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theironjef posted:Yeah, I saw basically "If you're picking boring abilities (for any reason, really) that's on you" and was responding "if the game has boring abilities, that's on the game." Different people have different things they find boring. If I'm playing a Supers game I would prefer The Hulk to be a lot simpler to play and thinking about a lot less than Tony Stark. There are also a non-trivial number of people that will find "Hulk Smash" boring and want something to mechanically sink their teeth into and a non-trivial number of people who will find a quasi-engineering approach with suit customisation and energy allocation in the suit to be boring and just want to get to playing their character. And there are some people that play different things at different times or in different types of game (for example I only really play non-4e D&D rogues in one shots as once I've got the character's rhythm down it doesn't feel like I need to try and that makes it feel less roguelike). That said there are things almost no one finds interesting. But if everything a game has is interesting to you it's probably either pretty light or pretty narrowly focused.
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Sep 21, 2022 11:41
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neonchameleon posted:Different people have different things they find boring. If I'm playing a Supers game I would prefer The Hulk to be a lot simpler to play and thinking about a lot less than Tony Stark. There are also a non-trivial number of people that will find "Hulk Smash" boring and want something to mechanically sink their teeth into and a non-trivial number of people who will find a quasi-engineering approach with suit customisation and energy allocation in the suit to be boring and just want to get to playing their character. The danger is trying to balance these characters. If you're in a situation where, if Tony manages his energy just right, he's the same strength as Hulk is all the time, Tony's player's going to feel unrewarded for their extra effort and that their character is outright weaker. If Tony's stronger than Hulk if he manages his energy correctly, but doing so is easy enough that the player can do it, then Hulk's player's going to feel penalized for having their preferred playstyle.
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Sep 21, 2022 12:49
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Hulk's player has to look at problems and think "drat, how do I handle this by being huge and strong and angry?" Stark's player can just overcome the obstacle with some bullshit.
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Sep 21, 2022 12:51
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Yeah, a good reward for technical challenges is versatility. This famously fails on large scales like MMOs, but works just fine in the context of normal tabletop groups... as long as niches are respected, like 3.X D&D famously doesn't.
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Sep 21, 2022 13:01
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hyphz posted:The danger is trying to balance these characters. The "obvious" solution is floors and ceilings. You can give the Hulk archetype a high floor and the Tony character a floor of 1, but they both have easily reachable 9's and occasional situational 10s. So the Hulk can just Hulk Smash and occasionally Double Hulk Smash leading to a solid 7 performance, but they can also hit 9 by engaging in ragepoint brinkmanship to maximise their targeted hulk rampages vs uncontrolled hulk rampages shut up brain stop trying to invent a whole mechanic for this example. Meanwhile the Tony needs to constantly juggle their power level to even hit 7, but hitting 9 is no more difficult than for the Hulk player and they still don't have the option to go to 11. e: in 5E bumping the Fighter to an optional 10 would translate to Action Surge being usable for the current option of getting a whole other turn, but also usable for stuff like "Just stun this guy no questions asked". Adding a floor to the Wizard would be "And also every Wizard knows fireball so you can just cast that if you're not sure what to do this turn". Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 13:31
