How do you prefer to roleplay?

[Dintiradan]

To clarify, I'm talking about role-playing games, the kind you play around a table (or in an online chat, in this community's case). If you're not familiar with AIMhack, think about games like Dungeons and Dragons. This topic is due to the recent conversation we've been having in the AIMhack meta thread. We've been discussing a new set of rules for roleplaying online, and it was clear that everyone had a different idea of what the rules should do.

 

I'd like to poll the community in general (not just the AIMhack players): what would be the qualities of your ideal RPG? One big caveat: roleplaying is first and foremost a social activity, and like all social activities compromises are necessary. That's fine. But for the purposes of these questions, assume you're playing your ideal RPG with a group of like-minded friends.

 

(Also, this post ended up bigger than I thought it would be. Feel free to answer as many or as few questions as you like.)

 

What is the purpose of the rules of the game? And how important are the rules when you play? Do you think there should be clear rules for every common situation your character runs into? Or should there be relatively few rules, with the Game Master coming up with ad-hoc rulings when necessary? Do you think that the rules should be ignored when the story is more important?

 

How do you feel about combat in RPGs? Do you view the characters and monsters as pieces in a boardgame? Or do you think the combat rules should try simulating how an actual battle would play out? Is it important to you that each character in a party is roughly equal in power for any given combat? Should there be a multitude of strategies available to characters at any given time, or should combat be simple and straightforward?

 

What about time spent out of combat? Is this the focus of your ideal campaign? Or do you prefer less roleplaying and more dungeon stomping? Do you think there should be rules for social interactions the way there are rules for combat interactions?

 

How powerful do you like your characters to be? Able to weather whatever comes their way, or barely able to survive? Do you think your characters should be able to overcome most obstacles put in their path, or should they only be able to succeed at their specialities?

 

What's the most important facet of the characters you make? Is it their backstories? Their personalities? Their abilities? Their items? When creating a character, do you enjoy pouring over sourcebooks and items lists trying to optimize performance, or do you think character creation should be less about those things?

 

 

 

And I could go on and on and on. I've tried to keep all of this at a high level. If you want to talk about something else that interests you, by all means.

[BJ Back From the Beyond]

Rules: to me, the rules serve two purposes. First, they ensure that all the players are being fair to one another and to the GM (this isn't as much of a concern if you have a really cool group of players, but every once in a while you'll get one of those players that reminds you why the rules are important). Second, they are there to provide the players with a myriad of possible tactics while ensuring that each of those tactics is as viable as the rest (I know this rarely happens, but this is supposed to be my ideal RPG).

One thing I've realized about RPGing is that it's as much a creative exercise as it is a tactical one, and I love that aspect of it. I think trying to make a rule for every situation would only stifle the creative process, though for common situations, those that each party member would possibly run into at some point, it's nice to have a set of rules to fall back on. As a GM, it simplifies things by taking some of the rules decisions off your shoulders so you can focus more on the story. As a player, it's nice to know what you can expect to have happen in a given situation so you can plan around it. This doesn't mean the DM needs to follow the rules; they're just nice to have.

 

Combat: I haven't had any experience with table-top RPG combat beyond AIMHack, so I'll just give my impression of that. To me the characters feel like much more than just pieces on a board, even when we're running around on a battle map. It feels much closer to an actual battle, especially with everyone in the party taking their turns at once. There's less time to think about what action you're going to take than if you were waiting on everyone else, and this gives me a sense of urgency similar to what I imagine my character is feeling. There's also less input from the other players. One player could be typing up an argument for my character to go do something, and in the meantime I may or may not tell my character to go do something else entirely before the other player has a chance to say anything at all.

As for strategies, I think making combat too straightforward would just make it dull ("my warrior swings!", roll, wash, repeat), but having too many strategies available would slow down the combat too much, especially for online play. There is a sweet-spot, and I think we've about reached it.

