 |
|
|
What Makes Your Ideal Game System?
Adrian Martinez wrote:
To start off could I ask you what qualities you are looking for in an *ideal* rpg system (pretend that we are in a perfect world). Please specify what these qualities are, elaborate as to why you value that quality and share with us how you think it will enhance game play.
Here's what an ideal RPG system would contain for me.Please keep in mind that these are opinions only and not the ten commandments. However, I would welcome comment and critique since there may be contradictions in my expectations that I don't see but you may. Why am I doing this? To help me clarify my thoughts about game design. So, please help.
Detailed and Meaningful Character Design
Detailed: the abilities of the character are listed or at least expressed in some way in the system. This is contrasted with the old "class" system or any similar system that uses a basic template and allows variations of a theme. Each character must be unique and an ideal system for me would help me craft a character that is unlike any other in the game.
Meaningful: the abilities described have weight in the game. They affect the game in some way. Their existence changes the story in subtle ways. There are important implications in the game environment for the character and those who associate with him. I look at character abilities as foreshadowings of sorts. Sooner or later, a plot hook will snag that ability. Sooner or later, that ability will be essential for the group's success.
Design: the players may choose how to express his character within set parameters. The character is not a result of chance or arbitrary decisions, but a product of a well-thoughtout convergence of the player's imagination and the material the milieu presents.
Transparent Resolution
The resolution of all actions in the game should be intuitive and brisk and not get in the way of the story. In my experience, resolutions that get in the way end up devolving into boring dice-rolling exercises. I feel that resolution systems are necessary to heighten tension and suspense, but not become tedious. I guess this means transferring the issue for fairness to the GM instead of investing it in the dice and the system it serves. I guess that this means minimal dice rolling as far as the games go, making the dice rolling the punctuation marks of the game rather than the actual text itself.
Easy to Learn and Easier to Teach
Related to the previous characteristic, this one is a consequence of the system being easy to use. This becomes important in a game because it makes getting into the game easier. Furthermore, simple, internally-consistent systems prevent the spawning of rules-layers who thrive on the exceptions of a system.
Malleable
I see rpg systems as building blocks for the imaginations of the GM and the players. I wouldn't want detailed resolution procedures because it locks the system into the milieu, but I would appreciate a system that makes it easy for me to come up with detailed and meaningful procedures of my own. This make it easy for GMs to adjudicate situations they are totally unprepared for without having to wade through volumes of rules.
Portable
A consequence of transparent and malleble, the system should so simple that a GM can carry all he needs about the system in his head and, if need be, can easily reconstruct pertinent tables and charts. This frees the players from the burden of carrying around books (or buying them, for that matter!). That means that they can game virtually anywhere!
Feedback, please
Dariel Quiogue wrote:
Ambershae already knows quite well what I want in an RPG system, but to get the ball rolling and to make it public, here's my wish list (not in any particular order):
1) Simplicity - simple to learn, simple to play; no heavy number-crunching, either upon character creation or during the game itself; a die-roll system that's easy to understand and use, and one that doesn't ask you to roll an entire bucketful of dice all the time. Nor should either player or GM have to perform any complex mathematical operations during play; the most that should be done is either addition or subtraction.
Also, the system should use a single resolution mechanic; I now shy away from systems that require multiple varieties of dice, and systems that use the same dice in completely different ways. For example, in AD&D, Hit Rolls, Saving Throws, and Ability/Proficiency Checks are all made using the d20 - but Hit Rolls and Saving Throws use "higher = better" while Ability/Proficiency Checks use "lower = better." This can get confusing, and I remember even a veteran like Josh asking ever so often if he needed higher or lower than the number given to succeed.
Another quibble with AD&D is the way skills are handled. Weapon and hand-to-hand combat skills are handled one way (THACO), non-weapons proficiencies another, the specialized thief skills yet another way, and clerical abilities such as turning undead yet another! Such a system can be described in a single word: CLUMSY!!! All these things could have been handled with a single mechanic.
2) Flexibility - the system does not enforce any particular playing style, and allows me as a character to try anything feasible in real life. This is where many games (and in my old group, GM's) fail to pass my SOD (suspension of disbelief) barrier. To be told "you can't try that because there aren't any rules for it" is one of the worst turnoffs I can get in an RPG.
