TheRPGSite

Spinning off from Bren's Violence and fading to black (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=33095) thread, I'm interested in if or how people spotlight things other than combat.

Yes, we can all role-play without the need for rules. But the name of the hobby is a role-playing game and sometimes we want to emphasise that bit of the fun at the table.

Some systems like GURPS give you lots of tools for adding mechanical heft to non-combat scenarios, but not much guidance on how to use that capability until you get into supplements like Social Engineering which has a fantastic break down of different social scenarios and what skills might apply. Other games like Fate allow you to apply mechanical resolution to any endeavour using the Fate fractal and there are some really useful worked examples like the Fire Fighting game in Fate: Worlds on Fire. So this is not a case of trad versus modern or narrative games.

I love shifting the focus away from combat without having to go completely free-form or one-roll-resolution about it, but very few games address this well in my experience. There are some standouts to me like Social Engineering or Fate and the chase rules from Top Secret get a lot of love. I thought the Skill Challenge rules in 4e were a step in the right direction but they copped a lot of flack.

How 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?

Currently I am running Beyond the Wall and Other Adventurs and for task resolution use a simple d20 vs Attribute, roll under for success. The task difficulty gives a bonus or penalty to the roll and having an appropriate skill gives a bonus.

I have played dice pool games where a given number of successes were required to be accumulated to complete a complex task. Either through one character making repeted rolls or several characters rolling and pooling their results. This often turns into "roll the dice until you succeed" and doesn't add much drama to game play.

Neither approach deals well with the time aspect of non-combat tasks. There is often a point at which you can tell if the task is going to fail well before the time to finish it. But it usually doesn't have more than a narrative effect to say "you spend X time and realize you have to start over". If time is an important part of the task, unlock the door before the guards catch you, bake a cake in two hours, then some means of tracking how much time is spent for each die roll is needed. Otherwise a single roll success/failure resolution is all that is needed.

I wonder if some of it is that in an RPG round by round combat is usually more exciting than round by round cake baking. Having also watched the Great British Bakeoff cake baking can certainly be made exciting.

I do think my players might be disappointed if I went to a single roll victory/defeat combat system.

This, really, REALLY depends on the type of game you're running and playing. To use your example of baking from your other thread..

The vast majority of players don't have an interest in complicated, intricate, detailed baking rules. They just don't. Baking isn't going to come up as a major plot point in 99% of Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire, Shadowrun, and Deadlands games...

For those very few times it shows up as important, you can default to your system of choice's extended action rules...

Now if you're playing a game where cooking is the actual focus, or a major part of typical roleplay (Like maybe an Anime Highschool game where you're expected to bake for your love interest) then sure, you might need some dedicated baking rules...but in almost every game, you probably never will.

Now to speak more generally, many games also have "Social Combat" rules. Exalted 2nd ed did, Nwod does, and A Song of Ice and Fire does...

For awhile I actually liked these...I thought detailed social combat and intricate rules and abilities that just affected social actions made things more "Interesting".... and then I realized that was crap.... all complicated social rules did was remove the "role" playing from the game.... So I went back to simple rolls to help influence an NPC's reaction combined with actual in character RP to handle that...

It all depends on your setting and how you expect sessions to go. Shadowrun has dedicated Hacking and Chase rules because those are important aspects and elements of their setting outside of just normal combat...

Most of the time though, you don't need complicated intricate rules for every situation, you more need general rules which can be easily applied and modified by a GM to cover any situation that arises.

I actually went to less detailed hacking rules in one Cyberpunk game. Yes, that's right Cyberpunk, the genre that is all about 'Netrunning with less detailed hacking rules. The reason? All but one of my players were sitting around bored for extended periods of time with nothing to do while the Netrunner played out a detailed hack of corporate security systems, usually supposedly in parallel time with their break in. The problem was actions that took under a minute in game time were taking an hour of table time to resolve.

So, as an entire group, including the Netrunner we went to a faster and less detailed system for cyberhacking.

Now, if everyone had been involved in hacking or if hacking had taken place on a similar time scale (and play time) to the rest of the action I probably would have stuck with the detailed systems.

If I were playing Great British Bakeoff the RPG I would want the most detailed cooking rules I could get, as that is rater the point of the whole thing and every character is involved in baking. Similarly for an anime bake for your sweetheart game.

