RPG mechanics you are done with. And why.

[K]

Ok, we've all played a lot of RPGs, and a lot of them share the same mechanics.

Here are some I'm done with:

Murder XP: I'm done with killing things for XP. I mean, seriously? When all you do is hammer all day, everything starts to look like a nail, so it's no surprise that "hack and slash" is an actual genre.

Choose the wrong stats/race for your class, get a crap character. I'm done with minmaxing my Str because I'm a Fighter. I'd actually like a game where there are grizzled veterans fighters who win battles with brains and tactics or thin and fast fighters who can go toe to toe with Conan.

And do that by being Fighters, and not by choosing some other class and paying out the ass in consumable class features and then pretending they are Fighters when they are poor imitations.

Support characters. I'm sorry, but if you are a support character who's only job is to roll healing dice or cast buffs, we can have an NPC for that.... who works for salary.... and occasionally gets pushed into dungeon hallways to set off traps.

DD characters. Again, I'm sorry, but if your only job to is do damage, then I can have a NPC for that. Maybe a griffin or giant white tiger or something, so I can ride them and not give them a share of the loots and maybe eat them if we run out of food.

Magic Item Shopping Lists. I'm over NEEDING to get certain equipment to play my class as much as I am over playing Logistics and Dragons to GET that equipment.

NPC-only Dark Magic. Trust me, I'm a big boy. I can take it.

The assumption of the win. I don't mind losing as long as I don't get ganked in round 1 of the fight. And someone can Raise me.


OK, so what are your mechanics you are done with?

[Manxome]

Support characters. I'm sorry, but if you are a support character who's only job is to roll healing dice or cast buffs, we can have an NPC for that.... who works for salary.... and occasionally gets pushed into dungeon hallways to set off traps.

DD characters. Again, I'm sorry, but if your only job to is do damage, then I can have a NPC for that. Maybe a griffin or giant white tiger or something, so I can ride them and not give them a share of the loots and maybe eat them if we run out of food.

I honestly don't know what you're trying to get at here. You think that healing, support, and damage are not valid things for a PC to ever do? You think that doing "only" those things (to the exclusion of what, breathing?) is too narrow a scope? You think that character concepts that you don't personally want to play should be banned from the game? You think that every PC in the game other than yours should be replaced with an NPC so that you don't have to share? What?

[TarkisFlux]

[*] Unlimited scaling attributes. Scaling attributes sure, but with caps (alternately, just scale everything). I'm tired of having to boost one stat forever to keep relevant while the rest of them rot in obscurity. I'm also tired of games either assuming these boosts, so the ones I don't boost suck more at their level, or not assuming these boosts, so things start breaking down when the boosts happen. Damned scaling fail.

[*] Racial attribute adjustments. I'm tired of some races being better starts for certain classes than others. I'm actually ok with varrying racial attribute maximums, so some races can have higher max intelligence than others and actually be slightly better wizards at higher levels, it just needs to not be something that you see out the gate anymore.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm done with the idea of the game advertising to me that I'm now entering a new phase of the game where everything is Epic and Different when I'm still effectively doing the same boring bullshit I did at level 2.

I can understand people who don't want to play games where they never get much more badass than a Lord of the Rings character, but for the love of Koresh don't let this desire infect genuine high-level play. If you want to keep playing your LotR character then either salami-slice advancement. Or don't advance at all.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm also very tired of the idea that a stat can scale infinitely and linearly throughout all phases of the game, especially if the game has stark differences in power between low levels and high levels.

This is effectively what broke the skill system for high level 3E. Going from 30 DC to 60 DC is much much harder than going from 0 DC to 30 DC but the difference in effect is linear. The ELH tried to fix this for some skill applications, but damn, what a shitload of motherfucking bullfuck.

[MGuy]

Open Ended Abilities: I find that the less an ability defines itself and exactly what it does the more ways it can be used "creatively" (abused) to get out of any scenario. I will gladly sacrifice the ability to create any illusion you want and take predetermined illusions in its place if only for simplicity's sake (since I'm the one who DMs most of the games).

