Avoiding the Mechanics for Functional Play
Chris_Chinn:
Over at this thread ( http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php?topic=30561 ), Abkajud mentioned:
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Oddly, I've noticed a parallel conceit regarding "traditional" design - there's a crowd that thinks game mechanics should be brutal and unmerciful, and there's a (perhaps younger) crowd that thinks it actually kind of sucks to have to go outside the rules to increase your chance of surviving the session. Y'know, that strategy of asking for enough details and plugging away with logic to avoid having to roll a save or enter combat.
I want to talk about that as being a "victim" of that sort of design.
My first experience with roleplaying was picking up the classic "Red Box" D&D when I was 12. Being 12, and seeing the cover depicting this guy taking on a sky-scraper sized dragon, I was completely saying, "AWESOME" and proceeded to devour the rules.
Now, in trying to run the game, from the book, for my friends, everyone kept getting killed by rats. I was certain there had to be something we were doing wrong, since the game is (as I perceived it) about awesome sword and sorcery heroics. We tried a lot of times and ultimately, my friends and family decided roleplaying was boring and not worth trying - "We spent 20 minutes picking out equipment and died in 5 minutes, what the fuck?"
See, the rules mention "ignore the rules" which, by itself without any guidance is useless for most people to translate into functional play. There also wasn't really anything about how "referee'ing" should trump rules except in "Be fair, but be tough" and similar useless pithy sayings.
It really wasn't until I saw the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming ( http://www.lulu.com/product/file-download/quick-primer-for-old-school-gaming/3159558 ) that it really became clear to me that this was effectively the "missing text" or oral tradition a lot of people were playing by.
Games that push for players to avoid combat (or other mechanics) is fine, though for it to functionally work, it needs to be clearly stated HOW it works for both the GM and the players. Without an understanding of what your options are and how play is to work, people naturally fall back on the clear procedures- after all, that's how all -other- games work.
I don't think it's so much that people are "against" doing free-form solutions as much as that the expectation of doing free-form/Referee'd solutions is so rarely well communicated, and has led to so much history of snags in play, or, in my case, no play at all.
Has anyone else taught themselves roleplaying from a book or spoke with people who have and seen similar concerns?
Chris
Filip Luszczyk:
My first game was the old introductory Lord of the Rings Adventure Game. The text was pretty much the condensed essence of 90s bullshit. The only other reference I had were a few issues of a Polish rpg magazine, which was more confusing than useful. There was nobody to teach me gaming, I was the first kid in the village who got interested in this sort of stuff.
The first time I tried to run the game, upon encountering GM's determination issues, my cousin said it's dumb.
It took several years of stumbling before I finally realized that it was dumb indeed.
Abkajud:
My earliest RP experience was actually (to be generous) a home-brew - but the system was entirely derived from GM fiat. Entirely. We had character sheets with HP, MP, levels, spells, all that, but the entire game was like a sort of crystal ball experience: players say what they do, maybe ask questions and things, and the GM decides everything that happens.
We played at recess, and we were in middle school, so it's probably normal that we didn't spontaneously derive some kind of diceless, flat-surface-less randomizer or whatever.
The game itself was called Quest: play consisted of over-the-top, anime-inspired battles, with lots of jumping around and throwing spheres of energy at each other. Character options, in 5th grade, were limited to knight, wizard, or swordsman (a mix of the two others). I was the first person to play it with Alex, the GM, and as other kids grew interested in it, Alex let them take over as various NPCs on the fly.
By 8th grade, we had a suite of character classes, lots of stolen/cribbed setting material from Warcraft 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 3, etc.
And yet, the system always consisted of GM-fiat only, and mean-spirited fiat at that - the GM would twist anything we said, if the mood struck, such that our characters were horribly mangled and disfigured, but managed to survive our unintentional injuries. A ninja p.c. once attempted to backflip off the back of an airship (upon landing, mind you), but "neglected" to be 100% clear that he was waiting until the ship had touched down. The GM "let" him go from free-falling to using a midair drill-attack, but then ruled that he didn't burrow safely into the landing strip - it was adamantium-enriched soil, and killed him on impact.
I think we somehow got the middle school D&D experience without even playing D&D until we were almost in high school - a malevolent, word-twisting GM; random, gruesome character death, etc. The plot was actually not too bad, and very player-driven (with a focus on traveling to new lands). I also recall that when we started AD&D 2nd Edition, we had no one to teach us the rules; I made the error of buying the DMG before the PHB, thinking "This first one here says you need it to run the game. Maybe that's all I need!"
Tips from InQuest magazine helped a lot, but this was before we used/were allowed to use the internet for much more than AOL-hosted online games, so whatever wealth of how-to-play info that may have been on the web at that point was beyond our reach.
White Wolf games were better-explained, but the opinion pieces (how to set theme in a game, what World of Darkness games are about, etc.) in the books seemed to flatly contradict the way combat rules were laid out, the huge charts of firearm info, etc. The dice pool system seemed fine, but there were, to us, "extra" rules - ones we had little intention of following or bothering to know. Given that I gamed with the same five or six people, mostly, from 4th grade til 12th, we had all cut our teeth on propless "freeform" RPing, and had little interest in mastering crunch once we realized how much *work* it was.
I'm finally making my way into the Old School Revolution, and I really, really enjoyed the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. It revealed a lot to me about the play-culture centered on D&D that came (and largely went, imo) before my time, and revealed a TON about the mindset of many designers since - basically, take the Primer, play the telephone game for 20 years, and see what you get. Fillip's phrasing "the condensed essence of 90s bullshit" is pain I can share all too easily, and I think a lot of folks in the indie scene can too - indie gaming by way of really bad, unfulfilling experiences.
Mathew E. Reuther:
I learned when I was in 2nd grade in '81. "You just killed a god, so you become a god . . ." Yeah, that happened. :) Now for the record, I know a lot of people love the original D&D red box, and I did own it, . . . but I learned on the 1977 blue box one weekend at a sleepover. My halfling died so very quickly . . . I was hooked. ;)
Nearly three decades on, I'd say that my learning was never hampered by not having anyone to pass the rules down (to be fair, in the early 80's there was not this massive tradition yet anyway in my opinion) mainly perhaps because the people I played with were also young and very flexible. Characters died when we played, but we just accepted that it could happen and we moved on. We didn't waste a lot of time on "that's not fair" and instead moved on because of how many cool things were happening.
As an aside, it irritates me that you linked a product on Lulu that is listed as a free download and won't resolve . . . Lulu says "no access!" . . . I wanted to see what Matthew had to say. LOL. *rawr!*
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Mathew,
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but I learned on the 1977 blue box one weekend at a sleepover.
I'm not clear - did your initial experience come from playing the game or from reading the books?
Chris
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