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Absurd Alhazred posted:Couldn't you say the same about any dungeon crawly game with respect to the dungeons that end up getting run there?
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Mar 15, 2022 00:46
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mellonbread posted:Gumshoe replaces skill rolls with point spends, but the end result is still the same. "any opportunity or payoff for good recon" is still "up to the scenario writer's whims." Unless you're procedurally creating the investigation as you go, you're always going to be at the mercy of the module author or GM who wrote the mystery you're trying to solve. I feel like that’s maybe unhelpfully reductive, a little, but it also doesn’t seem to contradict “has meaningful rules for investigation” as I read it.
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Mar 15, 2022 00:52
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Leperflesh posted:AD&D assumed you'd scout and bullshit your way through adventures rather than blithely attacking everything, that's part of why AD&D modules are often so brutal. You got XP for gold, not monsters. Which I honestly consider kind of a failing of AD&D, as much as I like 2e AD&D, because if you have a system but reward players for not engaging with the system but instead for finding creative ways to make the system irrelevant, for which they get rewards which largely only work within the system that's just... you have made a busted-rear end game, mister! I'm entirely cool with the idea that "if you get into fights, the fighty rules are meant to be nasty because it's a last resort for loser nerds who do dumb things," but then at least give more than one of the classes a consistent, system-supported way to not get into fights(AD&D thieves don't count because all their skills are useless until like 9th level or so, Fighters and Clerics don't count, really only mages do. 2e flips this up somewhat, but sure as hell not 1e).
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Mar 15, 2022 02:07
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Subjunctive posted:I feel like that’s maybe unhelpfully reductive, a little, but it also doesn’t seem to contradict “has meaningful rules for investigation” as I read it. If Delta Green doesn't have meaningful rules for investigation then GUMSHOE won't qualify either: GUMSHOE's "system" is barely a system at that, being spending points instead of rolling and a bunch of advice on how to make spending a point worthwhile. In terms of encouraging, driving, and structuring it does very little other than to stop investigation from happening when you've used up all your points. It accomplishes a very specific thing: it makes sure you can get the clues if they're there. It doesn't do much to inform the GM of how the scenario should be designed to give the players opportunities for clues other than that they should be there, and it doesn't inform the players about how they can go on about finding clues other than that they can. PurpleXVI posted:I'm entirely cool with the idea that "if you get into fights, the fighty rules are meant to be nasty because it's a last resort for loser nerds who do dumb things," but then at least give more than one of the classes a consistent, system-supported way to not get into fights(AD&D thieves don't count because all their skills are useless until like 9th level or so, Fighters and Clerics don't count, really only mages do. 2e flips this up somewhat, but sure as hell not 1e). AD&D doesn't have that many rules for avoiding fights in the first place, but it has a lot of rules for getting out of fights once begun. You can simply run from monsters if you're faster than them, and if you're not there's systems for trying to distract the monsters with food or valuables, and there's a chance pursuing monsters will break off pursuit if they can't tell down which of a branching passage the player characters went. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 05:32
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LatwPIAT posted:If Delta Green doesn't have meaningful rules for investigation then GUMSHOE won't qualify either: GUMSHOE's "system" is barely a system at that, being spending points instead of rolling and a bunch of advice on how to make spending a point worthwhile. In terms of encouraging, driving, and structuring it does very little other than to stop investigation from happening when you've used up all your points. It accomplishes a very specific thing: it makes sure you can get the clues if they're there. It doesn't do much to inform the GM of how the scenario should be designed to give the players opportunities for clues other than that they should be there, and it doesn't inform the players about how they can go on about finding clues other than that they can. But ultimately the investigations you build with those rules will be experienced by the players the same way they would in any other investigative game - by the player characters moving between the investigative nodes, using skills from their character sheet to gather information, and then making decisions about what to do next. The best scenarios and books have advice on how to improvise and create new content when the players do unexpected things that change the scope of the adventure, but ultimately what's going on under the hood remains the same. Gumshoe's most celebrated feature (core clues are never gated behind skill checks) is a scenario design philosophy (and a good one) rather than a genuine mechanical innovation.
