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Just to be clear, this is absolutely an appropriate thread for this kind of discussion. Chat thread would work as well, because this straddles both. FWIW I'm definitely on the side of "it's not worth getting mad about rule 0 or reminders thereof, what the gently caress?" and it's fascinating to me that this seems to be happening. That's definitely an industry thing.
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May 1, 2024 14:55
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I've been mostly playing 5e lately and too basic rules get pushed on the dm, so I'm primed to be mad about that sort of thing. "use this rule or don't" doesn't bug me as much but like they said if you're not confident in the design I'm not gonna be either.
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May 1, 2024 15:04
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"You can change the rules" good "Ask your GM how this thing works because we didn't both defining it" bad So far as I know only 5e has made the latter a core part of its identity.
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May 1, 2024 15:09
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to piggyback on Panzeh's post, I do think there's a qualitative difference in a game that might expect you to use or not-use certain sets of rules, as opposed to telling you that this or that rule can be ignored or changed, but without necessarily providing a "replacement" for it
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May 1, 2024 15:16
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Bottom Liner posted:
I am now lol'ing at the idea of a novel where the intro says "Hey, if you don't like what happens at any point in the story, please write fan fiction and change it! I have no confidence in my storytelling abilities, and really want you to not be mad at me!" Which I'm not sure is better or worse than the "I do not allow fan fiction of my work" stance of some rather pretentious authors, as if they have any control over what the folks at Ao3 and other places do
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May 1, 2024 15:24
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dwarf74 posted:Just to be clear, this is absolutely an appropriate thread for this kind of discussion. Chat thread would work as well, because this straddles both. I'm also on team "design quibbles in ttrpgs should probably not have this kind of vitriol around them". gradenko_2000 posted:to piggyback on Panzeh's post, I do think there's a qualitative difference in a game that might expect you to use or not-use certain sets of rules, as opposed to telling you that this or that rule can be ignored or changed, but without necessarily providing a "replacement" for it I also think it's honestly good practice, if you have the room, to explain what the effect of changing a rule might be on the game itself and its mechanics as well, if you have something that might obviously be changed. Not required, of course, but i always love a good set of designer's notes. Maybe comes from playing wargames (not the dolly kind).
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May 1, 2024 15:25
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It's interesting to me that in games with serious complexity and rules interaction, you genuinely can't just gently caress with one thing without it having a broader impact than intended. Like it's fine to play Battletech without the rules for tracking heat. Maybe it's a headache, or you're learning! But that's going to drastically advantage some mechs over others. D&D 5e really pushed the sloppy design fixed by "ask your DM!" attitude, though. Which works in a game where little care goes into interactions, because there's a player whose job is to constantly hedge this, fudge that, and "rule of cool" adjudication. The original tweet hit this divide in an abrasive way. It is "cowardly" to be intentionally noncommittal to design. But the tweet seems to be leveraging that accusation against a designer who's describing the first case. The game says "you don't have to track heat if it's not fun," and the Twitter user is trying to shoehorn that into whatever box early 5e belongs in.
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May 1, 2024 15:26
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Perhaps as someone who quit reading things on X, I’m missing part of the argument, but isn’t this a case where a bunch of people are mad at this solo RPG rulebook for having a specific rule that says “ignore these limitations if you aren’t having fun” without any actual discussion of the rules system outside this snippet? Did the original tweeter just read the rules, encounter this one, and go berserk, or has he played multiple sessions of the game and have a cogent argument about why these limits are vital? Arguing about system mastery and well-designed rules generally without having even read the rules to this game seems potentially ironic. If the rules are crap, this is just part of the rules being crap. If they aren’t, and this “opt out” rule shouldn’t be opt out, I’d expect discussion of specific rules mechanics. Otherwise, it’s invoking a keyword for outrage/views/retweets, not making a substantive argument. The argument over 5E’s rule zero is at least somewhat substantive (WotC is industry leader and can afford well-designed rules so hand-waving the many flaws in 5E using rule zero patches is an outrage), especially as there’s so much discussion of 5E’s shortcomings as a rules-set. Personally, I think it’s an audience mismatch: 5E wants to expand the player base and rule zero could be important to new players, but the system as a whole has huge cognative gaps where the designers clearly didn’t register whole sets of things new players might not understand that are intuitive to them. What actual effect on play do these limitations have? What is the effect of ignoring them? And why do a subset of people seem to think there’s “good RPG rules” when at the high end of quality, designers are left with choices and they’re not min/maxable ones? Is it because so many games (RPGs and boardgames alike) have poorly-written rules and they’re a constant source of struggle and frustration for us? Even the “crunchy rules vs loose improv” debate is at least partly a matter of preference, though I will note that writing clear rules for a game with one page of rules is a lot easier than the same across 1200 pages. Tl;dr: People are rightly upset at WotC/Hasbro over 5E’s many shortcomings and react poorly to Rule zero even though there’s nothing wrong with it conceptually, especially in an RPG format and even more especially in a solo RPG. At least nobody is going to send the Pinkertons after me if I cheat a few rolls when playing solitaire.
