The Problem with RPGs (Long Rant)

[Username17]

Interestingly, Toon then serves to support my point

No. It does not.

The narrative the players are creating are never disrupted by the skill checks because the failures are constructive with respect to the protagonists (the cartoon characters).

And this is similarly the case in Dungeons and Dragons, where the very real possibility of character death and failure is supposed to be part of the narrative. And this is similarly the case in Champions, where getting captured by supervillains and put into a death trap is part of the narrative.

And so on and so forth. The point is that there is not now and never has been an opposition between "narrative" and "failure." Skill checks exist in almost all games, and do so because you genuinely don't know whether actions will succeed or fail and it makes a story either way!

People make skill checks in Toon constantly. People make skill checks in Vampire constantly. They do it in Champions, in Rolemaster, in Runequest. And the game does not suffer from it. And the story does not suffer from it. Because your character's success means nothing unless it carried with it a real chance of failure.

-Username17

[rapanui]

Skill checks, sure. You roll a dice and it affects the outcome. OK, no problem there. (Well, no, it's still a weird way of determining the outcome of a narrative, but it's such an ingrained part of RPGs I'm not even going to discuss that now)

I'm talking about skill-testing, where the decisions made by players (attack, cast spell, run away, etc) have an impact on the game board. In Toon, this is minimized because even if you fail to make tactically sound decisions, the narrative goes on with the same protagonists. In the other games you mentioned, this is not that case. The narrative can continue, but with one or more protagonists replaced.

This might be fine in a Game of Thrones game, but it's not really suitable for a game where the emphasis is individualistic heroics (D&D, Vampire, Shadowrun, etc, etc). In my humble and biased opinion.

This brings us back to the K dillema: the players want a challenge and the feeling of real threat, but at no point do they want their narrative-relevant increasingly-invested-upon (time-wise, emotionally, etc) character to fail at their most basic purposes (at root: survival, but also permanently crippling effects, and even failing to win against their narrative-relevant antagonist in the long run).


Thesis statement: The K dillema is brought about because of two conflicting player expectations: the expectation of a true skill test (tactics, danger, death) and the expectation of a consistent narrative with their character in play.

[Crissa]

But it's all up to the setting to see if you come back to life at the end of combat ala Final Fantasy - if there are spikes at the bottom of the pit instead of water - if the characters die when they fail.

Change the setting and you don't need to change the rolls.

-Crissa

[rapanui]

Beyond being a setting consideration, its a system consideration.

Sure, you can play Toon, or Pokemon, or Final Fantasy, but the dilemma is that most players want some level of grit in their heroic fantasy: where a sword to the gut will kill you.

At the same time the want to be "the hero", "a hero" or even just "hero-ic", which often means not taking the steel to the gut until the time is right in the narrative, or never at all.

(But seldom "an hero" which means something completely different.)

Now, normally I'd hate to use Andy "The Fucknut" Collins as some kind of buttress to an argument (in fact, I should automatically be disqualified from the internet for life for doing so) but check this quote out:

"Sure, an occasional PC biting the dust isn't the end of the world -- and may in fact make the encounter more memorable -- but ultimately, D&D is a game that the players are supposed to win. When they don't, you're not only left with disappointed (and surprised) players, but also with a potentially wrecked campaign (and maybe even lost friends)."

This statement isn't just Andy making crap up (he sure does do that from time to time), I'm pretty sure that was in the rules text of the original 3e D&D GM manual. (I don't have it on me right now, sorry.)

So, again: if the players are "supposed" to win, why the hell are we bothering with tactical skill tests? Answer: to try and resolve the K dillemma by PRETENDING there's a real threat on the table when there really isn't.

If we look at the evolution of the D&D rules, there's been a downwards trend in PC lethality. Giving characters extra HP. Making them elites from the get-go. Making the default stat rolling system more forgiving. That's because heroically-oriented games where you play dipshits that get splattered on the sidewalk suck.


Alright, at this point I'm willing to concede that this may be a matter of me being anal-retentive.

