What makes a bad system?

If people discuss it here and play it, it's not shit.
People will have alternate definitions, but it'll mostly be a definition crafted to exclude games they simply don't like.

>>53602561
The main point that most of us agree on, above all else, is that a bad system is any system where the mechanics don't support, and actively work against the goal of the system itself.

In fact, that's what a majority of our system arguments are about. Arguments between People who have tried to read/run the system and it didn't support their goals/the written goals of the system, and people who have learned the system and are able to run and enjoy the games that it does well.

Anything in D&D 3.5. That game is all entirely shit, literally everything about it is bad. It is literally unplayable, fighter as a class does not even function and is basically impossible to even play, even at level 1 wizards beat fighters pretty much 99% of the time. Also it is basically impossible to play as RAW because there are so many rules it is impossible to learn them all.

>>53602561
A bad game is one where there's supposed to be a focus on one thing, but the rules fail to support it. A game supposedly about peaceful slice-of-life stories where two thirds of the rules are about combat and you get XP based on scalps collected would be a perfect example of a shitty game. Contrast with a good game, where the mechanics are set up in such a way that playing to the intended focus is mechanically enjoyable for the players and rewarding for the characters.

>>53603163
You could at least put some effort into your false flag and/or shitpost.

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This sums up good game design and signs of a bad game.

>>53603269
>false flag and/or shitpost
It would be funny if you actually thought that.

>>53603409
3.5 does a number of things wrong, but it hardly deserves being called all that. "Terrible in every way" is FATAL.

>>53602561
I'll be honest, there are very few actual "bad systems". People on the internet, specially 4chan, will call anything below a 9/10 shit because they already have their personal 10/10. That's true for most veteran communities with many options. You're new to the medium, so pick a well-known, common option for what you want. Stuff only gets famous if it's at least good in executing its premise.

You want fantasy medieval? Pick D&D. 3.5 has the most content, 5e is the most noob-friendly. Want space fantasy? D20 Future is a basis for everything, and Warhammer 40k has a strong lore and very cool universe. Want an apocaliptic world with fantasy and sci-fi all meshed together? Rifts is a great system for all that. Multiverse-traveling mess with travel between all the above? -Strange- is kinda shit but fun as well.

Decide what's your jam and pick what seems to suit it the most.

>>53603163
Can you stop trolling already? It's unsightly to see you be constantly upset about a game that's actually pretty great.

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>>53603163
Jesus Christ i swear i think 3.5 books killed his parents and raped his wife. every thread he spews vitriolic salt. Its not the best system but its perfectly fine and i like to run it fuck you i don't piss on other systems

>>53603351
This is pretty awful and full of internal contradictions and circular reasoning. Worse still, it basically says nothing about good and bad game design, only that he's extremely frustrated by people with opinions that differ from his own and that he can't convince people to accept what he considers objective.
The "fallacies" are particularly silly, and seem to just be something he's hoping he can summon to try and make people take his own arguments more seriously when there's very little reason to. The "band-aid" fallacy in particular is amusing, because the "scratch" argument could be set up to counter it, in that the person is arguing about a flaw so minor it could be called a scratch while they are claiming it is a mortal wound. Of course, he would call it a fallacy to say a flaw is minor or not important or to otherwise demand that a flaw's importance cannot be treated with subjectivity beyond exaggerating how important it is, but that's because the foundation of most trolling is taking any molehill and turning it into a mountain.

In the end, the bullshit about hoping to make arguments "more civil" is the worst part of the whole thing. It's all just particularly awful system warring, with a heavy focus less on actually critiquing systems and more of a demand that flaws be treated with neurotic obsession. This isn't healthy discussion, but an attempt to steer system examination into the most caustic arguments.

>>53603843
I think a possible problem with quantifying a "bad" is the fact that humans run it, and humans have different preferences, it becomes hard to pinpoint which flaws are in the people playing, and which are in the system at large.

Houserules are an excellent example. A flawed game can be houseruled, and said houserules can make a game better than it's competition. Say, you play in a game the GM has houseruled a bit, but the GM never tells you he's houseruled stuff, he just runs it that way because he can. The game is better than the other game that should by all rights be better, but because it's run by a person, it's better in your vision because you don't know the game has been modified.

It's really muddy.

>>53604296
You call it a possible problem, while it's more fair to call it an inevitable consideration.
Some games don't work great right out of the book, but with a few commonly known houserules can be amazing.

What's fair to say? That those games suck and that no one should ever play them, or that a few tweaks can lead to great games? Is it really fair to omit the human element from the game's evaluation, to demand RAW only like there's anyone who's ever played a game without tweaking it somewhat?

Some games don't have anything that makes them worth adapting, but take for example D&D 4e, which suffered from odd math early on that made the game rather slow and somewhat tedious. A flat HP/Damage adjustment makes the game run a lot better and the other merits of that game can then be discussed, but is it more important to do nothing but lament how that game is so slow, when that's not even an issue to people who actually play the game?

>>53602561
>but what makes a system shit

That question is broad enough to be meaningless. A comprehensive answer would be longer than all RPGs ever printed put together.

>>53604142
>>53603965
D&D 3.5 ruined a generation of roleplayers. Everyone who worked on it should get cancer, they have fucked up so much. Even today we are struggling to undo the damage 3.5 did to the hobby. It fucked up so much it's unbelievable. It basically created munchkinry and magical realm bullshit. It set the precedent for casters to be OP. It made overcomplicated, roll-play-focused games okay. Dungeon World undid some of the damage, but it will be many years before the RPG world is back to the way it should be.

>>53605019
Wow, you've convinced me. Can you start using a name and tripcode, so that you can spread your message with more pride? It'd be a shame to not have your efforts in your crusade realized.

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>>53605019
>3.5 created magical realm bullshit
i'm going to call bullshit unless you can give me something other than vague assertions.
>created munchkinry
Maybe but who cares, stop being such a whiny cunt or use a trip so we can know you just ignore your hit posting

>>53605561
Munchkins existed since the start of roleplaying games. Even Gygax's own original crew contained munchkins, and their exploits are particularly cheezy.

>>53604267
It's only "awful" because if you took it at face value you would have no justification for screeching and derailing threads you worthless shitposter.

>>53602561
>What makes a bad system?
Things you like.

>What makes a good system?
Things I like.

>>53605736
How did words manage to pass through you so easily? Was it not just explained how that picture is nothing but a lame attempt at justification for screeching and derailing threads?
It's a shitpost of the highest caliber, because it's nothing more than a way of trying to add false legitimacy to the most banal of trolling, complete with a baseless claim that his troll fuel would somehow bring civility to system discussions.

So, quit shitposting yourself, especially if you have to go through such roundabout methods in order to do so.

>>53602561
>What makes a bad system?

For me, too intricate rules, or rules for literally every circumstance one could possibly conceive.
>Rules for swimming, adjusted according to character weight, the time of day, weather conditions, the pull of the moon's gravity on ocean tides, etc.
Just leave this shit abstract. It's doubtful any GM wants to waste time micromanaging rolls for every small detail.

Also, superficial / padded text. D&D rules really don't need to come in three individual manuals. Having to look up a specific term or item really boggles the mind when you have to juggle so many supplements. Rulesclones manage to spell out entire game systems in under 100 pages in many cases, and with a fair amount of flavor text to boot.

>>53605835
>Was it not just explained
Wrongly explained. Nothing in that image is incorrect.

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>>53602561
it's not suited for the fluff. for example, if you want to run gritty cyberpunk action, running a D&D style system with characters that each have over 70 hitpoints is not a good idea. or, on a similar note, if you want a fantasy campaign that his aiming long-term heroic play, you don't want to run a very lethal dark fantasy RPG. fluff and crunch should match.

beyond that there are 3 main different playstyles, pic related. if a game is strong in one playstyle but a neckbeard here doesn't like that playstyle, he will probably call it bad because it doesn't support his playstyle as good. this is the majority of those cases aka the game isnt really bad, just not one's cup of tea.

>>53603163
and as an addendum people have certain preferences regarding the complexity (and thus lack of abstraction) of games. if a game is too complex for their taste or too rules-light, they will call it bad. but as you can see, this is again an issue of taste.

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>>53602561
Developer bias is a pretty good indicator that a game is going to be if not bad, then not nearly as good as it could be. I'd say that every developer has a bias, but good developers recognize their own biases and try not to let the game get bogged down by it.

Bad developers, on the other hand, will gladly devote 30-40% of the core rulebook to the rules for that single option that they like better than all the others. Typically this option has significantly more fluff, and it tends to be the most versatile, often to the point that the right selection of abilities within that option will invalidate other options entirely.

It's like how a wizard in D&D can learn and prepare spells to disarm traps, charm or outright control minds, climb, fly, understand languages, deal huge damage either to a single target or a wide area, enhance his defenses, and more. And, if he is unsatisfied with his spell selection, he can just change it the next time the party takes a nap.

>>53605937
It even includes the "Stormwind Fallacy," which is a phrase basically guaranteed only to be uttered by the worst kind of munchkins.

It's a thoroughly terrible screencap, because it's not even lame enough to be a joke, it's just lame enough to be stupidly reposted by people who think any post longer than a few sentences must certainly contain at least a scrap of wisdom.

>>53605970
of course there will always be times where a neck-beard's idea of "fun" comes at the cost of everyone else's fun. He will wind up being a bad fit for any play style.

>>53605019
>It set the precedent for casters to be OP.
dude... seriously... this is so wrong, you wouldn't believe it. try some high-level rolemaster, for example. caster always sucked a low-level and became way too OP at high levels in games.

>>53606078
what about games like Roge Trader, Black Crusade, and FFG Star Wars?

>>53606103
>Roge Trader
"Rogue Trader"
I cannot spell...

>>53606078
That entire post is just one troll imploding on himself. Pay him no heed.

>>53606010
You mean something that's nothing but a properly applied false dichotomy?

>>53606103
>>53606109
What about them?

They are fine games if you don't mind that 2 of the ones listed are 40k role playing games.

>>53606148
You mean what shitty munchkins try to call up when called out for being shitty munchkins?

In the munchkin mind, they probably think of calling it up as some defensive skill that allows them to negate any attack, when all it really does is re-emphasize that they are really bad at basic human interaction and communication.

>>53606231
No, I mean the basic application of logic. Picking Power Attack doesn't make you less capable of roleplaying when it's the best feat for you.