Detailed rules need an activity that is a central focus of the game, to be exciting and engaging to play, and perhaps most importantly to involve the majority of players at the table in the action at the same time.

I think baking is a red herring.

How about disabling a nuclear warhead, painting a picture to impress the queen, debating the senate, building a makeshift aircraft, improvising a gadget or any of the other myriad of tasks that could be made into interesting challenges that you don't want to wing or resolve with a single dice roll?

Quote from: dbm;853677I think baking is a red herring.

How about disabling a nuclear warhead, painting a picture to impress the queen, debating the senate, building a makeshift aircraft, improvising a gadget or any of the other myriad of tasks that could be made into interesting challenges that you don't want to wing or resolve with a single dice roll?

Those are called "Extended Tasks" and have rules in many roleplaying games already, from Storyteller to Savage Worlds, Roll&Keep and many others.

Quote from: Orphan81;853561For awhile I actually liked these...I thought detailed social combat and intricate rules and abilities that just affected social actions made things more "Interesting".... and then I realized that was crap.... all complicated social rules did was remove the "role" playing from the game.... So I went back to simple rolls to help influence an NPC's reaction combined with actual in character RP to handle that...

That's been my take on it. We play out most all the social stuff in-character... if there's a specific influence that someone is aiming for it's probably a Diplomacy roll or something similar in addition to actually talking it out.

I was reading about Houses of the Blooded earlier today, in relation to playing out Game of Thrones-style political intrigue... but, while it sounded interesting, maybe a cool boardgame, it didn't sound like the sort of thing I want out of an RPG.

Quote from: dbm;853677I think baking is a red herring.

How about disabling a nuclear warhead, painting a picture to impress the queen, debating the senate, building a makeshift aircraft, improvising a gadget or any of the other myriad of tasks that could be made into interesting challenges that you don't want to wing or resolve with a single dice roll?

I stand by what I said "Detailed rules need an activity that is a central focus of the game, to be exciting and engaging to play, and perhaps most importantly to involve the majority of players at the table in the action at the same time."

Quote from: Orphan81;853707Those are called "Extended Tasks" and have rules in many roleplaying games already, from Storyteller to Savage Worlds, Roll&Keep and many others.

But they are, in my experience, almost universally rubbish, flimsy and flavourless. Which one do you think does it well and what does it do that is good?

Quote from: DavetheLost;853730I stand by what I said "Detailed rules need an activity that is a central focus of the game, to be exciting and engaging to play, and perhaps most importantly to involve the majority of players at the table in the action at the same time."

Few games are quite so laser focussed in my opinion. Take Star Wars as an example. Yes, you will have straightforward combats where everyone is simply trying to kill the opposition.

But you will also have scenes much like you describe in a cyberpunk scenario - maybe half the group are holding off the storm troopers whilst other try to jury rig the ship and prep for take off. That is hardly the focus of the game but it is a common enough premise for it, or something like it, to be something you would want to both work well and give each player choices. The combatants are making tactical decisions every round, what decisions are the non-combatants making, other than 'I roll my mechanics skill'?

In GURPS Social Engineering they break down a wide range of social interactions into the types of skills you might employ (more than just one in most cases) and gambits that you might use (again, multiple options most of the time). You can get an interesting mechanical element into these interactions without resorting to social combat mechanics.

Quote from: dbm;853677I think baking is a red herring.

How about disabling a nuclear warhead, painting a picture to impress the queen, debating the senate, building a makeshift aircraft, improvising a gadget or any of the other myriad of tasks that could be made into interesting challenges that you don't want to wing or resolve with a single dice roll?

One option I sometimes use is for the GM or Player to divide the task into parts.
 
   Nuclear warhead: recognize the warhead, remove the cover, disable systems A, B, and C.
   Paint a picture to impress the Queen: figure out a subject (who or what) or treatment (realistic, allegorical e.g. momento mori, impressionistic) would be likely to impress, sketch the picture, paint several elements: face, clothing, setting.
   Debate the Senate: if it's an oration than a debate: select several key points (3 tends to be a nice number) to be made, for each point try to persuade the audience; if it is a debate treat it like an oration but add in the need to rebut opposing arguments, then add in a series of steps for the opponent's debate points, figure out how successful the opponent was (which sets the difficulty for PC counter arguments) and try to counter the opponent's key points.
   Scoring: Score each point successfully carried as 1, each Critical success (or really apt point with a great argument) as 2 each Critical Failure counts as -1. If the speech is a debate rather than an oration, subtract the opponent's score.
   Scores
4+ = Major success,
3= Solid Success,
2=Success,
1=Limited or Partial Success,
0=Failure,
-1 or less=Major Failure.
   Gadget creation is covered in some detail in H+I so I won't go into it here. But methods similar to the above would also work.