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Mar 15, 2022 06:24
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hyphz posted:If you're looking for literally a tactical miniatures wargame, yes. But if you're looking for a tactical miniatures wargame but actually playing an RPG then there can be problems with the interface. Rather than being a problem I feel like both of situations are just opportunities for the GM to improvise a bit. Like, presumably the enemy who is attacking a castle can also scout and determine that there are arrow slits present and modify their plan for attack accordingly? An extended siege at a warehouse seems like an excellent opportunity for some reinforcements from both gangs as their people are getting worried about too long. and if the PCs occasionally just crush an encounter by being clever that's cool too
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Mar 15, 2022 06:39
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I think it's true that typical RPGs in the D&D style don't presume you're fighting a battle, on a battlefield, e.g. a siege of a castle, and that's also totally fine and not actually a reasonable criticism of the tactical systems for RPGs. More broadly, arrow slits are hard cover, and lots of RPGs have rules for hard cover. To the extent they don't work, well, that's on each system I suppose.
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Mar 15, 2022 06:56
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mellonbread posted:I can't speak for Shadowrun, but this is definitely not true about Delta Green. Or it's trivially true, in the same sense that you could say "D&D doesn't have any meaningful rules for combat, it's just attack roll soup, any opportunity or payoff for good tactics is up to the DM's whims." but also yes I unironically do think D&D is attack roll soup where the only meaningful decision is too often "which one of these monsters do we kill first". My kingdom for a better Monster Manual (and the courage to kill my players' characters when they play their fights real stupid.  )Like, DG and D&D both follow the model where you show up to a place, make a roll, and then a successful roll removes one obstacle that's standing between you and the end of the adventure. That obstacle might be a trap or a clue or a goblin sentry, it doesn't really matter. You string these obstacles together with room descriptions and you have an adventure, and it's in this scenario-writing that the ~actual game~ that we play is produced. So I guess I'm of the opinion that the game can't be evaluated without seeing some form of scenario where it's applied to, because even good rules can't really salvage bad scenario writing. And I think lots of games kind of forget about doing any kind of forward thinking. YMMV, but my D&D games somehow end up emulating Munchkin most of all: You slam open the door and stick your head inside, and just hope the monster inside is an easy one. Likewise, even though the book kind of talks about the importance of doing your legwork, lots of DG actual plays I've listened to seem to boil down to "investigators bungle into a case, nobody has a plan, awful things happen, let's try human sacrifice". It might just be a player culture thing, in that these specific players don't know how to prepare, but I think a game could be made to teach these habits. So to answer your question re: investigative mechanics, I think I have to conclude that a good investigative game requires some form of scenario-writing aids, like the ones you pointed out Gumshoe has. Likewise, a good tactical game would need something to aid the scenario-writer to design either a single combat or an entire dungeon so that the players get to make informed decisions on how they want to tackle that. Or, alternatively, the game could lean on improv tools like random encounter tables, encounter rolls, or whatever the Armitage Files do for Gumshoe games, but make those work consistently so that the players can actually anticipate things and play around them. Siivola fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 08:12
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Siivola posted:And I think lots of games kind of forget about doing any kind of forward thinking. YMMV, but my D&D games somehow end up emulating Munchkin most of all: You slam open the door and stick your head inside, and just hope the monster inside is an easy one. Likewise, even though the book kind of talks about the importance of doing your legwork, lots of DG actual plays I've listened to seem to boil down to "investigators bungle into a case, nobody has a plan, awful things happen, let's try human sacrifice". It might just be a player culture thing, in that these specific players don't know how to prepare, but I think a game could be made to teach these habits. I don't know if this is inherent to cosmic horror as a genre or just bad scenario design, but people seem to feel that the epitome of a Cthulhu scenario is 'poo poo is hosed up for reasons you cannot comprehend, on a level you can't engage with, survival is your main goal'. Frantic scrambling and grasping at any solutions that spring to mind emerge naturally from that sort of setup. If you wanted to teach players that preparation is important then I think the GM needs to be more generous with information and resources. At the very least the players need a clear, achievable objective and several ways to gather information regarding that objective. The 'what' should be obvious and the 'how' is the question. You may also need ways to compel the characters to engage with the problem in the first place if they realise the danger and decide sensibly to nope out of town. To back-port that to D&D you give them a clear objective -- retrieve the wizard's teapot from the dungeon -- then you put very clear signs in the dungeon that there's a high-level monster in there that will obliterate them if it finds them. (This would be easier if you could have combat objectives in D&D that weren't 'to the death' but that's a complaint for another time.) Then you let the party use their skills to scout, hide, find alternative paths, or just loving talk the monster down if they can get it some good vegetarian samosas or something. Or maybe they combat-specced and they have a fighting chance, who knows? I mean, D&D in particular has that problem where if a monster requires preparation to defeat and the party kick in the door and get their asses handed to them, at least one PC is probably dead and the players are calling foul about an OP monster. It would be a lot easier to handle if there were ways to safely retreat from combat if you realise you're overmatched.
