Design philosophies that make you rage?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 11:40 pm

Certain roles can ONLY be performed by a specialized group of classes/builds. And you can't reliably start the adventure until you have someone in this role, such as healers in D&D or hackers in Shadowrun.

Games that encourage a fight of 'smear the queer', where opponents converge on the 'weakest' member of the party and gangbang them. Every single RPG I've seen does this, though Shadowrun very weakly (and accidentally I might add) tries to discourage this.

Characters who have 'magic' get to inherently do more things than characters who don't have magic. Dungeons and Dragons in all editions are guilty of this. Combine this with pet peeve number one and you're sure to pull peoples' hair out.

Systems where the attacker determines all of the fates of effects. 4E is especially bad about this one; if you get stunned in the middle of combat you may as well go play Smash Bros. for the next few minutes. Goddammit, the defender should be making as many die rolls as possible. I think that attack and damage values should be fixed and they should be replaed with a 'dodge' and a 'soak' roll.

Racial anything. I really fucking hate this and I wish Andy Collins would've been promoted to some other division in Hasbro, because he is fucking in love with racial effects being stronger than race-neutral effects.

Charisma and Constitution scores. I can tolerate them in Shadowrun since they're opposed by other scores so there's symmetry at least, but D&D has been tolerating this shit for far too long. The 6-stat system makes constitution and charisma useless AND doesn't have symmetry.

Damage and effects having anti-synergy. How many times have you played D&D and you as a fighter take down a monster to a couple of hp and then someone negates all of your hard work with a save-or-suck? Way too fucking often. If you're going to have save-or-suck effects in the game, they should at least get a bonus or a penalty depending on what other effects are on the enemy and how much hp they have left.

koz · Post by **koz** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 11:55 pm

The philosophy of "we don't give a shit about game balance". Kev Siembieda, we're looking at you.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 11:55 pm

#2 seriously contains every game ever produced in any genre except those involving at least 3 teams.

As for me, anything that depends on players fixing broken rules.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 12:15 am

Anything where having Stuff is Important to the point that not having Stuff makes you useless.

D&D and magic items, for the most obvious example.

Bad or no connection between fluff and crunch.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 1:19 am

The concept that some players should have the option of doing substandard actions, that they will presumably do at some point, in exchange for getting access to options for actions that are beyond the standard. 3e D&D was quite explicit about this: Clerics were better than you because they had Cure Light Wounds. In general, having an option to do something shitty does not balance out the option to do something awesome, because a skillful player can choose the awesome action and get power for nothing, and the unskillful player can end up doing the weak action over and over just to end up weak with no compensation.

The concept that character building options are worth anything at all to the character. That shit is all over everything, but the poster child is the 3e Fighter. We're supposed to accept reduced power on Fighters because a Fighter could have taken different feats to have some other set of substandard powers. The problem with this entire line of reasoning is that whatever builds are nominally possible with your class are just as meaningless to your actual character as whatever builds are available in other classes. Your character still only has one build. The fact that you could have written something else on your character sheet is fucking worthless because you jolly well didn't.

-Username17

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 1:34 am

Smash the weakest is inherient in the game concepts because focus fire is always better at reducing the number of actions the other guys take, and all games want actions to be meaningful so reducing them is usually good.

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 2:29 am

I don't know how much this counts as a design philosophy, but I hate it when people look down on you for looking at what shit does when making a character.

"dude, since your making a palladin this feat, good guy, would be awesome"

"It would be, except the feat absolutely sucks nuts"

"your a power gamer dude"

God, I hate it when game systems encourage people to ignore the balance of things and just take things for the fluff. Especially when you are looked down on when you choose something because it's powerful.

I like making effective characters (not broken, effective). I'll occasionally choose something ineffective if it helps me attain my feel for my character, but most of the time I won't pick up toughness because my dwarf is supposed to be tough.

I also hate it when people use the "you can't predict how things will interact so balance is really hard when you expand things" line. Bullshit. 90% of the broken things out there are broken because of a single stupid ability. Hulking Hurler: the ability that lets him use whatever he can carry to damage people; Pun Pun: the ability that lets him grab other abilities.

I also hate the philosophy that players and monsters are two entirely different things, and it's ok to give monsters abilities that are entirely out of line because players will never have those abilities. Not even because of the "players can't have nice things" idea. It's because I like my worlds to have something called verisimilitude.

Then there is the idea that it's impossible to make a perfectly balanced system, so we shouldn't try that hard. Sure, it is, but we can get it close enough that it doesn't matter. We don't need to balance everything perfectly, just enough to give players a choice. That's really what balancing extra abilities is mostly about, something too good takes away a lot of choices (everything worse), and something horrible doesn't add any choice, it just takes up space.