>>53602561
If you go into a discussion about the system and see people saying things along the lines of "well the rules don't matter, it's about ROLEplaying not ROLLplaying, balance isn't important" etc etc then that's almost a 100% guarantee that the system is complete shit

>>53602614
>If people discuss it here and play it, it's not shit.
lmbo

>>53602561
Some of the signs of a bad game are...
>The rules are too complex and slow down the game without adding anything meaningful to it
>The rules are too shallow for any meaningful choices to be made during character creation or advancement, every power or ability is the same with a slightly different coat of paint
>The rules don't cover or even give guidelines of tons of actions players can attempt
>The rules don't match the tone of the setting that the game is built around
>The rules don't allow meaningful character improvement, they're as powerful or as competent as they start off and they never get any better
>The rules are heavily skewed so that a few options are far, far better than the rest to the point where characters who choose those options invalidate the importance of characters who do not choose them
>The mechanics of play make sense from an in-universe perspective; people understand what Spell Slots are and can quantify them, for example
>The setting is bland, boring, and/or has no interesting hooks for adventure
>The setting is the real world plus magic but history played out exactly the same for some reason

My ideal game is pretty simple with more complex rules at higher level play. All rolls use the same method of stat + dice + circumstance vs difficulty and they cover everything you might ever want to do in-game. The setting and the rules are connected and are internally consistent. It's reasonably balanced with interesting options as you grow in power and influence. The setting is interesting and takes queues from reality so you can make comparisons but it's different enough to be its own thing.

Honestly? Don't Rest Your Head is one of my favourite games ever. It only lacks the character advancement, Scars are decent but it needs rules for mystical equipment and additional skills and powers as you get stronger.

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2050/roleplaying-games/revisiting-encounter-design

>>53603163
>fighter as a class does not even function
Monk doesn't function, Cleric and Druid are excessive.
If you don't go above level 10, everything else is fine.

>even at level 1 wizards beat fighters pretty much 99% of the time.
They have to win innitiative, and even then the odds aren't that good.
And 2 level 1 fighters can beat dozens of level 1 wizards (one at a time) in one day.
...why are your level 1 fighters fighting level 1 wizards?

>there are so many rules it is impossible to learn them all.
Unless you're memorizing the feat and skill lists, it's actually really light.

>>53603351
This image is okay.

It's annoyingly focused on D&D, but in general what it's saying aligns with my views.

>>53603351
Great post, I bet >>>r/rpg really liked it

>>53603351
Good idea. Shame that it's precisely those to whom it is addressed will dismiss it out of hand because it represents a train of thought that diverges from their own and is therefore evil.

>>53603163
Your absurdly hyperbolic expression of your opinion is noted.
That said,

>>53605019
>D&D 3.5 ruined a generation of roleplayers. Everyone who worked on it should get cancer, they have fucked up so much. Even today we are struggling to undo the damage 3.5 did to the hobby. It fucked up so much it's unbelievable.
None of this is a criticism of the system.
This is a criticism of how you perceive the system affected the community.
To illustrate the difference, "It helped launch Nicholas Cage's career." is neither valid criticism or praise of the film "Raising Arizona".

I am not defending the system, I'm just pointing out that your stupid post was stupid.
If you want to bait D&D 3.5 defenders, I can't stop you.
But if you post stupid posts, you'll only ever be a stupid poster.

>>53606769
I agree with all but character advancement, which is entirely dependent on tone.

>>53606769
>The setting is the real world plus magic but history played out exactly the same for some reason
There's a few ways this can work - history working the way it did because of behind-the-scenes magic, or hidden magic world/communities. Or the magic only recently came back.

It's only when the magic is highly overt, impactful and yet did nothing to history that this is shitty

>>53607511
>>53607862
Trying to defend that post is kind of silly. At best, you might be able to convince someone of one of the empty truisms sprinkled throughout it, the ones that actually say next to nothing about actual game design. At worst, you're likely going to be committing your own grave fallacy by referencing it and failing to realize that it's much more concerned with trying to invent empty counterarguments. It's basically the "Fallacy-Fallacy" post, but without the benefit of using any real fallacies.

Also, good game design? You can find a thousand games that follow his three criteria, and none could be good games.

>>53602561
Anything Palladium puts out.
Anything PbtA.

>>53602561
A game is shit if
A) It doesn't do what it says it does
and
B) If it isn't fun to play

>>53602561
Anything that requires to be reread three times and to take notes for the average player or DM to understand how more than half of the rules work.

>>53602561
Don't listen to >>53602614
Generally, if a game is well made but has a relatively small community, you'll never hear about it on here because there's no way to shitpost about it because either a) there aren't any memes for the average shitposter to gravitate upon to generate (you)'s and b) most people in any given thread won't care enough to argue over its quality like they would if it was D&D or WH40K.

This is true for anything btw, if you see a shitload of threads dedicated to one thing, either it's new or its not really worth your time.

>>53602561
In a nutshell, a bad tabletop game is one where the rules inhibit the way that the player can approach obstacles within the game using the character that they made during character creation.

For example, a low level fantasy setting where the focus is on a gritty conan inspired setting while having a mage with the power to cause tidal waves and summon demons as a base character option.

>>53605561
>i'm going to call bullshit unless you can give me something other than vague assertions.
Not him but >>53605120

>>53606231
Explain to me how picking "sleep" or "color spray" or "magic missile" as a level 1 wizard makes me inherently incapable of roleplaying my character.

Oh wait, you can't.

>>53610031
>You can find a thousand games that follow his three criteria, and none could be good games.
Such as?

>>53602561

Personally, I think it's always a matter of how well the rules support the GM and the premise of the game.

A good systems mechanics will represent and reinforce its fluff and provide useful assistance to a GM, making their job easier.

A bad systems mechanics will contradict or undermine its fluff and make the GM's job harder, forcing them to struggle against them or ignore them entirely.

Of course, many systems have elements of both, so it's about the balance of them and which ones are more prominent and important. There are also neutral systems, which simply function, neither helping or hurting a GMs attempt to run them.

>>53611044
FATAL works as advertised (it doesn't try to be anything but a terrible rape simulator), the crunch represents fluff (anal circumference is used to measure at what size of insertion your character can take before taking damage), and the game is generally balanced, since all options either lead to you raping or being raped, according to your preference.

>>53611011
You being an awful roleplayer is what makes you an awful roleplayer.

>magic missile

And a bad munchkin too.

>>53603351

Man, this is such a great image. Glad to know there are other sane people on /tg/ who actually understand how to assess systems.

>>53611116
False!
>1
FATAL advertises itself as being a violent rape simulator yet the rules are so complicated that most people will drop the game before even finishing character creation.
>2
Because the rules are so needlessly complex, any sexual interest that the could feasibly have is gone by the time you're finished character creation. Not only that, but the actual rules for playing the game itself are also needlessly complex so at the end of the day, you're not even going to be able to use most of the rules because you'll be too focused on dealing with the most basic of bullshit.
>3
Because of the nature of how RNG works in the game, you can end up as a character who is unable to perform a job that he rolled for due to age, sex, height, weight, anal circumference, etc. which basically means that you can end up as a gimped character right out the gate while another dude ends up getting a combination that actually works .

Nice try though.

>>53611148
>You being an awful roleplayer is what makes you an awful roleplayer.
Exactly, it has nothing to do with whether or not my character is properly built, if I'm a shitty roleplayer, I'm going to be one whether my character is viable or not.

>>53611251
1. That doesn't stop it from being a violent rape simulator as advertised. It being too complicated is of no concern to his three principles.
2. Once again, the complexity doesn't really have anything to do with the crunch representing fluff.
3. You fail to understand what the game is trying to do, and putting your own interpretation on it. The game isn't just about raping, but being raped, and the RNG helps force players into situations where they can't help but be raped. Like they say, you can't rape the willing.
And, once again, the RNG has nothing to do with whether or not the game is balanced, because as far as "options" go, all the players have equal opportunity to get a rapist or rapee.

So, yes, it's a great game, up until you go ahead and look beyond the "three meaningless principles of game design".

>>53611263
No, you might have a chance of being a good roleplayer if you spent more effort on being a good roleplayer and less effort worrying about being a munchkin.

>>53611263
I think Stormwind is a shitty concept because it's a distraction from the real problem

The real problem is that taking spells that aren't munchkin choices will invariably make you less viable. Taking a way to control fire so you can entertain a caravan with a campfire punishes you mechanically, by taking up a slot that could've gone to a better cantrip, like Firebolt. This repeats in higher level spell lists. Spells that work as roleplaying aids are always worse than spells that only have combat effects, because apparently the people designing the game balance them that way: "This spell is interesting? Then it can't deal damage. We can't have spells be interesting AND useful!".

There are a few exceptions, of course, but most of them are spells that come from past editions, where this design philosophy wasn't as common. I shouldn't need to hope for a houserule when playing with another GM, just to not be gimped for my roleplay-based decisions.

>>53611359
>1. That doesn't stop it from being a violent rape simulator as advertised. It being too complicated is of no concern to his three principles.
The complexity of the game stops it from being a violent rape simulator because you're spending more time calculating for the angle of the wind than actually, y'know, violently raping people.
>2. Once again, the complexity doesn't really have anything to do with the crunch representing fluff.
See above
>3. You fail to understand what the game is trying to do, and putting your own interpretation on it.
Wut?
>And, once again, the RNG has nothing to do with whether or not the game is balanced, because as far as "options" go, all the players have equal opportunity to get a rapist or rapee.
Equal opportunity is not a quality of a balanced game though, what you're looking for is equal outcome.

At this point, I'm assuming you're shitposting for the sake of it.

>>53611384
But me picking the best options for my characters doesn't mean that I stop knowing how to roleplay either. It wouldn't make sense for a practiced wizard not to take spells that give him (and the party) the best odds of surviving the dungeon just because I, as a player, want to appear as a "good roleplayer."

I mean, it seems silly when you think about it, especially when roleplay has nothing to do with how well you understand the game or the mechanics that it employs.

>>53611571
>The complexity of the game stops it from being a violent rape simulator because you're spending more time calculating for the angle of the wind than actually, y'know, violently raping people.
You're committing the "All the Rules, All the Time" fallacy, where you pretend that a game with a lot of rules forces people to use all of them. That's just a weak way of hating on larger games that provide more material.
And, you're still trying to confuse "it's bad because it's complex" with "it's bad because it does as it advertised." It's not like being a complex rape simulator stops it from being a rape simulator. In some ways, the discomfort its rules give you merely enhance the experience, because rape, contrary to popular knowledge, isn't really all that fun.
>See above
See above.
>Equal opportunity is not a quality of a balanced game though, what you're looking for is equal outcome.
Not in the case of a game where players are to be both rapists and raped. Equal outcome is not the intended goal here.

