![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackInspired by playing an apocalypse world inspired system at the one-shot on Saturday, my brain started thinking about roleplaying systems again.
Apocalypse World
This is the system where you roll 2d6 (possibly adding a stat or a bonus), and on 10+ you succeed, and on 7-9 you succeed but with an inventive drawback that keeps things dramatic, and on 1-6... well, I'll come back to that. There's hundreds of different settings based on variants of this system because it's easy to adapt to any setting.
As best as I can tell by reading around online, the intention of the system is to take a more narrative approach to resolution than DnD like games have. I want to be clear about what I mean by that, because both types of progress get muddled together in most games. By mechanical, I'm thinking of systems like DnD where the GM is expected to set up a situation and let the players explore it, and alters it on the fly to a greater or lesser extent, but by and large the results of a player action are some physical change in the game world known to all.
By contrast, the narrative resolution is more like, the player describes what happens, and as long as it doesn't depart what's physically plausible too far, you roll some dice to determine, "does the character mostly proceed, or does something that make you say uh-oh happen?"
E.g. in DnD, it makes a big difference if you have a short sword or a long sword because it affects how much damage you do. In dungeon world, it's not that granular, instead, you're expected to describe your character -- whoever they are -- facing off against some orcs, until conflict happens where the result isn't obvious, when the dice determine what happens. But the specifics could be anything, "having the orcs flee" or "killing them" uses much the same mechanic, as does, if you fail, it doesn't mean "miss", it means, the gm gets to ratchet up the tension, e.g. "your sword swings wide, the orc looms over you" or "you trip and drop your sword" or "you stab the orc, but suddenly, you hear a vast drum sounding from deep in the mines, DOOM, DOOM..."
That is, you wait until something dramatic is happening, when both failure and success have interesting what-happens-next-s like a choose your own adventure book, and then you roll to choose one or the other.
The specifics vary between the variants, and I've only experienced one or two, and not any of the originals, so I can't speak with much authority here, but I think that's the idea, and it seems like a good one. So what's the problem?
It doesn't work
I'm sure I must be being too negative here. Thousands of people have played this game. Hundreds of people have written adventures for it. Some people must have found doing so successful. I'm interested to know if anyone (any of you?) feels like the game has worked well in a narrative way.
Because my impression is that lots of people have had really great games by basically ignoring the mechanics and hoping for the best, but that's not really what your mechanics for.
What problems, based on a fairly cursory investigation, do I see? Well, the mechanics that there are don't really fit the ostensible aim. In Dungeon World, the battle with orcs is supposed to be quite cinematic. But the rules encourage you not to resolve the combat at a high level of abstraction. You can't say, "we outnumber the orcs, we charge in for the slaughter, rolling?, mixed success, ok, they all die but one of us is wounded", the rules specifically call for the orcs to have a fixed number of hitpoints, and actions which attack cause a specific number of hit points worth of damage.
So lots of people have a problem of just saying "we attack" repeatedly, and all get dead if the GM is harsh with their counter-actions, or win boringly if the GM is benign. A good GM certainly CAN avoid that, but it seems like the dungeon world rules encourage you into the unhelpful behaviour, not the fun behaviour, and don't provide a lot of guidance.
Or suppose there's a battle and all the characters want to act at once. Is there a secret round mechanics where everyone gets to act, even though the rules don't specify it? Or it just a rules back and forth with "player action, GM action only if player failure, etc" with no mechanically-relevant actions by the opponents outside that, where the players are incentivised to let the hack-iest character keep acting and everyone else keep their head down and doesn't actually contribute anything? And just rely on "common sense" that having four PCs is better for defeating an orc than one?
And lots of the moves are weirdly specific. Like, a class has some specific possible action that gives +2 to something or other. Which often seems completely at odds with what you might expect to be able to do, and weirdly restraining. Like, I should just narrate? But then it suddenly matters that I have this very specific action?