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May 1, 2024 15:27
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My personal take is that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if the discussion of how you can ignore the hard limit on how many assets you can include in a roll if it feels better stayed in the longer rules discussion and not the step by step list of how it works. Talking about how breaking that mechanic's hard limit won't impact the broader mechanics too badly if you want to do something more high-power in the moment is perfectly normal. In fact, I'd actually encourage it. Including it in the step-by-step list just feels like a real lack of confidence in your own mechanics, and that taps into things people are annoyed by in the wider D&D discourse as already mentioned.
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May 1, 2024 15:39
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Jimbozig posted:the excesses of Rule 0 culture. Do elaborate on whatever this is. Try to do it in a Canadian professor voice too.
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May 1, 2024 15:45
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TG as an industry: A pendulum swing against the excesses of Rule 0 culture.
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May 1, 2024 15:52
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I honestly am failing to see what's even actually being fought over here. Like, when I was a kid, I played a poo poo load of 2e D&D. It was what we played in my boy scout troop. And we invariably and without even thinking about it discarded the racial level caps. They were lovely design. I feel like you'd have to search far and wide to find anyone that thinks they weren't lovely design and could make any sort of defensible argument as to why and how they were good actually. We also dropped 2e method 1 rolling (3d6 down the line) for a wide variety of other rolling methods, because the odds of rolling a bard were like .0017% or something. That's lovely design. Why devote page space to something so rare? We laugh when Synnibarr has three pages dedicated to what happens if you roll 5 zeroes on a 5D10 roll and qualify to be a godling or whatever, but that's .01%! It's more likely! So we house ruled that poo poo. And generally speaking, if you played 2e, you probably house ruled the poo poo out of it too. 1e more so, 3e more so, even my favorite 4e had the MM on a Card to make up for the lovely first two MMs and a bunch of other stuff besides (hello free weapon focus math fix feat). But it honestly reads like the argument here is that it would have been cowardly if an edition of 2e had come out with a sentence at the start that said "If you think halflings should get to be bards, go ahead, it's your table." Is that accurate? Like, we were all gonna houserule poo poo anyway. We did. Even the games with rules against house ruling we house rule anyway. So we're mad at the possible existence of a sentence that acknowledges that? What are we, page space fundamentalists? Who gives a gently caress? Or am I misreading this whole thing, I am a moron by trade.
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May 1, 2024 16:03
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The point appears to be two fold. The first is 1) People shouldn't have to help design your system in order to play the game. This is best typified by stuff like D&D doing nothing to actually help design anything in terms of encounters or how/why to change certain things and leaving that up for the GM to design as a result of a crappy system. 2) People should be allowed to change the game if they want. This is where it becomes slightly thornier. Because some people really see someone going "if your not enjoying this, change it" as an example of not believing in the rules that you have created and that the developers couldn't put together something that could deal wit it. That seems to be the cliff notes from what I can tell.
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May 1, 2024 16:10
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theironjef posted:Or am I misreading this whole thing, I am a moron by trade. My read, as a fellow "old gamer used to tinkering with poo poo," is that it's something of a culture clash between those of us who grew up with lovely broken rule sets we felt free to tinker with because it didn't matter; and those who appreciate newer, smaller, tightly designed games where tinkering can break them, and who expect a more curated and focused approach where every rule must have a purpose. And the Twitter thread is basically group b laying into group a and group a being really loving confused. Basically modern indie vs... everything before that. With 5e's shittiness somehow smeared over the whole discussion. Or maybe I'm wrong too. Idk.
