This is another one of those topics that's been bouncing around inside my skull for a while, but which seemed so...something...(Pedantic? Navel-gazing? Pointless? Already discussed to the point of futility on some gaming forum long before I took up interest in gaming again?) Anyway, as I was saying, so...something...as to be completely unworthy of wasting my time to post, or yours to read. Well, screw it. I'm posting it. Whether you want to read it through is your call.
It seems to me that for the most part, people don't expect non-roleplaying games to "make sense," except in the most superficial and abstract of ways. The rules are the rules, and that's that. Nobody questions why a hand of 21 in blackjack wins but 22 is an automatic loser. Nobody objects that Monopoly bears no resemblance to capitalism or real estate markets other than some loose terminology. Why does the knight in chess move in an L-shaped pattern? It just does, and nobody bats an eye. Nobody ever asked why you would walk right past a ladder without climbing it, and then slide down the chute two spaces farther on, just because a throw of the dice said so.
If official rules are omitted, it's not because it's not realistic or because it's unbalanced, but because the rule is too tedious to remember or apply, or bogs down the game, or just generally doesn't contribute to the fun at all. I don't ever remember using the official challenge rule in Scrabble; if somebody thought something wasn't a word, we'd look it up in the dictionary. If it was there, it stood, and if it wasn't, the player took back his tiles and played something else. I know there were obscure rules in Monopoly that we never applied. As for chess, I never had much interest in learning the rules in the first place. I just stuck with the much simpler game of checkers.
That was the attitude with which I began to read my first copy of Moldvay Basic too, because that was how I thought of games in general. For the most part that was the attitude with which I actually ran the game during those first formative months. It didn't matter to me WHY magic-users couldn't wear armor, or WHY clerics didn't get a spell at first level, or WHY movement rates were what they were. Those were just the rules of the game. The only thing in the rulebook that really struck me strange was the bit about fudging dice rolls at the DM's whim - for example, if a character with 3 hp is struck by a monster wielding a 1d8 sword, you just announce 2 points of damage and the game proceeds. (Side note: I think that bit of advice was a poor one, and to the extent that my games of old eventually descended into PC-coddling, railroading, and Monty Haul-ism, this was at the root of it.)
Just like in Scrabble or Monopoly, we didn't embrace every rule in the book. I mostly handwaved stuff that just bogged down the proceedings, at least in my view at the time. Encumbrance was a load (heh) so we ignored it - everybody had a movement rate of 120' (40') and whatever treasure they found they could cram into their packs and carry away. The Caller rule seemed to be a needless procedural thing rather than a rule that really affected play (sort of like the Banker in Monopoly) so we ignored that too. What we didn't do was to argue whether a rule best represented how something would really happen. We didn't quibble over realism. In other words, we played it a lot like a board game, if the game pieces had had personalities and goals.
The crazy thing is, it worked on both levels. We played by the rules, because they were the rules, but we also played out heroic quests and adventures. We imagined characters and monsters, not game pieces, and caverns and ruins, not game boards. Characters developed and prospered, and characters died, and some of each were quite beloved by players and DM alike. Some of each were forgotten, too, either retired and discarded or killed in action to be replaced by a more compelling persona, but when was the last time anybody EVER felt a thrill for the Top Hat token when it just missed landing on Boardwalk with a hotel, or lamented the loss of a particular pawn on the chess board?
I guess the thrust of my whole line of inquiry here is, how granular and how "realistic" does a system need to be in order to foster that kind of imagination-centric experience, rather than just a contextless contest of tactics and probabilities like chess or blackjack or Scrabble?
A secondary question (or is it the primary one?): Why do RPG enthusiasts obsess over these things in a way that even the most ardent chess or poker player does not? Why, for example, the endless debates over what "hit points" are and what they mean in the game, and whether they ought to be replaced with some sort of realistic wound system? Nobody puzzles over how many "men" a checkers game piece represents, or whether defeating it on the game board represents slaughter or capture. To be honest, I have no idea what the hell, if anything, poker hands could possibly represent.