I find that when it comes to psychology and social interactions, the kind of number-crunching that can often be worthwhile in assessing physical activities is usually not just needless but a great distraction from what's really fun and interesting.

Something like Pendragon 's Traits and Passions can be handy, but I'd say it shouldn't come up much. Likewise C&S Influence calculations, and Reaction and Loyalty rolls in various rules sets.

The more our characters have character, relationships, desires, fears, the less we need to treat them as ciphers whose behavior is randomly generated.

Bren's examples are things I see no reason not to treat as we can treat them in reality and describe in natural language. With that, the actual questions that are uncertain naturally present themselves, usually along with a sense of appropriate odds.

One way to avoid nit-picking over an imponderable precision is to have a set scale on which one picks whatever seems closest: e.g., is it 2, 3, 4 or 6 to 1?

I guess one big thing to me is that I find interminable randomization boring compared with decision making. I have no interest in Roulette, Faro, Pachinko, Snakes & Ladders, etc.

Quote from: Orphan81;853561This, really, REALLY depends on the type of game you're running and playing. To use your example of baking from your other thread..

The vast majority of players don't have an interest in complicated, intricate, detailed baking rules. They just don't. Baking isn't going to come up as a major plot point in 99% of Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire, Shadowrun, and Deadlands games...

Exactly. It's just nutty to show up for Boot Hill expecting to spend the session making horseshoes. What part of "Dungeons & Dragons" or "Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes" do people not understand? We spend a lot of time on what interests us, and often the name of the game should be fair warning.

QuoteFor those very few times it shows up as important, you can default to your system of choice's extended action rules...

That might be just getting stuck in a rut.

People of a certain age might recall games such as Battleship, Operation, Lunar Lander, Triplanetary, Burger Time, Tapper, and Paradroid (or Quazatron). How about Origins of the Second World War, Up Front, Red Empire, Credo? Stratego, Cluedo,Twixt, Mastermind, Black Box, Jenga ...

Heck, the jousting rules in Chainmail!

There are lots of ways to play a game, and something other than tossing dice may often be a more flavorful model for a given situation.

QuoteNow if you're playing a game where cooking is the actual focus, or a major part of typical roleplay (Like maybe an Anime Highschool game where you're expected to bake for your love interest) then sure, you might need some dedicated baking rules...but in almost every game, you probably never will.

Now to speak more generally, many games also have "Social Combat" rules. Exalted 2nd ed did, Nwod does, and A Song of Ice and Fire does...

For awhile I actually liked these...I thought detailed social combat and intricate rules and abilities that just affected social actions made things more "Interesting".... and then I realized that was crap.... all complicated social rules did was remove the "role" playing from the game.... So I went back to simple rolls to help influence an NPC's reaction combined with actual in character RP to handle that...

It all depends on your setting and how you expect sessions to go. Shadowrun has dedicated Hacking and Chase rules because those are important aspects and elements of their setting outside of just normal combat...

Most of the time though, you don't need complicated intricate rules for every situation, you more need general rules which can be easily applied and modified by a GM to cover any situation that arises.

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 (http://d20pirates.blogspot.com/2012/03/interlude-chase.html) 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 (http://www.technoirrpg.com) 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.)

Quote from: rawma;856015So, what, the cake is a lie?

[neo]There is no cake[/neo]

Quote from: Justin Alexander;856043Two key concepts.

That approach sound interesting; I'll check out Technoir.

I've been thinking about chases in particular. It seemed to me like there were a few basic strategies that you might employ when trying to get away from someone. You could simply try to outdistance them, by being at least as fast and having more endurance. You could try to block them with the old 'turn over the market stall' trick or similar, or you could try to break line of sight and hide. (These would be examples of vectors, I guess?)