Soccer: sport: skill testing.
Chess: tactics: skill testing.
Theater: acting: narrative.
Literature: writing: narrative.
Warhammer: tactics: skill testing.

RPGs: acting and tactics: narrative and skilltesting...??? WTFOMGBBQ??

It doesn't fit into a neat little category, so the whole thing seems awkward to me.


Moving on. Even if we can't agree on whether or not true skill testing belongs in a narrative-creation exercise I hope we can all agree on one point:

The rules for a heroic adventure game system should emphasize tactical skill testing, and de-emphasize the random effect of dice on combat over the long-run. If the players are not only creating good character, roleplaying them well, but also making tactically sound decisions, the game should generally (99% of the time) favor them.

[RandomCasualty]

Yeah, it's pretty much Orwellian doublethink where you want your character to beat the odds and be put in danger, but also want to win all the time. It's pretty illogical, and often requires the DM to be the magician keeping up the illusion of danger while still letting you win.

[rapanui]

From personal experience, sometimes it's not hard. The players will not question that "magic healing potion you just happen to find in the nick of time" if it means their character doesn't bleed to death. It's a silent, understood DM mercy. No one says anything the game moves on. The problem is when inexperiance or a shitty ruleset means you fuck up as GM a lot and battles turn into rocket launcher tag and stuff... where you constantly have to obviously pull punches or bail the PCs out of trouble.

D&D has the crutch of resurrection: your character can die, but... if you're high enough level and you have nice friends, and a Bhargest didn't just rape your soul... you're probably OK. The only problem is that after the 15th resurrection, your 'hero' starts to feel a bit more like a punching bag. Pretty lame all-around actually. This is probably a subject for different thread, but getting killed and rezzed more than once (and dramatically!) per campaign is kind of a mood killer.

[PhoneLobster]

Look you are stumbling over a massively simple basic conceptual problem here.

1) I want Skill tests.
2) I don't want to die.

Does not involve a massive contradiction between 1 and 2. You can have endless non fatal skill tests.

But then you extend it to.

1) I want skill tests
2) I want the possibility of death
3) I don't want to die.

And you use that to declare that 1 and 3 are massive conflicts.

Its not 1 and three that are in conflict. 1 has nothing to do with it. Its 2 and 3 which are in conflict.

Its your inability to know or admit what you want that is the source of the conflict.

And I have no sympathy at all for your position. Because when you fill in the details to satisfy your demands then the chain goes.

1) I want skill tests.
2) I want loss to equal death.
3) I don't want to die.
4) So I always want to win.

And that makes you a bad player who hurts the game for the entire group. Because then you are the guy in cops and robbers who NEVER goes down when someone says "Bang! You're dead"

[rapanui]

You're making a funny assumption here: that I'm a player.
Mostly, I just GM.

EDIT:

Addressing your points.

"1) I want skill tests
2) I want the possibility of death
3) I don't want to die.

And you use that to declare that 1 and 3 are massive conflicts."

Not quite. I don't 'want' any of the two. What I 'want' is to get to the core of what a heroic RPG is. Either it is a skill test, or it is a heroic narrative, or it is both. If it is both, there's a problem. Mainly that in a heroic narrative, the hero(s) win. What I am looking for is ways to resolve that problem/contradiction.

"And that makes you a bad player who hurts the game for the entire group. Because then you are the guy in cops and robbers who NEVER goes down when someone says "Bang! You're dead" "

Ad hominem. I am not a bad player, back in the day when the GM said I was dead... so it goes. New character. Sucks, but I move on. I have seen people who are not bad players (who are actually great roleplayers and/or tactically very competent) get very upset over character death, because to them it's not "I broke a nail".

[Crissa]

Where does the assumption come that you're the player?

If you don't want death, don't put it in your setting.

The system is agnostic to whether people actually die when you roll the dice.

Make the tests non-lethal and your problem is solved.

-Crissa

[JonSetanta]

Oddly, the GM can't "die" or else the game ends; no NPCs to interact with, either by combat or nonlethal interaction.