The major difference between a roleplaying game and a plain old game, as I see them, is that the former expressly encourages imagination on the part of players (including the DM/GM) as an integral and essential part of the game experience, while the latter does not. You can play chess or checkers without giving a flying rat's ass on the lower east side of hell what these armies are fighting about, the personalities of the commanders, the terrain of the battlefield, or what's at stake for the potential winner and loser. Nowhere in the rules of those games or in the culture of players who play them is there any very strong suggestion that such games are anything more than gridded boards, some tokens, some bits of stiff paper with numbers and symbols printed on them, etc. Drawing a royal flush in poker means nothing more than that you hold all the cards of a particular suit from 10 to Ace, and it beats any other hand. A hard 8 in craps is just that, a number. In an RPG, though, getting hit for 8 points of damage means something more. As such, it's completely natural for the player to want to know what that means beyond mere numbers. Does taking 8 points of damage and surviving mean your character just got run straight through with a sword (max damage, after all) and sucked it up like a badass, or did he get just get grazed, or did it just rattle his confidence?
Another facet of most RPGs is that they expressly state that the rules in the book do not cover all possible actions of the characters/"game pieces," but rather that they cover the most often encountered situations. That's in direct contrast to most games, in which all possible moves are prescribed by the rules. The pieces on a chess board each may be moved in a certain way, and no other. In blackjack, you stand or hit. In D&D, the actions your character may attempt are limited only by your imagination and the context of the setting. That naturally leads to a mentality that every nuance you might be able to describe in stating your actions should have a mechanical effect in the game. For example, shouldn't leaping from a shoulder-high wall and driving your sword point at your enemy be different somehow from just swinging at him in toe-to-toe combat? There's a certain impetus toward extreme granularity of rules, to uniquely accommodate every action a player can imagine. To what degree should that impetus be resisted, and to what degree should it be indulged or even encouraged?
I'm as guilty as anybody, and perhaps more than most, of compulsively putting rules under the microscope to see if they conform to my ideas of how combat and other elements of a fantasy world should behave, and of proposing new or modified systems or sub-systems to enhance the game experience. Perhaps it's the nostalgia of seeing B/X officially revived, but I'm starting to rethink all of my design tinkering, or at least my motives for engaging in it. I do think that there can be value in deconstructing and analyzing a system, figuring out exactly what the rules do and whether it's what they purport to do, and what to do about it when effect and purpose don't match. I think there's value in codifying house rules to deal with recurring situations that come up in one's own game that perhaps the game designers didn't anticipate, or that are just more important to one's own game than the original designers contemplated.
What I can't deny, though, is that, warts and all, I never had more fun playing D&D than when it was just good old B/X D&D, and at this point in my gaming and blogging "career" I think I may soon be shifting my focus away from so much rules tinkering, and toward my philosophy of DMing, of building atmosphere in a campaign setting, and similar topics.
Showing posts with label complexity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label complexity. Show all posts
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Thursday, July 5, 2012
What's in your monster?
(I had initially set out to write about the explosion in complexity of monster stat blocks compared to old school games, but that line of thinking led to something a bit more far-reaching. You never know what you're going to find when you start dissecting monsters.)
Monster stats sure have changed a lot over the history of the world's most popular RPG. Early editions took a pretty bare-bones approach toward a monster's mathematical DNA - mostly just some basic combat stats. When D&D "upgraded" to 3rd edition, though, I remember being completely flummoxed by the stat blocks I saw in my new issue of Dungeon Adventures. Suddenly monsters had a full complement of ability scores and skills, among other strange notations! (I let my subscription lapse shortly thereafter.) I'm completely unfamiliar with 4e monsters, but considering the ubiquity of the "skill challenge" mechanic, I'd be surprised if they weren't fully statted-up like characters too. Word is that monsters in the playtest version of 5e have ability scores as well.
I don't know what the initial impetus behind this seismic shift was. Perhaps somebody started wondering why monsters and characters seemed to operate on different mechanics, and sought to "unify" things. Perhaps it's merely the by-products of a misunderstanding of the importance of ability scores and the drive toward greater "realism" of the skills system.
In reality, in old editions monsters and characters actually did, for the most part, run on the same rules. Despite the obsessing of players and DMs over ability scores, they were never actually a core mechanic of the game, only a peripheral one. They provide some points of reference for imagining and role playing the character as a unique individual, and a few minor statistical deviations from the baseline in certain actions that were governed primarily by the real core mechanics. The real cogs and pulleys of the game engine were the things that were shared in common by PCs and monsters alike: a number representing how hard they are to hit (Armor Class), matrices determining their ability to hit (a function of levels for PCs, Hit Dice for monsters), a number representing how much punishment they can take before dying (hit points, derived from class and level for PCs, Hit Dice for monsters), a number or range of damage they cause with successful attacks, chances for avoiding or mitigating the effects of special attacks (saving throws, again a function of level/HD), and a movement rate. Some of these things could be modified by ability scores, but none were dependent upon them. The game, in fact, would play perfectly well without ability scores - essentially, as if everyone had modifiers of 0.