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May 1, 2024 16:15
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theironjef posted:I honestly am failing to see what's even actually being fought over here. Like, when I was a kid, I played a poo poo load of 2e D&D. It was what we played in my boy scout troop. And we invariably and without even thinking about it discarded the racial level caps. They were lovely design. I feel like you'd have to search far and wide to find anyone that thinks they weren't lovely design and could make any sort of defensible argument as to why and how they were good actually. We also dropped 2e method 1 rolling (3d6 down the line) for a wide variety of other rolling methods, because the odds of rolling a bard were like .0017% or something. That's lovely design. Why devote page space to something so rare? We laugh when Synnibarr has three pages dedicated to what happens if you roll 5 zeroes on a 5D10 roll and qualify to be a godling or whatever, but that's .01%! It's more likely! So we house ruled that poo poo. And generally speaking, if you played 2e, you probably house ruled the poo poo out of it too. 1e more so, 3e more so, even my favorite 4e had the MM on a Card to make up for the lovely first two MMs and a bunch of other stuff besides (hello free weapon focus math fix feat). Making this specific argument really bugs me personally, because the whole reason this is a bugbear for parts of the RPG community is that for decades the first response when you post something like "racial level caps in D&D are really dumb" would be "just ignore that rule lmao" and that doesn't do anything to change that this mechanic in a book you spent good money on is poo poo. Thus, the general frustration that if the core rules aren't good enough to use, why did I loving buy them? The entire point of my last post is that when you say something like the inciting rules text in a step by step list of how to resolve that mechanic, it feels less like a discussion of what is mechanically necessary to keep the game running smoothly and what can be adjusted for taste/drama and more like the game itself going "just ignore that rule lmao", and by extension if the core rules aren't confident that they're good enough to use, what's the loving point. (This post might be a bit unnecessarily spicy, but it's a sentiment that's generally built on years of reading people with very bad opinions on ENWorld et al. There's built-up feelings there.)
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May 1, 2024 16:30
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The racial level caps was more of a setting feature than core mechanic. Back then that distinction hadn't really emerged.
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May 1, 2024 16:35
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Making this specific argument really bugs me personally, because the whole reason this is a bugbear for parts of the RPG community is that for decades the first response when you post something like "racial level caps in D&D are really dumb" would be "just ignore that rule lmao" and that doesn't do anything to change that this mechanic in a book you spent good money on is poo poo. Thus, the general frustration that if the core rules aren't good enough to use, why did I loving buy them? I'm pretty safely not the type to hit you with the "lol ignore that stuff scrub" level discourse, I review roleplaying games for a living. But reading hundreds of the things has made it clear that none of them are perfect, but most of them are good enough to use. I do feel like it's weird, at least for me, to apply that level of perfectionism to anything you actually buy or intake. Like who am I, Anton Ego? Sometimes good enough is good enough. A roleplaying game to me is a stack of ideas, a rule framework or two, and generally some art, and I am perfectly comfortable buying them for parts. dwarf74 posted:Me too, but here goes an attempt at it? I can see that, though it still drives me nuts. Like who's the victim? If I buy a brand new tightly designed little game experience, take it home, and use it to do something else, what's the next step in the chain of disaster? Do I hurt the writer, the other fans, or myself?
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May 1, 2024 16:42
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Didn't AD&D 1e specifically tell you not to remove demihuman level caps (at least not without some corresponding nerf to demihumans) for balance reasons? Or was that only in OSRIC?
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May 1, 2024 16:43
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People should just embrace running more games. As a GM you should just embrace making arbitrary decisions, so while maybe the system you are using isn't clear on all the rolls to swing on a rope over a pit and backflip off you can just have whatever you want happen that works narratively. The best thing from the rise of narrative gaming getting more popular is just having your players describe what they are doing/want to do and you call for the rolls when needed. Playing with people who frame everything as "OK, let me roll X" gets old.
