TNE: Setting: Suggestions

[Bigode]

In that case, why are we worrying about the cultural background yet? We need to go back to the very bottom level. What genre are we trying to simulate? Clearly some sort of fantasy, but do we want sword and sorcery, high fantasy, epic fantasy, or D&D crazytown?

I think that was discussed a long time ago, and reached better levels of consensus than the racial/cultural issues.

[Crissa]

Frank doesn't seem to want to make toolkits for TNE to be anything but a one-story game, which makes me sad.

We spent an hour in IMs arguing about it.

I think we left off where I don't even understand how he can say it's possible to make an adventure or dungeon in the same game because of possible nebulous formulae you may have to insert.

I don't think TNE should simulate the wild west of sci-fi, but I don't care what the gods are called or what classes we use because people will seirously just add their own. Frank asserts that will break the game.

At that point, what are we doing?

-Crissa

[Bigode]

A log of that, should either of you have one, might be useful - failing that, I think at least hilarity's guaranteed.

[Crissa]

Do you really want to see Frank do 'Is not - Is too' with me? O-o

Your stubborness is actually amusing.

[later]

Now you're talking such bullshit crazy talk that I am going to go to sleep rather than just get pissed off at you.

[Bigode]

I thought I pre-empted that question. Even if there's no usefulness within, I already saw some hilarity (not trying to put it as your fault).

[CatharzGodfoot]

Perhaps what we really need are two 'NEs': one done "right" and one done Star Trek.

Because we have so few people, splitting our efforts might be a bad idea. However, at this point I think we've wasted more effort arguing theological differences than it would have required to simply pursue both paths.

Here's to hoping that someone steps up like Frank has, and puts forth a serious attempt at the second, 'dirty' option.

[Crissa]

The thing is, Frank can rattle these off the top of his head.

But I think we should work on making something so nearly anyone can rattle them off their head.

He doesn't think that's possible.

So... That's my suggestion.

Aside from that, we need a list of what we want it to do, and then a list of edge cases we want it to stop at. Very similar to the balance list of what things should be dealt with in a resolution system.

-Crissa

[Judging__Eagle]

Ok.


What sorts of things are there in a game setting?

Let's stick with.... power groups? or power centres?

Power Groups would be things like religions, non-aging armies that replenish on their own, powerful individuals, economic trade leagues, the Huns.

Power Centres would be things like Cities (people in a place), Sites of Power (power in a place), the wilderness (a vacum of people or power sites), Ruins/Dungeons (either broken places of power that can be started up or contains random stuff to power up or affect an existing Power Centre).

Is that what you mean Crissa? Or something else?

Like:

"What is the adamantine ceiling for power of a PC/NPC?"
"Can PCs have minions or not?"
"Power Scale = How much, how fast?"

[Crissa]

What stories do you want to tell with this?

What do you want magic devices to do?

We already brought out a framework for how cities work.

So, yeah, your second thing.

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

From the toolkit perspective there is frankly far too much effort going into specific campaign design.

Franks biggest wank is his obsession with socio political economic simulation rather than actual game play goals.

With his little obsession left to run rampant of course it makes sense to design a Fire Wizard as some very specific balance within a complex 7 colour wanker magic philosophy no one cares about with a silly made up specific gibberish name no one cares about with special accounting for internal consistency and original artiste's envisaged role protection up the ying yang.

Personally I'd just say "Spell caster that burns junk is a Tool Kit goal." Provide a guy who burns things with magic and move on with my damn life.

I mean how hard is it to make up some game rules for burning stuff with magic that AREN'T part of a specific complex multi colour semi original specific magical mythology. Really his power is "set things on fire" it doesn't NEED a complex network of interacting cryptotheology it just needs to burn shit up.

[CatharzGodfoot]

The balance of a fire mage can be significantly impacted by the systems that you want to ignore. For example, in D&D a guy who goes around setting stuff on fire isn't viable without explicitly breaking the rules. In a system that doesn't do "elements" and resistances like D&D, that might not be the case.

