For me, the ideal system would be one that can use the same resolution mechanics to act out a “fight” in which one character is sword-fighting, one is trying to talk down the villain, one is trying to disarm his doomsday device, and it all gets physically resolved with the same narrative weight.
Fate absolutely does this.
For once, we agree! This is exactly what Fate seems designed to do.
Could you expand on the “clunkiness” of how BW skills work in your experience? (Mine differs, so I am interested in the difference.)
I don’t think this is anything not covered in the rules or perhaps with experience, my group just found that sort of, figuring out what skills to apply to a given roll and what the modifiers should be was not easy. This is one area where DW, for example, shines (though at the cost of the beauty of BW’s character creation, which I adore). The rule book goes into a lot of detail on this, but for me the fundamental issue is that a lot of skills end up being pretty specific or very general. Again, I know this is by design, but given the incredible diversity of skills and all the diversity of depth of those skills, I found resolving skill checks effectively to be a bit difficult! It ended up devolving a bit, which sort of defeats the purpose of the system (since using skills is sort of the key progression mechanic!)
Did you play only based on reading the text? If you were interested in APs I learned a lot from:
I really liked that game! I did watch it – well, probably listened? Would probably be worth revisiting.
I think the story I was trying to tell was also a bit complex, which is fine, but can be taxing to a DM new to a system. The game you linked is, really, all quite simple. Which I mean is good – they lean into the drama of it all and it’s all just very good!
Yeah… As far as I can tell the secret with BW is to start out using only the most basic stuff. Get comfortable with that and bring in the more complex stuff later.
I think the difference is that, no matter what you do narratively in Fate and PBTA, you always roll the same dice and get the same mechanical bonuses. Like someone stated, pretty much every Tag or Aspect gives you the same bonus. The flavor changes based on what you’re doing narratively, but the die rolls are perpetually the same.
D&D may appear to be similar at first glance, but it’s actually quite a bit more complex. This does, of course, vary based on which edition you’re playing–4th Ed is notorious for feeling really “samey” and, to me, 5e doesn’t feel significantly better. 3.5e / Pathfinder really mix things up though.
Even when you’re playing something like 5e though, there are some differences in the feeling of the game mechanics depending on what you’re doing. Your core checks might comprise of 1d20+Attribute, but your spells might do something else entirely. You might roll a fist full of d6s when you throw a fireball, rattle a bunch of d8s when you cast a cure spell, or roll absolutely nothing when using a battlefield control spell like fog cloud.
As you level up, your characters end up with a lot of different options that don’t just boil down to “+2 to Overcome actions.” You might get bonuses to your Strength, which also improves your damage with melee weapons, or they might be things like “you can now teleport up to 30 feet.” The variety is virtually endless, and you really start to feel diverse as you customize your character with racial abilities, class abilities, feats, skills, and magic.
I feel like 5e took a step backward from 3e in this regard, because there really aren’t as many opportunities to switch up your character’s abilities. Still, even 5e gives you a larger variety of options than you might see in a game like Fate or PBTA.
So it doesn’t just boil down to “roll 1d20+X and compare to a DC.” It makes room for a lot of tactical decisions and character builds that feel distinct from one another. I would argue that D&D and its ilk spawn more diversity in terms of gameplay styles than do games with wide-open character creation systems, because open systems often say “Do whatever you’d like, but whatever that is you still only get a +2 to your roll.”
To put that another way, d20-type games mechanize diversity, whereas more story-oriented games encourage diversity through imagination. Neither method is bad or wrong, and in fact I love both styles of play. I would say they definitely feel very different though.
Ah you absolutely nailed what I’ve been feeling. The question I still haven’t quite been able to answer to my own satisfaction is: why does mechanizing that diversity feel so satisfying? (When done well)
I’ve been furiously googling for the past five minutes, and while I can’t find specific papers that satisfy my hypothesis, I think this may be a left brain/right brain or analystic/abstract thing. Acting out a character with a satisfactory narrative has a different brain feel than optimizing a turn by eliminating subpar options. Obviously this gets tangled up, we’re still trying to optimize narrative play (just in a direction that isn’t always for the character’s benefit), and we’re still applying narrative control over tactical play (my paladin isn’t going to fight to deal killing blows even though it would be trivial), but the different styles of play are going to provide different kinds of psychological satisfaction.
I don’t really feel the “mechanize diversity” angle; I mean, yes, there are some arbitrary differences, but very few of the things the game does make things feel different in a way that makes sense to me. Why is a fireball a bunch of d6s? Because Gary Gygax wrote it that way 35 years ago? That’s…nice?
You say a bonus to strength does “lots of things” but so does the aspect “Strongest Man in the World”. I definitely feel like this DOES just boil down to d20+bonuses here?