Thus, there was no point in generating ability scores at all, save for those entities most important to the game, the player characters. Take a look at the "monster" versions of humans and demi-humans (e.g. Bandit, Noble, Trader, etc.) in the rule books - nothing but standard monster stats. Or thumb through the Keep on the Borderlands module, and see how many of the denizens of the Keep had been given ability scores. (In a few cases, a single exceptional score is noted. Other than that...nada.)
In many or perhaps most cases, ability scores don't even apply very neatly to monsters. How do you rate a horse's Strength score on a scale meant for humans? Do you give it the strength several times that of a man, as a real life horse would have? If so, what do you do about the massive bonuses to hit and damage that would come with such a score? How about a pixie? Or a grey ooze - does it even have a Strength score, and if so, how exactly does the creature employ it? Does it have Wisdom or Charisma? Does it have Dexterity? How do you handle a giant's Constitution? It's clearly orders of magnitude sturdier than any human by virtue of sheer size, but does that give it greater endurance and resistance to disease too?
No, rather than rate every ability of every monster on the same scale as player characters, their abilities are subsumed in their standard stats. The Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution of grizzly bears and kobolds are reflected in their damage ranges, Armor Class, and number of Hit Dice. There's rarely any need to individualize them further, but when there is, it can be achieved simply by granting a bonus or penalty to any or all of these stats, rather than mucking about with the intermediary step of generating ability scores.
Early skill systems were similarly peripheral to the essential rules of the game. Originally they were bolted on to mainly to graft on background stuff that had nothing to do with interacting with monsters and NPCs, and often little to do with adventuring at all. Formally granting a character the ability to rig a sail or weave baskets doesn't even touch upon the core mechanics of the game or any of the situations that they govern. There's almost never any reason why you'd need to know whether an orc or dragon can do either, and if some situation arose in which it is important - say, encountering a ship crewed by orcish pirates - you just assume they have the ability to do what they're clearly doing.
Somehow, though, the game evolved to begin incorporating ability scores directly into core game mechanics, rather than simply modifying them with a bonus or penalty. In case there's any confusion, resolving a situation by rolling a die and adding an ability score modifier is an example of the latter. Even without the ability score, the roll can be taken straight. A check of "1d20, roll under ability" is a simple example of the former - it cannot work at all in the absence of the requisite ability score. (Granted, the d20 ability check does appear in old school rule books, but it's generally suggested as a sort non-specific or catch-all mechanic in the DM's tool box, to be used at the DM's discretion for adjudicating occasional actions covered by no formal rule. As a tool for ad hoc rulings and resolutions, it seems no more objectionable than any other. Only with the intent to formally codify it as an official mechanic for resolving specified actions does it really turn malignant.)
Maybe this was an outgrowth of the inflated importance so often mistakenly assigned to ability scores, or maybe it was a conscious effort to actually make them as important as they were perceived to be. Whatever, chicken and egg. Once you have ability scores exerting a direct rather than indirect effect, you either have a mechanical double standard - a thing is done one way for PCs and another for monsters, which of course is fraught with opportunities for imbalance and abuse - or you have to assign ability scores to the monsters so they can use the same mechanics. If a certain action in combat is resolved with a check against Strength, then monsters need Strength scores, and even more problematically, they need Strength scores that are directly comparable to human Strength scores. Simply rolling 3d6 won't do - see the aforementioned examples of the horse and the pixie.
Similarly with skills. As long as they pertain to things like singing, basket weaving, and historical knowledge, they don't intrude upon the jurisdiction of the foundational rules for combat, negotiations, and other interactions, so they generate no disequilibrium if monsters don't have them. When they do start branching into those areas (sometimes morphing into "feats;" same concept, different label) they become a point of asymmetry between PC and monster, and the pressure to balance things out mounts. If a PC can have a Dodge skill for additional chance to evade attacks, what justification can there be for monsters not to have access to a similar ability? When skills and feats function on an opposed mechanic of some sort, it's pretty much mandatory that monsters have skills, else what exactly is the PC's skill opposing? When skills and feats are based on ability scores, it's then required that monsters have ability scores as well.
