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Kestral posted:We've both been on this forum long enough for me to know that our perspectives on RPGs are irreconcilable, so I'm not going to argue this with you - feel free to have the last word! I'll just post this for others to ruminate on and investigate in their own play: I don't doubt a word you're saying here (I've played enough 5E to confirm that fighter DPR is as good as it looks), but we are actually describing the exact same problem from two different directions. Precisely because fighters don't get mic drop moments (potions and rings and the like are not fighter-only), they have to get something else instead, which is way-higher-than-everyone-else's base stats that turn them into a sort of upcasted Flaming Sphere that deals slashing instead of fire damage. Timmy cards aren't exceptionally good, after all. They're just cool. If you want to win at all costs you may indeed just want to be able to just churn out a continuous stream of slightly undercosted attackers off like three mountains max until your enemy folds. But if you're playing a roleplaying game rather than a tournament they've got a value beyond just taking the other guy's life to zero.
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Dec 29, 2023 19:40
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Griddle of Love posted:A real Gundam RPG, and I say this with love in my heart for Gundam, would need rules for
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Dec 29, 2023 20:36
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In my opinion "death to ability scores" is partially about eliminating an unnecessary level of quantification - if the main purpose of ability scores is to provide derived adjustments to other numbers like skills, then just give people those adjustments directly - but more importantly about not constraining a bunch of other factors that aren't actually necessary to constrain in order to achieve the desired result. To spell that out, I think a likely desired set of qualities of a class-based RPG system is to make sure each class feels different, special, interesting, providing genuine choices in play; to have some level of niche protection, i.e. my guy can do things your gal can't and vise-versa; to give everyone things to do during play, i.e. if your gal gets to shine three times a session mine should probably have a similar number of times of standing out too; and perhaps also to provide some of that good old fashioned traditional "crunch" where as players we get to engage with the complexities of a system that lets us tweak a lot of different knobs and levers to discover interesting synergies and combos and so on. Having a set of six ability scores that define in very broad strokes what your character is and is not, physically and mentally, doesn't serve the first two things at all, and arguably isn't necessary for the third. If I want my character to be a grizzled combatant who is best at swording but knows nothing of your mumbo jumbo mage nonsense, then I should have various "good at swording" character options built into my class or maybe that I can take at more optimal/better versions than other classes. Stats that are derived from STR and CON can just exist independently: give my class a good hefty attack score, damage dealing score, a slew of abilities related to punking on foes in combat. BUT that doesn't mean that I have to be the best at surviving a harsh blizzard, or lifting a heavy gate, or swimming. Those things should be optional for my character, or maybe for any character, unless there's a character class that is specifically about being an athlete or specifically about being an unkillable hardass. And in particular I shouldn't be forced to be a worse fighter if my character concept includes "particularly insightful; good at reading situations and getting to the heart of matters" or "extremely alert and attentive; a sentry, keen-eyed and sharp-eared." Which is to say, I shouldn't be forced to spend startup resources on boosting WIS at the expense of either STR or CON in order to have those things be character options for my class or build. At least, if I am forced to make that choice, that forcing ought to be intentional, something the designers decided to do independently of other design decisions. "In our game, the best sword gals are bad at paying attention" is I guess a valid statement to make, but go ahead and make it out loud and justify it with setting details or genre reference or something. That's just one example. Why should "best at understanding and communing with the gods" be tightly correlated with "best at noticing people sneaking around"? Why should "best at archery" be tightly correlated with "best at sneaking around"? Why should "best at public speaking" be tightly correlated with "best at instinctively casting arcane magic spells without preparation"? "Because we used ability scores" is a bad answer by itself. Those are answerable questions, I'm not saying those things all have to be character options in a given system. But the thing where you have to first define your character as Very Smart but Not Strong in order to then pick a class, and then also have those choices severely restrict your skill, feat, combat and non-combat, and even roleplaying options, is just an unnecessary and sometimes seemingly quite random set of weird barriers. You don't have to actually eliminate ability scores to fix this, but you do have to make some kind of design decision that decouples broad, universally quantified personal capacities like "charismatic" or "tough" from restrictions on character builds that are otherwise believable, normal, not particularly overpowered or underpowered or bizarre. If "really good fighters are never smart enough to learn a third language" isn't an intentional feature of your setting, then don't make it essentially an unavoidable consequence of your system design. It's also fine to have lots of numbers to tweak. I think the classic six scores aren't the best and definitely aren't the only way to do that. e. aside from all of the above, I think there's a regular and pretty justified attack on CON being separate from STR as compared to the domains that the other four D&D scores cover, and I have complained more than once about the basically racist origins of a quantified singular intelligence score and I wish we'd get away from that forever too, but I don't think either of those are specifically within the "death to ability scores" discussion, they're more tangential. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 20:59
