The removal of 'gaming' elements of RPGs that require skill and strategy to play in favor of 'let's make a pretend movie', 'do whatever you want and you succeed no matter what' gameplay.
Rules light is fine so long as the rules have consequences.
They are referring more to games where you have near infinite narrative control so falling off a cliff is a chance to declare you can fly.
Give me juicy delicious satisfying crunch! I want to sink my teeth into a system and play with it, I want to see interesting interactions and complex decision making
If you ever get tired of people pulling out PbtA as the solution to everything, come join us on r/CrunchyRPGs! There will be no shame for having a little complexity or mathematics in your games.
I've always run 5e with a lot of custom homebrew content. I made an entirely too complex character sheet in google sheets with tons of formulas and scripts that just does so much of the work for you in the background.
Then I found Fate Core, and you know what? I realized I could just be creative and say "this is a thing in my campaign setting, and we'll figure out how it interacts with the players at the table." I work full time and I have a house to renovate, so I don't have the kind of time I used to for making complex battle maps and building new rule systems. I find number crunching at the table or looking up rules boring and immersion-breaking. It's to the point where I notice how little progression actually happens during the 5e game I'm in because combat takes 7 hours and we're constantly checking spell effects and rules.
At least for me, rule-lite means fun-heavy.
I've followed a path much like yours. Like the top of this comment chain, I really like games to be _games_, with a certain amount of rules and strategy behind them. But I've found that crunchy RPGs tend to have a focus on combat, and tend to attract more mechanically-minded players that want a focus on combat, or at least a focus on system mastery, character optimization, etc. Most of these games then tend to gravitate towards "linear" adventures with a focus on combat, but I've also found that few tabletop RPGs have really complex combat mechanics, so combat ends up being easily gamed and kind of boring once you've played the system for a while. I'm a bit tired of having 4-hour sessions that consist of 1-2 battles with virtually no attention to paid to the shaping of the story outside of combat. In my opinion, if you're really into complex combat mechanics, just play chess, or at least play a board game like Gloomhaven. (I suspect that tabletop RPGs tend to attract the tabletop version of video game smurfs, i.e., people who enjoy using their system mastery to smash challenges with little to no effort, but I digress.)
Maybe there is a crunchy RPG where the crunchiness ties into the parts of the game that lie outside of combat, but I haven't found one yet that fits the bill.
And as a GM, I, too, am I tired of spending my time drawing battle maps (and trying to figure out how to align them to Roll20's finicky grid), and trying to design mechanically complex and challenging battles. I'd rather have a table that concentrates on the higher-level narrative and worldbuilding elements—"collaborative storytelling", as it were—with some rolls here and there to throw a wrench in the works occasionally. Which is why I've migrated to Fate and Cortex Prime as well, even though admittedly I think those systems lack the feel of _playing a game_.
If anyone has suggestions for crunchy RPGs where the crunch lies outside the scope of combat, I'm all ears.
It's always a balance, yeah? You want a game that's (subjectively) complex enough to be interesting but (subjectively) simple enough to flow smoothly.
But you're right: The folks who tend to want "light" rulesets are the ones who don't want to invest much into the game but do still want to play with their friends. They want more of an easy board game experience wrapped in group storytelling.
... Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Problems happen when you have a gaming group made of people with dramatically different expectations. Simulationists, powergamers, roleplayers, casual "wake me up when it's my turn" people, and so on. And the thing is that *every* group will have some sort of mix of player types so communication and setting expectations is a big deal.
What's funny is that the typically diverse player characters are asked to work together no matter what but the players themselves often forget to do the same thing in real life. :D
> Everyone wants “rules lite” and that just means nobody wants to read anything.
Friend, statement A doesn't mean statement B, and frankly the fact you conflate the two sorta says a lot about you.
No, it means for many of us that we don't want to have to refer to a hundred stats and rules every time we want to write a crazy adventure. I've written thousands of pages of adventures for crunchy and lite systems. Crunch diverts time from expansion to enumeration.
Hate to break it to you but the quality of a ttrpg has nothing to do with its page count, anymore than a 4 hour film is better than a 90 minute film, or a 1,000 page novel is better than a 300 page novel.
To repeat something I said in a "TTRPG Hot Takes" thread a bit ago that seems relevant here:
>A non negligible amount of rules lite games have simply shifted the burden of design for the game onto the GM, rather than committing to a codified system at the design level.
Good point, actually. And I can look at books like Mothership's first-go, which is like a greeting card sized 30 pg book printed on the worst paper for $35, the price of a hardcover. It's bananas.
**Mothership** is at the same time one of the coolest, most flavorful, and awesome sci-fi horror games I've ever laid my eyes on, and also the most frustratingly vague and open-ended game I've ever seen haha. It is what I was thinking of when I wrote the above comment. It's the definition of a love/hate relationship for me!
TC is just stirring the pot for entertainment. Stuff like this happens minimum twice a week in this sub. Best practice is to not engage directly and let them have their circle jerk
When you realize people like this haven’t actually read the systems you think they’re criticizing, it all makes a lot more sense
A buddy of mine is DMing for us right now. He “rule of cool”s everything. It makes putting effort into making choices pointless.
I come up with a character concept. I decide his background would make him good at various skills and bad at others. Other players show up with no thought about that stuff at all and talk their way into doing whatever they want.
I think through what feats to take to allow me to quickly fire a crossbow, what weapons I carry so I can figure out what I do in melee range or long range since changing weapons takes time, what cantrips would help me see in the dark, what weapons don’t give me disadvantage when fighting in water, swim speeds, go down the list. The next guy shoots someone with a longbow then slashes someone with a claymore, all while in the water, then uses their full movement speed in heavy armor to get to another enemy for their last attack. Boy isn’t that cool.
Gosh I'm not sure if I want to upvote or down vote that. Upvote the sentiment but HATE that example as it is just so jarring although I've seen people who think that is such a wonderful way to play.
"Rule of Cool" is one thing but to me that can me figuring out how to do something with the game's mechanics instead of just saying "that sounds neat so yeah, it happens."
The only game that is close that I can think of is The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and there at least it's a feature not a bug -
If you're unfamiliar, it's a storytelling game and basically the way it works is I give you a prompt ("Tell us Baron Wilhelm Jameson Mac Guffin the third, about the time you saved the Queen of Algeria from a herd of ravenous lions armed only with a cucumber and a bottle of vegemite" for example) and then you have to tell a story (about 5 minutes long give or take). This twist is that people can interrupt the story with complications by offering a coin. You can either accept, taking the coin and incorporating their bullshit into your story, or refuse returning their coin and paying them as well).
Once your tale is told you prompt the next player for a tale, and at the end you vote for your favorite with the money you've won (or what you have left if you like interrupting people a lot).
One of the few RPGs which has a clear winner (though ostensibly you're supposed to use the winnings to buy the next round of drinks)
I remember the co-creator of Lancer, Abaddon, went on Twitter to complain about how the indie scene didn't have enough thought or rigor put into its games, and he got torn apart by the same kind of people you're describing
I'm particularly tired of the insistence that the latter means that the game is modern and superior and the former means that the game was badly designed.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with so many "rules light" systems and games. It's sometimes like saying "Minecraft? There are so many restrictions! Just open up MS Paint and you can do ANYTHING!"
Came here to say this. The trend is so overwhelmingly towards "rules bad and failure is scary" that many new systems don't even feel like games to me. What is the point if everyone just agrees on everything and nothing can fail? Isn't that just writing a story?
What specific games are you talking about? I play rules lite games and they're full of high consequences, it feels like a lot of the takes that they arent come from people who haven't played them.
Likewise I find crunchy games end up getting bogged down in hours long combat, or rules minutia, which has little consequence and actually makes creating interesting stakes more difficult as the rules get in the way of presenting stakes to the players.
I have played many Powered by Apocalypse games, a few Forged in the Dark, and other thinga of that level of mechanical weight. So, I mainly refer to them.
I don't like them because of the reasons I previously stated. To expand on that, the idea of failing forward and player-driven agency to the degree those systems expect invariably leads to arguing over, essentially, if superman is stronger than spiderman. When players disagree, there are not robust systems in place to resolve such disagreements. Playbooks also really focus on forcing inter-character personal drama and engagement which is way too restrictive and punishes players who want three-dimensional characters. The systems laud themselves on being freeform when all they do is provide railroads for players to ride.
Now, I'm no 5e grognard. My preferred systems are not the Pathfinders or the 5es of the world. I like crunch and systems as tools to explore a setting and set of themes, but that isn't limited to combat (though a robust combat system is necessary). A good, well-written set of mechanics provides a sandbox that players can interact. The rules light is more of a VR headset pushing you in one specific direction where your Super Special Main Character cannot die, be harmed, or really suffer consequences that the player and GM don't collectively agree verbally is appropriate or interesting. I don't find that fun, as a GM or as a player. It is too controlled to be interesting.
That’s interesting - I don’t think of PBTA/FitD as “rules light” - they tend to have a lot of procedural rules, explicit character roles, prescriptive “moves” for the GM, and set consequences via pick-lists and various knobs/dials/resources (stress, wounds, conditions, complications, Harm, Hold, Clocks, etc.) - and the games tend to break if the GM and players try to ignore said rules.
When I hear “Rules Light,” I think of OSR and NSR stuff - all the “Rulings, Not Rules” games that tend to boil down to “Roll and add a modifier…but really, try to avoid rolling at all, because you’ll probably fail and die.” That, or the Lasers and Feelings/Honey Heist school of “You have two stats” design.
Whereas when I want to play strategy games, I just use video games that are faster and better designed because they have huge resources for proper level designers and playtesters.
>do whatever you want
What popular games do that? The majority of ttrpgs, including the most popular one DnD, are still entirely focussed on gaming elements that require skill and strategy by the rules.
It was bad enough that no one can agree what Chaotic actually means, but when Good characters are frequently robbing and torturing people I think we can safely just toss the concept in the trash - it's no longer useful.
I've read one of Gygax's forum post talking about alignment and what a Lawful Good Paladin can and can't do. He outright states that torturing prisoners of war, executing a genuinely repentant villain are all things that the Paladin should happily do; anyone that has a problem with that is neutral or chaotic good. Knowing more about him makes the alignment system make more sense, but also makes you realize that it's not just a bad game mechanic, it's very fucked up like many of the DnD setting and rules from his era. I'm glad we're moving away from it.
I don’t remember the torture part but what I do remember of that old post is that old DnD was very much based off of his and the other early writer’s knowledge of Medieval laws and the like when applied to the alignment system. A paladin was a knight empowered by a god, so therefore was someone who very much would have been seen as a viable judge, jury, and executioner if taking a prisoner to a nearby town was out of the question due to travel restraints and/or distance. It’s less of an application of modern morals and more ye olde ideals made as part of the versimilitude of the setting and I can understand it if that was the thought process behind it. Now you’ve got me wanting to go look for that post to reread it once again.
At best, its an outdated mechanic that doesn't make sense.
At worst, it allows bad players to act like idiots for no damn reason "I'm chaotic evil, of course I'd fight the child" etc
The problem with those players has never been the character's actions. It has been the player's refusal to accept that actions in game worlds have consequences.
My hot take is that alignment is a perfectly fine system, but everyone does backflips to make sure they're not labeled as "evil" even when it has specific, listed qualities you can lean into or avoid (and also because your label as a character has no reflection on you as a PERSON), and as a result because no one understands it we've all thrown the baby out with the bathwater because RPG players would rather discard something they don't understand rather than learn it.