Then there is the idea that the system should have things that are subpar and over par built in to reward mastery of the system by letting people make better characters.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 4:13 am

cthulhu wrote:Smash the weakest is inherient in the game concepts because focus fire is always better at reducing the number of actions the other guys take, and all games want actions to be meaningful so reducing them is usually good.

Well actually it depends.

If you're playing rocket tag, then smash the strongest is generally the way to go, because everyone is pretty easy to kill, it's just the stronger guys can do more damage and take out more of your group.

Though really, I have yet to see any game that encourages spreading your attacks instead of focus fire. It's just sometimes you attack the strongest and sometimes you focus on the weakest.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 4:33 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Certain roles can ONLY be performed by a specialized group of classes/builds. And you can't reliably start the adventure until you have someone in this role, such as healers in D&D or hackers in Shadowrun.

Worst of all: the minesweeper. Yes, you can to a certain degree just throw stones ahead, have disposable hirelings (for the jerks) or summon monsters to run ahead, but there's still the idea that you need someone to play as the minesweeper. Which is often boring, especially in D&D.

One "Let's pretend we know what the fuck we're talking about" article suggested that this is why so many rogues like to shaft the party. They create a character who's supposed to be a great trickster thief or thief acrobat. They're thinking Jimmy the Hand or Silk/Velvet. Then they get dragged into a dungeon instead of having fun in the town, and they get shoved into minesweeper role "Because you're the rogue"*, unable to make use of anything that isn't Search or Disable Device, so they get bored and start nicking stuff from the party.

It's possible.

Games that encourage a fight of 'smear the queer', where opponents converge on the 'weakest' member of the party and gangbang them.

It's annoying, and basically every game does it. I'd love to see a game that does a good job of discouraging it, though - and it'd have to believably do so, so no fucking FFT judge sitting at ringside declaring "I'll red-card you if you attack him more than once per round!"

Characters who have 'magic' get to inherently do more things than characters who don't have magic.

I actually like this. Maybe it's because I feel magic SHOULD exist and make everything much better than things are, maybe it's because I'm sick of not being in the "Congratulations, you were born a winner, enjoy the ride to the top" group so can at least get that in games. But I do like the idea of there being those with magic, and they are just flat-out better than those without.

The only problem that arises is when they present magic man and sword guy as equally valid choices. And THAT would be my complaint, the concept of putting useful and useless next to each other as valid choices. Aside from this being bad design in general, it feeds into the wars between "Omg you are a powergamer" and "So? You're a wanker, but I don't go on about that every day."

And the other big one:

"Our setting is so awesome that you could only fuck it up by interacting with it. Therefore, you're really here just to see how cool our setting and story are." Whether it's by filling it with millions of epic level wizards (Forgotten Realms, probably every other WotC world) or by declaring "You, the PCs, will suck and be forever worthless and bossed around by everyone, as they are bigger than you" (White Wolf, Dark Heresy)

Actually, come to think of it just about everything in WW, and a large amount of DH, could be listed as "design philosophies that make me rage".

*I seriously have had a player not put any ranks in Search, and yet offer to always search for traps because "I can find traps!" They knew how it worked, they thought it was funny. And it was, because the game style allowed for such a thing, and the traps tended to be as bad as "pool of honey, shower of crushed nuts. Next door: a squirrel swarm!"

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 5:30 am

How to discourage gang-banging one target at a time:

1. Creatures all have souls
2. Souls don't like to leave their bodies
3. Hurting a creature's body pisses off their soul.
4. The more pissed off a soul is, the bigger the creature's attack will be in the next round. Each attack a creature takes adds a +1 bonus to attack/damage/DCs next round.
5. Assasination. If you kill a creature before it has acted in a fight, it will try to follow you for the rest of the battle and fuck up all of your Random Number Generation attempts. This is represented by the creature's killer having to make a saving throw with a DC equal to 20 + CR of the creature that assasinated it - the CR of the creature killed. If you fail, you take a -1 penalty to all of your rolls until the fight ends.

You can actually play D&D powerscaling with such a system in place. One lvl 8 Bard vs 40 Orcs would be interesting to watch.

Of course, assasins are only good as the "2nd wave" or after the 1st round of combat. Heroes also use subduing strikes vs peeny-weenies, in order to not risk being revenge-ganked by ghosts and injured enemies.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 6:24 am

Or you could give large penalties to characters not attacking those threatening them. Make AoOs hurt more, I suppose.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 6:41 am

Psychic Robot wrote:Or you could give large penalties to characters not attacking those threatening them. Make AoOs hurt more, I suppose.