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Silver2195 posted:I can see this, although I feel like the logical conclusion of this is likely to be reinventing ability scores in the guise of classes or subclasses. (E.g., all Warriors are strong, but they come in six types: Fighters are even stronger, Swashbucklers are also dexterous, Barbarians are also tough, MacGuyvers are also intelligent, Rangers are also wise, and Warlords are also charismatic.) Though maybe that’s a pro rather than a con. At this point you seem to be using the term "ability score" interchangeably with "assigning a game mechanical advantage to a character that reflects their expertise" which is so far out in the weeds it's impressive. DTAS means that D&D and its typical ripoffs have a specific set of character traits that are only "mostly redundant" because developers keep wedging in uses for them that only exist because they are not allowed to or don't even think about getting rid of them, and these poor choices mean they are mostly useless and even sometimes detrimental to everything else the game is doing, with the exception of "have ability scores because D&D has those."
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Dec 29, 2023 20:59
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What really annoys me about 5e’s class balance is that it re-broke the things 3.5 eventually fixed. Even the Bard, the only core class that wasn’t broken in the first place (it was the only “Tier 3” class in the 3.5 PHB). We already had Tier 3 versions of everything from the Monk (the Swordsage) to the Druid (the Wild Shape Ranger). Just use those as the basis for the 5e core classes! Now to be fair, there’s some tension between balance and simplification here. Some of the Tier 3 and high-Tier 4 classes got much of their power from sourcebook-diving and rules loopholes (the Factotum comes to mind). But that feels like an inadequate explanation for the way 5e ended up. Several explanations (not mutually exclusive) come to mind here. One is that WotC’s staff turnover meant that the late-3.5 and early-4e designers were almost all gone by this point, so there was no one left who actually understood how past editions worked. The second, which I believe Ferrinus has argued in the past, is that it’s poorly balanced on purpose to pander to people who like being overpowered casters. I don’t really buy this; I think it’s rooted in a strawman. The third, most charitable, explanation is that 5e was trying to imitate TSR-era D&D, deliberately moving away from 3e as well as 4e (but with some 3e-isms sneaking in anyway). The final explanation (which I think is the actual main reason) is that 5e was designed in a half-assed way, with more attention paid to marketing than to actual game design; it wasn’t deliberately unbalanced, but very little thought was paid to balance, or to how past editions actually worked beyond the superficial nostalgia-appeal level. The annoying thing is that despite the zillions of D&D-inspired games out there, the game that strikes me as the natural evolution of 3.5 has never been made (maybe in part because non-WotC companies don’t want a lawsuit for copying non-SRD material too closely). PF2 comes the closest, but PF2 PCs are more Tier 4 than Tier 3. (Which makes sense in terms of Paizo’s business model, to be fair; PCs with too much agency are an awkward fit for Adventure Paths.)
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Dec 29, 2023 21:07
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It's definitely the final explanation.
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Dec 29, 2023 21:18
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Silver2195 posted:Ah, a mecha game in the sense that it has giant robot fights, not in the sense that it has masked antiheroes and idealistic princesses and so forth. Firebrands
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Dec 29, 2023 21:31
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Leperflesh posted:BUT that doesn't mean that I have to be the best at surviving a harsh blizzard, or lifting a heavy gate, or swimming. Those things should be optional for my character, or maybe for any character, unless there's a character class that is specifically about being an athlete or specifically about being an unkillable hardass. This is where I disagree. 3e didn’t go far enough in this regard; 4e, PF2, and other games with a unified Athletics skill had the right idea. Having a separate skill for every action involving physical strength is needlessly fiddly and needlessly makes Fighters and similar classes worse. Yes, in real life there are strong people who don’t know how to swim, but do they exist in the kind of genre fiction D&D is supposed to be emulating? And how often does swimming come up in an actual campaign? A separate swim skill makes sense in only two contexts: 1) a game based on One Piece, specifically; 2) a GURPS-style “realistic” game.