At this point, I fear that you recognize that those three principles really have very little to do with whether a game is good or not (seeing as how you need to look beyond them in order to condemn FATAL), but are just being stupidly stubborn.

>>53611739

You're talking trash and using an extreme example to prove how much you hate the idea of games you like not being good.

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>>53611739
>You're committing the "All the Rules, All the Time" fallacy, where you pretend that a game with a lot of rules forces people to use all of them.
Have you even read FATAL? It DOES force you to use a lot of its goddamn rules for the most basic of shit and it's usually needlessly complex for what the game is supposed to be.
>Not in the case of a game where players are to be both rapists and raped. Equal outcome is not the intended goal here.
Well how are you being both a rapist and victim if RNG forces you into being either the rapist or the victim due to RNG?
>At this point, I fear that you recognize that those three principles really have very little to do with whether a game is good or not (seeing as how you need to look beyond them in order to condemn FATAL), but are just being stupidly stubborn.
Okay, now I know you're a shitposter, I gotchu senpai. Here's a little attention to keep you going.

>>53602561
broadly?
if you arent having fun playing it, but this is subjective

so lets take a look at the one game we can all tell is bad, since we agree on bad things more than good things
FATAL

i have many things to say about it, but i am terrible at saying them
so here is some reading material, shamelessly lifted from 1d4chan, that will give you a rundown on the one thing we can all agree is bad
http://www.anthonypryor.com/?p=2030

>>53611552
Splitting it up into utility spells and other spells is a good move, not sure about 4e's split between them and how well it worked in the end but it's certainly better than other modern editions. Selecting spells in 5e is fucking minefield of traps.

>>53611935

4e kinda has the same problem, even though it has 'utility' powers, most of them are combat focused.

I'd prefer it they made combat utility into 'Support' powers, but had a separate category for pure out of combat effects just called 'Utility'.

Then again, in general, being forced to pick between mechanical potency and something fluffy or flavourful is something I fucking hate in RPG systems.

>>53611843
>Have you even read FATAL? It DOES force you to use a lot of its goddamn rules for the most basic of shit and it's usually needlessly complex for what the game is supposed to be.
It's seems that you just have a very different idea of what a rape simulator is supposed to be like. I personally would find anal circumference to be one step more complex than I needed it to be, but for the people who play the game, tearing apart people's assholes may be what they find most compelling.
>Well how are you being both a rapist and victim if RNG forces you into being either the rapist or the victim due to RNG?
If you thought that was what I was saying, allow me to clarify. Players can end up in either (or both) roles.

>Okay, now I know you're a shitposter,
How about you just give up, if you already recognize that those three principles really have very little to do with whether a game is good or not.

>>53611980

Because those three principles are a great guideline, you're just arguing from an extreme in a strange attempt to cripple reasonable discourse and the ability to discuss and analyse systems?

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>>53603163
Jesus fuck man, I hate 3.pf too but I've still managed to run games in them where people had fun, even the martials. The level of mad you have has ceased to be funny and has begun to be incredibly worrying. This is a really unhealthy outlet for you, anon, can you please just calm down before you stress yourself into an aneurysm?

Please, watch this gif and drown your anger in confusion, that will not kill you as quickly.

>>53611955
Yeah their definition of utility is weird, but I still think it's better than "fireball or counterspell or create food/water" since you have to pick x utility powers and I don't think there were any/many useless utility spells. I never looked at rituals, maybe the true utility spells were tackled with that.

>>53612001
This gif makes me angry

>>53611955
>being forced to pick between mechanical potency and something fluffy or flavourful

This. I don't know why there isn't a real effort to kill this thinking in game design. What a waste

>>53611980
>I personally would find anal circumference to be one step more complex than I needed it to be, but for the people who play the game, tearing apart people's assholes may be what they find most compelling.
Which isn't what I'm referring to, I'm referring more to all the hoops you have to jump through before you reach the asshole tearing part, which is somehow more complex and unintuitive than 3.PF's grappling system.
>Players can end up in either (or both) roles.
Unless they get fucked over by RNG, then they're decidedly the victim for the rest of the campaign unless they decide to kill themselves and play the lottery again.

>>53612030
>I never looked at rituals, maybe the true utility spells were tackled with that
They are. Virtually everything people said was missing in 4e's utility spell was a ritual. Strange how changing the name of a thing can make people completely ignore it

>>53612061
It's easy to ignore a rule when you haven't read the rules in the first place.

>>53605088
He's already done that... This is just another classic Virtpost, especially the bit about Dungeon World. It may be Virt, or, more depressing, a Virt Imitator

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>>53612034

>>53602561
It doesn't inspire any GMs.

>>53611995
They're useless and extremely subjective, and are hardly guidelines so much as they are arbitrary points of contention.

Balance is generally good. But, that's hardly the core of what makes good games great, and the question of "does the crunch match the fluff" and "does this game do what it advertises" is open to so much interpretation that it is nothing but an empty argument starter.

>>53602637
Underrated post.

>>53611116
FATAL advertises itself as "the most realistic fantasy RPG" or something along those lines.

Needless to say, it fails that.

The fluff is... I don't even know, I think you are just supposed to be fantasy people, but you can be a person who can cut solid slabs of steel with his piss stream. I mean, I guess that could be considered fantastic.

If your criteria for balance is "every option you take either makes you win or lose" that's impossible to not fulfill.

>>53612161

They're very clear, unambiguous and simple principles that you continue to argue against because they likely show a game you like in a bad light.

Grow up. I like some bad games, but I know they're bad and I'm able to accept that. Being able to honestly analyse them is a part of appreciating them that you'll always miss out on if you just keep trying to remove and and all ways of criticising them.

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>>53612626
>Grow up. I like some bad games, but I know they're bad

It just sounds like you don't understand what makes a game "good".

>They're very clear, unambiguous and simple principles

You're not even trying anymore.

>you continue to argue against because they likely show a game you like in a bad light.

The opposite. They show bad games in a good light, and are so ambiguous as to be meaningless.

>>53612735

They really don't. The whole FATAL example is laughably stupid, since it's entirely based on the meme the game became rather than the game itself.

>>53612161
>>53612735
Let's look at these three principles again and see how FATAL fails to achieve this.
>1. Features should work as advertised
FATAL advertises itself as being “the most difficult, detailed, realistic and historically/mythically accurate role-playing game available" but the problem is that not only are many of the conventions in the book outright wrong (in more ways than one) but the game itself isn't even difficult unless you count "needlessly complex" and "tedious" as a sign of difficulty, which you really shouldn't.
>2. Crunch should represent fluff
The fluff is supposed to be that you're in a fantasy land that still operates off of realistic expectations yet you can be a dude who beats people to death with his dick. So realistic.
>3. Games should generally be balanced
Because of how complex the game is and how most options are decided through RNG and determined through shitty math, you'll never achieve balance because there's no solid base to stand on.

>>53612826
>laughably stupid

What's laughable is that you think those principles are unambiguous when they can't even clearly condemn FATAL without having to look beyond those principles.
FATAL was chosen as an extreme example to highlight the inadequacies of those principles even when set against an almost universally reviled game.

It's just chaff written on 4chan.

>>53612895

Except you can condemn it easily, as shown by >>53612839

You were literally just talking shit based on the meme of the system to try to support your shitty point.

>>53612839
>FATAL advertises itself as being “the most difficult, detailed, realistic and historically/mythically accurate role-playing game available"

I'm willing to wager that's tongue-in-cheek. Also, funnily enough, thanks to the wonderful contradiction of "mythically accurate", it's not wholly wrong either.

>The fluff is supposed to be that you're in a fantasy land that still operates off of realistic expectations yet you can be a dude who beats people to death with his dick. So realistic.

It's very mythical though. "Accurately" mythical too.

>Because of how complex the game is and how most options are decided through RNG and determined through shitty math, you'll never achieve balance because there's no solid base to stand on.

"Balance" in an RPG isn't so simple as "all characters are identical". Though Fatal produces characters with unequal statistics and attributes because of its RNG, the players all have the same initial options available to them, and the unbalanced statistics of their characters are part of the insane notion of historical/mythical "accuracy" the author is hoping to present.

>>53613019

You are literally just pulling things out of your arse at this point.

>>53613019
>I'm willing to wager that's tongue-in-cheek. Also, funnily enough, thanks to the wonderful contradiction of "mythically accurate", it's not wholly wrong either.
>It's very mythical though. "Accurately" mythical too.
Unfortunately, "mythically accurate" contradicts the realistic portion of the game and even if we look at how the more fantastical elements work, they still aren't accurate because few things in the game actually borrows anything from how things like elves, dwarves, and kobolds worked in olden myths.
>"Balance" in an RPG isn't so simple as "all characters are identical".
Okay, but that's not what I was referring to. "Balance" in this case was more in reference to the fact that there's nothing in the game that symbolizes what a balanced character would look like. Either you're an alpha who rolled well and can beat people to death with your dick or you're a bitch boy who can die at the moment of insertion because you rolled too low on anal circumference and age.

>>53607363
The Alexandrian is pretentious garbage, but honestly if you like the Alexandrian then I'm not surprised you like 3.5 so much

>>53613019
>the players all have the same initial options available to them
That should never be used as a hallmark of balance.

>>53613077
You mean easily countering weak arguments.

>>53613171
>Unfortunately, "mythically accurate" contradicts the realistic portion of the game

Hence why it's fair to call it tongue-in-cheek, especially considering it's a rape sim.
And, how can we even start to say whether it delivers as advertised is clear, unambiguous, or simple if what it advertises isn't clear, unambiguous, or simple?

>Balance" in this case was more in reference to the fact that there's nothing in the game that symbolizes what a balanced character would look like.

I think the best way to look at it is to ask the question "will rape be involved?"
If the answer is "Yes", we're looking at characters that both satisfy the big question of the system.

>>53613303

Except none of what you're talking about is actually what the system advertises itself as or claims to do.

You're analysing the system based on the meme of the system, and the actual book doesn't even do that well.

>>53609129
I disagree but it's a matter of taste. I just won't play most games that don't let characters get better as you play.

>>53609252
If magic just recently came back that's fine, it could not have really affected history if it wasn't around. My problem is with settings where someone goes "WW2 happened with wizards and paladins but everything turned out the same way." It completely breaks any suspension of disbelief I might have.

