You know what sucks about RPGs' rules?

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 4:12 am

All of them. I mean ALL of them suck in this way. It's not their fault, really, but it's true.

All RPG rules are a) written poorly and b) propped up by 30-some years of excuses for poor rules.

Why does this piss me off? It leads to bullshit arguments between people who would otherwise get along quite well, thank you, all because one person decides to reject the bull shit excuses ("Rules are just, like, guidelines, man. Here, take a hit of this!") and actually read what the fucking rules fucking say and take them at their fucking word. Literally.

Case in
fucking point.

Now, why is this a problem? RPGs unfortunately attract the highly analytical, obsessive compulsive, pedantic bastards who are going to trying to make their points against people who are logically impervious, pseudo-intellectual RPG-hippie, causing themselves irreparable psychological damage in the process.

It's high time that this heretofore unpublicized yet terrible result of role playing games receive the attention it deserves. It is criminally irresponsible and negligent for game designers to put such horribly worded and conceived rules on paper for a terribly fragile consumer base to break their heads against.

Who's with me?

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 4:30 am

So you're saying a Vrock shouldn't take it for its Spores?

-Crissa

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 4:42 am

WHAARRGARRBLL!!!!!11!111!!!!shift!!!1!

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 4:46 am

I agree that rules for the game should be written clearer.

Talisman · Post by **Talisman** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 9:15 pm

I agree that RPG rules should be written more clearly.

I also believe that no RPG can be written to cover every eventuality, and there will inevitably be times when the GM must either interpret or overrule specific rules/situation interactions.

I believe that a Perfectly Written RPG is not humanly possible, so no one should be crucified for failing to meet that goal. However, if you design an RPG, it should be a Damn Well-Written RPG; that is possible and is a very valid goal.

MartinHarper · Post by **MartinHarper** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 10:04 pm

How about quality vs quantity? Is it better to have many hundreds of feats, each of which is poorly balanced or written (ala 4e) or is it better to have relatively few feats, but each is written well and properly play-tested?

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 11:08 pm

That's a really dumb argument they're having.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 11:09 pm

Actually writing good rules is really hard.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 11:22 pm

The entire DMG should be one long section about "use your best judgment, don't be a dick, and feel free to kick players out if they're douchebags."

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 12:41 am

Psychic Robot wrote:The entire DMG should be one long section about "use your best judgment, don't be a dick, and feel free to kick players out if they're douchebags."

Pure fail.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 3:58 am

What makes a rules system fail?

I. The logic/math of the rules is bad, i.e. the rules are bad by themselves.
This is simply the matter of understanding what the fvck you write (I'm looking at you, Mike Mearls).
If you're making a dice-based game and can't calculate probability, you should go home. I "discovered" the Bernoulli formula when I was nine.
To quote the Dragon article advertising the new and improved D&D3.5, "Harm is fvcking broken, it's so obvious that it's obvious." How did Shivering Touch get past the radar then? WotC designers cannot learn from their own mistakes. People like that should have Darwin knocking on their door to get them selected out. Shadowrun's two hit points tracks are retarded. If you punch someone in the ear twice he falls, but if you punch once and then crush his skull with a sledgehammer, he's unexpectedly ok.

II. It does not work in the setting/genre, i.e. the rules are bad in the context of the setting.
This is the matter of the game world making sense rules-wise and the rules rewarding actions appropriate for the genre and the game world.
When the OGL first appeared, there was an article in Dragon about the ease of adapting everything you can imagine to d20 system. And while the article had some good advice on runnung campaigns for n00bs, the main point is wrong. There's no universal system for each and every game.
Storyteller is "mortals suck". It's about the cool powers, and thus it does not care about the battle grid or combat actions - the cool powers are combat actions, if you're out of mana then cool things are over for the day. There's no way to play heroic mortals in Exalted.
GURPS is "crossbows are scary". (Also, GURPS Vehicles.) Sure, you can play it in space with lasers and magic and mutations and stuff, but "railguns are scary" is not really different.
D&D in its best incarnation (Tome) is about heroes in the Greek sense. You fall from a cliff and you're ok. In space!, you fall from a space station and you're ok. Sure it's fun, but if you're trying to run, for instance, a horror campaign based on Cthulhu mythos, the players will conk Yog-Sothoth on the head and take his stuff. If you're trying to run a campaign in Forgotten Realms or Eberron, you'll get a similar result.
There's no point in complaining about PCs doing what the system rewards them for. In a heroic game, a rule favoring the 15 min workday is fail. A game about political intrigue should have the political power be worth something (by making heroes vulnerable to armed crowds of people, for instance). And in everything but computer games of the quest genre, a rule punishing creativity is fail. (I'm looking at you again, Mike Mearls.)

