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.