Having a set of template approaches to resolving these three common ways of handling a chase would be a good start to having a more satisfying (in my opinion) way of playing them out. And it would give you choices as you have three high level strategies and then, presumably, a number of more tactical choices to make whilst implementing your strategy.

In a actual car chase, there are several important elements that come to mind:

* Each driver's skill(s) which might vary by type as well as level.
* Each vehicle's characteristics, including acceleration, cornering, top speed, mass, traction and durability, as well as cover provided if people start shooting at each other, and tracking condition as cars start taking damage of different types, and perhaps what's involved if anyone goes insane and tries to actually jump onto another car (which realistically would usually fail horribly except possibly at very low speed).
* Road layout, type/quality, and terrain, including parked cars, traffic signals, road work, debris, obstacles, conditions (leaves, dirt, oil, water on road) and off-road possibilities as well as what's off-road to run into.
* Traffic and pedestrians.
* Presence of others that might get involved, such as police or people who might call for police if they notice a chase.

Evasion tactics include outrunning, out-cornering, using traffic signals and traffic to cut off pursuit, escalating danger, stopping and attacking the pursuit, attacking to slow pursuit (e.g. break windshield), stopping and running on foot, dropping objects that look like what the pursuit might want and stop for, dropping passengers, causing accidents, sudden stops, sudden reverse direction, fake a turn then go another way (possibly using on/off ramp or other obstacle), going off-road, driving over dust to create a cloud, going through terrain the pursuit won't/can't follow, going where there's police to help, turning off headlights in dark conditions, driving onto a beach, driving on sidewalks or stairs, using a motorcycle vs. car to go through narrow places, driving on shoulders or between lanes, dropping objects out window to damage pursuit or get them to swerve, ramming or sideswiping the pursuit, driving into underground garage, driving through shopping mall (see The Blues Brothers :cool:), driving up to/through large crowds.

Etc.

Yet another advantage to Free Kriegspiel, I can adjudicate any situation I want.

It requires a certain amount of ability to think on your feet and players who trust you, but it's not hard.

Describe the situation, change the situation based on what the players do, roll some dice if you think a random element might come in.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Quote from: dbm;855718I'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?

Interesting, understandable, subject to convenient rules in its own right without further abstraction. Formal procedures are already in the Original D&D set, and possibly superfluous.

 

QuoteOr 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.

If you want to abstract away all reference to what the particular 'dohicky' is and how it works, then you want a thoroughly different game. You want it no longer to be actually about any of those things!

That said, you could always toss on the flow charts in 1st ed. Gamma World. In translating to actual results, though, the GM should still have a picture of what the thing is and how it works even though it's an enigma to the players.

Quote from: dbm;853832But they are, in my experience, almost universally rubbish, flimsy and flavourless.

I realize this is a couple weeks' ago now, but.  For my part, I don't want my rules to have "flavor."  Rules, to me, are a means to an end.  As a GM, they're what enable me to adjudicate what the PCs do.  As a player, they're what informs me to what I can do, and how good am I likely to be at it.  I absolutely, positively, most sincerely do not want my rules to be exciting -- excitement comes from roleplay -- and I've seen a lot of crap game systems come from the designers being bound and determined to gussy up game mechanics to seem Exciting And New.

On a tangent, since the subject's been raised, I hate the term "social combat" like poison. To me, it implies the reduction of social interaction to Just Another Tactical Combat System:

GM: "Fair enough, what's your next Social Attack?"
PC: "I hit her with a Bon Mot!"
GM: "Alright, that costs you two Social Fatigue ... she responds with a Witty Retort! (sound of dice rolling) Alright, add her Charisma and Social Status bonuses to the damage ... you lose 5 Social Hit Points."
PC: "Curses, that was a bad one. Alright, I'm down to my last couple ... I better retreat with a Cut Direct."

Isn't something like that just a combat system with the serial numbers filed off? IMHO, a combat system with attacks, defenses, combat rounds and hit points doesn't cease to be so just because you attach names to the elements which imply social interaction.

Quote from: Phillip;856174If you want to abstract away all reference to what the particular 'dohicky' is and how it works, then you want a thoroughly different game. You want it no longer to be actually about any of those things!

I was aiming to be as all-inclusive as possible in the question to avoid answers like 'we don't have magic in my game of choice' etc. I definitely would care about the what and the how if I was gaming this stuff.