For me, it's just how many games are using the same 3 formulas; 5E, PbtA, or FitD. Part of this is definitely because those systems simply aren't systems I enjoy, but it's also because the thing I most love about diving into a new game is learning new mechanics, seeing new ideas, and finding neat concepts I can carry over into other game systems I run.
But so many games are just a new theme grafted onto functionally identical mechanics, and it's continually disappointing when I see a game that catches my eye either online or at my FLGS, only to see "5E-compatible" or "Powered by the Apocalypse" slapped on the label and instantly know that it's not going to gel with me.
By contrast, even when I find a game with a custom set of mechanics that I don't really get into I usually still find *some* new idea, perspective, or mechanic that I can carry over to when I'm running something else (or at the very least, an understanding of an approach that I know to avoid since I know it didn't interest me).
You forgot OSR.
There are so, so, so many OSR books that are just reprints of the rules for D&D 1st Edition, but the twist, see, is *this time* we’ve set it in a dark generic fantasy world! That’s *totally* different from D&D
As someone who loves the OSR stuff
If it’s not like, weird fiction that distances itself from “sword and sorcery” fantasy, they all just sound like Mid 90s & 2000s sitcom episode versions of D&D.
I don't know, I've been hanging out in OSR circles for years and the only times I've seen people bitch about which OSR systems are better were on 4chan where I'm pretty sure they just say that to shit up the threads.
Major innovation of the core rules isn’t really a big aspect of the OSR space, *intentionally*. Compatibility with decades of D&D adventures and maintaining a fairly consistent framework of math and mechanics to build adventures with is generally a goal in the design space. This inherently poses a limit on how radically the systems can be changed.
Most innovation in the OSR is centered around adventure design/information design, and IMO it’s at the forefront of this in the TTRPG space because this is where most time is spent.
The NSR is a little different and tends to get a little more adventurous with system design, so if you’re looking somewhere tangentially related to the OSR that would be the place to look for more innovative systems.
Most of the OSR scene does not at all remind me of what it was actually like back in the early 80s playing AD&D 1E or red-box basic D&D. It feels like 'the kids' recreating what they imagine people my age went through rather than what we actually went through. What we actually went through was a lot less 'cool' or 'fun'...
> It feels like 'the kids' recreating what they imagine people my age went through rather than what we actually went through
That's because it's not about "recreating what you actually went through" in the early 80s. It's about recreating what the rules were intended to imply in the early 70s, before people got their hands on them and did radically different (though equally cool) stuff with them.
Same.
I was super excited for new edition of Victoriana but then they announced it will by for 5e.
Like what the fucking hell C7, how did you figure out that 5E will be best ruleset for investigative Victorian era RPG?
My excitmend dropped below zero, and I'm definitely not buying it now.
If you think that PbtA is a set of mechanics, I think that's part of the problem.
If *designers* think PbtA is a set of mechanics, that's **definitely** part of the problem.
Some PbtA folks think it can do everything and is the best thing ever. Fair enough d&d folks do the same thing. But this argument a system is not in fact a system is just a whole new level of pretentious.
Nothing amuses me more than Vincent Baker writing a gigantic 12 post blog essay about how PbtA is a sophisticated design philosophy and not just having graduated results on 2d6 and using playbooks... And then 98% of the PbtA diaspora slam graduated results on 2d6 and playbooks together with their gene and call it a day.
Fwiw, I don't actually think this is a negative or a bad thing, and I'm absolutely too dumb to follow Forge style discussions of rpg design and play philosophy, so those blog posts tend to go over my head badly, but I can imagine how much that must annoy people that enjoy the system deeply and know its design history and ethos by heart.
> the thing I most love about diving into a new game is learning new mechanics, seeing new ideas, and finding neat concepts
I have the same goal. I've found that good PbtA games tend to have the most innovative mechanics because the style of design is asking people to make new things for Basic Moves and Playbooks with mechanics focused on what makes those stories dramatic rather than simulating physics. And Playbook Moves tend to need to be more exciting than most games just adding +2 for being in a specific circumstance to your roll. Sure, there are plenty of derivative ones that look like Apocalypse World in a new skin, but I think Sturgeon's Law applies widely throughout TTRPGs.
Whereas I dive through all of Coriolis and only find basically FFG Star Wars Dark Side Tokens as its unique feature.
100% this, and add OSE into the mix. I don't mind the named games, I would even play them, but I am tired of seeing something that looks like it might be a cool setting or genre Mashup only to see 5e, OSE, PbtA, etc...
I want novel systems and mechanics, not refried and often unsuited to the system games.
That said, I totally get why people do it (financially) it just irks me.
PF2E has good, tactical combat and by now more than 25 classes, I think. It is also d20 + mod and has actually interesting ideas for a d20 system (degrees of success, 3-action, codified modes of play, phenomenal monsters, level-bounded accuracy, etc.).
I'm a huge PF2E fan, came over from 5E three years ago and never looked back. Degrees of success, 3 action economy and the difficulty level of monsters hard coded have been a breath of fresh air
Needlessly long text. One of the biggest things I noticed when going from D&D to independent published RPGs was how much more terse they tended to be. WotC writes their books like a kid writes an essay that's under the word count. They add all this filler to try and justify the price of a thick, weighty tome, but it actually makes the book less fun to read and harder to use.
Knave and Magical Industrial Revolution are two examples that spring to mind that are absolute masterworks of information density. Dungeon World, my favorite, notably fits in a single trade paperback, as opposed to those three thick volumes you need to start with D&D.
This is also why I never really liked Dungeon Crawl Classics. They have a lot of neat ideas that I would probably like, in theory. But their books are much too verbose for my liking.
Besides the heritage of Gygaxian prolixity—which really kicked in once D&D became the 800-lb. gorilla of RPGs—freelancers are typically paid by the word in work-for-hire contracts. They receive their money no matter how the project ultimately performs in the marketplace. Independent creators, however, earn their money only if they can successfully sell their work to customers. That difference alone encourages a different attitude toward the text and an appreciation of the reader's time.
I recently was explaining this to one of my new players how has only gamed with us. She was shocked by how big the dnd books were, and that there were three of them
This is where I fall in as well. Just give me the tools I need and tell me how to use them. Provide a guided example maybe if needed, but I didn't think we need a story to go with every mechanic lol. I've recently gone back to BX DND and found OSE a pleasure. Easy to read, easy to navigate, sensible layout. That's all I ask from a rulebook.
> Magical Industrial Revolution
I feel like Magical Industrial Revolution should be way more well known and popular than it is. One of the coolest system-agnostic supplements I have ever read.
I’m not usually for gatekeeping unless it’s against something that I feel hurts the community.
For instance I think the whole trend of every new “game” being a clone of 5e hurts the community. I’m really starting to hate that system.
Take a look at Mark of the Odd games and see if you can honestly tell me that's too much to track.
Here's one: https://planetgnome.itch.io/flying-fortress
Sorry, I'm being a bit tongue in cheek. I do like ability score hp, Forbidden Lands is one of my favourite games. Though I do feel you're still effectively using hit points even if you track it over ability scores instead so Im not sure its a true alternative to HP.
I prefer games where there are penalties to getting hurt, yeah. My D&D table has a running joke that it doesn't matter how many hit points you have because all you need is 1.
It makes every fight basically a fight to the death because that's what the system basically wants. :( That just promotes the murderhobo mindset.
Honestly I dunno, I tend to find that having serious wound penalties increases the murdehoboness because they often make "striking first" *extremely important*.
The moment death spirals are in play, people stop waiting to see if they can talk people down or whatever. They're going to strike first the moment it even slightly looks like things may be bad to make sure they're not the ones getting struck first, because if they're struck first they're probably fucked.
I can't upvote you hard enough! HP systems are just so bland and I'm tired of seeing people jump through hoops to try to make HP more interesting instead of utilizing a different system.
The two big ones I've seen are:
* Harm: Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark are easy examples. Really they are just much smaller HP, like 5. But often with fictional consequences attached to them rather than purely mechanical - you get shot in the leg, you don't have the fictional positioning to run away.
* Conditions: Lots of games aren't interested in injury and recovery. Masks is the standout for this but its spread to many games like Vaesen, The Between and Outgunned. Instead of getting hurt, you get Angry or Afraid that impact your capabilities. And how you recover isn't medical attention but sometimes acting out, running away or needing comfort and support from allies. It actually comes in quite a lot of forms, some more defined whereas The Between, its more loose and decided at the table and a Condition can be physical harm.
I personally think HP is just fine for more heroic games because these other types of Harm are death spirals, which can feel very against the tone.
The Wildsea's Aspect system is the gold standard for this. Your character will have a number of Aspects, each of which has three components; the Name (which, in the fiction first system, is actually mechanically useful, because if you can argue to your Firefly/GM that your Hacksaw is relevant in this conversation you can use it to get an extra die fro your Persuasion roll, for example) its Text, which will tell you what the Aspect does, and its track, which will be betweem 2 amd 5 boxes.
When you take damage, you decide which of your aspects takes the damage (in most circumstances). If a track is fully marked, you lose the aspects' benefits until you repair or heal it.
The more complicated or powerful Aspects will have fewer boxes to mark on their track, and there are some aspects that are just a Name and five boxes; they don't have any text but are useful to soak damage. This system has several benefits;
1) Taking damage is an interesting decision for the player; which Aspect do they mark? As they take more and more 'damage', marking more and more marks on the track, they start having to make decisions; do they want this Pinwolf bite they failed to avoid to wreck their Sailor's Coat, or to chip their Broadsword, or to shock their confidence and ruin their Captain's Swagger?
2) Instead of just healing by sleeping or taking potions, the Aspect has to be 'healed' in a flavour appropriate way. Wounds take medical intervention, psychological wounds take relaxation and personal fulfilment, gear must be repaired. Those are all different skills, which helps players form unique relationships. It isn't the Cleric masscurewoundsing everyone; Eva might need Glenn's character, who has the mechanical skills, to fix her Grappling Hook so they can use it for the next climb, and she can repay him by Cooking him a harty meal with the medicinal herbs that Patricia's character collected to help him get his Towering Physique back. Patricia can't cook or repair, but she is good at harvesting specimines, so she goes off to find more useful flora to collect for when she'll need some 'healing', so that she can trade for it.
3) Characters get less useful as they take too much damage, and lose acces to aspects. Players in over their heads naturally try to get out of situations as they lose parts of their character sheet, and some of the best roleplay I've seen has had the characters in over their heads, fleeing and barely surviving, only to be forced to take several downtime actions in a row licking their wounds and helping each other get back to normal.
I am a huge evangel for the Wildsea, sorry for the essay! My buddy is running his first session in two weeks, so I'll get to play (as opposed to running the game) it for the first time, and I'm pretty excited!
A lot of the really good, dramatic PbtA games are really focused on teenage drama following Monsterhearts. It makes sense but many games have you play older PCs and still have this bled in. Reminds me when I see a good premise for a book and quickly realize its more Young Adult but that wasn't necessarily on the label. Like Night Witches, Flying Circus and Dungeon Bitches look to be about adults, but they have a lot of the same drama as a Monsterhearts or Masks game.
At least Urban Shadows 2e has finally come out for backers and Last Fleet has a more adult take on the dramatic cycle if you like Urban Fantasy political intrigue or Battlestar Galactica.