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May 1, 2024 16:45
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moths posted:The racial level caps was more of a setting feature than core mechanic. They made a bit more sense if you also used the racial/class age tables and age bonuses. Technically, an Elf cleric in 1e is supposed to be a minimum of 500 years old, and therefore gets a bunch of bonuses to their intelligence and wisdom modifiers, thus they've got a level cap to compensate for this. So, you have a more powerful character at the start, balanced by how they taper off in power as the game continues. And no, the DMG does not make this explicit at all, you're supposed to just remember and then combine the three different sections. The level cap makes no sense if it doesn't come alongside the big stat bonuses Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 16:56 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 16:51
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Silver2195 posted:Didn't AD&D 1e specifically tell you not to remove demihuman level caps (at least not without some corresponding nerf to demihumans) for balance reasons? Or was that only in OSRIC? Dunno about the game text, here's Gygax defending it in a 1979 Dragon Magazine: quote:The character races in the AD&D system were selected with care. They give variety of approach, but any player selecting a non-human (part- or demi-human) character does not have any real advantage. True, some of those racial types give short-term advantages to the players who choose them, but in the long run, these same characters are at an equal disadvantage when compared to human characters with the same number of experience points. This was, in fact, designed into the game. The variety of approach makes role selection more interesting. Players must weigh advantages and disadvantages carefully before opting for character race, human or otherwise. It is in vogue in some campaigns to remove restrictions on demi-humans — or at least relax them somewhat. While this might make the DM popular for a time with those participants with dwarven fighters of high level, or eleven wizards of vast power, it will eventually consign the campaign as a whole to one in which the only races will be non-human. Dwarves, elves, et al will have all the advantages and no real disadvantages, so the majority of players will select those races, and humankind will disappear from the realm of player character types. This bears upon the various hybrid racial types, as well. Generally Gygax was afraid of the whole "Well, elves live for a thousand years, if they don't have a level cap, won't they just all be level 20 everythings?" argument, because he was the original grog-rear end weirdo simulationist, who couldn't conceive of answering that question with "No, because it's a shared heroic narrative and not an elaborate thought experiment." More relevantly this shows his lack of imagination in how to fix this in a few ways. One, the opposite of his fears will inevitably come true. In any sufficiently high-level RAW game, it'll end up all humans eventually just because the elves and such can't hack it with the big boys. Two, if the only thing he could possibly think of to make humans interesting enough to bother playing as was level caps for everyone else, he should have just done another design pass on making humans a fun species to play. Toph Bei Fong posted:They made a bit more sense if you also used the racial/class age tables and age bonuses. Nah, AD&D may have been lacking in a lot of things, but boring charts of minutia wasn't one of them, and elves start at 110 + 5D6 years old, not technically a minimum of 1000 or whatever. Plus they have their own ranges for when they hit the next age blocks, and middle age was at 175, so at least 35 years after you make the character at level 1. theironjef fucked around with this message at 16:57 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 16:52
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Sometimes a game tells you "don't use the rules as written if doing so wouldn't improve the outcome" because the designers are aware that even a precisely-tuned game engine will sometimes produce weird or overcomplicated results. Sometimes a game tells you "don't use the rules as written if doing so wouldn't improve the outcome" because the designers don't know or care what results their engine is likely to produce and would rather just laugh it off with a "lol, just do whatever."
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May 1, 2024 16:57
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And for some reason a PBTA-based solo game is catching strays
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May 1, 2024 16:59
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theironjef posted:Nah, AD&D may have been lacking in a lot of things, but boring charts of minutia wasn't one of them, and elves start at 110 + 5D6 years old, not technically a minimum of 1000 or whatever. Plus they have their own ranges for when they hit the next age blocks, and middle age was at 175, so at least 35 years after you make the character at level 1. In 1e AD&D the charts were as follows (DMG p 12-13):    This was dropped in 2e, while the level limits were retained, because no one put it together edit: And yes, this is incredibly stupid to begin with, and should have been laid out clearly and plainly, something Gygax was absolutely allergic to Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 17:05 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 16:59
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Lumbermouth posted:And for some reason a PBTA-based solo game is catching strays i feel like "mild criticism on twitter" isn't really catching strays. edit: i'm salty sorry gang Ominous Jazz fucked around with this message at 17:04 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 17:01
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The fact that, by the rules, it could take years of downtime training and multiple dungeons worth of gold to actually reach the next experience level is also a factor here, as is the "takes years off your life" cost of spells like haste and wish in the absence of experience costs as a concept
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May 1, 2024 17:04
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old dnd seems like an entirely different kind of game entirely
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May 1, 2024 17:05
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You know what, you're right, I had mixed up the age charts for first and second edition in my head. But honestly that just creates a mess of weird new problems. Why did Gygax think clerics needed to be so old? What were they before they were like 515? How come gnomes are invariably so elderly? How does this fix things for fighting classes, as it will mostly just lead to them losing physical stats, not gaining them? Why would elven wizards only have a slight chance of making it into the vaunted "mature" category if that stat bonus was such an important aspect of design? Like all 1e stuff it does a great job of presenting a veneer of professorial stentorian design, but actually sucks on close examination.
