Torchbearer - Kickstarter is UP

[Ice9]

It really does promote metagaming, among anybody who understands the effect of the rules. And understanding rules is like an optical illusion - once you see it, you can't unsee it. You can choose to take a suboptimal course, but that's still something pulling you out of the fiction, every time you decide which skills to use.

And I don't know about other BRP games, but in the one I was playing, this was actually a way more effective method than training:
* Time: This happened every couple weeks, training could take much longer.
* Cost: This was free, training was expensive.
* Opportunity: This happened as long as you could find a chance to use your skills (and some skills were easy that way), training required an uninterrupted stretch of time and an appropriate NPC.

IIRC, the rules also put a limit on how much training could improve a skill, and made PCs training each-other even slower than normal. So - a character that took every opportunity for skill use would in short order become noticeably more competent than one who didn't. And skills that could be easily used in any situation quickly outpaced specialist skills, even if they started lower.

One other thing, and YMMV on how much this is a problem, but "use to improve" systems pretty much make a certain type of character impossible - namely, people who have something they're really good at but only use when absolutely necessary. The quiet monk who avoids conflict, but can bust out amazing kung-fu when needed, for example.

[DSMatticus]

The mechanic only rewards metagaming if the group playing it is composed of powergamers.

No, the mechanics reward whatever they reward. They are on paper, and they say what they say, and that's pretty much that. Having +1 lockpicking is better than not having +1 lockpicking. That is simple and obvious fact. It is better in the sense that your character is more powerful, it's better in the sense that (as a player) you will have greater control and input into future stories, it's better in the sense that your character undoubtably wants to be better at his trade, and it's better in the sense that games call it reward/advancement and it is how you progress through the game as you play to bigger and better stories. Whatever perspective you approach it from, everyone has a reason to advance their character.

You may as well be arguing that people should turn down level ups in D&D because wanting to go from wizard 1 to wizard 2 is evil powergaming. You may as well be arguing that people should turn down karma in Shadowrun because wanting to improve your skills is evil powergaming. You're being a dumbass.

In D&D, a wizard gets XP for overcoming a challenge, and because wizards are best at solving their problems through wizardry that means a wizard gets XP for behaving like a wizard. In Shadowrun, a street sam gets karma for accomplishments during the session, and because street sams are best at solving their problems through clever applications of violence that means a street sam gets karma for behaving like a street sam. In use-advancement systems, an archer gets advancement for solving problems in as many different ways as possible, and because archery is only one solution that means the archer gets advancement for spending as little time as possible being an archer. One of these things is not like the other; one of them is a steaming pile of shit.

You are quite possibly the shittiest poster here. Nothing you have ever said on these forums has held up to any scrutiny whatsoever, and if you had ever bothered to think about any of it instead of being determined to regurgitate buzzwords at people you would realize that.

[silva]

You may as well be arguing that people should turn down level ups in D&D because wanting to go from wizard 1 to wizard 2 is evil powergaming

Nope, but you could argue that a wizard assaulting civilian homes for gold (and gold = XP in some older D&D editions) should qualify as valid XP. Or you could argue that more experienced players in GURPS may build better charactesr because they metagamingly know how to game the system better than novice players. The question is: if a group of GURPS players end up building a party of fully uber-optimized characters, who is to blame ? The game or the players ?

Again: min-maxers exist everywhere. If you approach any game with that mentality, any game will be exploitable. From Shadowrun to Gurps to D&D to Runequest to Warhammer to whatever.

*EDIT*

You are quite possibly the shittiest poster here

Thanks. Given the one-true-wayism and math-anal-obsession a bunch of folks here adheres to, I take that as a compliment.

[fectin]

Nope, but you could argue that a wizard assaulting civilian homes for gold (and gold = XP in some older D&D editions) should qualify as valid XP.

...and that argument would be correct. Also, it would be realistic, in that strongmen often raid a populace for resources, because it's a successful tactic.

Or you could argue that more experienced players in GURPS may build better charactesr because they metagamingly know how to game the system better than novice players.

That's just begging the question.


Do you know what "meta" means as a prefix? Is this a language barrier issue?

[hogarth]

The advancement of RQ and BRP in general is completely fucked, and people have been making fun of it for longer than I've been alive. And they've been right to do so.

Of course, it's not any stupider than D&D's advancement scheme.

[Kaelik]

The question is: if a group of GURPS players end up building a party of fully uber-optimized characters, who is to blame ? The game or the players ?

Why is anyone to blame? Should people who engage in combat to maintain their continued life be bad at combat? If the GURPS players end up building a party of fully uber-optimized characters they are just building characters that make sense in the fucking game.