3) Internal Logic - the entire system "hangs together" well. There is a definite and logical relationship between the mechanics and what they represent, and because these elements are consistent with each other you feel comfortable with the system. Real-world expectations can be met consistently, and a player can establish the limits and capabilities of his character
intuitively.Example of bad internal logic: in AD&D, armor makes you harder to hit; Hit Points are not a straight measure of physical well-being; Saving Throws are redundancies of what should be simple ability checks - and so on and so on until TSR lawyers slap a lawsuit on me but what the hell I'm a heretic and proud of it ...
Most 3rd generation games - Fuzion, White Wolf, CF, L5R - already have satisfactory internal logic (though again in L5R the old question of what armor does pops up again, but otherwise the system is ok).
4) A plenitude of options when acting - players as a rule are natural tacticians. Part of the fun in the game is weighing the different options and juggling resources to best effect. The player must know his options and decisions are important, else the game becomes no more than a dice-rolling exercise.
The realization that initiative is actually a matter of choices was what made me replace the initiative roll standard to most games with a bidding mechanic in Flex (my homebrew system) where initiative is commensurate to the risk the player is willing to have his character take.
5) Non-random character generation - I usually approach games with a character concept already in mind. I then fit the concept to the numbers as best as possible. All too often, rolling dice keeps me from getting the kind of character I want.
6) Character background must matter - most RPGs simply give you a list of stuff your character can have and leave you to "go shopping." There's no incentive to craft a background for your character, because it won't matter anyway. My ideal RPG system would recognize the knowledge and experience a character gains from his background and makes use of it.
A frustrating experience I had while playing AD&D illustrates the point: I was playing a barbarian warrior from a Celtic-based culture, and we had just encountered a band of pixies. I told the GM I would volunteer information about the pixies that was partially correct but larded with errors (I also GM, so I knew their game specs), based on the superstitions of my people (who I explained had some experience with the faerie races, but far from possessed the whole picture); instead he told me that I knew absolutely nothing about that particular race, and that my character's action was abuse of player info.
Now while I may rant on and on about this particular GM's ineptitude, in fairness I must say a large part of the fault is the system's. Since any barbarian created using the Player's Handbook is essentially the same anyway, there's simply no point in giving him a background.
By contrast, a game that takes care to make backgrounds matter is Pendragon. Though the selection of "character classes" is limited - the entire game is slanted toward playing knights - each knight can be made very different as the game takes into account the character's race, region of origin, parentage, foster-parents if he was fostered, religion, etc etc - and by the time one is finished, the player will have a pretty good idea who and what his character is in the world of Pendragon.
Yet another game whose character creation system makes background story important is Fuzion (Mekton Z, Bubblegum Crisis, etc). Here, the player makes a character by following a Lifepath flowchart, where either choices or die rolls prompt the player to define significant events in his character's life and work out their consequences.
7) Graded Results - players want to know how well or how badly they did, both for entertainment value and to adjust their plans accordingly; therefore a mechanic that allows both player and GM to gauge relative success/failure is important.
This is why I felt it was imperative to eliminate entirely the damage roll from FLEX. My idea was, any weapon used properly and with skill will have a significant if not deadly effect. Most systems would rate a penknife at, say, 1d3 worth of damage potential and a battleaxe at 1d10; but to my mind, a penknife used to severe the jugular and a battleaxe used to crush a skull achieve exactly the same thing. The difference is in the way they were employed, and the requirements for the proper use of the weapons; the battleaxe is deadlier because it can do crushing blows from a distance, while with a penknife you have to get up close and personal. In FLEX, this simply translates to a higher difficulty number for the penknife wielder.
So far, this is a general list that I would apply to any game system regardless of genre. Now for my genre-specific wants:
Fantasy:
1) Skill-based magic system - magic must be treated and resolved as any other skill in the game, different though its effects may be.
2) Internal logic - internal logic is most vital to a magic system because here you must construct a plausible system of causes and effects based on phenomena our modern, rational mind does not accept as possible. This is where most magic systems fail.
3) Mythic magic - this is hard to define, but perhaps the simplest way to do so is "not AD&D style magic." That is, point-and-zap spellcasting such as found in AD&D should either not work or be very costly somehow. Magic and magical items should not be commoditized - there is no proliferation of "+1 swords" lying about, there are no "magic shops" without good reason, and supernatural entities should take notice when their dominions are trespassed. Magic-workers should not be stereotyped. Now I don't know how other players will react to this one, but I say, personally, that magic should never be completely divorced from religion.
