The Gaming Den

OK, so I did a random web search and ran across web-copies of one of my favorite old games: the Lone Wolf books. They were a "choose your own adventure"-style book with a bare boned RPG engine to fight combats and solve problems with a mostly binary decision tree based on whether you had chosen some abilities at character creation or not.

That got me thinking. I mean, how complex does a game engine really need to be to be playable? Arkam Horror gets by with an extremely simplified system of stats and combat and I could see playing that over and over.

On the flip side, 4e DnD tries to be very simple by unifying all ability mechanics but at its core its a tactical combat simulator.

My first instinct is that KISS is a decent design concept in that it makes learning the game super easy, but that creates the danger that there will not be enough depth to keep players interested.

Thoughts.

The eternal design aspiration is "easy to learn, difficult to master", like Chess or Go or something. As long as there are tactically interesting actions you can take with your simple system, then KISS is viable.

This is the basic idea behind some of the rules light systems, the tactical interest comes from your descriptions and imagination within the parameters. The more granular and "hard" you get with your rules, the more the rules need to be solidly defined, clean, and the game ultimately becomes more complex.

Just because something is simple doesn't mean it can't be complex.

Go has one of the simplest rule sets of any board game, and yet the amount of strategy and depth of the game is staggering. On the other hand, Eclipse Phase is extremely complicated and convoluted...but its mechanical system is not very complex at all.

Ideally, an rpg should be simple and complex. If one had to be sacrificed, I would say simplicity, but only so long as you're getting some actual bang for your buck. Rolling half a dozen dice in order to declare a simple attack doesn't add anything.

Simplicity isn't a design goal; it's a design principle.

Define: Ockham's Razor wrote:A rule in science and philosophy stating that entities should not be multiplied needlessly. This rule is interpreted to mean that the simplest of two or more competing theories is preferable and that an explanation for unknown phenomena should first be attempted in terms of what is already known. Also called law of parsimony.

[Edit] For those who want to read the Lone Wolf stuff: http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home [/Edit]

K, I kind of think that you're underestimating peoples' abilities to master the system.

Take 3E D&D for example. If you try to get a newcomer to play a 17th-level wizard they'll be paralyzed by all of the options. But if you get the same newcomer to start out at 1st level and regularly play games for a period of two months until said newcomer becomes level 17 they have a much better chance of mastering all of their options.

Same for MMORPGs. You'd be surprised at the amount of otherwise computer or tactically illiterate people who become Sun frickin' Tzu on the gaming engine after a few months on that thing.

By the same token, the game should start out simple and become more complex as time goes on. I actually kind of find the 4E paradigm appropriate for newcomers, until about level 5. At that point they've already seen everything--the problem is that it's all they're ever going to see.

To help with the simplicity issue, introductory play should also tie into what people might already likely be familiar with. Most everyone interested in playing heroic fantasy has seen Lord of the Rings and Star Wars; low level play should play off of these tropes. A lot of newcomers to D&D have also played jRPGs--D&D should pander to these people, at least at first. Which means that low-level armor should be bought in shops, wizards cast simple fire/ice/bolt spells, and fighters pretty much have the commands of Fight/Dark Slash/Item. Just at first, however.

Simplicity is nice, it means it's easy to learn things.

Depth is nice, it means that there is a lot to learn and fairly far to go until you master it.

Ideally you want both. Complexity slightly increases depth by making it take longer to learn things, but usually to justify more complexity the system we need to have a lot of benefits. Simple does not equal shallow as well, Go is one of the simplest and deepest games I know of.

Shallow systems just become boring really really fast.

MtG is a great example of a game that is both Simple and has a lot of Depth.

My view is that KISS is great when possible, however additional Complexity can justify itself by bringing in some benefits.

Arkham Horror's good - but after just 2-3 games you probably know most of the entries on the location cards. Which is good if you're in the business of selling expansion packs, I guess. Also at that point my friends started modifying the rules because it was obviously going to start being really easy if we didn't change anything.

Simplicity makes changing the system easy, but if we weren't into that we'd likely have ditched the game at that point or shortly after.

In other words, I think you'll catch more long-term players with a more complex system than the simplest possible. I'm not sure where the ideal balance point is, but I suspect it's more than a few steps up from Arkham Horror.

K wrote:Thoughts.

