Eh
Eh, okay, let's just run with that choosing system for now. In practice, as I recall from the 1E days, you just roll guys up until you get a guy with great stats and go with him in any case.
Yeah, high stats is 1/2 of the real problem. The other half is the arbitrary and unbalanced modifiers associated with having high stats. You still gotta work on balancing END vs STR vs AGIL. Why? Otherwise, everyone plays super-AGIL characters, just to survive.
At this point, I think I sort of view that as your problem, which I'll happily to playtest and bitch about. But the core difference in the mechanics of the system is AC = AGIL and HP = END, which is, as I remember, direct from Chickens. That's what I've been seeing this DiDFactory system as, really: a hybrid of your game Chickens plus my skill system. Certainly that's exactly what it started out as. (Although if memory serves me right, Chickens had CHA as a stat too.)
And AC = AGIL is basically the core problem too. It's nice, but everything (or, the effects of END and STR) needs to revolve around that.
...
Raising stat scores in the system is possible but unfeasible. It's just not worth the skillpts.
...
Next, the question of 'is Roger Bacon interesting' is irrelevant and ill-posed.
1) The question of how interesting a character is, is only meaningful in the scope of an actual game. He could be the most interesting PC you've ever seen; that's only determined by player actions.
2) But after years of gaming, I've come to the conclusion that combat is a necessary evil. It's fun, sure, but 'gaming' and 'role-playing' is what's in between the invidual combats. For that reason, characters who can get shit done and kick ass in combat are the most important and interesting, because it's exactly these characters who allow the party to progress along the story and actually exert change in the world. Consider the relative campaign impact of Slath vs. Jimmy Swill. Slath may have looked boring on the page, but it was Slath who went down in the history books. Jimmy Swill just quit (only to become a major player as it were, as an NPC). (But this is somewhat tangential and game specific. My main point- that combat is what happens in-between plot points- is the real issue here.) Jimmy Swill may have been fun when the stakes were zero, but once the campaign actually kicked into gear, he wasn't a contender.
3) More importantly, Roger Bacon is an interesting character in that he tested the system. Jimmy Swill and Morgan don't really poke holes in the system and ask what's broken. In fact, Jimmy's ambidexterity is a clear example of you missing a substantial design flaw. Two-weapon fighting is always problematic; is it always strictly better than having a shield? In D&D, yes. So how can we balance it out?
That's the point of even making characters now, yes? Not to sit around and play SkillChickens, but to test for flaws in char design. I wanted, not to make a wacky dude like Jimmy Swill, but to see what Paladins, Fighter Tanks, Thieves and Mages just look like in DiDF. They look unbalanced, i.e., unfair, i.e., unfun.
A bit of unbalance can be fun, sometimes- it's driven a lot of DiD (really just a riff on the original lack of balance in 1E) and the card game MegaWizards, but it's not suitable for a serious system, which is what we're going for here. Uh, right?
4) 'Interesting' is a question of flavor, which is proper for skill and spell names, but not for system mechanics. It's essential that a system be fast and balanced. If it is, I think it can't help but be interesting. Unbalanced and slow systems are uninteresting, as they're easy to design and unfun to play. If everyone has low hp and high AGIL, the game is uninteresting, because it's just gambling... whoever rolls the 17 first (or whatever) is going to win.
...
Re: spell advancement and mages being boring. Making skill and ability costs more expensive is a kludge that doesn't solve the ultimate problem. If your mechanic says 'whenever you get a spell circle, that's when you start to accrue spell slots' means that there's a huge advantage to getting circles as early as you can. Making circles more expensive to obtain doesn't solve that problem, it just makes mages even weaker relative to non-mages. A better solution is to have so many potential skill and prof choices that you don't know what to do with your skillpts. I think we want positive controls on character diversity rather than negative controls, if you get me.
...
Finally, on skills and checks being relativistic and messy. A fundamental feature of all of my games, and every game I've played, is 'Red Queen' scaling. Meaning that at every stage, it's equally hard to do the hardest thing that could be expected of characters of that status. I.e., the big boss for 1st level chars should be as hard to defeat as the big boss for 10th level chars.
You guys always bitched about this- that when your guys got to be powerful, I never threw a few goblins at you and let you show off your new skills. Every combat was just as bloody and involved lots of unconsciousness.
But that's the drama. It might be fun to have one low level encounter when you're high level, but lots of them are a time waste. A 1st level thief should have a rough but possible time of it, breaking into a bakery and stealing a recipe. A 10th level thief should be able to do that no problem, but WTF kind of game would that be? (It'd be DiD.) The 10th level thief should be trying to break into the castle and get the crown jewels. Or some such. I.e., even though the 10th lvl thiefs skills are much higher, there's still an equal element of danger and drama, i.e., roughly a 1/3 chance of pulling it off no sweat, 1/3 in some trouble, and 1/3 of it going to hell.
And in the end, it's really the most fun when it's the final 1/3rd.
That's why I think most games end when chars reach their ultimate potential- because there's nothing more to achieve, which is what brings many people back to the RPG table time and time again. Look at KT constantly asking when he can train, and making his guy based around fast advancement. Imagine playing without levels or any kind of skill advancement. There's some fun to be had, but no campaign there. It's the same scenario with skill and stat caps.