I think something that people tend to forget about Fate is that Aspects are True. If you have an aspect that says “Teleportation Belt” then you can teleport. No questions asked. So your “teleport 30’” special ability isn’t actually that special either?
The point you are missing is that in a “do whatever” system, you get to… do whatever. You get a bonus in D&D for flanking? Great! You can get that bonus in a “do whatever” system. You can get a bonus for whatever you can think of. And usually, they stack. So the point is not “Look at the list of bonuses and try to shoehorn them in” but rather “Figure out what the advantageous way to do a thing is, and collect bonuses as a result.” Both, I find, are tactical. The tactics are different, but that’s not surprising. I think this is strictly a difference in perception, where one game encourages examining differences and the other is less concerned with that.
If you can “do anything” and it’s always resolved in the same way, then those things are much less satisfying in my experience. It’s one thing to grapple with the mechanics, tweak your character, progress, and be able to do amazing things in the context of the rules. It’s another to “do the amazing thing, roll a 2d6.” Not that either is bad, they just offer a different sort of satisfaction. If anyone can just fiat that they do thing x, thing x sort of loses any meaning.
I lust for a game that feels like Ars Magica, but…handles the complexity better. I love so much about the game but…it sort of just doesn’t come together for me. Sigh.
Also it seems I really need to check out Pendragon!
It’s interesting to unpack why some of us enjoy complex rules. Here are a few reasons I think this might be:
We may want mechanics that are as “isomorphic” to the game world as possible (i.e. that the logic of the game-world and the logic of the rules line up). By this measure, we’d like for actions that make mechanical sense to make narrative sense, and for the relative likelihoods to match up too. For example, @jco complained the roll to do an amazing thing is likely the same as the roll to do a safe, conservative thing in some systems.
We may want particular tasks or conflicts that we imagine as having depth in game world to have depth in the rules. Some examples might involve:
We may want actions that feel qualitatively different in the game world to have rules that are different (or at least, that feel different). People who subscribe to this principle probably don’t enjoy things like a conflict resolution system that can support any type of conflict, since they want different types of conflict to feel different and use somewhat different rules.
We may want to avoid rules that have stable optimal strategies. Some people seem to have a hard time passing up an obviously optimal strategy, even if they intellectually know that the strategy won’t be fun, is boring, will be seen as unfair by others, etc. Even if players don’t feel compelled to use these strategies, it can be a drag to know that they exist, and creates some space between what the character wants (to succeed) and what the player wants (to play an interesting game).
We may want to feel like we’re fully engaging our powers of problem solving. In some cases, I think the appeal from complex rules comes when you’ve learned them enough to feel like you’re finding a good solution to a challenging problem within the rules.
We may want a set of rules that introduce novelty apart from player imagination. One appeal of games with lots of tables and procedures is that we can create a system-driven story (similar to the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse). By using the rules to limit and/or guide authorship during the game we end up telling stories we never would have expected otherwise, and can escape our own minds.
I’ve had a lot of fun playing games that used PbtA, FATE, and other “story-first” systems. I’ve also enjoyed “classic” simple systems such as B/X D&D, Troika, and Knave. So I’m not someone who needs a complex system to enjoy a game, and I don’t intend this post to be an attack on any of these games.
Like @jco I do enjoy learning and playing games with complex rules, and I’m trying to figure out what about them appeals to me given that they are harder to learn, often much harder to run, it can be quite difficult to find interested players, they often don’t work well with “one-shot” games, etc.
Good post! The only one I take issue with is #4, because I feel like games with a lot of moving parts are more likely to have optimal strategeies than games with relatively streamlined engines where issues are easy to see.
I don’t think being arbitrary has any bearing on whether it’s diverse.
I also don’t think a lot of the mechanics are arbitrary. Let’s look at two examples:
To me, these two things feel very different. The first feels like you have the potential to swing and miss. The second feels like you’re enveloping an entire area in magical fire and you’re going to deal damage to something, barring any magical counterspelling or protection. Also, with the first one the attacker rolls 1d20 and with the second the defender(s) roll 1d20 (and the attacker rolls d6s).
The fact that the fireball gets a bunch of d66s may be somewhat arbitrary, although I feel it has something to do with overall game balance. Lightning bolt also gets the same number of d6s, but it still feels different than fireball. Why?
Because the fireball is a 20-foot radius and the lightning bolt is a 60-foot line. One feels like a ball, the other like a streak of lightning. They are actually designed in such a way that the mechanics make sense for the narrative flair of the attack. In combat, they may be used for different tactical situations.
To be clear, I’m not saying this is better or worse than any other system. It’s a different kind of diversity, which I chose to describe as “mechanized” because the game mechanics dictate how these things feel. Players are given more creative constraints because if there isn’t a rule for it, they can’t really do it. Some people thrive on constrained creativity while others just feel, well, constrained by it.
