Game Design Sins

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Chivalry & Sorcery 2. They did large, and fixed. amounts of damage, so even a complete scrub got full damage out of them.
 
If you are designing a game and you want people with melee weapons and people with guns to have balanced fights, you've already decided to make an action movie RPG. Don't worry about realism.

This depends on how you implement initiative and the 21 foot rule. Knives are also silent, while it takes a lot of work to make a suppressed pistol hollywood silent. So they don't necessarily need to be balanced against each other in a head on fight, just balanced in a way to make you want a knife expert and a gun expert in the party.

I just don't like systems that conflate being a marathon runner, being someone blessed with an amazing immune system, and being a big guy who can lift a ton but has no stamina. Strength and health/constitution being one stat does this unless you then have traits that modify it, and unless they're quite coarse you rapidly end up at the point where having them split to start with would've been simpler.

It's also messy when you move outside the human scale.

So about the only time I'd expect it to not annoy me would be in a game where it's never used and could just be part of the character's 'fluff' description anyway.

Right, but is being a marathon runner or having an amazing immune system going to be a big feature of the game? If only one character is good at it, you split the party. If everyone is good at it, it doesn't matter what your stats are. Disease might seem like fun in a hardcore way, but mostly it just brings the adventure to a crawl and takes one character out of action. So you really only want disease as a plot device affecting NPCs.
 
Right, but is being a marathon runner or having an amazing immune system going to be a big feature of the game? If only one character is good at it, you split the party. If everyone is good at it, it doesn't matter what your stats are. Disease might seem like fun in a hardcore way, but mostly it just brings the adventure to a crawl and takes one character out of action. So you really only want disease as a plot device affecting NPCs.
That last's logic applies to anything that only clobbers one character. Should all traps be designed so they always catch the whole party? If not, one character gets hit and knocked about and taken out of action and either the whole party waits or that PC and player are out of the action, just as with a disease. You seem to be arguing for a collective group hit point pool or for a game where anything that incapacitates a character is gone after the scene it was applied ends.

Now, while this last is something of a trend in D&D and its spin-offs these days, it's very much not a universal trait of RPGs.

As for splitting/not splitting various traits, how often PC intelligence really come up other than as a skill modifier or as a gateway for (some) magic? Likewise 'Wisdom', whatever the heck that is, and so on. For most rpgs, combat and 'adventure' oriented as they are, strength, toughness, endurance, and so on are very important, and where a huge amount of character definition occurs. How strong, how many hit points, and how generally enduring a character is is often, in my experience, a point of discussion, or pride, or concern, even when discussing intellectual types and spell casters.

Unless the game really isn't about anything physical, conflating these things removes a great deal of distinction between characters.

Also, if something isn't important to the game, rather than lump it into some other character stat, surely it would be better to just have it set as a flat value? That way if it suddenly does matter, we don't find that someone's character is much better or worse at it simply because they bought up something else that the game did care about.

If Strength and Constitution (to come back to the stats originally under discussion) are lumped into one stat, what we're saying is that we do care about them (otherwise they wouldn't be a stat), but we care so little that all big strong men are also marathon runners with great immune systems, and all small, slight women are sickly - or that small, slight women can be capable of lifting and humping round just as much as big guys (if we decouple strength from physical size and mass). Either way it's going to mess with someone's suspension of disbelief. Even modern action movies that have tiny little actresses playing characters that toss great big guys around like it's nothing pretend it's from skill, not power.

Basically this bothers me because these are things that are very not not linked in real life in ways that are quite obvious in day to day life, so to link them makes these differences impossible without some way of then de-linking them. Ads/disads that do this are a workable option if the system being used is fairly coarse, but if it's quite detailed you're probably better off just having separate stats, in my opinion.
 
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I just don't like systems that conflate being a marathon runner, being someone blessed with an amazing immune system, and being a big guy who can lift a ton but has no stamina.

Most trad systems have a health track and a CON/STA/END score as well as Strength.

Seems like needless duplication. Especially when you remember that marathon runners are strong as F, as are Pilates teachers. And the strong person with little stamina is … well, me … but only after a year of couch sitting. It takes less than a month of prep and I’m running 8 miles non-stop (and probably more but I get really bored).

So much of it is genetics anyway. And games don’t allow for rapid transformation (like the stamina example)


putting numbers on every possible interpretation of health/fitness/stamina/etc doesn’t make a system realistic, it just adds numbers (which is my interpretation of “crunch”).

Are we talking about “adventurers” or normal janes?