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hyphz posted:The danger is trying to balance these characters. Splicer posted:The "obvious" solution is floors and ceilings. You can give the Hulk archetype a high floor and the Tony character a floor of 1, but they both have easily reachable 9's and occasional situational 10s. So the Hulk can just Hulk Smash and occasionally Double Hulk Smash leading to a solid 7 performance, but they can also hit 9 by engaging in ragepoint brinkmanship to maximise their targeted hulk rampages vs uncontrolled hulk rampages shut up brain stop trying to invent a whole mechanic for this example. We already solved this problem. The correct approach is that both characters are exactly as powerful as each other, because complexity is purely a personal preference variable and the Tony player is playing Tony because the idea of fiddling with providing power to 10 different subcomponents appeals to them. If the Tony player wants to play Tony but not have to manage 10 subcomponents, they can play the Hulk instead and just reskin the smashing as power armour and laser beams and the rage point management as energy point management. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 13:47
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As a fan of games like Marvel Heroic and the Sentinel Comics RPG, I feel like I should talk about this a bit more. Mostly because I agree with Lemon-Lime's point, but "if Iron Man's player wants to play a simple character, they should just reskin the Hulk" feels weirdly dismissive when you say it like that. The thing about complexity is that, if the system is roughly balanced, it's all just tone-setting. Iron Man has a bunch of fiddly little abilities where he boosts the power to this ability and lowers the power of this one and burns out this to make a giant laser, because fiddling with a bunch of dials helps sell the Iron Man fantasy. The Hulk has simple dice tricks about getting stronger and tougher and angrier over time, because that's the Hulk fantasy. And if you want an Iron Man that's as simple as the Hulk, you're going to need to excise those fiddly mechanics about power modulation and replace them with simpler mechanics, like the ones the Hulk has. Just call them something like Beam Frequency Modulation instead of Growing Anger so they fit the Iron Man fantasy better and do a bunch more small adjustments like that, and you should be good to go. (Actually porting over mechanics like that while maintaining each character's tone is a lot more complicated than I'm making it sound, but you get the point.)
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Sep 21, 2022 16:27
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Bruce Banner is an accomplished and intelligent scientist. And the Hulk can punch a man into orbit. Iron Man has a radio and can manage sustained flight across continents and is a billionaire. They both can turn into a normal-looking human who can walk into a restaurant or hold a press conference or meet with the chief of police without implying imminent violence. When you're talking about complexity, I don't think that has to be the same thing as versatility. Tony Stark's billions and his technology combine to allow that player to handwave away a ton of obstacles that Bruce Banner absolutely cannot, but it doesn't necessarily require complex mechanics to do that. "We need to get to the other side of the world." Stark: "we'll use one of my several private jets." "We need to get an audience with the Senator." Stark: "billionaires can always get audiences with senators. I'll make a strategic donation to a super-PAC." "We need to decombobulate the frangipons within this inversed thermobaric magnetosphere." Stark: "Bruce and I will work on this in one of my many absurdly well-funded and outfitted technology labs." None of this requires any more complexity than writing "billionaire" and "tech genius" on Stark's character sheet, and a game that allows the player and GM to use that attribute the same way it's used in the comic books. Similarly, Banner can have "super scientist" on his sheet, and also maybe "can get stuck as the Hulk for up to multiple years" as a flaw, along with "is always the strongest" as a unique power if you want, at least until you're on the level of power of like, Galactus (IMO Galactus shouldn't be treated as a character anyway). But again neither of those things is necessarily simpler than "billionaire" or "recovering alcoholic" or "extremely public identity" or "reputation as a womanizer" etc. etc. Mechanical complexity can be applied to any area of a game, or not, as a design choice, and IMO characters like the Hulk don't have to be single-faceted to be "simple" to play, but neither do characters like Iron Man have to be reduced or diminished to be "simple" to play either.
