What's with fluff/gameplay badassery dissonance in TTRPGs?

[Lago PARANOIA]

By fluff/gameplay badassery mismatch, I mean game effects that are fluffed out to sound awesome and epic and earthshattering in the flavor text but in actual gameplay they are conspicuously underwhelming. You know, shit like Yu-Gi-Oh! cards that have a picture of a rift sucking in a planet's population or Final Fantasy spells that show a in-combat cutscene of the planet being nuked.

While 4E D&D is probably the worst offender of this trend when it comes to mainstream TTRPGs, it's still a trend that has been affecting RPGs in general. See: the Dragon Age TTRPG, Exalted 2nd Edition, Pathfinder, and so on. I'm very baffled as to the driving force behind this trend. I do agree that there is a wide audience for TTRPGs that let people do things like fight dragons the size of buildings -- and not in an ironic or contradictory way like Bigode's quote. I also acknowledge that attaining this goal is very difficult because it involves math, which is hard, and designing interesting challenges for Goku is harder than designing interesting challenges for King Arthur.

Even so, I can't imagine that anyone truly likes the middle-way approach of 'just SAY the effect is awesome but not actually implement the awesome'. It's deeply insulting. If 4E D&D straight up admitted that the game was supposed to be a low to early mid-level combat simulator the game would have offended a lot fewer people.

[ishy]

Might it have something to do with people getting influenced by tv shows like DBZ?
Where people get hit by awesome looking attacks that don't do anything all the time?

[Previn]

I can't seen anyone liking it in TTRPGs, but I think they're fine in video games. I'm pretty fine with getting a flashy visual if the effect is disjointed in video games because I don't expect it to match up to 'reality.' I have the complete opposite view point for table top because one of the big reasons I specifically play table top RPGs is that if I'm sucking half the city into a rift, I expect half the city to be gone.

As a side note I'm really tired of continual graphic improvements, but basically completely static environments in video games. "You hit the crate with an anti-tank rocket... it's fine!"

[RadiantPhoenix]

Only if it's intended as comedy.

As a side note I'm really tired of continual graphic improvements, but basically completely static environments in video games. "You hit the crate with an anti-tank rocket... it's fine!"

And that is why I'm so enamored with Dwarf Fortress.

[Ravengm]

I think it's mostly a matter of people thinking "Well, we don't actually want this spell to depopulate the planet, but it sounds so awesome that way. Keep the fluff, make it do 1d6/level to a single target."

And then they break for an early lunch.

[Whipstitch]

Heh, yeah, if anything dorf fort builds have historically gone the other way--boulders, vomit, and fluffy wamblers have all been hurled with vicious results.

[Libertad]

This isn't unique to Tabletop RPGs. In video games, you can play a real badass in the actual game, but then he suddenly becomes weak and powerless in a cutscene. And vice versa, when all the cool stuff the hero does is stuff you cannot do in-game.

Same for literature. You can have a master manipulator villain do a bunch of smart shit "off-screen," like coming to power by seizing on people's fears of an invasion. But the author doesn't know much about social manipulation, so the villain's dialogue comes off as obviously stupid.

It's much easier to give the appearance of being bad-ass than actually being badass.

It's a universal flaw.

Also, writing a compelling story's different than math and probability testing. Your RPG plot can be excellently written, but the game mechanics may not reflect the story: like how in Final Fantasy 6, Relm's a better magic-user than Terra despite the latter being half-Esper.

BTW, Final Fantasy 6 is overall a great game. I was just using that as a quick example.

[Mask_De_H]

Because it is very hard to conceptualize the consequences of actually earth-shattering abilities for players and designers. It's also due to the fact the story is more important than the mechanics to a lot of people. What you consider deeply disappointing about 4e is why, say, Goons will defend the system to the death.

Actually crazy go nuts abilities confuse and anger people. See: D&D casters in 3.X, Creation Slaying Oblivion Kick, fun with Matter and Forces in Mage. Oddly enough, doing this in structured CRPGs is looked upon rather favorably.

[shadzar]

Might it have something to do with people getting influenced by tv shows like DBZ?
Where people get hit by awesome looking attacks that don't do anything all the time?

pretty much this.

people think they was a fighter to cut a mountain in half, but then what mortal could really survive a single hit, and how often could people really dodge such a hit?

i dont recall many thins prior to WotC that were fluffed wrongly in terms of not being WYSIWYG. obviously WISH couldnt do everything cause that would be game breaking.