I have to say I like the bumps and dips options allowed by some games.
 
That last's logic applies to anything that only clobbers one character. Should all traps be designed so they always catch the whole party? If not, one character gets hit and knocked about and taken out of action and either the whole party waits or that PC and player are out of the action, just as with a disease. You seem to be arguing for a collective group hit point pool or for a game where anything that incapacitates a character is gone after the scene it was applied ends.

Not everything that makes for a good story makes for a good game. This is something that comes up with board games, that a design like monopoly that knocks one player out after another is bad design because in the end it's just two players playing. So you want a game where everyone is engaged until the play resolves entirely.

Nowadays, you're lucky if you can get a gaming session together once every few months, and you might only have a few hours for that one session. That means you want everyone to get the most of it, otherwise they won't put the effort in to come back for the next session. It was very different when you were playing in high school every day, and having your character taken out for a bit was just an excuse to take a break and read a book while everyone else keeps playing.
 
I'm pretty confident that most marathon runners are stronger and vastly healthier than the average person. They might be quicker than a body builder, but will still almost invariably be noticeably stronger than your typical couch potato, and infinitely healthier as well. So I don't get where the huge disconnect is that a marathon runner, or pretty much ANY physically inclined character, would be stronger and healthier than sedentary characters on the basis of having a single stat that gives them all of that in one go.

Should a body builder be stronger than a marathon runner, and the runner quicker? Sure, but that's what skills and advantages (Feats, Edges, whatever) are for. But pretty much every physically inclined character would literally be stronger and healthier than one that isn't physically inclined. That's literally the way it is in real life.

Attributes in RPGs are general abilities. They shouldn't be set around edge cases, but broad strokes of what a character's general aptitudes are like. For everything else there's skills and advantages.
 
I'm pretty confident that most marathon runners are stronger and vastly healthier than the average person. They might be quicker than a body builder, but will still almost invariably be noticeably stronger than your typical couch potato, and infinitely healthier as well. So I don't get where the huge disconnect is that a marathon runner, or pretty much ANY physically inclined character, would be stronger and healthier than sedentary characters on the basis of having a single stat that gives them all of that in one go.

Should a body builder be stronger than a marathon runner, and the runner quicker? Sure, but that's what skills and advantages (Feats, Edges, whatever) are for. But pretty much every physically inclined character would literally be stronger and healthier than one that isn't physically inclined. That's literally the way it is in real life.

Attributes in RPGs are general abilities. They shouldn't be set around edge cases, but broad strokes of what a character's general aptitudes are like. For everything else there's skills and advantages.
(Small pedantic caveat simply because it's interesting: a marathon runner in heavy training - or another type of endurance athlete like an elite cyclist - may actually be more susceptible to disease than a regular person because of the strain of accumulted fatigue on the immune system.)

I've often thought systems get it wrong by following D&D and making Strength an ability and Athletics the skill.

The A Song of Ice and Fire rpg actually puts it the other way around and I remember thinking it generally makes more sense that way. The ability is basic physical athleticism in a general sense, the skill represents the effort you have put into tuning that to be able to apply force and build muscle.

The other thing of course is whether there's some measure of size in an rpg.
It would be interesting to have Fitness and Size as seperate abilities that when combined in some way yield the measure of Strength.
 
The other thing of course is whether there's some measure of size in an rpg.
It would be interesting to have Fitness and Size as seperate abilities that when combined in some way yield the measure of Strength.
That's sort of how Chivalry & Sorcery did/does things. Depending on edition mass matters more or less (always for encumbrance, sometimes for damage).

Likewise 2300AD based strength off a size stat, so they got part-way there.

You could also have that same Fitness stat combine with some kind of Constitution stat to give fatigue points or the like if you want those in your system.
 
This depends on how you implement initiative and the 21 foot rule. Knives are also silent, while it takes a lot of work to make a suppressed pistol hollywood silent. So they don't necessarily need to be balanced against each other in a head on fight, just balanced in a way to make you want a knife expert and a gun expert in the party.
You can obtain this sort of effect without messing with the numbers - for example, if you just have damage take effect at the end of a combat round, rather than after the individual strike, suicide charges then work.
 
(Small pedantic caveat simply because it's interesting: a marathon runner in heavy training - or another type of endurance athlete like an elite cyclist - may actually be more susceptible to disease than a regular person because of the strain of accumulted fatigue on the immune system.)

I've often thought systems get it wrong by following D&D and making Strength an ability and Athletics the skill.