And there's a lot of other things. The resolution is defined by specific success/failure values, modified by the player's abilities. And you can add other modifiers but that doesn't seem to be the standard. So if you're bad at talking ALL your talking attempts will be "probably fail" ones. That's dramatically appropriate. But you can't ever have some easier challenges -- it's either so easy you succeed automatically, or so hard you probably fail. So you've no way to get familiar with what's possible. And if you're good at something, all your rolls will be easy ones, there's no way to face a harder-than-average challenge unless the GM adds some negative modifiers to you.
Jack's rules of thumb for how heavyweight mechanics should be: Lightweight
If it comes up at most once a session, it should be extremely lightweight and it doesn't really matter how it works, the GM can just wing it and it's fine. Even crappy systems usually handle this fine because the GM will just fiddle things if it doesn't work and seat-of-the-GM's-pants works fine.
For most DnD games, most things outside combat, i.e. mostly skill checks, fall into this system. There's a big minority of DnD adventures where there are a lot of skill checks, but in most, it's just one every so often, so it only really matters that some characters are good at this, some are bad, the specifics, and whether the skills are well-chosen or should be merged together or split up doesn't really matter.
Jack's rules of thumb for how heavyweight mechanics should be: Less Lightweight
If it comes up repeatedly in a session, you need to make sure the mechanics you use to resolve it are fun when the players are trying to navigate through the system and succeed. That can be lightweight, but it at least needs to be consistent, and it needs to be well balanced without any gaping flaws.
That doesn't matter in every single game, but in most games, the players are rooting for their characters, and it's much much more fun if "the things that make the characters succeed" has a significant overlap with "the things that are fun for the players to have the characters do". If one ability is overpowered, you'll find out here. If there's too few possible actions and combat just comes down to "I hit him, he hits me", you'll find out here.
In DnD this is combat, and DnD puts a lot of effort into that. I think most games benefit from having some 'central' resolution mechanic like that, whether it comes up often or rarely, to give some weight to decisions because the players know that how dangerous the situation is actively determined, and not just up to GM fiat. And usually it rewards (some) player skill as well. Although you might count something like a "doom track" counting down to red alert/horrors break through/night falls/etc as the same sort of thing, that there are clear understood rules come up repeatedly, and the players understand when they're hastening bad things.
Apocalypse World
This is the system where you roll 2d6 (possibly adding a stat or a bonus), and on 10+ you succeed, and on 7-9 you succeed but with an inventive drawback that keeps things dramatic, and on 1-6... well, I'll come back to that. There's hundreds of different settings based on variants of this system because it's easy to adapt to any setting.
As best as I can tell by reading around online, the intention of the system is to take a more narrative approach to resolution than DnD like games have. I want to be clear about what I mean by that, because both types of progress get muddled together in most games. By mechanical, I'm thinking of systems like DnD where the GM is expected to set up a situation and let the players explore it, and alters it on the fly to a greater or lesser extent, but by and large the results of a player action are some physical change in the game world known to all.
By contrast, the narrative resolution is more like, the player describes what happens, and as long as it doesn't depart what's physically plausible too far, you roll some dice to determine, "does the character mostly proceed, or does something that make you say uh-oh happen?"
E.g. in DnD, it makes a big difference if you have a short sword or a long sword because it affects how much damage you do. In dungeon world, it's not that granular, instead, you're expected to describe your character -- whoever they are -- facing off against some orcs, until conflict happens where the result isn't obvious, when the dice determine what happens. But the specifics could be anything, "having the orcs flee" or "killing them" uses much the same mechanic, as does, if you fail, it doesn't mean "miss", it means, the gm gets to ratchet up the tension, e.g. "your sword swings wide, the orc looms over you" or "you trip and drop your sword" or "you stab the orc, but suddenly, you hear a vast drum sounding from deep in the mines, DOOM, DOOM..."
That is, you wait until something dramatic is happening, when both failure and success have interesting what-happens-next-s like a choose your own adventure book, and then you roll to choose one or the other.
The specifics vary between the variants, and I've only experienced one or two, and not any of the originals, so I can't speak with much authority here, but I think that's the idea, and it seems like a good one. So what's the problem?