Where these changes lead in the end is not a to few new bells and baubles tacked onto a simple system, but to a fundamental transformation of a simple system into a much more complex one.
Monster stats sure have changed a lot over the history of the world's most popular RPG. Early editions took a pretty bare-bones approach toward a monster's mathematical DNA - mostly just some basic combat stats. When D&D "upgraded" to 3rd edition, though, I remember being completely flummoxed by the stat blocks I saw in my new issue of Dungeon Adventures. Suddenly monsters had a full complement of ability scores and skills, among other strange notations! (I let my subscription lapse shortly thereafter.) I'm completely unfamiliar with 4e monsters, but considering the ubiquity of the "skill challenge" mechanic, I'd be surprised if they weren't fully statted-up like characters too. Word is that monsters in the playtest version of 5e have ability scores as well.
I don't know what the initial impetus behind this seismic shift was. Perhaps somebody started wondering why monsters and characters seemed to operate on different mechanics, and sought to "unify" things. Perhaps it's merely the by-products of a misunderstanding of the importance of ability scores and the drive toward greater "realism" of the skills system.
In reality, in old editions monsters and characters actually did, for the most part, run on the same rules. Despite the obsessing of players and DMs over ability scores, they were never actually a core mechanic of the game, only a peripheral one. They provide some points of reference for imagining and role playing the character as a unique individual, and a few minor statistical deviations from the baseline in certain actions that were governed primarily by the real core mechanics. The real cogs and pulleys of the game engine were the things that were shared in common by PCs and monsters alike: a number representing how hard they are to hit (Armor Class), matrices determining their ability to hit (a function of levels for PCs, Hit Dice for monsters), a number representing how much punishment they can take before dying (hit points, derived from class and level for PCs, Hit Dice for monsters), a number or range of damage they cause with successful attacks, chances for avoiding or mitigating the effects of special attacks (saving throws, again a function of level/HD), and a movement rate. Some of these things could be modified by ability scores, but none were dependent upon them. The game, in fact, would play perfectly well without ability scores - essentially, as if everyone had modifiers of 0.
Thus, there was no point in generating ability scores at all, save for those entities most important to the game, the player characters. Take a look at the "monster" versions of humans and demi-humans (e.g. Bandit, Noble, Trader, etc.) in the rule books - nothing but standard monster stats. Or thumb through the Keep on the Borderlands module, and see how many of the denizens of the Keep had been given ability scores. (In a few cases, a single exceptional score is noted. Other than that...nada.)
In many or perhaps most cases, ability scores don't even apply very neatly to monsters. How do you rate a horse's Strength score on a scale meant for humans? Do you give it the strength several times that of a man, as a real life horse would have? If so, what do you do about the massive bonuses to hit and damage that would come with such a score? How about a pixie? Or a grey ooze - does it even have a Strength score, and if so, how exactly does the creature employ it? Does it have Wisdom or Charisma? Does it have Dexterity? How do you handle a giant's Constitution? It's clearly orders of magnitude sturdier than any human by virtue of sheer size, but does that give it greater endurance and resistance to disease too?
No, rather than rate every ability of every monster on the same scale as player characters, their abilities are subsumed in their standard stats. The Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution of grizzly bears and kobolds are reflected in their damage ranges, Armor Class, and number of Hit Dice. There's rarely any need to individualize them further, but when there is, it can be achieved simply by granting a bonus or penalty to any or all of these stats, rather than mucking about with the intermediary step of generating ability scores.
Early skill systems were similarly peripheral to the essential rules of the game. Originally they were bolted on to mainly to graft on background stuff that had nothing to do with interacting with monsters and NPCs, and often little to do with adventuring at all. Formally granting a character the ability to rig a sail or weave baskets doesn't even touch upon the core mechanics of the game or any of the situations that they govern. There's almost never any reason why you'd need to know whether an orc or dragon can do either, and if some situation arose in which it is important - say, encountering a ship crewed by orcish pirates - you just assume they have the ability to do what they're clearly doing.