It might be possible to include a 'damage types toolkit', but when you start getting into "Does my fire resistance apply to heat damage?" and "Why does her laser do [light] damage while mine does [heat]?" like d20, you've got a serious problem.

[Crissa]

Frank doesn't think toolkits are plausible.

So in order to focus on the game, we need to choose things like 'can the fighter use wands?' or 'what should happen when the wizard blasts things'. Etc.

What sort of stories do you want to tell with this, you need to know whether these things can exist in the same game.

Frank also said he doesn't think Shootout at the OK Corral and Trigun could be done in the same system. That was the longest part where I was convinced that we weren't going anywhere with a toolkit suggestion.

-Crissa

[virgil]

Judging by how I remember Trigun went, I can see that argument working in Frank's side. I also consider Vampire and Werewolf to be different systems that happen to use very similar resolution mechanics, since the genre/mood of both differ enough within the mechanics to cause forced blendings to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

[Elennsar]

This isn't a setting specific suggestion, but...

Something where there are monsters that humans (and human equivalants) cannot stand toe to toe against and expect to come out winning.

They may win with something like the Special Arrow of Bard sent into the dragon's weak spot, overwhelming numbers, becoming more than human through some special process that is beyond the usual ways people power up, or some other "unusual" circumstance, but if we have levels from 1-20, then things that can reach over that that aren't on the playable-on-the-same-tier that exist in the setting.

Orcus as no more challenging to a party at the right level than Bob the Stone Giant at the right level feels very wrong.

Orcus is specialer than that.

Pick something other than Orcus if you have a different stopping point than 20.

[PhoneLobster]

The balance of a fire mage can be significantly impacted by the systems that you want to ignore.

I think you may be misunderstanding me here.

I've had it up to my neck with this whole "One true setting" bullshit where things like a fire wizard get design motivations like "conforms to weird ass specific setting mythology".

The design motivation you complain about me ignoring is the one I want focus to be shifted to. The interaction of damage types and mechanics of desirable toolkit options like Fire Wizard and dude with laser (well, your examples, maybe not the best).

I mean WTF? I said hey we should focus on cool tools people want like dudes who burn shit with magic and you complain that some existing set of rules doesn't let you burn shit and didn't focus enough attention on that resulting in confusing kinda-burning-things parallels and conflicts?

Those rules failed because they focused on maintaining weird ass traditional D&D mythology sacred cow shit and failed to pay attention to the practical implementation of a burny wizard character tool and its proper interaction with game play goals.

The aspect of the one true system argument that is most utterly heretical of Frank to espouse is that he is using it to justify putting FLUFF first.

He is making fluff decisions that impact game play and tool kit goals and declaring that it isn't his fault because the mechanics must conform to the fluff and that fluff cannot conform to mechanics and game play goals.

[Elennsar]

The mechanics exist to represent the fluff.

If "fire wizards" all draw their power from living near "elemental nodes" for fire and regularly doing bizzare rituals involving fire, that's different than if they draw their power from an academic study where they pick one discipline because that's all they have the time and energy for without giving up a social life (and game balance).

Either is valid on its own merits, but having "doesn't matter which you pick" means that there's no consistent "this is how fire magic works" (and how it doesn't).

Nothing about picking one of those for TNE means that the others are BAD any more than picking to watch Seven Samurai over Glory makes either a bad movie.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I think you're right: I have no idea where you're going with this. What do you propose for your game-independent 'burninator' or your 'burninator-based game system?

[PhoneLobster]

The mechanics exist to represent the fluff.

No, they exist to make the robber fall over a fair proportion of the time when the cop points his finger and says bang.

Mechanics first and foremost must conform to game play and usefulness motivations.

A set of mechanics that conforms to VERY narrowly setting specific limitations is a set of mechanics that fails on most usefulness and game play motivations by definition.

[Elennsar]

And the assumption that he should fall over a fair proportion of the time (and what specifically that means, and whether he's dead, wounded, unconscious, or whatever) are determined by what setting and flavor we're playing.