>>53613303
>Hence why it's fair to call it tongue-in-cheek, especially considering it's a rape sim.
Okay, well you can't really use that in your argument when the position was that it failed to work as advertised.
>And, how can we even start to say whether it delivers as advertised is clear, unambiguous, or simple if what it advertises isn't clear, unambiguous, or simple?
Because it clearly billed itself as an RPG that difficult, realistic, and historically/mythically accurate, which it failed to deliver upon in every feasible way.
>I think the best way to look at it is to ask the question "will rape be involved?"
What the fuck kinda baseline is that? You can technically rape in any tabletop game known to man and nothing about that question actually answers the question of "what does a balanced character in this game look like?"

In D&D, I can say that a character with a 10 in every stat is balanced since they have no modifiers to any of their rolls; I cannot say the same for FATAL.

>>53613265
I don't like 3.5, but I do like the Alexandrian.

>>53612001
Yeah unless you play with a bunch of power gaming, munchkin, WAAC faggots who spend all day inventing imaginary scenarios on chat op boards 3.5 D&D is fine.

>>53613478

But that isn't true.

You might be fine, sure. Or you might fall into one of the dozens trap options, or accidentally overpowered options, the system does nothing to help you avoid.

In my very first time ever playing D&D, it was 3.5 and I made a two weapon fighter in a group including a druid, a cleric and a 'do everything' wizard. I was less than useless the whole fucking campaign, and it almost soured me on roleplaying games for good. The GM bent over backwards to try and make me feel useful, and I still felt utterly underwhelming throughout.

>>53613335
The game is very tongue-in-cheek. I'd have a hard time believing anyone would take it seriously.

Also, you're still getting way too hung up on something that's really largely irrelevant.

Whether the game "does as the designers advertised" is pretty much as moot a point as saying that Post-it Notes are worthless because the inventor was actually trying to make a super strong, rather than super weak, glue. While it's a bad glue, it's still a fantastic product.

Even the genesis of roleplaying games themselves was largely accidental, with Gygax adding fantasy rules to the back of his historical medieval war game as an afterthought, and only developing them further once those rules became enormously popular.

It also gets rather complicated in the age where often the designers are not even the ones in control of what's being advertised, with the most notable example being 4e's misguided campaign.

And, above all else, it's still not a measure of a game's quality so much as an excuse to argue about what exactly the game is advertised as, and whether the game fulfills that vague criteria, which is ultimately irrelevant in comparison to questions like "Does the game provide sufficient rewards for risks taken to make decisions viable and dynamic?" and other more direct issues that actually determine whether a game is good or not.

>>53613509
This happened in our group, except I was a bard. Poor fighter player, the DM made him into a lord and everything to keep him relevant.

>>53613376
>Okay, well you can't really use that in your argument when the position was that it failed to work as advertised.
It can if your argument rests on everything being taken absolutely literally.

>What the fuck kinda baseline is that? You can technically rape in any tabletop game known to man and nothing about that question actually answers the question of "what does a balanced character in this game look like?"
When the game is basically a rape sim, it's a pretty important baseline.

>>53613509
As a GM who played it for a long time and knew all the trap options, I could advise players on how to avoid them, how to make such trap options work, and homebrew what couldn't be made feasible.

I'm not trying to say 3.pf aren't terrible games with terrible balance, because they are. I am saying, however, that you CAN have fun with them if you know what you're doing, and people who have played the system forever... Know what they're doing. Imagine that.

>>53613550

You know nothing about FATAL. Do research before trying to justify bullshit.

>
Whether the game "does as the designers advertised" is pretty much as moot a point as saying that Post-it Notes are worthless because the inventor was actually trying to make a super strong, rather than super weak, glue. While it's a bad glue, it's still a fantastic product.

...What? It was a bad glue, sure. That they adapted it to be good at something else doesn't stop it being a bad glue.

If a game is bad at doing what it says it should do, it's a bad game. That you and your group figure out there's something else it can do well doesn't make the base game be good. But if the developers rerelease the game under that new premise where it actually works, then you could call it a legitimately good game. It's not hard to wrap your head around.

Also, while we use the word somewhat wrong, it's not really about the advertising and marketing, but what the games books tell you it does. When you open up the book of a game, it will tell you what kind of game it is meant to run. That is explicitly what we're talking about when we ask whether a game supports its premise. It is very clear, exact and distinct, making it a useful metric for assessing RPGs, despite your intense desire to destroy it.

>>53613608

I completely agree with you, but part of the point is that you can have fun in any system, regardless of how good or bad it is. But while a good system makes it easier, a bad system makes it harder, creating extra work- Like a GM having to take the time to advise new players on what parts of the system to avoid.

>>53613590

>When the game is basically a rape sim

But it isn't. At least, it never claims to be or argues that's what it should be used for, which completely torpedoes your stupid point.

>>53613550
I remember the post-it argument from about a month ago.

It was just as retarded then.

>>53602637
the man speaks sooth

>>53613613
>...What? It was a bad glue, sure. That they adapted it to be good at something else doesn't stop it being a bad glue.

"Bad" glue becomes subjective, because in its application in Post-its, weak glue is actually "good."

>If a game is bad at doing what it says it should do, it's a bad game.

This is still really irrelevant and largely a matter of opinion, as I've just explained.

>That you and your group figure out there's something else it can do well doesn't make the base game be good

That's basically the genesis of all games, re-purposing good rulesets for new purposes. The "base" game is good, so that its future application is good. Really, you need to stop hoping to treat games like frigid, uncomplicated, and sterile products rather than living, breathing, organic creations.

>But if the developers rerelease the game under that new premise where it actually works, then you could call it a legitimately good game. It's not hard to wrap your head around.

But, it's not good BECAUSE it delivers under a new premise, so much as it delivers on the new premise because the original game had a lot of good in it.

>It is very clear, exact and distinct,
Can you quit with this bullshit already? It's about as exact as saying GURPS is a bad game because it fails to deliver on its promise on being a generic system good for a wide variety of genres. It is in fact rather limited in what it's good at, but in those particular applications it's not a bad game.

I understand you're hoping to have some useful metric to help organize system discussion, but the one you're trying to back is largely useless.

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>>53613590
>It can if your argument rests on everything being taken absolutely literally.
Whether or not the game should be taken seriously is irrelevant, it said that it was an RPG that was realistic, difficult, and historically/mythically accurate yet it failed to reach its own criteria, which means that it failed to satisfy
>1. Features should work as advertised
which is what the argument was originally about in the first place.
>When the game is basically a rape sim, it's a pretty important baseline.
Any game can be a rape sim if the GM is willing to roll with it and FATAL isn't advertised as being a rape sim, it's a rape sim as a consequence of the devs trying to make a game that's as offensive as humanly possible under the guise of being realistic and historically accurate (while having armor that turns you into a black person and rules for slicing through metal with your piss...)

>>53613792
Not that anon, but the only proof you've offered that the debated metric is NOT clear, exact, and distinct is one system out of many that this same metric has been used, successfully, to judge.

GURPS is bad anyway so that argument is moot.

>>53613792

Except the consensus seems to be that it's a good, useful metric, and you keep muddying the waters for bizarre reasons?

We analyse things based on the context they are in. The best screwdriver in the world is awful if what you really need is a spanner, and it's especially bad if you were sold it as a spanner. A product that fails to fulfil its purpose is not a good product because you find something else it can do. but it can Become a good product if it is sold in a way that's more suitable.

>>53613841
>Whether or not the game should be taken seriously is irrelevant,

Not if what it advertises is not to be taken seriously.

>and FATAL isn't advertised as being a rape sim,
How is "Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery" supposed to be interpreted otherwise?

>>53613426
Good to see some Alexandrian love. I use his stuff to create so many structures for my games.

Hes using a heavily house rules version of 3.5 that he's super familiar with so I can understand his use of the system.

>>53613855
>Except the consensus seems to be that it's a good, useful metric, and you keep muddying the waters for bizarre reasons?

What consensus? A few people arguing in a thread hardly count as a consensus, and more importantly regardless of how many people agree, the basic faults remain. These are not "bizarre" reasons, but clear arguments against what's basically some silly anon's half-baked meditations on how to try and objectify something subjective, and failing spectacularly in the process.

>We analyse things based on the context they are in.

The "context" of a game is not what it's advertised as so much as what it does.

>product that fails to fulfil its purpose is not a good product

And, once again, we return to the important idea that what a game is advertised as does not define its purpose. Worse still, most arguments about whether or not a game fails or succeeds at its purpose largely revolve around contradicting interpretations of what a game advertises itself as, making the already indistinct concern even more muddy.

What you've got is something pointless that you're desperately trying to pretend has meaning, when it's largely irrelevant to any important question about a game's quality that people are actually going to ask.

If I make a pure and simple Rape Simulator, advertised as such and even just named Rape Simulator, is that going to get the thumbs up just because the crunch represents the fluff and the game is generally balanced?

>>53614048

I wouldn't call it a bad game. If the rules served your intentions, were well designed and the game clearly stated what it was for, I would acknowledge it as a good product, even if one very much not to my tastes.

You might have a discussion about whether the game should exist, some people might get offended and so on, but none of that is directly relevant to the quality of the product.

>>53613897
Lechery doesn't imply rape

>>53614135
>Lechery
>noun
>noun: lechery; plural noun: lecheries
>excessive or offensive sexual desire;

It would probably have been called FATAR if that was a word.

>>53614256
Do keep in mind it got renamed to "From another Land, Another Time" or something.

>>53614088
>were well designed

Well, lookie here, something that actually determines whether a game is good or not, rather than all that other irrelevant bullshit.

Too bad that's so fucking vague, but it's at least a step forward from saying if the fluff matches the crunch and it's balanced that's enough to call it good.

>>53614292

...What?

Do you just completely fail to understand the three principles laid out above?

If a game mechanic is well designed, it will work as advertised (i.e. do what it says it will do and what you think it will do) and match the fluff that is associated with that mechanic, as well as fitting into the ideas and themes of the system overall, directly following from those prior two points.

>>53614342
That's got nothing to do with making a mechanic well designed, as has been said multiple times already. All that does is make it so that the argument is devoted to something as inconsequential as your personal interpretation of what the game is advertising and your personal interpretation of whether or not it fulfills that.

Ultimately, those points are so meaningless that they can be used to make any bad game seem good and any good game seem bad, simply by spinning what's being argued to suit your agenda, all without ever actually discussing what actually makes good games good.

>If a game mechanic is well designed,

If a game mechanic is well designed, the bullshit you followed that statement with comes largely as an afterthought of little consequence, and hardly as guiding principles.

>>53614480
Why are you so angry?

>>53614480

Can you come up with a well designed game mechanic that does the opposite of what it's intended to do?

