Somebody please write a set of detailed, engaging, and interesting rules for baking in RPGs.

I just want to see a baking RPG that I would actually play.

Still with the baking? Brendan suggested this activity as one amongst many that he could never imagine needing rules for. I commented that this is something that manages to fill 10 hours of high-rating TV every season here in the UK, and it's clearly an intricate business.

The point - tasks we dismiss as trivial aren't if you are doing them to a high level of skill, creativity or precision. There may be stakes riding on them.

We all do stuff every day which is skill based, can go badly wrong and yet doesn't involve attempting to kill other people. But most RPGs completely ignore these endeavours, or give them a really poor showing. Apparently everyone else is ok with this. It seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Quote from: DavetheLost;854108Somebody please write a set of detailed, engaging, and interesting rules for baking in RPGs.

I just want to see a baking RPG that I would actually play.

I can see something similar to Starchildren's concert mechanics working here.

But before that, what's most important is to set the stakes. Why is fighting orcs interesting? Because your character might die. It's an oversimplification, but that's why we play out the scenes where you're fighting an orc and not the ones where you're sparring using padded weapons in your training montage.

So you need a compelling reason to be baking. Maybe it's an Iron Chef-style gladiatorial baking contest where only the winner, as adjudged by a panel of two experts and a celebrity, leaves alive. We shall call this contest Cake or Death and Eddie Izzard can be the presenter.

That might be a little too on-the-nose. For non-lethal stakes, you have all the reasons one might enter The Great British Bake-Off. A need to prove oneself, wanting greater social standing, wanting to beat a rival baker, needing to get close to the contest organiser to discover the whereabouts of your kidnapped sister, all that kind of stuff. These would all work for a game where you're students in a D&D-ish setting sparring with padded weapons at an academy for fighters, incidentally.

For system, you may or may not want to use extended tests. If the stakes are high enough, a single die roll becomes loaded with meaning. So that's a matter of taste.

What you do need is meaningful decisions to make at any given stage. Three Baking skill rolls in a row are just an exercise in probability, the same as if all you did in a D&D fight was roll to hit over and over. (Yes, some people do that - but it's their decision.) Movement, holding actions, options for defensive or attacking stances, all that kind of thing - they all provide options that give the player a meaningful choice to make. When working correctly, your baking or combat system provides options that have significant effects but where there's not one option that is obviously the best choice. (This was Greg Costikyan's criticism of Talisman, the board game - every turn you get two options and one of them is almost always obviously correct, which is nearly the same as no choice. I think it was him, anyway. Definitely somebody's.)


Starchildren presents a straightforward choice in every concert "round", which corresponds to one key song in your band's set: difficulty vs crowd-pleasing. Console games about skateboarding use a similar mechanic.
Play an easy song and the crowd are OK with it, but only OK. Play a difficult song and the crowd love it, which will boost your band's fame. Mess up a song of any difficulty and the crowd think you're losers.

That would work OK for a competitive baking game. Whether or not you'd want to get into the details of specialising in different kinds of baking (e.g. breads vs pastries), presentation, etc., I don't know. Depends how much crunch you like and how interested you are in the real-life minutiae of baking.

Quote from: dbm;854221We all do stuff every day which is skill based, can go badly wrong and yet doesn't involve attempting to kill other people. But most RPGs completely ignore these endeavours, or give them a really poor showing. Apparently everyone else is ok with this. It seems like a missed opportunity to me.

:rolleyes: Oh boo, hoo, hoo.

The existence of games like FATE and HeroQuest where everything works like everything else disproves your hyperbole that only you have seen the light of systemic same-itude. Some people want exactly what you want. Some of us don't.

Traditionally RPGs have more detailed rules for combat because (a) death is a severe and serious consequence that tends to stop play for that character so clear rules to adjudicate combat is a common need or desire; (b) RPGs developed out of the miniature war gaming hobby and those games had rules for combat, and (c) most players find combat interesting.