 

Party Power: I think the party's power really needs to be determined by the campaign (and thus, by the GM). I've played in campaigns where the party was barely able to stay on their feet (Zombies 2) and in campaigns where the party was so capable that they practically looked for trouble (All the Creeping Things), and I have to say that I've really enjoyed both.

 

Character Creation: I don't really have any hard and fast rules on character creation. Usually when I want to make a character I start by thinking about what that character's personality is like and what their main capabilities are. Then I think about their past by asking the questions "Why are they the way they are, and why are they good at what they do?" I don't always come up with the answers before playing the character, but usually I do. From that I try to fill out their skills and abilities with ones that would be logical for them to have based on their backstory and try to give them items that are either logical for them to have (like Nathan's lockpicks) or say something interesting about them (like Lucia's pendant). Then I go back through and tweak as needed until satisfied.

[Lilith]

I'd say that for me, the single most important thing I look for in a roleplaying session is that I be able to make difficult decisions with consequences that matter, and have enough information to have a reasonable idea of the consequences of those decisions in advance. Even what kind of decision I'm making is secondary: I can be equally content whether I'm choosing which spell to cast to try and turn the tide of a pitched battle, deciding which feuding noble family to throw my support behind, or agonising over whether it's worth letting a criminal go free in exchange for information that could save lives. It's not very important to me whether the challenges and decisions I face involve combat or not, as long as I have multiple interesting options with meaningful consequences.

 

I also strongly prefer for there to be clearly defined rules that bind the GM as well as the players. I'm okay with there being room for interpretation and judgement calls, but I don't want there to be an expectation that the group should fill the holes and sand down the rough edges during play in order for the game to work at all. The way I see it, if you need to ignore rules in order to play the game you want, your rules are a bad fit for the kind of game you want to play.

 

To me, one of the main purposes of rules is to maintain the integrity and emotional tone of the shared imagined space, even if that sometimes creates instances of play that are unwelcome to the players at the time. It gets a lot harder to do that if there's one person at the table whose job it is to ignore rules that the players don't like. A simple illustrative example of what I mean is a dungeon crawl, where the main question of the game is whether you get the treasure at the bottom of the dungeon and get out alive. In any individual dungeon crawl you'd rather have your character live than die, but playing a game where the GM always pulls your ass out of the fire when the rules say you should die gets boring, because the tension and sense of achievement disappears -- that's the kind of thing I mean by rules maintaining emotional tone. Playing a game where the GM sometimes ignores the rules to save your character's life can be even worse, because then when the GM chooses not to do so you have reason to blame the GM instead of the rules.

 

I think boardgame-style combat works very well for games where "whether the PCs will survive and defeat their enemies" is one of the questions the game is meant to address. I enjoy games like that, but they're not the only games I enjoy. I very much like Dogs in the Vineyard's conflict system, where the question being addressed is almost never whether the PCs are able to win a fight against NPCs (they're the baddest dudes and dudettes in town) but whether they're willing to escalate that fight as far as they have to in order to get their way.

 

When the players are faced with a challenge, whether in combat or out of it, I want all of them to be able to contribute meaningfully. I don't feel that they have to be exactly as good at each other in every single situation, but their contribution should normally be roughly equal over the course of a session, and situations where any player is effectively useless (either because they have nothing to contribute, or because another player can solve the challenge singlehandedly) should be as rare as possible. It's okay if bad decisions exist on a tactical, minute-to-minute level, but I don't want players to be able to make bad character-building decisions that restrict their ability to contribute over a long span of time.

 

I prefer characters to have their own strengths and weaknesses, because I like games that encourage teamwork and interaction between the player characters, but I also want most characters to have a basic assumed degree of competence in at least some areas outside their specialisation, especially when we're talking about D&D-style adventurers. I don't want to have to roll to cook a meal or tie a knot, unless I'm cooking to impress the king or tying up someone's who's resisting, or being bad at cooking or knot-tying is a fact that I've specifically chosen to establish about my character. Most of the time, I want characters to be competent at the things they're good at, but not so powerful that they can't get in over their heads -- that's a pretty broadly stated preference that I don't think is too hard to satisfy.