[ModelCitizen]

Most internet forums give people a distorted view of what gamers actually want. The people who are most vocal about their views on RPGs tend to be DMs, which is why so many RPG discussions are dominated by people who want as much dissociation and MTP as possible without cluing the players in. Games with complex character-building minigames like 3e, Shadowrun, and Exalted also get people focused on the player experience, but they're mostly charoppers who write off basically everything but combat. If you write your game for the internet, you can make both of these camps happy by including a very complex combat minigame with well-defined results, and a bunch of deception and DM-cocksucking everywhere else. Sounds like 4e or Exalted to me.

[K]

The problem is that writing a system with abilities that do things is tough.

A lot of of beloved games work fine with abilities that are a single stat. You have Swording at 2 and that means that you are a better swordsman than everyone with a 1, and this means that you don't have to design an elaborate system of parries and ripostes and lunges that is mechanically fun to play with and not distracting from the narrative of the cooperative storytelling experience.

This is why 4e was not going to answer the question, "does X energy type work on doors?" Making a system where your powers are not simple math exercises is hard where coming up with a dice-rolling mini-game is not.

Take the 3e spell magic jar. It's horribly complicated spell that's overwritten, and it still doesn't answer all the questions that someone might have for edge cases. Even straightforward spells like fireball need elaborate rules for objects and for setting fire to things to even use them as fucking fire, something which people are intimately familiar with in real life.

Start interacting real abilities and suddenly design gets dramatically hard. For example, Shadowrun has a spell that edits memory.... can you imagine how dramatically this power could alter every narrative ever if the PCs actually used it? You really can walk into a bank, find the manager, and then edit his memory where he thinks he got a call from the CEO and a confirmed electronic transfer order telling him to hand over all the branch's available credit onto anonymous credsticks. Who needs do do shadowruns when you can do that?

Abilities that do things are like that. You really can use illusions to do anything. Mind control is even better. Even setting fire to stuff at a distance is a DM-handwave away from being game-breaking power in the hands of the right person.

So yes, fluffing things up and powering them down into uselessness is the default because writing a system where things are as powerful as they seem is just too damned hard for even professional game designers.

[Koumei]

I would have thought it'd be a more recent thing (with 4E or Exalted taking the crown), relating to balance: bigger and more spectacular effects (and more complex ones) are harder to balance, and having balanced games is more of a modern idea in roleplaying. AD&D told fighters to fuck off and get used to wizard cock, Rifts has a big thing saying "Not all men are born equal - but if someone else plays a dragon and you play a hobo, yes he is better than you at everything, but you can have your fun too."

Modern games can't really get away with that shit - at least not so blatantly. I mean, Sean got hammered even by Paizo supporters for his "Yeah the VoP Monk is supposed to suck, dealwidit.jpg" comment - that's from people who liked him, liked Pathfinder and want to see it succeed, never mind the grumpy old cynics like us.

So they really do have to make some pretense at being balanced, no matter how hard they fail, and your first stumbling block is "I can blow up the world." "I can hit one dude EXTRA HARD". Solution if you're a lazy hack? Make "Worldsploder: you wave your arm and the entire planet detonates" do 3d8+Int damage to all creatures in a 500' radius blast within line of sight so that "EXTRA HARD STAB: you hit one dude EXTRA HARD" can do 6d10+Str+Magic Weapon Bonus to one guy (special: your target has to say "Ow" as a Free Action) and have that be balanced.

Which is all a great explanation, except that the problem still exists even in older games where balance wasn't the excuse.

[Foxwarrior]

I'm suddenly tempted to try a game of Shadowrun for some reason.

[tussock]

I think it's because they studied creative writing for ten years and did not study how actuarial tables work at all. They know how to make something read like it's cool and fun and awesome, but have no fucking idea how to make something actually play out like that by throwing "dice plus" at it.

Exactly the opposite of Gygax, who made his Arch-Mages have all the dread power of the stories he was modelling and more, but the spells all read much the same.


4e, for instance, has fluff that scales like your high level Daily powers are going to be completely kick-ass, and your at-wills fluff as being fairly mundane. But half the original classes can just fire off at-wills and not care because they didn't get the math right.

[Korwin]

For an more recent game, with badass abilities...
Anima
But that game has some other problems...

[shadzar]

I think it's because they studied creative writing for ten years and did not study how actuarial tables work at all. They know how to make something read like it's cool and fun and awesome, but have no fucking idea how to make something actually play out like that by throwing "dice plus" at it.

so wannabe novel writers that couldnt write a novel, just throw ideas at D&D that dont match the mechanics at all. sounds like Tau for 40k.

