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I'm not a big fan of the 'each to his own' and 'fine if you're into it' chat about RPG systems. Even if RPGs were like art, art does not, as so many people have claimed, vary so much from person to person, nor lack in objective criteria. Insofar as a painting is trying to do something, it can be better or worse at it, and RPG systems are most certainly trying to do something.
Consider that an RPG's system can be the difference between twenty minutes of exciting combat, and three hours of combat where people are looking up tables and abilities. Sure, those tables and abilities may buy players more options and options are good, but the price isn't necessarily worth the goods, nor do the goods necessarily have to cost those four hours of table-faff. I propose that we can have a good idea of just how efficient a game is, which might give us an idea of where we should be aiming at.
Time and options my main metric - time spent in resolving actions, time creating characters; these are the costs which we bear, not a matter of taste and not something anyone craves. Options are the bread and butter of RPGs, or they should be. Less faff-time and more options are what make an RPG better or worse than its otherwise fungible peers.
Systems can be boiled down to sparse handful of tasks - results, variables which affect those results and system pairing, or mapping between, variables and results.
RPG systems produce the results to actions. In game terms one might think of a result as a blacksmith successfully making a sword, or being able to hit someone, or pick a pocket. But while those are story results, the real results of the system are often much smaller than that. Within D&D the results for most actions are <yes, no>; either you'll kick in that door or you won't, either you'll climb the wall or fall. Some extend that to {1, yes, no, 20} where '1' and '20' are the die results which grant a special condition each. In combat, the results of a hit extend to {no, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, critical} where 'critical hits' entail still more results being possible. After this, all is interpretation - so much painting on the statue. Exactly what someone is crafting is left to players' choices and not the system, what someone who has a pocket to be picked owns is a matter for the GM to decide, not the system. And where that short sword has hit, and what it does, are purely GM window-dressing. This isn't to disparage them, but we are here only interested in the meat of the system. With this in mind, D&D can be said to have in its entirety, only the following possible results: {1, 20, no, yes, n damage}. Of course, a few special terms, such as enchanted or other states of being are woven into spells here and there, but in the main, all story results will be an interpretation upon those system results.
Then there are variables - these are the things and distinctions which the system allows us to recognise. An in-game shop might be a lively and well-decorated place, but a shop from the point of view of the game mechanics barely exists. It's a place, which exists or doesn't. Nothing more than a designation with in/ out states. Far from being a lively and imaginative place, an RPG shop has fewer properties than a shop in a computer game, at least as far as the system itself is concerned.
The first thing a game recognises is a character's stats - {S, D, C, I, W, Ch} should be a set recognisable to almost any RPG player. Then there's the 'to-hit' bonus of all classes and monsters, and damage, along with its counterpart 'hitpoints'. Spells are their own collection variables - the system recognises that someone can 'have' a spell and that the spell can have location, duration and so on. Of course, all effects must have some duration, but the length of time to make an item is a matter of GM fiat, not of the system, while a spell might go on for a definite length of time, say, 10 minutes, while spells which can either be instant or 'for the scene' are really spells with two types of time available, one which is made of GM fiat again.
A variable tells you what you have to change results. The difference between a rapier and a short sword is practically non-existent if both do D6 damage. If the system gives one a +1 for something then it validates the existence of that thing by allowing it to change results.
In many cases, results can become further variables - once the result of 'wounded' comes out, it can become a variable which is used to adjust further results, giving the character a penalty to actions or making them that much closer to death. At other times a result is just a result - once you successfully chat up the person at the bar or craft a sword then the result just sits there, it won't become a variable.
Genre is generally marked mostly by its variables and results. A fighting game needs to recognise the distinction between two types of swords, while a game about crime-fighting anime-girls might not. Horror games usually have some result which recognises a horrified character, allowing characters to become 'insane' or 'scared', which then stipulates that they must flee. What invariably draws players' interests is variables which can make further variables. If you can pick someone's pockets the result is stealing gold, and gold is then a variable which can allow you to purchase a heap of items, therefore Picking Pockets is interesting. This designation of especially interesting variables is key to denoting a game's genre. Many games have a mechanic to allow characters to sing well to a bar - the character can sing so they must have a stat which says 'Singing 3' or some such. But where in a D&D game, the result is just 'yes', 'yes you can sing', so the game recognises bardic talent, but by providing a bare result with no additional variables, the 'Singing Skill' becomes a side-attraction in the game. A game based on gaining popularity will give you some additional renown points or produce a definite number of admirers for the night, who can possibly become long-standing allies - it will make the result into an additional variable for the character to play with.
The last part of a system is marrying up the variables to the results, which is made by a combination of choices and rules, generally including dice.
This is where people are warned away from rolling dice too much, and the reason behind the mistake is clear; if we are to marry variable to result and the only tool the system gives us is to roll dice, then any result will call for a dice roll, else it becomes an arbitrary ruling without the validation of a real result from a rule.
The best kind of mapping is, ceteris paribus, the one which allows us to get results from variables in the shortest amount of time.
Two systems can have the same variables and results while they have a different mapping, and if both have an acceptable probability distribution but one is faster, then that one is better.