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May 1, 2024 17:10
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that's why OSR is a thing, looking at the old books and going "wow this game seems bizarre and hard to understand looking at it from today's perspective. let's try and reconstruct how they came to these conclusions" except sometimes the reasoning is just tummyfeels, but the tummyfeels back then weren't fundamentally shaped by other editions of this game
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May 1, 2024 17:11
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theironjef posted:You know what, you're right, I had mixed up the age charts for first and second edition in my head. But honestly that just creates a mess of weird new problems. Why did Gygax think clerics needed to be so old? What were they before they were like 515? How come gnomes are invariably so elderly? How does this fix things for fighting classes, as it will mostly just lead to them losing physical stats, not gaining them? Why would elven wizards only have a slight chance of making it into the vaunted "mature" category if that stat bonus was such an important aspect of design? Like all 1e stuff it does a great job of presenting a veneer of professorial stentorian design, but actually sucks on close examination. I agree 100% There's a clear lack of understanding or perspective beyond just tossing out "Elves are old" and not thinking about the implications of a being born in the 1500s living from then to the present day, and what expecting to live 10 times the length of a human would do to your views on society, culture, time, and aging I have absolutely no idea why an Elven cleric is a minimum of 510 years old, while a human can do the same work in 19 years
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May 1, 2024 17:15
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Mister Olympus posted:that's why OSR is a thing, looking at the old books and going "wow this game seems bizarre and hard to understand looking at it from today's perspective. let's try and reconstruct how they came to these conclusions" The thing that gets me is that it's not like these people are long-forgotten mystic ancients or whatever. A bunch of them are still alive, Gygax lived long enough to post a bunch of dumb racist poo poo on messageboards and ensure his legacy would be forever poisoned by just exactly how much he liked confederate-era "nits make lice" type garbage. I just posted Gygax's own thoughts from '79 on the point of level caps, and it doesn't need to be solved or reinterpreted. Dude was just dumb. "Gotta have level caps because otherwise people won't play as humans." So? If humans are boring and suck maybe people shouldn't play as them, y'ever think of that you dead old piece of poo poo? Just go back in and give them another ability or something.
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May 1, 2024 17:20
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Making this specific argument really bugs me personally, because the whole reason this is a bugbear for parts of the RPG community is that for decades the first response when you post something like "racial level caps in D&D are really dumb" would be "just ignore that rule lmao" and that doesn't do anything to change that this mechanic in a book you spent good money on is poo poo. Thus, the general frustration that if the core rules aren't good enough to use, why did I loving buy them? And this is an odd argument for some of us because WTF are we saying if we expect a rules system to be “confident”? Do I expect the next edition of Vampire the Masquerade to come swaggering into the room and wander off to the bedroom with two of my players? There’s lots of confident bad rules systems designed by people with “artistic vision” who didn’t bother with things like playtesting. Something with a genuinely collaborative development cycle can produce something like this where some playtesters loved a rule and others hated it and the designer opts for a solution that’s “drop this rule if you don’t like it” as superior to “play the game once with this rule and then quit in disgust because you hate it.” I refuse to read X posts so I don’t know if the designer weighed in with his rationale, but I’m usually more upset with rules that are incomprehensible or unplayable and don’t get the white-hot fury some people still experience at things like 5E feats and multiclassing being RAW “optional” rules. Yes, pretty much everyone uses them. Yes, there’s some sloppiness and imbalance they introduce. Yes, the designers slapped “optional” instead of trying to fix those problems. And yes, now that their revisions will soon fix some of these problems while creating new ones, people will get pissed off at that, too. At least the anger directed towards 5E is because of the degree to which that brand can distort or define the RPG market around itself, meaning sloppy or lazy choices can propagate themselves. I don’t even remember this system’s name, and I doubt it’s going to influence much of anything. I do know that there’s a difference between me not liking a particular RPG rules-set and refusing to play it, and me trying to start a social media firestorm of wrath against a new game or designer because of something I don’t like in the rules. I have a lot more patience for people starting something over overt racist stereotypes that will drive people away from the hobby over something like this. Don’t like the rule zero equivalent in a numbered list? Ignore