Conscious design in RPGs

[Negative Zero]

Well, you've got games like Tenra Bansho Zero which are very stylistically cohesive, and were designed intelligently with that in mind.

D&D tries to be everything for everyone so it can often fall flat there.

I personally came to a realization similar to this when I first played Blazblue after having just played Street Fighter, Smash Bros, and Marvel vs Capcom.
It was bizarre playing a game that was played the way it was intended; it wasn't chock-full of infinites and glitches that defined the metagame.

Anyway, I don't think there's a lot of exploration on this subject.
"When you make a game, it should be well-designed so it doesn't develop a metagame that damages the game's atmosphere and/or playstyle."

[hogarth]

Characters getting knocked out of the fight and making a dramatic re-entrance is and was pretty standard in the comics genre.

Yes, if you take my comment and replace the word "villain" with "character" and "knocked out" with "knocked out of the fight", it isn't very accurate. Why you would feel the need to change the meaning of my comment in order to refute it is beyond me, though.

My point is that the mechanics in Champions encourage the heroes to keep hitting unconscious enemies to make sure they're really unconscious, which is a very unheroic thing to do.

[Neurosis]

Hogarth, lets put it another way:

What Shadowrun tries to achieve, and why did it pick that tools to achieve it ?

Can you answer that question ?

This is just so much more an issue of history than you are acknowledging.

Shadowrun came on the scene in 1989. It was designed off a basic chassis of assumptions that probably derived mostly from 2nd Edition AD&D, which is, if you have looked at it recently (I have) a fucking RELIC. It went for a game that not only had magic and dragons and elves and not only had car chases and guns but also had social and infiltration crimes and also had fucking cyborgs and also had goddamn virtual reality matrix hacking. Mechanically speaking? When you look at the nitty gritty mechanics of SR1, it shit all over itself colossally, but while it was doing it fucking invented dice pools while creating one of the most enduring modern examples of a classless system (following just behind Champions which, point for narrativism here, basically invented the idea that characters could be defined by WEAKNESSES as well as strengths). It innovated in leaps and fucking bounds. Try big, fail big, create something incredible and lasting.

Dogs in the Vineyard: gay mormon cowboys eating pudding and judging other people. Alright, in all seriousness, the consensus seems to be that DitV is very tight as a game, even if its premise doesn't excite me, and Victor Bakely is a pretty tight postmodern indie designer. BUT, and this is a big BUT, Dogs in the Vineyard was designed in the late 2000s, not the late 1980s. The amount of things that had come and gone in game design was fucking huge during that gulf of time. Four editions of Shadowrun had come and gone. The World of Darkness had come and largely gone. The Forge, Indie RPGs in general, Ron Edwards' crusade and Ron Edwards' community, D&D 4E had crashed and burned, etcetera. DitV might as well have been designed on a different planet or in a different fucking universe from Shadowrun. The knowledge base of how to go about designing a game was THAT different. DitV didn't innovate at all. It ITERATED on Forge design principles with micro-innovations.

For what it's worth, I think that Shadowrun (any edition) is a better game than DitV, even if it is a more flawed game than DitV because...

a) Its scope is vastly, vastly, hugely more ambitious which excuses a lot.
b) It is more "fun" to "play".
c) It's not pretentious.
d) Fuck you I love Shadowrun.

P.S. In the middle of writing this post I learned that Harold Ramis (Egon Spengler) died and I got really, really fucking depressed.

[Neurosis]

My point is that the mechanics in Champions encourage the heroes to keep hitting unconscious enemies to make sure they're really unconscious, which is a very unheroic thing to do.

Long time Hero System player here. This problem doesn't exist if you hit 'em hard enough the first time : P

[silva]

Then you are agreeing with me, Shwarzkopf ? Because I argued that this kind of "conscious design" is something that been hapenning with more frequency from the last 10 or 15 years to now. So Shadowrun being a piece of confusing (or bad) design while DitV being a piece of coherent design are things totally expected. I think the early 2000s were the turning point for this, with both D&D 3e in one flank, and the Indie scene in the other, being its most important proponents.