Rocket Mode: I hate rocket launcher tag. While I don't endorse padded sumo I'd actually be more willing to take that over seeing games boil down to spamming "Instant Death" attacks every round until one side wins.

Unlimited or Poorly Limited Healing: I hate games where healing is so easy to come by between fights that the PCs are basically at full health throughout a dungeon with hardly any concern about being slowed down. Hp is suppose to be a resource and if you basically have all of it every time you enter a fight then it isn't doing its job.

Auto Attack: Despite what 4e ended up being I honestly agree with the idea that "I attack" shouldn't be the only viable option you have from turn to turn. There should be other options to utilize from turn to turn and these options should all be viable and the number of these options should grow every level so that "I attack" eventually becomes a last ditch effort when you've exhausted all your other options.

Prestige Classes: I hate prestige classes. I understand what they do but I believe that instead of having a class built around a very specific shtick that there should just be an option(s) to allow you to do the same without giving up your base class. IMHO all prestige classes usually have one MAYBE 2 abilities that you actually care about that change what you do and really those could be made in the form of a class specific feat.

[K]

Support characters. I'm sorry, but if you are a support character who's only job is to roll healing dice or cast buffs, we can have an NPC for that.... who works for salary.... and occasionally gets pushed into dungeon hallways to set off traps.

DD characters. Again, I'm sorry, but if your only job to is do damage, then I can have a NPC for that. Maybe a griffin or giant white tiger or something, so I can ride them and not give them a share of the loots and maybe eat them if we run out of food.

I honestly don't know what you're trying to get at here. You think that healing, support, and damage are not valid things for a PC to ever do? You think that doing "only" those things (to the exclusion of what, breathing?) is too narrow a scope? You think that character concepts that you don't personally want to play should be banned from the game? You think that every PC in the game other than yours should be replaced with an NPC so that you don't have to share? What?

I'm saying, if we don't need a human to play your character, then we don't need YOU at the table. Human players need to add more than a bot, both for them and for me.

I mean, I don't ever want to play a character that gets killed by a kobold because I didn't have any combat abilities because I was forced to play the heal-bot. I don't want to sit on the sidelines of an encounter because after I say "I cast X, Y, and Z buff" my job is over. I really don't want to be tempted to play Smash Bros. because someone else can just roll my attacks for me.

And I don't want other people to be forced to do that either. I seriously felt like a tool in every DnD game where I forced someone to play a cleric.

[Manxome]

OK...I disagree with your assumption that being a "support character" automatically makes you a bot with no meaningful decisions to make, but we're completely in agreement that all players should have meaningful decisions.

[Blicero]

I suspect what K means by "support character" in this case is someone whose primary function is to either heal people or give them static bonuses/enemies static penalties.

Deciding who to stun, or where to place the stone wall in order to funnel the action toward the tactically superior location would not be considered "support" actions in this case.

[Zinegata]

Choose the wrong stats/race for your class, get a crap character. I'm done with minmaxing my Str because I'm a Fighter. I'd actually like a game where there are grizzled veterans fighters who win battles with brains and tactics or thin and fast fighters who can go toe to toe with Conan.

And do that by being Fighters, and not by choosing some other class and paying out the ass in consumable class features and then pretending they are Fighters when they are poor imitations.

Isn't this the slippery slope down the road of "all characters are generic" from a mechanical standpoint?

Support characters. I'm sorry, but if you are a support character who's only job is to roll healing dice or cast buffs, we can have an NPC for that.... who works for salary.... and occasionally gets pushed into dungeon hallways to set off traps.

DD characters. Again, I'm sorry, but if your only job to is do damage, then I can have a NPC for that. Maybe a griffin or giant white tiger or something, so I can ride them and not give them a share of the loots and maybe eat them if we run out of food.

