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Joe Slowboat posted:For the record, I absolutely think there's a threshold of how flawed a game is before it's not worth trying to hold it together that way. D&D is the Monopoly or Risk of RPGs; tons of people are going to play it and try to extract a good experience from it, but it's absolutely poorly designed for that.
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Sep 27, 2017 17:49
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Yeah the basic tension is: -most or all RPGs will have enough flaws built in that a player can create a character that is not well-balanced to the other characters reasonably created in the party -when this is extreme, the other players are likely to resent the imbalance -but at the same time, it isn't always intentional or "bad behavior" when a player sits down with a game book and builds a character that turns out to be comparatively imbalanced It ought to be a goal of a game designer to set expectations and build systems that prevent radical imbalance, and it also is incumbent on gaming groups to build parties rather than characters and otherwise cooperate during game setup so that everyone understands what the likeliest imbalance pain points are and can collaborate on avoiding the game's built-in flaws rather than running head-first into them. Getting mean about other people in your game group not being on the same page as you re: game expectations is unreasonable: but also players unwilling to cooperate during character creation or unwilling to discuss and compromise on power balance across the party are being unreasonable too. Poorly designed games make these bad situations more likely, while well-designed games make them less likely, and all games exist on a spectrum of mechanical design but are typically so complex that it's challenging to place them precisely on that line relative to one another. And the quality of the rules mechanics is not the sole factor by which games are (or should be) chosen, so it's also kind of lovely to attack people for playing a game with serious mechanical flaws. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Sep 27, 2017 |
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Sep 27, 2017 17:53
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Comrade Gorbash posted:The problem here is that Kai Tave isn't arguing against this stance, he's arguing against calling charop poison, especially in a specific TTRPG where the mechanics clearly enforce building characters a particular way. It wouldn't even really be a point of contention if Kai Tavern wasnt prepared to die on the hill of "It's not my fault the other players are scrubs, they should git gud." The fact that you can abuse the flaws in a system does not mean that you must, or even that you should unless the rest of the table is on board. There are better venues for that sort of play, like MOBAs or single player games where refusing to work with the assumptions of the other players at the table aren't going to impact anyone else's enjoyment of the game.
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Sep 27, 2017 22:36
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Liquid Communism posted:It wouldn't even really be a point of contention if Kai Tavern wasnt prepared to die on the hill of "It's not my fault the other players are scrubs, they should git gud." This hasn't been my point either but hey, don't let that stop you from continuing to misinterpret everything I post.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:06
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Kai Tave posted:This hasn't been my point either but hey, don't let that stop you from continuing to misinterpret everything I post. What is your point then? Lay it out in nice, clear language. Because all I've seen from you so far has been various takes on the stance that if abuse of a game system is possible, then it is justified, and if people don't enjoy that at their table they should not play games where it is possible... which amounts to not playing the vast majority of TTRPGs.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:11
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I still don't see anything posted actually being the fault of charop, but rather the fault of players who refuse to work within a set of shared expectations.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:12
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The point is that pushing game design problems off onto the social contract is a bad idea.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:14
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The point is that pushing game design problems off onto the social contract is a bad idea. While true, in my experience anyone who outright refuses to listen when people ask them to tone down what they're doing are also people who I'd rather not be playing with for a number of other reasons.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:20
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On the other hand, if someone optimizes their character for their main schtick and you go after them raging about how they're terrible munchkin powergamers there's one rear end in a top hat in that situation and it's not the dude who thought it'd be neat to have 16 dice in pistols.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:23
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Oh definitely. I just forgot to mention that because the groups I play with have historically had more problems with players who refuse to be reasonable than GMs that refuse to be reasonable.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:26