I think Champions/Hero/Gurps are actually the exception to this rule. Even with all their problems, I still think they were successful at stablishing clear goals and using coherent tools for accomplishing them, even back there in the early 80s. I would say Pendragon and Call of Cthulhu are exceptions too.

About Shadowrun specifically, I dont think its one of the most enduring examples of the classless concept. Traveller, BRP, Champions/Hero and Gurps came first and had more impact in the industry. I also dont think its a game that favors infiltration and subterfuge over pure combat - just look at the cheer weight of the combat rules and compare it to the "infiltration" ones. I suspect Leverage does everything Shadowrun sets out to do in a faster, simpler and more elegant way, the "infiltration" part included. (I said I suspect because, honestly, Ive just read reviews of Leverage and have not read it nor played it).

Oh and BTW, Im a huge fan of Shadowrun, play the 2nd edition to this day. And I appreciate DitV more in concept than in practice. Tried to play it just once and it was enough to see its not for me.

[CCarter]

RIFTS. Siembieda straight up says the game is not 'balanced', so that is conscious.... but I don't think any two writers for RIFTS can interpret the actual rules the same way. I read Eric Wujcik's writing and he seems to have a coherent way of looking at the portions of the game he wrote, but then you have dozens of other writers adding on to it with their own ideas (that they don't explicitly express either).

Rifts has no design goals, so its 100% successful in achieving them


In general on the topic I'd say we've made progress in game design. Historically we have
-lots of running around writing gibberish (early D&D era)
-around the 80s, an age when realism is considered the only possible design goal, making it crop up everywhere.
-experimentation with various design goals. Lots of weird micro-games that are good at achieving some specific but dubious purpose. (Dogs in the Vineyard for instance is super focussed on having social rolls that fail and turn into gun fights, with a mechanic that doesn't work especially well for anything else, and can't effectively handle a task that isn't both opposed and extended at all).

I'd consider the niche microgames to be just another passing fad. They served some purpose in finding out what things are possible, but most of them were junk, with their attempts to break away from an assumption often showing how necessary whatever it was actually was e.g. character advancement, or GMs, or how much 'simulation' is needed to support a range of character actions and player agency. In the current area we're back to making fantasy heartbreakers, just with more discussion about what design goals are worthwhile first.

[silva]

Interesting points there, CCarter. While I agree with you overall, I think the original D&D was indeed a great piece of design and, perhaps ironically, had much more to do with the "niche micro-games" you cite than to the toolkit ones. Sure, one can argue it used clunky/archaic tools for accomplish its design goals, but it undeniably did it. The fact that most games nowadays continue using concepts like character advancement, XP, classes, levels, focus on combat, etc. is proof of that, I think.

- By the way, what you guys think is the latest fad in rules/mechanics ? I would say the Success at a cost/"Yes, But"* is a strong contender here. If I aint mistaken, its present in a bunch of newish games like Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, 13th Age, Numenera, Star Wars: EotE, Dungeon World, Fate Core, etc. I wouldnt go as far as saying the traditional binary "Pass/Fail" model will get extinct, but I would bet it will lose considerable ground from now on.

*assume the "Yes, But" here as any variant implementation of the concept - Yes, But/Yes, And/No, But/No, And, etc.

[Username17]

A thing you didn't mention about Dogs in the Vineyard is that the die size of a trait in all ways trumps what that trait actually is. So if you have "Very Strong (d4)" and "Has a limp (d8)" and it comes to the part of the story where you shove someone, you are objectively better at doing that if you first describe how you aren't very good at it because you have a limp than if you first describe how you are good at doing it because you are strong.

Dogs in the Vineyard is, to be honest, pretty stupid. It only tells one story, and the only mechanics are there to encourage you to use the same story embellishments in the same order each time. It's like ritualized saga enlargement, the game. With Mormons.