Tau: hey we make big guns that can pierced anything from far away and take anything down.
Ultrasmurfs: how strong is your armor?
Tau: oh we dont have to worry about that with our range, so we never tested it.
'Nids: hissksihsi ishisk isk (Eat them ALL!)

[shadzar]

(duplicate post. this one can be deleted)

[Dogbert]

Let's also not forget that there are few things basket weavers and apologists love more than being lied to until their brains are trained to genuinely associate bottom feeder with badass. It's like that sexist joke of "Q: Why do women suck at parking cars? A: Because men have trained them to believe that three inches are a foot."

Take Firefly for example. A space western about a crew of losers and how everyone and their brother is out to rip them off because they'll never inspire something remotely resembling respect... and yet how many in the audience think for some reason they're "badass."

[InsaneWaffle]

Fluff can be awesome, but there is nothing worse then fluff that doesnt match the mechanics of a game. It just makes people envision awesomeness for the pc for the wrong reasons. Its like backstories ten pages long with nothing besides mental masturbation for a lvl 1 character.

One of the things i like about old rolemaster was that you didnt get pages up and down about fluff bullshit concerning classes. You got a brief description of the class,spell lists if any and the cost of skills. Done.
That does not make it a good game. But atleast you dont have to explain to people that even if it says so in the fluff, you cant fucking do it.

And the games with how to play a x class, and x classes in the game, and x exsamples of nothing related to mechanics at all? Fuck that shit. All it gives me are headaches.

[Ancient History]

I've been meaning to talk about this, but there's one other important difference that should be remembered: when RPG designers want to make a totally badass character, they cheat. They're so close to the system that it becomes hard for them to see the exploits that make certain builds overpowered, so instead they declare certain characters exceptions over the designed or arbitrary limits of the system. So, characters like Teachedaire (Prime Runners, Shadowrun) and Elminster (Forgotten Realms/D&D) get arbitrary rule-breaking nonsense that in the game designer's heads just puts them above and beyond what the PCs can (or should) ever really accomplish, because the PCs play by the rules.

Which of course is bullshit and falls apart when the players do not play by the rules, at least not as the game designers seem to think they should. So for example, no Shadowrun NPC is a pornomancer out of the box. That's not shit that was ever sat down and contemplated. Uber-quick special magical elf assassins have their knee caps shot out from half a mile away, if they aren't stunballed to death by a spirit first. Sometimes this is a failure of the system, but more often it's about the devs failing to take into account that players like a challenge and any character can die if it has stats and you put the time and effort into it, killing tarrasques and Cthulhu is an intellectual endeavor for many players.

The worst part (from a design perspective), of course, is when Informed Badass is rendered useless by sourcebook creep. Option X did not exist before Sourcebook X, so uber-NPC W is SOL because Option X allows the PCs to be better than them at Y. In Shadowrun this usually had to do with the steady creep on initiative boosters vs. the two-shot kill - if you went first in the round, you were likely to have first blood, and first blood is all you need.

[shadzar]

Take Firefly for example. A space western about a crew of losers and how everyone and their brother is out to rip them off because they'll never inspire something remotely resembling respect... and yet how many in the audience think for some reason they're "badass."

people see Mal et all as "badass" because they are the little-guy overcoming adversity. though River really was badass.

I've been meaning to talk about this, but there's one other important difference that should be remembered: when RPG designers want to make a totally badass character, they cheat. They're so close to the system that it becomes hard for them to see the exploits that make certain builds overpowered, so instead they declare certain characters exceptions over the designed or arbitrary limits of the system. So, characters like Elminster (Forgotten Realms/D&D) get arbitrary rule-breaking nonsense that in the game designer's heads just puts them above and beyond what the PCs can (or should) ever really accomplish, because the PCs play by the rules.

this is a case of authoritative license. Elminster WAS a PC, that became an NPC. the fallacy is thinking NPCs must be designed with the same rules, when the truth is a DM tool =/= to a player tool.

isnt it true that PrCs were a DMs tool, but every player wanted access to them? they were intended to make special NPCs without having to go through the char-gen process to make the DMs job a bit easier.

like wise the Necromancer was a DM tool pre-WotC, and not to be confused with a wizard specializing in necromancy. to my recollection (havent found a way to install that book into CR2) the Necromancer was NEVER an adventurer, but one who sought to begin with to have power over the dead and such, while a specialiast wizard PC was always intended to be an adventurer. thus the different rules serve different purposes. the Necromancer book would ahve created a vastly overpowered PC because the fact that it wasnt meant for adventuring purposes. it wasnt meant to work on the same level against PC challenges, etc. so like Elminster became as well as other NPCs in games, they are built with rules for making BBEGs, even though Elminster wasnt a BBEG. so it really isnt cheating, its the fact that the DM and players play the game from different angles, and thus have different rules with which to play. this has been true in EVERY edition of D&D.

