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today, on Mez Gives Her Opinions…
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eleanorjane asked me to blather on about RPG systems and game design. Here goes.So, the thing about D&D is, it was invented by wargamers. And if you try picturing it being used in a wargame, it totally makes sense. The flat D20 roll, the spell slots, the different classes… for wargaming, it works. For modern roleplaying? Not so much.
Using Dice
Rolling a single D20 gives you really flat probabilities (equal chance of getting any number on the die). That, combined with the wide 20-number spread, means that whether or not you can do an action is extremely random. (If a particular action isn’t very random, this is because the set difficulty is so high or so low that dice rolling at all is pretty pointless.)
This doesn’t represent real life very well. It also makes things much more luck-based, which makes your character’s skillset feel irrelevant.
Instead, I prefer dice rolls with bell curves, or else dice pools.
Your basic bell curve (2D6) is my go-to. It gives enough of a bias towards the middle that you have a good idea of what your character can usually handle – but it still allows for the outliers where you get a howlingly bad (or amazingly fantastic) roll. It’s also a simple enough mechanic that it basically fades into the background.
The reason I often wouldn’t go with a 2D6 system is because you’re still limited by your basic D&D mechanic of “pick an appropriate stat and an appropriate skill, and roll for the target number”. Whereas dice pools give you an excellent extra option of “yeah, I’ll throw that in too”.
I’m trying to break into this house, so I pick my Dexterity stat and my Lockpicking skill. But I’m also using my best set of lockpicks, so I’ll add an extra die for a “Favourite Tools” bonus. Plus, I’m being instructed (in whispers) by another PC, Fingers McDuff, who’s an experienced housebreaker, so he can give me a couple of extra dice as well.
Using a dice pool gives you a simple way to add extra skills, extra help, and extra complications to a roll. I don’t use it often, but in some games it’s brilliant – especially if characters are often needing to lend a hand to each other.
That Stat/Skill Breakdown
When I see a new RPG, I can tell if the creator doesn’t have much experience with games outside of D&D, because they will have the standard six stats in place (Str/Dex/Con/Int/Cha/Wis) without even considering that there are other options. (Brawn, for instance! It’s Str/Con combined!) I like seeing that a creator has put some thought into the possibilities – because, seriously, no-one is going to decide that Wisdom is really the perfect stat for their game if they’ve actually thought it through.
Far more interesting are those games that totally screw with the stat/skill thing, and come out with entirely different options.
For instance:
- I’ve seen a zombie game that had six stats (no seperate skills) – Control, Fight, Flee, Hide, Repair, Scrounge – all based on the likely options when in a zombie-infested zone.
- Lady Blackbird gives you a background (e.g. one character might be “Athletic”, a “Smuggler” and know the “Secret of Taking a Beating”) and that background tells you whether or not they’ll be able to do something.
- Lasers and Feelings gives you a single number that tells you how good/bad you are at “lasers” (sciency stuff) and simultaneously how good/bad you are at “feelings” (people stuff). You cannot be good at both.
- The Cortex Plus game for Smallville gives you “values” and “relationships”. So instead of Clark Kent maxing out his physical skills and pounding on everyone, he rolls for Justice and Friendship (Jimmy Olsen) and saves Jimmy from getting killed by mobsters.
I really enjoy games that do this sort of stuff, because it tends to bring out the flavour of the setting really well. (My in-development Stargate game, for instance, would need to have “motivations” on the character sheet, because Teal’c fighting random mooks on a random planet is going to go quite differently to Teal’c fighting Apophis’ troops.)
Ye Olde Black Magic
D&D uses spell slots. Good for wargaming, crappy for modern roleplaying. Plus, they totally ruin immersion, because there is no possible universe in which Vancian Magic is the most realistic option.
The best magic systems in RPGs all seem to do the following:
- treat it as a skill
- track how much you can do with “mana”
So you roll against Willpower (stat) + Magic (skill), and if it succeeds you take that spell’s worth of mana out of your current supply – thus handily limiting how much magic you can do per day.
It’s simple (because it’s just like every other roll you’re already doing), and it doesn’t break immersion. It’s also customisable – you can easily give extra skill points for spells you’re experienced at doing.
The BtVS RPG does it best. Because it’s the Buffyverse, there needs to be potential for the magic to backfire. So spells work like this:
Set Something on Fire Spell
roll 9 or over: You succeed.
roll 5 or under: You’re not powerful enough to get the spell going.
roll between 6 and 8: You’re powerful enough to do the magic, but not powerful enough to control it – so something else catches fire. Possibly you.
Further Reading
Honestly, I think everyone should start out by playing D&D. Even though it sucks, it gives a good basic grounding in the terms and assumptions that roleplayers are likely to work with.
But… they shouldn’t stop there. I think everyone should try out lots of different styles of RPG, so that they can get an idea of the possibilities, and a feeling for the style that really suits them.
This is what I would recommend:
- try D&D for a few sessions
- try a session of Lasers and Feelings
- try Ten Candles
- try a game where the characters are kids – like Monsters And Other Childish Things or BubbleGumshoe
- try Lady Blackbird
- then try as many different genres as you can, for shortish games
There are a ton of different options out there – many of them free – and some of them can really change your perspective of what an RPG can be.
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I feel very vindicated now, because your issues with D&D are exactly the same as my issues.
Though, also, I don't love class-based systems, and especially not the way D&D does it where some classes are a full-on profession/vocation while others are just a collection of skills that anyone should be able to learn.