Complexity is a cost, but it is also a reward and the means of providing ALL other rewards delivered by the rules system.

It's not a so much a matter of too much or too little, it is more a matter of applying it only to those things you care about.

Because when complexity crops up in areas which you don't want to be costly or rewarding for players it undermines your goals in every respect.

It's primarily about setting design goals and sticking to them.

If you care about say, martial combat abilities as much as magical ones, they had better have similar complexity costs AND rewards, quite aside from their actual relative power issues.

edit: and K we discussed this alot Here I think you missed it.

PhoneLobster wrote:
edit: and K we discussed this alot Here I think you missed it.

No offense, but no you didn't. That thread is a proper clusterfuck.

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However, the part you said before that is interesting: complexity as reward?

I mean, it takes dozens of games or so of Arkam Horror before you know what decks have the best things (yes, someone always camps the store and the newspaper). But, the same can be said of a Storyteller game for example; the Setites are mysterious and creepy right up until you have an adventure with one and then they become "ho-hum."

So I think variety is the reward, and not complexity. In my 3.x DnD career I have fought a very small minority of the monsters in the various MMs and felt enriched by the variety and the potential to meet thousands of different enemies based on the setting and story the DM had cooked up, but the additional complexity of say.... Tome of Magic..... did nothing to increase my overall enjoyment even though the amount of variety also increased a bit. The ratio of variety to complexity is all off.

I mean, we all know what an "ideal universe" version of Arkham Horror looks like: each deck is as high as the sky and you could play for years and never see the same card twice, or at leasta sizable portion of the cards would be different with the best ones cropping up over and over.

So some games I've encountered work like this:

-Rifts: high variety, and lots of complexity.

-4e DnD: low variety, low complexity.

-3e DnD: high variety, high complexity

-3e Storyteller games (Vampire The Masquerade, etc): simple at the core, but all variety adds unacceptable amounts of complexity.

-3e and 4e Shadowrun: moderate complexity and low variety.

The ideal would be "high variety, low complexity"; however, I'm not sure if its an attainable goal.

So I think variety is the reward, and not complexity. In my 3.x DnD career I have fought a very small minority of the monsters in the various MMs and felt enriched by the variety and the potential to meet thousands of different enemies based on the setting and story the DM had cooked up, but the additional complexity of say.... Tome of Magic..... did nothing to increase my overall enjoyment even though the amount of variety also increased a bit. The ratio of variety to complexity is all off.

That I will certainly agree with.

I think the thing to note is that variety doesn´t have to have fifty gajillion types of playable races or eighty classes or even ten thousand different monsters. Note that in Arkham Horror, all the PCs are humans and pretty much everyone you interact with is a human as well. A lot of variety can be crammed into relatively simple settings, and I genuinely think the game is better for it.

Variety is good, but divergeant theme makes things confusing and fall apart.

-Username17

K wrote: The ideal would be "high variety, low complexity"; however, I'm not sure if its an attainable goal.

I think something like that could be possible, but it would require a lot of work on the designer's part.

Picture a system that had something like 500 feats/powers/etc to choose from. Lets say they were all nicly balanced for their power level compared to the other options. Now, 3.5 just throws all of their feats together in alphabetical order, with nothing else to tell a player which feats are related and which aren't. Sure, you can look at the list in the front to see if it's in a tree or not, but that's only a partial indicator.

But, imagine listing all of those feats in several wider categories, each split into sub categories. So you might get something like:

Magic
Fire magic
Ice magic
Enchantment
Illusions
Necromancy
...

Combat
Weapon mastery
Durability
Evasion
...

Skills
Running up walls
Super stealth
...

So, a new player could look at a list and think "Oh! Fire magic and Necromancy look kind of cool", of "I want a swashbuckler. Maybe I should look into Weapon Mastery, Evasion, and Running up Walls" or something. This keeps it more simple from a broad stand point, but offers greater variety to a veteran player.

K wrote:The ideal would be "high variety, low complexity"; however, I'm not sure if its an attainable goal.

It absolutely is, but its easier in some milieus than in others.

Comparing go with a fantasy RPG provides an excellent contrast: go is simple but it also is just an abstract strategy game with no other design goals. Go doesn't have to provide an engine that maintains robust verisimilitude while incorporating anything so ridiculous as magic.