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Liquid Communism posted:It wouldn't even really be a point of contention if Kai Tavern wasnt prepared to die on the hill of "It's not my fault the other players are scrubs, they should git gud." The fact that you can abuse the flaws in a system does not mean that you must, or even that you should unless the rest of the table is on board. Liquid Communism posted:Honestly, after playing and running Shadowrun for so long, I am of the opinion that CharOp is poisonous bullshit that is actively the enemy of fun at the table. An optimized character has no way to grow or adapt in gameplay, and generally the player gets bored or butthurt if they cannot apply their optimized gimmick on a high percentage of game situations.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:47
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Precisely. If I come across as salty, it's because the attitude that extreme optimization is both necessary and the only way to play the game has been the end of several games I've played in or run because the players not focused on that optimization suddenly find better things to do when it becomes clear that their characters are just not going to be effective at all if the optimized PCs are given any kind of challenge. If the optimized PCs are not challenged, the players designing them usually get disruptive at the table because they're there to do one thing, and being denied that one thing (and an audience to their mastery) doesn't sit well.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:48
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Liquid Communism posted:What is your point then? Lay it out in nice, clear language. Because all I've seen from you so far has been various takes on the stance that if abuse of a game system is possible, then it is justified, and if people don't enjoy that at their table they should not play games where it is possible... which amounts to not playing the vast majority of TTRPGs. "This game is janky but my group and I agree to rein things in this way." - Fine, reasonable thing. "People who charop are just butthurt babies who want to spam their I Win button on everything and are RPG poison." - A thing an rear end in a top hat says. Consequently you're an rear end in a top hat. You electing to play a game you know is janky isn't the issue, the issue is you sound like an rear end in a top hat when talking about people playing that game in a Non Liquid Communism Approved Fashion. At no point have I said anything about people needing to "git gud" or that social contracts are bad or any of the things people have apparently divined from my not very ambiguous posts. There's a broader point of mine which is that charop and things like it have for a long time been blamed for the failings of lovely games, like something adjacent to the Rule 0 fallacy, and that getting mad at people who elect to engage a lovely game on its own lovely terms is stupid because not all of them, and likely probably not even a majority of them, are doing so for malicious reasons. Pushing all this off on "the social contract" simply furthers the long perpetuated notion that having to establish gentlemen's agreements to ensure a game doesn't break down when players put the most basic stresses on it is the right and proper way for things to be in the RPG hobby and not a dysfunctional state of affairs.
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Sep 27, 2017 23:53
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Liquid Communism posted:Precisely. If I come across as salty, it's because the attitude that extreme optimization is both necessary and the only way to play the game has been the end of several games I've played in or run because the players not focused on that optimization suddenly find better things to do when it becomes clear that their characters are just not going to be effective at all if the optimized PCs are given any kind of challenge. If the optimized PCs are not challenged, the players designing them usually get disruptive at the table because they're there to do one thing, and being denied that one thing (and an audience to their mastery) doesn't sit well.
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Sep 28, 2017 00:00
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I've seen quite a few instances where "optimise your character to the point where they're eclipsing everyone else" isn't even close to system mastery but instead is simply taking stuff that looks like it makes sense together. The AD&D 2e skills and powers book lets you do an unusually high amount of damage when you play a Minotaur, if you then take the obvious step of improving your ability to charge at things and gore them. Like, not "I spent hours extracting every point of DPR I could", just "I'm a rad bull-man, I'm gonna be good at charging people and goring them". "I'm gonna be pistol guy" and then taking lots of pistol stuff and a good pistol was enough to be "over-optimised" in whatever shadowrun I played in the '90s. In early Deadlands I decided to be "sneaky dude without many gun skills who prays and sprays in a gunfight" and took scatterguns and a quick reload spell and managed to significantly outdo the various gunslinger types at gunslinging. I wasn't trying to - fast-loading scatterguns are a pretty obvious choice if you're not good at guns. Was it the original Vampire where you could poo poo on most everything if you decided that "be the fastest" was a fun idea? If you approach a game from the perspective of "I'm gonna be the best at sword fighting, I'll take Sword Fighting Guy and some improved sword fighting stuff" and that means you end up better at killing people than Pistol Shooting Guy, that's not your fault. It's still not your fault if taking stuff that made you a better sword fighter somehow also made you better at shooting pistols than Pistol Shooting Guy. That's the fault of the system.
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Sep 28, 2017 00:09
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The "dying on the hill of git gud" is extra baffling to me because we just had a 2-3 page discussion about 4E D&D, a game I'm an outspoken advocate for, and how while you COULD charop it wasn't necessary or required to do so in order to keep up with the rest of the party. But no, clearly I demand the most rigorous minmaxing from everyone or they aren't sufficiently elfgame swole for my tastes.