 

To me, mechanically-defined abilities (including items and equipment, if they're a major part of what makes the character able to do things) are the most important aspect of my character, because those are the tools with which I'm guaranteed to be able to interact with the shared imagined space in a consequential way. My character's personality is a close second, because that's going to affect how I choose to use the abilities I have available. My character's backstory is significantly less important than abilities and personality: it gives me some guidance on how a character's personality might be likely to develop over time, but in most games (at least games with D&D-style play assumptions) I don't expect my GM to directly bring events from my character's backstory into play, although it can be fun if it does happen.

 

If a lot of sourcebooks and supplements exist for a game, then I'll gladly dig through them to find optimal or interesting combinations of abilities. But if all those extra supplements don't exist or aren't permitted, I'm perfectly content to make the best character I can with the options available. I generally won't deliberately make characters whose competence at the main things they're expected to do is too far out of line with the rest of the party. In Magic: the Gathering jargon, I'm more of a "Johnny" than a "Spike" -- given the choice between a unique and mechanically interesting thing that's reasonably effective and a boring thing that's a bit more effective, I'll usually choose the interesting thing, although I'll reluctantly pick the boring thing if the interesting thing ends up being useless.

 

Hope this gives you some idea of my thought processes during the design of Nibiru. Did I miss any major questions?

[Alorael at Large]

I think Lilith and I have overlapping taste in our tabletop gaming, so I'll just nod and say you should read what she has to say very carefully. If you happen to have it lying around, Burning Wheel in various editions also has strong words about rules, games, and why the latter have the former. Even roleplaying games. From the other end of the spectrum, Monte Cook, the once and future designer of D&D, just wrote an essay in Kobold Quarterly about much the same thing.

 

Rules serve many purposes. As Lilith says, they create and maintain tension and surprise that you can't get from simple make-believe. They keep everyone on a level playing field—ideally, the GM, too, is bound by the rules of GMing. I'm sometimes annoyed by games that make a chore of looking up rules for every single thing you want to do. One element that gets overlooked is focus: if you spend time figuring it out and rolling the dice for it, it's emphasized. Some things really shouldn't be; they may be complex or hard in real life but boring in-game, and the rules should emphasize fun. Dramatic fun, yes, but fun.

 

In general, unified rules systems, in which it's fairly clear at least how you should roll for things, appeal to me more than systems with a thousand different rolls for different things. A game like Lady Blackbird hits the extreme of always rolling the same way; 2nd edition AD&D or early Shadowrun goes the opposite way. If the rules are getting in the way and need to be ignored, do so... but it's a sign that the rules are wrong, either structurally or for the game you want to play.

 

Another role of the rules is to emphasize. Combat comes in here. There are games that try to have realistic combat, and they are often not fun. There are games with completely unrealistic combat that are very fun. It's subjective, of course, but I maintain that the primary goal of the rules is to match what you want out of a game, and while I like strategic combat with meaningful choices that let different characters shine, I also hate spending most of my time killing things.

 

And that gets me to roleplaying. Like Lilith, and like the goons at RPGCodex, I think the most important elements of the game are the choices you make (or you make for your character) and the consequences thereof. Dungeon crawling is fun, to an extent, but I get bored quickly. I like games where characters have personalities and desires. Backgrounds, too, but the past matters less than the present: what does my character want? What does yours want? How badly do they want it and what will they do to get it? What if their desires conflict? I'd much rather have a game revolve around personal issues than a plot arc I can't affect; ideally, there's a plot arc that's personal. (Note that books, films, and TV do this all the time, yet RPGs don't. It's not easy, but it's powerful.)