Somehow, though, the game evolved to begin incorporating ability scores directly into core game mechanics, rather than simply modifying them with a bonus or penalty. In case there's any confusion, resolving a situation by rolling a die and adding an ability score modifier is an example of the latter. Even without the ability score, the roll can be taken straight. A check of "1d20, roll under ability" is a simple example of the former - it cannot work at all in the absence of the requisite ability score. (Granted, the d20 ability check does appear in old school rule books, but it's generally suggested as a sort non-specific or catch-all mechanic in the DM's tool box, to be used at the DM's discretion for adjudicating occasional actions covered by no formal rule. As a tool for ad hoc rulings and resolutions, it seems no more objectionable than any other. Only with the intent to formally codify it as an official mechanic for resolving specified actions does it really turn malignant.)
Maybe this was an outgrowth of the inflated importance so often mistakenly assigned to ability scores, or maybe it was a conscious effort to actually make them as important as they were perceived to be. Whatever, chicken and egg. Once you have ability scores exerting a direct rather than indirect effect, you either have a mechanical double standard - a thing is done one way for PCs and another for monsters, which of course is fraught with opportunities for imbalance and abuse - or you have to assign ability scores to the monsters so they can use the same mechanics. If a certain action in combat is resolved with a check against Strength, then monsters need Strength scores, and even more problematically, they need Strength scores that are directly comparable to human Strength scores. Simply rolling 3d6 won't do - see the aforementioned examples of the horse and the pixie.
Similarly with skills. As long as they pertain to things like singing, basket weaving, and historical knowledge, they don't intrude upon the jurisdiction of the foundational rules for combat, negotiations, and other interactions, so they generate no disequilibrium if monsters don't have them. When they do start branching into those areas (sometimes morphing into "feats;" same concept, different label) they become a point of asymmetry between PC and monster, and the pressure to balance things out mounts. If a PC can have a Dodge skill for additional chance to evade attacks, what justification can there be for monsters not to have access to a similar ability? When skills and feats function on an opposed mechanic of some sort, it's pretty much mandatory that monsters have skills, else what exactly is the PC's skill opposing? When skills and feats are based on ability scores, it's then required that monsters have ability scores as well.
Where these changes lead in the end is not a to few new bells and baubles tacked onto a simple system, but to a fundamental transformation of a simple system into a much more complex one.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Why I scrapped skills
Since I started posting about how to make characters unique, I thought I should address one of the most common systems added to the game for that purpose. I'm aware that this topic has been covered pretty thoroughly and that I'm probably not offering much of anything in the way of fresh insights, but I felt like stating my reasoning in my own words, so here it is.
My introduction to skills came via the Gazetteer series of supplements to the Known World/Mystara setting introduced in the Expert Rules set, specifically GAZ6, The Dwarves of Rockhome, which happened to be the first one I acquired. Briefly, every character got four skill slots plus his Intelligence bonus, with additional slots gained at higher levels. Each skill was based on an ability score, and checked by rolling d20 against that score. The list of skills, accumulated over the entire run of the Gazetteer and Creature Crucible series, included things such as crafts (blacksmith, cobbler, armorer, weaver, etc.,) knowledge of whatever field you choose, acrobatics, dancing, singing, musical instruments, labor and professional skills (mining, engineering, sailing, cooking, etc.,) gambling, art, law and justice, alertness, weather sense, direction sense, healing, bargaining, persuasion, riding, tracking...the list goes on and on. Some skills, such as quick draw, fighting instinct, and blind fighting even granted combat bonuses.
The system appealed to me immediately for its promise in making characters more than just generic members of a class. At a glance, skills seem to do just that, defining a character's training and interests not directly related to the functions of his class, and since my players at the time were fairly experienced and game-savvy, they didn't have much trouble adding skill selection to the character creation process. Until pretty recently, in fact, I thought of a skill system as an essential part of my game. A few things have led me to rethink that view. My new group, with only one veteran player, found the skills confusing, and fretted about choosing the ones most useful in an adventuring career. Skills did not serve to add depth to their characters, but to gain bonuses and define what they could and could not do. And of course, I had begun to read the ruminations of some old school game bloggers that clearly articulated a lot of my vague misgivings about the skill system and added even more that had never occurred to me. In particular, -C of Hack and Slash has done a fantastic job of deconstructing skill systems and individual skills.
Using my own recently articulated framework for analyzing complexity, realism, and choices, here are my conclusions on skills.