it! Or if the whole rules-set is poo poo, discuss that! The idea that a rules system that isn’t “confident” is an outrage and offense just doesn’t parse for me, especially in a solitaire RPG where you are free to cheat outrageously if you like. Nobody is forcing you to purchase and play this game. If the outrage was pointed towards D&D as the creator of the “our rules suck but we told you to change them so they rock” trend, I’d feel differently, but “this designer made a choice I don’t like so I’ll attack him and tank his sales” is just weird. Not saying anyone here started that, but “incitement” seems like strong rhetoric to use over a pretty anodyne deployment of “you might hate these limitations and removing them won’t break the game, so feel free, we just think the game’s more fun if you have more chances for things to go wrong.” The D&D racial stuff is offensive now in ways not as obvious then; I do recall being upset at the human gender limits on stats (magic and elves are real and half-orcs are possible but girl cooties mean my female human fighter with an orc grandpa can’t have 18(00) strength) at the time, and it’s still upsetting. Those are both far worse than Rule 0, which if anything is inclusionary even if it’s being used sometimes to try to win irritating arguments on the Internet. Narsham fucked around with this message at 17:26 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 17:24
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Rand Brittain posted:Sometimes a game tells you "don't use the rules as written if doing so wouldn't improve the outcome" because the designers are aware that even a precisely-tuned game engine will sometimes produce weird or overcomplicated results. The latter is annoying to me because it reeks of laziness in the design. Werewolf 5th edition went the extra step and explicitly put the onus on the GM to rectify the hole in their design. For those who don’t know, Rage is a resource in Werewolf that provides fuel for their shapeshifting, healing, and other supernatural abilities. It’s pretty important to have when you need it, but also comes with a drawback that increases your chance of failure on Non-Combat/Break Stuff related rolls. Burning off Rage, for times when you don’t need it, can be as easy as rapidly shapeshifting a bunch, or maybe self harming and then regenerating. The designers knew this could be an issue, and instead of doing any kind of design, they included this passage in a sidebar; quote:A Storyteller should be mindful of players attempting to game the system by using Gifts or other abilities for the sake of dumping Rage. Spirits tend to frown on such abuse, and recklessly calling upon them to perform Gifts is sure to have consequences. There’s no suggestions on how the Spirits frowning upon “such abuse” manifests. I can appreciate an attitude of “don’t be a power gaming rear end in a top hat” but we’re talking about the basic resource system, not some overly complicated maze of Stat Min/Maxing and Prestige Class Combos a la 3rd Edition D&D. Free Gratis fucked around with this message at 17:28 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 17:24
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you can still be an rear end in a top hat about a game with bad rules, but i don't think there has ever in the history of TTRPGs been a case of "an explicit admonishment not to power game" that wasn't just cover for bad rules e: i guess the edge case is pure narrative games with a reminder along the lines of "this is not a tactical game / system mastery is not implicated by the goals here" but that's not really the same thing Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:29 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 17:27
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A common interpretation I've seen is that Gygax didn't actually like the Tolkien races (or Tolkien-derived elements in general, really) and included them only because players insisted on it, so he gave them level cap to passive-aggressively discourage people from playing them.
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May 1, 2024 17:27
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Free Gratis posted:The latter is annoying to me because it reeks of laziness in the design. Werewolf 5th edition went the extra step and explicitly put the onus on the GM to rectify the hole in their design. I mean, even in D&D 3e, you can arguably break the system just by being a Druid.
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May 1, 2024 17:34
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Free Gratis posted:There’s no suggestions on how the Spirits frowning upon “such abuse” manifests. I can appreciate an attitude of “don’t be a power gaming rear end in a top hat” but we’re talking about the basic resource system, not some overly complicated maze of Stat Min/Maxing and Prestige Class Combos a la 3rd Edition D&D. Reminds me of the discourse about blocking D&D players from picking thematically fraught multiclass combos (I say that as if there's a lot but it's Paladin/Warlock), where you'll see stuff like "This is technically allowable, but your player better have a drat GOOD REASON" or similar. And of course the problem is that a drat good reason isn't a game mechanic, it's just an allowance granted by the writer to the DM to say no to something for tummyfeels reasons. If people were looking for "cowardice in game design" or whatever, there it is. Fig leaves for feels decisions, available for reasonable rates.