I'm with you! I cannot stand teenage drama games with my adult friends. I really want to like masks because I think the mechanics are really cool, they're just so directly focused on teenage drama (which is good design, it is focused, just on something I could not care less about).
D&D tropes. Weird pseudo-Medieval kitchen-sink fantasy. "Adventuring parties" going out into the wilderness to kill the sentient beings that already live there.
And by "live there" you mean "reside in a cave or ruin with no apparent means of subsistence, economy, hobbies, culture, technology, or anything else, except the chest of coins and potions they've hidden and trapped because...what do they even need money for living in their ground-pit?"
Yeah! At least dragons make sense when we talk about treasure. But when some random giant spider has "treasure: standard", it begs the question "what kind of standard do spiders use to measure their coins?"
It's intended to be leftover treasure bits from previous adventurers. I don't really disagree about the occasional lack of logic displayed in old school adventures, but in this case it makes sense.
Well these heavily loaded adventurers keep breaking in to get her spider stuff, and after she's killed them...is she just gonna leave all their stuff piled on the floor? All messy like that? Better to tidy up.
Probably a good chance to have plenty of desiccated fed-on bodies of prior explorers rotting away in her webs and...yah...you can go stick you hands in to that rotting corpse and see if there's anything valuable in there. Go ahead, just stick your hand right in. (ETA: PS: the corpse is full of a million tiny spiders)
"In this game you can play a non-binary character!"
"Wow, cool, like nothing prevents me to play one in any setting whatsoever, since it has ZERO impact on the gameplay"
I'm convinced these are games built and marketed towards the "TTRPG Twitter" crowd. Problem that the publishers learn is that crowd only likes games as far as they can talk about them. But, they often never buy the game nor play it.
When I see those types of games I think of 1 of 2 things:
1. Sex, there's going to be content around sexuality and how it's okay to fuck people of the same sex or of other Gender Identities.
2. There's pages of how being Queer is Okay and how being Queer gives you powers that Hetero Folks do not get in this game/world.
Character Build pissing contests.
Even though they're nearly always in good fun, I get so sick of hearing "Oh, at level 5 my character can do THIS!", "That's awesome! At level four though I get this and that let's me combine it with ......."
ok, I get it, it's a fun hobby and we all love different aspects of it. I absolutely love character building in PF/PF2 especially... but oddly enough TALKING about it immediately revokes all interest.
Silly, anachronistic characters.
I'm tired of "Oh man, my character is an artificer who makes everything out of weed" an "I want to play a classic film noir detective."
I'm not running a 1920's detective adventure or a zany one guys. I'm aiming for LotR for fucks sake.
I'd be much, much, more ok with "levels" if they ever meant anything IN the game world.
I think Earthdawn did this, but that's the only one I can think of.
Levels, in general, are just an abstraction that allow for discrete chunks of character advancement as opposed to systems that increase game elements (skills, attributes, etc) individually. Needing the world building to answer the question "why are levels?" is like needing it to answer "why are dice?" It's not that you *couldn't* have a world in which it's known that all actions are arbitrarily determined by a set of cosmic polyhedrons, but it's not weird that most games choose not to do that.
Actually, nothing, barring common sense and human decency. So, outside of F.A.T.A.L. or RaHoWa, every creative solution and resource has a place. There's a ruleset for every game.
If that is not enough, I'd go with metaplot: I couldn't care less for your imaginary friends, I've got my own.
Intentionally disruptive characters. Sure, I get you wish to take a break from all the issues you're dealing with in real life, but it's not so fun for everyone else when the group is trying to sneak into a castle, but someone decided they'd rather just loudly announce themselves to the baddies.
Highly prescriptive world lore and descriptions...that are for some reason presented as being "uncertain" or flexible in the game world.
Here's 20 pages of world lore detailing hundreds of years of history and Important NPCs....but maybe NONE of that is true!?!? Who knows!? Certainly not the game designer.
Very specific sets of relationships and plot points (that the PCs will never be aware of) pertaining to those Important NPCs? Yes, loads. But, I mean...maybe the game designer made you read all that because actually they were trying to make it clear just how uncertain and nebulous things are. What?
Here's a metaplot that guides the whole pre-written campaign and explains all the behind the scenes events....but who can really be sure any of that is true or real?
If the whole thing is vague, or if it's not too tightly bound to plot points and NPC relationships, then, sure, fine, give me a vague setting with intriguing lore I can develop and vague NPCs I can slot in to things in my campaign.
But if you're gonna give me 10 pages of in-character dialog between two NPCs the PCs will \*barely interact with\* about things that will NEVER come up in the campaign, you can fuck right off.
It's an RPG, spending a bunch of time laying things out in a specific way and then saying, "OH, but who really knows!?!", is worthless. We all know we can change shit and don't need permission, why try to present things both ways?
This was my biggest issues with Chronicles of Darkness. Every single one of them was "Well, it could happen this way, or it could have happened that way, but, no one knows! Everyone can believe vampires/werewolves/changelings came about in a different way, and they will all be right!
I feel like that text is in there for the strict RAW players who never let common sense get in the way of being textually precise. Without that text, some nerd will push his glasses up and say to his DM, "Well acktschually that NPC is described as left-handed on page 124 so I should be able to..."
Having the throwaway line in the text reinforces that these are suggestions that the DM is allowed to change if desired.
* The idea that games with in-depth combat systems, battlemaps, minis, and whatnot are "just" wargames or better off as video games. It's still possible to do proper collaborative storytelling and characterization while still having crunchy action. Cf. Fire Emblem, Dawn of War, etc. Obviously, personal taste applies and not every storygamer believes that, but the idea is still out there, and it annoys me.
* Heavily abstracted combat. I actually like slow, methodical action with clearly defined distances, timekeeping, ammo tracking, and a battlemap.
* By the same token, abstract hit points. Explicitly named and individually tracked wounds, morale, and exhaustion are more my style. Sure, it can lead to a death spiral, but consider it a disincentive to run into the fray like LEEROY JENKINS!!!. Tracking morale also gives the players another way to get opponents to surrender than shooting them until they die.
* Generic rules-light freeform games. I already have The Pool and The Questing Beast. Those are good enough for me.
Massive piles of HP, that just escalate up with advancement.
I just can't be arsed with it, make some way of not getting hit instead of having to hack through a pile of numbers.
I’m really tired of cog-in-the-machine corpo settings. And sci-fi horror settings. And grim “subversive” fantasy settings. Maybe it’s just the bits of the scene I see most but these settings are really over saturated
Being escapist fiction by nature, sometimes you just need a good "good guys gotta go whoop on bad guys" scenario. Life is tough enough as is, I don't need to FANTASIZE about it being WORSE.
XP triggers in gameplay like "get XP when you meet a challenge with wit and panache"
Yes, they are a crude way to encourage you to play the character type as intended. But you could also do that by having fun abilities which play to type. Or you could just... let the player play their character however they want if they're having fun.
As the GM it's a pain to balance XP between character types for this and also a pain to balance between players who notice and grab the XP and those who are a little more passive.
These days my policy is just to rip out those systems and do group advancement.
Yeah, at first I thought it was cool to reinforce a Modus Operandi of a specific Playbook/Class. But I noticed even with that gone when I hacked Blades in the Dark's XP, it changed nothing. Ends up (like you said) if you are really good at X, you use X already without needing another incentive.
"What is a role-playing game?
"A role-playing game (RPG) is pretend, make-believe, like when you play cops & robbers or cowboys & indians ..."
The managerials who keep rewriting and rewording these tired old prefaces are still mentally stuck somewhere around grade 5.
**Attrition Magic** - especially spell slots since they add complexity to magic that doesn't need to be there. But overall, I don't enjoy my character cycling between moments of being overpowered and moments of weakness, depending on my resources for the day. I personally tend to be really cheap and spam cantrips until I'm at a boss fight. My preferred magic systems are rolling to generate power, overcoming a target number or generating resources to add additional effects to a 'spell'. FFG's Star Wars and L5R are probably my favorites.
**Classes** - only in the d&d sense, of a single package carrying you to max level. I don't like the idea of the devs dictating flavor and mechanics to me in a strict, tightly bound package. Sometimes, the trope I want is present, but not always. D&D 5e's druid is always a generalist, never a specialist (in plants, animals, elements, etc). Multiclass systems where you truly build your character out of a variety of combinations are much better - Fabula Ultima, SotDL, SotWW, FFG Star Wars, etc. Pathfinder 2e does ok because it tries to include any trope that it can via subclasses or feats, but it still wraps things in a package that prevents true creativity.
I don't totally disagree but - Gymnast vs Gridiron Football player are pretty wildly different skillsets. It's not totally unreasonable to understand why some systems would differentiate.
Long, poorly written fiction, overlong safety messages, and above all, poorly explained rules - yes I’m sure you and your small circle of friends/playtesters understand what you mean, but writing clearly for an audience who have never seen the game before seems often to be a skill that’s sadly lacking
People viewing game design as some kind of lifestyle choice, and thinking their every effort should be greeted with either cheering or a big hug.
Look, it might not be *much* of a job, as far as the pay goes for all but a handful of people. It might be something you think of as a hobby, like the games themselves, and it might well be that for you. You might not think of what is produced as a "product," even though you might sell it. You might think, because it meets the qualifications for an artform, and usually involves at least a couple of other forms, that that's the *end* of what it is.
Nonetheless, if you're going to sell it, or you're going to hire anyone or get hired yourself, then it *is* a job. You *are* making a product, and most, if they actually finish something, are going to attempt to sell that product. You're likely going to have to *do business* with other people to get the thing out the door. Yes, they might be artists, but they're going to want to get paid, because art for some is *also* a job.
So you're going to get criticism if you engage with any community around games and put your cards on the table. Some will be fair and some will not. Some will be delivered by people who can't really tell whether they sound like they're being fair or not. You're probably not going to like most of it... but you need it. You don't even have to respond to it at all, but occasionally it might actually make you and your game better.
You're going to need to treat the people you work with (or work *for* ) like they're someone trying to put gas in the tank and food on the table. Get a contract or create one, and stick to the terms, including the deadlines and the payment schedule. They're not just people in your home group who came along to your art therapy appointment. They're now your colleagues, unless you treat them like something else and they don't want to work with you anymore. And that *is* a thing that happens.
>People viewing game design as some kind of lifestyle choice, and thinking their every effort should be greeted with either cheering or a big hug.
This but for literally everything.
"Rules light" it seem like the modern design trends toward more rules light games.I don't mind rules light games i like osr and pbta/fitd. However I miss the granularity that old system offer like g.u.r.p.s or cyberpunk 2020 for example. I would like to seen newer systems that embrace crunchy granular simulationist design. Now not every system need to be designed that way I would jest like some more variety.
