put a good damper on caster spell abuse, but I would prefer a less certain and variable limit, perhaps a non linear DC as a function of total spells cast. The average would be the prescribed spells per day, but some days would be over while others would come under. Magic ought not to be predictably dependable. If anything it should be more like early gunpowder, powerful, dangerous, and unpredictable.

Quote from: Wisithir on August 22, 2022, 09:18:43 PM
Vancian magic never fit any fantasy archetype I was familiar with, but is iconic to stock D&D. I see spellbook caster as being able to quick cast from memory or taking longer to cast from the book. Thus, my preference would be that spells take an action to ready out of the book and an action to cast once ready. A caster could preload up to a days worth of spells ahead of time and cast them in one action each, read and cast taking two full round actions, or unload a ready spell to load a different one.

I had thoughts along a similar line. 5e already introduced "ritual" spells that can be cast without preparation. I would just make ALL of a wizard's spells Ritual spells. They could read directly from their spellbooks, with a casting time of 1 min per spell level, while also having their regular allotment (albeit reduced in number) of prepared spells and slots. This would make wizards far more utilitarian at the expense of time. Their prepared spells would obviously have a combat-focus, while they can still take 4 or 5 minutes to cast something like passwall when the party needs it.

Quote from: Effete on August 22, 2022, 09:30:19 PM

Quote from: Wisithir on August 22, 2022, 09:18:43 PM
Vancian magic never fit any fantasy archetype I was familiar with, but is iconic to stock D&D. I see spellbook caster as being able to quick cast from memory or taking longer to cast from the book. Thus, my preference would be that spells take an action to ready out of the book and an action to cast once ready. A caster could preload up to a days worth of spells ahead of time and cast them in one action each, read and cast taking two full round actions, or unload a ready spell to load a different one.

I had thoughts along a similar line. 5e already introduced "ritual" spells that can be cast without preparation. I would just make ALL of a wizard's spells Ritual spells. They could read directly from their spellbooks, with a casting time of 1 min per spell level, while also having their regular allotment (albeit reduced in number) of prepared spells and slots. This would make wizards far more utilitarian at the expense of time. Their prepared spells would obviously have a combat-focus, while they can still take 4 or 5 minutes to cast something like passwall when the party needs it.

Did that in my system, except instead of being tacked on with D&D baggage, it's designed into the system foundation.  The default to cast all spells is 2 actions, one to prepare and one to cast.  The character cannot move or talk between the start of preparation and the casting.  Which means a caster can move before preparation or move after casting, but not during.  Some casters have ways around this for a very limited set of spells prepared a head of time.  A handful of weaker spells have no preparation.  A few stronger spells take 2, 3, or more rounds to prepare.

Ranged attacks and drawing weapons have load costs.  Characters dedicated to their weapons can mitigate or even remove those.  (It still takes time to load a heavy crossbow no matter how skilled you are, but you can do it faster than the unskilled can.)  The net effect is that the system doesn't need special rules to handle spell interruption.  Someone starts casting, either have some ammo loaded and ready to go or have a melee guy get up in the caster's grill--if you can.

I've long been a believer that the default time to cast a spell in a fantasy RPG should be 2 actions.  With this system, I decided to see what I could do with it built in, instead of house ruled onto another system.

Quote from: Effete on August 22, 2022, 09:05:20 PM
I don't think I'm alone in this, since sorcerer and worlock are far more popular options than the wizard.

What are you basing that judgement on? https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/10/dd-character-data-breakdwon.html is a few years old, but there Wizards are more popular than either Sorcerers or Warlocks. That's consistent with what I've seen at my tables, but I don't have a huge player pool - is it that you've seen something different, or do you have more than anecdote?

Quote from: Naburimannu on August 23, 2022, 09:07:29 AM

Quote from: Effete on August 22, 2022, 09:05:20 PM
I don't think I'm alone in this, since sorcerer and worlock are far more popular options than the wizard.

What are you basing that judgement on? https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/10/dd-character-data-breakdwon.html is a few years old, but there Wizards are more popular than either Sorcerers or Warlocks. That's consistent with what I've seen at my tables, but I don't have a huge player pool - is it that you've seen something different, or do you have more than anecdote?

This is my impression as well. I can see Sorcerers being more popular in 3e, but in 5e everyone is essentially a "spontaneous" caster now that spell memorization is no longer a thing. Wizards, Clerics, and Druids technically need to "prepare" their spells, but all prepared spells can effectively be casted spontaneously using any available spell slots they want and they know VASTLY (by orders of magnitude) more spells than Sorcerers or Warlocks. Wizards, Clerics, and Druids can also prepare more spells than Sorcerers or Warlocks even know, giving them a bigger selection of spells to cast on the fly.

WotC basically took the Sorcerer's defining feature, gave it to everyone, but left them gimped in their spell knowledge (in fact they learn even less spells than in 3e now), making it almost a purely vestigial class now.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 23, 2022, 09:05:18 AM
Did that in my system, except instead of being tacked on with D&D baggage, it's designed into the system foundation.  The default to cast all spells is 2 actions, one to prepare and one to cast.  The character cannot move or talk between the start of preparation and the casting.  Which means a caster can move before preparation or move after casting, but not during.  Some casters have ways around this for a very limited set of spells prepared a head of time.  A handful of weaker spells have no preparation.  A few stronger spells take 2, 3, or more rounds to prepare.

Ranged attacks and drawing weapons have load costs.  Characters dedicated to their weapons can mitigate or even remove those.  (It still takes time to load a heavy crossbow no matter how skilled you are, but you can do it faster than the unskilled can.)  The net effect is that the system doesn't need special rules to handle spell interruption.  Someone starts casting, either have some ammo loaded and ready to go or have a melee guy get up in the caster's grill--if you can.

I've long been a believer that the default time to cast a spell in a fantasy RPG should be 2 actions.  With this system, I decided to see what I could do with it built in, instead of house ruled onto another system.

I like that.

If I was creating my own game, I'd get rid of vancian magic altogether. The thing I posted was just a thought I once had concerning wizards.

Quote from: Naburimannu on August 23, 2022, 09:07:29 AM

Quote from: Effete on August 22, 2022, 09:05:20 PM
I don't think I'm alone in this, since sorcerer and worlock are far more popular options than the wizard.

What are you basing that judgement on? https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/10/dd-character-data-breakdwon.html is a few years old, but there Wizards are more popular than either Sorcerers or Warlocks. That's consistent with what I've seen at my tables, but I don't have a huge player pool - is it that you've seen something different, or do you have more than anecdote?

Most of my gaming is done through PbP now, with open-enrollment periods for games. Worlocks are the most common arcane caster I see applications for, with sorcerers and wizards probably neck-and-neck. I mean, it's still anecdotal since it's based off my limited observations, but it's a decent litmus test for what people seem to like.

Quote from: Naburimannu on August 23, 2022, 09:07:29 AM
What are you basing that judgement on? https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/10/dd-character-data-breakdwon.html is a few years old, but there Wizards are more popular than either Sorcerers or Warlocks. That's consistent with what I've seen at my tables, but I don't have a huge player pool - is it that you've seen something different, or do you have more than anecdote?

That's an old (2017) dataset of 100,000 characters. For a newer (2020) dataset of 30 Million characters:

https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2020/07/dd-and-the-most-popular-class-is.html

Warlock (9%) beats Wizard (8%) but Sorcerer (7%) loses to both.