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Mar 15, 2022 10:53
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potatocubed posted:I don't know if this is inherent to cosmic horror as a genre or just bad scenario design, but people seem to feel that the epitome of a Cthulhu scenario is 'poo poo is hosed up for reasons you cannot comprehend, on a level you can't engage with, survival is your main goal'. Frantic scrambling and grasping at any solutions that spring to mind emerge naturally from that sort of setup. I think that bad writing in the "cosmic horror genre" has convinced some people that bad scenario design is the intended goal. Because consider how much easier it is to write this way, just make the combat stats for everything that can attack insanely high, have everything attack on sight(because it's inscrutable, you see) and describe some geometric shapes while making everyone roll not to vomit and cry at the same time when they look at them. Boom, you've got some real "cosmic horror" written up. Now on the other hand if you want the "enemies" to be something that can be engaged with, creatures that have (possibly alien) goals and means of communication, and the scary thing actually something that's scary, then there's a demand for the scenario writer to engage their brain and oof, ow, can't have that. Sounds like work.
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Mar 15, 2022 11:19
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SkyeAuroline posted:Seconding interest in this, with an added wrinkle of a question: are there any GMless games that manage investigation that's coherent... at all? I know Solo Investigator's Handbook exists, and that's about it. Everything in the GMless sphere (not just solo) is pretty well built on "randomly generate everything as the need comes up, meaning you can't figure a mystery out early or shortcut any parts, and there is no way to ensure all the clues/etc are coherent". Any system that does that would be Very Useful for both personal gameplay and, maybe eventually, some writing inspiration. This isn't even a joke answer, I wonder what you could do with the cluedo "I know what's NOT right" format. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 11:38
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I can speak to GURPS in this regard but basically once you get to the stuff from High-Tech(which is basically TL5+, where TL5 is the 1800s), combats are very much about taking advantage of situations where you go first and the enemies have a surprise round or two and you just mow everyone down because GURPS guns are deadly- that's basically tactics there. In fact, the Tactics skill is primarily used to start a battle in the right place, because movement in that system is punishing(move is something you do instead of attack, in most circumstances all you get is a step if you want to do anything else).
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Mar 15, 2022 11:41
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PurpleXVI posted:I think that bad writing in the "cosmic horror genre" has convinced some people that bad scenario design is the intended goal. This is one of the reasons why comic horror works way better when your primary opposition comes from other human beings who are wielding cosmic horror, wittingly or unwittingly, and whose reasons for doing so are more fleshed out than "I would like to unleash some cosmic horror".
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Mar 15, 2022 13:47
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Siivola posted:Likewise, even though the book kind of talks about the importance of doing your legwork, lots of DG actual plays I've listened to seem to boil down to "investigators bungle into a case, nobody has a plan, awful things happen, let's try human sacrifice". It might just be a player culture thing, in that these specific players don't know how to prepare, but I think a game could be made to teach these habits. I guess the Matt Mercer Effect is real after all, if everyone thinks this is how Delta Green is actually meant to be played.