If you want to watch Seven Samurai, watch Seven Samurai. If you want to watch Glory, watch Glory. If you want to watch Saving Private Ryan, watch that.

If you want to watch (), then watch that.

You can only watch one at a time, but you can own any of them and watch any of them.

You can only play one RPG at a time (unless you can multitask like a computer), so having a -particular- RPG only represent one particular setting is no worse than not being able to watch Glory and Seven Samurai at the same time.

Going back on topic. Which do we want?

To use PL's statement as a metaphor, should combat be quick, gritty, and unforgiving? Long and epic? What?

Same with anything else, but that's one thing we need to address mechancially which will impact the setting.

[PhoneLobster]

I think you're right: I have no idea where you're going with this. What do you propose for your game-independent 'burninator' or your 'burninator-based game system?

You put together a list of tools like burny wizard guy and other cool stuff, select a game play style and get to work presenting tools that function within that style.

Then anyone playing with that game play style has the cool tools that can be used along with a wide range of whatever damn fluff they pull out their ass. I mean once you have a functional guy who burns shit there is a LOT of fluff that can potentially be used with him. A fucking lot.

You don't start by saying "I envisage a highly personal adaptation of Indian Mythology with a complex interlocked and highly specific factional multi color magic/mythology system with several non customisable races no one has heard of or gives a shit about. From this fluffy foundation all mechanics shall be bound with iron.".

Because really there AREN'T a lot of games, players or alternate fluff sets we can use with that.

That is putting fluff ahead of delivering on the initial stated goal of creating a successor to what has always been a genre toolkit.

[Username17]

I've had it up to my neck with this whole "One true setting" bullshit where things like a fire wizard get design motivations like "conforms to weird ass specific setting mythology".

The "setting specific mythology" you consider bullshit is the physics of the world that the character operates in. It is as noticeable or more so as how far people can jump or fall. How people react to magical fire striking them and how people go about generating, targeting, and resisting that magical fire is therefore a physical constant of the story world that is no less oppressive and distinct than the world's fucking gravity.

When people are shooting at each other with colt pistols at high noon near a dusty stable you're in wild west territory; and when people are dueling with rapiers and dueling pistols on a misty lawn you're in enlightenment territory; and when people are fighting in the thunderdome you're in fallout territory; and when people are slow knife fighting to get past forcefields you are in dune territory. All of these settings have guns and nominally human actors, but to properly model them you have completely distinct game systems because the technology levels and expectations of personal accomplishment are so different. And that's intuitively obvious, because we classify Swashbuckling, Western, Fallout, and Space Opera as different "genres" so it "makes sense" that the different duels would be governed by different rules.

The problem is that "fantasy" is no more coherent of an over genre than "people have guns in the setting" is. Frankly, it's less. Aladdin and Liu Bu don't actually live in the same story that is generated by the same cooperative storytelling game system. Magic and superheroics are the "technology" of a fantasy setting, and the world of Arcanis where powerful people have to be check mated by rampaging monsters across specially attuned territories just to banish them to another world is way more different as far as that goes than The Seven Kingdoms where by and large a powerful man can have their head staved in with a candlestick at any time. The Musketeers and the Fremen have much more in common than do Planeswalkers and Starks as far as personal expectations and physics go.

Just look at literally anyone bitching about the Weeaboo Fightan Magik book for being out of place. You and I both know that it isn't particularly over powered barring a few obscure loops that I lack the patience to find for myself and in turn aren't even as brutal as the Wizard loops of obscurica from Core. But the fact is that it genuinely is outside the physics that D&D previously sold itself with. Now the Physics of D&D - where Wizards Rule and Fighters Blow - are not very balanced, but they actually are the defining point of D&D. The moment you make the physics be different, you don't have D&D anymore. The people who hate Weeaboo Fightan Magik are in a sense correct: ToB isn't Dungeons and Dragons.