One example of this is in practice comes from one of my favorite RPGs, Street Fighter. For all the maneuvers available in all the expansions, in practice you've already dumpster-dived for the relevant ones and are only going to have four or five that are gonzo enough to really rely on; the interaction between fighters and their individual four or five powers (and possibly strategic implications of their character XP expenditures) is captivating. Between players with similar amounts of experience with the system, the simultaneous cardplay mechanic where you don't know what your opponent is doing until you've committed to your own course of action, layered with RPS-style tactical implications leads to a very rich combat minigame.

mean_liar wrote:One example of this is in practice comes from one of my favorite RPGs, Street Fighter. For all the maneuvers available in all the expansions, in practice you've already dumpster-dived for the relevant ones and are only going to have four or five that are gonzo enough to really rely on; the interaction between fighters and their individual four or five powers (and possibly strategic implications of their character XP expenditures) is captivating. Between players with similar amounts of experience with the system, the simultaneous cardplay mechanic where you don't know what your opponent is doing until you've committed to your own course of action, layered with RPS-style tactical implications leads to a very rich combat minigame.

That is fine for PVP games, where you can have near infinite depths simply by players trying to outguess each other. I don't think this carries over to non-PvP games.

One thing to note is that empty variety is useless.

Having 1000 feats to choose from and having none of them make a difference in play is bad.

Having 10 feats to choose from where it really makes a difference to your character is good.

This is the problem with abilities that give a +1 bonus to something, you can't tell the difference between those with the feat and those without.

WH40k is actually good in this regard. The numbers and abilities for everything really do matter. Toughness 4 is significantly better than toughness 3, and that's the way it should be.

The ideal would be "high variety, low complexity"; however, I'm not sure if its an attainable goal.

It sounds attainable to me.

Shadowrun to be honest struck me as relatively low complexity until you start hitting the subsystems like magic or gear.

Also, are you sure about making 3e high complexity and 4e low complexity? I mean sure, 3e was a bit more complex, but 4e doesn't seem to warrant low complexity (I'd rate it as high).

Feng Shui is an example of a game that's low complexity.

Murtak wrote: That is fine for PVP games, where you can have near infinite depths simply by players trying to outguess each other. I don't think this carries over to non-PvP games.

I don't see why GMs shouldn't be engaged in the outguessing as well.

K wrote: -4e DnD: low variety, low complexity.

-3e DnD: high variety, high complexity

Might be unpopular, but I'm going to disagree here. 4e has about the same amount of complexity as 3.5, just not in the same places. The brunt of 3e's complexity goes into the character creation process. The multiclass system lets you spend hours scouring for all those nice bonuses and tricks and what have you. But once you've built your character, you're mostly done, especially if you're a martial class, even a Tome one. Each battle is "Hit them with that thing I do really well". Spellcasters on the other hand have a glut of options during play and most of the difficulty is in resource management.

4e has a much simpler character creation process. No keeping track of cross classes, or stacking save bonuses, whatever, and you can make an epic level character in a few minutes just using their character builder. However, during the actual fights, each PC regardless of class is going to have that same glut of options and the challenge of resource management as a spellcaster. With 4e powers emphasis on combat, I would actually say they have a wider variety of viable options per combat, with said options being more mutable depending not on just the enemy being faced, but on the round by round situation.

Apalala wrote:With 4e powers emphasis on combat, I would actually say they have a wider variety of viable options per combat, with said options being more mutable depending not on just the enemy being faced, but on the round by round situation.

That's the idea, anyway...

4e has a much simpler character creation process. No keeping track of cross classes, or stacking save bonuses, whatever, and you can make an epic level character in a few minutes just using their character builder. However, during the actual fights, each PC regardless of class is going to have that same glut of options and the challenge of resource management as a spellcaster. With 4e powers emphasis on combat, I would actually say they have a wider variety of viable options per combat, with said options being more mutable depending not on just the enemy being faced, but on the round by round situation.

Depends on the character and the level.

At around level 9 or so, a wizard has a very nice variety of options to choose from. They have some very nice combat-wrecking powers in their arsenal; the choice whether to drop a Visions of Ruin or an Enlarged Stinking Cloud is a pretty hefty choice. Using Icy Terrain or Twist of Space does require some tactical planning and mastery.

