A lot of people these days prefer light/no systems saying things like "You don't need rules to tell a story." Well yes, but actually no. The rules of a game do tell a story. Conan's doom system tells a story of creeping dread followed by explosive action. Warhammer's critical hit tables tell a story of a grim world where permanent maiming and damage can hamper a character, or force one into retirement early. Torchbearer's encumbrance system and conditions tell a story of a slow, plodding, agonizing crawl through dark and terrible places anathema to human life by their very nature. Also some us just prefer rules. I'd prefer to have lots of rules, to having lots of wibbly-wobbly stuff. I love games like D&D 4e that has concrete and easy to follow rules for combat. I love games with robust skill systems like Mythras or Burning Wheel, instead of backgrounds or keywords. I love building characters, instead of just selecting race/class. There's room on my shelves for lighter systems, but the heavier systems all hold special places of honor at the top.
I feel like, those people are loud more than they are numerous. It’s an easy argument to make, and straining to understand something difficult, anxiety over math tests, etc is In many ways an appeal to authority that writes itself. Disagreement with these diatribes about hw FATE or Savage Worlds etc can one-size-fits-all inevitably leads to easy retorts about “superior attitudes, gatekeeping, non-inclusivity...I’m sure you can imagine how it goes. If that kind of game suits them, good for them, and perhaps it’s a good fit for the specific intent their table seeks from a session. My first year or so of occupying the CGA persona was largely caught up in finding a voice in those debates. It’s interesting how few troll posts about how messianic simple system X or Y I’ve seen in the last year or so. Games can be specific. And they can choose to be specific in some places more than others, to draw the gameplay toward those loci.
@@The_CGA : Personally I've never been a big fan of the one-size-fits all attempt for game systems. I don't think it's a rules complexity issue as you see GURPS, d20 system and Savage worlds trying it on the complex tactical game side and FATE, Year Zero and Powered by the Apocalypse on the narrative. Inevitably I think it spawns this sort of lazy attitude of "we only have to learn one system to do everything." Which, while it sounds like some kind of Holy Grail, usually isn't. Speaking as one of those DMs that used to advertise a game as D&D only to heavily house rule the thing to try to make it fit my vision, I'll say that's a terrible way to do things, and that's essentially what most of the one-size fits all mentality tries to do. That's not to say that all the listed systems suck, but they definitely have a certain genre/style of gaming they're best at, and if you stray too far, it really suffers. The problem is that I don't really think it's possible to write a genre agnostic system, at least not well, because inevitably every game gets told in the style of your system. Horror is extremely hard to do with tanky D&D characters, and most systems that aren't d20 just can't handle the idea that you start fighting mundane orcs and end up killing massive Smaug-sized dragons with your basic swords. On the other hand, a system like D&D does a terrible job capturing the "magical" feel to magic. Magic is the most predictable thing in the game. You have to roll to pick a lock but you cast a fireball every single time and it comes in that nice predictable radius you can perfectly aim into a melee every time. So if you're looking for that feeling of controlling this unstable mysterious force, D&D just isn't going to do that. D&D magic is great for the tactical board game usage because it lets people make more informed decisions, but it's terrible for the world-building and flavor. I think it's a big benefit to learn multiple systems and then pick one that does the best job of capturing the feel you want to go with for your campaign. When learning a system I tend to start with the question of "what does this system do really well?" as I'm reading it. Another important question is to ask what the system does poorly, like spotting that Savage Worlds tanks are crazy overpowered, and that whole "fantasy invasion in modern world" or Starcraft idea just isn't going to work as you expected when a single M1 Abrams effortlessly takes out a whole flight of dragons and godzilla in a single engagement. Every system is a tool, and no matter how well built the tool is, you don't want to get locked into using only one tool for every job.