Yeah, high stats is 1/2 of the real problem. The other half is the arbitrary and unbalanced modifiers associated with having high stats. You still gotta work on balancing END vs STR vs AGIL. Why? Otherwise, everyone plays super-AGIL characters, just to survive.
At this point, I think I sort of view that as your problem, which I'll happily to playtest and bitch about. But the core difference in the mechanics of the system is AC = AGIL and HP = END, which is, as I remember, direct from Chickens. That's what I've been seeing this DiDFactory system as, really: a hybrid of your game Chickens plus my skill system. Certainly that's exactly what it started out as. (Although if memory serves me right, Chickens had CHA as a stat too.)
And AC = AGIL is basically the core problem too. It's nice, but everything (or, the effects of END and STR) needs to revolve around that.
...
Raising stat scores in the system is possible but unfeasible. It's just not worth the skillpts.
...
Next, the question of 'is Roger Bacon interesting' is irrelevant and ill-posed.
1) The question of how interesting a character is, is only meaningful in the scope of an actual game. He could be the most interesting PC you've ever seen; that's only determined by player actions.
2) But after years of gaming, I've come to the conclusion that combat is a necessary evil. It's fun, sure, but 'gaming' and 'role-playing' is what's in between the invidual combats. For that reason, characters who can get shit done and kick ass in combat are the most important and interesting, because it's exactly these characters who allow the party to progress along the story and actually exert change in the world. Consider the relative campaign impact of Slath vs. Jimmy Swill. Slath may have looked boring on the page, but it was Slath who went down in the history books. Jimmy Swill just quit (only to become a major player as it were, as an NPC). (But this is somewhat tangential and game specific. My main point- that combat is what happens in-between plot points- is the real issue here.) Jimmy Swill may have been fun when the stakes were zero, but once the campaign actually kicked into gear, he wasn't a contender.
3) More importantly, Roger Bacon is an interesting character in that he tested the system. Jimmy Swill and Morgan don't really poke holes in the system and ask what's broken. In fact, Jimmy's ambidexterity is a clear example of you missing a substantial design flaw. Two-weapon fighting is always problematic; is it always strictly better than having a shield? In D&D, yes. So how can we balance it out?
That's the point of even making characters now, yes? Not to sit around and play SkillChickens, but to test for flaws in char design. I wanted, not to make a wacky dude like Jimmy Swill, but to see what Paladins, Fighter Tanks, Thieves and Mages just look like in DiDF. They look unbalanced, i.e., unfair, i.e., unfun.
A bit of unbalance can be fun, sometimes- it's driven a lot of DiD (really just a riff on the original lack of balance in 1E) and the card game MegaWizards, but it's not suitable for a serious system, which is what we're going for here. Uh, right?
4) 'Interesting' is a question of flavor, which is proper for skill and spell names, but not for system mechanics. It's essential that a system be fast and balanced. If it is, I think it can't help but be interesting. Unbalanced and slow systems are uninteresting, as they're easy to design and unfun to play. If everyone has low hp and high AGIL, the game is uninteresting, because it's just gambling... whoever rolls the 17 first (or whatever) is going to win.
...
Re: spell advancement and mages being boring. Making skill and ability costs more expensive is a kludge that doesn't solve the ultimate problem. If your mechanic says 'whenever you get a spell circle, that's when you start to accrue spell slots' means that there's a huge advantage to getting circles as early as you can. Making circles more expensive to obtain doesn't solve that problem, it just makes mages even weaker relative to non-mages. A better solution is to have so many potential skill and prof choices that you don't know what to do with your skillpts. I think we want positive controls on character diversity rather than negative controls, if you get me.
...
Finally, on skills and checks being relativistic and messy. A fundamental feature of all of my games, and every game I've played, is 'Red Queen' scaling. Meaning that at every stage, it's equally hard to do the hardest thing that could be expected of characters of that status. I.e., the big boss for 1st level chars should be as hard to defeat as the big boss for 10th level chars.
You guys always bitched about this- that when your guys got to be powerful, I never threw a few goblins at you and let you show off your new skills. Every combat was just as bloody and involved lots of unconsciousness.
But that's the drama. It might be fun to have one low level encounter when you're high level, but lots of them are a time waste. A 1st level thief should have a rough but possible time of it, breaking into a bakery and stealing a recipe. A 10th level thief should be able to do that no problem, but WTF kind of game would that be? (It'd be DiD.) The 10th level thief should be trying to break into the castle and get the crown jewels. Or some such. I.e., even though the 10th lvl thiefs skills are much higher, there's still an equal element of danger and drama, i.e., roughly a 1/3 chance of pulling it off no sweat, 1/3 in some trouble, and 1/3 of it going to hell.
And in the end, it's really the most fun when it's the final 1/3rd.
That's why I think most games end when chars reach their ultimate potential- because there's nothing more to achieve, which is what brings many people back to the RPG table time and time again. Look at KT constantly asking when he can train, and making his guy based around fast advancement. Imagine playing without levels or any kind of skill advancement. There's some fun to be had, but no campaign there. It's the same scenario with skill and stat caps.
posted by Rob @ 5:01 PM
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