... however, that's just for wizards and to a slightly smaller extent invokers. Every other character I've seen has a 'Five Moves of Doom Combo'. Here's how it goes for a melee ranger, assuming that they have one daily power budgeted:

Set fire to a minor action to use Oath of Enmity granted by your Hero of Faith or Disiciple of Divine Wrath feat if the target is in range. Use Frenzied Skirmish or Attacks on the Run to get into position if you have it budgeted. If you're not in range AND you don't have a FS/AotR budgetted then burn a move action to get into place then use OoE. If you're already in place, use Ruffling Sting (to grant your next attack Combat Advantage) and then Jaws of the Wolf instead because situations like this are rare.

Anyway, do you have an AP budgeted? If you do, use it for Twin Strike unless you have another daily power in the tank, then use that instead. After all that, if you didn't burn a move action to get into place and haven't used Ruffling Sting, use Ruffling Sting. Then blow the encounter power on your Boots of Eagerness to give yourself an extra move action: use this for Offhand Strike. If you did burn a move action to get into place use your BoEagerness to use Ruffling Sting.

If your target makes an attack (and they will) use Disruptive Strike on them.

Next round: if you have only Off-Hand Strike available, use that and Hunter's Quarry and then use Twin Strike. If you have Off-Hand Strike AND Ruffling Sting available, use those instead. Next round is when you pop a Quarry.

Or in short-hand terms:

Worse-Case Scenario, when you begin the encounter with nothing left in the tank (no dailies or APs):

Round 1) Move Action + Hero of Faith or Disciple of Divine Wrath for OoE --pick depending on whether you can kill the monster in one turn or not + Twin Strike --> Boots of Eagerness for Ruffling Sting. Between rounds, use Disruptive Strike.
Round 2) Offhand-Strike + Hunter's Quarry + Twin Strike.
Round 3) Keep spamming Twin Strike until the monster dies.

Best Case Scenario, when you have a full array of powers and an AP in the tank and the enemy is already in range:

Round 1) Frenzied Skirmish + Oath of Enmity + Ruffling Sting + Boots of Eagerness for Off-Hand Strike + AP for Attacks on the Run. Between rounds, use Disruptive Strike.
Round 2) Jaws of the Wolf + Hunter's Quarry.
Round 3) Spam Twin Strike until the monstah is dead.


Ideally you'll want both the Disciple of Divine Wrath and the Hero of Faith feats if you can afford them. Hero of Faith's OoE lasts until the end of the encounter but is only good for one enemy; Disciple of Divine Wrath lasts until the end of your next turn but comes back if you kill an enemy. Since 9th-level rangers have a high probability of killing enemies in one round the latter does have some utility if you think you can kill an enemy in one round. This only applies if your DM will only let you use one source of Oath of Enmity per encounter; if they let you do both then the advice only partially applies.

Your stat array:

Actually, you know what? Since the stat and feat arrays are so locked in it'll only take me an extra 5 minutes to stat out a character good for levels 1 to 30.

If you're a Longtooth Shifter or Half-Orc:
STR: 18 DEX: 16 WIS: 15 CON: 11
All of your stat raises go into Strength and Dexterity.
1) Weapon Proficiency: Bastard Sword
2) Hero of Faith
4) Weapon Focus: Heavy Blades
6) Weapon Expertise: Heavy Blades
8) Disciple of Divine Wrath
10) Two-Weapon Fighting
11) Prime Punisher, retrain Disciple of Divine Wrath to Called Shot.
12) Prime Quarry
13) Retrain Prime Quarry to Lasting Frost, for your level 13 item select a Frost Bastard Sword.
14) Wintertouchedd. Grab a frost bastard sword and a Siberys Shard of Lasting Cold.
16) Prime Quarry
18) Two-Weapon Opening
20) Who cares, really?
21) Weapon Expertise, Retrain your level 20 feat to Mighty Enmity (lets you target two targets for Oath of Enmity, awesome with Hero of Faith)
22) Rending Tempest
24) Improved Prime Shot
26) Martial Mastery
28) Epic Recovery
30) Who cares, really?