Also: I hope I'm not the only person who is really fucking tired of Silva getting his dick into things he doesn't understand. Shadowrun had clear design goals that it achieved. In 1989, people were actually mad at d20 based resolution because it could only give increments of 5%. People wanted fumbles, but everyone acknowledged that natural 1s came up way too often for that to be anything other than retarded. Shadowrun invented dicepools, and with it the "Rule of One" which was that you could still have the fumbles people wanted but they only happened if all the dice came up 1. So a character with a skill of 4 might still fumble, but only 1296 throws of the dice. Creating the possibility of catastrophic failure that people wanted without the actuality of constant fumbling which made everything look like a damn three stooges vehicle.

Now Shadowrun did have a RNG that was too complicated. But it wasn't designed to be simple. It was designed to be able to generate extremely long odds in order to make the game space feel more complete. Which it did.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

D&D was literally a kludge together of bits and pieces over a period of time using xeroxed house rules that were mailed between gaming groups as "wargame magazines". It was never a particularly elegant piece of design. It wasn't meant to be. The original fanbase was aimed squarely at people who totally rolled on the sewer drainage ditch chart (this was a thing in ASL).

You might have a "micro-games" argument in that early D&D basically bolted whatever it wanted onto the framework without a lot of consideration as to overall design. You have the thief microgame and the wizard microgame and the cleric microgame and they really didn't interact much past, say, saving throws.

As far as "yes, but" that's just a mechanical justification of a DM skill. It forces DMs to get used to the idea of complicated successes or failures with side effects. At the end of the day you're still pulling complications out of your hat, but now the dice/system tells you when to do it instead of you getting to do it when you felt appropriate.

This is good for DMs who don't do this already, but is a dead end not because it's a gimmick or niche, but because you have to have a certain amount of investment of creativity in your game before you can think of that shit anyway.

I'd replace that fad/gimmick with "trying to code good DM habits and skills into the rules". It's a good crutch/training wheels, but in the end it doesn't replace the skill or talent of just being a good DM for your group.

[Chamomile]

The most obvious failing in Dogs in the Vineyard, and the one that is worst to hear fanboys try to cover up, is the way that setbacks and penalties (like wounds or antagonistic relationships) are represented as d4s. Now the way Dogs in the Vineyard works, you basically never want to use a die roll that comes up as anything less than a 4, however you are not obligated to use any die rolls so adding dice is always an advantage. Which means that if you get shot in the foot, you get just a little bit better at running. And I've actually heard fanboys try and tell me that if you rolled a bunch of d4s because you've taken multiple horrible injuries just before starting a fistfight, you'll really wish they were d8s instead. Well yeah, of course, but if you didn't have the wounds you wouldn't be getting d8s, you would be getting nothing.

[CCarter]

While I agree with you overall, I think the original D&D was indeed a great piece of design and, perhaps ironically, had much more to do with the "niche micro-games" you cite than to the toolkit ones. Sure, one can argue it used clunky/archaic tools for accomplish its design goals, but it undeniably did it. The fact that most games nowadays continue using concepts like character advancement, XP, classes, levels, focus on combat, etc. is proof of that, I think.

The fundamental innovations like character advancement, a GM, dice as a randomizer were all good ideas; dungeons are a good place to start for a new GM. Calling it a great design as a 'niche' game - presumably because of its heavy focus on handling dungeon crawls, gold for XP, avoiding monsters, random characters with high lethality, checks for open doors and other dungeonocentric stuff - seems backward since one of the main drives across future editions would be making it work better as a game that would handle stuff outside the dungeon, i.e. making it more of a toolkit for running more complex adventures and detailed worlds.

[OgreBattle]

Maid RPG is very consious in design, though I've wondered how well it'd work as a replacement to Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy's rules set where the Master is the Inquisitor and the maids are acolytes.

[silva]

Maid for Warhammer ? Is that a joke, right ?