Skills certainly do offer up a lot of additional options, but the placement of those choices and their actual interest are dubious. Skill systems heavily front-load choices into the character creation phase. Most of the choice comes in the form of whether to take the skill in the first place, very little in whether and when to use it in play.
I divide skills into two admittedly nebulous categories: Those that are directly and commonly useful in adventuring, and those that are mainly for role playing color and flavor. The first sort are prone to either limiting the scope of choice in play, or else contributing to bonus inflation. To be worthwhile at all, having a skill must provide an advantage over not having it. That necessarily means that either characters who lack the skill are penalized or barred from attempting actions relating to it, or else characters with the skill get a boost over and above the baseline of ability assumed in the game. It's debatable whether the "useful" skills actually expand the range of choice during an adventure at all. At best they affect the odds of success of a particular action, but they generally don't open up completely new possibilities. You can attempt to persuade someone without having the persuasion skill; you can bargain without bargaining skill; lack of mining skill doesn't prevent you from examining a cave wall or trying to tunnel through the wall with a pick; you can run and jump without athletics skill.
The choices implied by the "color and flavor" skills, the cooking and crafting and singing and all that, are generally ones that players wouldn't try without them, but also aren't all that interesting to most players. 99 times out of 100, a painting or leather-working skill roll has no significant consequences in the game.
Skills add only a little complexity to actual play, but a lot to character creation. The relatively uninteresting range of choices they add to game play doesn't even come close to offsetting this unless your players really know their way around the D&D game. Even then, it's iffy. It may be moderately interesting to make your character a singer or a blacksmith, but it has precious little application in play beyond a role playing hook, and that can be accomplished without codifying it into game mechanics.
Having failed the interesting choices vs. added complexity test, assessing realism is more or less a moot point, but the skills system does produce some wildly counter-realistic results. For one, it allows a character with a high requisite ability score to be an instant virtuoso, while one with an average score can never be more than mediocre. Worse, a character with a high score in a particular ability can load up on skills based on that ability, and be a virtuoso in multiple fields. A character with a 17 Intelligence can begin play as a master blacksmith, tracker, shipwright, and alchemist, trades that each should require years, if not decades of diligent practice to attain mastery. It's terribly unrealistic for someone who deserts the family farm at the age of 16 for a life of adventure to be a better farmer than his father who's been toiling in the fields for a quarter century simply because he has a higher Intelligence score.
In my opinion, the skill system fails at what ought to be its primary purposes. It doesn't add much in the way of new options in actual play - in fact, it subtracts from them. As a means of distinguishing and individualizing characters, it's a Rube Goldberg device, and it even fails the lowest priority, the realism test. Its cons far outweigh its pros in my estimation, which is why it's no longer a part of my game.
My introduction to skills came via the Gazetteer series of supplements to the Known World/Mystara setting introduced in the Expert Rules set, specifically GAZ6, The Dwarves of Rockhome, which happened to be the first one I acquired. Briefly, every character got four skill slots plus his Intelligence bonus, with additional slots gained at higher levels. Each skill was based on an ability score, and checked by rolling d20 against that score. The list of skills, accumulated over the entire run of the Gazetteer and Creature Crucible series, included things such as crafts (blacksmith, cobbler, armorer, weaver, etc.,) knowledge of whatever field you choose, acrobatics, dancing, singing, musical instruments, labor and professional skills (mining, engineering, sailing, cooking, etc.,) gambling, art, law and justice, alertness, weather sense, direction sense, healing, bargaining, persuasion, riding, tracking...the list goes on and on. Some skills, such as quick draw, fighting instinct, and blind fighting even granted combat bonuses.
The system appealed to me immediately for its promise in making characters more than just generic members of a class. At a glance, skills seem to do just that, defining a character's training and interests not directly related to the functions of his class, and since my players at the time were fairly experienced and game-savvy, they didn't have much trouble adding skill selection to the character creation process. Until pretty recently, in fact, I thought of a skill system as an essential part of my game. A few things have led me to rethink that view. My new group, with only one veteran player, found the skills confusing, and fretted about choosing the ones most useful in an adventuring career. Skills did not serve to add depth to their characters, but to gain bonuses and define what they could and could not do. And of course, I had begun to read the ruminations of some old school game bloggers that clearly articulated a lot of my vague misgivings about the skill system and added even more that had never occurred to me. In particular, -C of Hack and Slash has done a fantastic job of deconstructing skill systems and individual skills.
