The Gaming Den

In the great tradition of bitching about rules we don't like...

Skin of the Construct is about the worst feat in D&D, I think. Not the worst balanced, most pointless, worst for the game or any of that, just simply the worst because it does next do nothing you would expect it to. It lets you meld with the form of an astral construct, which you would expect to grant you the Menu abilities of the construct you can manifest, increase your size to that, give you armour.... any of that.

No, it turns Astral Construct into a shitty False Life with a single Menu A ability, which is usually equivalent to about a feat.

Fuck Complete Psion.

Level adjustment. Wanna be a cool monster? Wanna pay double levels for static abilities?

You can't do that because you're a dirty powergamer.

On a completely unrelated note, the formian queen. Note that it has a Reflex save of blank. Not like undead where they have fort saves, it's blank. This is because she can't move.

However, the formian queen casts as a 17th-level sorcerer.

So what the hell happens when she casts fly? Her Dex is -, which I think translates to a +0 on saves. Still, it's just a weird thing to see.

Prak_Anima wrote:In the great tradition of bitching about rules we don't like...

Skin of the Construct is about the worst feat in D&D, I think. Not the worst balanced, most pointless, worst for the game or any of that, just simply the worst because it does next do nothing you would expect it to. It lets you meld with the form of an astral construct, which you would expect to grant you the Menu abilities of the construct you can manifest, increase your size to that, give you armour.... any of that.

No, it turns Astral Construct into a shitty False Life with a single Menu A ability, which is usually equivalent to about a feat.

Fuck Complete Psion.

Possibly relevant.

Prak_Anima wrote:Fuck Complete Psion.

Fuck psionics as a whole not only because it sucks, but because there are still people arguing how it's more balanced than core D&D (whatever that means) or spellcasting.

Brilliant Energy Weapons.

What they should do: Have a bow like Hawk's and let you make attacks against Touch AC, which is listed for every critter in every Monster Manual.

What they actually do, ( as per the SRD ) is recalculate a new sub-AC value for every target you fire at and have to enchant each arrow. Oh and by the way, no damaging Vampires with your Bow of Sunlight.

I'm going to go a bit more abstract: Roll and Keep systems. It seems like there should be a game there. I like rolling piles of dice, I like solving puzzles, so you'd think I'd like a roll and keep system. But whether you're rolling piles of d6s, d10s, or playing cards, every system I've ever seen has been straight ass.

The big issue of course is that the math for figuring out probability is extremely non-trivial. People who make Cthulhutech or One Roll Engine or L5R or Deadlands or any of that shit seriously have no fucking clue what the chances of success or failure are on any particular roll. That ends up with modifiers that are more asspullish even than what is sadly the standard for RPG designs.

But the secondary issue is that fucking around with figuring out which dice you're going to pick just takes a fuck load of time. Especially when you're looking for pairs and straights and fuck knows what all else, but even just when you're arranging the dice from biggest to smallest and having to deal with a cutoff before going to the next step of action resolution. That kind of thing is OK for a single player game like Puzzlequest, or a game like Poker where it's literally the whole entirety of everything. But in an RPG where there are going to be a lot of actions and there's a narrative that people are trying to follow and all that shit, it's just not acceptable to have a random number generator be that intrusive.

I want to like Roll and Keep. It has a lot of aspects which appeal to me. But fundamentally every system that uses it is a platter overflowing with monkey shit and I don't think anyone can do that much better.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: The big issue of course is that the math for figuring out probability is extremely non-trivial. People who make Cthulhutech or One Roll Engine or L5R or Deadlands or any of that shit seriously have no fucking clue what the chances of success or failure are on any particular roll. That ends up with modifiers that are more asspullish even than what is sadly the standard for RPG designs.

[...]

, it's just not acceptable to have a random number generator be that intrusive.

I guessing, by the way that you addressed this, that there simply is no way to overcome that second part. And I can't say that I necessarily disagree with you.
The question I have is:
Let's say, hypothetically, that someone was indeed able to get all the math "right", so that the end user could actually trust the system and just go with it. One theory could be that if the math involved is sufficiently convoluted, the end user won't even pretend to bother; and not thinking about the math removes one more element of distraction from immersion. I.e., not wasting grey matter on the math behind the game can be further dedicated to just enjoying the play of the game.
Is that even a thing? If so, is it a valid theory, even in principle?

Yeah, that totally works with several of my buddies . . tell them the rules and you get blank looks, then trying to udnerstand, the failing, then haggling about ways it could be read, then still failing to know what to roll with what dice . . simple telling them roll xdy and you need to roll z to achieve your goal and it's over in seconds.
Now with people such as Frank and other Denizens . . nope, that so won't fly.