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Mar 15, 2022 17:19
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So in case you're wondering, the plays I've listened to have all been RPPR productions featuring published DG author Caleb Stokes. Like yeah I do actually think this is how people actually play DG. How on earth should I know any better?
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Mar 15, 2022 17:35
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Siivola posted:So in case you're wondering, the plays I've listened to have all been RPPR productions featuring published DG author Caleb Stokes. E: I should clarify this since I mean it completely sincerely, and not as a dunk. There is a profound difference between watching other people play an investigative RPG, and playing it yourself. Caleb Stokes was added to the Delta Green dev team so that he could write up his famous "God's Teeth" campaign, and to do that he had to take an exciting series of set pieces from the show and build them out to make a full investigative campaign. He himself recognized that the way he ran the game on the show was not necessarily how everyone else would experience it at the table. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 17:37
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If you've ever actually played a RPG you should know that it's different from AP podcasts
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Mar 15, 2022 17:45
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mellonbread posted:
"Wait, you mean I don't need to spend two hours of our four hour play time interacting with nobody shopkeeper NPCs to get a 1 gold discount on my 20 gold purchase? I can just say, 'I buy the poo poo at the shop' and be done with it??"
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Mar 15, 2022 18:11
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dwarf74 posted:Frankly, Mercer and CR spend so loving much time talking to random shopkeepers and pinching silvers it's kind of the opposite of what's being described for DG podcasts.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:22
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mellonbread posted:They may be onto something, because "players getting way too into shopping for items" is an accurate reflection of every RPG I have ever run or played. Yeah haggling with the NPCs is something I do all the time if I have a guy capable of doing jt
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Mar 15, 2022 18:26
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mellonbread posted:They may be onto something, because "players getting way too into shopping for items" is an accurate reflection of every RPG I have ever run or played. If you're short on stuff for a session, introducing PC's to a merchant caravan, a shopping district, a weird store selling curiosities or, in a pinch, just a single farmer trying to offload an old cow on someone, is a guaranteed recipe for bogging down the players for at least one session while you rush to prep for the next one. The stranger you make the shopkeeper and the more useless you make the items on sale, the better.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:27
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Bartering is a low-stakes NPC interaction with an easily recognizable goal, and its something any character can do. Me and my friends went through kind of a phase early in our RPGing where we went into barter mode every chance we got, and eventually we grew out of that, and I think that may be a fairly normal progression for a lot of players irrespective of the game they're playing. e. It also has that effect where, once the PCs succeed at lowering a price, once, they know the possibility of paying less is in the game, and not doing it means paying too much probably, which means their gold/resources don't go as far. It's hard to just choose not to take an opportunity to optimize when it's right in front of you. Plus you get to haggle with the GM! And it means your character is shrewd (or foolish)!
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Mar 15, 2022 18:38
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mellonbread posted:By playing it? So at that point, if I was looking to get my group into some real gum-on-my-shoe DG, I'd kinda be in a bind. It's been some months so I can't remember how much advice for writing an investigative scenario the Handler's Guide has, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a lot. And since mechanically the rules are only concerned about whether the agents find the clues or not, you don't really get feedback or direction from that direction either. I realize it's not an investigative game, but I think for a game you learn by playing, you might want to try something more akin to AW's moves that really push the characters in directions. With those the players might be more inclined to gently caress around and find out how the engine works. (My answer? When our schedule opens up, I think I'm going to go buy the Call of Cthulhu starter box instead. I feel like those scenarios are stronger intros.) dwarf74 posted:Frankly, Mercer and CR spend so loving much time talking to random shopkeepers and pinching silvers it's kind of the opposite of what's being described for DG podcasts. 