[Manxome]

It sounds like there's two key separable issues:

First, there's the issue that you have certain general expectations for the narrative, and the game doesn't necessarily follow them; in short, the game doesn't respect your narrative conventions. The heroes can die inconsequential deaths or whatever.

This is a hard problem to completely fix, but I don't see any reason in principle that it's not fixable; the rule set just needs to be consistent with the narrative conventions. Those aren't the same for every group or every game, and so you may need different rule sets for different games, but that's OK. The point is that you can have different outcomes, depending on random and tactical effects, but all of those outcomes are acceptable.

In the ideal game, if the heroes confront the BBEG in his lair and you decide that it's OK for the heroes to chase the BBEG away or for the heroes to be forced to retreat or for the heroes to be knocked out and captured, but it's NOT OK for either the heroes or the BBEG to die in this scene, then different combinations of tactics and die rolls will result in different outcomes from the first list, but no combination will result in an outcome from the second list. You have uncertainty and skill tests, but only within boundaries set by the narrative.

This is a generlization of what I think you called the RC-FF objection: if an outcome is unacceptable, then the game shouldn't generate it, but that doesn't mean the game can't generate a variety of acceptable outcomes based on player input and die rolls.

If you're trying to use a system that isn't absolutely perfect for your narrative conventions, you'll probably have to fudge some things. That's an imperfection in the rules (at least for your purposes), and I have no doubt that many rule sets are rather poorly designed for their intended use, but it's not some fundamental irreconciliable conflict. It's just poor design.


Secondly, there's the possible issue that the narrative conventions players ask for and the narrative conventions they actually want may not coincide--for example, players may say that they want a risk of death, but actually want to never die. This may cause the players to select the less appropriate of two possible rule sets.

This issue can theoretically be addressed either by better educating the players (so they know what they want) or deliberately deceiving them (tell them they're getting what they think they want but actually give them what they actually want). Both solutions have difficulties.

But the fundamental problem here is not in the nature of the game, but the nature of the players.


Rapanui, if you're trying to get at some problem that you don't think is covered by either of those, then I'm not picking up on it.

[K]

Have you ever played the game Arkham Horror?

In my mind, its almost the perfect RPG. The weird thing is that its a tabletop boardgame.

It works like this: heroes run around having adventures trying to slow down the advance of an evil beyond time. Failing that, you try to gain the power to win the fight with the big evil at the end. Everyone can tell how far you are from losing and when the big evil is coming.

Sometimes, you die and choose to end up in the hospital with some swag missing. Sometimes you die and choose to pick a new character. Sometime you just straight out get killed by something dramatic and awesome. Sometime you get horrible afflictions and don't die when you should, which sometimes get to heal. Items and money run through your hands like water, and most of the time you give them to the guys who can use them the best.

Its a team game against objective win and loss conditions. Skill tests are mostly objective, but you can spend special tokens to basically win the tests you consider important or just want to win (like life or death stuff).

---------------

What does this mean for an RPG like DnD? I don't think you should be able to die involuntarily unless its wicked dramatic (swallowed by dinosaur, fell into lava, decapitated in a coup de grace, soul swallowed by cursed artifact, etc).

However, if someone beats you in combat, you do fall down into a coma. Maybe you wake up after a healing potion is forced down your throat and you have a never-healing chest wound that weeps blood or the potion didn't heal the lost eye the arrow went through.

And resurrection needs to be equally dramatic to match those dramatic deaths. If you got swallowed by a dinosaur, maybe you need to appease the Old Lizard King god so he'll let you be hatched from a lizard egg as a scaly version of yourself or be reborn in the Fires of the Phoenix's Aerie with eyes that burn forevermore.

Small deaths like "oops, I seem to have been on the wrong side of that Fireball" or "that gobbo just fucking shivved me" need small remedies like healing potions.