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Dec 29, 2023 21:31
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I thought about this a fair bit and colony drops have such immense narrative scope that it almost feels like a UC Gundam-esque game would need some kind of narrative rules for the Signature Atrocity, since it defines and escalates the nature of the war. You actually would have to strategically create a situation where PCs do not have agency over the outcome of such a decisive thing. (This doesn't mean PCs couldn't prevent or avert a colony drop, in the sense of the literal physical/military event, of course.)
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Dec 29, 2023 21:32
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The thing about a gundam rpg is that actual piloting skill or the advanced technology of the robot can't be a factor in conflict resolution. Piloting skill is a character trait, weapons development is a setting detail, but the question of who wins this fight in Gundam is 100% always answered by "which of the participants is the more self-actualized as a person and confident in their ideology?"
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Dec 29, 2023 21:35
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Mister Olympus posted:The thing about a gundam rpg is that actual piloting skill or the advanced technology of the robot can't be a factor in conflict resolution. Piloting skill is a character trait, weapons development is a setting detail, but the question of who wins this fight in Gundam is 100% always answered by "which of the participants is the more self-actualized as a person and confident in their ideology?"
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Dec 29, 2023 21:41
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Because Amuro grew as a person, he could kill Ramba. More recent character development = more effectiveness, except in the case of blatant death-flag type character development
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Dec 29, 2023 21:49
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Ramba Ral won the battle for my heart and that's what's most important
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Dec 29, 2023 21:55
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Silver2195 posted:This is where I disagree. 3e didn’t go far enough in this regard; 4e, PF2, and other games with a unified Athletics skill had the right idea. Having a separate skill for every action involving physical strength is needlessly fiddly and needlessly makes Fighters and similar classes worse. Yes, in real life there are strong people who don’t know how to swim, but do they exist in the kind of genre fiction D&D is supposed to be emulating? And how often does swimming come up in an actual campaign? A separate swim skill makes sense in only two contexts: 1) a game based on One Piece, specifically; 2) a GURPS-style “realistic” game. That said, I do agree that Wisdom, specifically, ties together a bunch of things that have no real connection to each other aside from tabletop RPG tradition. I guess the logic is “they need to be covered by something and Intelligence covers enough things already.”
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Dec 29, 2023 21:55
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In On Contradiction, Mao Zedong lays out the difference between the metaphysical worldview of liberalism, which holds that things are driven by fundamentally static and eternal essences which can only change in quality, and the dialectical worldview of Marxism, which holds that things are in a process of constant transformation driven by the clash of internal forces. It's the liberal conception of reality, and therefore of history, that classifies people by supposed essential natures that then render those people civilized or savage, smart or stupid, innocent or criminal, and so on. This is why ability scores are not simply bad game design but a manifestation of the racial ideology that underlies western hegemony.
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Dec 29, 2023 21:56
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Ferrinus posted:In On Contradiction, Mao Zedong lays out the difference between the metaphysical worldview of liberalism, which holds that things are driven by fundamentally static and eternal essences which can only change in quality, and the dialectical worldview of Marxism, which holds that things are in a process of constant transformation driven by the clash of internal forces. It's the liberal conception of reality, and therefore of history, that classifies people by supposed essential natures that then render those people civilized or savage, smart or stupid, innocent or criminal, and so on. This is why ability scores are not simply bad game design but a manifestation of the racial ideology that underlies western hegemony. This strikes me as wrong, incidentally; I would say that “things change” is the liberal worldview and “things are static” is the pre-liberal, feudal worldview.