Quote from: Ravenswing;856226I realize this is a couple weeks' ago now, but.  For my part, I don't want my rules to have "flavor."  Rules, to me, are a means to an end.  As a GM, they're what enable me to adjudicate what the PCs do.  As a player, they're what informs me to what I can do, and how good am I likely to be at it.  I absolutely, positively, most sincerely do not want my rules to be exciting -- excitement comes from roleplay -- and I've seen a lot of crap game systems come from the designers being bound and determined to gussy up game mechanics to seem Exciting And New.

On a tangent, since the subject's been raised, I hate the term "social combat" like poison. To me, it implies the reduction of social interaction to Just Another Tactical Combat System:

GM: "Fair enough, what's your next Social Attack?"
PC: "I hit her with a Bon Mot!"
GM: "Alright, that costs you two Social Fatigue ... she responds with a Witty Retort! (sound of dice rolling) Alright, add her Charisma and Social Status bonuses to the damage ... you lose 5 Social Hit Points."
PC: "Curses, that was a bad one. Alright, I'm down to my last couple ... I better retreat with a Cut Direct."

Isn't something like that just a combat system with the serial numbers filed off? IMHO, a combat system with attacks, defenses, combat rounds and hit points doesn't cease to be so just because you attach names to the elements which imply social interaction.

A couple of things. First, I agree that the fun is set up by the role playing, but the rules have to help you score the goal, to borrow a soccer / football phrase. If you build up to a great and exciting point of action but then only have a single pass/fail roll to adjudicate it then I would say the rules are inhibiting the fun.

I used to be really keen on developing a universal mechanic to handle any conflict (which Fate does a pretty good job of in my opinion, far better than any of my ideas). But then I had the realisation that different activities had different important factors and a different feel. Which is pretty much what you are saying re social combat. I agree that social hit points are rubbish and fail to suitably represent the nature or usual flow of debate or discussion. And how they could ever represent building a relationship with someone boggles the mind.

So this is why I have come to the conclusion that some kinds of mini-games are a desirable addition to RPGs. Combat is the classic mini-game, but it is so dominant in the rules space people can't see the 'mini' and often just interpret that as 'the game.' I know I have fallen into that trap on multiple occasions, even though I am intellectually aware of it.

Hence this thread. I think having a small set of mini games to make the stuff which we would find interesting and points of tension in books, TV or films equally fun and interesting to game when they occur has to be a good thing. You never have to use these tools, in fact I would suggest that even combat should be either hand-waved or resolved with a single roll when it is not a genuine challenge to the PCs abilities. But if one of your players wants to be an artificer or cat burglar then giving them some 'game' elements to interact with as the head cracker has seems to be a worthwhile endeavour.

Many people's mileage will vary...

Quote from: dbm;856232If you build up to a great and exciting point of action but then only have a single pass/fail roll to adjudicate it then I would say the rules are inhibiting the fun.

Sure.  But that doesn't have anything to do with my point.  Whether rules have "flavor" or not have little to do with their mechanical complexity; they're separate values.

Quote from: Ravenswing;856226GM: "Fair enough, what's your next Social Attack?"
PC: "I hit her with a Bon Mot!"
GM: "Alright, that costs you two Social Fatigue ... she responds with a Witty Retort! (sound of dice rolling) Alright, add her Charisma and Social Status bonuses to the damage ... you lose 5 Social Hit Points."
PC: "Curses, that was a bad one. Alright, I'm down to my last couple ... I better retreat with a Cut Direct."

Isn't something like that just a combat system with the serial numbers filed off? IMHO, a combat system with attacks, defenses, combat rounds and hit points doesn't cease to be so just because you attach names to the elements which imply social interaction.

I agree that this sort of social combat sucks. However, I think that flavor is important because I think flavor is far more than just the names of the elements. Flavor includes how the system works, and the hypothetical social combat above has sucky flavor.

The most important issue for game design is what choices the players are making. In combat, there are usually a variety of maneuvers and options that players can take - plus choice of how to move and which enemies to target.

In an extended skill tests, there is generally no choice. You're just rolling the dice over and over - like playing Candyland.