Now I can see DitV working for a short campaign of Inquisitors in WH40K. I heard it adapts nicely for other thematic similar setups (Jedis in the Vineyard, Heortlings/Lunars in the Vineyard, Judge Dredd in the Vineyard, etc ).

The fundamental innovations like character advancement, a GM, dice as a randomizer were all good ideas; dungeons are a good place to start for a new GM. Calling it a great design as a 'niche' game - presumably because of its heavy focus on handling dungeon crawls, gold for XP, avoiding monsters, random characters with high lethality, checks for open doors and other dungeonocentric stuff - seems backward since one of the main drives across future editions would be making it work better as a game that would handle stuff outside the dungeon, i.e. making it more of a toolkit for running more complex adventures and detailed worlds.

Yup, thats the nice design I was talking. Not necessarily innovating by creating those concepts (most of those were already present in Chainmail in a form or another) but in combining them together around this reward cycle of dungeon delve > take treasure > get gold > get stronger > LOOP while assuming a single person in a fiction environment (I think the word environment is better than world here, because the first D&Ds were not good at emulating worlds, only dungeons ).

And I wouldnt say its micro-game premise is backward at all, on the contrary, I would say that is the real, undiluted, essence of the game. Every subsequent edition tried to stretch that essence down to emcompass other aspects, but the results are arguable at best, specially because other games presented more coherent frameworks for playing "out of the dungeon" since the beginning (Traveller, Runequest, Champions/Hero, Gurps, etc).

Dogs in the Vineyard is, to be honest, pretty stupid. It only tells one story, and the only mechanics are there to encourage you to use the same story embellishments in the same order each time. It's like ritualized saga enlargement, the game

Sure, and I didnt say the contrary. But the undeniable fact is it accomplishes its design goals nicely, even if these design goals are very narrow in scope. Its not so different from the original D&D in this case, the difference is that it uses modern sensibilities. If DitV is ritualized town clearing for demons, OD&D is ritualized dungeon clearing for gold. At least thats the impression I get.

Shadowrun had clear design goals that it achieved. In 1989, people were actually mad at d20 based resolution because it could only give increments of 5%

What people are you talking ? Because Runequest, CoC and BRP already had more granularity than 5% at least 5 years before that, and the same is true for Gurps, Champions, Warhammer FRP, etc.

People wanted fumbles, but everyone acknowledged that natural 1s came up way too often for that to be anything other than retarded. Shadowrun invented dicepools, and with it the "Rule of One" which was that you could still have the fumbles people wanted but they only happened if all the dice came up 1. So a character with a skill of 4 might still fumble, but only 1296 throws of the dice. Creating the possibility of catastrophic failure that people wanted without the actuality of constant fumbling which made everything look like a damn three stooges vehicle.

Again, look at the games I cited above. Most of them already have fumbles (in fact RQ introduced it in its very first edition, in 1978) in frequency great than the constant 5% cited.

[nockermensch]

Maid RPG is very consious in design, though I've wondered how well it'd work as a replacement to Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy's rules set where the Master is the Inquisitor and the maids are acolytes.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only tea and frilly aprons.
Where do I sign in to play?

[silva]

Well, you've got games like Tenra Bansho Zero which are very stylistically cohesive, and were designed intelligently with that in mind.

Yup, agreed.

D&D tries to be everything for everyone so it can often fall flat there.

Yup too. But I suspect thats because of what we talked above. D&D was created for dungeon delving. In THAT premise, its a nice game. The problem begins when you get out of the dungeon.

You might have a "micro-games" argument in that early D&D basically bolted whatever it wanted onto the framework without a lot of consideration as to overall design. You have the thief microgame and the wizard microgame and the cleric microgame and they really didn't interact much past, say, saving throws.