The thing is that if you set your sites wide enough to include everything from recent past historical fiction to star faring science fiction, you have no constants of what your game is supposed to generate. You can't playtest your game. You can't ever know whether you've "succeeded" at your design goals or not because you don't actually have any. A system that is supposed to generate "some event" has by definition succeeded because for every input there is an output. But unless you actually define your goals in some tangible fashion ahead of time you're just committing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

You can make a game for "Star Wars" but not for "Science Fiction." You can make a game for "Arabian Nights" but not for "Fantasy." That's unfortunate, but them's the facts. You can't bring forcefields and tanks into a western without radically altering the rules of the game used to generate those western stories. And you can't add magic carpets and fire wands to Hansel and Gretel without radically changing the rules needed to generate those "fantasy" stories either.

-Username17

[SphereOfFeetMan]

The "setting specific mythology" you consider bullshit is the physics of the world that the character operates in.

The physics of the gameworld are a mechanical choice that affects the setting. That mechanical choice can be made first. And it can be specific.

[PhoneLobster]

You can make a game for "Arabian Nights" but not for "Fantasy."

You keep making this ridiculous "I define these two different things, because they are different, everything is!" argument.

But really you are again putting fluff before game play and mechanics.

You can't have a system that tells even ONE of those stories because they are fucking stories not games.

If you had a functional system built off a specific game style full of a bunch of pretty damn common tools then we could add all kinds of flavours to the themes. You just have the same style of play with all the action dungeon crawling bullshit that is so popular with the hip kids and their dungarees these days.

The one true Aladin game that has highly customized rules that accurately emulate events similar to the tricky activities of Aladin, Sinbad and friends has a very small audience and is going to constantly hit a wall in design as game play conflicts with the Aladinesque fluff goals.

But most people don't want that, they want the same damn kill things and take their stuff game where everyone wears baggy pants and funny hats and the kings are all called "Sultans" and the villains are called "Viziers" and aside from a thin paint job and a costume change its basically the same as the kill things and take their stuff game where they call the NPCs Shoguns and Ninjas and shit. Heck. It might even be the very same game.

And that's what D&D is, and what it needs to be. Your princessly obsession with true and accurate fluff representation is no less annoying as when folks rant on about how superior Elves should be. It's bad fluff that's bad for the game and bad for people who want to use the game for anything other than wanking over some non game play oriented bullshit.

[Username17]

The physics of the gameworld are a mechanical choice that affects the setting. That mechanical choice can be made first. And it can be specific.

Sure. The problem is that that is incredibly stupid. You can create a set of rules and just lean back confident that your set of rules has generated some game world and then crank through it to try to figure out which one. You can totally do that. But it's a lot of work and in the end there's no guaranty that the generated world will make anyone happy. A lot of people are legitimately offended by the Wish Economy, for example.

The world generated by your rules is the end result. When you don't set a goal for your end result then all end results are equally viable - or rather nonviable as final products. If you refuse to set yourself criteria for success or failure, your system has no basis by which to claim success. I might as well be the ravings of a madman. You don't draw the bull's eye around wherever your bullet happens to land if you want me to take you at all seriously.

they [the mechanics] exist to make the robber fall over a fair proportion of the time when the cop points his finger and says bang.

Mechanics first and foremost must conform to game play and usefulness motivations.

This is, in essence, true. The thing is that the process is slightly more complicated than Phone Lobster is giving it credit for. The fact is that the actual interchange looks like this:

• Cop: "Bang! You're Dead!"
  Robber: "No I'm not, I have [fill in defense]."
  Cop: "Yes you are, I'm using [fill in attack]."
  Both: Check rules.
  Both: Roll dice.
  Both: Agreement as to whether Robber is now dead.

The problem is that the interaction between the attacks and defenses is nothing like universal. A defense might be a force field or precognition, or just a bullet resistant vest. An attack might be a magical hellstorm or a giant laser blast.

If you use an ice beam against a fire monster this is "Super Effective" in D&D land, but it's "Not Effective" in Pokemon country. And when you make a change like that, you are making a different game even if you manage to salvage a bunch of isolated mechanics.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Which really needs its own thread, Frank.

-Crissa