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Dec 29, 2023 22:01
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Considering how badly he hosed up his country I don't know if Mao Tse Tung is the most reliable source
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Dec 29, 2023 22:13
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Silver2195 posted:Ah, a mecha game in the sense that it has giant robot fights, not in the sense that it has masked antiheroes and idealistic princesses and so forth. Beam Saber might be what you're looking for. It's a Forged in the Dark game where you can't leave because you're on a Kessler Syndromed planet all the Spacenoids have decided is the lost Earth.
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Dec 29, 2023 22:14
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Runa posted:Considering how badly he hosed up his country I don't know if Mao Tse Tung is the most reliable source Glazius posted:Beam Saber might be what you're looking for. It's a Forged in the Dark game where you can't leave because you're on a Kessler Syndromed planet all the Spacenoids have decided is the lost Earth.
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Dec 29, 2023 22:16
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Silver2195 posted:This strikes me as wrong, incidentally; I would say that “things change” is the liberal worldview and “things are static” is the pre-liberal, feudal worldview. I think the liberal worldview is specifically that things change insofar as they prove out. The cream rises to the top due to its inherent and objective superiority. It might not start there, but that's just because 1d20-1 can sometimes, out of sheet chance, produce a higher result than 1d20+4.
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Dec 29, 2023 22:17
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Mister Olympus posted:Firebrands Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands completely rules and any Gundam enjoyers in this thread should check it out. It's very, very indie storygame-y stuff designed for one-shots, but if your group can handle that it does The Gundam Thing exceedingly well. Runa posted:Considering how badly he hosed up his country I don't know if Mao Tse Tung is the most reliable source Ferrinus has disclosed his politics enough in the past to suggest that he has to tow that line or he gets a struggle session.
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Dec 29, 2023 22:24
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"Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?”
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Dec 29, 2023 22:30
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Ferrinus posted:"Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?” Even 1966 is four years after the end of the Great Leap Forward; I think we’re beyond “a great man but flawed” territory at that point. Even by 1956 he’d had millions of people killed without anything that could seriously be called due process.
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Dec 29, 2023 22:40
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Silver2195 posted:Even 1966 is four years after the end of the Great Leap Forward; I think we’re beyond “a great man but flawed” territory at that point. Even by 1956 he’d had millions of people killed without anything that could seriously be called due process. “Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.” My question for you is this: what's your theory of mind for the countless people, largely not westerners, who feel differently and instead count him as a national if not world-historical hero? Do you think you know something they don't, or that they're gripped with some kind of nationalistic or ideological fervor that your cool objectivity protects you from, or that they're the subjects of some kind of cultural or governmental brainwashing that you've been lucky to escape? I think this loops neatly around to my original point, which is that ability scores are actually a proxy for an extremely specific and highly ideological set of beliefs about people, nature, and history. The idea that people are defined by a static collection of inborn traits which can differ merely in magnitude, and that these differing internal magnitudes proving out over time is how history unfolds (or, in this context, how a combat encounter or whatever gets resolved), is something a lot of people can't and indeed vigorously don't want to shake. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 22:53
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Ferrinus posted:My question for you is this: what's your theory of mind for the countless people, largely not westerners, who feel differently and instead count him as a national if not world-historical hero? Do you think you know something they don't, or that they're gripped with some kind of nationalistic or ideological fervor that your cool objectivity protects you from, or that they're the subjects of some kind of cultural or governmental brainwashing that you've been lucky to escape? Some of the second and some of the third, I guess. I make no claim to cool objectivity in general, only on this particular point. Edit: And I guess some of the first, too. I’m not making any claim to special knowledge, only to access to the Internet outside the Great Firewall. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 22:56
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whatever man this poo poo's boring who cares
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Dec 29, 2023 22:57
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Yeah, I always thought of DTAS as being pretty D&D and equivalents specific, there are already plenty of games that do away with what we traditionally consider ability scores, and I get it, because every time D&D adds a layer of choice all it seems to do is provide an opportunity to build your character right, now with an extra step. Choose Fighter. Set strength as high as you can. Okay, now there's subclasses. Better choose the one that does the most damage. Feats? Better find the one that layers without overlapping what your stat and subclass and class do. Weapon specialization? Better make sure to follow suit. If you do any wrong, like you think "Oh hey, I will take the Educated feat so that my character has extra profession skills because I would like to play a fighter that was originally a librarian" well you hosed up, because a feat that was "Do fighter better" was also available. It's a false choice. And stats are basically the easiest layer to get rid of. Fighters should start with an 18 in strength? Great, they start with +4 to Fighter poo poo. Done. No chance to mess up, and why would you have needed to anyway? All that poo poo about "Lower stats make for better roleplaying" is dumb hustle struggle culture D&D poo poo and we all know it, so what else was there?