Mythic magic is magic that resonates with magic as we learn of it from fairy tales, ancient epics, fantasy fiction, and – yep -history. Historically, all magic traditions stem from the same roots as religion; religion being the way people perceive and venerate the supernatural, and magic being the way people access, utilize and manipulate the [same] supernatural.
Mythic magic operates according to certain defined laws and is therefore a skill.
Mythic magic is a secret shared only between a select few, but is generally known of and either respected or dreaded by the rest of society. Mythic magic has a socioeconomic function; its practitioners are tolerated or venerated by society because they perform certain beneficial functions such as weather prediction/control, bring luck, keep the gods happy and the demons far away, etc etc.
Mythic magic is wrapped around, and is wrapped in, story. Every magical item has a unique origin. Every action and item used in the casting of a spell has a reason for being there. Every entity invoked has his/her own nature and motives, and acts according to them, helping or hindering as they see fit. Time and place affect the use of magic; geomantic, astrological and other auguries are significant in the selection of times and places for the casting of spells.
I could go on and on in this vein, but - I'm getting rather sleepy. More tomorrow, plus wants in scifi/space opera RPGs.
Angelo Bautista wrote:
Hmm... What is my _ideal_ game system? Or what do I look for in a game system...
SIMPLICITY
I like game systems to be simple in resolution. When the system resolves things fast with no fuss, role-playing does not suffer and it is not reduced to a chart or dice-based game. Systems that I like for their simplicity in resolution (IMHO-YMMV) are Star Wars, Mechwarrior, Storyteller (WW) and In Nomine. This is my primary requirement.
FLEXIBLE CHARACTER GENERATION
Having crossed-over from being a number cruncher, I now believe in the concept first system. This needs a system that is _not_ based on random generation like AD&D, et al.
SKILL-BASED NOT 'CLASS-BASED'
Systems that take into account both natural aptitude and proficiency is a must in my book with both being based upon the characters' background.
These are my Top Three. There are others that I want to list down and I want to expand on, but time constraints compel me to cut this short.
'Till next time... B)
Frank Perez wrote:
WHAT IS MY IDEAL SYSTEM? BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HAH!
What is the ideal game system? In essence, there is no such thing. A system must revolve around the game milieu that you want to simulate. How successfully it simulates that game world with minimum fuss will determine if it is ideal for that milieu.
BACKGROUND: VICTORY CONDITIONS AND WAYS TO ACHIEVE THEM
Before I discuss the design considerations for any game system, let me discuss victory conditions as they apply to a game.
Role-playing games have been classified as a different kind of gaming experience. Some advocates claim that, in a role-playing game, there is no real goal. The very purpose of gaming is to live out the life of an alter ego in a shared "reality" that exists only in the players’ minds.
This does not mean, however, that there are no such things as victory conditions. Every adventure has its own conditions that indicate whether a party wins or loses. In one adventure, the objective might be to slay the evil dragon that has been ravaging the land. In another, the objective might be to escort the princess to safety through the Forest of Undead Gods. That role-playing games offer this much flexibility is but one of its selling points.
This sort of flexibility is also a trouble spot. When a player creates a character for a game, how does he know what skills are best to acquire? For example, creating an entire party of combatants may be perfect in a game of Recon, but it will be terrible in a game that also emphasizes investigation and research skills, such as Call of Cthulhu. Players who have a good guess as to what their campaign’s victory conditions are will be able to choose the complement of skills that their party will need.
Now, I know that there are game masters out there who want to curb any tendency to min-max by insisting that their players create their characters without discussing among themselves who should get what skills for party survival. Whether this strategy will work will depend on one thing: Does your game have victory conditions that require the successful use of certain skills or not?
If your answer to the above question is "yes," then players will naturally want to maximize their chances to succeed. To prevent a player from doing so will only result in frustration on the player’s part, especially if the lack or inadequacy of a vital skill will prevent victory.
There are also victory conditions that do not require a character’s skill. Puzzles in a computer adventure game fall under this category. All that is necessary to succeed is to execute the necessary actions in the proper sequence. Determining this sequence of actions will then be a function of the puzzle’s difficulty and the players’ real-life IQ (gasp). If your game world is rife with puzzles like these, you might as well tell your players to throw away their character sheets because they won’t need them to solve your puzzles.