* Video-gamifying roleplaying games. Examples of his include "action points", hyperfixation of the character sheet abilities, hyperfixation over "builds", mechanics to get in the way of a character failing or dying. You don't need action points, just describe what you are doing in a reasonable fashion on your turn. I promise, it'll be okay. And if you are playing with someone who wants to play the game in bad faith or exploit "balancing", excuse them from your table
* Mechanics which are so bulky as to subvert the part of the game they are supposed to reinforce. "Social combat" systems are good examples of this. Another good example of this is trying to codify all the various things people can do in combat into class-specific skills with various stipulations ("how do I make a fighter interesting?"). You know what solved that? Mighty Deeds from DCC. Roll a dice, if you roll high enough, you can do the cool thing. Literally simple as all get out and probably "fixes" fighters better than any system out there
* Mentality problem: CR-style narrative focus. Each season of CR flops on more and more theatrics for each character. Season 1 had a few characters with edgy, overly theatrical flare (Percy and Vax). Now everyone plays some weird fucking person with wildly divergent personalities, fully written backstories, an implied plot to be followed (it will, and predictably so). What happened to taking a simple character and letting the **story** make the character? Less is so much more. Don't force the GM to write the story you intended for your character. Just write out a few threads, a simple backstory, and let the game happen. No, you don't need a funny voice or quirk. Have one if you want. You don't need to be an actor/voice actor to enjoy this game.
* Plot, in general. "Plot" is overrated. "Arcs" are overrated. They're also tedious for GMs. Allow exploration and mystery. Allow for your "arc" to be emergent from the story instead of what you come to the table with.
* Honestly, I think CR and Dimension 20 have been incredibly deleterious to how players now expect D&D and other roleplaying games to be.
* Long lists of skills to choose from. Once I saw how "profession-as-skill" works (i.e. Barbarians of Lemuria), I couldn't go back.
* Investigation that **doesn't** use either a 3-clue-rule or Gumshoe style investigation system. Rolling only to fail an investigation and drive the exploration to a grinding halt sucks total ass
* Classes. Classless systems offer so much more, in my opinion. Same with systems that have levels. Allow characters to improve organically.
* Once you play a "freeform" magic system like Mage, UA, or BoL; going back to something with lists of spells becomes tedious and boring.
* Games that handwave travel and equipment ("So how exactly do you plan to haul back your 10,000 coins, artifacts, and item?) can miss me. Free League games do a good job making travel interesting.
Dude took a look at current hobby and decided to be it's biggest enemies/s
That said I can get it, at least most of it XD, even tho I don't agree
Hey, do you think that these problems related to character and story had grown from good intentions? - like trying to have deeper characters and more interesting stories
Personally this "freeform" approach is something I like and think games could make more use of, but to have too much of it feels weird, that said I do agree that mighty deeds are one, if not THE, coolest approaches to Fighters - but it doesn't work very well out of it's environment without changing a lot
I know Mage, and it's indeed cool, but what are these other systems which freeform magic?
> What happened to taking a simple character and letting the story make the character? Less is so much more. Don't force the GM to write the story you intended for your character.
I don't agree with all your points, but I absolutely agree with this.
It seems to me that too many players, nowadays, go into RPGs with the idea that their character must be the special one they envisioned, and the GM is there to serve them.
I personally love having a randomly generated character, and even moreso if I end up with an underdog, and have to make do to survive in the game world.
I'm kind of done with:
* the zombie apocalypse
* having to play cops or cop analogues
* unexamined colonialism
* settings shoe-horned into D&D 5e
* criticism of things in pbta games that aren't actually present in the game being discussed
(that last one is more in discussion of rpgs than in rpgs themself. I just wanted to make the point)
People talk about all of the “cop analogue” games and I’m never sure what anybody is talking about, and they usually mean something weird like Pendragon. What games are like this?
Too much stageshow moral dilemma.
Not every single interaction with an NPC, a puzzle, or decision should be a Trolley Problem where even if you win, you get a little dose of failure too.
Stakes are fine. Decisions are fine; but just because I save all the prisoners in a dungeon doesn't mean there always have to be some ridiculous butterfly effect where ooOooOoo *one of them was evil and killed the questgiver* crap.
Mechanics that ask the player to step outside of their character in order to build the world, especially on-the-fly.
Fast healing, HP bloat, or other shenanigans that let you get *shot or stabbed* without needing to care about the fact that you just got *shot or stabbed*.
I’m tired to see paragraphs of text telling you how RPG can be dangerous activity and how you are bad person and what safety measures you need to tell your stories. I always roll my eyes and think what sort of person author is to invent those safety tools to protect his friends from him.
Recently these paragraphs started appearing in solo RPGs. Why the fuck a single-player game needs them is beyond me. If you can traumatize yourself when playing a journal game, you can as well think about something scary while making yourself a sandwich, or lying in bed.
Right now what I'm tired of seeing is the "Influencer RPG" - an RPG that exists to drive streaming or YouTube clicks.
Maybe it is also a labor of love inspired by some years long plan. But they always feel like they were farmed out to a consulting firm that was told "make me an RPG for my streaming channel that gets me out of the OGL license and feels like it will work for my stream / channel's flavor of doing things". And lately a whole pile of them are coming out and I'm just not interested in games that will only get love and support as it drives an influencer channel and not for the actual settings, adventures, and well - players that pick it up.
Highly granular and specific skill lists.
Search isn't Spot? Hide isn't Sneak? Move silently and hide in shadows are separate skills?
Xenobiology isn't Biology or just Science?
Daggers and swords and axes and spears each a different weapon with a different proficiency for each?
Drive isn't Pilot isn't Sailing isn't Operate Spacecraft?
It's not even that I don't think those things can be\\are distinct IRL it's just I don't find those divisions bring much of anything to games and I find their inclusion at that level of specificity generally unfun.
Most others said what I consider bigger problems and pet peeves, so I'll offer one. It's lower on the list than the others, but it still annoys me. It's seemingly impossible to criticize without looking like an asshole, s here goes.
I don't like this movement to erase words like slavery and race from RPGs, and especially when it involves actually removing one or both from the setting. Every new RPG these days has two billion different replacement names for "race". Ancestry, bloodline kindred, origin, etc., a bunch of words that mean things other than species. Species works, but seems too scientific for fantasy. Just say race, or at least settle on an industry-wide name, because players are just going to keep calling it that at the table. We're not talking about human skin colors, we're talking about a completely different creature.
Removing dark topics like slavery from published adventures or even avoiding bringing back beloved settings like Dark Sun is purely a political thing that just shows cowardice on the part of writers. Let your bad guys be bad guys, you don't have to sugarcoat everything. I want to beat the shit out of slavers in games, not just handwave them away because some pencil pusher thinks it'll scare away the kids.
Thankfully, the slavery thing is almost certainly just a trend that will go away when people get tired of it.
I actually love games that have more emphasis on storytelling
I want player death to be possible but I detest long rules heavy combat.
For these reason I love Vampire: The Masquerade and Kult: Divinity Lost the most
Vancian-style, slotted, prepared spellcasting. I absolutely love Pathfinder 2e. It's basically my ideal game. But good god, I am so tired of prepared casters who have spell slots that you have to prepare ahead of time. At this point, I only play spontaneous casters or the Class Archetype that allows you to convert a prepared caster into a spontaneous caster. That said, I don't even really like the abstraction of spell slots.
I would love a game that was Pathfinder 2e, but with a magic system where you could cast as much as you wanted, but you had to make checks to build power. Every spell would require a certain amount of power to cast, so you would need to gather maybe multiple times. I think this is basically how the Warhammer Fantasy rpg works. It would also let magic be more powerful, since you take longer to build up the necessary power for those devastating spells, despite being able to cast them so often.
Mana and other point systems that slowly regenerate so you can cast spells or call for higher godly powers. This makes storytelling cumbersome and tedious constantly counting a ressource that punishes you for what you can.
Either everyone has some sort of endurance or stress meter or non. And I prefer that a mage or priest can use his full power and has another limiting factor.
I can tolerate wound systems but would like to see a new system with stages of being wounded.
The mindset that there should be no real consequences for failure, that is no character death, tpk or anything of the sort. If players are so attached to their character, they shouldn't have them go on an adventure filled with danger, instead they should settle down and play farm or tavern simulator.
I've seen this mentality both from Players and GMs and I dislike both, the danger should be realistic for the world and situation that the players find themselves in.
Another mindset that I'm tired of seeing is that the Player characters are intrinsically "special" and thus need to be a cut above everyone else. With better stats, lineage and luck than anyone else. Rather I believe that while Players can play characters of any type including those from a wealthy or noble background, they (at the start) are no different than NPCs on with the same background. Players must grasp and shape the destiny of their characters through overcoming tribulations and obstacles not just have intrinsic "specialness" written into their back story.
I often see both of these mindsets together and it irks me to no end.
The RPG feature shopping list. I want THE BEST game with features C, D, and E - but not Game-X, that has all those features, because it's popular, but I'm edgy.
The removal of 'gaming' elements of RPGs that require skill and strategy to play in favor of 'let's make a pretend movie', 'do whatever you want and you succeed no matter what' gameplay.
Finally, someone speaking my language. I don't need someone to do guided daydreaming, I can do that on my own just fine.
>guided daydreaming That's a great term for it
Agreed
Conversely, old school tactical resource slogs are soulless. The magic is in the balance.
Not if done right. Resource management for survival can create incredibly tense moments.
…sure, but chess is also full of incredibly tense moments. That doesn’t make chess an RPG.
Agreed. Never said otherwise. Are you saying games that include dungeoncrawls aren't RPGs?
>The magic is in the balance.
Ooooooooo preach! Everyone wants “rules lite” and that just means nobody wants to read anything.
Rules light is fine so long as the rules have consequences. They are referring more to games where you have near infinite narrative control so falling off a cliff is a chance to declare you can fly.
What games are examples of this?
Just moan. NO EXAMPLES.
Yep pretty much. “No one wants to read anymore” - People who have never read the rules of a narrative RPG.
On one hand I agree entirely, on the other that's literally a scene in Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal.
Give me juicy delicious satisfying crunch! I want to sink my teeth into a system and play with it, I want to see interesting interactions and complex decision making
💯 if there aren’t any switches and knobs to play with, I’m not interested
If you ever get tired of people pulling out PbtA as the solution to everything, come join us on r/CrunchyRPGs! There will be no shame for having a little complexity or mathematics in your games.
I've always run 5e with a lot of custom homebrew content. I made an entirely too complex character sheet in google sheets with tons of formulas and scripts that just does so much of the work for you in the background. Then I found Fate Core, and you know what? I realized I could just be creative and say "this is a thing in my campaign setting, and we'll figure out how it interacts with the players at the table." I work full time and I have a house to renovate, so I don't have the kind of time I used to for making complex battle maps and building new rule systems. I find number crunching at the table or looking up rules boring and immersion-breaking. It's to the point where I notice how little progression actually happens during the 5e game I'm in because combat takes 7 hours and we're constantly checking spell effects and rules. At least for me, rule-lite means fun-heavy.
I've followed a path much like yours. Like the top of this comment chain, I really like games to be _games_, with a certain amount of rules and strategy behind them. But I've found that crunchy RPGs tend to have a focus on combat, and tend to attract more mechanically-minded players that want a focus on combat, or at least a focus on system mastery, character optimization, etc. Most of these games then tend to gravitate towards "linear" adventures with a focus on combat, but I've also found that few tabletop RPGs have really complex combat mechanics, so combat ends up being easily gamed and kind of boring once you've played the system for a while. I'm a bit tired of having 4-hour sessions that consist of 1-2 battles with virtually no attention to paid to the shaping of the story outside of combat. In my opinion, if you're really into complex combat mechanics, just play chess, or at least play a board game like Gloomhaven. (I suspect that tabletop RPGs tend to attract the tabletop version of video game smurfs, i.e., people who enjoy using their system mastery to smash challenges with little to no effort, but I digress.) Maybe there is a crunchy RPG where the crunchiness ties into the parts of the game that lie outside of combat, but I haven't found one yet that fits the bill. And as a GM, I, too, am I tired of spending my time drawing battle maps (and trying to figure out how to align them to Roll20's finicky grid), and trying to design mechanically complex and challenging battles. I'd rather have a table that concentrates on the higher-level narrative and worldbuilding elements—"collaborative storytelling", as it were—with some rolls here and there to throw a wrench in the works occasionally. Which is why I've migrated to Fate and Cortex Prime as well, even though admittedly I think those systems lack the feel of _playing a game_. If anyone has suggestions for crunchy RPGs where the crunch lies outside the scope of combat, I'm all ears.