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Mar 15, 2022 18:39
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Andrast posted:Rather than being a problem I feel like both of situations are just opportunities for the GM to improvise a bit. Like, presumably the enemy who is attacking a castle can also scout and determine that there are arrow slits present and modify their plan for attack accordingly? An extended siege at a warehouse seems like an excellent opportunity for some reinforcements from both gangs as their people are getting worried about too long. The problem is that the most likely way to modify their plan for attack to allow for arrow slits, is either not to attack, attack with an army instead of a goblin band, or.. do a siege, which is probably not fun for the players. As for reinforcements approaching the warehouse, they basically just threatened to fill the warehouse with grenades if anyone approached. What was improvised on a cinematic basis actually destroyed the entire plot on a tactical basis. Leperflesh posted:More broadly, arrow slits are hard cover, and lots of RPGs have rules for hard cover. I think it is a bit optimistic to say that hitting a target behind an arrow slit is only a -10% or -20% chance to hit. And that doesn't even allow for the defender to be able to step out of the only path available to the arrow. But of course I think that this is why RPGs give only a -20% chance to hit for that arrow slit, or require the defender to "pop up" and be vulnerable to readied actions when they fire - because actual tactics aren't much fun. The problem is, the RPG then has to build an entire physics in which tactics are understandable fun and interesting, and most don't manage that. Halloween Jack posted:If you've ever actually played a RPG you should know that it's different from AP podcasts I think it's right that APs are RPG reality TV.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:40
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You keep referring to arrow slits being "realistic" as "actual tactics" but that's not true. Chess has "actual tactics" and it is not a realistic war game. Game design is applied to whatever objects and rules and conditions you choose to put into play, and then players engage with those rules. If the players do not understand or are unwilling to accept that there are constraints on options in order for the game to function, then this concept needs to be explained to them better. And if the tactics engine you're using only provides for 20% miss chance for hard cover, you can either accept that that's one of the rules constraints the designer felt they needed, or, you can modify the engine to suit what you want. What you seem to be trying to say is that if you can't reconcile some game mechanic with what you think is "realistic" then the game has no tactics or bad tactics, and that's just a mismatch of concepts/terminology. We are not under a hard obligation to make our game mechanics suit real-world physics, and in fact, every attempt to do that is doomed because real-world physics is far too complex to faithfully turn into an RPG game engine. Compromises for mechanical simplicity and function are required.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:45
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Leperflesh posted:Compromises for mechanical simplicity and function are required. Every game engagement should be resolved by handing out guns/swords as appropriate to the players involved and making them fight it out in the woods. Survivors win the fight. The perfect simulationism!
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Mar 15, 2022 18:48
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I also think people actually did end up doing siege warfare despite it being a "solved problem", just like they did trench warfare in WWI despite the only likely result once the relevant tactics had been fully developed on both sides being casualties and not much long-term movement.
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Mar 15, 2022 19:07
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I also think people actually did end up doing siege warfare despite it being a "solved problem", just like they did trench warfare in WWI despite the only likely result once the relevant tactics had been fully developed on both sides being casualties and not much long-term movement. Absolutely. But siege warfare involves more than a party of adventurers. I've played a few different tabletop minis combat games that had siege rules and they give more than 20% miss chance on hard cover, for example. Garrison rules, rules for using heavy artillery on buildings, all that poo poo is possible - but not really appropriate for a party-sized adventurer game. And when you play a battlefield-sized historical (or quasi-historical fantasy) war game, you can interact with what was (of course) an arms race between varying technologies of fortification and fortification-busting, and you can build rules that help to balance that game using all sorts of variables - differing force sizes, rules for sapping and artillery and reinforcing fortifications etc. etc. Like, the notion this isn't a solvable problem is just foolish, there's countless games that approach it from different angles. It's solved via gamification, that's literally what we do when we reduce reality to a game, every set of rules is a set of constraints that contain the possibilities so they can be dealt with using comprehensible mechanisms that provide players with interesting choices. Or you can throw up your hands and just play make-believe, that's a legit way to play too, and if you want to you can use that to deal with inevitable corner cases in an RPG, like the one time in a campaign where the characters are exploring an abandoned castle when they come under an attack from outside and they ask if there's arrow slits and you accidentally say yes, you can just say "gently caress it you get a 90% cover from the arrow slit" even though the rules say hard cover = 20%, that's a more or less arbitrary GM decision but your players are assholes if they complain about it because it's just... reasonable, yeah? Maybe that makes that encounter you planned trivial, well, sorry, this game doesn't have rules for arrow slits, so either don't have arrow slits, or you take on the job of trying to modify and balance a rules engine with your new thing. This, again, has nothing to do with whether your game does or does not provide a fun, engaging tactics experience. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 19:18
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Leperflesh posted:What you seem to be trying to say is that if you can't reconcile some game mechanic with what you think is "realistic" then the game has no tactics or bad tactics, and that's just a mismatch of concepts/terminology. We are not under a hard obligation to make our game mechanics suit real-world physics, and in fact, every attempt to do that is doomed because real-world physics is far too complex to faithfully turn into an RPG game engine. A corollary to this is that real life combat almost universally sucks, and so any attempts to make depictions of it realistic are likely to be unfun and/or boring. Making combat fun in media either takes heavy fictionalizing or very, very intense curation for the minuscule fraction of combat that was actually interesting.