Using my own recently articulated framework for analyzing complexity, realism, and choices, here are my conclusions on skills.
Skills certainly do offer up a lot of additional options, but the placement of those choices and their actual interest are dubious. Skill systems heavily front-load choices into the character creation phase. Most of the choice comes in the form of whether to take the skill in the first place, very little in whether and when to use it in play.
I divide skills into two admittedly nebulous categories: Those that are directly and commonly useful in adventuring, and those that are mainly for role playing color and flavor. The first sort are prone to either limiting the scope of choice in play, or else contributing to bonus inflation. To be worthwhile at all, having a skill must provide an advantage over not having it. That necessarily means that either characters who lack the skill are penalized or barred from attempting actions relating to it, or else characters with the skill get a boost over and above the baseline of ability assumed in the game. It's debatable whether the "useful" skills actually expand the range of choice during an adventure at all. At best they affect the odds of success of a particular action, but they generally don't open up completely new possibilities. You can attempt to persuade someone without having the persuasion skill; you can bargain without bargaining skill; lack of mining skill doesn't prevent you from examining a cave wall or trying to tunnel through the wall with a pick; you can run and jump without athletics skill.
The choices implied by the "color and flavor" skills, the cooking and crafting and singing and all that, are generally ones that players wouldn't try without them, but also aren't all that interesting to most players. 99 times out of 100, a painting or leather-working skill roll has no significant consequences in the game.
Skills add only a little complexity to actual play, but a lot to character creation. The relatively uninteresting range of choices they add to game play doesn't even come close to offsetting this unless your players really know their way around the D&D game. Even then, it's iffy. It may be moderately interesting to make your character a singer or a blacksmith, but it has precious little application in play beyond a role playing hook, and that can be accomplished without codifying it into game mechanics.
Having failed the interesting choices vs. added complexity test, assessing realism is more or less a moot point, but the skills system does produce some wildly counter-realistic results. For one, it allows a character with a high requisite ability score to be an instant virtuoso, while one with an average score can never be more than mediocre. Worse, a character with a high score in a particular ability can load up on skills based on that ability, and be a virtuoso in multiple fields. A character with a 17 Intelligence can begin play as a master blacksmith, tracker, shipwright, and alchemist, trades that each should require years, if not decades of diligent practice to attain mastery. It's terribly unrealistic for someone who deserts the family farm at the age of 16 for a life of adventure to be a better farmer than his father who's been toiling in the fields for a quarter century simply because he has a higher Intelligence score.
In my opinion, the skill system fails at what ought to be its primary purposes. It doesn't add much in the way of new options in actual play - in fact, it subtracts from them. As a means of distinguishing and individualizing characters, it's a Rube Goldberg device, and it even fails the lowest priority, the realism test. Its cons far outweigh its pros in my estimation, which is why it's no longer a part of my game.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Complexity, realism, and choice
A lot has been written in OSR circles about the siren's song of realism in role playing games. Pursuit of realism has led to some wildly complicated game systems, pages and pages of tables and subtables, systems and sub-systems bolted on willy-nilly, until you need an accounting degree just to keep track of a simple scene or combat. I think realism does have its place, and it is a good and useful thing when it remains in that place. Maintaining its proper place in relation to other factors of game design is key.
First off, it seems to me that people often conflate realism with level of detail, what I might call granularity or resolution. Resolving a combat with a single die roll is no less "realistic" than resolving it through a complex system involving many die rolls to represent actions within the combat, any more than a picture of Earth from space is less realistic than a 100-page coffee table book filled with pictures of people and places on Earth. They're simply different perspectives with different levels of resolution.
Secondly, I think that often the pursuit of supposed realism is actually driven by a misidentified desire not for realism, but for more choices in game play. A DM adopting a "realistic" system with hit location charts and rules to handicap characters according to their specific wounds may actually be intrigued by the role playing and tactical possibilities of playing wounded characters, but with his or her conscious focus on realism rather than on the true goal of providing interesting choices in play, the result may be a needless and frustrating quagmire of complexity. It may even be destructive and limiting to player choice, rather than expansive.
With those thoughts in mind, here's my take on the proper relationship between complexity, realism, and choice:
The goal of rules in a role playing game is to provide a framework in which players can make choices. The more interesting the choices it imposes or facilitates, the more valuable is a rule or sub-system to the game. Of course, what's interesting is a subjective matter, so the preferences of the players will tend to determine which activities warrant detailed "hi-res" systems and which can be glossed over with a single "low-res" die roll or ruling.