Any mechanic that has one player or only a single type of character play in a minigame that takes up a bunch of time and that no one else can compete in. Additionally any mechanic that actively discourages some number of people in the group from participating by punishing people who haven't maxed out the relevant stat resulting in a group loss whenever they fail.

Character creation systems that can give you two freshly created characters where one is strictly better than the other. Relatedly, systems where one type of currency is spent at creation and a different, inconsistently-converted currency is spent on advancement, such that, after two sessions, one character can be strictly better than another.

Prak_Anima wrote:In the great tradition of bitching about rules we don't like...

Skin of the Construct is about the worst feat in D&D, I think.[..]

Fuck Complete Psion.

That seems like an odd thing to choose; it's just one of a zillion sub-par feats in the D&D world. It's not even the most outrageous waste of space in Complete Psionic.

--

My choice: giving the Thief class a class-specific Find/Remove Traps skill in D&D. It was a terrible idea in 1975, and it's a terrible idea 40 years later in Pathfinder.

If thieves never fell into the role of "obligatory trap specialist" in the first place, then maybe they would have been de-shittified years ago. Instead, you end up with this excruciatingly stupid circular logic: You need someone to play a shitty thief in order to disarm traps, and you need to put traps into your adventures to give shitty thieves something to disarm. Nerts to that!

hogarth wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote:In the great tradition of bitching about rules we don't like...

Skin of the Construct is about the worst feat in D&D, I think.[..]

Fuck Complete Psion.

That seems like an odd thing to choose; it's just one of a zillion sub-par feats in the D&D world. It's not even the most outrageous waste of space in Complete Psionic.

Sorry, that should have been more explicitly personal opinion. It's like Frank with Roll and Keep. I want to like Skin of the Construct. I like the concept behind it, because I really like psionics, astral constructs, ectoplasmic mechs, and all that, but the feat is just complete shit.

The power Gnorman posted is a lot better, if sadly, a 3rd level power.

I'm actually just done with dice-based mechanics.

Even when attempts to do basic things doesn't turn into Absurdist Failure Theater because the designer decided that 50% success rates were "cinematic," rolling dice usually involves various dice-modifying mechanics that are always going to feel like dice-modifying mechanics, always is going to deliver stupid results some of the time, and is always going to cost a lot more time at the table than people realize.

As far as I can tell, dice mechanics are just a way to conceal a lack of coherent design and DMing skill.

K wrote:I'm actually just done with dice-based mechanics.

Even when attempts to do basic things doesn't turn into Absurdist Failure Theater because the designer decided that 50% success rates were "cinematic," rolling dice generally becomes the starting point for various dice-modifying mechanics that are always going to feel like dice-modifying mechanics, are always going to deliver stupid results some of the time, and are always going to cost a lot more time at the table than people realize.

As far as I can tell, dice mechanics are just a way to conceal a lack of coherent design and DMing skill.

What do you see as a better resolution for TTRPGs then? Should the game assume you succeed at what you try at, and the challenge comes entirely from picking the right tool for the job/proper resource management? Or something else?

Deciding to ditch dice-based mechanics is a big thing to do, but it's not unheard of. I'm not even talking about "replace it with cards" (another RNG). Examples:

1. Boobie KnightsRelic Knights is a tabletop wargame that uses resource expenditures. Now admittedly, you generate the resources largely through drawing cards (and some of these are drawn after you declare your action), though special characters can just generate their own specific red tokens or whatever each turn.

2. When we were talking about putting Pokeyman Tactical Battles together, it looked like the direction it was going was "this attack has an AoE that looks like a Rorschach test on a chess board" without attack rolls and stuff: you hit anything that is in the actual affected area. Damage was going to still be rolled, admittedly.

3. In a whole bunch of games, non-combat stuff (such as skills) is reduced to "Do you have the skill? Grand, you can just do that. No? Well fuck off." Non-Weapon Proficiencies of 2Ed D&D sometimes did that (and sometimes had a percentile or roll under your ability score on d20 or consult the entrails of a sheep), and basically any game that was "some dude's houserules for 2Ed D&D" followed suit.

K wrote:As far as I can tell, dice mechanics are just a way to conceal a lack of coherent design and DMing skill.

You can do the physics to determine whether a particular fall from 100m is fatal to a particular human or not, and if not, how badly injured they are in game-time?

I can't, and I'm pretty sure that neither can most people I know.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:

K wrote:As far as I can tell, dice mechanics are just a way to conceal a lack of coherent design and DMing skill.

You can do the physics to determine whether a particular fall from 100m is fatal to a particular human or not, and if not, how badly injured they are in game-time?

I can't, and I'm pretty sure that neither can most people I know.

Who gives a fuck?

Seriously. It's a game, and real-world physics went right out the window the instant we decided to not use super-computers to simulate anything at all. Then physics got huffy and took it's ball and went home after it heard we were using protagonist logic and magic spells.