While I agree with your first point, I think the micro-game we are talking about here is more related to the overarching reward cycle than each specific classes mechanics. In fact, I think the kind of exception-based design where you have different mini-games for different classes/archetypes works fine if each mini-game is kept simple and fast, and OD&D suceeded at it, I think, even more than subsequent editions. Shadowrun, again, could be cited as a bad example here, with its unecessarily complex mini-games. (try to imagine a rigging car chase with a decker immersed inside together with an astral projecting mage, a conjuring shaman, while the samurai gives fire support with the car in movement... the game crumbles miserably)

[OgreBattle]

Maid RPG is very consious in design, though I've wondered how well it'd work as a replacement to Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy's rules set where the Master is the Inquisitor and the maids are acolytes.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only tea and frilly aprons.
Where do I sign in to play?

If I can get a hold of the rules set, I'll run it by PbP.

[Red_Rob]

Maid RPG is very consious in design, though I've wondered how well it'd work as a replacement to Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy's rules set where the Master is the Inquisitor and the maids are acolytes.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only tea and frilly aprons.
Where do I sign in to play?

If Koumei hasn't already written this I'll eat my hat.

[darkmaster]

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only tea and frilly aprons.

Sigged.

[CCarter]

Yup, thats the nice design I was talking. Not necessarily innovating by creating those concepts (most of those were already present in Chainmail in a form or another) but in combining them together around this reward cycle of dungeon delve > take treasure > get gold > get stronger > LOOP while assuming a single person in a fiction environment (I think the word environment is better than world here, because the first D&Ds were not good at emulating worlds, only dungeons ).

And I wouldnt say its micro-game premise is backward at all, on the contrary, I would say that is the real, undiluted, essence of the game. Every subsequent edition tried to stretch that essence down to emcompass other aspects, but the results are arguable at best, specially because other games presented more coherent frameworks for playing "out of the dungeon" since the beginning (Traveller, Runequest, Champions/Hero, Gurps, etc).

Ah I missed one - Chainmail didn't have hit points either. (Or a GM or advancement).

IMHO the niche games aren't great design so much as lazy design. By limiting the possible play space you obviate any need for rules that cover the forbidden sections, but will players enjoy the reduced play space as much? People going 'I want to play a mormon gunslinger' are relatively few, so DiTV is largely irrelevant. Of those few, many of them would be used to or enjoy games where characters could have skills, advantages, magic, whatever.

Similarly 0D&D functions in a dungeon framework but it wasn't long before there were rules for firearms, Gamma World crossovers or secondary skills. Because a well-designed niche is all very well and good, but players wanted a larger playspace to work in, and because RPGs have a tendency to accidentally wander off into unexpected directions, so that its advisable to have plotted some of the area beyond what's within the expected playspace to cover e.g. (for DiTV) 'my Dog had to sell his soul to save the town and picked up magic powers from Mormon Satan' or (for 0D&D), what to do with those people who were enticed into the hobby with the promise of 'hey you can be a hero like Elric/Conan/[insert favourite literary hero]' and then given a wargame where you get a nameless disposable probe that goes into a tunnel to be eaten by giant rats.

...

Anyway, the question of whether D&D is normally used as a 'generic' game rather than as primarily dungeon based was an interesting one, but difficult to get any solid info on... The closest I could get then is to see what edition people are playing and assuming they're using it with the intended playstyle. Here I've used Obsidian portal to get estimates since with 100,000+ gamers involved its going to be a reasonably good sample of gamers as a whole, in absence of anything else.

https://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns

Counts of some of the games (those looking relevant to the question):

Swords & Wizardry (73) (= the 0D&D retro-clone)
Dungeon Crawl Classics (90)
Dungeon World (172)
AD&D 1E (172, +392 under "D&D (1.0)")
AD&D 2E (1,024)
D&D 3.0 (316)
D&D 3.5 (9,698)
Pathfinder (11,471)
D&D 4E (14,688)
Hackmaster various editions (110)
D&D "Next" 640

(oh and BTW also Dogs in the vineyard: 8 )

I've also included any other games that are more heavily dungeon-based as well (like DCC). You can see the majority of people are playing later editions, with peak volumes around combined 3.x + Pathfinder and 4th Edition...draw what conclusions you like.