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Sep 21, 2022 18:50
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The supers game I play these days would probably have a wildly more complicated Hulk than Iron Man (though I wouldn't run him using the assumed default model because generally Hulk isn't Bannering and Hulking repeatedly during every combat). And yeah technically boredom is subjective but you know what's boring almost universally is poo poo like Toughness in 3e. Also yeah I never go along with this Hulk would be simple mentality because his powers aren't what I care about at the table, their mechanical representation is. Hulk big and strong, but Hulk also absorb damage, hold line, cover distance with leaps, throw exploding obstacle into orbit, clap away cloud of gas, rip up street to create difficult terrain, resist mental compulsion, heal rapidly, release puny Banner for science emergency. He's actually got a lot going on mechanically. Trying to use Marvel guys to do an end run around to "fighter just swings a sword all day" is just as reductive as "fighter swings a sword all day." Can you run Hulk as just "it's my turn, I roll to punch the Wizard into Hoboken?" Sure yeah. But I generally tend to think people spend more time wasting digital ink on a class of players that won't engage with the game unless it's bone simple and it's a waste of time. Those players are rare and that design is simple. theironjef fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 20:54
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For reference, making the Hulk in GURPS with full fidelity would definitely be more complicated than Iron Man, though you could build both the same way if you wanted to. In game, Stark would probably have a much more complicated sheet overall(if I had Hulk in GURPS, i'd probably just give them two sheets- one for Hulk, one for Banner so the alternate form is easy to understand). Superheroes are by far the most complicated characters to make in GURPS. Even fantasy wizards can usually be done at an okay level with GURPS Magic's overall system and be somewhat simple. I actually kinda do prefer characters in that kind of game playing mechanically differently rather than just having slightly different names on their "do superhero thing" action roll.
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Sep 21, 2022 21:21
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Yeah, I was talking about Sentinels personally, where I think people are naturally inclined to make Hulk using the Form-Changer archetype, which I'd say no to. Form-changer makes changing forms a combat strategy, which isn't how Hulk fights. I've had to talk a lot of players out of Form-Changer, they keep trying to use it for stuff like Magical Girl archetypes, and I keep telling them "you can have the transformation sequence for free, it's not really mechanically part of anything." I mean, maybe they did it in a Madoka or something, but I've never seen the Sailor scouts get shut down mid-transformation by a villain.
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Sep 21, 2022 21:34
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Panzeh posted:For reference, making the Hulk in GURPS with full fidelity would definitely be more complicated than Iron Man, though you could build both the same way if you wanted to. In game, Stark would probably have a much more complicated sheet overall(if I had Hulk in GURPS, i'd probably just give them two sheets- one for Hulk, one for Banner so the alternate form is easy to understand). Always thought it would be fun to try and make Homelander in GURPS
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Sep 22, 2022 05:24
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trapstar posted:Always thought it would be fun to try and make Homelander in GURPS He'd actually be pretty easy. In a lot of ways, his being a goober other than being basically superman makes him way easier to make- the 'i'm actually a genius, too with x skills' aspect of a lot of superheroes means you have to have a huge skill list but Homelander can be built mostly with his powers and a fairly moderate skill list.
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Sep 22, 2022 10:26
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In "Missing the forest for the trees" talk, the thing* wasn't "Hulk simple tony complex" it's "if you have class/build/whatever who is performs pretty much the same regardless of effort and class/build/whatever who performs very dependently on engaging in shenanigans" then you have to decide if straightforward guy is just plain worse than fiddly guy or if fiddly guy is just fiddling to get up to par with straightforward guy. The most obvious solution is to not have characters of mixed complexity into the same game, but I was putting forward the option of straightforward guy having a high minimum threshold but an optional fiddly threshold on par with fiddly guy's maximum capability. Which one you choose to apply to the hulk and which one is iron man is completely irrelevant. *don't
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Sep 22, 2022 11:04
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Splicer posted:In "Missing the forest for the trees" talk, the thing* wasn't "Hulk simple tony complex" it's "if you have class/build/whatever who is performs pretty much the same regardless of effort and class/build/whatever who performs very dependently on engaging in shenanigans" then you have to decide if straightforward guy is just plain worse than fiddly guy or if fiddly guy is just fiddling to get up to par with straightforward guy. The most obvious solution is to not have characters of mixed complexity into the same game, but I was putting forward the option of straightforward guy having a high minimum threshold but an optional fiddly threshold on par with fiddly guy's maximum capability. That's exactly it. The case I was thinking of is that of the Fighter and the Swashbuckler in PF2e. The Fighter gets higher base numbers than the swashbuckler, but the swashbuckler can gain "panache" by performing certain stunts and feats in a round which give them bonuses that are close to (but not quite the same as) the Fighter. I can understand the argument that some players might just prefer to play a more involved character, but unfortunately it falls down on two counts. First is action economy - for example, one of the panache students is to Tumble Through the enemy, which takes up an action; that means that the Swashbuckler's panache attack afterwards has to be comparable to the two attacks the Fighter could have made, which it doesn't come close to. Secondly is situational nature - sometimes the Swashbuckler just can't do the complex thing needed to get their bonus, but the Fighter doesn't need to. These end up meaning that the Swashbuckler is outright weaker than the Fighter almost no matter how well they are played.