The A Song of Ice and Fire rpg actually puts it the other way around and I remember thinking it generally makes more sense that way. The ability is basic physical athleticism in a general sense, the skill represents the effort you have put into tuning that to be able to apply force and build muscle.

The other thing of course is whether there's some measure of size in an rpg.
It would be interesting to have Fitness and Size as seperate abilities that when combined in some way yield the measure of Strength.

IMO, Size should be treated as something separate from Attributes with it's own scale that modifies certain abilities, game stats or rolls based on how small or large something is. It could be treated as Categories (D&D style: Tiny, Medium, Large, Huge, Gargantuan) or levels, if you want to be more granular, and provide consistent modifiers based on whatever measure is used. Larger creatures would get bonuses to Strength, carrying capacity, HP/Equivalent and rolls affected by physical power, but a penalty to rolls involving mobility (including attacks and evasion), while smaller creatures would get the opposite.

But I think that Size is a different thing from actual aptitudes, which is what Attributes (or whatever they're called) tend to reflect in RPGs.
 
IMO, Size should be treated as something separate from Attributes with it's own scale that modifies certain abilities, game stats or rolls based on how small or large something is. It could be treated as Categories (D&D style: Tiny, Medium, Large, Huge, Gargantuan) or levels, if you want to be more granular, and provide consistent modifiers based on whatever measure is used. Larger creatures would get bonuses to Strength, carrying capacity, HP/Equivalent and rolls affected by physical power, but a penalty to rolls involving mobility (including attacks and evasion), while smaller creatures would get the opposite.

But I think that Size is a different thing from actual aptitudes, which is what Attributes (or whatever they're called) tend to reflect in RPGs.
We're talking size in terms of 'small humans' vs 'large humans', rather than between say 'human', 'halfling', and 'ogre'.
 
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We're talking size in terms of 'small humans' vs 'large humans', rather than between say 'human', 'halfling', and 'ogre'.

Tracking size of human vs human is too much granularity dealing with things I'm not sure have that huge of an impact realistically speaking. But even then, I think it would be more efficient to track it as its own thing that modifies the core, rather than an "Attribute" (or Characteristic) BRP-style. Cuz Size isn't really an aptitude you can improve over time the way you can Strength or anything else, and conceptually speaking it's this secondary factor that affects you're abilities in other areas rather than being an ability per se. So it shouldn't operate under the same score structure as attributes/innate aptitudes.
 
Nowadays, you're lucky if you can get a gaming session together once every few months, and you might only have a few hours for that one session. That means you want everyone to get the most of it, otherwise they won't put the effort in to come back for the next session. It was very different when you were playing in high school every day, and having your character taken out for a bit was just an excuse to take a break and read a book while everyone else keeps playing.
I don't find that at all. Now that gaming by video chat is completely normal, as long as you have three hours free in an evening, time I might have spent watching TV or on the Internet, I can spend it gaming. I have three groups at the moment

That's not to say that you shouldn't be cautious about incapacitating a player for an extended time, but it's more an issue in combat-centeres games where you have a team taking on combat threats calibrated for their expected power level. It's less of a problem in a game where you want to avoid combat, like CoC. Having one player in the group slowly withering from a curse is a great way to motivate players.
 
I'm pretty confident that most marathon runners are stronger and vastly healthier than the average person. They might be quicker than a body builder, but will still almost invariably be noticeably stronger than your typical couch potato, and infinitely healthier as well. So I don't get where the huge disconnect is that a marathon runner, or pretty much ANY physically inclined character, would be stronger and healthier than sedentary characters on the basis of having a single stat that gives them all of that in one go.

Should a body builder be stronger than a marathon runner, and the runner quicker? Sure, but that's what skills and advantages (Feats, Edges, whatever) are for. But pretty much every physically inclined character would literally be stronger and healthier than one that isn't physically inclined. That's literally the way it is in real life.

Attributes in RPGs are general abilities. They shouldn't be set around edge cases, but broad strokes of what a character's general aptitudes are like. For everything else there's skills and advantages.

It's also worth noting that a bodybuilder is a bit of a red herring, the ones we conceive of now can only exist with drugs and specialised training for hypertrophy. Go back a hundred years and you won't see anyone as jacked as even the pre-Dorian Yates era (which marks when bodybuilders got disgustingly huge) bodybuilders like Frank Zane and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Someone strong would be a farmer, he might be big, but he's not going to gas after an early burst like Bob Sapp. So thinking realistically about the type of person you would have in medieval times, the strong person would also probably have pretty good endurance.