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Mar 15, 2022 19:23
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I also think people actually did end up doing siege warfare despite it being a "solved problem", just like they did trench warfare in WWI despite the only likely result once the relevant tactics had been fully developed on both sides being casualties and not much long-term movement. the history of siege warfare is actually very cool and part of why it's cool involves the layers of knowledge people did and did not have about what was going on a big element of course being that for ancient era or early modern armies, those armies basically did not commit to a siege unless they had overwhelming advantage, which meant that both the defenders and attackers had a pretty reliable idea of how things were going to go: an entire city was going to get torched and butchered. Because getting torched and butchered was really bad, the defenders had good reason to pull out all the stops and make it as painful as possible. Which meant that the attackers knew that they were getting themselves set up for a potentially awful, awful time. Going through with a full assault was such a bloody, painful affair for both sides and both knew it well in advance that surrender negotiations were a continuous element of a siege. Depending on the particular time and place there would be whole set of norms about that negotiation - the famous one from Rome is that they'd accept the peaceful surrender of a besieged city up until the first ram touched a wall. There would be rounds of negotiations corresponding to different developments of the siege - when the city was encircled, when people were captured during raids, after x y or z thing succeeded or failed. And of course, as much as it may seem solved the details and play of it matter. A famous example is the 80 Years War, aka Dutch War of Independence, where the Dutch revolted against Spain. Spain unsurprisingly had an outrageous numerical advantage, and won a lot of battles including many, many sieges, but the thing is that winning an early modern city assault is still really bad and Spain couldn't keep it up because even winning was too costly. Leperflesh posted:You keep referring to arrow slits being "realistic" as "actual tactics" but that's not true. Chess has "actual tactics" and it is not a realistic war game. Physicists make compromises on physics for the sake of simplicity and function. I do think that attempts to play at realism can add really interesting texture and balance, but you have to come at it sincerely. An example I really like is Red Orchestra 1 - if SMGs existed, why use bolt action rifles? The answer is fairly simple: there were not enough SMGs to arm the entire WW2 eastern front. So play it out and see what that's like to have combat where only a handful of people have SMGs and the vast majority have bolt actions. You learn some things about how bolt actions work and the tactics that were necessary to fight in small units, and perhaps more importantly the game is balanced in its own peculiar, interesting way that I'm really glad I got to experience. In any event the test here was not "was RO1 realistic" but "was RO1 fun" and it was, and part of that fun was derived from its attempts at realism but it definitely was not more realistic than it was fun.
