[Rifts] -- Who's responsible for fun?
Andre Canivet:
Hey all...
Something ironic happened today, in that I was invited to join a Rifts group. It was ironic because, while I got my first real start in role-playing with Rifts (and other Palladium games, I also kind of swore never to play Rifts again, because I found the rules and the text so incoherent and badly written that it was affecting my blood pressure (okay, kidding, but it was frustrating). In fact, it was the sheer badness of Rifts (& Palladium's system in general) that actually inspired me to write my own games, convinced that I could do better (which really remains to be seen).
Anyway, my question for the Forge is, what are people's thoughts about the quality of a game, both mechanically and in terms of the text? Where do the responsibilities of the designer end and those of the players begin? On the one hand, I think Neil Gaiman is right when he says an creator is not a slave to his audience ( http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html ). On the other hand, I know as a customer, I was pretty disappointed when after a couple of years of wading through poorly defined, typo-ridden rules (which one RPG.net reviewer rated "unintelligible" -- http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11645.phtml ), and trying to figure out how to patch it and reign in every new weapon or uber-powerful character class, I finally concluded that it was just too much work and gave up.
So, my question is, how much is it the responsibility of the designer to produce a coherent and clearly explained set of mechanics, and how much of the burden is on the players to interpret the rules and generate their own enjoyment? Is this just a decision people have to make for themselves?--is it merely an issue of social contract?
I'll probably join the group, because I'm hoping to get a little more into the local gaming scene, but I'm apprehensive about getting back into a game that caused me so much frustration.
-A.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Andre - excellent topic, which has seen a lot of discussion here already.
But please, provide a quick example of play which, in your experience, illustrated an answer to that question, or rather, shows how that question was answered, well or badly, by a group you played with. It might be Rifts or any other system, doesn't matter.
If you do that, then we can have a great discussion here with links and all sorts of stuff. But without it, not.
No one else post until after Andre's reply, please.
Best, Ron
Andre Canivet:
Hi Ron,
I can think of a few of examples of how we broke the game. Hopefully that will be enough to spark discussion, since I haven't played a Palladium game in about 16 years (a full transcript of play would be difficult at this point).
I guess the first example is the ways we could really mess with the GM during character creation. My favourite example from Rifts is the Gromek Juicer somebody created. Juicers get two extra attacks per melee, and Gromeks (gargoyle-like winged creatures from Conversion book 1) got a number of bonuses, including another two attacks per melee. Then, taking Hand to Hand: Assassin, it was possible to get a character with 7 or 8 attacks per melee, and an auto-dodge, by second level. Whereas, most characters at a similar level had about half as many.
Compare that to another player's human wilderness scout, who starts with no special powers or augmentations; just some mega-damage armour and a rifle, who is expected to compete. It was a situation where routinely a player's character concept could get him into serious trouble, or make him unstoppable, without any seeming method or consistency across the character types.
This led to a kind of arms race in which players were constantly scouring the books to see what sort of bigger and badder character they could create. Nobody played an ordinary person any more, since everything was geared toward combat effectiveness. Something similar happened when every new supplement included a bigger gun or better power armour--people would always find ways to beg, borrow, or steal in order to acquire the latest and most outrageous hardware. This in turn led to several adventures where characters would be stripped of all their possessions at the beginning of the adventure. One game, in particular, the characters were ship-wrecked and had been forced to abandon their equipment (or drown), and found themselves more or less naked on the shore of an island. I understand why the GM did it, but many of the players felt this was unfair.
This sort of "arms race" was repeated in Palladium's Fantasy game, where certain playable races, like Wolfen or Ogres, were considered giant creatures although they weren't much bigger than other playable races. But it meant that they could wield giant weapons, and gain an extra die on their damage rolls. Obviously, the designer felt these characters would have an advantage, but it's one that seemed fairly arbitrary--again, with no real method or consistency. I hesitate to use the word "balanced" here, because I realize that's often subjective--but hopefully you see what I'm getting at. It's like they re-wrote the rules every time they introduced a new playable race or character class.
I remember one campaign where the starting characters were all humans and elves. As they died in play, everyone made their new characters big bruising wolfen and ogres--effectively, we had a group of monsters. This was especially true, since when the last couple of elves in the group died, the rest of the group sold their bodies to an alchemist--since in the alchemist section it was written that elf bones could be used in magical rituals and were worth cash. To get off track a little bit, something similar happened in a different campaign when we killed a dragon, and spent six months carving up the body in order to sell the bones and make a fortune.
Anyway--something must be said here in that we were teenagers, this was our first experience with gaming, and no one really knew how to limit things, or even say "no" to their friends' character choices--or at least, do so without sparking bitter arguments over what the rules allow versus what the GM was willing to put up with. Clearly, an experienced GM could have put limits on all of this or made better house rules to cover these situations. It's just that the text of the games didn't hint that this would be necessary, or explain how to go about doing it. What they did do was provide ample opportunity for abuse.
We'd played these games because we were excited about things like Mad Max or Star Wars, in the case of Rifts; or iConan and the Lord of the Rings for Fantasy... but a group of mean Ogre protagonists selling their last elf compatriot to a shady alchemist for a little extra coin is pretty far from Tolkienesque Epic storytelling (though, in retrospect I suppose it would make for an amusing novel--by Pratchett, maybe?). Again, a more experienced group could have established a more explicit social contract to ensure a particular type/genre of play, but the rules didn't offer much aid in this regard either.