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Sep 28, 2017 00:10
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Pff, you only have a +20 modifier? Get on my level, pleb. *becomes the moon*
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Sep 28, 2017 00:11
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(they are the moon)
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Sep 28, 2017 00:24
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Kai Tave posted:The "dying on the hill of git gud" is extra baffling to me because we just had a 2-3 page discussion about 4E D&D, a game I'm an outspoken advocate for, and how while you COULD charop it wasn't necessary or required to do so in order to keep up with the rest of the party. But no, clearly I demand the most rigorous minmaxing from everyone or they aren't sufficiently elfgame swole for my tastes. It's basically just the reverse side of defining this as a player problem rather than a dev + GM-as-rules-enforcer problem. It's good and normal for a player to seek to make the best character they can. It's not good if the best character they can make is a curve-wrecking monstrosity. The answer, of course, is don't give them rules that say they can make a curve-wrecking monstrosity. And, similarly, don't rely on their implicit understanding of what "curve-wrecking monstrosity" means to prevent it because a) they can't read your mind b) vagueness here is a recipe for misunderstandings and favoritism, perceived or real, and c) having to balance the fun thing you want to do and the responsible thing you have to do without explicit guidelines is miserable -- and ironically can cause even more imbalance if one player's conception of "fair" is much harsher than another's. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 00:32
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's good and normal for a player to seek to make the best character they can. It's not good if the best character they can make is a curve-wrecking monstrosity. The answer, of course, is don't give them rules that say they can make a curve-wrecking monstrosity. And, similarly, don't rely on their implicit understanding of what "curve-wrecking monstrosity" means to prevent it because a) they can't read your mind b) vagueness her is a recipe for misunderstandings and favoritism, perceived or real, and c) having to balance the fun thing you want to do and the responsible thing you have to do without explicit guidelines is miserable -- and ironically can cause even more imbalance if one player's conception of "fair" is much harsher than another's.
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Sep 28, 2017 00:48
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I would say "can you imagine if a competitive game had a culture that depended on you policing yourself against being 'cheesy' but still also encouraged you to play to win?" But I'm worried I might be just describing Warhammer 40k tournament play if I say that. 
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Sep 28, 2017 00:52
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's basically just the reverse side of defining this as a player problem rather than a dev + GM-as-rules-enforcer problem. There certainly are toxic players who's primary goal in games it to wave their metaphorical dicks around and lord it over at the table. But the thing is, those players will try to avoid games that they can't do that in, and if forced into such a game, will just be toxic in some other way. This comes up all the time in the GM Advice thread, with GMs looking for ways to head off bad behavior. And the continual problem is that it's framed in this adversarial way - "those drat players are going to ruin my game unless I rein them in!" It's just a backwards way to think about it. If you're up front with the group about the style you want to play and they aren't in for it, that doesn't make anyone the bad guy. If the players say they're in, and then violate that trust, then yeah, they're the rear end in a top hat. But if the GM doesn't make it clear or even intentionally obfuscates what style they want to run, or okays player choices that they know will just create issues with that style, then that makes the GM the rear end in a top hat. EDIT: Or I could have just said: FMguru posted:The idea of having a system with multiple failure points, and then just throwing it in the lap of the GM saying "if your players actually use the rules to get too much of an advantage, your job is to punish them for their effrontery", is just appalling.
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Sep 28, 2017 00:58
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Eh, I'm probably just an rear end in a top hat, but most of it comes from the position of being asked to GM and repeatedly having headaches involving players who aren't very good at communicating what they're actually looking for out of the game, or working within the game the players at the table are expecting to play. I don't like being an adversarial GM, but it's hard not to come off as one when any challenge that isn't <thing player optimized for> is taken as an unfair attack on the player. The fact that I mostly run Shadowrun makes encountering this problem a lot more common.