By comparison, in the chase system of James Bond 007, it's a different choice. You bid against the opponent for how difficult a maneuver you want to try, and then each of you rolls and deals with the outcomes. If you're both bidding low, then you might both crash - as opposed to being overtaken or getting away. It's a different dynamic than combat.

Quote from: dbm;856232I was aiming to be as all-inclusive as possible in the question to avoid answers like 'we don't have magic in my game of choice' etc. I definitely would care about the what and the how if I was gaming this stuff.

If the actual what and how seem almost beside the point next to abstract contrivances, there's a good chance we haven't really paid them enough attention. In a role-playing game, I'd say its rather the abstraction that has the burden of justifying itself, not engagement with the situation at hand.

QuoteA couple of things. First, I agree that the fun is set up by the role playing, but the rules have to help you score the goal, to borrow a soccer / football phrase. If you build up to a great and exciting point of action but then only have a single pass/fail roll to adjudicate it then I would say the rules are inhibiting the fun.

The taste in fun to which early RPGs catered was one that also enjoyed the Avalon Hill and SPI board games in which a host of player decisions were the focus. My maneuvering of army divisions, say,creates the arrangement of forces and terrain that sets up the odds ratio. A die toss adds some variation to results that depend more on those strategic choices. To avoid a risk of "Attacker Eliminated", for instance, requires a minimum advantage (which might be attained with sacrificial "soak off" diversionary attacks).

QuoteSo this is why I have come to the conclusion that some kinds of mini-games are a desirable addition to RPGs.

Sufficient reason is that you have fun playing this or that game.

QuoteHence this thread. I think having a small set of mini games to make the stuff which we would find interesting and points of tension in books, TV or films equally fun and interesting to game when they occur has to be a good thing.

The early D&D booklets and magazine articles borrowed bits from various games. I take this cross-fertilization for granted as part of the process of play. However, I reckon most people don't think much about it or make a point of formalizing their improvised additions as the way something must always be hence treated.

No doubt one reason is that so many people have shelves of handbooks already presenting lots of sub-games. Get into a game line that has a long line of supplements, and you're pretty well set. You might not very particularly have Fish Tickling, Toadying and Running a Rat on a Stick Franchise, but in more general terms there's little old under the sun that won't come up given a few thousand pages of product. People tend simply to repurpose something conveniently at hand with whatever twist seems appropriate.

The amount of investment that seems worthwhile often relates to whether an enterprise is central to the game or a rare sideline.

Aces & Eights treats Wild West role-playing with distinctive treatments of cattle drives and other typical affairs. Those don't figure much in 1920s-30s Chicago, so Gangbusters instead treats such things as bootlegging, rackets and numbers running (probably not as ornately as you seem to desire).

For many of us, putting the emphasis on mechanics interesting in themselves has a tendency to distract from role-playing. A game such as Monopoly, Acquire or Saint Petersburg may be more colorful, but at the expense of being less like what I'm actually doing in my role of a real estate speculator, further removed from the phenomena that I see and hear while walking in those shoes.

Quote from: Ravenswing;856381Sure.  But that doesn't have anything to do with my point.  Whether rules have "flavor" or not have little to do with their mechanical complexity; they're separate values.

Quote from: jhkim;856437I agree that this sort of social combat sucks. However, I think that flavor is important because I think flavor is far more than just the names of the elements. Flavor includes how the system works, and the hypothetical social combat above has sucky flavor.

The most important issue for game design is what choices the players are making.

I think jhkim is looking at this from a similar perspective to me. If the systems available to you don't allow meaningful player choices which make sense in the context of what you are doing then they aren't helping. Vanilla systems with no flavour are 'meh' and ones with jarring flavour clashes can make you nauseous, to extend the metaphor.

Quote from: PhillipThe early D&D booklets and magazine articles borrowed bits from various games. I take this cross-fertilization for granted as part of the process of play. However, I reckon most people don't think much about it or make a point of formalizing their improvised additions as the way something must always be hence treated.

No doubt one reason is that so many people have shelves of handbooks already presenting lots of sub-games. Get into a game line that has a long line of supplements, and you're pretty well set. You might not very particularly have Fish Tickling, Toadying and Running a Rat on a Stick Franchise, but in more general terms there's little old under the sun that won't come up given a few thousand pages of product. People tend simply to repurpose something conveniently at hand with whatever twist seems appropriate.