Can you come up with a well designed game mechanic that does not at all reflect the fluff it's assigned to?

Because I don't think you can. It's a good, solid principle that you simply hate for no reason I can fathom, so you seek to remove it to make the ability to discuss and assess games weaker for everybody else.

>>53614512
That sounds angry to you? What? Was "bullshit" too harsh for your sensitive ears?

>>53614480

>Ultimately, those points are so meaningless that they can be used to make any bad game seem good and any good game seem bad, simply by spinning what's being argued to suit your agenda, all without ever actually discussing what actually makes good games good.

Except you tried to do this and comprehensively failed, possibly because you were spouting bullshit about a system you knew nothing about.

Do you actually have a central reason why you believe it's a bad metric? The only ambiguous thing in this thread is your 'arguments'.

>>53614545
The entire exchange.

>>53614540
>Can you come up with a well designed game mechanic that does the opposite of what it's intended to do?

The opposite? Why? How about a well designed mechanic that was intended to do one thing. but instead facilitated a different style of play? Something to the tune of ASoIF's combat system, which was so deadly as to make any combat a terrifying, regrettable experience that players avoided at all cost, allowing more focus to be put on the roleplaying/politics of the system? The designers did not intend combat to be quite as unforgiving and punishing as it ended up being, but it ultimately worked somewhat in the game's favor.

>Can you come up with a well designed game mechanic that does not at all reflect the fluff it's assigned to?
Using the same example, fighting in the books is not quite as hilariously deadly, but that's actually for the best, because the fights in the books ranged from long, drawn out affairs to silly gore bouts that a sadist and masochist would masturbate to. The game just treats combat as the very last option anyone would ever want to take.

>Because I don't think you can. It's a good, solid principle that you simply hate for no reason I can fathom, so you seek to remove it to make the ability to discuss and assess games weaker for everybody else.

Can you try actually reading what I'm saying, so as to not say such stupid things as "no reason I can fathom" when I've outlined a number of reasons for you?

>>53613897
>Not if what it advertises is not to be taken seriously.
Okay, what part of FATAL necessarily makes it seem as though it was not supposed to be taken seriously, if that's really your claim?
>How is "Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery" supposed to be interpreted otherwise?
First off, the real acronym (at least the one on the book) stands for "From Another Time, Another Land," the whole "Fantasy Adventure To Adult Lechery" came about as a consequence to its more...infamous elements.

Anyways, even if we accept "Fantasy Adventure to Adult lechery," the word "lechery" only denote excessive sexual indulgence, which does not inherently imply rape. At best, I'd assume that it's some sort of RPG centered around ERP or something, not hardcore rape, violence, and racial stereotyping.

>>53614588
>Except you tried to do this and comprehensively failed

You failing to comprehend is not a failure on my part.

>>53614727

You presenting reasons doesn't make me able to understand them. Your examples seem equally bizarre and nonsensical.

>>53614727

The first one is not the opposite of what it was intended to do, the second is not an example of it completely failing to fit the fluff. Try again.

>>53614734
>Okay, what part of FATAL necessarily makes it seem as though it was not supposed to be taken seriously, if that's really your claim?

Really? What

> the whole "Fantasy Adventure To Adult Lechery" came about as a consequence to its more...infamous elements.

That was actually it's original title.

>Anyways, even if we accept "Fantasy Adventure to Adult lechery," the word "lechery" only denote excessive sexual indulgence, which does not inherently imply rape.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

>>53614738
Actually it is, since you're the one delivering your argument with the intention of getting others to believe (or at least understand) whatever point you're trying to make and you failing to deliver your points makes it harder for other people to understand where you're coming from.

>>53614780
The criteria you demanded is nonsensical and does nothing to diminish the points I presented.

>>53614809
You can only task a teacher with so much. At some point, you must blame the student.

That point was passed long ago.

>>53614822

You presented points? You presented examples of things that, from the sound of it, fit perfectly with the prior principles for what makes a good game, somehow trying to use them as a way of discrediting it. It makes me wonder, again, if you simply fail to understand it.

It's like the text equivalent of a slap-fight

>>53614806
>Really? What
Answer the question, what part of this game tells me that it's something that isn't meant to be taken seriously when it's advertised as being difficult, detailed, and accurate game on the market?
>That was actually it's original title.
Can you prove it? Because I have a picture of the rule book and it doesn't say that in the subtitle.
>Oh, for fuck's sake.
What's wrong?

>>53614848
If the entire class leaves the classroom and doesn't understand a damn thing that you taught them, the blame falls squarely upon you for not delivering the information in a way that other people could understand.

If you're the only person in the room who thinks that you're right, either you're in the company of the wrong people or you're not nearly as clever as you think you are.

>>53614850
You seem to be misconstruing something that accidentally worked towards a games advantage as working as the designers advertised or matching the theme or setting of the game.

>>53614916
If the class is three kindergartners pretending to be able to hold their own in an adult discussion, it's not much of a classroom.

>>53614916
>either you're in the company of the wrong people

Well, yeah.

>>53614876
You have the "sanitized" cover, anon. If you don't know the history of the game, don't speak authoritatively about it, you just undermine your own argument by making it hard to trust you're arguing in good faith.

The reality is FATAL is a shit game that doesn't do what it promises with even the barest level of competence, so it fails at the three basic principles. It's simple as that.

>>53614978
Well look at it this way, three seperate individuals out of 47 unique IP's have gathered together to tell you that you're mistaken, yet nobody within this same pool of people have risen to your defense. What exactly does that tell you about your argument when you've failed to convince at least one other person ITT that you're right?

>>53615041
>You have the "sanitized" cover, anon.
Okay, can you prove it? Maybe provide a picture of the "unsanitized cover" or maybe even an interview with the creators or a website or fucking anything?
>The reality is FATAL is a shit game that doesn't do what it promises with even the barest level of competence, so it fails at the three basic principles. It's simple as that.
Okay, now actually prove that that's the case and you'll be a quarter of the way towards an actual argument.

>>53615015
Then why are you here?

>>53615143
>What exactly does that tell you about your argument when you've failed to convince at least one other person ITT that you're right?

That /tg/ falls for bait easily.

I'm one of the three... if there's only 3
>>53615176
It really was the original title IIRC. However, it still advertised itself as being the most complex/realistic/whatever thing.

>>53615176
Anon, I'm not cracking open that pdf to take screenshots. Go fuck yourself

This has reached consensus already. There's literally no point in entertaining your bullshit. Why don't you go prove it actually does what it says? Burden of proof for positive claims and all

>>53615041
>The reality is FATAL is a shit game that doesn't do what it promises with even the barest level of competence, so it fails at the three basic principles. It's simple as that.

The reason it's shit isn't because it fails the "three basic principles", and it can be argued that it passes those three with flying colors.

The reasons it's bad are mostly just basic designer incompetence. Overly specific rules, poor research, terrible themes, and edgy material designed largely just to get attention and be offensive. Even if it was balanced, even if it advertised exactly what it delivered, it would still be a terrible game.

>>53615247

>it can be argued that it passes those three with flying colors.

Not successfully. You tried, but all you demonstrated was a complete lack of understanding of... Basically anything involved.

>>53615230
On second thought, I'll just paste the links from 1d4chan, where you could've read this on your own, you lazy piece of shit

Original: http://web.archive.org/web/20030228195602/http://www.hyperbooks.com/fatal/fatal.pdf

Sanitized:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040413024552/http://www.hyperbooks.com/fatal/fatal.pdf

>>53615230
>I have run out of logical reasons to oppose your argument, but here's one more quip so I can maintain the high ground while offering nothing of substance to the argument.
FTFY

Next time, just say you were wrong and apologize.

>>53615269
>Not successfully.
By your biased evaluation?

Oh, but wait, what about the rest of that post you just ignored?

>The reasons it's bad are mostly just basic designer incompetence. Overly specific rules, poor research, terrible themes, and edgy material designed largely just to get attention and be offensive. Even if it was balanced, even if it advertised exactly what it delivered, it would still be a terrible game.

>>53615247
The first page of the game says it "seeks to be realistic without sacrificing fun", but it's easily the least fucking fun game I've ever had the displeasure of reading. The pdf reeks of trash, every mechanic is outright repellent.

You're arguing from nothing, anon, because you've never read FATAL, not even as a joke. You're just against the three basic principles on purely emotional grounds and can't even explain why properly.

>>53615310

The funny thing about all that crap? The end results of it are quite neatly covered by the three principles. They provide a clear, easy to use and understand metric for analysing and discussing systems.

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>>53615276
Now was that so hard? For all your efforts, you can say that you proved me right in that the subtitle was changed.

Here's a trophy.

>>53615284
I had just joined this stupid fucking conversation, anon. That was literally the second post I made in the entire thread and I immediately followed it up

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>>53615346
Sure anon, whatever you say.

>>53615331
You keep repeating that, even when it's not true. It's vague and indistinct as fuck, and it's to the point where I'm starting to believe you might be the one who wrote it, considering how attached you are to something so stupid.

And, let's open up the hypothetical you're not willing to look at, since you seem to not be swayed by any other arguments.

>Even if it was balanced, even if it advertised exactly what it delivered, it would still be a terrible game.

>>53615382

But if it adhered to those, it would be.

What it pitches is good. If anything, what the game claims to be is quite ambitious. If it had successfully fulfilled that potential and been a balanced system, it would have been a good game.

>>53615325
>The first page of the game says it "seeks to be realistic without sacrificing fun", but it's easily the least fucking fun game I've ever had the displeasure of reading. The pdf reeks of trash, every mechanic is outright repellent.

That's nice and vague, subjective and indistinct.

>>53615423
Hold on, don't dodge.

Imagine that I make a FATAL clone, and call it Autistic Rape Sim. Same book but with better balance, new cover, and a statement that clear as day advertises exactly what the game is.

Good game?

>>53615382
Literally most people ITT understand the concept anon, it's really only you who has an issue in understanding what the three principles are supposed to represent, using one of the absolute worst examples of tabletop RPG's in an attempt to prove your point.

FATAL is a shit game because nothing in its design actually works as intended, various anons ITT have given you reasons for why that is, yet you still try to say that the three principles are vague even though you're the only person having trouble understanding them?

Are you a 3aboo or something? Because I usually don't find this level of willful ignorance and autism unless it's because someone insulted 3.PF in some way.

>>53615465

It'd take a damn lot of work, but in theory yes. The exact same logic applies as with the earlier 'rape simulator' post.

I might not like it, but if it effectively fulfils its premise and the mechanics make sense, I can't really call it a bad game.