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May 1, 2024 17:35
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^^^^^ Edit: As I was typing this, you preempted me and answered your own question! That poo poo is exactly what I mean by "excesses of rule 0 culture."theironjef posted:Do elaborate on whatever this is. Try to do it in a Canadian professor voice too. I mean, technically, everything I say is in a Canadian professor voice... Anyway, by "rule 0 culture" I mean basically the poo poo you guys are always on about on your show: Rules are for players. GMs can do whatever they want. Anything a GM does is by definition for the good of the group, especially when the GM is disciplining the players like little children. (Ok sorry, I know you asked me to do a Canadian professor voice but I was channeling your podcast voice for that last bit there.) Rule 0, saying that you can ignore whatever rules you like, is inextricably tied up with that notion because to the people who advocate for rule 0, of course a halfling can be a bard... as long as you ask your GM. And of course you can ignore that feat requirement for narrative reasons... as long as your GM says it's ok. The idea that a player could ignore or change the rules without consulting their GM is absolutely not part of what they mean by rule 0. Rule 0 is a freedom that only applies to one person at the table. And then, also, when I say "excesses" I mean the thing that has already been elaborated in this thread: that you can release an incomplete game and tell GMs to fix it while also telling them that by asking them to do your job, you're really actually giving them freedom! Don't you want to be free? If I sold you a game that was actually functional and complete, wouldn't that be taking away your freedom? Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 17:39 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 17:36
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theironjef posted:I'm pretty safely not the type to hit you with the "lol ignore that stuff scrub" level discourse, I review roleplaying games for a living. But reading hundreds of the things has made it clear that none of them are perfect, but most of them are good enough to use. I do feel like it's weird, at least for me, to apply that level of perfectionism to anything you actually buy or intake. Like who am I, Anton Ego? Sometimes good enough is good enough. A roleplaying game to me is a stack of ideas, a rule framework or two, and generally some art, and I am perfectly comfortable buying them for parts. I am literally a lapsed System Mastery listener who keeps thinking they should get back into the podcast but never does because doing things is hard. I promise, I know. I wasn't kind of spicy because I thought you were that kind of guy. I was kind of spicy because I was confused that someone who has been in the RPG community longer than I have didn't get that there is a long history of That Guy in RPG discussions and the many years of this kind of opinion are a response to many years of That Guy. To try to make my point a bit clearer, I'm going to talk about a different game for a bit. I've been rereading Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine recently, because Jenna Moran launched a kickstarter recently and it was on my mind. (Side note: the window to buy backer rewards for that campaign via Backerkit is literally closing today, if that's something anyone is interested in.) That game has a lot of weird, wobbly rules, and it actively tells you to only use them at your discretion most of the time. But it doesn't run into the problem that led to this entire discussion, because those discussions are always focused on how the game is weird and wobbly and designed to be molded to your game's fiction and are generally treated as design insights that help you understand the game's intent better. If there was a bulleted list of steps on how to take actions and each one ended with "(or don't, as appropriate for the fiction)", it would be... well, not as immediately negative as this, because Ironsworn is a much more traditional RPG and thus closer to the games That Guy has been making stupid "just ignore the bad parts and do a better job as GM, forehead" posts about for years, but it would still feel like a weird lack of confidence in the part of the rules text that should feel the most confident in telling you what to do. Again, to be perfectly clear: I am literally making a tone argument about RPG rules text. So to Narsham's point... listen, it's literally what Rand Brittain said earlier. Sometimes a game can say this kind of thing and it feels like a game admitting that certain elements should be adjusted for taste, and sometimes it feels like the designers weren't sure that this mechanic was a good idea in the first place. It's all about how they write it and how it fits into the text as a whole.
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May 1, 2024 17:41
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:you can still be an rear end in a top hat about a game with bad rules, but i don't think there has ever in the history of TTRPGs been a case of "an explicit admonishment not to power game" that wasn't just cover for bad rules I wouldn't call the famous Wild Talents "you can turn off the sun with a six dice power, everyone is trying to have a good time so please do not build stupid game-ruining poo poo" that. Acknowledging bad rules, sure, but it's a very frank admission that they're there because they wanted to leave as much control in players' hands as possible and this is a side effect that players need to avoid for their own good.
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May 1, 2024 17:45
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