that doesnt mean the DM cannot create things solely based on PC char-gen, but then there would only be those core classes and races for the DM to use against the PCs as challenges. doing that you lose the goblin that speaks 30 languages as a special NPC, and other such oddities that could help the story or the game world itself have its feel.

the question to ask would be is there anything saying a goblin cannot know 30 languages in the mechanics that the fluff violates?

[Ancient History]

This is a case of shadzar being a [EDITED]. As usual. One of the silliest, most ridiculous, and annoying thing that lazy/crappy game designers do is restrict some character option solely to NPCs - whether it be some magic artifact that breaks the rules for one adventure in Dungeon magazine or a discipline in Vampire that trumps all the others and which only the NPCs can take. If your system cannot handle the player characters being smart enough or evil enough to use the villains'/antagonists' stuff against them, you've failed.

[shadzar]

This is a case of shadzar being a [EDITED]. As usual. One of the silliest, most ridiculous, and annoying thing that lazy/crappy game designers do is restrict some character option solely to NPCs - whether it be some magic artifact that breaks the rules for one adventure in Dungeon magazine or a discipline in Vampire that trumps all the others and which only the NPCs can take. If your system cannot handle the player characters being smart enough or evil enough to use the villains'/antagonists' stuff against them, you've failed.

no it is YOUR failing to understand the relationship of DM:player, and how they have different functions as opposed to a game like Monopoly where ALL the players have the same function and role in the game. yes some people "play" the banker, but it really isnt a role in Monopoly or anything for the banker to do as the game defines the actions of the banker through the game rules written in various places during play. the "banker" doesnt really exist, and is just someone saving time of the other players as they compete with each other.

an RPG n the other hand has different functions for the different players, and thus different rule to operate as that player, for example:
*players play PCs that go on adventures in the game world
**exception: the DM is a special player that creates the world the other players have PCs in, and thusly does NOT get a PC with which to play.

there is specifically 2 different types of players in an RPG and this relationship of them means they MUST function differently, as their roles dictate.

you CAN play with the DM having the same or close to the same rules of the other players, but ONLY when the DM is using the PHB for ALL opponents the PCs will face. the problem then lies with the DM knows the PCs the players have and can build opponents specifically to beat them with little to no chance of success, aka optimized opponents. and it would get very boring with such a short list, unless you are playing a human only world, with none of the other races in it. this CAN be fun, but will NOT make a full fledged world acceptable leading RPG.

humans vs dragons, already breaks the rules and the DM "cheats", unless players can play dragons, because a dragon can ALWAYS fly while a human cannot. fish cant exist even as a food source, because fish have an unfair advantage over players because they can, and most times MUST, be underwater all the time, while humans cannot.

what you want is either a competitive game like Monopoly, or Warhammer (any other miniature game), where everyone follows the same rules all the time, and that is NOT the nature of D&D, but what D&D was created to get away from. the stagnation of wargames is what led TTRPGs to kill the wargaming market, and thusly the complication and misunderstanding of TTRPGs is what led CCGs to kill the RPG market.

wargames are to CCGs in terms of this "balance" as RPGs are to novels/movies. everyone in the wargame or CCG has equal chances (giving equal money to purchase the pieces they wish to employ), while the movie viewer/(TT)RPG player is confined to the author's (DM's) world/universe.

only when one understands the nature of the RPG can they understand why it has this balance/fluff/badassery relationship.

[Foxwarrior]

I think there are at least five different ways that different people have come up with to let players play dragons. PC/NPC asymmetry annoys me, at least, in both directions.

Dogbert: They may never inspire respect (from other characters), but when they're ripped off by some powerful force or another, they survive it admirably. It's a sort of fluff/badassery dissonance, where the characters see the fluff "a bunch of poor space hoboes" and then get perpetually surprised by "who are each extremely competent at a small range of skills".

[shadzar]

I think there are at least five different ways that different people have come up with to let players play dragons. PC/NPC asymmetry annoys me, at least, in both directions.

1) name ANY story where the protagonists and antagonists dont have asymmetry.

2) name the RPG system that can properly handle this story WHEN the PCs leave the given story path and do something different than is scripted in the story.