The instant I decided to make a game and not a state-of-the-art medical simulator for super-computers, I was freed up to make anything that fit a game. I could use a simple "PC's would survive that and get hurt, but NPCs die" rule. I could use HPs and levels where higher-level humans get less damaged or killed. I could use some kind of resource allocation where people with that resource can burn it to live (Karma, Luck, God's Special Little Angel Points, Narrative Penis Points, etc).

That's game design. Game design is NOT ass-pulling a probability and then figuring out a dice-roll to simulate that. Sure, the history of tabletop RPGs design to date has been all about dice, but other kinds of RPG games like video games left that nonsense behind decades ago.

K wrote:but other kinds of RPG games like video games left that nonsense behind decades ago.

I was with you until this point. Video game RPGs almost exclusively use an RNG, they just obfuscate it and hide it behind stuff and can apply more modifiers than you can list, all before the animation finishes playing out (in some hilarious cases literally, where you make one attack action and then "Dead, Great Cleave, Dead, Great Cleave, Dead" appears on the screen, and then the enemies fall over and die about the same time as one sword-swing finishes animating).

Hell, even skill-based* games (FPS for instance) tend to use the RNG for exact damage numbers. You sort of used the worst possible example by citing video games.

*Or twitch-reflex based games if you want to call it that.

Role protection. It's one of those mechanics that means a MCing style can easily break the game. The point about traps above is really just one part.

Unarmed combat tends to be a fustercluck in every system. Something about it seems to make designers forget all about abstraction.

Fluff that encourages players not to work together, bonus points if it's mechanically enforced.

Koumei wrote:
... Hell, even skill-based* games (FPS for instance) tend to use the RNG for exact damage numbers. You sort of used the worst possible example by citing video games...

I'm thinking of games like Banner Saga and not the DnD-clones that the industry has been pumping out. "Tend to use" and "absolutely need to use" are incredibly far from each other because we have games like Banner Saga.

Sure, lots of RPGs clone DnD in at least a few of the core assumptions. Some are even like Final Fantasy where the math being done is incredibly complex and the random-number generator is producing very subtle effects, but that doesn't actually do anything necessary.

Heck, in lots of games, the randomness is just adding a little variety to the numbers that come up. The wild swings in numbers that we get from tabletop games are almost entirely absent from video games these days, and you could use static numbers without ever noticing a difference in DPS.

Even actual DnD-branded video games have a spotty history of using rolls. Very often you get the best dialogue option because you have a high CHA or something and not because of a roll.

the "Jump" function in RPG's measuring things so that super awesome heroes can't eventua''y "Jump good".

Races forcing PC's into stereotypes via core numbers, opposed to just using flavorful abilities

General failure to prevent "focus fire", and/or otherwise boss fights being anti-climatic in RPG's (be it limited HP,actions, stunlocks, etc).

K wrote:Very often you get the best dialogue option because you have a high CHA or something and not because of a roll.

Yeah, Fallout 3 had things on an RNG for speech challenges, and it just encourage people to Save Scum, until they got their desired result. A static value does work, though I can see value in allowing "degrees of success" with set numbers, so even if you're a little short, you can pay some low cost to make up the difference in some way.

K wrote:I'm thinking of games like Banner Saga and not the DnD-clones that the industry has been pumping out. "Tend to use" and "absolutely need to use" are incredibly far from each other because we have games like Banner Saga.

I like how one game from last year is your example, following up your wild claim that 'video games left that nonsense behind decades ago.' They didn't leave it behind, they still fucking use RNGs, they still overwhelmingly use RNGs. Even the Banner Saga uses an RNG to handle certain marginal cases in its engine. The games that don't use RNGs are mostly using real-time player input, like manual aiming, in a way that's incredibly unhelpful for designing a PnP game.

If video games left dice behind decades ago, so did PnP RPGs.

Agree with K here. I would like to see more games leaving dice rolls and probabilities behind.

Banner Saga uses RNGs to create encounters. The damage you inflict when you declare an attack against strength or armor is deterministic, but everything up to that point is like that because of die rolls.

Frankly, I don't think it's really practical to create a table top deterministic game. It works in computer games because you can look up all the stats and run your comparisons yourself. But in a table top game, having to constantly ask a real person "What's that orc's armor rating? What about that one?" would slow the game to a fucking crawl. Letting the petty variations pop out organically from die rolls is simply faster.

The other option of course, is just leaving the crucial information secret and having things be deterministic anyway. But that's just a recipe for dickishness. No one feels good when they lose the game "Guess what number I'm thinking of."

-Username17

Stahlseele wrote: Yeah, that totally works with several of my buddies
[...]
Now with people such as Frank and other Denizens . . nope, that so won't fly.

Okay. But is that a function of just some OCD need; or are there actual principles involved?