Have you ever considered some people actually *like* playing Support and DD characters?

[Zinegata]

Double Post. Sorry

[Maj]

I suspect what K means by "support character" in this case is someone whose primary function is to either heal people or give them static bonuses/enemies static penalties.

I've actually had people inform me that I had to play a cleric so I could cast healing spells. They wanted to fight, negotiate, and star in all the encounters while my character made sure they were in good health.

I was more than happy to play a cleric, but not the bandaid kind.



As for RPG mechanics I'm done with: The Bajillion Stacking Bonuses. Not only do I dislike having to remember stacking rules and fishing through a ton of books to find another bonus that will work, but I hate it when math gets in the way of my game.

Even if I'm totally prepared and write up my character sheet in excel and label it neatly, there's always someone who asks me how much number got so high or where the bonus comes from. It's time consuming, takes up too much space on the character sheet, and is a bitch to keep track of.

[Juton]

I hate randomness in CharGen, or anything else that requires a DM's approval. To many times the entire first session has been spent generating characters, half are dead two games in.

[Hicks]

Amen.

[Doom]

Easily Manufactured Magic Items: If it's the tiniest bit inferior to another item in the same slot, nobody wants it and the item shouldn't exist anyway, and designing more than a handful of items to this standard is impossible. If it's a good item, everyone has a copy and now there's nothing magical about it. Give me a reason to bother killing orcs besides getting enough gold to buy that perfect 'magic' item everyone else has, and make it possible to appreciate a flaming +1 sword, even if a better sword exists somewhere.

[TavishArtair]

As for RPG mechanics I'm done with: The Bajillion Stacking Bonuses. Not only do I dislike having to remember stacking rules and fishing through a ton of books to find another bonus that will work, but I hate it when math gets in the way of my game.

Even if I'm totally prepared and write up my character sheet in excel and label it neatly, there's always someone who asks me how much number got so high or where the bonus comes from. It's time consuming, takes up too much space on the character sheet, and is a bitch to keep track of.

I have played one game which was designed in part by a math teacher, who was also tired, I imagine, of engaging in their profession outside of a pay schedule. So their rule in the RPG they wrote up?

Highest bonus, highest penalty, forget the rest. There was one exception in which there was a particular kind of bonus that could have an additional bonus and penalty. But this was only on attack/defense checks in order to add a bit more granularity to combat. As you can see, this brought the system up to a whopping total of four modifiers on a roll.

[Manxome]

I suspect what K means by "support character" in this case is someone whose primary function is to either heal people or give them static bonuses/enemies static penalties.

And I'm saying that healing and buffing can involve tactical choices.

As a general example, Guild Wars doesn't provide the same amount of choice or the same kind of choice that you'd want in a tabletop game, but when I played a Monk and my role was to heal and buff, I had several inter-dependent optimization problems:

• Time limitations. Deciding whether to use a spell that would complete quickly, or something slower that would leave my ally vulnerable longer (but had some other advantage), or whether I should spend some of my valuable time moving around to mitigate damage against myself (can't cast while moving, and if you start moving mid-cast you lose the spell).
• Energy (mana) limitations. I had a free healing ability, but it took a long time to cast. I had faster ones that took energy, and big ones that took even more energy.
• Cooldown limitations. Most of my abilities couldn't be used as often as I would like, so even if ability X is the best one for a given situation, it could still be better to save it.
• Situationally-effective abilities. Sometimes it's more efficient to use a protective spell to prevent damage, sometimes it's more efficient to just heal the damage after the fact. Sometimes healing is potentially more efficient, but carries a risk that the target will die if something goes wrong. Different defensive spells are effective against different types of attacks: Protective Spirit puts a cap on the maximum damage sustained from a single hit, making it good against big nukes; Ward Against Melee stops 50% of enemy melee attacks against allies in an area, but doesn't work against ranged/spell damage and doesn't help an ally who leaves the area; Spell Breaker makes a single ally temporarily immune to magic; Divine Intervention saves an ally and heals them for a ton if they would have died shortly after I cast it.
• Meta-abilities. Air of Enchantment temporarily reduces energy cost of my spells on a single ally; Glyph of Energy can reduce the cost of my big spells if I know a few seconds in advance that I'm going to cast them; etc.
• Mixed-blessing abilities. Divine Boon provides extra healing whenever I cast but reduces my energy regeneration; Armor of Earth greatly reduces damage I receive but slows my movement; etc.
• Prioritization of targets. In Guild Wars, it is not uncommon to lose a person (or several) and revive them after the battle; if this is going to happen, I have to try and see it coming, and make sure that the person we lose is someone that we can (situationally) afford to lose.