Unless you are playing "Sudden Death Bake Off" a fallen cake doesn't stop play for the character, it means their cake sucked so the stakes just aren't as high as a rule; RPGs didn't develop out of The American Baking Competition or Top Chef so rules for that or for everything weren't a major concern; and only a small subset of players are likely to find a narrow focus game like "Bakers & Bundpans" interesting. If you are one, just make something up.

It was a joke guys. That and an abstract challenge of game design.

Take something that most of us gloss over in RPG play and make it the central activity and theme of the game. In most RPGs the longest and most detailed subsection of the rules mechanics is combat. Not unexpected, combat is exciting.

Quote from: DavetheLost;854371It was a joke guys.

Oh.

I guess my humor sensor needs recallibration. Well that and FATE makes me cranky and HeroQuest was a tremendous disappointment.

For games with baking, look at some Computer RPGs which have crafting systems. I've seen several with cooking systems, though they tend to just require you to combine ingredients, possibly hold them over a fire for certain amount of time, and then the ingredient objects turn into a cooked food object, possibly with a chance of success and an increasing cooking skill value for your character. The food objects tend to vary in weight, value and effects. I imagine there's at least one vapid "social networking" computer game with that topic, too.

I usually find those systems pretty disappointing in various ways, but there are MMORPG players who focus on crafting items for other players, sometimes to the exclusion of other activities. There have even been games where most of the usable items in the game world were actually crafted by players.

I guess there are a few different types of non-combat activities that could be interesting from a gaming perspective.

Crafting is one of the lesser ones probably, but you could certainly break that down into some kind of planning or design phase, perhaps even a series of spin-off mini quests to acquire rare components and then finally an execution phase where you construct the item. Depending on the complexity you might need multiple designs and constructions. For example, if you were building a technological device you might need to address both hardware and software aspects of the crafting. For a magical item there could be both the construction of the base item followed by enchantment. Bad design would reduce capability, as would bad construction. Really bad performance in design might produce an item which doesn't do what was intended at all, or something that breaks almost immediately. Really bad construction might result in wasted materials or, again, a fundamental flaw which renders the item useless. Bad design might be countered by expert construction (e.g. working out the flaws as you go) or vice versa.

One of the things I think has more interesting potential is chases, be they on foot or whatever. I haven't really come across a rules system which does them well, though. I seem to recall Savage Worlds having rules for this but can't say that I recall how they work. We tried using the skill challenge rules from DnD 4e on this kind of task with some small success. In one example the GM described the encounter, with an NPC fleeing the scene and us giving chase. We switched to him asking how we were attempting to pursue, us describing our characters actions and then him deciding the effect of the action with a skill roll. The tricky thing with these kind of things (IMO) is how to adjudicate failure. It's a bit rubbish, and a bit harsh, to rule that any single failed roll ruins the pursuit. Instead I would describe the situation as getting worse and the player would then need to pull something good out of the bag to recover the situation - either a greater level of success on the following roll or achieving against a higher difficulty level perhaps. This isn't how the Skill Challenge rules worked in 4e, that was just scoring a given number of successes before scoring a given number of failures.

I would like a system to account for gambits that the player's might come up with. There needs to be the option for creative solutions or simply taking bigger risks. A good system should give the GM tools for making these kinds of assessments on the fly. And the framework of a chase is probably useful enough to handle a range of situations where two parties are competing and only one can achieve their aim (contrasting against a competition where both could achieve their aim but one could do better, like an archery contest where both can hit the target but one or the other will get closest to the Gold).

Of course the GM can make these adjudications every time, but in my personal experience you get 'assumption gaps' where a player assumes their character is able to pull of some feat or other and the GM has a very different opinion of their capability. Without some common ground of a system it can be hard to square this. I'm not advocating the tight definition that you get in things like GURPS (it has rule for how quickly you can dig with a spade or pick axe, for example...) or even as tightly defined as, say, the rules are for cover in DnD 3.x. But some kind of defined approach where you can benchmark the capabilities of a character against some kind of consistent measure.

And, of course, make playing that stuff out interesting from a game perspective.

The problem/puzzle/mystery solving aspect of role-play games perhaps thrills me more than the tactical war-game aspect, but -- barring some novel twist -- baking a cake is not interesting enough.