If you're anything else that has a strength bonus (why?)
STR: 18 WIS: 15 DEX: 13 CON: 13
All of your stat raises go into Strength and Dexterity, even though you're going to wear heavy armor and the stat is gimped. Why? Because the really gar ranger feats like Prime Punisher and Called Shot require dexterity, that's why.
Feat Array:
1) Armor Proficiency: Chainmail (if you're, god forbid, a human then pump the other feat into Scalemail proficiency)
2) Weapon Proficiency: Bastard Sword
4: Weapon Expertise: Heavy Blades
6) Hero of Faith
8) Weapon Focus: Heavy Blades
10) Armor Proficiency: Scalemail (if you were a human, grab Disciple of Divine Wrath)
11) Prime Punisher (lets you use Prime Shot against melee opponents)
12) Called Shot (gives you a +5 damage roll to people you get a Prime Shot bonus against)
14) Prime Quarry (gives you a +1 bonus to Prime Shot if target is your quarry.
16) Lasting Frost (from now on, you have a Frost Bastard Sword with a Siberys Shard of Lasting Frost in it, a Reckless Bastard Sword, and a pair of Bloodclaw Spiked Gauntlets and you stack all of them)
18) Wintertouched (retrain Improved Prime Shot to Two-Weapon Fighting)
20) Two-Weapon Opening (gives you an extra attack with your off-hand weapon if you make a critical hitty poo)
21) Weapon Mastery: Heavy Blades
22) Mighty Enmity
24) Rending Tempest (gives you an additional die of weapon damage if you hit with a power that requires two weapons)
26) Martial Recovery (this is also the level where you get a Violet Solitaire)
28) Epic Recovery (retrain to Prime Quarry)
30) Prime Quarry

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Same for MMORPGs. You'd be surprised at the amount of otherwise computer or tactically illiterate people who become Sun frickin' Tzu on the gaming engine after a few months on that thing.

Well this is because people just learn tactics from others and the opposition is stupid. In a truly deep tactical/strategic game, your opponents would constantly be tossing counters at you, forcing you to adapt and making it so you can't just rely on some predefined strategy.

If at all possible we want to set it up so people are thinking. For a low power game, basically you're going to be doing wargame thinking. Using cover, using terrain and so on to your advantage. One reason everyone flying really kills the tactics of the game is that it removes terrain entirely. For a game that's based around terrain tactics and unit positioning, that's horrible.

Now if you're playing a superhero style game, you don't even want a map and you want your depth based off of something else. Terrain probably isn't going to play much of a role and you probably want something more based off of M:tG.

Apalala wrote: Might be unpopular, but I'm going to disagree here. 4e has about the same amount of complexity as 3.5, just not in the same places. The brunt of 3e's complexity goes into the character creation process. The multiclass system lets you spend hours scouring for all those nice bonuses and tricks and what have you. But once you've built your character, you're mostly done, especially if you're a martial class, even a Tome one. Each battle is "Hit them with that thing I do really well". Spellcasters on the other hand have a glut of options during play and most of the difficulty is in resource management.

Yeah, that's one thing I really hated about 3E. All the special moves like trips or disarms or whatever totally sucked unless you specialized in them. Then it just became some move that you might as well spam every turn.

Most of the game was seriously done at char creation, and even that usually just amounted to ripping a build off the internet.

That's really a paradigm that needs to be dropped if you want a game that's tactically deep. It should be your decisions in combat that matter more, and how you counter the opponent's strategy. Not just about what kind of build you're walking in with.

It should be similar to 4E where the basic attack is a move of last resort, when you literally don't have anything else of worth. Every other ability should be situational.

K wrote:The ideal would be "high variety, low complexity"; however, I'm not sure if its an attainable goal.

What you are talking about there is not so much low complexity as it is high efficiency.

Variety requires complexity, it is very nearly the same thing. Only where added complexity is some sort of inefficient doubling over of the same thing, an overly complex representation of a single thing, or covering ground entirely undesirable in the first place is it not adding variety.

RandomCasualty2 wrote: Well this is because people just learn tactics from others and the opposition is stupid. In a truly deep tactical/strategic game, your opponents would constantly be tossing counters at you, forcing you to adapt and making it so you can't just rely on some predefined strategy.

I'm not saying that MMORPGs are deep or anything, I'm just saying that if you can get a layperson hooked on the basic game engine then after a few months most people who stick with it are able to master a much larger portion of the gaming engine than they could to begin with.