Test your game, see if it has falling damage. Most real game-systems agree that falling damage is proportional to distance fallen but there is an upper limit. This is a feature of physics, and a setting that obeys physical rules will automatically get more versimilitude. If the game says "the falling damage is whatever the GM deems is dramatically appropriate for the game", then make tracks away from this game, in fact accelerate away at a distance of 0.5at^2...
@@Dracopol : Actually I think there's some pretty reasonable arguments for letting the DM determine fall damage (with guidelines of course), since if you want to talk realism of falling, the way you hit the ground can make a huge difference and weight also matters as well. Squirrels can survive falls at terminal velocity. There's just a ton of factors involved in how much damage a fall does beyond just height fallen from. While one method is certainly to just abstract it out to some fixed quantity based on damage fallen, that doesn't have any more verisimilitude than a good DM making a judgment call. In some cases, the DM ruling will actually be more "realistic" because it takes extra factors into consideration. What you gain from crunchy rules is predictability, which then lets you make more informed decisions (hence very popular in tactical style). This actually becomes more useful in settings that are divorced from conventional physics and common sense. Like D&D, where a barbarian can dive headfirst off a 50 ft cliff and have a 100% survival chance, you need rules that tell you that, because it makes zero sense that Conan could just get really angry, leap off the cliff and onto the jagged rocks and not have his skull or legs busted. So basically the less realistic your setting, the more rules you generally want/need, and the more tactical you want the style of game, the more rules you're going to need. Actually, I'd say a lot of the codified games tend to be among the worse for verisimilitude in the long run, it's why you get so many arguments about rules in codified games, because the rules often don't reflect reality, so you end up having to argue in this sort of alien language of rules speak which is quite often contradictory to common sense. I've been playing D&D for about 20 years now and I still honestly couldn't tell you what hit points really represent in the narrative.
It's all about d100 for me. BRP puts the crunch where I want it, and is straightforward enough that everyone can have fun and be useful from the first session.
There's benefit in having easily understandable odds from the dice-roll. I'm looking at YOU, Shadowrun, Savage Worlds, Fate Core, Star Wars symbol-dice...
@@Dracopol Yup, after running a campaign of Mage: The Ascension I was totally burnt out on dice lag: that time in between the roll and the results. I want to spend more time in the world and less messing with dice, these days.
An important component here is how much time does a given die roll represent, how many parties are involved in the roll coming together, etc. dice that take longer to read get a pass from me as those same dice represent more action in the world: Star Wars dice, for example. I have less charity for GURPS And in some genres, “never tell me the odds!”
@@The_CGA I'd agree with that, but add that something like Pendragon can do a season just as well as narradice, though the dice augury in that situation could be fun. And yeah, every player likes the 'don't tell me the odds' attitude until the robot soldiers grab you with their metal claws. Then suddenly everyone's a statistician.
I really like you're moving towards discussing things like line of sight, setting a scene, and the more "narrative" discussions. You, Dungeon Craft, and Zipperon Disney are the only ones REALLY looking at game systems and saying: "I wonder, could this be done better?" I learned all of the old time-management tricks being suggested today decades ago, so now I'm looking "deeper" into gaming with real-world takes on time, pacing, and world-building. I want my players to unconsciously say "What should I DO?" Not "What should my character do?"
What's wrong with Fate is that vagueness is a design feature, characters can't die but they get Taken Out and players can avoid it by Conceding, and will ultimately be rewarded with more Fate Points to come out swinging in the next scene, in effect rewarded for the stupidity that forced them to Concede, just to keep the game on a dramatic up-down roller-coaster. Also any conceivable edge, Advantage, Stunt, whatever, is the same: a +2 or re-roll, there's no subtle gradations in tactical effects.