III. It's not balanced "fair", i.e. the rules are bad in the context of the game.
The question of fairness.
That's where the opinions of intelligent people can differ greatly, because fairness is inherently arbitrary. It can be probably defined as "equal opportunity to have fun at the gaming table".
In a point-based system, should a point in an ability be worth a point in another ability? How to you define "worth" within the context of a game? Does your DM cheat at plot resolution, or would he rather burn the adventure if you fail that one Survival check and get lost?
Should there be optimal builds, or should every single combination of abilities be viable? Should an Nth level fighter have a 50% chance of killing an Nth level wizard? How much spotlight is ok?
Considering all the arbitrariness (does such a word exist?), some things, though, are obviously unfair, such as a skill that's plain better but costs the same or a character that fails in all the relevant areas of expertise.

Psychic Robot wrote:The entire DMG should be one long section about "use your best judgment, don't be a dick, and feel free to kick players out if they're douchebags."

You're joking, right? Because it already is, not that it helps.

The only part of the DMG3.0 which isn't more rules and is remotely useful is the 100 adventure ideas table. I hoped WotC would steal the concept from Tomes' DM chapters and throw in some cool ideas for the DMs to work with. We get 224 pages' worth of "don't be a dick" instead. The whole civilization depends on its ability to persuade people not to be dicks, and millions of pages were written with this particular purpose in mind. And while people may hold the opinion that every page helps, I'd rather read something new about creating a believable and fun world than about the importance of having enough cola.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 7:01 am

PhoneLobster wrote:Pure fail.

EDIT: Actually, you're probably right--it would be pointless. Jerks are jerks, and all the advice in the world won't change that.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 8:34 am

Fairness is best seen in terms of your share of the screen time. If combats are short pieces of rocket launcher tag interspersed with long sections of diplomacy, exploration, research, and puzzle solving, then a single character can be a total non-combatant and still be "fair." If you spend an hour and a half moving miniatures and tiles around the board while people maneuver and stab each other, then everyone has to contribute to the combats in order to be "Fair."

To that extent, the FATE people are dead right, even if they are totally pretentious about it. How big your numbers are isn't important. What's important is how much screen time that the numbers you have give you.

-Username17

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 9:23 am

FrankTrollman wrote: To that extent, the FATE people are dead right, even if they are totally pretentious about it. How big your numbers are isn't important. What's important is how much screen time that the numbers you have give you.

That's a very good point. I noticed that when it comes to certain skills, being good at it often meant that one had less screentime in some games. "You sneak past the guards and reach the treasure chamber" "You convince the guards to let you pass with your story" vs. 5 to 15 minutes of chase scenes, distractions, desperetate improvisations, plain hilarity and so on.

Absentminded_Wizard · Thu Mar 12, 2009 11:29 am

It's high time that this heretofore unpublicized yet terrible result of role playing games receive the attention it deserves. It is criminally irresponsible and negligent for game designers to put such horribly worded and conceived rules on paper for a terribly fragile consumer base to break their heads against.

Who's with me?

Count me in. In what other industry can people say, "I don't have to do my job well because the customer's supposed to cover for my mistakes."? And get a way with it.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 5:04 pm

How about the Health Insurance Industry?

"Whoops, you should've known you had a pre-existing condition..."
"Sorry, we'll only treat you in six-month increments. Anything from before that is a pre-existing condition. See your contract."

-Crissa

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 7:08 pm

Computer gaming gets close at times.

Of course, I've heard that actually beta testing for a job is a soul-crushing monotony, so i guess i can see part of why it's so universal

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 7:27 pm

PhoneLobster wrote:
Psychic Robot wrote:The entire DMG should be one long section about "use your best judgment, don't be a dick, and feel free to kick players out if they're douchebags."
Pure fail.

So often, the DM is the douchebag. Making the DMG say that is so full of fail.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 7:51 pm

Gamebooks should find a way to make an action that the characters should look at as a challenge (as in "something that by its nature or character serves as a call to battle, contest, special effort, etc.: Space exploration offers a challenge to humankind.") look like even if it is really difficult and/or dangerous, that those make it more interesting.

If Exploration is the theme of the game, I should be able to say "Yes, I don't know what's over the horizon. And that could be bad. But I want to find out more than I'm worried that there really could be sea monsters."

A good game can support that. A bad game...won't.

