💾 Archived View for ttrpgs.com › system_care.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 15:58:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Gaming systems are incredibly important. Chess provides a better game than Monopoly. The benefits of a good system won't present themselves immediately - and that's a feature, not a bug. The system should provide a good time, not spent your time telling you why it provides a great time. But I will. I will tell you why all this matters.
When people spend 45 minutes going through some combat in D&D, or the old World of Darkness, they can tell something's off. When they have to tell a player how the body-part hit-locations work for the tenth time, they may initially blame the player, but once three players have problems remembering how it all works, they will start to blame the system. And in each case the player's instincts have shown them the truth, without any reliance on maths or system analysis.
Forty-five minutes is just too long.
If you have two combats per D&D session, you stand to lose 1.5 hours to number-crunching, and if another system might resolve each combat in 5 minutes, then 1 hour and 20 minutes of no-fun-crunch make the difference between good and bad systems.
I once played a game of Dark Ages: Vampire where one character played a Kuldonic sorcerer, with Earth-Magic. One power allowed him to have the earth reach up and trap victims by the leg. The rules gave no further help with how this changes what they can do during combat, but it didn't matter - the combatant had been disabled (since they could not attack), and the rest piled in. Each round, the sorcerer cast another spell, trapping another person, once the spells had constrained every enemy, the group loosed arrows at them until they died.
The game had lost something of the genre - almost every combat problem could be solved with a single trick. Being 'over-powered' does not seem like the right description: vampires should be over-powered, relative to most of their surroundings. The problem lay in the shift of genre - they had no more enemies.
Dozens of systems leave players with nothing to do. When a PC falls, nearly dead, it leaves the player with nothing to do. When a ritual spell requires 3 rounds to cast, it leaves the player with nothing to do. When everyone sends 'the social character' (with the highest Charisma Bonus) to do all the talking, then it leaves all the other players with nothing to do.
Systems can easily leave people with 'nothing to do', which promotes long periods of players staring at their phones.
Once someone stews deep in contemplation of whether +1 to the attacker, or -1 to the opponent makes more sense, one might be tempted to say 'calm down, it's just a game system, people don't care about system - focus on presentation'.
This temptation is wrong.
I don't care about my washing machine, but when it broke down, I noticed. I still don't care about how all those weights and wheels work, but I care that it works. When players talk about their game rather than the system, this should not indicate to anyone that the system does nothing - it indicates that the system has done well.
Ignoring a game's system means ignoring the game that people play, even if they don't speak about the mechanics directly.
Systems may also seem subjective. Some of this comes down to different GMs (and players mistaking the GM's results for the system's). Other times, the same system has provided a good game to one and not the other. But none of the seemingly subjective results really show that people's preferences rely entirely on personal taste.
Where two systems give the same result, but one resolves in half the time, that one makes a better game. And if two systems resolve at the same time, but one provides richer information, that one makes a better game.
Finally, genre provides the largest contributor to the illusion of subjectivity. Where GURPS might provide a game set in WWI, which focusses heavily on simulation, Cairne will provide gritty fantasy. Whenever RPG systems have different genres, we should understand them as tools designed to do different things, although we can still measure their success with similar tools.
A difference in system can make the difference between bored and not-bored players, even with the greatest of GMs.
For more ranty analysis, see the article on what systems do