@@Dracopol : Yeah Fate is not a good choice of RPG if you're looking for any kind of tactical play or deep level of decision-making. Fate doesn't really see losing a battle as necessarily stupidity as a tactical game would. Generally losing is a result of being low on fate points and getting some bad rolls. It's similar to the 2d20 series of games in that regard where an empty momentum pool basically means you're screwed. Conceding is often the smart thing to do because you avoid taking future wounds and get fate points from doing it. They basically wanted to create a game where heroes would be more okay with losing. In tactical games like D&D and Savage Worlds, because retreat is so hard to pull off, you pretty much fight every battle to the death. With narrative games, they wanted the PCs to keep in mind that retreat is an option and not every failed battle has to be a TPK. Whether you think this makes for a better story/experience is of course up to the opinion of the group. Oddly though Fate ends up being the more "Realistic" RPG in this regard, because in most battles, there were usually some survivors. Very rarely do you see situations like in D&D where two forces kill the other side to the last man. Retreats and surrenders are actually the norm.
FATE seems to be the system of choice (or PBtA) in my local TTRPG org, but there’s nothing about it that appeals to me. I hate that player characters are always special. I hate that the core mechanic is based on making choices as players and not characters. I hate player-authorship as a game mechanic. I hate that it tries to be setting agnostic by virtue of being a system for creating narrative instead of one that seeks to emulate a world. Like, every time I see that half of the one-shots at our quarterly events are FATE, I think it might not be so bad. Then I start to read the rules and remember why I don’t ever want to play it.
@@NarfiRef : Yeah Fate and narrative RPGs in general are not for everyone. There is no universal RPG that everyone likes, it's why so many RPGs exist and why so many tables use house rules. It's one good reason to learn a bunch of them and see what style you prefer. I think everyone has a game that's anathema to all their desired goals. For me, that game is GURPS.
I used to not think twice about this, but now that my brain is old and shriveled up, I confess to making some purchases with ease of learning in mind (for example, starting with John Carter instead of jumping right in with one of the crunchier 2d20 games).
Hackmaster 4th ed (1st ha ha) has a lot of interesting stuff. Great video btw. I read a lot of rulesets, but really need a deeper study on the tabletop.
Instead of dumbing down the game, build up the players. Learn speed-reading, so you can actually attack the whole core rulebook instead of just skimming. Speed-reading classes will help undo certain mistakes in reading picked up from the old classroom "read aloud" days and often state they will double your reading-speed while maintaining the same comprehension. Once you have that, you can chew through the entire game as the author(s) intended, and only then would you be entitled to make changes. Learn the Multiplication Table, if you didn't do so before. Then, approach a game by studying its subsystems like Movement and Combat, and the Hit Points and Defenses to avoid losing so many damn Hit Points. Play around with simple characters fighting each other (for no reason) to learn the system. The chunky games have wargame roots, so learn the systems the wargame way by dividing rules into subsystems. The simpler RPGs of today encourage lazy habits and people think Drama is the only subsystem. Wrong-o!
Hardware Low pass filter on the microphone *i think* is engaged; software noise reduction isn’t in the signal chain here as I’m working to preserve harmonics and tone, and didn’t hear a lot of fan noise in the raw audio I suspect what you’re hearing is a function of the dynamics processing, possibly the exciter/expander interacting with the limiter and creating some artifacts in the louder bits
Entirely accidental as I was just scraping to remember the 6-long fictional proper noun names without stuttering- I can’t remember my lines...or artistic acting? Who knows?
Just do it is often the correct answer with life in general. How to get into X? Just do it! There are lot of resources on the internet about X and you have just failed to take the first step!
This learning by doing seems to be rather common, yet it is not the right way for me. I guess the perk of having a brain that simply can learn by reading stuff and also have a solid idea how the game mechanics will work even without having to actual roll the die lets me take a different path. Still, I have to be carefully, since I cannot assume that everybody is like me and thus I have eventually look through my own game for signs that I ignored how other people learn things. After all, I like it crunchy too, even though more regarding narrative tools and not for the purpose of verisimilitude like most more extensive games usually do.