Hopefully this will be enough to start a discussion. I'm curious how much of this was just us being teenaged noobs, and how much the designer could have done to educate us on how to play without things getting out of hand.
Thanks for listening,
-A.
Callan S.:
Hi Andre,
That reminds me to an extent of my own early Rifts play. Given a game where the only apparent end goal was to own a really big gat and wear the toughest armour/power armour, the ruleset allowing you to start a character with the biggest gat and toughest armour meant you'd finished play the instant you started play/finished character gen. Kind of a 'premature ejaculation' ruleset.
That said though - the players in your example don't seem to be weeping when they do this? You might say you all played these games because of mad max and star wars, but really they sound like they were pretty happy doing what they did, which was within the rules framework (such as it was). Instead it sounds more like your the non premature partner, exlaiming "What!? That's it?!??'. And your atleast partly looking to the game author, asking how much they aught to deal with this whole 'wham bam, thank you mam' thing.
Or maybe not? What's your call?
But certainly I had an issue with 'everything, straight away or practically straight away'. Though for myself I was thinking more in terms of 'Hey, how about we don't get the big trophy like, instantly, and start putting a gap in' rather than getting excited by mad max and wanted to engage the inspiration the movie gave in some sort of game format.
Andre Canivet:
Heheh... I wouldn't frame it quite that way, but there's maybe an element of what you're saying in my complaint. But there was more to it, and I wasn't the only one in the group who was frustrated. I remember some long earnest discussions trying to figure out just what the heck ol' Kevin was trying to say when he was explaining (or more frequently, completely failing to address) crucial points in the rules. But that usually followed a session where a bitter shouting match had broken out when somebody's character was on the line, and quite often we never fully resolved the question.
The group actually fractured--eventually there were two to three different groups that would meet, each with different interpretations of the rules. Some of the same people went to all of these groups, and others attended only one or two groups, alienated by disagreements they'd had with other players & GM's. So, nearly all of us had experienced difficulty with the game, although I was perhaps the most dissatisfied of the bunch, since here I am griping about it :)
These disagreements were usually about something ambiguous in the rules, like automatic parries and the Juicer's auto-dodge. For whatever reason, the text was just cryptic enough that when we started playing, we thought that everyone got only one automatic parry per melee round; and likewise for the Juicer's dodge. The text describes each one in a sentence or two, and as far as I can tell, never again. Of course, somebody read the rules again, and realized these sentences could be interpreted to mean that parries for trained individuals, and dodges as well as parries for Juicers, were completely free, never using up a melee action. Moments like that were when the shit would hit the fan, because suddenly everybody wanted to be a Juicer, and the GM's are wondering how the heck they're going to deal with them, and the shouting would start. It just seemed like a little more detail in the text could have saved this hassle. But this sort of thing was a common occurrence. We probably spent as much time arguing as we did playing.
But how much of that strife was just teen angst, how much was inexperience with gaming in general, and how much was legitimate frustration with the quality of the rules and the text... well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. I've only recently gotten back into regular gaming with several different groups of people--but most of them are fairly mature, so it's tough for me to gauge what was at fault when we were kids.
----
Power levels are an issue, too, as you said, but it wasn't so much the fact that you could start the game with god-like power, as it was the differential in power between different character concepts. So you get the power-gamer who decides to play a dragon or other supernaturally strong character; and the more character or story driven players who wanted to play more sympathetic characters, such as Rogue Scholars, Vagabonds, or even Coalition Military Specialists. Then the GM has to figure out what to throw at them that will be challenging for the power-gamer's dragon, but won't make the human character into a grease-stain on the first hit--especially if they get attacked while camped and the human isn't wearing his armour.
In a game which is pretty much explicitly about combat, it very quickly makes no sense to play an ordinary human character if you wanted him to survive more than a few sessions. It might not be so bad if creating a character in Rifts was simple, but it's not--even after playing a while, it usually took people a couple of hours. I suppose some of the problems I'm describing are challenging in any game where characters at different scales are playing on the same battlefield, but in Rifts, those differences are vast, and those situations are constantly coming up. It might not be so bad if it wasn't all so arbitrary--there was no way to predict what kinds of special bonuses or powers a character class might offer. Many games that followed started using point-buy systems or other mechanisms to ensure that characters were balanced, which seems a lot more rational to me; but that may simply be a personal preference of mine. I've recently started playing D&D 3.5, and notice that it seems to be almost as arbitrary, so maybe it's not that unusual.
Bottom line, Rifts is a power gamer's paradise--which is probably fine, if you know what you're doing; but the game doesn't do much to ease beginners into the hobby. The Game Master's section in the core book has about half a page of somewhat self-congratulatory text describing the scope and detail of the game, assuring players that they should not be intimidated and offering a paragraph or two of actual advice on how to run a game. The rest of the section is descriptions and quick-roll tables for common monsters in the setting. There's maybe a little bit more advice in random paragraphs throughout the rest of the book, but nothing really solid.
So, without any explicit guidelines on how to actually run a game, set consistent power levels, resolve disputes, and establish a social contract, the game in the hands of some unruly teenagers seems a bit like a loaded rail-gun tossed into the monkey cage at the local zoo. Friendships were damaged. Maybe that would have happened anyway as teens will be teens, but it seems like a lot of it could have been avoided if we'd gotten our start playing, say, Heavy Gear or Mekton II instead.
-A.
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