>>53615471
>FATAL is a shit game because nothing in its design actually works as intended

That's not why it's a shit game though, at all.

Imagine, for a moment, that the designer, contrary to your expectations, designed the game to be exactly as is, with all the tongue-in-cheek business about it being super realistic despite having firehose dicks. Let's say, for the sake of argument, purely a s a hypothetical, that he even went ahead and wrote a statement later on about how the whole game is a bizarre joke.

Even then it's not a good game, just like how The Room is not a good movie just because Tom later on tried to claim it was intentionally made to be as bad as it was.

>>53615471
It's Richard Petty. Yes, he's a 3aboo. I'm mystified as to why the mods haven't booted him by now despite banning him before because literally all he does is fuck up the board.

>>53615523
Then your definition is garbage. I'm not simply making a rape game, I'm including almost all the terrible rules and design decisions that FATAL has, aside from the question of balance.

It would be a terrible game, because FATAL's flaws are not that it doesn't deliver as advertised or that it lacks balance, but that it is a clusterfuck of every single amateur game design mistake.

>>53615434
You want me to spell out that there's a whore "profession" (class) that gains experience by getting people off? Oh, but that's the easy one.

There's a profession for a "young boy who carries a torch". You can be a fucking locksmith and get 16 silver pieces a day. Oh joy.

You can't be a knight at character creation. Someone has to knight you, and once they do you're a knight forever because you can't change it.

If you're an assassin, you have a random chance of getting traumatized for killing someone, and you will randomly remember having killed them.

I don't even want to get into the spell list, which is full of overcomplicated garbage that needs entire sheets of paper to keep track of PER USE.

FATAL is designed to be unfun, in every regard, from every angle. Its GM is renamed MAIM MASTER for fucks sake

>>53615621

No? Those rules are terrible because they don't fulfil their intention as rules and don't do what they're said to do or expected to do. To comply with the three principles, most of those bad rules would need to be fixed.

>>53613550
>I'd have a hard time believing anyone would take it seriously.

Oh, anon, you poor naive thing...

>>53615634
>You want me to spell out that there's a whore "profession" (class) that gains experience by getting people off?

I don't know, that sounds pretty realistic.

>>53615551
There's a difference in making bad shit and then claim you made it intentionally bad, and make well crafted shit that most people find tasteless and don't enjoy.

>>53615621
If you actually went through the effort of balancing the game though, any issues with the rules and the game's design would already be fixed since it's impossible to create balance when nothing in the rules actually work.

Ergo, fixing the balancing would actually make it a good game.

>>53615683
This. It's the difference between The Room and Gummo.

>>53615702
>Gummo
... do I want to google that?

>>53615640
>No? Those rules are terrible because they don't fulfil their intention as rules and don't do what they're said to do or expected to do.

What? No, they're terrible because they're flat out stupid, not because "they don't fulfil their intentions as rules."

If the intention is for whores to be encouraged to get people off, so they get experience points in doing so, that seems to fulfill the intention of the rules. Doesn't make it less dumb.

>>53615725

see >>53615694

So yeah. You don't actually understand the three principles or their implications, which is why you're getting mad about them.

>>53615694
>If you actually went through the effort of balancing the game though, any issues with the rules and the game's design would already be fixed since it's impossible to create balance when nothing in the rules actually work.

That's not how it works. At all.
The game can be "balanced" and still not actually work. In fact, you can balance it relatively easily, by just restricting all the character options down to a single choice and removing and randomness. Everyone plays an identical character.
And the game would be balanced, and somehow, it might actually be worse than it was before, which is an amazing feat.

>>53615739
I'm looking, at it seems like you are the one trying to pretend that "balance" is some magical force that fixes all of a games issues.

That's you just being dumb.

>>53615814

No, but it's a principle that, if you adhere to it, generally obliges a lot of those other issues not to exist. So yeah, you're just talking shit out of ignorance. Good to know.

>>53615832
It's a series of meaningless "principles" that don't actually provide any basis for meaningful discussion. It does the exact opposite, because it puts undue weight on considerations that are largely irrelevant when the most important question is "Is this game fun?"

The major difficulty with that latter statement is the unfortunate truth that fun is subjective, and that it trumps every other concern. Even so, we're able to have helpful discussions about games because we understand that fun is the most important thing, and not whether it adheres to some arbitrary goals or guidelines or the question of how initially balanced it is.

A game should do as advertised. It's nice when the rules are balanced and reflect the fluff. But, to try and promote those as the three major principles of game design? They're very far from being the chief concerns of a game designer, and very distant from being any real measure of a game's actual quality.

>>53615782
You don't understand what the word "balanced" actually means, do you?

>>53615988

But 'Is the game fun' is in itself kind of useless. While fun should always be the goal in game design, it's also true that any game can be fun or not fun depending on what people do with it.

Instead, you need to examine the traits of the system itself and how they would contribute or detract from the fun, how they support the job of the GM or make his job harder.

And three of the most important, in my experience, are whether the system properly supports its premise, whether its rules are balanced, and whether there's a dissonance between the mechanics and the fluff.

>>53615988
Just because it seems meaningless to you and you lack the understanding to know what the principles actually mean, doesn't mean that there's actually a problem with them.

At this point, you just sound like a butthurt 3aboo whose angry that someone on the internet shat on 3.PF, and I bet that if the OP hadn't mentioned anything about D&D in the original post, you'd have no problem with it.

>>53615988
What are chief concerns then?

>>53616104
>And three of the most important, in my experience, are whether the system properly supports its premise, whether its rules are balanced, and whether there's a dissonance between the mechanics and the fluff.

In my experience, the most important design concerns are Speed (in terms of how efficient the rules are), Clarity, Imagination, and Depth. Those are actual design concerns.

Your "design" principles are mostly just arbitrary analysis that tries to establish criteria that largely ignores what makes games good. In fact, unbalanced games can be quite good, and some of the more "gamey" systems also are pretty great. And, above all else, the "system supports its premise" remains arbitrary and indistinct, and largely up to interpretation.

>>53616218

Can you define those, please? Because those sound even more wanky and ambiguous.

>>53616249
His point I think is that what makes a good game good is in fact ambiguous, as there's different kinds of games.
While the guidelines given before are great for a certain subset of games, they're arbitrary when applied to all games.

>>53616218
Speed and clarity are good.

They should be added to the 3 as "playability" or something.

Not sure how you define Imagination and Depth though.

>>53616270
I think it's a good base of comparison. I can't think of a game it couldn't apply to.

>>53616270

But those three are universal, and what he decries as ambiguous is one of the most specific and important.

A system should support its premise. What the system sets out to do, the experience it tries to create, should be both clearly conveyed to the people playing it and integrated into the mechanics such that playing that way is natural.

Done right it means that taking actions that are in keeping with the tone and theme of the system are intuitive and rewarded. Done wrong it means that your expectations of the system will fail to be met and actions that seem intuitive will be punished.

It's a very specific idea, and there is no system that could possibly be imagined which would not benefit from properly supporting its premise.

>>53616218
>Those are actual design concerns.
No, those are vague terms that you pulled out of your ass that could mean practically anything.

Like wouldn't the efficiency of the rules fall under "Clarity" not "Speed?" What is "Imagination" supposed to represent? The aesthetics of the game? How many unique rules are present? Also, is Depth supposed to be something like the the skill floor vs. the skill ceiling or is it supposed to denote PVP elements?

Like, if you want us to accept these terms, we need some context here.
>>53616270
Oh sure, the three guidelines are ambiguous but a stat called "Imagination" isn't? Get the fuck outta here, you're not fooling anyone.

>>53602637
This.
Also, d&d alignments are the stupidest shit ever invented. It makes no fucking sense.

>>53615284
Why do people keep responding to you? You don't listen, you insult the people you're trying to convince, and above all else you're not even honestly trying to argue

I mean for fucks sake, do we really fall for something this obvious? This blatantly devoid of any actual fucking sincerity? What the fuck is wrong with us that we actually have this little self awareness?

And you, fuck off. This had potential to be an educational and interesting thread until you just had to be an asshole.

>>53616345
They are stupid now, but made plenty sense when they were invented.

It's just something that got bloated and lost its old purpose.

File: 1485496172047.jpg (54KB, 360x500px) Image search: [Google]

54KB, 360x500px

>>53616357

>>53616288
>I think it's a good base of comparison. I can't think of a game it couldn't apply to.
It kind of applies to Space 1889.
It's a game based around the following premise:
>H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs were 100% right about everything
>It's the year 1889, and the British Empire, along with the Germans, Belgians and some other minor players are busy colonizing Mars, Venus and Mercury in great ether flying ships, and ships made out of exotic Martian "Liftwood" that is lighter than air.
The game rules themselves are extremely light and arguably not very well balanced (You can become an inventor and create lightning guns, machine people, mind control weapons and all sorts of other MAD SCIENCE if you put enough work into it in addition to actual historical inventions)
The fun part of the game is not so much in the application of the rules, but the application of the setting, creating characters like Big Game Hunters or grizzled Victorian soldiers who can partake in all sorts of Edgar Rice Burroughs style adventures, face off against otherwise under-utilized forces of fiction and engage with the setting based on the character, their responsibilities and other colonial intrigues that develop over a campaign.
Some would brand it as "freeform" based on this description, but there's actually lots of stuff like ways to command and customize your party's own Sky Ship etc. It's more minimalistic in execution than void in rules.

>>53616321
>reading comprehension
I described the three guidelines as arbitrary IF applied to all games people can/want to play. I only described what >>53616218 said as ambiguous.

>>53616485

>The fun part of the game is not so much in the application of the rules, but the application of the setting, creating characters like Big Game Hunters or grizzled Victorian soldiers who can partake in all sorts of Edgar Rice Burroughs style adventures, face off against otherwise under-utilized forces of fiction and engage with the setting based on the character, their responsibilities and other colonial intrigues that develop over a campaign.

At this point you're just talking about fluff, not rules.

>>53611552
>I think Stormwind is a shitty concept because it's a distraction from the real problem

Stormwind gets misapplied a lot. It often gets used to justify power gaming (which it does not) rather than counter someone who was decrying powergaming for hurting roleplaying.

When the fallacy was originally proposed some people would regularly complain about players making optimal choices rather than thematic choices by saying making non-optimal and even bad choices the character involved was inherently better for roleplaying. The fallacy came to be when people pointed out how this was inherently not true.