I regard a lot of the tools in Star Trek Adventures as 'Narrative,' and for that matter 'crunchy,' and for that matter, Good Society has some complex procedures to it in that department as well. In any case, while actually sitting down learn by 'playing' is something that I'd just like to clear the air on-it is okay to do, not amazing or anything- The intended challenge here is to see how a system like Character Creation and avancement plays out, alongside another system, like combat, and a third system, like healing and recovery, and then to examine not simply how the first cycle of these interactions will play out, but how the effects of the first outcome will prejudice and compound into the second. Call it 'thought experiments.' An example, Very rarely do I see GMs drawing outdoor maps or setting up the miniatures on the battle grid with any regognition of the 30 foot movement rate, or what the action tax of putting a waist-high ledge across the battlefield will be. Really, I'm recommending that special kind of looking-before leaping where one recognizes what kind of fall awaits at the bottom.
@@The_CGA I have a BIG chip on my shoulder regarding time, movement, and activity in a game system. I was not only in LE and the US Army where "time management" was a very powerful skill during a conflict, but I also shot competitively (to this very day). I have a very good grasp of how long it takes to draw, shoot, reload, and move around in a scale of seconds (or even tenths of seconds). Most RPG games are WOEFULLY NEGLIGENT in time management. Only recently with one, three, and six second combat rounds do they even get close to real-world combat timing with variable interactions. This is why I love the Initiative Pass system where everyone has a few ACTIONS (usually three) and each combatant takes an ACTION in order until EVERYONE has taken one ACTION and then they begin their second Action Pass and everyone takes their second Action and finally, everyone takes their third ACTION for that round. This mixes all of the combatant's activity together and can cause "movement" or "plans" to be thwarted or new opportunities to open up. This is much closer to the chaos of a real-world fight.
I may have said this elsewhere, but my experience of marital arts and also IRL combat with smoke, civilians and chaos has been that while there is a huge density of action and reaction in those moments, so much of it is training reflex, Kata, rehearsed mantras (“the rule of engagement is X”...or occasionally “to h*ll with the rule of engagement”) So much of it is on a sub volitional level, that my experience of combat and martial arts is a memory of making a single choice every six seconds...or longer. Anything smaller was simply acting on premeditated plans, or rehearsed kata, or an almost animal exercise of dexterity and fight/flight. All those tenths of seconds *exist* but when I was really there I wasn’t able to be choosy about what I was doing all that often. One die roll abstracting many attempts to engage, one die roll for evading, for parsing out the foe’s lines of sight and fields of fire, one roll for empathizing and getting inside their head... It all happens faster than I can make choices IRL. It feels weird when a system like GURPs or shadowrun asks for Roleplaying choices from my character at timescales more discrete than my own ability to choose.
I’m trying to learn GURPS for a one-shot I’m running in a bit over a month. My ADHD is making it difficult to just wade through the rules. I’m honestly starting to panic a bit.
Oof. That’s a system where I can definitely say the players need to put in some non zero amount of effort on their end too. What I can say is that the old choose your own adventure solo module in the back of the third edition basic set is a huge help here. It’s kind of a dog at the table, lots of modifiers especially for Gun combat. White rooming a bit of combat, some solo showdowns can be really helpful. Make the learning into a (solo) game, it can reallyhelp get the dopamine hits to slog through these things with ADHD...speaking from personal experience. I do have a video about GURPs here on the channel, salty as it may be there are some genres (realistic war) where I think it still holds some charm for me.
Complex Games Apologist Thankfully the adventure I’m running only has one planned combat, and guns are almost useless in it anyway because it’s against incorporeal entities that take no more than 2 damage from any physical attack. What I’m more worried about is figuring out how magic works to help someone play a mage since they’ll be the big gun in that combat. I seem to be confused about how skills work, which is part of my confusion with how spells work. I’ll look for the 3E adventure and see what i can do with that. I have seen your GURPS video, btw.
Dracopol Yeah, I want to use GURPS Lite as much as I can for this, but unfortunately it has no rules for magic so I’m having to slot one of the magic systems in.