Seriously guys...this is DnD. If we can posit the existence of sex demons and planes of Elemental Vacuum, then I think we can figure out a narratively delicious mid-ground between skill-testing and death, and plot arcs and Pretty Princess Dress-up.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

What does this mean for an RPG like DnD? I don't think you should be able to die involuntarily unless its wicked dramatic (swallowed by dinosaur, fell into lava, decapitated in a coup de grace, soul swallowed by cursed artifact, etc).

However, if someone beats you in combat, you do fall down into a coma. Maybe you wake up after a healing potion is forced down your throat and you have a never-healing chest wound that weeps blood or the potion didn't heal the lost eye the arrow went through.

And resurrection needs to be equally dramatic to match those dramatic deaths. If you got swallowed by a dinosaur, maybe you need to appease the Old Lizard King god so he'll let you be hatched from a lizard egg as a scaly version of yourself or be reborn in the Fires of the Phoenix's Aerie with eyes that burn forevermore.

Small deaths like "oops, I seem to have been on the wrong side of that Fireball" or "that gobbo just fucking shivved me" need small remedies like healing potions.

This is intriguing...I think this may be the groundwork for rules I have been looking for. Small deaths, Great deaths, maybe something in-between? You have a Heroic Destiny (your level), which can't be stopped by a Gobbo shiv, at least when your heroic companions are there to revivify you after your 'small death'. And when you come back from a death, you bear a Crippling Mark or a Courageous Mark dependant upon the nature of your death...

[PhoneLobster]

You're making a funny assumption here: that I'm a player.

Yes, I am. I am assuming that you are actually sitting at the table playing.

Mostly, I just GM.

The GM is a player.

Know it, understand it, live with it. It is a vital and basic concept that you need to know backwards.

What I 'want' is to get to the core of what a heroic RPG is.

Which you WANT to define as a story where you can die but you also can't.

That piece of double think is the ONLY fundamental problem you face.

Ad hominem. I am not a bad player

Its a valid criticism. You are presenting an argument that there should exist rules that you personally ignore as and how you feel like it.

That argument, those rules, the whole concept of demanding impossible contradictions that magically fall in your favour, they are all foundations of being a bad player.

So when I say that argument makes you a bad player I'm not criticising your argument based on the fact that you are a bad player, I'm criticising your argument on the basis that if you adhere to it (which you admit you don't foolishly attempt) it would make you a bad player.

It's stupid "I want to be able to die but I don't ever want to die, that is the nature of heroic narrative or whatever I'm calling it." WTF?

[rapanui]

Manxome, yours is the best explanation of what I'm getting at.

However, if we go back to my original post, you'll note I never said it was irreconcilable, I just said there was a contradiction. I even proposed a couple of half-baked solutions that could deal with the problem in a general manner. One of my mistakes was generalizing the original post to all RPGs where maybe I should have restricted myself to heroic adventure RPGs.

rapa-nui said:
"The final point is this: the rules are to blame for this failure, as they present themselves as a legitimate skill-test while in truth being nothing of the sort."



PhoneLobster:
I don't see the GM as JUST a player, although you could certainly see him in that light as he has to control the NPCs. The GM goes beyond being a player because he is the arbiter of the rules, and the primary driving force behind the narrative. As sigma said: you can't kill the GM.

Also, you're taking all of this very personally.
Chill out, and stop calling me a bad player, you don't know me. This thread is the result of a series of thoughts about what it means to RPG, and I am basing it on previous experience with other people besides myself, and how they react to situations like character death.

The bizarre thing is that I'm not even denying there's doublethink: I'm saying the rules ENCOURAGE that type of thought process. Many groups play a game that's lethal, but don't really want to die while simultaneously wanting there to be a risk of death.



K, Arkham Horror looks awesome. I have seen it for sale on the net and in a local hobby store, but never picked it up. I'm going to give it a shot because it sounds like by-and-large it tackles what I'm now christening "The K Dillema" head on and produces memorable results.

[PhoneLobster]

The bizarre thing is that I'm not even denying there's doublethink: I'm saying the rules ENCOURAGE that type of thought process. Many groups play a game that's lethal, but don't really want to die while simultaneously wanting there to be a risk of death.