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Sep 28, 2017 01:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I would say "can you imagine if a competitive game had a culture that depended on you policing yourself against being 'cheesy' but still also encouraged you to play to win?" The usual counterargument to this point is that tabletop RPGs aren't really competitive, they're cooperative and collaborative, and therefore it's more reasonable to suggest that groups simply nudge and fudge and self-police things along the way. The counter-counterargument to that point, besides the obvious "just because a game is cooperative and not competitive doesn't mean you still can't design it so it doesn't split apart like a rotten melon the first time a player puts any sort of stress on it," is that a lot of RPGs are essentially competitive to an extent. I'm not even talking about adversarial GMing where it's the Players versus the GM in a constant arms race of bullshit, but most RPGs are built around a very "competitive" framework of both goals and task resolution, and players generally want to win for a variety of reasons, among the most obvious being A). in most RPGs failure is an extremely uninteresting state of Things Not Happening, unless it's combat in which case B). in most RPGs failure means you're probably going to die and and make a new character. Things happening is generally more interesting than things not happening, and players usually like to keep their characters around instead of having them die to a random mook. Consequently, in a lot of games players are going to push their characters to be as successful as possible at the things which matter most to them because winning and succeeding is generally (not always, but we'll get to that in a second) more enjoyable and entertaining than failing and dying, especially when failure isn't really a result of being outwitted or outskilled so much as "well your numbers weren't big enough, I guess." Now some games, a slowly increasing number of them these days, acknowledge this dynamic and take steps to try and make it so that there's a lot more codified variance in results than simple binary pass/fail (which you see in games like Apocalypse World, Fantasy Flight's Star Wars games, Strike!, Blades in the Dark to name a few, there are others) and/or allot players resources which they can opt to spend or not to determine if something is important enough to them to want to empty the tank turning a brutal failure into something less painful or save your juice for later and take it on the chin (this isn't precisely new elfgame technology, fate points have been around for a while, but there are games like Blades in the Dark with its Stress which don't hinge on rerolls but simply allow you your choice of where you take the punch, so to speak). I'm not really invested in trying to argue that these games are better than others, I don't think they necessarily are. And I continue to enjoy games which don't employ methods or design similar to these, even if sometimes I think they could benefit from it...to go back to 4E, it still suffers from the "failure means nothing happens" issue more than I'd like sometimes, it's kind of annoying to spend some time at the table planning your next move in combat, playing off someone else's ability to pull off some sick combo and oh I rolled a 2 never mind, that's my turn (though at least Daily powers usually have some sort of "on a miss" rider to make people less paranoid about wasting them). But I will note that in games that take pains to make success and failure more nuanced and engaging that players seem more willing to simply "roll the dice and see what happens" with less concern about squeezing every drop of success out of system beforehand. All that said, if a game doesn't actually present players with anything more interesting than a basic binary pass/fail setup then it really shouldn't be terribly surprising that a good chunk of players are going to look at that and go "okay, how do I go about making it so I get more Stuffs Happening than Stuffs Not Happening?" Shadowrun is very much a game in this mold, you take a mission from a dude and your goal is to do X by Y and you get paid Z dollars is the default mode of play, and it's also a game (last time I checked) where one or two bad hits in combat can reduce someone wearing a "reasonable" amount of armor to a chunk of leaking meat, so Shadowrun both tacitly and overtly tells the people playing it "if you want your BIG CASH PRIZES you need to bring your A-game, also you better not gently caress up or you might die horribly." Recent editions do have a metacurrency, but it's pretty limited and only operates on a "reroll/add extra dice to roll" basis, which can still hang you out to dry. It is not an "adversarial game" in the sense that people usually use the term, where the GM and players are both trying to outdo the other in some weird dominance struggle at the gaming table, but it's "adversarial" in the sense that the default goal of a default character in Shadowrun is to go do crimes against megacorporations (or whoever) and live to get paid, and "telling a rich, fulfilling story about the struggles of the outcast dregs of society in a hypercapitalist dystopia with magic and dragons" is not something that the game as it presents itself to players is especially concerned with. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 02:11