It is however, very obviously, the games fault if doing so forced them to perform actions that don't make sense in character.

Given the one-true-wayism and math-anal-obsession a bunch of folks here adheres to, I take that as a compliment.

Because silva would never imply that one method of gaming is better than another, like for example, spending multiple posts criticizing people who play characters that are good at combat in games about people who engage in combat for a living.

[DSMatticus]

Nope, but you could argue that a wizard assaulting civilian homes for gold (and gold = XP in some older D&D editions) should qualify as valid XP.

Or you could argue that gold = XP is also a stupid advancement rule for the same reason wealth by level is a stupid system. What's your point? "There are other shitty advancement systems that you weren't talking about, here they are?"

Or you could argue that more experienced players in GURPS may build better charactesr because they metagamingly know how to game the system better than novice players.

You don't know what the word metagame means. Metagaming is making game decisions based off of information outside the scope of the ruleset. Creating a character using the character creation rules is not metagaming. Creating a character who is optimal at stealth or enchantment spells or whatever using the character creation rules is not metagaming. Character creation rules are part of the game, and using the character creation rules (even with some goal in mind, such as "be a kickass rogue") is not metagaming.

If you know that your DM loves fiery creatures, and you use this information to design a character who is both resistant to fire and does not use fire-based attacks, then that would be metagaming. Because your DM's love of fiery creatures is not described in the ruleset, but you used it to make decisions about how to play the game - you used information outside the rules. Metagaming.

This is why I called you a shitty poster; you are an empty sack of buzzwords you don't even understand. You have made my point about how you thoughtlessly regurgitate bullshit absolutely perfectly.

[Username17]

silva, like every other thing you talk about, "one true wayism" does not mean what you think it means. Everyone disagrees with you, but this does not mean that we're all in cahoots or that we have narrow experiences or that we only accept a single vision of how things should work. We disagree with each other here about all kinds of things all the time. However, everyone disagrees with you because you are fucking wrong. You lost the argument. And that is not a problem with everyone else being intolerant, that's a problem with you having made a shitty argument and having lost. You would be a better person if you could man up to the fact that you have fucking lost this argument and tried to learn something from it instead of denouncing the world as being filled with "one true wayism" or whatever the fuck.

The advancement of RQ and BRP in general is completely fucked, and people have been making fun of it for longer than I've been alive. And they've been right to do so.

Of course, it's not any stupider than D&D's advancement scheme.

I would argue that it is. 2nd Edition AD&D's whole deal about giving out XP for casting spells and picking up treasure is stupid. But it also gives people tangible character advancement rewards for having their characters behave like they are "supposed to." BRP games, by comparison, give people tangible advancement rewards for behaving in a manner that they are not supposed to. That makes it stupider.

Granted, the rewarded behavior is kind of stupid in either case, and there's no particular reason why the character would associate either set of actions with becoming more powerful. But in AD&D, the actions that it encourages you to take are actually actions that the designers and the players of the game agree are actions that your character should take. Your character may not get more powerful for doing things that have any reason to make them more powerful, but you are being rewarded for acting in-genre. In RuneQuest, skill grinding is a problem, and RuneQuest defenders like silva spend four pages of threads just like this one attempting to explain complicated doublethink about how doing the things that make your character better in the game is playing the game wrong. Because the game tangibly and demonstrably rewards playing out of genre. And that's stupid. Moreover, it's stupider.

-Username17

[Dean]

it's not any stupider than D&D's advancement scheme.

Hogarth I'm going to ask that you look at your recent posts and see just what percentage of them are you limply apologizing for bad mechanics. It's a thing you do a lot and I don't know why. My family runs a terrible car repair shop and I spend less time than you apologizing for shitty mechanics.

[RadiantPhoenix]

My family runs a terrible car repair shop and I spend less time than you apologizing for shitty mechanics.

That cracked me up.

[nockermensch]

Do you know what "meta" means as a prefix? Is this a language barrier issue?

"meta" in Portuguese is the singular second person form of the present tense (at the imperative mood) for the vulgar variant of the "insert" verb. I heard that my mother language is a very complicated one, and when I look at what I typed right now, I believe it. In any case, time for some examples! Things between brackets are >implied and can be omitted in speech, because that's just how Portuguese rolls:

"Meta [a] piroca!" = " stick the cock in!"

"Meta [o] jogo" = " stick the game in"

So yeah, it's totally a language barrier issue.

meta also means "goal, mark, objective" besides having the same latin meaning you're used to in English. But this and the fact that meta (the order to stick it in) and meta (the goal or the latin prefix) are spoken with a different "e" sound and could never be mixed out loud are irrelevant: silva is totally thinking on that first case.