For TNE, I'm pretty sure that there was going to be a CAN bonus to [melee?] attacking someone when you yourself had not been [melee?] attacked yet. In one fell swoop that simulates 'sneak attacks' and sometimes encourages divided 'fire',

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 9:39 am

Red Orchestra has a system in which bullets flying near you fuck up your aim something fierce. So spraying bullets around towards all enemy positions is more valuable than hosing down a single position until someone dies.

I genuinely think something like that can be done for table top, where characters that are "unengaged" can go crazy with running around behind people and such. This encourages people to set up blocking patterns rather than just having everyone gangbang one enemy and then moving on to the next one.

-Username17

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 11:11 am

Sample DnD implementation (because everyone knows DnD mechanics):

Unengaged
A character who did not have to make a saving throw and who was not attacked since his previous turn is considered unengaged.

Unengaged characters do double damage with all their attacks. All DCs against their spells and abilities are increased by 4.

Of course handing out more rocket launchers in DnD is actually the last thing you'd want to do, but something like this seems like it should work fine in a game with a lower lethality. In DnD you would have to to do the opposite I guess, and penalize damage and DCs for engaged characters.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 11:35 am

cthulhu wrote:Smash the weakest is inherient in the game concepts

There are a lot of potential and some already mentioned ways to interfere with this.

Personally I've been working with a pseudo-simultaneous turn resolution system where the results of everyone's actions are somewhat up in the air until turn end.

As such it was relatively easy to implement something rather counter-intuitive for a more typical serial resolution system. A turn based damage cap.

In my case, only one hit per turn (the most successful one) can actually land on each target and deal damage.

So ganging up on one target DOES have some benefit (so people don't just stand around when they outnumber the enemy) since you might get in a better hit than someone else or cover someone else's miss. But all in all there is significantly higher damage potential by spreading your attacks across about as many targets as you have actual attacks available.

It worked very nicely and is one aspect of my series of personal home brew systems that has been retained across several implementations, very different campaigns, and many games.

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 1:10 pm

I'm also in the camp that Magic shouldn't inherently make you better. You should be able to do things others can't, but that means that they should be able to do things that you can better.

For example, you can set a guy on fire, but it's much more efficient to stab him. I recognize this as personal flavor preference, but I hate it when games say this is a good reason to make the classes unbalanced.

As far as beat up on the weakling, what about removing the weakling?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 1:18 pm

Thymos wrote: As far as beat up on the weakling, what about removing the weakling?

The weakling in that case is simply "whoever got attacked first."

The concept is that you win when all enemies are defeated. In most games, an enemy who has not been defeated yet poses a threat of some kind, meaning that the option where you defeat Enemy A and then defeat Enemy B is fundamentally superior to the option where you damage Enemy A and Enemy B and then defeat both.

This is not necessarily true. You can give out wound penalties, bonuses for being unengaged, easy access to hit point sharing as a healing mechanic, strong zones of control, and so on and so forth. But especially in games that have a critical existence failure mechanic, the "focus fire" tactic is obvious, boring, and over used.

-Username17

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 1:28 pm

It's mostly used because it's effective though.

What about enabling players to defend the weakling until he can be brought back up to snuff?

If I fighter has a "cover" ability where he can step by the wizard and take the hits for him, then the weakling is taken off the field as an available target. If the fighter is sufficiently harder to hurt, it might not even be efficient to go through the fighter to get at the wizard.

Then we have positioning. Sadly with the small groups most rpg's need it's not feasible, but creating a wall with melee fighters works wonderfully in Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced.

Also, if the weakling has escape abilities that remove him as an option to fight (if only being able to move your your attack range) he can pose a threat later.

There is a lot you can do with creating a different target than the weakling. Healer and Party Support usually are even more important to take down than the guy with low life.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 1:49 pm

I want to know why smart play is actually a problem. Because that's what Critical Existence Failure + Focus Fire is. Why the fuck should intelligence be punished and stupidity encouraged? That just gets you bullshit like the D&D 3.5 playtesters and their Epic [Fail] Overrunning of golems instead of ya know, smashing them up. And we all know how 3.5 turns out when you have a non zero amount of brain cells involved.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 1:55 pm

Roy wrote:I want to know why smart play is actually a problem. Because that's what Critical Existence Failure + Focus Fire is. Why the fuck should intelligence be punished and stupidity encouraged? That just gets you bullshit like the D&D 3.5 playtesters and their Epic [Fail] Overrunning of golems instead of ya know, smashing them up. And we all know how 3.5 turns out when you have a non zero amount of brain cells involved.

