Taking turns: Don't step on my cool!
masqueradeball:
John,
I mean, how I conceptualize my character, how I see them in my head. I can give plenty of examples (from either side of the table (either as GM or player)) of games that got seriously derailed because player's weren't playing the characters that they thought they made, because the system wasn't clear on how to make that character. A good example is something that happened a lot with the older White Wolf system. One player would make a martial artist, and, wanting to stay in realistic levels, only raise their Martial Arts (or Brawl/Melee) to 3-4, while another player, whose concept had nothing or little to do with Martial Arts, would put 4-5 dots in Martial Arts (or Brawl/Melee) just because they had the left over points. Now, all of the sudden the jock knows more karate than the karate master because two different people have different expectations out of the dots.
Also, I think my D&D example still holds true. The last time I played a fighter in that game, my expectations of my characters effectiveness in game (which for me is part of how I imagine/conceptualize my character) was seriously undermined by the rogue in the party, or, in previous games, by some other fighter who knew the feat system better. This is effectively bogus. D&D tells me that two characters of the same level should be within the same power level but that each has trade-offs on their effectiveness from area to area, so I should be able to expect to get a certain mileage out of my character, but I can't because of these layers... being a fighter at least gives me some ground for asking others to stand down and let me handle situations that are more core to how I see my character functioning, and, if the system wasn't so bloated, it'd probably actually help ensure that my fighting ability was as functional as I expected it to be.
John Adams:
OK Nolan, I see your point now. You have a clear image of your character "in the world", what he should be able to do and where he should fit relative to everyone, PC and NPC alike. It's all too easy for the GM or another player to blow that out of the water in most Sytems. Heck, that describes a huge chunk of my role-playing experience, usually followed closely by mean accusations of "you min-maxing bastard!" and such. In hindsight it looks like straight up Sim/Gam agenda clash but there might be more than that. I'm no expert in any flavor of D20, but D&D 3.x strikes me as a very Gamist friendly system, so you can hardly blame people for leaning that way when they play it. That also implies you have a lot of extra work to do to make it support Sim. Large grain of salt there, I'm not very familiar with 3.x.
So in a nutshell all I can do is shrug and say "yeah, been there done that too." But I will assert that carving out ad hoc functional roles is a lousy solution to the problem. System should support your CA better than that, you would do well to find a ruleset better suited to your group's needs. Kudos for anyone who provides recommendations, my luck finding a good system to support Sim has been awful. Maybe that's because I'm a closeted Nar GM or I just don't really know what I'm looking for yet. =)
masqueradeball:
Hey, your right, D&D sucks for a lot of things, including most of the things that we've (my playing group) tried to do with it, but its really not a D&D-exclusive or gamist exclusive problem. "Realism Sims" like GURPs tend to be so layered that its hard to guage actual effectiveness without a lot of experience with the system (sort of, the attribute-skill system is pretty straight forward, but with Advantages and all the added combat complications... things can get pretty unclear). As far as classes/roles/whatever go, I feel there a pretty shoddy fix at times. My only point in posting was that:
1) If your used to playing with classes, there's more that needs to be done to replace them than just adding set turns, and
2) I think a lot of SIM games in the past try to have the rules be as "hidden" as possible, which is a good thing sometimes, but rules transparency (where you can see that something is a game mechanic and that's that) might really improve a lot of SIM play. This is all part of my personal campaign (I guess) to challenge what I see as preconceived notions about SIM play and technique. Turn based play is just one technique normally associated with other CA's that I feel can support strong, unabashed SIM.
3) In some games, niche protection has deeper implications than people realize. in AD&D I always felt that it was there for archetype protection, so that it forced players to "act" like traditional (at the time) fantasy troups.
John Adams:
Quote from: masqueradeball on March 05, 2008, 09:30:10 AM
... rules transparency (where you can see that something is a game mechanic and that's that) might really improve a lot of SIM play.
I totally agree with this. My gut feeling is that the most basic challenge in Sim design is deciding "what are we going to simulate?" and focusing only on that. Trying to simulate every damn thing is a recipe for madness, better to take a core concept and give that over to the 'game engine' and 'say yes' to everything else.
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