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Dec 29, 2023 23:00
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Silver2195 posted:Some of the second and some of the third, I guess. I make no claim to cool objectivity in general, only on this particular point. Well, they'd say the same about you, right? On both the second and third point you're as likely as not somewhere that would've treated Mao, and does treat basically any anti- or post-colonial uprising as the actions of an enemy state, and therefore awash in cultural and government discourse that emphasizes the casualties while downplaying the public health gains, such that you can't be objective about the ultimate benefits of etc etc etc. And each of these conflicting views, by conflicting, are going to produce a future that couldn't have existed without either. I don't actually want to have an argument about historical communist K/D ratios here and mostly brought up Mao to be cheeky, but I do seriously believe that the bad design associated with ability scores can be traced back to this deeper ideological clash. To analogize from my last paragraph, it's like: if you grew up somewhere different with a different history, might you be soberly acknowledging that the Chairman was 70% good, 30% bad? Or is your INT simply too high for you to fall for that? One of the most chilling posts from the original Grognards.txt, and I'm sure people have seen me reference this before, is that one from a kid on Stormfront or something who was excitedly posting about how D&D, like, resolved the internal contradictions of racism for it. He was like, when I was younger, I was really anguished and confused: if white people were supposedly smarter than Black people, how come there are so many smart Black people around? But then I saw how Dungeons and Dragons mechanized racial ability score modifiers, and could rest easy knowing that even if a member of the lesser races rolled straight 6s during chargen, they'd still have lower INT and WIS than a white person who rolled the same!
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Dec 29, 2023 23:15
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Ferrinus posted:I think this loops neatly around to my original point, which is that ability scores are actually a proxy for an extremely specific and highly ideological set of beliefs about people, nature, and history. The idea that people are defined by a static collection of inborn traits which can differ merely in magnitude, and that these differing internal magnitudes proving out over time is how history unfolds (or, in this context, how a combat encounter or whatever gets resolved), is something a lot of people can't and indeed vigorously don't want to shake.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:22
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I can't tell if this whole current conversation is a dry meta joke or not.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:28
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Nessus posted:I believe there is considerable evidence that the idea that "people can be defined by a static collection of inborn traits" precedes modernity. Hercules, for instance, is defined by his origin; similarly, both David and Goliath had various qualities and it was understood that, for instance, David was less endowed in some traits than Goliath (size, strength) but exceeded him in others (piety), with the latter being expressed as greater than the former. (It appears that being frum was a recipe for being OP in Bible times.) Sure, but so does the idea that people should own the land in common. The question is which views become hegemonic and why. If you're leveraging a temporary tech advantage to conquer and enslave a bunch of people, it's going to get easier and easier for you to assume that those people aren't people after all (or are like, attenuated people, ~50% people) because that's how your whole social universe works and also what puts bread on your table. And then this loops back on itself and makes future conquest even easier to stomach by reflex action. But let's take your example. We're writing and/or playing the Bible RPG. Does every single character have a "Size" attribute, scaling from 1 to 20, and David is 5 and Goliath is 20, and attacks add Size as a damage modifier (and also there's a separate Faith score which is low-key better to have, akin to STR vs. INT in D&D)? Or do some characters just get a "Giant" feat noted on their sheet that allows or prohibits certain actions?