>>53616345
>Also, d&d alignments are the stupidest shit ever invented. It makes no fucking sense.
They made sense when many games involved were mainly focused on the battles between the forces of Law/Chaos and/or Good/Evil

>>53616310
Universal? But that's partially the folly of them. They're trying to be open and accepting of a lot of different needs, but the chosen criteria is aimless and might as well be arbitrary.

They say very little about whether a game will be good, and aside from the notion of balance are largely endlessly open to interpretation.

>>53616559

...But I just explained to you why it's a very specific thing? The fuck?

>>53616524
Fluff can create rules.
A Paladin, Cleric of Druid's necessary obedience of their respective patron figures/forces is fluff too, but in Space 1889 from the moment of character creation you have a much more concrete background and potential sets of responsibilities. The whole game's designed around the idea of the the world pushing back against you, only rules that govern how people of the era and location act, who observes what acts as good or bad are not something you put into roll-able tables.
That doesn't make them rules any less, just of a different kind.

>>53616249
How fast you play, how easy it is to play, how much you play, how long you will play.

>>53616603

...yeah, those seem far, far less specific and useful than the three principles.

>>53616559
Just because you're too stupid to understand the criteria doesn't mean that the fault lies in the concept though.
>They say very little about whether a game will be good, and aside from the notion of balance are largely endlessly open to interpretation.
Maybe if you're retarded or needlessly obtuse about it then sure, you have a quarter of a point there. Fortunately, the rest of us aren't sub-70 IQ trying to argue against logic so for us, there really isn't a problem.

>>53616601

Ahh, that makes sense. So those are rules for supporting its premise, just as the three principles advise!

>>53616601
>Fluff can create rules.
No.

If that were true, Monks would actually be a good class in 3.PF.

>>53602561
>what makes a system shit.

Are you having fun? Then it's not shit. Are you not having fun? Then it's shit.

>>53616603
>How fast you play
Okay, what the fuck does this mean? Are we counting how fast combat takes to resolve, how quickly you can resolve an action, how fast character creation is, we need more details here.
>how easy it is to play
Again, we need more details here.
>how much you play
See above
>how long you will play
See above

Like what the fuck anon, if you're going to claim that a concept is vague and arbitrary then don't come up with a criteria that's several magnitudes WORSE!

>>53616648
>No.
Earlier this week, in a game I was running a new comer Druid wanted to summon a creature a few dozen feet off the ground in an effort to make it fatally crash on top of another creature.
While we both agreed that this is actually a hilarious idea that I might have to steal from him for a Lich in the future, there's the small caveat that he might not want to do this, considering that Nature itself is what gives him his power, and Mother Nature would probably be displeased about him using the noble creatures he's supposed to be protecting as literally live ammunition.

Go play some games.

>>53616635
On one level, yes.
On another level you can still have a character who is a cut purse who became something of a decent shot, serving as the personal body guard of an unexaggerated Captain Nemo character who comes from a ridiculously wealthy family and is actively developing the Atom Bomb in an effort to hold the entirety of Mars hostage.
Not exactly "balanced".

>>53616746

That isn't unnecessarily balanced? There are loads of systems who can use narrative mechanics to 'balance' characters with different amount of in universe power. FATE is an excellent example, and it sounds like this system could be too.

If it doesn't give them all an equal amount of fun stuff to do, of course, then that's a mark against it.

>>53616622
They're actually infinitely more useful, since even those quick and vague assesments at least have something to do with the actual game and how it's played.

>>53616780

No? They give far, far less than even the single 'Support the premise/function as advertised' principle, since that implicitly includes a statement of how the system is played, in intention and in practice.

>>53616746
What game was that?

Most D&Ds stipulate that the summon must be on surface that can upport it, and summoning spells are full round spells so everyone could just move out from under it.

And Druids should be okay with killing things (for the greater neutral), the same as a lion is anyway.

>>53616780
Did you just make them up to show that you can make up random shit as a sort of argument against the three anon made up in that image?

>>53616740
You asking for a book?
Because, you should at least be able to recognize the valid concerns even those short statements suggest, without demanding a diversion.

>>53616746
Literally nothing that you've said has any basis on the argument, at best it's an anecdote, at worst it's a total misunderstanding on the way that summoning works.

Nature is all about sacrifice for the sake of survival because if you're dead, you're not procreating and in order to live, you must devour another living entity to make yourself stronger. Nature wouldn't give a shit if you crushed one creature with another and even if it did, nothing in the rules states that that's the case.

>>53616827
Oh whoa, I didn't realize it was three guys. So, it's you three guys who wrote it? That makes a sudden ton of sense, in that how only the guys who wrote something so limp-wristed would ever repost it or try to defend it.

>>53616780
How so?

>>53612101
>Virt
>some cunt is stealing Jake Kaufman's handle
what an asshole

>>53616767
Well you're right, but /tg/ seems unanimously certain that narrative mechanics are not allowed to balance roleplaying games, hence why if you're a DM who's having the general populace be uncomfortable a around- and distrustful towards the strange men who speak arcane words and make people turn to stone, then you're "cheating" and "not playing D&D right" and "your solution isn't spelled out in the DM's Guide, therefore it is wrong".

>>53616827
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/summonNaturesAllyI.htm
Where does that specify it has to be on the ground?
Also, to both you and >>53616860:
A lion stalks its prey. And considering given Druid's "Mother Nature" in the setting has been well established to be partial to fair play, thus frowning on hunters who only use traps but accepts those who hunt animals in earnest, not robbing their prey of the ability to escape if it's capable, it was part of the fluff.

In addition: The idea that anecdotes are always bad is pretty childish. Anecdotes can't prove that something never applies, but they can serve as an example to when they do apply as a counter argument against "no this never happens ever for it never could happen" which the original comment claimed.

>>53616878
Aaaaand you can't parse sentences either.

>>53616830
Since you need me to spell it out for you, give me an example that helps me to understand what the fuck you're even going on about.

Shit like "How fast you play" or "how long you play" answer nothing, because such factors are generally going to be determined more by the quality of the group than on anything that's caused by the system.

>>53616949
>http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/summonNaturesAllyI.htm

>A creature or object brought into being or transported to your location by a conjuration spell cannot appear inside another creature or object, nor can it appear floating in an empty space. It must arrive in an open location on a surface capable of supporting it.

>>53616878
You can generally tell a screencap is shit if the guy who screencapped it also wrote it.

Watch out for any screencaps with (yous).

>>53616991
Wrong link, sorry,
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/spellDescriptions.htm#conjuration

>>53616949

No, the GM pulling shit is not the same as narrative mechanics balancing things at all.

Real rules to ensure PCs have an equal ability to do things regardless of in universe potence is what I'm talking about.

>>53616949
Anecdotes in this context is worthless because you're effectively citing your own house rules as evidence for why the game is good or not.

Your houserules mean nothing outside of your table and your personal interpretations of the rules that you're using has no basis as to the quality of the rules in and of themselves, especially when you don't even understand the rules that you're actually using.

Also, since you outed yourself as a butthurt 3aboo, I can only assume that you're so upset because somebody posted something that shat on your shitty system.

>>53617070
>Anecdotes in this context is worthless because you're effectively citing your own house rules as evidence for why the game is good or not.
That was not the point of the anecdote.
The point was to show that if the fluff prevents a character from doing something without sever consequences, it's the equivalent of a rule. It was simply an example of such a piece of fluff.
The fact that you don't understand this distinction makes me question the value of continuing this back and forth.

>>53617014
>>53616991
Fair enough. Honestly I didn't know about this particular line. Back when I was still just a player, the way the previous DM always ran it as "If can exist in an environment, it can be summoned into it.", but I guess that's not RAW.
Still, I'm sure anyone could easily come up with similar situations. Might as well summon an earth elemental into a catapult just to launch it at a fort wall. Same issue.

>>53617198

>The point was to show that if the fluff prevents a character from doing something without sever consequences, it's the equivalent of a rule. It was simply an example of such a piece of fluff.
>The fact that you don't understand this distinction makes me question the value of continuing this back and forth.

If this exists in a system, then it should be an actual rule rather than an ambiguous fluff implication, and it's still not a good way of 'balancing' powerful PCs unless there is a systemic method of making it logical, consistent and proportional to the power they express in a way that's interesting and enjoyable.

>>53617198
>Still, I'm sure anyone could easily come up with similar situations. Might as well summon an earth elemental into a catapult just to launch it at a fort wall.

This actually happened in GitP and is totally legal.

Hell, I'm pretty sure it happens in some novel.

>>53617198
>The point was to show that if the fluff prevents a character from doing something without sever consequences, it's the equivalent of a rule.
Except it doesn't
>>53617014
>>53616991
Not only do you not understand the rules, but your ruling was all shit that you pulled out of your ass. It's about as much the equivalent of a rule as taking a black magic marker to my PHB changes the title to "Dungeons and Dildos."

You can come up with any excuse under the sun but at the end of the day, you introduced your anecdote to the discussion under the premise that it would help you out in some way, rather than weakening your argument further. If Druids are supposed to work the way that you claimed that they worked, it'd say so in the actual fucking book, clearly and distinctly, and wouldn't require you to actually put in any effort towards limiting the Druid's power in the first place.

Do YOU understand the distinction now?

>>53617070
>Your houserules mean nothing outside of your table and your personal interpretations of the rules that you're using has no basis as to the quality of the rules in and of themselves, especially when you don't even understand the rules that you're actually using.

Not really. Sufficiently explained, even houserules can be a point of reference. In fact, they're vital to any discussion about games, because almost every GM uses at least houserule.

Why discuss games that no one actually plays? Why demand a common point of reference that doesn't actually exist?

>>53617304

Houserules should always be mentioned in the context of RAW and should be clearly expressed as such. RAW as a common frame of reference is the only way RPG discussion can function, as without it nobody is actually talking about the same game.

>>53617304
I don't use houserules unless I'm trying to change the premise of a system. Usually, if a system doesn't work for my ends I just drop it like it's hot and go find another one, because there's a lot of them out there and I'll probably find what I'm looking for.

The worship of houserules is really mostly a "One-System Player/GM" thing. I'm pretty sure most people who use houserules don't actually understand what went into designing what they've cut and rerouted

>>53617304
>Not really. Sufficiently explained, even houserules can be a point of reference. In fact, they're vital to any discussion about games, because almost every GM uses at least houserule.
Maybe in a shitty system like 3.PF where you need to come up with houserules just to make sure everyone is at least doing shit but in most systems, the rules are already written in such a way that actually gives you both a point of reference and a means of determining how an action should play out.

If you want to bring up a houserule that you made up that's, like, the best fucking rule ever xD, then be upfront about it and realize that if we allow houserules to enter the discussion, the discussion itself becomes moot because we'd just be talking about our own version of the game, rather than the actual fucking rules.