So even though I'm not responsible for anything other than damage mitigation (and maybe condition/hex removal), I still need to make complicated trade-offs on the fly, monitor and react to enemy tactics, and be aware of the roles that each of my allies is playing in the battle. And that's without even worrying about all the nasty things enemies can theoretically do to me that would force me to behave differently--interrupts, energy denial, retributive effects (the Backfire hex damages you every time you cast while it lasts), and a host of other hexes.

I didn't follow the PvP metagame closely, but apparently the swing towards always having lots of healers in your party was reversed pretty quickly when people discovered that badly-played healers were honestly not that useful.

The point being, there's no reason for "support" roles to be boring other than failure of design. If your job is to do the same thing over and over until the battle ends, that's dull no matter what the thing is, but there is no general category of interaction that is doomed to that if the designers do their job.

Highest bonus, highest penalty, forget the rest. There was one exception in which there was a particular kind of bonus that could have an additional bonus and penalty. But this was only on attack/defense checks in order to add a bit more granularity to combat. As you can see, this brought the system up to a whopping total of four modifiers on a roll.

Sounds like it makes things easier on experts who memorize approximately how big each effect is, and so only need to check the really big ones; not so helpful for newbies who still need to calculate and list every single bonus and penalty in order to figure out which one is biggest. Non-stacking bonuses also have the risk of stripping tactical layers off of the game as you grow in power; no need to worry about flanking for a +2 bonus if your magical sword gives you a non-stacking +3, for example.

[TavishArtair]

There is literally no way to make a system that involves modifiers be as easy to remember for both newbies who have only glanced at the book and for people who've read the book three times and carefully memorized it. That is the definition of memorization. You forget that once a +3 bonus is present, however, and all the bonuses or penalties in the game have their values listed right beside them, you can just scan for a +4, and ignore everything else. Seeing as how most of the modifiers are pretty situational, and so you're unlikely to have 4, much less more than 4 to a roll, it works out pretty well.

Also, the game in question creates about a dozen tactical layers by introducing a number of resource types, which are only more engaged in resolving things as the the game progresses into higher levels. The "sword issue" as you mentioned actually is the one modifier that is an exception... a weapon's innate bonus is still a bonus and thus does not stack with other bonuses, however, it is the one "named" modifier and thus can be modified itself, generally by character abilities, much in the same way as armor and enhancement bonuses to armor work in D&D. And, likewise, enemies can penalize that value, too, which is the downside of it being a named bonus...

[Username17]

The question of guys who simply auto-attack or healbot, or provide inspiring song or whatever the fuck is an interesting one, but I don't think it rightfully qualifies as multiple different issues. Any time a character's contribution to team hero can be summated by one action, that's bad. If your character is such a cartoon character that he does an action, then really no one needs to be there to play your character. And that's bad.

Classic characters who have had this problem are the Fighter (who is expected to use the "attack action" every round until he or his opponents have fallen), the Heal Bot (who is expected to use heals on allies as they are injured), and the Bard (he sings to provide the bonus that he provides each battle). And yeah, it's bad. But it's basically one issue.