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Dec 29, 2023 23:32
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Colonel Cool posted:I can't tell if this whole current conversation is a dry meta joke or not. ferrinus is a gimmick poster, it's like arguing with video game quotes or lottery of babylon
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Dec 29, 2023 23:35
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Ferrinus posted:Sure, but so does the idea that people should own the land in common. The question is which views become hegemonic and why. If you're leveraging a temporary tech advantage to conquer and enslave a bunch of people, it's going to get easier and easier for you to assume that those people aren't people after all (or are like, attenuated people, ~50% people) because that's how your whole social universe works and also what puts bread on your table. And then this loops back on itself and makes future conquest even easier to stomach by reflex action. On the second: It's difficult to say. If I was, for some reason (lost a bet?) making some kind of system that was supposed to allow you to do Microscope-style generation of mythologies and scriptures for a particular culture, sort of like Dwarf Fortress, I would probably mark Goliath as having had a unique feat or aspect for his notable size. You can imagine a story with the same general point in which Goliath was a powerful Midianite sorcerer (a reprise of Aaron throwing down his staff and having it become a bigger snake, which ate the Egyptians' little snakes), but the greater point of that story was that David had faith and Saul did not. Indeed, other parts of the scripture around David and Goliath note that, first, Saul was the biggest Hebrew and would have been the fairer fight against Goliath, and second, that their weapons were equal. It came down to David's superior factors, whether you wanted to articulate this as some qualia David had that Saul didn't (or that Saul had less of), or as a, so to speak, thing David roleplayed out.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:41
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Whirling posted:whatever man this poo poo's boring who cares Lol that this captured my exact thoughts
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Dec 29, 2023 23:45
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I like Mutants and Masterminds' classless point build system since I think it does a better job of letting you create something like a very smart Conan the Barbarian type guy since it isn't a waste to give him some extra intelligence and skills.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:46
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Kestral posted:Ferrinus has disclosed his politics enough in the past to suggest that he has to tow that line or he gets a struggle session. lmao rip couldn't be me homie I guess im just built different
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Dec 29, 2023 23:46
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Nessus posted:Regarding the first: I don't think you're wrong so much as eliding a whole lot of contingent details, and those details are important. I'm not sure that, for instance, ancient Rome or ancient China had concepts of people overseas being "different/lesser orders of being" so much as "poorly behaved assholes." In order to have different categories of human being, you must first have the category "human being." Maybe one of us is misreading the other, but I agree with you on this. Universal humanity, but with a massive flashing asterisk leading to a multi-page footnote on "race", is a pretty modern invention. The idea of Abby being able to beat Bobby in an arm wrestling match because she's got bigger muscles is not, but if you then assume that the latter is downstream from the former, and the result of certain universal and scientifically ("scientifically") measurable capacities that inherently differ between populations... quote:On the second: It's difficult to say. If I was, for some reason (lost a bet?) making some kind of system that was supposed to allow you to do Microscope-style generation of mythologies and scriptures for a particular culture, sort of like Dwarf Fortress, I would probably mark Goliath as having had a unique feat or aspect for his notable size. There's a lot of ways to do it and I like your suggestions, I just want to underline the fact that a roster of universal but numerically-varying ability scores is only one way to do it and not one that's politically neutral. If we were writing an RPG about, I don't know, a hospital, it might behoove us to assign every last character a 1-5 rating in how good they are at actually doctoring (or subdivide it such that I can have different scores in oncology and endocrinology or something) because that's very relevant to what we're trying to stochastically generate stories about, but the more you try to generalize and universalize this stuff the weirder and more obviously political it can get.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:49
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Yeah, let's table the question of what our political enemies may or may not believe about human capabilities and get back to the important stuff: games not bein' designed too good On a completely different subject, has anyone here played Brindlewood Bay? I just got my physical copy right before Christmas vacation and have been enjoying reading it, and I'm really curious how it plays.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:49
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Whirling posted:I like Mutants and Masterminds' classless point build system since I think it does a better job of letting you create something like a very smart Conan the Barbarian type guy since it isn't a waste to give him some extra intelligence and skills. 
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Dec 29, 2023 23:54
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I dunno I'll take an army of Ferrini going on about whatever grad student word examination of stat design over any talk at all about whether or not Chairman Mao was well respected in the 60s. One of those is at least tangentially about Trad Games. Goons gonna poli sci though.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:54
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