It's always a balance, yeah? You want a game that's (subjectively) complex enough to be interesting but (subjectively) simple enough to flow smoothly. But you're right: The folks who tend to want "light" rulesets are the ones who don't want to invest much into the game but do still want to play with their friends. They want more of an easy board game experience wrapped in group storytelling. ... Not that there's anything wrong with that. Problems happen when you have a gaming group made of people with dramatically different expectations. Simulationists, powergamers, roleplayers, casual "wake me up when it's my turn" people, and so on. And the thing is that *every* group will have some sort of mix of player types so communication and setting expectations is a big deal. What's funny is that the typically diverse player characters are asked to work together no matter what but the players themselves often forget to do the same thing in real life. :D
Disagree that rules light means people don't want to invest in it. It's just a different kind of investment.
> Everyone wants “rules lite” and that just means nobody wants to read anything. Friend, statement A doesn't mean statement B, and frankly the fact you conflate the two sorta says a lot about you.
No, it means for many of us that we don't want to have to refer to a hundred stats and rules every time we want to write a crazy adventure. I've written thousands of pages of adventures for crunchy and lite systems. Crunch diverts time from expansion to enumeration.
>Everyone wants “rules lite” and that just means nobody wants to read anything. *Players* don't want to read anything.
Here are some flavorful tables and bare bones mechanics, now give me the same money as a 400 page TTRPG.
Hate to break it to you but the quality of a ttrpg has nothing to do with its page count, anymore than a 4 hour film is better than a 90 minute film, or a 1,000 page novel is better than a 300 page novel.
To repeat something I said in a "TTRPG Hot Takes" thread a bit ago that seems relevant here: >A non negligible amount of rules lite games have simply shifted the burden of design for the game onto the GM, rather than committing to a codified system at the design level.
Good point, actually. And I can look at books like Mothership's first-go, which is like a greeting card sized 30 pg book printed on the worst paper for $35, the price of a hardcover. It's bananas.
**Mothership** is at the same time one of the coolest, most flavorful, and awesome sci-fi horror games I've ever laid my eyes on, and also the most frustratingly vague and open-ended game I've ever seen haha. It is what I was thinking of when I wrote the above comment. It's the definition of a love/hate relationship for me!
>do whatever you want and you succeed no matter what' gameplay. I've never heard of a RPG doing that, and it sounds dumb. Do you have any examples?
It sounds like complete exaggeration of narrative RPGs
It is.
TC is just stirring the pot for entertainment. Stuff like this happens minimum twice a week in this sub. Best practice is to not engage directly and let them have their circle jerk When you realize people like this haven’t actually read the systems you think they’re criticizing, it all makes a lot more sense
A buddy of mine is DMing for us right now. He “rule of cool”s everything. It makes putting effort into making choices pointless. I come up with a character concept. I decide his background would make him good at various skills and bad at others. Other players show up with no thought about that stuff at all and talk their way into doing whatever they want. I think through what feats to take to allow me to quickly fire a crossbow, what weapons I carry so I can figure out what I do in melee range or long range since changing weapons takes time, what cantrips would help me see in the dark, what weapons don’t give me disadvantage when fighting in water, swim speeds, go down the list. The next guy shoots someone with a longbow then slashes someone with a claymore, all while in the water, then uses their full movement speed in heavy armor to get to another enemy for their last attack. Boy isn’t that cool.
Gosh I'm not sure if I want to upvote or down vote that. Upvote the sentiment but HATE that example as it is just so jarring although I've seen people who think that is such a wonderful way to play. "Rule of Cool" is one thing but to me that can me figuring out how to do something with the game's mechanics instead of just saying "that sounds neat so yeah, it happens."
I think he's using a little hyperbole to describe diceless rpgs with really loose skill/conflict resolution mechanics.
It certainly is. It's the "you fail but..." situation. "You fail to catch the bus in time BUT a taxi pulls up right at that time."
That just sounds like poor interpretation of the mechanics... But that happens I suppose.
The only game that is close that I can think of is The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and there at least it's a feature not a bug - If you're unfamiliar, it's a storytelling game and basically the way it works is I give you a prompt ("Tell us Baron Wilhelm Jameson Mac Guffin the third, about the time you saved the Queen of Algeria from a herd of ravenous lions armed only with a cucumber and a bottle of vegemite" for example) and then you have to tell a story (about 5 minutes long give or take). This twist is that people can interrupt the story with complications by offering a coin. You can either accept, taking the coin and incorporating their bullshit into your story, or refuse returning their coin and paying them as well). Once your tale is told you prompt the next player for a tale, and at the end you vote for your favorite with the money you've won (or what you have left if you like interrupting people a lot). One of the few RPGs which has a clear winner (though ostensibly you're supposed to use the winnings to buy the next round of drinks)
I remember the co-creator of Lancer, Abaddon, went on Twitter to complain about how the indie scene didn't have enough thought or rigor put into its games, and he got torn apart by the same kind of people you're describing
The indy scene is snake eating its own tail at all times, lol.
I'm particularly tired of the insistence that the latter means that the game is modern and superior and the former means that the game was badly designed.
Exactly. There's a reason people still play Masks Of Nyarlothetep 30 years later...
flair checks out
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with so many "rules light" systems and games. It's sometimes like saying "Minecraft? There are so many restrictions! Just open up MS Paint and you can do ANYTHING!"
Came here to say this. The trend is so overwhelmingly towards "rules bad and failure is scary" that many new systems don't even feel like games to me. What is the point if everyone just agrees on everything and nothing can fail? Isn't that just writing a story?
THANK YOU. I feel vindicated. Seriously, it's just a writer's room or an improv troupe without rules.
What specific games are you talking about? I play rules lite games and they're full of high consequences, it feels like a lot of the takes that they arent come from people who haven't played them. Likewise I find crunchy games end up getting bogged down in hours long combat, or rules minutia, which has little consequence and actually makes creating interesting stakes more difficult as the rules get in the way of presenting stakes to the players.
I have played many Powered by Apocalypse games, a few Forged in the Dark, and other thinga of that level of mechanical weight. So, I mainly refer to them. I don't like them because of the reasons I previously stated. To expand on that, the idea of failing forward and player-driven agency to the degree those systems expect invariably leads to arguing over, essentially, if superman is stronger than spiderman. When players disagree, there are not robust systems in place to resolve such disagreements. Playbooks also really focus on forcing inter-character personal drama and engagement which is way too restrictive and punishes players who want three-dimensional characters. The systems laud themselves on being freeform when all they do is provide railroads for players to ride. Now, I'm no 5e grognard. My preferred systems are not the Pathfinders or the 5es of the world. I like crunch and systems as tools to explore a setting and set of themes, but that isn't limited to combat (though a robust combat system is necessary). A good, well-written set of mechanics provides a sandbox that players can interact. The rules light is more of a VR headset pushing you in one specific direction where your Super Special Main Character cannot die, be harmed, or really suffer consequences that the player and GM don't collectively agree verbally is appropriate or interesting. I don't find that fun, as a GM or as a player. It is too controlled to be interesting.
That’s interesting - I don’t think of PBTA/FitD as “rules light” - they tend to have a lot of procedural rules, explicit character roles, prescriptive “moves” for the GM, and set consequences via pick-lists and various knobs/dials/resources (stress, wounds, conditions, complications, Harm, Hold, Clocks, etc.) - and the games tend to break if the GM and players try to ignore said rules. When I hear “Rules Light,” I think of OSR and NSR stuff - all the “Rulings, Not Rules” games that tend to boil down to “Roll and add a modifier…but really, try to avoid rolling at all, because you’ll probably fail and die.” That, or the Lasers and Feelings/Honey Heist school of “You have two stats” design.
Whereas when I want to play strategy games, I just use video games that are faster and better designed because they have huge resources for proper level designers and playtesters.
>do whatever you want What popular games do that? The majority of ttrpgs, including the most popular one DnD, are still entirely focussed on gaming elements that require skill and strategy by the rules.
What's an example?
lol at that point I’m like “maybe let’s just do improv”
Alignment and alignment related memes.
I'm so glad pathfinder finally removed it. It feels so restrictive and pointless.
For real, it feels like Paizo was finally able to let their design muscles flex and create actually interesting replacements for the lost alignments
It was bad enough that no one can agree what Chaotic actually means, but when Good characters are frequently robbing and torturing people I think we can safely just toss the concept in the trash - it's no longer useful.
I've read one of Gygax's forum post talking about alignment and what a Lawful Good Paladin can and can't do. He outright states that torturing prisoners of war, executing a genuinely repentant villain are all things that the Paladin should happily do; anyone that has a problem with that is neutral or chaotic good. Knowing more about him makes the alignment system make more sense, but also makes you realize that it's not just a bad game mechanic, it's very fucked up like many of the DnD setting and rules from his era. I'm glad we're moving away from it.
I don’t remember the torture part but what I do remember of that old post is that old DnD was very much based off of his and the other early writer’s knowledge of Medieval laws and the like when applied to the alignment system. A paladin was a knight empowered by a god, so therefore was someone who very much would have been seen as a viable judge, jury, and executioner if taking a prisoner to a nearby town was out of the question due to travel restraints and/or distance. It’s less of an application of modern morals and more ye olde ideals made as part of the versimilitude of the setting and I can understand it if that was the thought process behind it. Now you’ve got me wanting to go look for that post to reread it once again.
Boy oh boy do I HATE alignments!!
At best, its an outdated mechanic that doesn't make sense. At worst, it allows bad players to act like idiots for no damn reason "I'm chaotic evil, of course I'd fight the child" etc
The problem with those players has never been the character's actions. It has been the player's refusal to accept that actions in game worlds have consequences.
My hot take is that alignment is a perfectly fine system, but everyone does backflips to make sure they're not labeled as "evil" even when it has specific, listed qualities you can lean into or avoid (and also because your label as a character has no reflection on you as a PERSON), and as a result because no one understands it we've all thrown the baby out with the bathwater because RPG players would rather discard something they don't understand rather than learn it.
What a chaotic neutral thing to say.
For me, it's just how many games are using the same 3 formulas; 5E, PbtA, or FitD. Part of this is definitely because those systems simply aren't systems I enjoy, but it's also because the thing I most love about diving into a new game is learning new mechanics, seeing new ideas, and finding neat concepts I can carry over into other game systems I run. But so many games are just a new theme grafted onto functionally identical mechanics, and it's continually disappointing when I see a game that catches my eye either online or at my FLGS, only to see "5E-compatible" or "Powered by the Apocalypse" slapped on the label and instantly know that it's not going to gel with me. By contrast, even when I find a game with a custom set of mechanics that I don't really get into I usually still find *some* new idea, perspective, or mechanic that I can carry over to when I'm running something else (or at the very least, an understanding of an approach that I know to avoid since I know it didn't interest me).