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Here's a list of things that have led me, personally, to charop: 1. Sometimes it's enjoyable, as many have already said. For example, in D&D 5e you can make a Cleric who uses a whip, takes the Spell Sniper feat, and uses the Booming Blade cantrip to hit people with a whip that sounds like thunder, then forces them to move and take additional damage due to the properties of the cantrip and the fact that they were hit from a distance. In these cases, sometimes you have a very particular idea and the system rewards you with some common mechanical concept of success (in this case, more damage) for making sensible selections. In other cases, charop is fun just to solve the "puzzle" of the system, like making the Crossbow Expert Fighter. 2. A lack of clear guidance on what a "good" number is. This probably applies mostly to point-buy based systems. If you're unclear on how many points need to be invested into a single concept to make that your character's Thing, you may err on the side of going all-in so that the part of your character that is most important to you will never fail you. I remember, for example, not really being sure how much to invest in a single power in the Savage Worlds Necessary Evil book (basically a point-buy super power system). If I don't put everything into super strength and agility for my Kamen Rider character, will he still be able to hang with martial artist villains? Or let's say I want to roleplay a really smart guy; how smart is enough for him to occupy that role in the fiction as being The Smart Guy? I, as a player, have no idea what to expect there so I'm tempted to just dump everything into the most salient aspect of that character to be safe, and maybe develop everything else as I go. I haven't played Shadowrun but it kind of sounds like this happens a lot there based on what others are posting. This happens less in D&D, but it's still there in damage numbers: how much is enough? When the variance in an optimized Fighter and a randomly generated Fighter can be so wide (~15 damage a round versus like 35), how is the player going to know when enough is enough? The book doesn't really say anything like "the average fighter should be able to deal around this much damage per round" so the player can't make an informed decision on how much of their fighting ability they're sacrificing or emphasizing. 3. Lethality. If death is on the table in a game, then optimizing my character maximizes the chances that they'll see a long, satisfying story arc. I think this one is pretty straightforward. 4. Trying not to break the difficulty balance. If I'm playing D&D 3.5 and another player picks a full caster, chances are my character is going to need to be optimized to keep the monster stat curve smooth. I think plenty of other people have pointed out how this works in reverse, too. If I pick a Wizard in 3.5, the lovely balance means I now have to design and play my character to support the other players feeling powerful because I want them to have a good time. Overall I think I tend to err on the side of character optimization being a symptom of a game simply not being well designed, but I also think it's extremely important to communicate to your players what level of system mastery, if any, you're expecting from them. Whenever I ran 3.5, for example, I'd explicitly go and build characters alongside every new player to keep them around the same level of power as the experienced players. Likewise, I'd let players know how player death can be expected to work and in what context it could happen (I'm a big fan of that "death flag" rule from E6). OF course, I recognize that the goal is to be creating and playing games where disparate levels of system mastery do not affect the DM's ability to run a fun game. It's just very, very likely that you'll play Dungeons & Dragons so it's definitely worth discussing how to approach that situation and I think that's where people who get annoyed by charop are coming from. The problem is that it's kinda subjective: to me, making a 20 strength Battlemaster Fighter with Great Weapon Master in 5e is going to make the new player who's a Champion Fighter with a long sword and 16 strength feel like the most worthless fighter ever, so to me that's charop/system mastery. And it's loving ridiculous that doing a concept that simple is a product of system mastery in that game! To others, it's the Warlock/Sorceror or Paladin/Sorceror that crosses the line. I think the only real solution in games as poorly balanced as this is having the DM be closely involved in character creation and explicitly laying out the boundaries. Nickoten fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 02:22
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Kai Tave posted:All that said, if a game doesn't actually present players with anything more interesting than a basic binary pass/fail setup then it really shouldn't be terribly surprising that a good chunk of players are going to look at that and go "okay, how do I go about making it so I get more Stuffs Happening than Stuffs Not Happening?" Shadowrun is very much a game in this mold, you take a mission from a dude and your goal is to do X by Y and you get paid Z dollars is the default mode of play, and it's also a game (last time I checked) where one or two bad hits in combat can reduce someone wearing a "reasonable" amount of armor to a chunk of leaking meat, so Shadowrun both tacitly and overtly tells the people playing it "if you want your BIG CASH PRIZES you need to bring your A-game, also you better not gently caress up or you might die horribly." Recent editions do have a metacurrency, but it's pretty limited and only operates on a "reroll/add extra dice to roll" basis, which can still hang you out to dry.