On the other hand, if your game has no victory conditions, there really is no point in min-maxing character skills. Any outcome is as good as any other outcome. You and your players may as well do improvisational theater instead.
(By the way, if a game has no victory condition, is it still a game? An oxymoron, if you ask me. I’d say it’s more like a shared hallucination than anything else. Some people enjoy getting together to live out meandering lives in an alternate reality. I don’t.)
For this discussion, I am going to concentrate on games whose victory conditions require the successful use of character skills.
COST OF SKILLS
The gaming world will determine what skills are more important than others. A hierarchy of importance implies that some skills should be more expensive to acquire and develop than others. On the other hand, the cost associated with the most desired skills should balance out with those of the less desirable ones. Without this balance, player frustration may ensue.
For example, in Call of Cthulhu, a character can conceivably have any skill imaginable, including Singing. The cost of acquiring initial skills (and the method of developing them) is the same for all skills in this game. On the other hand, I have never seen a published adventure for Call of Cthulhu whose victory conditions require the successful use of Singing. Hence, the cost of acquiring such a skill should be much cheaper than acquiring, say, Library Use or Handgun. To speak in economic terms, the cost (of acquiring skills) must match the demand (of skills whose successful use in an adventure will determine victory). Note that since skills are themselves freely available to anyone who wants to acquire them, supply does not figure in the economic equation.
Conceivably, any skill might be successfully used to achieve a victory condition. For example, someone with the Singing skill might distract a target long enough for a thief to sneak into the target’s bedroom and purloin a magic gem. Nevertheless, if Singing is not expected to be used often to achieve a victory condition, its cost must be cheaper than those that are more vital to success. For example, why should a character invest so much in Singing to distract a target when he can just as easily acquire a Blackjack skill to knock the target from behind? If the Blackjack skill will see more use in your game world than Singing, there is little sense in making them cost the same.
In simple terms, a skill that will be used ten times more often to achieve victory than any other skill should also cost ten times as much.
To achieve balance requires knowing beforehand what skills are most necessary in your game. This means that for a game engine to perform optimally, its design cannot be divorced from the game world for which it will be used. A system’s adaptability to any other world will depend on how similar it is to the system’s inherent milieu and the expected victory conditions implicit in that milieu. Even among game systems that claim to be generic, you will need to make a considerable investment in source books that tweak the engine to adapt it to a particular milieu.
SKILL DIVERSIFICATION
What are the skills that should be available to your player characters? That will depend on the whole emphasis of your gaming world. For example, if you are simulating the world of Kung Fu movies, you should not lump all the various fighting styles under a generic "Martial Arts" skill. T’ai Chi Chuan is not the same as Jeet Kune Do or Jujitsu. A character who knows only Karate can conceivable lose against someone who knows both Karate and Aikido. The effects of pitting one fighting style against another are sufficiently different to warrant more detailed treatment. On the other hand, if your gaming world will hardly feature unarmed combat, it makes little sense to give it this much detail.
Here’s another example to drive home the point. White Wolf’s World of Darkness games use the generic "Firearms" skill to resolve all combat involving bullets. Anyone who has actually handled different types of ordnance will tell you that being skilled in using pistols will not make you equally skilled with submachine guns. In fact, shooting clay pigeons requires a different set of skills from shooting combatants who can shoot back, even if you’re using the same kind of weapon in both cases. Being good at one skill will not automatically make you good in another skill that looks similar on the surface.
If you’re playing a game where all your player characters are soldiers in a war milieu, it makes sense to model firearms with a high level of detail. Even then, if your soldiers will be shooting enemy soldiers most of the time instead of clay pigeons, you may not want to offer a detailed set of skills for trap shooting. On the other hand, this kind of detail is ridiculous in a game of comic book superheroes, especially if their powers include the ability to dodge bullets or to be altogether invulnerable to them.
Ultimately, the reason for offering skill diversity is to allow players to achieve a victory condition in a variety of ways. A character’s winning strategy should depend on the skills that he has. A unique and well-engineered character is a source of pride for the owning player. Characters that look and feel generic are not.
Here’s a variation of the Pareto rule that you can use to determine how detailed your set of skills should be: Determine the top 20% of the activities that will have a significant effect in your gaming world and use them to identify the top 80% of your game’s skills. For example, if most of the characters’ activities will involve dealing with computers, you might want to diversify the generic "Computers" skills, providing skills for Programming, Networking, and Hacking, among others.