 

As a much more minor matter of taste, I prefer high-power games. Not so much characters that can steamroll over all foes in combat, although I admit that's part of it. I like the feeling of knowing that my character's actions are important because no one else can do it. And I like a political angle in which the characters are closer to being the movers and shakers than the pawns. Political and social power adds a lot to a game, particularly in adding more realms for conflict. Combat is the standard, but it's not the most interesting. Once swords are drawn and guns leveled, it's clear what people want: survival, and the death of the other guys. But whispering in the halls, sending anonymous letters, making deals and telling lies? That's where you find out who your character really is and just what they'll do. And then when you pull a knife on Caesar, it means something.

 

—Alorael, who will add that he's a powergamer at heart. He likes rules that let you do awesome specialized things with your awesome specialized character. In fact, that's his biggest disagreement with Burning Wheel, currently his RPG darling. But he'd rather have everyone be at least a little awesome by default, and he'd rather have the rules minimize the degree to which one can be completely useless. Because that's not fun, and rules should protect against unfun where they can.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Explodium-Unobtainium Exchanger

—Alorael, who will add that he's a powergamer at heart. He likes rules that let you do awesome specialized things with your awesome specialized character. In fact, that's his biggest disagreement with Burning Wheel, currently his RPG darling. But he'd rather have everyone be at least a little awesome by default, and he'd rather have the rules minimize the degree to which one can be completely useless. Because that's not fun, and rules should protect against unfun where they can.

have you tried Legends of Anglerre? it's pretty much an attempt to build a D&D-style fantasy game using FATE and it's got a lot of good press. it's slightly less rulesy than Burning Wheel or D&D, but still rulesy enough to provide character customisation options that go beyond "pick these adjectives to describe your character"

[Alorael at Large]

I've looked over LoA, and while it looks fun (I'd pick it over D&D for anything but running dungeon-crawl, original-flavor D&D adventures) it's not perfect, and I think I still prefer BW. Among other reasons, because I'm apparently in that fringe minority that thinks that BW's rules are actually quite simple, unified, and sufficiently elegant, except for the combat subsystems that can be avoided until players are ready. And with the caveat that I've played BW, but not LoA.

 

Originally Posted By: Vincent Baker

The worse problem is that if you don't know in advance generally what the game's content is going to be, it's very difficult to design rules for escalation, development, resolution etc. that treat the game's content concretely. What you get are games where pushing someone down has the same range of possible consequences as setting fire to a planet's atmosphere, and where "my mother is the moon and my father is the evening wind" is mechanically equivalent to "I have a motorcycle."

 

The more specific or modular you are upfront, the more detailed you can be. D&D gives you different bits of rules all the time. They're usually a d20 roll and a table with some modifiers, which keeps the headaches down and lets you decide what flavors of cool stuff you want. World of Darkness is all about building very specific rolls into the type of character you are. Werewolves can transform into giant killing machines. Changelings can swear vows that give them bonuses with some risk. Vampires can enslave someone's will. This works because they are not, in fact, in the same game.

 

BW and LoA both avoid that. They let you pick forms tags that customize your character in terms of what you are and what you can do. LoA's stunts let you pick more awesomely and with more freeform choices, and the game tries to set a much less gritty tone. But both suffer from scale problems: BW can run identically whether you are the mighty heroes facing the Dark Lord or scrappy peasants trying to fight off scruffy bandits.

 

—Alorael, who wants the rules, not just the game, to note that being the child of the moon and the evening wind is cool and special. It's a loss of system unity and simplicity, but he prefers it in favor of distinguishing the very special from the ordinary differences.

[Yuna Corne]

Has anyone here had any experience with Unhallowed Metropolis?

[Frozen Feet]

For mechanics that pertain to characters and character actions, I actually like for rules to be fairly simple, but in a way that allows for easy extrapolation of new abilities or fitting of new actions into old ones. A good example would be old-school D&D, where most non-combat things boiled down to ability score checks.

 

I do like some extent of character customization and tinkering, but not so much that it takes an Excell spreadsheet to track all details of one, like modern versions of D&D tend to demand. I'd like all important information for a character to be contained in a single book, preferably a short one. For example, if a game has classes, I'd like all important rules minutiae for a "Warrior" class to be contained in a "Warrior" booklet.