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Mar 15, 2022 19:25
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I think that's very true, and to abstract it a little: we can develop game mechanics that are inspired by reality. The knight can jump over pieces, but the other chess pieces are blocked. Realistic? Sorta, for some value of realism, but nobody would mistake a chess game for an attempt at a "realistic" wargame. E. to put it another way, game mechanics can inspire the imagination, and some would argue in an rpg that's their primary job; I would argue that the primary job is to function in a way that produces interesting decisions, but inspiring the imagination is a close second, or perhaps that these priorities go hand-in-hand. I'd place "avoiding anachronisms" as part of inspiring the imagination, or perhaps avoiding the cognitive dissonance that ruins the imagination - so placing the right amount of the right sorts of guns in the hands of your toy soldiers when re-enacting a historical war front is part of that - but if you felt the need to abstract all your infantry to just having "a gun" without specifying, that isn't wrong, or necessarily counter to the goal of producing a tactically interesting game. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 19:39
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hyphz posted:The problem is that the most likely way to modify their plan for attack to allow for arrow slits, is either not to attack, attack with an army instead of a goblin band, or.. do a siege, which is probably not fun for the players. This is presumably a system with goddamn magic in it, right? I feel like the enemies could get over a couple of arrow slits with magic. That whole warehouse stalemate seems like a pretty fun situation with a lot of variance on what could happen too so i'm not sure what is the problem here Andrast fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 19:47
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Tulip posted:the history of siege warfare is actually very cool and part of why it's cool involves the layers of knowledge people did and did not have about what was going on There's a good collection of articles on the evolving history of fortifications and siegecraft on this historian's blog I follow that I really recommend. https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fortifications/
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Mar 15, 2022 19:52
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Plutonis posted:There's a good collection of articles on the evolving history of fortifications and siegecraft on this historian's blog I follow that I really recommend. That's where I read the depressing history of WWI trenches!
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Mar 15, 2022 20:05
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Leperflesh posted:I think that's very true, and to abstract it a little: we can develop game mechanics that are inspired by reality. The knight can jump over pieces, but the other chess pieces are blocked. Realistic? Sorta, for some value of realism, but nobody would mistake a chess game for an attempt at a "realistic" wargame. I do think that game design is a very flexible space where multiple design goals can operate with each other. When it comes to historically inspired games, I tend to think most self-consciously about the political agenda of the writer, because it can be very VERY interesting to see the way that a polemical argument can be made inside of game mechanics. Paradox games are the most famous for this of course, but I think this applies to a wide range of games. Spirit Island for example is rather self conscious (and unsuccessful), Wargame: Red Dragon and its predecessors have a peculiar theory about how combat should go and if you read the devnotes/forum you got to learn that the developers deliberately made American infantry bad because they thought American infantry are idiots who only look good in Hollywood movies, you can get a hell of a lot of insight into how people think about Catholicism based on how that church is portrayed in a game (and of course that has an interesting question of: is this portrayal specific to the Catholic church, supposed to use the Catholic church as a stand in for religion, organized religion, or even large scale organization, or is it just nationalist?). I could literally write a book about this so I'll curtail myself here. In any event, not just in game design but all the way up to "writing full on academic histories and physics textbooks," you inevitably are faced with the demand to focus. I did Raman spectroscopy for a project in college, and it is a process that at a very physical level does not produce good results if you do not specifically filter out the brightest bands produced by the process, because the very thing you are measuring is the variation off of the primary wavelength. Well over 99% of the photons coming through would be at whatever wavelength and you are very deliberately looking at the <1% that are coming in from another wavelength. Because that's what we wanted to see. Metaphorically, you tend to design games around exceptional and extreme phenomena. I've never killed a man with a sword. I suspect nobody in this thread has. Even if we talk about IDK Musashi, a man famous for killing people with swords, he spent the vast majority of his time not killing people with swords. And still we make games all about killing people with swords. It's very easy to take a realism knife to any such game and be like "why do you spend more time killing people with swords than sleeping," and I think that the fact that you could do that is a pretty strong indictment of using that realism knife so sloppily. Plutonis posted:There's a good collection of articles on the evolving history of fortifications and siegecraft on this historian's blog I follow that I really recommend. Neat, thank you!
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Mar 15, 2022 20:12
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Siivola posted:I think you'll agree that both Fulminate and Last Things Last kinda suck as mysteries, even though they might be great horror scenarios. Siivola posted:So at that point, if I was looking to get my group into some real gum-on-my-shoe DG, I'd kinda be in a bind. It's been some months so I can't remember how much advice for writing an investigative scenario the Handler's Guide has, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a lot. And since mechanically the rules are only concerned about whether the agents find the clues or not, you don't really get feedback or direction from that direction either.