[shadzar]

Does it make sense ?

games are made with a design goal. one trying to be Redwall might have a bunch of mouse characters to allow people to play through that or the Fieval movies.

the rules are there just to piece it together as a game to allow people to play.

others have some rules that they want to use and the other stuff is added onto it just to make it less bland, like WH40k. Tau, Chaos, Eldar.. who cares. it is the rules you are playing with and the fluff barely enters into the actual game play. just an avenue to collect more money from the game for those that like the themes added to the mechanics.

sometimes the theme and mechanics are designed together, but more often than not, i would think one is designed and the other added as best as can be.

[Neurosis]

I would say the Success at a cost/"Yes, But"* is a strong contender here.

You know what also has this built in, of all fucking things? Shadowrun 4th Edition. Glitches, man.

A thing you didn't mention about Dogs in the Vineyard is that the die size of a trait in all ways trumps what that trait actually is. So if you have "Very Strong (d4)" and "Has a limp (d8)" and it comes to the part of the story where you shove someone, you are objectively better at doing that if you first describe how you aren't very good at it because you have a limp than if you first describe how you are good at doing it because you are strong.

The most obvious failing in Dogs in the Vineyard, and the one that is worst to hear fanboys try to cover up, is the way that setbacks and penalties (like wounds or antagonistic relationships) are represented as d4s. Now the way Dogs in the Vineyard works, you basically never want to use a die roll that comes up as anything less than a 4, however you are not obligated to use any die rolls so adding dice is always an advantage. Which means that if you get shot in the foot, you get just a little bit better at running. And I've actually heard fanboys try and tell me that if you rolled a bunch of d4s because you've taken multiple horrible injuries just before starting a fistfight, you'll really wish they were d8s instead. Well yeah, of course, but if you didn't have the wounds you wouldn't be getting d8s, you would be getting nothing.

But the undeniable fact is it accomplishes its design goals nicely.

Does not fucking compute, hombre. Unless said design goals were to make a heap of fucking shit.

[silva]

I would say the Success at a cost/"Yes, But"* is a strong contender here.

You know what also has this built in, of all fucking things? Shadowrun 4th Edition. Glitches, man.

Yup, agreed. Shadowrun, Leverage, Fate, etc. Its the latest fad.

But the undeniable fact is DitV accomplishes its design goals nicely.

Does not fucking compute, hombre. Unless said design goals were to make a heap of fucking shit.

None of the cited gimmicks impede the game from promoting its themes of judgment and consequences. Saying the contrary is like saying D&D sucks because grappling rules are broken.

[Username17]

None of the cited gimmicks impede the game from promoting its themes of judgment and consequences.

The narratively bad consequences are actually good game mechanically. What the actual fuck would a game have to do to fail to promote its themes to you if having the design accomplish literally the opposite of the stated intention doesn't count?

-Username17

[silva]

. What the actual fuck would a game have to do to fail to promote its themes to you if having the design accomplish literally the opposite of the stated intention doesn't count?

The stated intention of the game has little to do with physics realism or simulation, which the gimmick with the d4 die is about. Once again you are judging games by your own set of premade assumptions instead of by what they set out to do. Tip: the conflict resolution and fallout dice are much more important to the game stated goals. If you want to criticize the game, begin there.

[MGuy]

. What the actual fuck would a game have to do to fail to promote its themes to you if having the design accomplish literally the opposite of the stated intention doesn't count?

The stated intention of the game has little to do with physics realism or simulation, which the gimmick with the d4 die is about. Once again you are judging games by your own set of premade assumptions instead of by what they set out to do. Tip: the conflict resolution and fallout dice are much more important to the game stated goals. If you want to criticize the game, begin there.

What do you think the intention of the dice are exactly?