I'm sorry but are you absorbing ANYTHING a single person other than yourself has said over the course of this utterly inane thread?

Also, you're taking all of this very personally.
Chill out, and stop calling me a bad player, you don't know me.

I take such a ridiculously stupid argument very personally.

And your argument is in actual fact the direct demand that you be provided with support for being a bad player.

It is the argument that you should be allowed to demand the existence of and manipulate the effects directly contradictory rules and setting elements as you see fit to tell a story exactly how you want it told with no input from any source other than your greedy self.

THAT IS BAD. It is transparently bad. Undeniably bad. Obviously greedy. demonstrably bad for the game. Etc...

Then you dress it up and pretend (very poorly) that its some common dilemma facing us all.

That well pisses me off.

It doesn't surprise me then that you refuse to recognise the GM as another player and instead describe him as fucking god. Because that's exactly the dilemma you claim to be facing, lack of goditude.

In which case I wonder WTF you are on about since you can just Oberoni fallacy your way out of it. That sort of bullshit is PREFECT for the bullshit dilemma you present.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

I started a thread dedicated to making alternate death rules based off of K's description about different levels of death:

http://bb.bbboy.net/thegamingden-viewthread?forum=6&thread=190

[RandomCasualty]

The main reason I feel the problem is unsolvable is because you want effectively the PCs to behave as though a different set of rules applied. Even though Rambo can't die, you don't want him just walking in the center of the enemy base and letting them fire on him like he was the Terminator or something. You still want him to use cover and otherwise make it appear as though he could die.

When PCs know it's written in the rules that they have invulnerability, then you'll get them doing stupid stuff, and you basically don't want that.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I personally don't play towards any direct narritive end, per se. My character has goals, these coincide with the goals of the GM and with other players to some degree or another. That said, I do not generally play the game to tell a story. It's my experience that trying to recreate narritive structure makes for bad games and bad narritives.

As a GM, I don't approach games from a narritive standpoint. I have villians, I know what the villians have done and I know what they intend to do. To try to lay a narritive framework requires too much pulling the party around by the nose, and it's much more fun to go in with basics and roll with it.

-Desdan

[PhoneLobster]

And like I highlighted first page.

Narrative is not a goal. It is not a force. It is a medium.

Narrative is your bitch. Stuff happens, THEN you tell a story about it.

Getting that backwards is to miss the basic premise and requirements of cooperative game play and is a primary source of railroading uncooperative BAD players.

[Manxome]

1202883718[/unixtime]]Manxome, yours is the best explanation of what I'm getting at.

However, if we go back to my original post, you'll note I never said it was irreconcilable, I just said there was a contradiction.

I don't see a contradiction. I don't see any place where the game is trying to do two incompatible things or pursuing two opposed goals. All I can see that we've established is a flawed execution of a perfectly consistent, rational idea.

You said the contradiction was that the game was presented as a skill test and is not. Everyone else in this thread seems to be in agreement that it is a skill test, and that it is supposed to be a skill test, and the only reason that the skill tests end up getting overruled is because the rules don't always accomplish what they're supposed to do, not because there aren't supposed to be skill-based rules governing the outcomes.

Ideally, you have skill-tests that generate different possible results within boundaries that the players find acceptable. When the actual boundaries don't align with the desired boundaries, you need corrective measures. That indicates a flaw, but not a contradiction.

1202901330[/unixtime]]The main reason I feel the problem is unsolvable is because you want effectively the PCs to behave as though a different set of rules applied. Even though Rambo can't die, you don't want him just walking in the center of the enemy base and letting them fire on him like he was the Terminator or something. You still want him to use cover and otherwise make it appear as though he could die.

When PCs know it's written in the rules that they have invulnerability, then you'll get them doing stupid stuff, and you basically don't want that.

Seems like that could potentially be solved by using rules that say that the players can't die, but only as long as they're acting like they can. That's potentially kind of complicated to execute, but saying that deliberately suicidal actions negate your invulnerability seems reasonable to me.