As an example, take the soak system of the Storyteller system. The Stamina variable is used to create a result which stipulates how much incoming damage is reduced by. How is the variable mapped to the possible results? The Stamina is rolled as a dice pool and each success is retracted from the damage total, once it is produced. Now to the alternative: when Damage is calculated, the Stamina score is subtracted from the dice pool. That's is we've gotten rid of a dice roll and all the initial results are still possible. The probability has changed and the exact range of possible results will change but the new probability distribution isn't intrinsically bad, it's just different. The result is a cleaner, more efficient system.
Choices generally occur before the system - players chose what to do then the rules take over. I recognise three types of choices - pseudo choices are those where the best choice is obvious, or so unfathomable that a super-computer couldn't guess at it. Basic choices are those which require some skill to get the correct answer, so unskilled players may get the answer wrong, for example in Monopoly, new players may make an incorrect choice, but more advanced players will always make the best possible choice. Complete choices are those where anyone might intuit a guess and skilled players will do better than others, but no player could possibly guess at the best answer routinely. A good example of this in other games is chess - nobody knows the best move for all occasions but the better players routinely do better.
As an example of a pseudo choice, a D&D fighter in combat might be asked 'What do you do?', but the possible variables are either 'fight' or 'run'. The 'run' mechanic is uninteresting and leads to certain defeat, the 'fight' button is the only choice which allows victory, and even if it doesn't; nobody knows how tough an enemy is so there's little use thinking of stats - one just hits things. Such systems pantomime choices in front of people, occasionally putting in more, small choices such as which of two types of enemies to hit first but largely sticking to the old routine of doing the work for the player and occasionally pretending to care about their input. The biggest aid in this illusion are the dice. It can give players a sense of agency and control - it seems important to players that they roll their own dice instead of the GM rolling for them. The result, of course, won't vary either way. And if dice were absent from the game, with the options of 'continue combat y/n?' blinking from the GM, it would become apparent that this combat is as empty of any participation from them as the overhead light bulb in the room. Pseudo-choices may continue to entertain, but for obvious reasons I consider them to be a poor move for any system.
As to basic choices, there are 'tactical' moves in plenty of games. The Storyteller system, for instance, allows players to make a targeted head-shot, with the penalty of a +2 difficulty (the target number on a dice pool of D10's) and the bonus of an additional die. There is a simple answer to whether or not one should take this tactical move - if you're rolling 4 or more dice then you take it, otherwise you don't. Again, this is a fake choice with a slightly thicker disguise. It suggests a little skill to the game, and suggests players are making a 'brave move' when they go for that head-shot. In reality, no deep tactical decisions are being made, a more skilled player simply knows not to take that option.
Lastly, there are complete choices - the ones which will allow a player to make decisions without being told by the system what the best decision is. Here, players can gain real advantages in terms of results. What should be worrying is that few games can lay claim to a Complete Choice being present anywhere in the game. A Complete Choice would allow a more skilled player to get ahead - perhaps being able to beat a less skilled player with a more experienced character. The only place we commonly find such Complete Choices is within character creation. Within D&D's 3rd Edition, a multitude of Feats, Classes and Spells could be selected. Good players could get ahead, so the system allows true agency. Unfortunately after character creation the choices leave the game; it's an initial rush of ability for the players, followed by an eternal lag into becoming a part of the dice-rolling engine in a system which doesn't require further player input.
Of course, this isn't to say that games do not present real choices, but those choices are system-independent. If the players could attack a group of thugs or just hand over the money - and if both are presented as real options - then that's a real choice. However, the system isn't giving you the choice, it's a choice which you could have had in any system. The systems present in most games do not support any decision-making.
Different games often require different variables and results - this is a matter of genre, and there can only be a good or bad set of results in relation to what a game is attempting to represent. However, the mapping of variable to results is far more objective - it should require as little time as possible, and therefore as little computing-power as possible. If a game adds more possible results at the cost of more system-faff then that might, for some, be a preferred option. However, for any given range of fixed results, the system should provide those results with the least amount of faff. People asking for 'more crunchy' systems are, I suspect, imagining that a wider range of results necessitates more faff when in fact it does not.
In addition, while so many systems lack in-game Complete Choices, we can still see that they are good, and that they are well worth paying for in terms of a little system-faff.
These two goods a game can provide - efficient rules and complete choices - are paid for with system faff. And while two people may be able to stomach more or less system faff, or enjoy better mapping or more variables to different degrees, there are objectively better and worse ways of making a system, given any fixed variables and desire for complete choices. There are plenty of pairs of games which share nearly identical inputs and outputs, but one is simply slower than the other. There are also games which add small details which are unwanted at the cost of too much faff. Take for example D&D 3.5's distinction between spotting something, hearing something and searching for things - that's a lot of fine distinctions between one's ability to perceive things, and may as well have just been a perception stat (as it was later).
The value of a complete choice must be high, or else we only value the illusion the game gives of choices. However, it will inevitably vary in value from person to person. If the value of a choice could be given an absolute number, in comparison to a roll or recording of an action's results then systems could be given a more complete rating of how good they are. For example, in an earlier post I suggested that a die roll be given 2 'faff points'. If a complete choice is valued at 4 faff-points then we are saying we are ambivalent between one system, and an identical system which adds in two additional dice rolls and a single complete choice.