Greater complexity allows for more choices. However, complexity exerts resistance to the flow of the game, much like friction between moving parts of a complex machine. Too much complexity can offset the value of interesting choices provided by a rule or sub-system.
The purpose of adding complexity to a game should always be to increase the range of interesting choices, not to increase "realism." (The two are not mutually exclusive, but the focus must always be on the former.) Thinking of interesting choices as benefits and complexity as cost, the economic law of diminishing marginal returns clearly applies. At some point, the enjoyment gained from the choices provided by a new rule is going to be outweighed by the disutility of having to remember and apply it. This applies both to any given rule or sub-system individually and to their cumulative effect on the game as a whole.
Realism applies in a negative sense, not as a driving force behind system design but as a post hoc litmus test. Rules and systems should strive not to slavishly model reality, but simply to avoid clashing with it so blatantly as to harm players' immersion and willing suspension of disbelief and foil their reasonable expectations of how their actions should be able to affect elements of the game world. Magic and other fantastical elements need only be internally consistent, but anything that mirrors the real world, such as armed combat, must not violate players' basic understanding of real world physical laws. Sometimes this is simply a matter of properly "fluffing" the rule; e.g. making clear that character hit points are the ability to avoid taking real bodily harm, not the capacity to absorb direct sword strikes.
In general, then, the most valuable and useful rules are those that effectively provide for the most interesting choices with a minimum of complexity and without flagrantly violating players' conception of reality.
First off, it seems to me that people often conflate realism with level of detail, what I might call granularity or resolution. Resolving a combat with a single die roll is no less "realistic" than resolving it through a complex system involving many die rolls to represent actions within the combat, any more than a picture of Earth from space is less realistic than a 100-page coffee table book filled with pictures of people and places on Earth. They're simply different perspectives with different levels of resolution.
Secondly, I think that often the pursuit of supposed realism is actually driven by a misidentified desire not for realism, but for more choices in game play. A DM adopting a "realistic" system with hit location charts and rules to handicap characters according to their specific wounds may actually be intrigued by the role playing and tactical possibilities of playing wounded characters, but with his or her conscious focus on realism rather than on the true goal of providing interesting choices in play, the result may be a needless and frustrating quagmire of complexity. It may even be destructive and limiting to player choice, rather than expansive.
With those thoughts in mind, here's my take on the proper relationship between complexity, realism, and choice:
The goal of rules in a role playing game is to provide a framework in which players can make choices. The more interesting the choices it imposes or facilitates, the more valuable is a rule or sub-system to the game. Of course, what's interesting is a subjective matter, so the preferences of the players will tend to determine which activities warrant detailed "hi-res" systems and which can be glossed over with a single "low-res" die roll or ruling.
Greater complexity allows for more choices. However, complexity exerts resistance to the flow of the game, much like friction between moving parts of a complex machine. Too much complexity can offset the value of interesting choices provided by a rule or sub-system.
The purpose of adding complexity to a game should always be to increase the range of interesting choices, not to increase "realism." (The two are not mutually exclusive, but the focus must always be on the former.) Thinking of interesting choices as benefits and complexity as cost, the economic law of diminishing marginal returns clearly applies. At some point, the enjoyment gained from the choices provided by a new rule is going to be outweighed by the disutility of having to remember and apply it. This applies both to any given rule or sub-system individually and to their cumulative effect on the game as a whole.
Realism applies in a negative sense, not as a driving force behind system design but as a post hoc litmus test. Rules and systems should strive not to slavishly model reality, but simply to avoid clashing with it so blatantly as to harm players' immersion and willing suspension of disbelief and foil their reasonable expectations of how their actions should be able to affect elements of the game world. Magic and other fantastical elements need only be internally consistent, but anything that mirrors the real world, such as armed combat, must not violate players' basic understanding of real world physical laws. Sometimes this is simply a matter of properly "fluffing" the rule; e.g. making clear that character hit points are the ability to avoid taking real bodily harm, not the capacity to absorb direct sword strikes.
In general, then, the most valuable and useful rules are those that effectively provide for the most interesting choices with a minimum of complexity and without flagrantly violating players' conception of reality.
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