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Sep 28, 2017 02:25
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Liquid Communism posted:What is your point then? Lay it out in nice, clear language. Because all I've seen from you so far has been various takes on the stance that if abuse of a game system is possible, then it is justified, and if people don't enjoy that at their table they should not play games where it is possible... which amounts to not playing the vast majority of TTRPGs. To step in as I'm agreeing with Kai Tave here can you lay out in nice, clear language what exactly counts as abuse? I'm going to use D&D 3.5 as my example; I know that system better than Shadowrun. There are a few things that clearly do - Pun-Pun style exploits and Ur-Priest/Nar Demonbinder or other loops pretty clearly do. But what about the bear-druid who turns into a bear, has a bear as a companion, and summons bears? Our aggressively hegmonizing ursine swarm is not even especially trying to min max - but he's going to make a fighter of the same level look like a chump. This just because one player liked the idea of a bear druid and took the only druid-only feat (Wildspell) and the feat to make his summons better and the other liked the fighter and followed the guidance in the rulebook that said Toughness was a good feat. We've got a problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with playing either a razor-optimised character or a well rounded character. But. A well rounded character at a table of razor-optimised characters is going to be utterly incompetent and the player is almost certainly going to have a bad time. A razor-optimised character as part of a group of well-rounded characters is likely to cause trouble because it's almost playing a different game. But none of the players are in the wrong. So who is in the wrong? The entire point of a character creation system is to get the players onto the same page to play the game. If you need a meta-ettiquette to say how this group of players makes characters then the character creation system has failed. And Kai Tave is suggesting pushing the system (and I'm talking about deliberately creating aggressively hegmonizing ursine swarms, not about creating an Ur-Priest/Nar Demonbinder combo) because that's the easiest place to meet. And because characters are supposed to be facing challenges and the in character choices should reflect their desire to stay alive. And yes you can have table ettiquette to not push the system - but table ettiquette in this case is close to a synonym for house rules that are needed because the system fails to have a character creation model that leads to outcomes you like.
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Sep 28, 2017 02:26
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AlphaDog posted:"I'm gonna be pistol guy" and then taking lots of pistol stuff and a good pistol was enough to be "over-optimised" in whatever shadowrun I played in the '90s. I'm reminded of playing Alpha Protocol for the first time, and taking lots of skills in Pistols because that was the weapon that I currently had, and then also taking Stealth skills because it was ostensibly a spy game ... ... and accidentally stumbling upon the most powerful skill combo in the game.
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Sep 28, 2017 02:30
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Now let me bring you the Good News about Shadowrun: Anarchy, a game that maintains Shadowrun's legacy of being a hot mess but makes a concerted effort to be about telling stories. Yeah, I've heard about Anarchy, and while I have no firsthand experience with it as a system so I can't speak for the various ways it may be (definitely is, let's be honest here) a hot mess, it doesn't surprise me that an effective way to approach the "how do I get my Shadowrun players to stop squeezing this lovely old system that only cares about your success threshold and where character advancement is primarily defined in terms of how many dice you can stuff into a pool" is "create a new system that leans less heavily on that stuff, then." e; my bone of contention, if it's still not clear here, is the constant refrain of "well you can just houserule it/use the social contract" to paper over shoddy game design is what perpetuates shoddy game design. People who internalize that attitude at the gaming table to on to publish RPGs, pretty much every elfgame designer is someone who started out as a nerd at the kitchen table rolling dice, so the more this ingrained idea that games are simply bound to have these flaws and it's a game group's responsibility to find, as FMguru aptly puts it, the Goldilocks Zone, the more they're going to push slipshod, untested jank out the door with a shrug and an admonition that if anything falls apart it must be your fault. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 02:32
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AlphaDog posted:I've seen quite a few instances where "optimise your character to the point where they're eclipsing everyone else" isn't even close to system mastery but instead is simply taking stuff that looks like it makes sense together. And yeah, Vampire was famous for having characters who took Celerity (the super-speed and super-reflexes ability) absolutely trouncing everyone else at combat. Dex as god-stat + extra actions = I just broke your game's action economy over my knee.
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Sep 28, 2017 02:40
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FMguru posted:BESM is probably the all-time champion system for people accidentally creating overpowered system-breaking characters without meaning to. First time I played BESM I accidentally made a character that was effectively immortal as well as completely incapable of hurting enemies.
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Sep 28, 2017 02:46
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BESM was the game where the designer, noted thieving writer-bilking rear end in a top hat Mark MacKinnon, absolutely refused to believe that his game had a severe glass ninja problem (it was trivially easy to make characters who were nigh-unhittable with attacks that would explode people on a hit, turning combat into a long series of whiffs until the dice fell in just the right way that someone instantly died) until noted catgirl enthusiast David Pulver literally sat him down and forced him to 1v1 him in imaginary anime character combat.
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Sep 28, 2017 02:54
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The thing I most distinctly remember about BESM is that there are a number of powers that have an exponential point buy curve. Like if you spend 10 points on super speed you can run 60 miles an hour, but if you spend 20 you can break the sound barrier.