 

I'd like most of the rules to focus on creation and running of the environment, such as random encounters, weather etc. - things that help me create content, on the spot if I feel like it. But again in a focused manner - if I want to run a jungle adventure, I want all the necessary rules to be under "Jungles" heading.

 

To me, the main purpose of the rules is that they outline what the game is actually about. They tell what kind of characters are desired, what kind of content can be expected, and dictate the flow of the game. Ideally, rules exist to solve arguments, as I believe is their original intent; dice are rolled to quickly see who is wrong and who is right, to prevent a game from freezing into a debate about what should happen (as freeforms roleplays without contingency "flip a coin" rule are wont to do). Rulings should be made when necessary, but should be codified into rules ASAP. Also, if you've gone over the trouble of learning a ruleset and using it, I feel ignoring parts of it kinda misses the point of having rules in the first place.

 

I like playing all sorts of characters, of all sorts of powerlevels. I might want to play a teenage girl idol popstar one day, and undead demi-god of war the next. But this also means there likely isn't a one system "to rule them all" for me.

 

The most important facet of a character is, well, their role in the story (protagonist, antagonist, hero, villain etc.). Or rather, their desired role in the story that will emerge during course of a game. This is rather important: I do not like heavily scripted games, or the idea that certain things "should" happen just because one of the players (GMs included) wants them to happen. The rules, the game part of RPGs exists to create this certain uncertainty of the outcome. If there's a story, it's something that will exist once the game is over.

 

Anyways, to use a chess analogy, it's still important to know whether a character is meant to be a King, Queen, or just a Pawn. This also reflects to their capability to overcome obstacles - some characters should be made and played with the expectation that they will fail rather than succeed, but whether they actually do is left for the actual game to decide.

 

As far as combat is concerned, I don't consider it fundamental to RPGs. That said, when it is included, it should be interesting and tactically challenging to all parties involved. Not all characters need be equal (see Chess, again), but all of them should have some chance to influence the outcome.

 

Overall, I consider "combat" and "non-combat" to be equal in their need for rules. Both benefit from guidelines and argument-solving mechanics (such as die rolling), but get bogged down with too many rules.

[Tracer Bullet]

For myself, I strongly believe that the rules must be tailored to the setting. My most recent ruleset was for a Night's Watch RP, where we had a Lord Commander (code for GM, played by me), a maester, a First Ranger, a First Builder, a Lord Steward, a master-at-arms, and a King-beyond-the-Wall, and there was little mechanic aside from coin-tosses. I just drew a huge map of Castle Black and the Haunted Forest, and we had a blast just moving little Risk pieces around to represent wights, rangers, giants, etc. The most structured part of the entire game was the Lord Steward's ledger, where we kept tabs on every turnip and arrowhead in the entire Night's Watch. Added hilarity was provided by our King-beyond-the-Wall, who brought out a guitar and gave an amateur rendition of 'The Rains of Castamere' for us.

Combat, though sketchy in game-engine terms, really came alive for us. I attribute that to the lack of a grid on my map. We were free to move where we chose, measuring with a ruler to determine maximum movement range. I remember we fought an entire battle without a single die-roll or coin-toss, because everyone reached a consensus and built upon what everyone had said in a cooperative-story-telling sort of way.

 

At the other end of the spectrum, we have games that need careful regulation in all things, like my Geneforge-based fanfic-ish campaign, the ruleset for which I threw together using a combination of the actual Geneforge engine and D&D v4.0 (I never liked v3.5). Exacting figures are important, and remembering every one of them can become a chore. (If you write them down, you end up erasing them so often that your paper smudges irreparably or tears.)

 

Of the two of these games, I have to say I enjoyed the first one better. Probably because of the social attitude which accompanied it, but also because of the increased freedom. Ideally, though, something in between is reached, which brings me to the next point of the question: combat. Of all the battlegrounds between freedom and rulesets, this one is the fiercest fought.

 

The...

 

- Will update post again as soon as possible. It's still far from finished.