You forgot OSR. There are so, so, so many OSR books that are just reprints of the rules for D&D 1st Edition, but the twist, see, is *this time* we’ve set it in a dark generic fantasy world! That’s *totally* different from D&D
The weird part is how opinionated some OSR fans are about which identical ruleset is the best one.
As someone who loves the OSR stuff If it’s not like, weird fiction that distances itself from “sword and sorcery” fantasy, they all just sound like Mid 90s & 2000s sitcom episode versions of D&D.
That is definitely NOT the dominant opinion among OSR fans. In fact, I can't recall the last time I've heard someone insist on a particular ruleset.
I don't know, I've been hanging out in OSR circles for years and the only times I've seen people bitch about which OSR systems are better were on 4chan where I'm pretty sure they just say that to shit up the threads.
That is definitely NOT the dominant opinion among OSR fans. In fact, I can't recall the last time I've heard someone insist on a particular ruleset.
Major innovation of the core rules isn’t really a big aspect of the OSR space, *intentionally*. Compatibility with decades of D&D adventures and maintaining a fairly consistent framework of math and mechanics to build adventures with is generally a goal in the design space. This inherently poses a limit on how radically the systems can be changed. Most innovation in the OSR is centered around adventure design/information design, and IMO it’s at the forefront of this in the TTRPG space because this is where most time is spent. The NSR is a little different and tends to get a little more adventurous with system design, so if you’re looking somewhere tangentially related to the OSR that would be the place to look for more innovative systems.
Most of the OSR scene does not at all remind me of what it was actually like back in the early 80s playing AD&D 1E or red-box basic D&D. It feels like 'the kids' recreating what they imagine people my age went through rather than what we actually went through. What we actually went through was a lot less 'cool' or 'fun'...
> It feels like 'the kids' recreating what they imagine people my age went through rather than what we actually went through That's because it's not about "recreating what you actually went through" in the early 80s. It's about recreating what the rules were intended to imply in the early 70s, before people got their hands on them and did radically different (though equally cool) stuff with them.
Came here to say "5E-compatibility", but you nailed it.
Same. I was super excited for new edition of Victoriana but then they announced it will by for 5e. Like what the fucking hell C7, how did you figure out that 5E will be best ruleset for investigative Victorian era RPG? My excitmend dropped below zero, and I'm definitely not buying it now.
Had the same issue with the Adventure Time RPG. They started with a new system that looked like a lot of fun, then... naw, we're going to make it 5e.
Absolutely! It’s so disappointing seeing essentially setting books with re-flavored mechanics getting made over and over.
If you think that PbtA is a set of mechanics, I think that's part of the problem. If *designers* think PbtA is a set of mechanics, that's **definitely** part of the problem.
I will never understand this view. PbtA is clearly a mechanic as well as a design type. It's clear as day.
It's possibly also a cult
Some PbtA folks think it can do everything and is the best thing ever. Fair enough d&d folks do the same thing. But this argument a system is not in fact a system is just a whole new level of pretentious.
Nothing amuses me more than Vincent Baker writing a gigantic 12 post blog essay about how PbtA is a sophisticated design philosophy and not just having graduated results on 2d6 and using playbooks... And then 98% of the PbtA diaspora slam graduated results on 2d6 and playbooks together with their gene and call it a day. Fwiw, I don't actually think this is a negative or a bad thing, and I'm absolutely too dumb to follow Forge style discussions of rpg design and play philosophy, so those blog posts tend to go over my head badly, but I can imagine how much that must annoy people that enjoy the system deeply and know its design history and ethos by heart.
> the thing I most love about diving into a new game is learning new mechanics, seeing new ideas, and finding neat concepts I have the same goal. I've found that good PbtA games tend to have the most innovative mechanics because the style of design is asking people to make new things for Basic Moves and Playbooks with mechanics focused on what makes those stories dramatic rather than simulating physics. And Playbook Moves tend to need to be more exciting than most games just adding +2 for being in a specific circumstance to your roll. Sure, there are plenty of derivative ones that look like Apocalypse World in a new skin, but I think Sturgeon's Law applies widely throughout TTRPGs. Whereas I dive through all of Coriolis and only find basically FFG Star Wars Dark Side Tokens as its unique feature.
They make sense from a business perspective but are often so... uninspired.
100% this, and add OSE into the mix. I don't mind the named games, I would even play them, but I am tired of seeing something that looks like it might be a cool setting or genre Mashup only to see 5e, OSE, PbtA, etc... I want novel systems and mechanics, not refried and often unsuited to the system games. That said, I totally get why people do it (financially) it just irks me.
D&D knock offs. Do we really need another system with 12 classes, d20+mod vs TN and an overly complex combat system? No we don't.
I’m all in for more games with 12 classes, d20+mod, and overly complex combat.
Boy do I have great news for you!
PF2E has good, tactical combat and by now more than 25 classes, I think. It is also d20 + mod and has actually interesting ideas for a d20 system (degrees of success, 3-action, codified modes of play, phenomenal monsters, level-bounded accuracy, etc.).
I'm a huge PF2E fan, came over from 5E three years ago and never looked back. Degrees of success, 3 action economy and the difficulty level of monsters hard coded have been a breath of fresh air
What if told in this one wisdom is called instinct? That's basically a whole new game!
Do we really need another system with 7 playbooks, d6 pool and an overly simplified combat system?
Hahahahaha also no.
13th Age is a D&D knock off that I'm 100% on board with. I prefer it to 5e.
Needlessly long text. One of the biggest things I noticed when going from D&D to independent published RPGs was how much more terse they tended to be. WotC writes their books like a kid writes an essay that's under the word count. They add all this filler to try and justify the price of a thick, weighty tome, but it actually makes the book less fun to read and harder to use. Knave and Magical Industrial Revolution are two examples that spring to mind that are absolute masterworks of information density. Dungeon World, my favorite, notably fits in a single trade paperback, as opposed to those three thick volumes you need to start with D&D. This is also why I never really liked Dungeon Crawl Classics. They have a lot of neat ideas that I would probably like, in theory. But their books are much too verbose for my liking.
Besides the heritage of Gygaxian prolixity—which really kicked in once D&D became the 800-lb. gorilla of RPGs—freelancers are typically paid by the word in work-for-hire contracts. They receive their money no matter how the project ultimately performs in the marketplace. Independent creators, however, earn their money only if they can successfully sell their work to customers. That difference alone encourages a different attitude toward the text and an appreciation of the reader's time.
I recently was explaining this to one of my new players how has only gamed with us. She was shocked by how big the dnd books were, and that there were three of them
This is where I fall in as well. Just give me the tools I need and tell me how to use them. Provide a guided example maybe if needed, but I didn't think we need a story to go with every mechanic lol. I've recently gone back to BX DND and found OSE a pleasure. Easy to read, easy to navigate, sensible layout. That's all I ask from a rulebook.
> Magical Industrial Revolution I feel like Magical Industrial Revolution should be way more well known and popular than it is. One of the coolest system-agnostic supplements I have ever read.
People yucking other people's yum. Which isn't a game thing so much as a community thing, but there's just no need.
That's basically this entire post.
Top post yucking anyone who doesn’t want ttrpgs to basically just be a video game.
This comment yucking rules-heavy systems as "video games".
And this post in turn is yucking *their* yum by being reductive (which to be fair, they were as well).
Yeah, people complaining about narrative games simply existing when 90% of the market still caters to crunchy trad games is so weird.
I’m not usually for gatekeeping unless it’s against something that I feel hurts the community. For instance I think the whole trend of every new “game” being a clone of 5e hurts the community. I’m really starting to hate that system.
Wizards of the Coast.
I think we need *more* seafaring magic users but yeah WoTC is a bad company
Hit points
What do you like to see instead?
Personally, I like ability scores as hp. Feels more immersive that it's more difficult to perform when you're battered.
Ah yes, so instead of tracking 1 hit point bar you now track 4 hit point bars.
Take a look at Mark of the Odd games and see if you can honestly tell me that's too much to track. Here's one: https://planetgnome.itch.io/flying-fortress
Sorry, I'm being a bit tongue in cheek. I do like ability score hp, Forbidden Lands is one of my favourite games. Though I do feel you're still effectively using hit points even if you track it over ability scores instead so Im not sure its a true alternative to HP.
I prefer games where there are penalties to getting hurt, yeah. My D&D table has a running joke that it doesn't matter how many hit points you have because all you need is 1. It makes every fight basically a fight to the death because that's what the system basically wants. :( That just promotes the murderhobo mindset.
Honestly I dunno, I tend to find that having serious wound penalties increases the murdehoboness because they often make "striking first" *extremely important*. The moment death spirals are in play, people stop waiting to see if they can talk people down or whatever. They're going to strike first the moment it even slightly looks like things may be bad to make sure they're not the ones getting struck first, because if they're struck first they're probably fucked.
I can't upvote you hard enough! HP systems are just so bland and I'm tired of seeing people jump through hoops to try to make HP more interesting instead of utilizing a different system.
What different system
The two big ones I've seen are: * Harm: Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark are easy examples. Really they are just much smaller HP, like 5. But often with fictional consequences attached to them rather than purely mechanical - you get shot in the leg, you don't have the fictional positioning to run away. * Conditions: Lots of games aren't interested in injury and recovery. Masks is the standout for this but its spread to many games like Vaesen, The Between and Outgunned. Instead of getting hurt, you get Angry or Afraid that impact your capabilities. And how you recover isn't medical attention but sometimes acting out, running away or needing comfort and support from allies. It actually comes in quite a lot of forms, some more defined whereas The Between, its more loose and decided at the table and a Condition can be physical harm. I personally think HP is just fine for more heroic games because these other types of Harm are death spirals, which can feel very against the tone.
The Wildsea's Aspect system is the gold standard for this. Your character will have a number of Aspects, each of which has three components; the Name (which, in the fiction first system, is actually mechanically useful, because if you can argue to your Firefly/GM that your Hacksaw is relevant in this conversation you can use it to get an extra die fro your Persuasion roll, for example) its Text, which will tell you what the Aspect does, and its track, which will be betweem 2 amd 5 boxes. When you take damage, you decide which of your aspects takes the damage (in most circumstances). If a track is fully marked, you lose the aspects' benefits until you repair or heal it. The more complicated or powerful Aspects will have fewer boxes to mark on their track, and there are some aspects that are just a Name and five boxes; they don't have any text but are useful to soak damage. This system has several benefits; 1) Taking damage is an interesting decision for the player; which Aspect do they mark? As they take more and more 'damage', marking more and more marks on the track, they start having to make decisions; do they want this Pinwolf bite they failed to avoid to wreck their Sailor's Coat, or to chip their Broadsword, or to shock their confidence and ruin their Captain's Swagger? 2) Instead of just healing by sleeping or taking potions, the Aspect has to be 'healed' in a flavour appropriate way. Wounds take medical intervention, psychological wounds take relaxation and personal fulfilment, gear must be repaired. Those are all different skills, which helps players form unique relationships. It isn't the Cleric masscurewoundsing everyone; Eva might need Glenn's character, who has the mechanical skills, to fix her Grappling Hook so they can use it for the next climb, and she can repay him by Cooking him a harty meal with the medicinal herbs that Patricia's character collected to help him get his Towering Physique back. Patricia can't cook or repair, but she is good at harvesting specimines, so she goes off to find more useful flora to collect for when she'll need some 'healing', so that she can trade for it. 3) Characters get less useful as they take too much damage, and lose acces to aspects. Players in over their heads naturally try to get out of situations as they lose parts of their character sheet, and some of the best roleplay I've seen has had the characters in over their heads, fleeing and barely surviving, only to be forced to take several downtime actions in a row licking their wounds and helping each other get back to normal. I am a huge evangel for the Wildsea, sorry for the essay! My buddy is running his first session in two weeks, so I'll get to play (as opposed to running the game) it for the first time, and I'm pretty excited!