To say nothing on how most people who make houserules also have a nasty habit of not understanding the rules that they're cutting en masse in the first place.

>>53617319
>Houserules should always be mentioned in the context of RAW and should be clearly expressed as such. RAW as a common frame of reference is the only way RPG discussion can function, as without it nobody is actually talking about the same game.

But people are already talking about drastically different games. That's RPG discussion, and hoping for otherwise is really just talking about hypothetical games rather than talking about actual experiences.

>Houserules should always be mentioned in the context of RAW and should be clearly expressed as such.

Yes, but excluding them from the discussion is basically just trying to argue about a static game, a game that doesn't honestly exist.

>RAW as a common frame of reference is the only way RPG discussion can function,

Why? Nothing is stopping people from explaining their houserules, and saying "I dislike X, but love X with these houserules" or "Have you tried X with these houserules? You might like it better."

There's really no reason to exclude houserules from a game discussion, just like there's no reason to exclude things like expansions or official variants. Games are fluid, and it's important to not try and get wrapped up in trying to organize game discussion in a fashion that denies this truth.

>>53617570

I'm not arguing for excluding them, just that RAW should always come first and houserules being involved is always the exception, not the rule, having to be explained and justified whenever it is brought up rather than implicitly accepted as part of the conversation.

>>53613265
Fuck you, Jaquaying the Dungeon is the best and most important article in modern RPG history.

>>53617639

I've only seen a few links to the website, but a lot of the time he seems to use way too many words to say way too fucking little, while wanking pointless bits of terminology like 'disassociative mechanics'.

>>53617394
> the discussion itself becomes moot because we'd just be talking about our own version of the game, rather than the actual fucking rules.

But everyone plays there own version of the game to a large extent. Even if someone were to solely stick to the "actual fucking rules", they would be running the game rather differently than any other GM. That's just the nature of games and game discussion, and if you think that renders it moot, than perhaps you shouldn't bother with game discussion? That's much better than trying to work up weird rules for how a discussion must go, especially when those rules don't really contribute to improving discussion and can in fact hamper it.

>>53617651

Are you literally the same guy who was arguing against the principles above?

If not, then fuck this thread is a hive of people actively trying to destroy all basis for coherent discussion of RPGs.

>>53617637
I disagree in a way, because there's a lot of common houserules and advice that are treated as rules, rather than exceptions. Stuff like not sticking with Fate's official attributes and substituting one of several variants, including the common one of just switching over with the similar one's used in the Dresden Fate game.

We can discuss Fate, and there's really nothing stopping us from saying "Fate's okay, but better if you don't use the offical attributes." In fact, you can really just use the shorthand of saying "Fate's good," if you happen to feel that way because of a few simple houserules.

>>53617720

If it's not RAW, then it's still worth repeating because it informs the context of the discussion.

It's something people do, too. Every time there's a 4e discussion of any length on /tg/, someone will mention the MM3/MV monster math and Expertise/Improved Defences fixes, and they're right to, because while they're implicit parts of the conversation for people in the know at this point, someone coming upon the conversation without that implicit knowledge will just be clueless, and needs those things stated directly in order to really understand what's going on.

>>53617649
Don't start man, you are going to trigger them.

From Encyclopedia of Games:

Shitty Game (n) - see Fate Core.

>>53617670
I'm not, but what you call "aiming for coherent discussion" sounds like you're hoping to limit discussion in a way that suits your needs, but doesn't really reflect how people actually play.

Coherent discussion about games doesn't require awful rules like "No Houserules allowed", especially when all that does is make the discussion have to require a lot of asterisks like "I think GURPS is great*" or "GURPS is fucking garbage**".

People should generally assume that games are played with some variation, and instead of dumping every little caveat as a footnote, should be welcome of opinions and experiences that include changes and deviations from your own personal expectations. Ultimately, if the goal we're all looking for is just to find and discuss games that we'll enjoy, things like houserules are vital to that discussion.

I mean, that is our goal, right?

*because I played it with a GM who used good houserules
**because I played it with a GM who religiously stuck to the rules as written and that lead to a lot of awkward circumstances and a lot of time wasted looking things up

>>53617760
>If it's not RAW, then it's still worth repeating because it informs the context of the discussion.

Agreed.
In the case of 4e, if someone says "4e HP math is shit", I think it's fair to counter with "4e HP math WAS shit. See my new and improved statblock."

>>53617902

See >>53617637

Houserules have a place, but they always need to be clearly marked out as houserules, because including them without doing so just confuses the conversation and makes it impossible to keep things coherent.

>>53617942
Yea i usually use the new math and make everything do an extra die of damage just for good measure.

My last dungeon crawl the pcs didn't even get any more health until paragon and the monsters all had from 15 to 75. It was brutal

>>53617987
Yes, but it should also generally be assumed houserules and rule variations are at play in all of our experiences, even accidental ones.

>>53618012

While that is technically true, RAW still needs to act as a common frame of reference. Even if it's not exactly the experience everyone will have, it's the closest thing we have to a common middle ground to start from for the purposes of mutual understanding.

>>53618001

...That sounds fucking awful

>>53618012
What does this even mean? What are you even fucking asking for? Can you get to the point, you weasely fuck? Are you just trying to wheedle in some consideration for a specific game that you think should be forgiven because your own houserules "fix" it? What the fuck are you going on and on about?

>>53618174
Whoa, what is your problem, man?

>>53618817
If you understood what the guy he's replying to has been doing for literally a year at this point you'd understand.

>>53618936
Whoa. What. Is. Your. Problem?
Autism?

>>53619331
My """problem""" is that the guy he replied to is a piece of shit who will fuck up D&D threads at the drop of a hat the second someone implies that it's not perfect.

Even if you're trying to help someone avoid those problems.

>>53619399
Oh yeah, and it's not just D&D threads, it's any game design thread ever.

>>53619399

I always think assuming consistent identities like this is a bad idea. It makes your point seem weaker, and there really isn't any evidence for it. It might be easier to believe there's only one kind of any particular idiot, but sadly that's usually not the case.

>>53619435
Well congrats, you're wrong.

>>53619399
What.
Just say you have autism next time.

>>53619399
>>53619435
Do you guys know each other?

>>53607606
How's it feel being dead inside?

>>53607363
The action and movement rules are like a 70's calleidoscope drug trip sequence of stupid limitations and pointlessly verbose waffling.

You just forgot how shit the core game features were because they've become second nature to you.

>>53602561
Needless complexity -- This doesn't mean that any complex game is bad, as long as it's making good use of what's there. You want things to be a simple as possible to accomplish the task you are trying to accomplish. If you could get 95% of the same sophistication out of half the rules, that's a pretty damning commentary on the more complex system.

Rules run counter to desired gameplay -- This one's pretty much self-explanatory. If it's supposed to be a quick, pulpy action-adventure game and you have to spend ten minutes each turn calculating blood loss and reduced mobility due to shock, the system has failed. Similarly, if a game is supposed to support being a warrior, but warriors are hopelessly outshined by spell-casters, that game has failed.

Mechanics obstruct role-playing -- This is really a subset of the former category, but it bears focusing upon. A lot of systems get you so tangled up in the mechanics, that it takes the focus away from other things. Also, some games seem to be more focused on character-creation than actual play, and since a shitload more time is spent playing than creating characters, this is a big problem.

>>53623356
Also, a game can be counterintuitive, hard to play, unclear in its rules, difficult to reference, unnecessarily time-consuming, and promote results that are undesirably silly or unrealistic.

>>53603351
This post is boring, pretentious shit. The author starts out promisingly, and then descends into critiquing 3.pf just like EVERY OTHER GODDAMN PERSSON ON THIS SITE. I generally agree with them, but they should have used something besides that if they're really trying to reach out to the 3.pf crowd.
Also
>screencapping your own post
>reposting your own post
Fuck right off

>>53624160
It's a post from fucking 2014, anon

Also trying to call someone out for samefag when you're quite likely the same fuck that's been shitting up this whole thread just pretending to come at it fresh n' new is a joke. Get a tripcode already, or is this "strategy" the reason you haven't?

>>53624160
I'd ask why but I'm fairly certain that you're either the same dude who has been positing ITT for the last few hours or you're another butthurt 3aboo whose more focused on the fact that someone *gasp* called 3.PF shitty than on the true merits of what the dude had to say.

>>53602561
The part where the game ends up requiring mid-game research.
Looking up shit in books/PDFs is just an immersion-slaughtering chore and a sign that there is too much going on to be functional. Now, this could be indicative of poorly educated game masters and players, but it usually means there are too many layers of rules; the game does not unify its mechanics enough to have memorable (or easily predictable) algorithms/conditions.

If your game system cannot be condensed in an abridged page or two of quick-reference, something has gone wrong.

File: roadtrip.jpg (219KB, 1848x743px) Image search: [Google]

219KB, 1848x743px

It's a wonder nobody posted this yet

That said, the only car you ever need is GURPS in my opinion

>>53624160
>I agree with the points it makes but it shits on system I like therefore it's bad despite the points being good

Get fucked, hypocrite

>>53626977
As someone who's taken a long road trip with 3 good friends in a car with no AC, that's a load of horse shit. It's still fucking miserable.

>>53627368
It's clearly another self-made and self-reposted screencap. D&D, in the analogy, would be a lot more like "a normal fucking car", but because 4chan won't give attention to people who just say things honestly or reasonably, he needs to exaggerate and shitpost about how much he hates the game.

>>53627368
Seconded. Fuck that post.

>>53628892
It's a fucking 2013 post, AGAIN. What the fuck is your problem, anon? Never come up with anything someone else would want to post?

>>53610819
>there aren't any memes for the average shitposter to gravitate upon to generate (you)'s
This has much truth to it. I find that the posts I make that I actually put thought into and care about basically never get any replies, but my shitposts usually do.

All systems have flaws, if those flaws interfere with your game, try another system. If they can be overcome by a good DM, be a good DM.

This is a pointless discussion

>>53602561
>what makes a system shit.

Being popular.

>>53622905
Pretty good, actually. Emotions take up a lot of processing power that has better, more refined uses--such as most forms of creation, production, or destruction.

>>53626977
That screencap may be the best post on the subject ever written. So truthful in it's simplicity, this anon clearly had a high Wisdom score.

>>53630467
It's truly a shame. The posts that actually deserve attention never see any.

>>53636775
4chan isn't for in-depth conversation (it happens but only randomly) but for bored people passing time. cue in the shitposts.