[fectin]

Okay. That's reasonable.

"Meta-" in English refers to levels of abstraction. Wiki tells me it's Greek for 'beyond,' but modern usage is closer to 'around'.

For example: data is information about [something]; meta-data is information about data. You might roll 2d6 a thousand times, and write down the results: that's data, it describes your rolls. You might then calculate an average and a standard deviation: that's meta-data, it describes the list of numbers you wrote down, instead of directly describing the dice-rolling.

In another example, fighting games have "yomi levels,", which describe optimizing your moves based on what your opponent will do, instead of what move is generically best. That is a type of meta-gaming, where you are reacting to the other player instead of purely to the game.

Likewise, Magic: the Gathering players refer to the "current meta" to describe the other decks they expect to play against. If the generically best deck is Rock, everyone will play that. However, if you know that everyone is playing Rock, you might build Paper instead, specifically to beat Rock even if Paper is weaker generally.

In RPGs, meta-game refers to actions or logic that make sense from the perspective of the player, but not from the perspective of the character. (It's closely related to "dissociation" in that sense, but not entirely).

Metagame thinking isn't entirely bad; in traditional RPGs it was even strongly encouraged. That hasn't been true for a while though.

[DSMatticus]

I do not at all believe this is a language barrier issue. There is really no reason to bend over backwards and give silva the benefit of the doubt here; we know he's a dumbass, he is in the middle of a how-dare-players-understand-the-rules-of-the-game rant, and metagaming is a very specific term he has undoubtably heard in the context of acting on out of character information (which, mind you, describes character creation both optimal and inoptimal, metagamed or not metagamed; character creation is by its nature out of character).

[Lago PARANOIA]

My favorite kind of metagaming is the kind of metagaming done to sandbag characters to make them less likely to cause paroxysms of 'ROLEplay not ROLLplay' among basketweavers.

For example, players of Mutants and Masterminds d20: how many times have you felt compelled to sink points into skills just to make your characters look more rounded? For example, you could've used those five extra points to buy more power stunts but instead you bought up bullshit like Profession/Journalist or to make your stats meaninglessly jumbled.

[nockermensch]

In after nobody read the spoiler and/or saw the sarcasm.

When brazilians talk about meta<something>, they mean exactly the same as you anglophones. silva's problem lies elsewhere.

[fectin]

Oh. I figured you meant he thought it meant "goal", and was translating it to powergaming or something.

[Kaelik]

nocker, you always put the version of meta we are talking about as the second or third case, then you said silva is using the first case.

You said in the spoiler that silva doesn't mean the version we are talking about. That may not be what you meant, but that is what you said when you put our version second, and then said he was using it in the first case.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Going back to the original focus of this thread:

As I said, the basic engine of Torchbearer I found pretty workable. Unfortunately, there are a lot of game-specific implementations that I don't like (use skills to level them up, race = class, so on) and I'm also skeptical about using this game as the basic pace of a low fantasy game. Even gritty-ass low fantasy series like Game of Thrones don't constantly prod you in the ass to get a move on.

Rather, I'd like to see this game adapted for a post-apocalyptic setting like Violence Jack or Fist of the North Star or Resident Evil: Extinction. A lot of the problems instantly go away. Instead of breaking your balls over having to use Checks to go into the 'camp' phase the game automatically sets the pace by plugging you into your needs and making water and food something you're not guaranteed to get. Nickle and diming you over inventory limits is kind of lame for a swords and sandals game, but it adds a good deal of tension when we're talking about making people choose between a tank of gasoline or a tank of water. Making people constantly move from city-to-wilderness-to-city ad infinitum on threat of game over is lame and irritating if we're talking about life as a medieval peasant, but not so much if we're talking about a visitor to Bartertown.

[nockermensch]

nocker, you always put the version of meta we are talking about as the second or third case, then you said silva is using the first case.

You said in the spoiler that silva doesn't mean the version we are talking about. That may not be what you meant, but that is what you said when you put our version second, and then said he was using it in the first case.

But this and the fact that meta (the order to stick it in) and meta (the goal or the latin prefix) are spoken with a different "e" sound and could never be mixed out loud are irrelevant: silva is totally thinking on that first case.

The part I bolded means that the conclusion in the spoiler was intended to be sarcastic. It's impossible to mix these words in speech and I'm pretty sure this also means that it's impossible to mix these words in the kind of thinking one has to engage before committing said words to the screen.

But then again, if Cynic, Stahlseele or Koumei made a similarly outrageous claim about an Indian language, German or Australian, I'd probably simply believe them, because we all vaguely suspect that foreign languages are full of bizarre cases. So, I apologise for the unintended confusion. I'm all for intended confusion at the right moments, but this was not a case for it. In the future, if I decide to entertain you with local trivia agin, I will jut stick to the facts.