It doesn't work
I'm sure I must be being too negative here. Thousands of people have played this game. Hundreds of people have written adventures for it. Some people must have found doing so successful. I'm interested to know if anyone (any of you?) feels like the game has worked well in a narrative way.
Because my impression is that lots of people have had really great games by basically ignoring the mechanics and hoping for the best, but that's not really what your mechanics for.
What problems, based on a fairly cursory investigation, do I see? Well, the mechanics that there are don't really fit the ostensible aim. In Dungeon World, the battle with orcs is supposed to be quite cinematic. But the rules encourage you not to resolve the combat at a high level of abstraction. You can't say, "we outnumber the orcs, we charge in for the slaughter, rolling?, mixed success, ok, they all die but one of us is wounded", the rules specifically call for the orcs to have a fixed number of hitpoints, and actions which attack cause a specific number of hit points worth of damage.
So lots of people have a problem of just saying "we attack" repeatedly, and all get dead if the GM is harsh with their counter-actions, or win boringly if the GM is benign. A good GM certainly CAN avoid that, but it seems like the dungeon world rules encourage you into the unhelpful behaviour, not the fun behaviour, and don't provide a lot of guidance.
Or suppose there's a battle and all the characters want to act at once. Is there a secret round mechanics where everyone gets to act, even though the rules don't specify it? Or it just a rules back and forth with "player action, GM action only if player failure, etc" with no mechanically-relevant actions by the opponents outside that, where the players are incentivised to let the hack-iest character keep acting and everyone else keep their head down and doesn't actually contribute anything? And just rely on "common sense" that having four PCs is better for defeating an orc than one?
And lots of the moves are weirdly specific. Like, a class has some specific possible action that gives +2 to something or other. Which often seems completely at odds with what you might expect to be able to do, and weirdly restraining. Like, I should just narrate? But then it suddenly matters that I have this very specific action?
And there's a lot of other things. The resolution is defined by specific success/failure values, modified by the player's abilities. And you can add other modifiers but that doesn't seem to be the standard. So if you're bad at talking ALL your talking attempts will be "probably fail" ones. That's dramatically appropriate. But you can't ever have some easier challenges -- it's either so easy you succeed automatically, or so hard you probably fail. So you've no way to get familiar with what's possible. And if you're good at something, all your rolls will be easy ones, there's no way to face a harder-than-average challenge unless the GM adds some negative modifiers to you.
Jack's rules of thumb for how heavyweight mechanics should be: Lightweight
If it comes up at most once a session, it should be extremely lightweight and it doesn't really matter how it works, the GM can just wing it and it's fine. Even crappy systems usually handle this fine because the GM will just fiddle things if it doesn't work and seat-of-the-GM's-pants works fine.
For most DnD games, most things outside combat, i.e. mostly skill checks, fall into this system. There's a big minority of DnD adventures where there are a lot of skill checks, but in most, it's just one every so often, so it only really matters that some characters are good at this, some are bad, the specifics, and whether the skills are well-chosen or should be merged together or split up doesn't really matter.
Jack's rules of thumb for how heavyweight mechanics should be: Less Lightweight
If it comes up repeatedly in a session, you need to make sure the mechanics you use to resolve it are fun when the players are trying to navigate through the system and succeed. That can be lightweight, but it at least needs to be consistent, and it needs to be well balanced without any gaping flaws.
That doesn't matter in every single game, but in most games, the players are rooting for their characters, and it's much much more fun if "the things that make the characters succeed" has a significant overlap with "the things that are fun for the players to have the characters do". If one ability is overpowered, you'll find out here. If there's too few possible actions and combat just comes down to "I hit him, he hits me", you'll find out here.
In DnD this is combat, and DnD puts a lot of effort into that. I think most games benefit from having some 'central' resolution mechanic like that, whether it comes up often or rarely, to give some weight to decisions because the players know that how dangerous the situation is actively determined, and not just up to GM fiat. And usually it rewards (some) player skill as well. Although you might count something like a "doom track" counting down to red alert/horrors break through/night falls/etc as the same sort of thing, that there are clear understood rules come up repeatedly, and the players understand when they're hastening bad things.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-11 02:15 pm (UTC)