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Sep 22, 2022 16:42
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D&D 3 loved "balancing" martials by giving them abilities that took multiple actions or skill checks to activate.
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Sep 22, 2022 16:43
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Halloween Jack posted:D&D 3 loved "balancing" martials by giving them abilities that took multiple actions or skill checks to activate.
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Sep 22, 2022 16:48
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hyphz posted:That's exactly it. The case I was thinking of is that of the Fighter and the Swashbuckler in PF2e. The Fighter gets higher base numbers than the swashbuckler, but the swashbuckler can gain "panache" by performing certain stunts and feats in a round which give them bonuses that are close to (but not quite the same as) the Fighter. That is less about the complexity and more about the fighter just being somewhat overtuned, the fighter outperforms other simple characters like barbarians in a similar way. If you compare Barbarians and Swashes it's much more equal and I don't think either significantly outperforms the other. Andrast fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Sep 22, 2022 |
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Sep 22, 2022 17:04
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I think the intention is for that to serve as an example of a more general rules design problem that folks could discuss and analyze? Hence porting it over to a made-up hulk/iron man case instead. That said: D&D 4e addressed this problem, at least to a some degree, by formalizing the leader/controller/tank/striker roles and giving players and GMs the tools to maintain role exclusivity, at least in a party with no more than 4 players: Hulk would probably not be in the same party as Iron Man if they're both Tanks, or at least the players would understand from the outset that if they're making two Tank characters, one or the other may wind up being "the best" at tanking in most situations (irrespective of what prerequisites or complexity is required to do the tanking) and that could be discouraging. If Iron Man's Tank spec winds up being sufficiently different from Hulk's Tank spec maybe that overlap doesn't matter so much, but clearly defined combat roles helps to avoid surprises and obviates the need to avoid design choices where one character "activates" a level of primary ability at some cost that another character just gets for free. And to extend the metaphor, either of Iron Man or Hulk could reasonably be specced as a Striker, Leader, or even a Controller, if you wanted to. I think I'd default to Hulk being a Tank and Iron Man being a Controller.
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Sep 22, 2022 17:40
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Yeah, Marvel moves around the abilities of their characters to match story needs all the time too, most notably by constantly "forgetting" that Spider-Man is supposed to be able to like pick up and throw a gas station. They gave Peter too many powers and half the time they just take a few away to get him to fit in group stuff.
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Sep 22, 2022 17:58
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I mean at least Iron Man is wearing a different suit in every scene so him having and then not having his roller skates or a little saw in his finger or whatever (those are both real things I remember from a 1980s comic) has an explanation. Hulk can punch through time and space:  Or, y'know, maybe he just hucks a car down the block. I think a comics-inspired game should decide pretty early on in the design process whether it's "genre fidelity" to just have characters wildly swing in power depending on the scene or story being written, or if it's better for playing a game to tone that way down and have an actual defined range of power and ability they have to stay within.
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Sep 22, 2022 18:19
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Make it like early spiderman where you can lose to a guy that got fused into a brick wall: the qualitiative powers stay the same but their effectiveness scales to the power level of the opponent they're facing. Fighting a bank robber? 1 die. Fighting galactus? 100 die.