[silva]

I used meta correctly you dumbasses.

Going back to the original focus of this thread:

As I said, the basic engine of Torchbearer I found pretty workable. Unfortunately, there are a lot of game-specific implementations that I don't like (use skills to level them up, race = class, so on) and I'm also skeptical about using this game as the basic pace of a low fantasy game. Even gritty-ass low fantasy series like Game of Thrones don't constantly prod you in the ass to get a move on.

Rather, I'd like to see this game adapted for a post-apocalyptic setting like Violence Jack or Fist of the North Star or Resident Evil: Extinction. A lot of the problems instantly go away. Instead of breaking your balls over having to use Checks to go into the 'camp' phase the game automatically sets the pace by plugging you into your needs and making water and food something you're not guaranteed to get. Nickle and diming you over inventory limits is kind of lame for a swords and sandals game, but it adds a good deal of tension when we're talking about making people choose between a tank of gasoline or a tank of water. Making people constantly move from city-to-wilderness-to-city ad infinitum on threat of game over is lame and irritating if we're talking about life as a medieval peasant, but not so much if we're talking about a visitor to Bartertown.

Lago, did you find the game a bit too fiddly / with too much info to keep track of at the same time and too many subsystems running in parallel ?

[Kaelik]

I used meta correctly you dumbasses.

I think the general conclusion is that you are not using meta to mean some other portugese specific thing, and that it is just your generally stupidity that causes you to fail to understand that the game incentivizing actions which require the player to make decisions that make no sense to the character is clearly metagamey. So it seems that we agree with you, it isn't that you use meta incorrectly, it is that you don't understand the basic precept of game design that you should incentivize the behaviour you want people to engage in.

[DSMatticus]

and that it is just your generally stupidity that causes you to fail to understand that the game incentivizing actions which require the player to make decisions that make no sense to the character is clearly metagamey.

That's not the use of metagaming that's being contested. Silva described optimization during character creation as metagaming. That is stupid and wrong.

I used meta correctly you dumbasses.

Or you could argue that more experienced players in GURPS may build better charactesr because they metagamingly know how to game the system better than novice players.

No, you did not. Metagame is a real word with a real definition and you fucked it up.

Metagame means either 1) for a player to act on information outside the ruleset, or 2) for a player to have his character act on information that the character does not have. The second term is technically an improper bastardization of the first, but it's common enough that I suppose it deserves consideration.

If you meant 1, then character creation is not metagaming. Character creation rules are in the game. Players acting on the character creation rules is not metagaming, which makes your usage incorrect.

If you meant 2, then either:
A) Character creation is metagaming regardless of optimization. Neither optimal nor inoptimal characters understand the character creation rules, and therefore interacting with the character creation rules is outside the scope of the character's knowledge and is metagaming. This is inconsistent with your attempts to describe optimization as metagaming, which makes your usage incorrect.
B) Character creation is not metagaming because it is a system in which the player, and not the character, acts. If the character is not acting, then it cannot be the second definition of metagaming, which makes your usage incorrect.

You do not know what the word means and do not know how to use it correctly.

[silva]

Hmmm, you have a point DS. Yeah, I used the term as your definition 2) above. And I was wrong. Thats not what metagaming means. I think I mean to say that some players like to create characters in a more organic fashion (like picking options that are coherent to his concept and background) in contrast to more gamey ones (like picking options that are urposefully optimized and result and mechanic more efficient characters).

So I stand corrected. I used the term metagaming wrong. But as my fellow carioca said above, it wasnt due to a language barrier, it was a conceptual mistake (I would get it wrong even in brazilian portuguese).

[ETortoise]

Lago, I've seen some people talking on Google+ about a Walking Dead hack for Torchbearer... https://plus.google.com/112346714622542 ... xTun7Jdd1n

It's very quick and dirty but there are some things to work with there.

[nockermensch]

I mean to say that some players like to create characters in a more organic fashion (like picking options that are coherent to his concept and background) in contrast to more gamey ones (like picking options that are

Do you realize this "contrast" is called "the Stormwind fallacy"? Case in point, what happens if my character concept is "Batman" or "Dr. House" or, in general "dude that gets shit done?" And then I proceed to pick the most optimized options and roleplay the shit out of a character that's very effective in the world?

There's no opposition between "coherent concept" and "optimization". Both behaviors are orthogonal. Some people will optimize and then barely roleplay, some will optimize and roleplay, some will not optimize and roleplay and finally, some won't optimize and won't roleplay either.