SKILL RESOLUTION
The method of skill resolution should have a feel that simulates the action itself. For example, Victory Game’s James Bond system has a method of resolving car chases that involves bidding to determine who gets to make the more daring move. Although it does make a lot of sense, the mere act of bidding hardly feels like an exciting car chase.
Combat resolution techniques that are as quick as swinging a sword are better than methods that take too long to resolve. This is where White Wolf’s World of Darkness games fail miserably. Players roll too many dice for too little effect, especially when they roll natural tens. This problem is most apparent in combat, where the attacker rolls dice to attack, the defender rolls dice to dodge, the attacker rolls dice to do damage, and the defender rolls dice to soak the damage. After rolling a whole lot of dice, the players may find that not much damage has been dealt after all. The system is more cumbersome than it has to be. Even a contrary game like AD&D has a more fluid combat resolution method, however silly it may be. Nevertheless the different methods of resolving actions in AD&D often requires scouring the rulebook for the appropriate tables, which makes for a slower resolution system.
Has anybody ever played Dragonquest? It’s a second-generation system that uses only percentile dice to resolve actions. Unfortunately, determining what effect the dice roll represents will require a lot of math. I don’t mean simple addition or subtraction. I’m talking multiplication and division here. Does all this math slow down combat resolution? You bet. Is this the way I like it? No way.
On the other hand, I’m not an advocate of systems with no method for randomly generating effects, however fast their resolution may be. Because of conditions that are too many to detail, one cannot expect a person to be able to effect the same action in the same way all the time. A good way to simulate these differences in effect is with a randomizer like dice or cards. I'm not adamant on this issue, however. If I see a believable way to generate effects without a randomizer, I'll go for it. Until then, I'll hang on to my dice and cards.
Speaking of random effects, one would expect that an expert at a particular skill would consistently be able to achieve the same effect each time he uses that skill. A rank amateur would be expected to achieve a diversity of effects, most of which are bad. For those who are statistically inclined, I’m talking about lowering the standard deviation of the effect for experts and increasing it for novices.
Say, wha-? Okay, let me illustrate this by way of an example. Imagine that we have a character who is an expert at shooting a stationary target. After years of practice, he can be expected to hit the bull’s eye practically all the time. Compare him to a novice shooter, who will more likely shoot many areas around the target, possibly even outside the target, rather than hit the bull’s eye itself. The more practiced the novice becomes, the smaller will be the scatter pattern around the bull’s eye. The more consistently will he then be able to achieve the effect that he wants.
Does this mean that those who are more practiced can achieve a better effect? Not necessarily. Imagine, for instance, that a particular character has taught himself how to play the piano. After years of practice, he still winds up making mistakes, but at least he makes the same mistakes consistently.
To date, I haven’t seen any paper-and-pen system that models the standard deviation of effect satisfactorily. Even among computer games such as Fallout, combat resolution for expert shooters can still result in a wide variety of ill effects, such as hitting your party members when you mean to hit an enemy. If you’re a game designer who’s trying to develop a better system, this is an area where you can actually make a difference. I'm not sure if including standard deviation in your model will be better, but it certainly will be different.
OKAY, SO WHAT’S MY IDEAL SYSTEM?
I already told you, I don’t have one. Oh, all right, I guess I’m partial to FUDGE, the free game system, because it presents a very elegant core that still allows me to define the rules the way I want to. Nevertheless, it does give the game master a lot of work to tackle. If you’re trying to design your own generic game system, you’re going down a path that many others have paved before. The level of acceptance for many game systems, such as GURPS and FUDGE, is so high that you face very stiff competition in the RPG world.
Game designers have a better chance of gaining market share if they develop a fascinating and creative world, however bad their system might be. Note, for instance, the popularity of White Wolf’s games. Even TSR’s AD&D has diversified its line by offering different game worlds on which to run their system. Creating your own world and offering it to the market is as difficult as trying to be a movie star in Hollywood. If you lack the creative juices to pull it off, you might want to try to get a license for a franchised world, like Star Wars or Star Trek. (Sorry, they have already been taken.)
Personally, I’m more interested in game systems that smoothly model a rich and exciting gaming milieu. White Wolf’s games feature some very rich worlds, but, like vampires, their game system sucks. Hmmm. I wonder if Kindred and Wraiths go well with FUDGE…
 |
||
|
|