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 8:50 pm

Starmaker, I think you missed an important one:

Rules can fail by being confusing, ambiguous, contradictory, or flat-out wrong, i.e. get yourself an editor.
This is when there's a disconnect between the rules in the designer's head and the words on the page.
Like when 4e defines the term "enemy" so that it includes yourself, or no one can figure out how the heck polymorph is actually supposed to work.

From the title, this looks similar to your category #1, but the examples you gave are of cases where the writing is clear but the idea is bad. Sometimes the writing itself is bad, and it doesn't matter how awesome the original idea was if no one knows what it is anymore.

A common one in EBD is the tendency of the writers to give you the answer to a certain special case, without actually creating general rules that would allow you to derive that result, so you have no way of knowing the answers to any special cases that are not specifically enumerated.

For example, Descent has rules that moving a space normally costs 1 movement point, jumping over a pit costs 3, and moving into a mud space costs 2. Someone writes in to ask what it costs to jump over a pit into a mud space, and the writers say that it costs 4. That's great, morons, you could have said that mud spaces cost +1 point to move into in the first place, but even when someone points out this mistake, you give us yet another special-case rule, so now we have to ask again when we want to know how many movement points it takes to climb out of a pit into a mud space, climb out of a pit and jump over some lava, wall-run into a mud space, or whatever the heck you make up in the next expansion.

Frank: that's probably a good rule for evaluating fairness between players, with the caveat that it applies primarily to cooperative games. Fairness usually refers to other things in competitive games.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 9:27 pm

Judging__Eagle wrote:So often, the DM is the douchebag. Making the DMG say that is so full of fail.

What part of "don't be a dick" didn't you understand?

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 9:42 pm

Psychic Robot wrote:What part of "don't be a dick" didn't you understand?

I'm just guessing and putting words in Eagle's beak here, but I'd say...

The part where you replace all the rules that keep the 'dick' in check with a screed telling him he can and should do whatever he feels like and should kick out anyone who disagrees with that.

There is a design principle I despise as worthless, the GM and Rule Zero is god, solves all problems and should never be questioned, actual rules are either not needed or magically counter productive, rule zero foreverszz !!!11!

That right there is one poor design principle. Very commonly touted by idiots though.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 9:58 pm

The DM is in charge. The DM can make up whatever rules he wants. There's a reason he's running the game and the players aren't. If a player is a jerk, he should be booted. Similarly, if the DM is a jerk, he should be booted. And if the players don't like the DMs rules, they can find a new game or try to get him to change his rules. This isn't some democratic-cooperative storytelling revolt where the players get to boss the DM around.

The DM's word is law. If you think the law is stupid, try to change it, leave the game, or accept it.

Also,

use your best judgment, don't be a dick, and feel free to kick players out if they're douchebags

translates to

a screed telling him he can and should do whatever he feels like and should kick out anyone who disagrees with that.

in PL world.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 10:05 pm

The DM is in charge. The DM can make up whatever rules he wants. There's a reason he's running the game and the players aren't. If a player is a jerk, he should be booted. Similarly, if the DM is a jerk, he should be booted. And if the players don't like the DMs rules, they can find a new game or try to get him to change his rules. This isn't some democratic-cooperative storytelling revolt where the players get to boss the DM around.

Um, PR, problem.

1) The DM can make up whatever rules he wants, because he's in charge.

contradicts

2) If the DM is a jerk, he should be booted.

Now, I think any reasonable DM would handle this fine and any unreasonable DM would go on a power trip whatever his role was "supposed" to be, but what exactly are players supposed to do when the DM says that sorcerers know spells like clerics but cast them as they currently do?

I mean, if the DM gets to make up the rules because he's in charge, you don't exactly have much room to say "Hey. You. Douchebag. Get out of our game."

After all, if you do, the DM has the right to call you a douchebag and kick you out, and what the fuck do you do about that? Trust that the other players care enough to walk out as protest?

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 10:07 pm

1) The DM can make up whatever rules he wants, because he's in charge.

contradicts

2) If the DM is a jerk, he should be booted.

#2 means that the players should tell him to fuck off and find a new game if he's a dick. Or have one of them take over for him.

What I mean is that the players don't get to vote on every houserule or ambiguous ruling and say, "No, we don't like that." The DM can say, "There are no elves in my world, and you can't play a monk" (spot the reference), and the players can either say, "Well, we won't play with those rules," or they can suck it up and live with there not being elves and monks.

After all, if you do, the DM has the right to call you a douchebag and kick you out, and what the fuck do you do about that? Trust that the other players care enough to walk out as protest?

You realize that you're better off not playing with a power-tripping cockstain.