See, to me, the difference between Lightning Bolt and Fireball is EXACTLY the difference between “anything” and “something else” in Fate. Do they work “mostly the same”? Sure. Do they feel different anyway because they ARE different? Yes.
I feel like Blades in the Dark does this pretty well.
I can imagine running this type of scene where there’s a ‘Defeat the Big Bad’ clock going, but (because the group’s strategy has changed) the Cutter has a ‘Fight the Big Bad to a Standstill’ clock that, when complete, will unlock a ‘Convice the Big Bad We Have a Common Enemy’ clock for the Slide. Meanwhile, the Leech is trying to fill the ‘Defuse the Bomb’ clock before the ‘Big Bad Looks Behind Them’ clock fills up.
And you can ‘mechanize’ fictional elements really easily with the Effect slide. Maybe the Cutter isn’t ordinarily good at Swaying people, but because they know the Big Bad’s dreadful secret, they can get increased Effect on a Sway roll if they say it aloud (though it may mean Desperate positioning, since they’re palavering when they should be kicking ass).
I think the way the Position/Effect matrix maps onto the fiction creates great feedback between mechanics and storytelling, gives the players a lot of room for tactical thinking, and also lets you move between very zoomed-in, costly conflicts and zoomed-out, abstracted conflicts.
I’m really loving playing The Veil, but I think I’m still figuring out how to get PbtA Moves to have the same sense of ‘mapping’ onto the fiction. I know (from Vincent Baker’s AW blog posts) that you can do it, but Moves still feel a little abstract to me (maybe because they constrain the intent of the character’s action, a little?).
Okay, so now compare a melee attack with a fireball.
I’ll use a game I designed myself as an example, so that it’s clear I’m not biased against this sort of system. I designed Psi-punk using the Fudge System, which is the progenitor or Fate. It uses 4dF + Trait and compres to the Trait Ladder.
In Psi-punk, a melee attack is 4dF + Offensive Damage Factors (ODFs), which typically includes your melee skill and your weapon’s bonus. Defender rolls 4dF and adds their Defensive Damage Factors (DDFs). Compare the two to determine damage, if any.
In the same system you can generate fire attacks using pyrokinesis. There’s a lot you can do with the power, but let’s assume you’re just trying to fry a handful of people with a fireball. That’s 4dF + pyrokinesis from the attacker, and 4dF + Body (your resistance) from the defender(s).
In both scenarios, it’s basically Attacker’s 4dF+ versus Defender’s 4dF+. The attacks feel very different because of the narrative, but the dice rolls are similar. I get that this is one system, but I feel this is the complaint others sometimes make. The die rolling feels “samey.”
In D&D, well, I described the differences earlier. The die rolls for melee attacks and fireballs feel very different from a mechanical perspective.
Neither is wrong. If I didn’t love 4dF, Fudge wouldn’t be my go-to system for game design.
My hypothesis, based on our discussion, is that math-minded people like d20-style systems because there’s a sort of mini-game in trying to make the numbers do what you want them to do. Less math-minded people like narrative systems because the story does what they want it to and the numbers get out of the way.
I could be completely wrong, or maybe I’m saying math-minded people prefer one to the other when it really has nothing to do with one’s love of math. Maybe there’s something else that draws them in, but in my experience the people who really thrive with d20 games are the people who really like to play with the numbers and beat them into submission with their character builds.
Bringing that back around to the original topic, it suddenly struck me that this is perhaps why games like Shadowrun and Ars Magica run into problems. There are games which get really mathy, to the point where only die hard enthusiasts get along with them.
Perhaps a sweet spot would be a complex character creation system with a simple resolution system. I shouldn’t ever have to do division after my die is rolled to determine my result, and ideally I showouldn’t have to do much multiplication either.
One of my favorite games is Killshot by Broken Ruler Games. It has an interesting dice pool mechanic when you’re building your attacks, but after you roll the dice everything grinds to a halt. You have to check for dice which explode, then after you find the total you divide everything by 10 to get the amount of damage you do. I’d love to see the game redesigned for a more streamlined system, because resolution is way too complex and time-consuming. I’d much rather spend time building my character and figuring out stats on the front end, then have a fast and streamlined resolution system during play.
And on that note, I should probably play some more Pendragon because that game nailed it. Or maybe it didn’t and I just have some great nostalgia for it.
I agree with your assertion that the primary appeal of these sorts of systems is because sometimes it is fun to do things with numbers. I remain somewhat unconvinced that this is an actual question of “these things are insufficiently different” rather than just a question of “There aren’t enough variables for me to manipulate.” (Apparently I find this distinction to be subtle but meaningful)
That said, I find TTRPGs to be a pretty lackluster place to do things with numbers, and I tend to prefer my number-tampering digitally, because math is annoying when I’m in a hurry. 