Fair points, and I freely admit to have come on a journey from where I wanted a single system to handle all types of encounter equally well to where I now find myself thinking that havering a small range of tailored subsystems is a better approach.

Quote from: DavetheLost;853730I stand by what I said "Detailed rules need an activity that is a central focus of the game, to be exciting and engaging to play, and perhaps most importantly to involve the majority of players at the table in the action at the same time."

I think that is an important point.
I really like rules for magic that involve details like group rituals and finding components and new spells and research/experimentation... but mostly for the ways they can generate content for the entire group... not as some dice fest that's left up to the wizard PC alone.
There are generally not going to be interesting stakes involved with baking bread, but if there were... 'The king demands his raisin bread be perfect or heads will roll!'... and the rules for baking bread can involve the entire group... then I can see even that being entertaining.

Quote from: Simlasa;856477

Quote from: DavetheLost;853730I stand by what I said "Detailed rules need an activity that is a central focus of the game, to be exciting and engaging to play, and perhaps most importantly to involve the majority of players at the table in the action at the same time."

I think that is an important point.
I really like rules for magic that involve details like group rituals and finding components and new spells and research/experimentation... but mostly for the ways they can generate content for the entire group... not as some dice fest that's left up to the wizard PC alone.
There are generally not going to be interesting stakes involved with baking bread, but if there were... 'The king demands his raisin bread be perfect or heads will roll!'... and the rules for baking bread can involve the entire group... then I can see even that being entertaining.

Whereas I lean more towards too many cooks spoil the bread because the bakery ends up looking like a fire-drill. But the group I am with is OK with taking turns at separate activities for things that are really more of an individual activity rather than wanting or needing everyone to be together doing the same thing. I can see if that isn't something the group wants that either a simple resolution or some way of roping everyone into the one activity would be mechanically better choices.

Quote from: Bren;856527Whereas I lean more towards too many cooks spoil the bread because the bakery ends up looking like a fire-drill.

I'm not seeing as switch that is always on... a magic-user could just as easily pay some hirelings to go out and retrieve roc feathers or bloodslime... in which case a few rolls to see how long it takes and how many they return with... but if the group WAS interested it's a potential adventure hook, generated by the magic rules (of a sort that are more than just buy spell, point and shoot). Something for the thief to steal, the warrior to kill and the cleric to bless...

A movie example that comes to mind, while pretty silly, is Tampopo... in the segments that focus on the 7 Samurai spoof of assembling the perfect team of ramen cooks.

Quote from: Simlasa;856552I'm not seeing as switch that is always on... a magic-user could just as easily pay some hirelings to go out and retrieve roc feathers or bloodslime... in which case a few rolls to see how long it takes and how many they return with... but if the group WAS interested it's a potential adventure hook, generated by the magic rules (of a sort that are more than just buy spell, point and shoot). Something for the thief to steal, the warrior to kill and the cleric to bless...

OK. Take up or leave 'em adventure hooks are fine.

One thing that annoyed me during game design was the occasional playtester who kept demanding more rules for talking to NPCs. Wanting everything boiled down to a dice roll. Another wasnt satisfied with using stats as the basis for interactions and wanted new mechanics for each different thing.

Everyone else was fine with less emphasis on mechanics as it allows them to interact directly.

Theres a middle-ground in there though and some systems you just about need more mechanics to handle things. Others not so much.

That has been a frequent bugaboo leveled against D&D. "All those rules and mechanics for combat and nothing for talking. The game must be all about combat!"

OD&D expressed less interest in whether a figure can sit a horse, than in whither he will ride.

I think that's for the better.

Quote from: dbm;855718I'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.

Being chased while trying to disarm a sliding puzzle exploding cake? :cool:

In D&D a stat check was the fallback for any task not covered. That is even in the rules somewhere in the AD&D DMG. Or make some sort of equivalent save-vs. The tools are there. There was no need for more complexeties. Do you really need a seperate mechanic to tie a knot? To walk a tight rope? Bake a cake? etc?

Some players feel they do. Some dont.

Simple, throw away actions deserve simple or no mechanical representation as the outcome is irrelevant or not in doubt.

More complex actions which the players are invested in, either by having a lot riding on them or because they are a signiature feature of their character, deserve more nuanced treatment IMO.