The problem isn't that people focus fire in an unmitigated critical existence failure environment. The problem is that focus fire isn't very interesting tactically, and therefore n unmitigated critical existence failure environment is bad design.

-Username17

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 2:08 pm

Roy wrote:I want to know why smart play is actually a problem. Because that's what Critical Existence Failure + Focus Fire is. Why the fuck should intelligence be punished and stupidity encouraged? That just gets you bullshit like the D&D 3.5 playtesters and their Epic [Fail] Overrunning of golems instead of ya know, smashing them up. And we all know how 3.5 turns out when you have a non zero amount of brain cells involved.

I think it's because it gets boring. When the general of the army can easily be taken out in a single combat round, it's boring to fight the rest of the army; the army might as well not be there to begin with. Because it means when the party meets their perfectly matched (in opposing fight ability match rather than necessarily being a 50/50 fight) NPC villain party, rather than pairing off into individual fights they're group curbed stomped one at a time (as are the PCs) which kills reoccurring villains and PCs alike.

It sucks when the dragon chooses to pick on one PC at a time rather than spreading the pain. It sucks when the Necromancer gets SoD ganked before his legions of undead are waded through. Having the game encourage that as the most sensible tactic sucks.

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 2:11 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
The problem isn't that people focus fire in an unmitigated critical existence failure environment. The problem is that focus fire isn't very interesting tactically, and therefore n unmitigated critical existence failure environment is bad design.

-Username17

Would mechanisms like living mooks contribute to the defense of their leader just by still standing and have a party HP pool that is automatically drawn from by anyone in the party help?

violence in the media · Tue Mar 10, 2009 2:42 pm

I think that the freedom to effectively target whoever you want is a contributing factor to focus fire.

Creatures need some sort of default rule treatment (not special abilty) that allows them to clog areas with their corpses, leap on grenades or fireballs and shield others from the blast, and block LOS and LOE.

If a Necromancer is sending his shambling hordes down a hallway at your party, and their bloated, stinking corpses are packed in there like Japanese salarymen on the morning train, you should never be able to hit or target that necromancer right off the bat with anything. Maybe have an exception for situations where you're so high level that the entire encounter is trivial anyway.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 2:53 pm

Roy wrote:I want to know why smart play is actually a problem. Because that's what Critical Existence Failure + Focus Fire is. Why the fuck should intelligence be punished and stupidity encouraged? That just gets you bullshit like the D&D 3.5 playtesters and their Epic [Fail] Overrunning of golems instead of ya know, smashing them up. And we all know how 3.5 turns out when you have a non zero amount of brain cells involved.

The point is not to punish smart moves, the point is to make the smart moves something different.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 2:59 pm

ckafrica wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:
The problem isn't that people focus fire in an unmitigated critical existence failure environment. The problem is that focus fire isn't very interesting tactically, and therefore n unmitigated critical existence failure environment is bad design.

-Username17
Would mechanisms like living mooks contribute to the defense of their leader just by still standing and have a party HP pool that is automatically drawn from by anyone in the party help?

I could see collective defenses working, but a shared HP pool being annoying to calculate. Since party composition can change from session to session and thus create extra bookkeeping steps.

Something where characters can take saving throws for each other, or the group makes saving throws when any individual is affected would be more interesting and encourage trying to weaken the enemy as a whole rather than going for the defeat in detail route.

Personally I've very seldom seen games where defeat in detail isn't rewarded, while games where dropping a ... no, Dawn of War has "morale" as a secondary pool from HP. Flamers do terrible damage, but disgusting morale damage.

A squad of well, anything (even IG troops) with only flamers as their special/heavy weapons can break nearly any enemy squad except for super-elites/command units within a few seconds of spraying flame everywhere. After that supporting squads with ranged special/heavy weapons can easily mow down the broken squad; who will now do very little damage. Meaning that IG infantry can successfully engage with Spess Mehrines and Chaos Marines heavy infantry in melee ranges, but only if the marines have had their morale broken.

Actually, I tend to use the "flamer squad forward" tactic a lot. One of my forward squads will invariably be engaged in melee, and usually a command unit (which are good at melee) will have to be in a forward position as well. I attach the command unit to the forward squad, give it max flamers and have them break the neck of any infantry based attacks that come towards my lines. With the attacking squads morale broken, they can deal no real damage, and then my fire support teams can mow the attack down without my battleline getting thrown into a disarray.

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Design philosophies that make you rage?

Design philosophies that make you rage?

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