4E combat can be taught to someone ignorant of the gaming engine (but not RPGs in general) in about an hour. That's good. I don't see anything really bad about the whole '2 At-Wills, 1 Encounter Power, 1 Daily Power' at level 1 thing. It teaches new players resource management and lets them get familiar with their class ability and tactics without overwhelming them.

Unfortunately, once you learn the gaming engine, there's not a lot of system mastery to be had. Which means that powers become repetitive. Classes like the ranger and the cleric don't change much in tactics or powers for the course of advancement. If you look at the ranger feat chart I gave, you'll notice that nearly every power I picked is a statistical manipulation to damage; while the ranger is really powerful in combat bowing only to wizards, the class plays pretty much the same at level 9 as they do at level 30. That is a very bad paradigm to have considering how long you're expected to play 4E D&D.

While we're on the subject, I think it was a big mistake on 4E's part to simplify combat the way they did. I can understand them wanting to make things easier for new players. Unfortunately, they kept the bonus inflation but took out the tactics. If I was designing 4th Edition I'd keep the boring old '3W and slides' powers to low level. Feats like Weapon Focus and Toughness and Two-Weapon Fighting should not exist. Powers would then get steadily more powerful and multifaceted as people gained levels, along with feats. Seriously, Polearm Gamble and Elusive Target should be introductory feats. That way advancement and tactics don't feel so repetitive.

Expanding on tactics, people are more likely to notice and appreciate tactics rather than damage. My friend Sandy loves her 4E Polearm Fighter; she has a great Zone of Control and forces her to coordinate activities with the party for massive damage.

I play a half-orc ranger in accordance with the feat chart I gave above; he uses a +2 reckless bastard sword and a +2 bloodclaw sword. He's kind of a glass cannon but chews through enemies like crazy; he has a very high chance of taking out 'regular' enemies his level in one round without blowing dailies or APs. But I wouldn't exactly say that he's fun to play even though he regularly steals the spotlight. I could pretty much hand someone my character sheet and go grab ice cream and they would play the character in combat pretty much how I would. Lame.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

RandomCasualty2 wrote: Well this is because people just learn tactics from others and the opposition is stupid. In a truly deep tactical/strategic game, your opponents would constantly be tossing counters at you, forcing you to adapt and making it so you can't just rely on some predefined strategy.

I'm not saying that MMORPGs are deep or anything, I'm just saying that if you can get a layperson hooked on the basic game engine then after a few months most people who stick with it are able to master a much larger portion of the gaming engine than they could to begin with.

4E combat can be taught to someone ignorant of the gaming engine (but not RPGs in general) in about an hour. That's good. I don't see anything really bad about the whole '2 At-Wills, 1 Encounter Power, 1 Daily Power' at level 1 thing. It teaches new players resource management and lets them get familiar with their class ability and tactics without overwhelming them.

Unfortunately, once you learn the gaming engine, there's not a lot of system mastery to be had. Which means that powers become repetitive. Classes like the ranger and the cleric don't change much in tactics or powers for the course of advancement. If you look at the ranger feat chart I gave, you'll notice that nearly every power I picked is a statistical manipulation to damage; while the ranger is really powerful in combat bowing only to wizards, the class plays pretty much the same at level 9 as they do at level 30. That is a very bad paradigm to have considering how long you're expected to play 4E D&D.

While we're on the subject, I think it was a big mistake on 4E's part to simplify combat the way they did. I can understand them wanting to make things easier for new players. Unfortunately, they kept the bonus inflation but took out the tactics. If I was designing 4th Edition I'd keep the boring old '3W and slides' powers to low level. Feats like Weapon Focus and Toughness and Two-Weapon Fighting should not exist. Powers would then get steadily more powerful and multifaceted as people gained levels, along with feats. Seriously, Polearm Gamble and Elusive Target should be introductory feats. That way advancement and tactics don't feel so repetitive.

I'll agree that 4e doesn't feel different enough at the higher levels of play, but uh...how did they take out the tactics from 3.5? What tactics?

Back on subject, HOW do you add depth to an rpg?

One thing I've noticed is that, the further away from simulationism you move, the greater potential for depth there is. A simulation of the real world is going to have highly optimal tactics so that decisions aren't all that hard. However, take a look at this:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/4/

THAT has more depth than most rpgs on the market.