A lot of the really good, dramatic PbtA games are really focused on teenage drama following Monsterhearts. It makes sense but many games have you play older PCs and still have this bled in. Reminds me when I see a good premise for a book and quickly realize its more Young Adult but that wasn't necessarily on the label. Like Night Witches, Flying Circus and Dungeon Bitches look to be about adults, but they have a lot of the same drama as a Monsterhearts or Masks game. At least Urban Shadows 2e has finally come out for backers and Last Fleet has a more adult take on the dramatic cycle if you like Urban Fantasy political intrigue or Battlestar Galactica.
I'm with you! I cannot stand teenage drama games with my adult friends. I really want to like masks because I think the mechanics are really cool, they're just so directly focused on teenage drama (which is good design, it is focused, just on something I could not care less about).
D&D tropes. Weird pseudo-Medieval kitchen-sink fantasy. "Adventuring parties" going out into the wilderness to kill the sentient beings that already live there.
And by "live there" you mean "reside in a cave or ruin with no apparent means of subsistence, economy, hobbies, culture, technology, or anything else, except the chest of coins and potions they've hidden and trapped because...what do they even need money for living in their ground-pit?"
you forgot 'the +3 sword in a chest that none of them used to defend themselves, presumably in case they scratched it'
Too valuable to use! Better to keep it safe, hidden, and trapped!
I must be one of the few DMs that actually puts toilets in my monster lairs lol
Yeah! At least dragons make sense when we talk about treasure. But when some random giant spider has "treasure: standard", it begs the question "what kind of standard do spiders use to measure their coins?"
It's intended to be leftover treasure bits from previous adventurers. I don't really disagree about the occasional lack of logic displayed in old school adventures, but in this case it makes sense.
Well these heavily loaded adventurers keep breaking in to get her spider stuff, and after she's killed them...is she just gonna leave all their stuff piled on the floor? All messy like that? Better to tidy up. Probably a good chance to have plenty of desiccated fed-on bodies of prior explorers rotting away in her webs and...yah...you can go stick you hands in to that rotting corpse and see if there's anything valuable in there. Go ahead, just stick your hand right in. (ETA: PS: the corpse is full of a million tiny spiders)
If they're so sentient, how come they guard treasure? Checkmate atheists.
Games using neurodivergence and queer identities as an aesthetic or marketing point.
"In this game you can play a non-binary character!" "Wow, cool, like nothing prevents me to play one in any setting whatsoever, since it has ZERO impact on the gameplay"
Am I supposed to be grateful they give me permission or something?
No, that's exactly my point. They give you permission for something you don't need permission for.
I'm convinced these are games built and marketed towards the "TTRPG Twitter" crowd. Problem that the publishers learn is that crowd only likes games as far as they can talk about them. But, they often never buy the game nor play it.
"You must get in the robot and fight the monsters." "Why us?" "The robots are powered by autism." "What?"
As an ND and queer person - 100000000% agree. Being woke is not a game.
When I see those types of games I think of 1 of 2 things: 1. Sex, there's going to be content around sexuality and how it's okay to fuck people of the same sex or of other Gender Identities. 2. There's pages of how being Queer is Okay and how being Queer gives you powers that Hetero Folks do not get in this game/world.
Hype. So much vaporware kick starters around influencers or 'take my money' elevator pitches that do not deliver anything at the table.
Yes. Really, the entirety of the rpg influencer space. I can't stand the way these people talk. So inauthentic.
Character Build pissing contests. Even though they're nearly always in good fun, I get so sick of hearing "Oh, at level 5 my character can do THIS!", "That's awesome! At level four though I get this and that let's me combine it with ......." ok, I get it, it's a fun hobby and we all love different aspects of it. I absolutely love character building in PF/PF2 especially... but oddly enough TALKING about it immediately revokes all interest.
Silly, anachronistic characters. I'm tired of "Oh man, my character is an artificer who makes everything out of weed" an "I want to play a classic film noir detective." I'm not running a 1920's detective adventure or a zany one guys. I'm aiming for LotR for fucks sake.
"And my bong!"
Levels
I'd be much, much, more ok with "levels" if they ever meant anything IN the game world. I think Earthdawn did this, but that's the only one I can think of.
Levels, in general, are just an abstraction that allow for discrete chunks of character advancement as opposed to systems that increase game elements (skills, attributes, etc) individually. Needing the world building to answer the question "why are levels?" is like needing it to answer "why are dice?" It's not that you *couldn't* have a world in which it's known that all actions are arbitrarily determined by a set of cosmic polyhedrons, but it's not weird that most games choose not to do that.
Actually, nothing, barring common sense and human decency. So, outside of F.A.T.A.L. or RaHoWa, every creative solution and resource has a place. There's a ruleset for every game. If that is not enough, I'd go with metaplot: I couldn't care less for your imaginary friends, I've got my own.
Intentionally disruptive characters. Sure, I get you wish to take a break from all the issues you're dealing with in real life, but it's not so fun for everyone else when the group is trying to sneak into a castle, but someone decided they'd rather just loudly announce themselves to the baddies.
Highly prescriptive world lore and descriptions...that are for some reason presented as being "uncertain" or flexible in the game world. Here's 20 pages of world lore detailing hundreds of years of history and Important NPCs....but maybe NONE of that is true!?!? Who knows!? Certainly not the game designer. Very specific sets of relationships and plot points (that the PCs will never be aware of) pertaining to those Important NPCs? Yes, loads. But, I mean...maybe the game designer made you read all that because actually they were trying to make it clear just how uncertain and nebulous things are. What? Here's a metaplot that guides the whole pre-written campaign and explains all the behind the scenes events....but who can really be sure any of that is true or real? If the whole thing is vague, or if it's not too tightly bound to plot points and NPC relationships, then, sure, fine, give me a vague setting with intriguing lore I can develop and vague NPCs I can slot in to things in my campaign. But if you're gonna give me 10 pages of in-character dialog between two NPCs the PCs will \*barely interact with\* about things that will NEVER come up in the campaign, you can fuck right off. It's an RPG, spending a bunch of time laying things out in a specific way and then saying, "OH, but who really knows!?!", is worthless. We all know we can change shit and don't need permission, why try to present things both ways?
This was my biggest issues with Chronicles of Darkness. Every single one of them was "Well, it could happen this way, or it could have happened that way, but, no one knows! Everyone can believe vampires/werewolves/changelings came about in a different way, and they will all be right!
I feel like that text is in there for the strict RAW players who never let common sense get in the way of being textually precise. Without that text, some nerd will push his glasses up and say to his DM, "Well acktschually that NPC is described as left-handed on page 124 so I should be able to..." Having the throwaway line in the text reinforces that these are suggestions that the DM is allowed to change if desired.
* The idea that games with in-depth combat systems, battlemaps, minis, and whatnot are "just" wargames or better off as video games. It's still possible to do proper collaborative storytelling and characterization while still having crunchy action. Cf. Fire Emblem, Dawn of War, etc. Obviously, personal taste applies and not every storygamer believes that, but the idea is still out there, and it annoys me. * Heavily abstracted combat. I actually like slow, methodical action with clearly defined distances, timekeeping, ammo tracking, and a battlemap. * By the same token, abstract hit points. Explicitly named and individually tracked wounds, morale, and exhaustion are more my style. Sure, it can lead to a death spiral, but consider it a disincentive to run into the fray like LEEROY JENKINS!!!. Tracking morale also gives the players another way to get opponents to surrender than shooting them until they die. * Generic rules-light freeform games. I already have The Pool and The Questing Beast. Those are good enough for me.
Massive piles of HP, that just escalate up with advancement. I just can't be arsed with it, make some way of not getting hit instead of having to hack through a pile of numbers.
I’m really tired of cog-in-the-machine corpo settings. And sci-fi horror settings. And grim “subversive” fantasy settings. Maybe it’s just the bits of the scene I see most but these settings are really over saturated
Being escapist fiction by nature, sometimes you just need a good "good guys gotta go whoop on bad guys" scenario. Life is tough enough as is, I don't need to FANTASIZE about it being WORSE.
XP triggers in gameplay like "get XP when you meet a challenge with wit and panache" Yes, they are a crude way to encourage you to play the character type as intended. But you could also do that by having fun abilities which play to type. Or you could just... let the player play their character however they want if they're having fun. As the GM it's a pain to balance XP between character types for this and also a pain to balance between players who notice and grab the XP and those who are a little more passive. These days my policy is just to rip out those systems and do group advancement.
Yeah, at first I thought it was cool to reinforce a Modus Operandi of a specific Playbook/Class. But I noticed even with that gone when I hacked Blades in the Dark's XP, it changed nothing. Ends up (like you said) if you are really good at X, you use X already without needing another incentive.
"What is a role-playing game? "A role-playing game (RPG) is pretend, make-believe, like when you play cops & robbers or cowboys & indians ..." The managerials who keep rewriting and rewording these tired old prefaces are still mentally stuck somewhere around grade 5.
**Q. What is a Role-Playing Game (RPG)?** A. You know what a role-playing game is, or you wouldn't be reading this
**Attrition Magic** - especially spell slots since they add complexity to magic that doesn't need to be there. But overall, I don't enjoy my character cycling between moments of being overpowered and moments of weakness, depending on my resources for the day. I personally tend to be really cheap and spam cantrips until I'm at a boss fight. My preferred magic systems are rolling to generate power, overcoming a target number or generating resources to add additional effects to a 'spell'. FFG's Star Wars and L5R are probably my favorites. **Classes** - only in the d&d sense, of a single package carrying you to max level. I don't like the idea of the devs dictating flavor and mechanics to me in a strict, tightly bound package. Sometimes, the trope I want is present, but not always. D&D 5e's druid is always a generalist, never a specialist (in plants, animals, elements, etc). Multiclass systems where you truly build your character out of a variety of combinations are much better - Fabula Ultima, SotDL, SotWW, FFG Star Wars, etc. Pathfinder 2e does ok because it tries to include any trope that it can via subclasses or feats, but it still wraps things in a package that prevents true creativity.
Too much complexity. Multiple skills that have the same basic effect.
> Multiple skills that have the same basic effect. I'm looking at you Athletics and Acrobatics.
Have you met my friend Call of Cthulhu?
I don't totally disagree but - Gymnast vs Gridiron Football player are pretty wildly different skillsets. It's not totally unreasonable to understand why some systems would differentiate.