Well, two. You have the issue of the 4e Swordmage who literally uses the same power every round, and then you have the separate and related issue of the 4e Ranger who uses the same progression of powers every combat. In neither case does the player actually need to be in the room, but the former case is a little bit worse.

But in any case, let's go back to walking about mechanics that I am done with.

Dicepools vs. Variable TNs The idea was that by setting the probability of a single die getting success and then varying the number of dice that you could generate any probability. And you know what? It doesn't fucking work. It doesn't work because when you change the TN, you change the value of the die, and when you change the number of dice you change the value of the Target Number, and thus you end up not being able to generate any specific probability because none of the modifiers you produce have consistent or even predictable meanings. Fixed TNs or Fixed Dicepools. For life.

-Username17

[Murtak]

character advancement does not equal character creation

Especially in point-based systems. Who the fuck ever though it was a good idea to hand out abilities at linear costs at character creation but at pyramidical, quadratic or exponential cost during character advancement? How could anyone, ever, anywhere come up with extra rules that take extra effort and obviously, demonstrateably and unavoidably make the game worse?

[Judging__Eagle]

Manxome,

The issue with playing a strict healer in a table top game is that it's boring for the game.

In a computer game, playing "healer" can actually be something that keeps you busy most of each encounter.

In WoW, I've got a druid that has run through all of the different roles in the game. They've been a main tank, melee dps, ranged DPS/AoE DPS, and healer; all at different instances. Right now, I'm playing lazily, and healing/ranged DPS is what I'm focusing on, because they're easy, and lower risk.

In any case, doing more than "just healing" is something that I prefer.

In fact, I prefer that if I didn't have to 'just heal', because it's boring.



Characters I've seen before, and not being allowed to make fun of them

When someone makes a character, and it's a fucking trope. Don't expect me to not make fun of your character.

Heck, don't expect me to not make fun of your game.

Straight-jacketed character types

Class systems tend to have this. I really can't stand this.



Simple characters are simple. They're not clever, or witty. Only complicated characters are remotely interesting. I don't want a game to tell me that a character is anything other than boring, when the rules don't provide a way to do anything that is not boring with a character.

[RobbyPants]

JE, your first one isn't a mechanic.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Dicepools vs. Variable TNs The idea was that by setting the probability of a single die getting success and then varying the number of dice that you could generate any probability. And you know what? It doesn't fucking work. It doesn't work because when you change the TN, you change the value of the die, and when you change the number of dice you change the value of the Target Number, and thus you end up not being able to generate any specific probability because none of the modifiers you produce have consistent or even predictable meanings. Fixed TNs or Fixed Dicepools. For life.

-Username17

I'm not against people messing with DPs & TNs in theory, but I don't think that anyone is a good enough mathematician to handle both without the system getting all kerfluffled and/or to know the exact numerical probability that they want once they do this.

[violence in the media]

Dicepools vs. Variable TNs The idea was that by setting the probability of a single die getting success and then varying the number of dice that you could generate any probability. And you know what? It doesn't fucking work. It doesn't work because when you change the TN, you change the value of the die, and when you change the number of dice you change the value of the Target Number, and thus you end up not being able to generate any specific probability because none of the modifiers you produce have consistent or even predictable meanings. Fixed TNs or Fixed Dicepools. For life.

-Username17

I'm not against people messing with DPs & TNs in theory, but I don't think that anyone is a good enough mathematician to handle both without the system getting all kerfluffled and/or to know the exact numerical probability that they want once they do this.

Along these lines, why do we use dice in this manner at all? Wouldn't we be generally better served just rolling percentages? Why have all this extra obfuscation if this is what it ultimately boils down to?

Rogue: I pick the lock.
DM: Ok, it's tricky so you have a 30% to get it on the first try.
Rogue: I have "practiced locksmith" on my character sheet.
DM: Huh? Ok, 50%.

[RobbyPants]

I guess it's a matter if you want simple, linear changes for things like "practiced locksmith", or if you want variable, hard to predict changes based on previous values.