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Sep 28, 2017 02:56
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Bob is playing Shadowrun, and he wants to make a cool cyberpunk ork with a rad rear end sword who's CYBERED OUT and has a GUN, TOO, so he grabs the pregen for the Cyber Samurai. It literally doesn't matter the edition. Mila is also playing Shadowrun, and unlike Bob, she's played it a few times before and knows the system very well, so she makes her usual gunbunny. The game begins, and, as is usual, they get into a fight. Maybe a group of Halloweeners tries to jump them, I dunno. Bob is hyped as has his cyber samurai charge at the enemy so he can cut them down, and then maybe fire a quick volley at some other gangmembers with his SMG. Unfortunately, melee is a complex action, and the pregen wasn't made super great, so he just cuts one of the gangmembers, and is now out in the open. On the next round, one of the Halloweeners kills him. Bob says the game isn't very fun. Bob is not an rear end in a top hat for accurately calling out that the game set him up to fail. Mila shrugs, pulls out the best rifle in the game (it's always a rifle), and fills two Halloweeners with lead, killing them both. She dominates the combat with ease. Mila says the game isn't very fun. Mila is not an rear end in a top hat for accurately building her character to surpass exactly the obstacles the game has told her she will need to surpass. The GM sighs and tries to imagine a combat that doesn't kill Bob instantly, but is still challenging enough for Mila. The GM says the game IS fun, just...just hold on, it gets way better. He starts putting in more and more prep time so it can work. The game is increasingly not fun for him. The GM is not an rear end in a top hat for trying to keep his game together and ensure his friends have fun in spite of a failed system. The game is at fault for this situation in the first place.
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Sep 28, 2017 03:41
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neonchameleon posted:There is nothing inherently wrong with playing either a razor-optimised character or a well rounded character. But. A well rounded character at a table of razor-optimised characters is going to be utterly incompetent and the player is almost certainly going to have a bad time. A razor-optimised character as part of a group of well-rounded characters is likely to cause trouble because it's almost playing a different game. But none of the players are in the wrong. They absolutely are if they did so knowingly. If you know, because the group is communicating properly, that you're showing up to a table of well rounded characters and you bring your razor-optimized cheeseweasel anyway because you believe that is how the game should be played and gently caress them for playing wrong, you are absolutely in the wrong. That is the experience I have had several times, across several systems, and why I have such a distaste for heavy charop and the attitudes it breeds. Edit : Cirno's absolutely right about SR, though. It is chock full of trap options and terrible math. Even the pregens in the SR5 mainbook were written in previous playtests and can't be built as starting characters by the rules as published. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 03:41
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ProfessorCirno posted:Bob is playing Shadowrun, and he wants to make a cool cyberpunk ork with a rad rear end sword who's CYBERED OUT and has a GUN, TOO, so he grabs the pregen for the Cyber Samurai. It literally doesn't matter the edition. This is a good post.
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Sep 28, 2017 03:45
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Liquid Communism posted:They absolutely are if they did so knowingly. If you know, because the group is communicating properly, that you're showing up to a table of well rounded characters and you bring your razor-optimized cheeseweasel anyway because you believe that is how the game should be played and gently caress them for playing wrong, you are absolutely in the wrong. The only part of this that is incorrect on the player's part is "gently caress them for playing wrong" though. And for the same reason as everything else I've been saying over the last few pages -- this is emphatically not a problem for players to solve, whether the particular way in which the problem manifests for them is "I don't know how to make a good character and it's effectively mandatory" or "I know how to make a broken character and don't know exactly how much to rein it in" or whatever.
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Sep 28, 2017 03:47
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And you seem to be mistaking a symptom (excessive charop) with the disease (people who refuse to play nicely with others).
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Sep 28, 2017 03:53
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For fucks sake you people are still going on about this? Charop is a problem with the mechanics of a game, it's not the GM's fault, it's not the player's fault. The only real solution is to play something else or admit it's broken and just deal with it. Y'all just keep talking past each other at this point and it's dumb as Hell.
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Sep 28, 2017 04:02
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Kwyndig posted:For fucks sake you people are still going on about this? Unless you're in a really weird group the GM picks the game and the GM interprets (and, if necessary, adjusts) rules. So while "fault" is kind of accusatory, yes, actually it is the GM's responsibility to either pick a game that works out of the box, or set the guidelines for what's acceptable and what isn't. It's the developer's responsibility first but as much as these forums sometimes provide the exception, you usually don't have direct access to the devs to get things fixed at that level. 
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Sep 28, 2017 04:04
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