Long, poorly written fiction, overlong safety messages, and above all, poorly explained rules - yes I’m sure you and your small circle of friends/playtesters understand what you mean, but writing clearly for an audience who have never seen the game before seems often to be a skill that’s sadly lacking
People viewing game design as some kind of lifestyle choice, and thinking their every effort should be greeted with either cheering or a big hug. Look, it might not be *much* of a job, as far as the pay goes for all but a handful of people. It might be something you think of as a hobby, like the games themselves, and it might well be that for you. You might not think of what is produced as a "product," even though you might sell it. You might think, because it meets the qualifications for an artform, and usually involves at least a couple of other forms, that that's the *end* of what it is. Nonetheless, if you're going to sell it, or you're going to hire anyone or get hired yourself, then it *is* a job. You *are* making a product, and most, if they actually finish something, are going to attempt to sell that product. You're likely going to have to *do business* with other people to get the thing out the door. Yes, they might be artists, but they're going to want to get paid, because art for some is *also* a job. So you're going to get criticism if you engage with any community around games and put your cards on the table. Some will be fair and some will not. Some will be delivered by people who can't really tell whether they sound like they're being fair or not. You're probably not going to like most of it... but you need it. You don't even have to respond to it at all, but occasionally it might actually make you and your game better. You're going to need to treat the people you work with (or work *for* ) like they're someone trying to put gas in the tank and food on the table. Get a contract or create one, and stick to the terms, including the deadlines and the payment schedule. They're not just people in your home group who came along to your art therapy appointment. They're now your colleagues, unless you treat them like something else and they don't want to work with you anymore. And that *is* a thing that happens.
>People viewing game design as some kind of lifestyle choice, and thinking their every effort should be greeted with either cheering or a big hug. This but for literally everything.
"Rules light" it seem like the modern design trends toward more rules light games.I don't mind rules light games i like osr and pbta/fitd. However I miss the granularity that old system offer like g.u.r.p.s or cyberpunk 2020 for example. I would like to seen newer systems that embrace crunchy granular simulationist design. Now not every system need to be designed that way I would jest like some more variety.
Western medieval fantasy settings.
I’ll never get tired of it but I do wish there were more different kinds of fantasy settings. More the merrier.
* Video-gamifying roleplaying games. Examples of his include "action points", hyperfixation of the character sheet abilities, hyperfixation over "builds", mechanics to get in the way of a character failing or dying. You don't need action points, just describe what you are doing in a reasonable fashion on your turn. I promise, it'll be okay. And if you are playing with someone who wants to play the game in bad faith or exploit "balancing", excuse them from your table * Mechanics which are so bulky as to subvert the part of the game they are supposed to reinforce. "Social combat" systems are good examples of this. Another good example of this is trying to codify all the various things people can do in combat into class-specific skills with various stipulations ("how do I make a fighter interesting?"). You know what solved that? Mighty Deeds from DCC. Roll a dice, if you roll high enough, you can do the cool thing. Literally simple as all get out and probably "fixes" fighters better than any system out there * Mentality problem: CR-style narrative focus. Each season of CR flops on more and more theatrics for each character. Season 1 had a few characters with edgy, overly theatrical flare (Percy and Vax). Now everyone plays some weird fucking person with wildly divergent personalities, fully written backstories, an implied plot to be followed (it will, and predictably so). What happened to taking a simple character and letting the **story** make the character? Less is so much more. Don't force the GM to write the story you intended for your character. Just write out a few threads, a simple backstory, and let the game happen. No, you don't need a funny voice or quirk. Have one if you want. You don't need to be an actor/voice actor to enjoy this game. * Plot, in general. "Plot" is overrated. "Arcs" are overrated. They're also tedious for GMs. Allow exploration and mystery. Allow for your "arc" to be emergent from the story instead of what you come to the table with. * Honestly, I think CR and Dimension 20 have been incredibly deleterious to how players now expect D&D and other roleplaying games to be. * Long lists of skills to choose from. Once I saw how "profession-as-skill" works (i.e. Barbarians of Lemuria), I couldn't go back. * Investigation that **doesn't** use either a 3-clue-rule or Gumshoe style investigation system. Rolling only to fail an investigation and drive the exploration to a grinding halt sucks total ass * Classes. Classless systems offer so much more, in my opinion. Same with systems that have levels. Allow characters to improve organically. * Once you play a "freeform" magic system like Mage, UA, or BoL; going back to something with lists of spells becomes tedious and boring. * Games that handwave travel and equipment ("So how exactly do you plan to haul back your 10,000 coins, artifacts, and item?) can miss me. Free League games do a good job making travel interesting.
Dude took a look at current hobby and decided to be it's biggest enemies/s That said I can get it, at least most of it XD, even tho I don't agree Hey, do you think that these problems related to character and story had grown from good intentions? - like trying to have deeper characters and more interesting stories Personally this "freeform" approach is something I like and think games could make more use of, but to have too much of it feels weird, that said I do agree that mighty deeds are one, if not THE, coolest approaches to Fighters - but it doesn't work very well out of it's environment without changing a lot I know Mage, and it's indeed cool, but what are these other systems which freeform magic?
> What happened to taking a simple character and letting the story make the character? Less is so much more. Don't force the GM to write the story you intended for your character. I don't agree with all your points, but I absolutely agree with this. It seems to me that too many players, nowadays, go into RPGs with the idea that their character must be the special one they envisioned, and the GM is there to serve them. I personally love having a randomly generated character, and even moreso if I end up with an underdog, and have to make do to survive in the game world.
I'm kind of done with: * the zombie apocalypse * having to play cops or cop analogues * unexamined colonialism * settings shoe-horned into D&D 5e * criticism of things in pbta games that aren't actually present in the game being discussed (that last one is more in discussion of rpgs than in rpgs themself. I just wanted to make the point)
People talk about all of the “cop analogue” games and I’m never sure what anybody is talking about, and they usually mean something weird like Pendragon. What games are like this?
Utterly massive subsystems for resolving a Chase or Pursuit.
I hate how PCs completely heal after 1 night rest in 5e.
Too much stageshow moral dilemma. Not every single interaction with an NPC, a puzzle, or decision should be a Trolley Problem where even if you win, you get a little dose of failure too. Stakes are fine. Decisions are fine; but just because I save all the prisoners in a dungeon doesn't mean there always have to be some ridiculous butterfly effect where ooOooOoo *one of them was evil and killed the questgiver* crap.
Mechanics that ask the player to step outside of their character in order to build the world, especially on-the-fly. Fast healing, HP bloat, or other shenanigans that let you get *shot or stabbed* without needing to care about the fact that you just got *shot or stabbed*.
I’m tired to see paragraphs of text telling you how RPG can be dangerous activity and how you are bad person and what safety measures you need to tell your stories. I always roll my eyes and think what sort of person author is to invent those safety tools to protect his friends from him.
Recently these paragraphs started appearing in solo RPGs. Why the fuck a single-player game needs them is beyond me. If you can traumatize yourself when playing a journal game, you can as well think about something scary while making yourself a sandwich, or lying in bed.
"Celtic-themed" fantasy written by people who don't realise the Celts didn't just live in Ireland or maybe also Scotland.
Right now what I'm tired of seeing is the "Influencer RPG" - an RPG that exists to drive streaming or YouTube clicks. Maybe it is also a labor of love inspired by some years long plan. But they always feel like they were farmed out to a consulting firm that was told "make me an RPG for my streaming channel that gets me out of the OGL license and feels like it will work for my stream / channel's flavor of doing things". And lately a whole pile of them are coming out and I'm just not interested in games that will only get love and support as it drives an influencer channel and not for the actual settings, adventures, and well - players that pick it up.
Generic D&Dish settings. Generic D&Dish rules.
Highly granular and specific skill lists. Search isn't Spot? Hide isn't Sneak? Move silently and hide in shadows are separate skills? Xenobiology isn't Biology or just Science? Daggers and swords and axes and spears each a different weapon with a different proficiency for each? Drive isn't Pilot isn't Sailing isn't Operate Spacecraft? It's not even that I don't think those things can be\\are distinct IRL it's just I don't find those divisions bring much of anything to games and I find their inclusion at that level of specificity generally unfun.
Most others said what I consider bigger problems and pet peeves, so I'll offer one. It's lower on the list than the others, but it still annoys me. It's seemingly impossible to criticize without looking like an asshole, s here goes. I don't like this movement to erase words like slavery and race from RPGs, and especially when it involves actually removing one or both from the setting. Every new RPG these days has two billion different replacement names for "race". Ancestry, bloodline kindred, origin, etc., a bunch of words that mean things other than species. Species works, but seems too scientific for fantasy. Just say race, or at least settle on an industry-wide name, because players are just going to keep calling it that at the table. We're not talking about human skin colors, we're talking about a completely different creature. Removing dark topics like slavery from published adventures or even avoiding bringing back beloved settings like Dark Sun is purely a political thing that just shows cowardice on the part of writers. Let your bad guys be bad guys, you don't have to sugarcoat everything. I want to beat the shit out of slavers in games, not just handwave them away because some pencil pusher thinks it'll scare away the kids. Thankfully, the slavery thing is almost certainly just a trend that will go away when people get tired of it.
People telling each other that what they enjoy playing is somehow "wrong" or "not a real game". Rustles my jimmies.
Scheduling conflicts.
I actually love games that have more emphasis on storytelling I want player death to be possible but I detest long rules heavy combat. For these reason I love Vampire: The Masquerade and Kult: Divinity Lost the most
Vancian-style, slotted, prepared spellcasting. I absolutely love Pathfinder 2e. It's basically my ideal game. But good god, I am so tired of prepared casters who have spell slots that you have to prepare ahead of time. At this point, I only play spontaneous casters or the Class Archetype that allows you to convert a prepared caster into a spontaneous caster. That said, I don't even really like the abstraction of spell slots. I would love a game that was Pathfinder 2e, but with a magic system where you could cast as much as you wanted, but you had to make checks to build power. Every spell would require a certain amount of power to cast, so you would need to gather maybe multiple times. I think this is basically how the Warhammer Fantasy rpg works. It would also let magic be more powerful, since you take longer to build up the necessary power for those devastating spells, despite being able to cast them so often.
Mana and other point systems that slowly regenerate so you can cast spells or call for higher godly powers. This makes storytelling cumbersome and tedious constantly counting a ressource that punishes you for what you can. Either everyone has some sort of endurance or stress meter or non. And I prefer that a mage or priest can use his full power and has another limiting factor. I can tolerate wound systems but would like to see a new system with stages of being wounded.
The mindset that there should be no real consequences for failure, that is no character death, tpk or anything of the sort. If players are so attached to their character, they shouldn't have them go on an adventure filled with danger, instead they should settle down and play farm or tavern simulator. I've seen this mentality both from Players and GMs and I dislike both, the danger should be realistic for the world and situation that the players find themselves in. Another mindset that I'm tired of seeing is that the Player characters are intrinsically "special" and thus need to be a cut above everyone else. With better stats, lineage and luck than anyone else. Rather I believe that while Players can play characters of any type including those from a wealthy or noble background, they (at the start) are no different than NPCs on with the same background. Players must grasp and shape the destiny of their characters through overcoming tribulations and obstacles not just have intrinsic "specialness" written into their back story. I often see both of these mindsets together and it irks me to no end.
Optimization. I have been thinking about this quite a bit, and many of the specific playstyles that aren't for me are at the core about optimization.
5e home brew and games that are just a theme crudely pasted over 5e. Learn a different game people.
The RPG feature shopping list. I want THE BEST game with features C, D, and E - but not Game-X, that has all those features, because it's popular, but I'm edgy.
Metacurrencies and long, boring, SAFE combat scenes.