I seem to recall some thread on this forum in which someone suggested that heroes could be invulnerable to mooks (at least temporarily) as long as they're taking some symbolic action to protect themselves, like holding up a shield, executing fancy dodge moves, turning invisible, etc. I no longer have any idea who said it or in what context, but it seems like a useful idea.

The other key distinction to make here is that just because you can't die doesn't mean you can't "lose." There should still be consequences for failure, they're just not consequences that violate the accepted conventions.

1202883718[/unixtime]]Arkham Horror looks awesome. I have seen it for sale on the net and in a local hobby store, but never picked it up. I'm going to give it a shot because it sounds like by-and-large it tackles what I'm now christening "The K Dillema" head on and produces memorable results.

I recommend Arkham Horror, but only to fairly hardcore gamers. It has a lot of rules and takes a long time to play.

I also feel compelled to mention my board game, Darkest Night, which I think has a similar feel to Arkham Horror, but has fewer rules and a shorter playing time. If you want to try it, you have to print your own set, but other than that it's free.

[rapanui]

PhoneLobster: eat a pile of shit. I asked you repeatedly, nicely, not to use ad hominems, I guess you're just too fucking daft to respond to courtesy. If The Great Fence Builder wants to ban me because I'm calling you out for the gigantic fuckstick you are, I respectfully accept that as it is his forum.


*ahem*


Manxome has done a much better job in a short time of convincing me of the flaws in my reasoning, all without calling me stupid in the interim. He's absolutely, completely spot-on correct when he says:

"he only reason that the skill tests end up getting overruled is because the rules don't always accomplish what they're supposed to do, not because there aren't supposed to be skill-based rules governing the outcomes"

Also:

"The other key distinction to make here is that just because you can't die doesn't mean you can't "lose." There should still be consequences for failure, they're just not consequences that violate the accepted conventions."

Spot on.

I will look at Darkest Night, it sounds interesting.

[JonSetanta]

Rapanui: Pretty much.
And as Maj suggested not too long ago, consider the "Ignore User" function; it does wonders.
I've un-ignored the few people on my list this year, since I figured a few months would be time to give another chance, but like a series of acquaintance fucktards from high school that I had done similar with (socially, they had become obnoxious so I ignored them, gave them another chance only to hit rough times with them yet again), once again I am proven that people don't change.

PL will always be a raging douche, and I will always be a ruminating airhead.

Now, to the meat, your claim isn't bullshit and it's not Oberony Fallacy. It's a valid concern that not many gamers truly consider, and it's probably the cause of many inter-gamer disputes when the story of a session goes awry. I don't have an answer, but I'd be damned to not tell you that you're definitely not in the wrong for proposing the situation looked at....

Biggest example I can think of how some writers correct the 'main character died, story is over' problem is how Tolkien brought Gandalf back to life.
Totally retconned the bastard.
But then, the LOTR story picks right back up where it left off, after his 'death' in the mines.
It's not really about the Ring, or the Hobbits, or Aragorn, it's about Gandalf.
So he's brought back through divine intervention and a whole backstory of his Valinor origin is revealed (in the book, at least)
Perhaps using the supernatural really is the best method, however much it may warp a player's sense of setting continuity.

[PhoneLobster]

An ad hominem argument is essentially to criticise the person in order to discredit their argument in place of attacking the argument directly.

I explained directly what was wrong with your argument, as various others did, and then pointed out that should you actually attempt to apply that reasoning it would effectively be the same as being a bad player.

That is in fact the direct OPPOSITE of an ad hominem argument.

In actual fact yelling ad hominem repeatedly and accusing me of taking it personally and being mean, daft, rude or whatever in order to discredit my argument that doing what you suggest is bad for game play actually looks a heck of a lot more like an ad hominem argument.

So I don't know, maybe don't go yelling ad hominem over and over again until you understand what it means.

[Captain_Bleach]

To Rapanui and PhoneLobster: I enjoyed arguing with people whose problems may not as well exist on message boards as much as the next guy, but this was before I learned to not take the Internet seriously. Take that as you will.