A big part of a good dungeon game is figuring out stuff and playing around with things to see what they do.

Ultimately, though, it's the character of the characters and their relationships that adds the special sauce.

Quote from: DavetheLost;854371It was a joke guys. That and an abstract challenge of game design.

Take something that most of us gloss over in RPG play and make it the central activity and theme of the game. In most RPGs the longest and most detailed subsection of the rules mechanics is combat. Not unexpected, combat is exciting.

Combat also gets you DEAD if you lose.  Baking rarely does that.

If most of my game involved "Cake or Death!"  I'd want more complicated baking rules.

"Take something that most of us gloss over in RPG play and make it the central activity and theme of the game. "

Why?

I've tried to move the conversation on a few times: everyone drop the cake

How about stuff like a chase, where success or failure could be critical to the characters objectives of wellbeing? Or disarming a physical or magical dohicky? Given the common stance that DnD or other games are about more than just killing things and taking their stuff few provide good tools for gaming other types of endeavour.

I've found these work well

• James Bond 007 included great rules for resolving chases.
• WEG's StarWars D6 movement rules worked for chases and races.
• Honor+Intrigue chase uses what seems to me to be the standard system of tracking relative distance with repeated rolls based on situation and character choice.

I find this set of tables from the d20 Pirates blog is helpful for adding some interest to the chase.

Quote from: dbm;855718I've tried to move the conversation on a few times: everyone drop the cake

So, what, the cake is a lie?

Pretty much every modern system out there has adequate rules for most any task one could want.

I'm running E6 Pathfinder with an all rogue party and for the most part we've had no rules troubles with evasion, chases  casing the joint, finding scores , crafting, social manipulation, stealing, fencing goods, building networks or anything else than the player might want to do.

We have a lot of alchemy going on too its its been a dramatic focus of the one of the players. Its probably more important to him than combat which everyone has been avoiding.

In real terms this alchemy is just a series of "craft alchemy" checks at DC 20 or so but the critical (2 natural 20's on two separate batches) have been a major part of the game, as much as or more so than combat/

amusingly I think we actually had a session in which there was cooking and very possibly baking. It was glossed over since it was an NPC doing it but when the gourmand PC gives it a go, it will be easy as err pie, Roll Craft Cooking X number of times for the dish.

And yes it can matter.

Quote from: dbm;853524How do you do it in your game of choice? Have you developed your own procedures that you fall back on? What games do it well out of the box in your opinion?

Two key concepts.

First, vectors. This is a concept from Technoir and it basically means that you can't try to accomplish something until you've got a vector for achieving it. The obvious physical example is, "If the guy you want to shoot is on the other side of a wall, you need to get line of sight on him before you can take the shot." But you can apply that same concept to anything in order to get away from the "one roll" paradigm: You want to convince Senor Gomez to help you? Okay, but first you're going to have to establish a relationship with him (the vector) which would make him susceptible to being convinced. (And establishing that relationship may itself require a vector.)

Second, complex skill checks. Complex skill checks require you to achieve X successes before Y failures. This is an easy mechanical way of moving away from the "one roll" problem, but the limitation is that simply rolling the dice over and over again isn't inherently interesting. To solve this, each roll needs to be contextualized. That can either be done directly by the GM, or the GM can frame the situation in a way which allows the players to contextualize each check.

One way to do this is to simply create a secondary set of stakes which applies to each check: Combat is an easy example ("You've got to hold the ogres off until Bob can defuse the bomb!"). A mechanical cost for each check also works ("The longer you spend in the demonic circle trying to undo the binding rituals, the more negative energy flows through you!").

But the most flexible way to contextualizing a complex skill check is to combine it with the conceptual framework of vectors: Don't just say "you need 3 successes to make this happen". Instead, say "these are the three things you need to accomplish to make this happen".

(Skill challenges are similar to complex skill checks, but they attempted to "evolve" the mechanic in a way that only resulted in it becoming heavily dissociated. That dissociation is, in fact, the exact OPPOSITE of the contextualization that you need in order to make a complex skill check work.)