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Sep 22, 2022 20:46
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Broadly I would expect increased fiddliness and possibility-of-failure to, as a reward, offer increased versatility or adaptability to changing circumstances rather than raw numerical throughput or power. Like, your guy can do good single target or good AoE but certain behind-the-scenes things have to line up to let you make the transition smoothly or you might end up doing either worse or at greater cost than if you'd specialized properly. But, there should be a certain baseline of complexity and resource expenditure that everyone buys into akin to blood points in a vampire game or rechargeable powers in D&D.
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Sep 22, 2022 20:52
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Unrelated to the current discussion, I’m still baffled the Dark Souls rpg didn’t use Runequest.
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Sep 23, 2022 01:25
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MonsieurChoc posted:Unrelated to the current discussion, I’m still baffled the Dark Souls rpg didn’t use Runequest. That would require even slight creative thought from Steamforged.
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Sep 23, 2022 02:24
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zerofiend posted:That would require even slight creative thought from Steamforged. Oh I know why, I didn't say surprised, just baffled. I guess Fromsoft should have sold the rigths to the right group haha. Miyazaki even has a copy of the old Dragon Pass boardgame he keeps in his office!
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Sep 23, 2022 06:02
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Speaking of, Dark Souls is getting a relaunch of the core rules via kickstarter and a new expansion I believe. The rules are crowdsourced this time around.
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Sep 23, 2022 06:07
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S.J. posted:Speaking of, Dark Souls is getting a relaunch of the core rules via kickstarter and a new expansion I believe. The rules are crowdsourced this time around. Wait, they're running a second Kickstarter for their bad game?
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Sep 23, 2022 06:12
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zerofiend posted:Wait, they're running a second Kickstarter for their bad game? Actually poo poo, it might not be via kickstarter. I just saw the update ON their kickstarter. My bad. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/steamforged/dark-soulstm-the-board-game/posts/3605066
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Sep 23, 2022 06:32
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S.J. posted:Speaking of, Dark Souls is getting a relaunch of the core rules via kickstarter and a new expansion I believe. The rules are crowdsourced this time around. "Here, YOU fix our bad rules and we'll make money from it!"
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Sep 23, 2022 15:26
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Crappy gameplay that is saved by the fanbase fervor alone? Sounds like Dark Souls all right!
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Sep 23, 2022 15:48
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Plutonis posted:Crappy gameplay that is saved by the fanbase fervor alone? Sounds like Dark Souls all right! that's actually you're switched off monitor
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Sep 23, 2022 17:53
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Edit: Eh, nevermind.
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Sep 25, 2022 16:21
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Farg posted:that's actually you're switched off monitor
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Sep 25, 2022 23:36
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Years ago there was some RPG comic that was fairly well drawn. The party is stuck in some room so they chop up the dwarf, push him through, and use a wand of resurrection on him which puts his hands on backwards. Does anyone remember this?
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Sep 26, 2022 20:10
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Cat Face Joe posted:Years ago there was some RPG comic that was fairly well drawn. The party is stuck in some room so they chop up the dwarf, push him through, and use a wand of resurrection on him which puts his hands on backwards. Does anyone remember this? Sounds like something Looking For Group would have done.
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Sep 26, 2022 20:44
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I swear that happened on Ajin: Demi-Human too
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Sep 26, 2022 20:48
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Cat Face Joe posted:Years ago there was some RPG comic that was fairly well drawn. The party is stuck in some room so they chop up the dwarf, push him through, and use a wand of resurrection on him which puts his hands on backwards. Does anyone remember this? Skullkickers? The dwarf warrior's big upgrade was becoming comically undead. The gunslinger's was a second copy of their gun.
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Sep 26, 2022 21:11
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You're thinking of Zogonia from Dragon Magazine.
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Sep 26, 2022 21:49
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Rand Brittain posted:You're thinking of Zogonia from Dragon Magazine. THAT'S IT thanks man, I was imaging the art style completely differently
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Sep 26, 2022 21:55
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