If I had to go with a class-based system I'd probably go with something like Earthdawn - there are a collection of Talents and every class gets easy access to X many of them. You level them up with XP, and when you've reached a given threshold of X number of Talents at Y level, your class levels up and you get access to other Talents. So you can either be a broad generalist or a focused specialist or somewhere in between, and two characters of the same class might look very different from each other in terms of abilities while still having the same fundamental theme and role.
As for Magic, well, I couldn't phrase it any better than your "there is no possible universe in which Vancian Magic is the most realistic option" because no, there really is not.
I quite like Shadowrun's take on Magic - it doesn't use a Mana/Spell Pool system, it makes you resist drain (which inflicts damage every time you fail to resist it.) So you can throw low-power/low-drain spells around near-indefinitely, if you're relatively powerful, but you've still only got a few really high-powered spells in you before you fall over with your brain leaking out your nose.
I do like the BtVS take on magic, and it works really well for that setting where magic is supposed to be risky and potentially unreliable. I think one thing so many people discount is the way that the setting should influence the mechanics, and the way that the wrong mechanics will work against whatever flavour you're trying for.
no subject
Hurrah!
I'm not a huge fan of class-based systems either. The Earthdawn system sounds interesting, though – I've never encountered something like that before.
I quite like Shadowrun's take on Magic - it doesn't use a Mana/Spell Pool system, it makes you resist drain (which inflicts damage every time you fail to resist it.) So you can throw low-power/low-drain spells around near-indefinitely, if you're relatively powerful, but you've still only got a few really high-powered spells in you before you fall over with your brain leaking out your nose.
Ooh. That sounds really cool!
no subject
Random number generators are hard to do! I agree that dice-pools are generally the most interesting but I do also like flat rolls a lot because of exactly what you said about their use in systems where many checks will be un-passable and un-failable; it's an interesting design space to me, to be able to formally and exactly quantify what's so easy for a PC that they can do it without needing to roll, and what's so hard that rolling for it is absurd, and to have that track with mechanical progression rather than with the intuitions of the GM. This is one of the reasons I hate 5e so much; it takes the elegant implementation of this that 3.5 had going and ruins it by making the bonuses too small for the random generator.
>>> Ye Olde Black Magic
I def agree keying magic to a stat of some kind is pretty good (and obviously necessary to the extent that "class level" isn't another stat and that you're using classless systems, which TBH you should be; classes make building characters easier but are otherwise pretty bad), and that you should use your system's regular metric for capacity to measure capacity in magic. Rolling to cast spells works well, as does having a finite resource pool to cast out of (often fatigue instead of mana but that's much of a muchness). However systems like "Magic is just a thing you can do and then keep doing", "Magic is impactful primarily in terms of narrative positioning" (e.g. in the clark kent example above, all the super-strength in the world can't change how many dice he rolls, but it can mean that when he rolls well he gets to tear steel beams in half and when he rolls badly he gets knocked backwards through three buildings and that has implications about the story you're telling and what actions and plans seem interesting and feasible).
There's also Chuubo's which has many paths to attaining *supernatural effect* (Mostly either of the spending-MP form or the permanent-capacity form) depending on the desired mechanical framing of the supernatural effect, but the skills which are tagged magical skills are particularly interesting - a magical skill, in exchange for having few to no mundane uses (generally only "knowing about the mundane aspects of the magic system at hand, e.g. knowing about fire for a fire-mage, though given that this is a system where most characters will custom-write skills, exceptions naturally abound), the magical skill will have some set of magical techniques which can do things otherwise impossible at the cost of a often-substantial obstacle (which in this system impairs your ability to be *impressive, productive, and happy* with the results of your skill, not your ability to achieve naive success, so you can get off a city-destroying conflagration and not achieve any of your goals amid the destruction, or beat someone in a sword-duel but have the victory turn out to be narratively irrelevant if you produce anemic intention ratings).
>>> Further Reading
I broadly agree with all of this bar two points: Firstly, that I think light oneshots and crunch or narrative heavy longer campaigns have a substantial qualitative difference. I'm not sure there's any good way to do a taster plate of the latter; it's innately difficult to do a taste of something high-investment and complicated. But I still think they're important parts of the hobby worth thinking about and mentioning. If you have ideas for introducing people to these, I'm all ears.
Secondly, I used to agree WRT D&D being a good game to introduce things, but I'm increasingly opposed, for a couple of reasons. The main ones are that D&D isn't actually a good tool for teaching TTRPG assumptions and how to think about them, because it doesn't actually talk about them explicitly very often, and thus players who get into the hobby from D&D often end up stuck in this kind of D&D cul-de-sac where they expect all other systems to be alike to D&D in various unspoken ways. It's *really* frustrating to talk to people who believe they have to write their own systems or endure games they hate because every system is *clearly* going to have some trait of D&D that is patently not universal (See: classes, a focus on combat, a cliche fantasy setting, racism, no good social skills, any social skills). The cultural omnipresence of D&D helps this along a great deal because it drowns out competing voices.
(Also lots of people just stick with their first system no matter what it is, or will dump the hobby if they don't enjoy the first few sessions because really who wants to give more than a couple evenings to a potential hobby you don't enjoy, so you'd better introduce them to something great)
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True. I'm really not sure how someone could get introduced to them, though.
I used to agree WRT D&D being a good game to introduce things, but I'm increasingly opposed, for a couple of reasons.
Your reasons do make sense. My main problem is that I'm not actually familiar (in practice) with much fantasy roleplaying other than D&D. If I'd played it, I'd probably suggest that new players start with Dungeon World – but I'm a bit limited in only having read about it.
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