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Mar 15, 2022 20:17
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Tulip posted:Wargame: Red Dragon and its predecessors have a peculiar theory about how combat should go and if you read the devnotes/forum you got to learn that the developers deliberately made American infantry bad because they thought American infantry are idiots who only look good in Hollywood movies Honestly I think that part gets wildly overstated: that was something Eugen said in response to people who felt US infantry were bad, but the reasons US infantry were bad in the first place came down to a bunch of balance and game design decisions which actually had nothing to do with the perceived quality of US infantry and everything to do with Eugen not understanding their own games. Take Marines, for example. A 15-man Shock squad armed with M16s, M72s, and the Colt LMG. Because it's a 15-man Shock squad it has to, in Red Dragon's logic, cost 25 points. This is massively overpriced because 15-man squads aren't that much better than 10-man squads, and with M72s the Marines can't kill tanks effectively. US Marines being a bad unit came down to a bad pricing, not an assessment of the fighting ability of US infantry. Eugen said they didn't rate US infantry very highly, but that's Eugen covering their asses for their own bad game design. (An example of this overly rigid pricing structure in reverse was the Wessie Jäger, which had G3s, PzF-44s, and the MG3. At ten men, Regular squads with low-power anti-tank weapons are consistently priced at 10 points. It just so happens that the MG3 is the best machine gun in the game because Eugen has a fetish for it, and the PzF-44 has 16 AP-HEAT, which allows it to one-hit-kill any APC with 2 armour, which basically no other low-power anti-tank weapon can do. Because Eugen didn't understand just how powerful the MG42 was, and that 16 AP-HEAT leading to one-shot kills on 2-armour APCs is actually incredibly powerful, they priced it at 10 points for patch after patch until finally relenting. This has nothing to do with Eugen having a high opinion of West German jäger and everything to do with Eugen not understanding the balance of their own game.) ((When Eugen actually thinks a unit is the bees knees they jump straight to making it Shock or even Elite, which is what led to the Mot.-Schutzen meta with 15-point shock squads that couldn't kill tanks but could eat any infantry thrown an it at ridiculous cost-effectiveness.))
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Mar 15, 2022 21:06
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LatwPIAT posted:(An example of this overly rigid pricing structure in reverse was the Wessie Jäger, which had G3s, PzF-44s, and the MG3. At ten men, Regular squads with low-power anti-tank weapons are consistently priced at 10 points. It just so happens that the MG3 is the best machine gun in the game because Eugen has a fetish for it, and the PzF-44 has 16 AP-HEAT, which allows it to one-hit-kill any APC with 2 armour, which basically no other low-power anti-tank weapon can do. Because Eugen didn't understand just how powerful the MG42 was, and that 16 AP-HEAT leading to one-shot kills on 2-armour APCs is actually incredibly powerful, they priced it at 10 points for patch after patch until finally relenting. This has nothing to do with Eugen having a high opinion of West German jäger and everything to do with Eugen not understanding the balance of their own game.)
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Mar 15, 2022 21:12
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I think I'm getting lost in examples. The issue is that it's almost impossible for an RPG to come up with any system of tactics that makes every tactical situation interesting. Chess does not have to do this. It only has to make the one situation, which is the starting position of chess, interesting. Wargames do not have to do this. It only has to enable the players or the tournament organizers to come up with interesting situations which are played in isolation. If an RPG has rome-roaded combat set-pieces, it also doesn't have to do this, as only those ones have to be made interesting (although often they are not) But in an RPG where the players can affect the world and choose their battles, and aren't constrained to set-piece combat, they could fight in any situation. And most of the time, they'll choose an uninteresting situation where they win over an interesting one, because not doing so means they aren't responding normally to challenge and also makes a hell of a bizarre story. I mean, there could be some kind of Jenna Moran style symbolic resonance going on where you have to beat the enemy armies in a skilled way because their mythic nature makes them keep respawning until it's proven that their general is inferior but that's a very strange edge case.
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Mar 15, 2022 21:49
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hyphz posted:Chess does not have to do this. It only has to make the one situation, which is the starting position of chess, interesting.
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Mar 15, 2022 22:01
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