You can obtain this sort of effect without messing with the numbers - for example, if you just have damage take effect at the end of a combat round, rather than after the individual strike, suicide charges then work.

The 21 foot rule is that an attacker with a knife can get to you and stab you to death (or at least incapacitation) before you can even draw your gun from your holster. It's not a suicide charge, it's a pre-emptive strike. It would need to be represented by having drawing your weapon be something like a full round action.

I don't find that at all. Now that gaming by video chat is completely normal, as long as you have three hours free in an evening, time I might have spent watching TV or on the Internet, I can spend it gaming. I have three groups at the moment

That's not to say that you shouldn't be cautious about incapacitating a player for an extended time, but it's more an issue in combat-centeres games where you have a team taking on combat threats calibrated for their expected power level. It's less of a problem in a game where you want to avoid combat, like CoC. Having one player in the group slowly withering from a curse is a great way to motivate players.

It also needs to be the same evening for everyone. I've never gone more than 2 months with a consistent work schedule in the past 21 years. I might have a few hours free in the evening one day, but the next week it will be a different day. And the chance that it lines up with everyone else who is playing in that game is next to zero. Especially for more than 2 weeks.
 
Tracking size of human vs human is too much granularity dealing with things I'm not sure have that huge of an impact realistically speaking. But even then, I think it would be more efficient to track it as its own thing that modifies the core, rather than an "Attribute" (or Characteristic) BRP-style. Cuz Size isn't really an aptitude you can improve over time the way you can Strength or anything else, and conceptually speaking it's this secondary factor that affects you're abilities in other areas rather than being an ability per se. So it shouldn't operate under the same score structure as attributes/innate aptitudes.
It's fairly strongly linked to strength in fit, trained people. It's also fairly strongly linked to strength in unfit, untrained people if comparing them to others of the same level of fitness and training.

Also, if you want a vaguely realistic melee system, it should take size and weight into account, especially if there's any close-in fighting and grappling. There's a reason boxing and other martial arts very commonly have weight categories, and there's a reason they are fairly narrow bands of weight.

Not all games have attributes that change after chargen (in fact it being the norm is a relatively recent thing), and if they are fairly static having size be one is fine (as in the BRP games) if it merits that degree of emphasis in your system. The fact that it's not easy to change (other than adding or losing body fat and to a certain degree muscle) suggests it's very much an innate characteristic of a character.
 
It also needs to be the same evening for everyone. I've never gone more than 2 months with a consistent work schedule in the past 21 years. I might have a few hours free in the evening one day, but the next week it will be a different day. And the chance that it lines up with everyone else who is playing in that game is next to zero. Especially for more than 2 weeks.
I think a lot depends on the type of work you do and the community you surround yourself with. I know people that are in your situation, but it sounds completely foreign to me. Other than a few aberrations, my schedule is exactly the same, and the same is within our group.

It's just like a lot of other things- one size doesn't fit all, and you have to work with where you are in regards to that, and find those that are in the same space.
 
It also needs to be the same evening for everyone. I've never gone more than 2 months with a consistent work schedule in the past 21 years. I might have a few hours free in the evening one day, but the next week it will be a different day. And the chance that it lines up with everyone else who is playing in that game is next to zero. Especially for more than 2 weeks.
I worked as a waiter for years in a place where restaurant work was very common. I can completely relate to this problem.

In the last group I was in a campaign with, we had 2 core members who were 9-5ers ( The GM and the host) and the other 4 of us were all mostly evening shifters in bars, restaurants, and tourism in various positions.

It took a lot of effort and compromise to get a time (and session length) that worked for all of us, and even then, our "weekly" game met something like every third week on average.

It's part of the reason that I like games that are short and intense and can be played in relatively short chunks of 1-3 sessions (I don't even think in terms as fancy as "arcs").
 
It's fairly strongly linked to strength in fit, trained people. It's also fairly strongly linked to strength in unfit, untrained people if comparing them to others of the same level of fitness and training.

Also, if you want a vaguely realistic melee system, it should take size and weight into account, especially if there's any close-in fighting and grappling. There's a reason boxing and other martial arts very commonly have weight categories, and there's a reason they are fairly narrow bands of weight.

Size on a human scale doesn't really have much of an impact beyond Boxing style Light vs Heavy Weight categories. And that stuff can pretty much be handled by advantages without necessitating an entire stat to measure that. Even if you tie that to something like a Size/Scale level, it shouldn't take up more than one level above or below adult human average, or "Medium" size.

Not all games have attributes that change after chargen (in fact it being the norm is a relatively recent thing), and if they are fairly static having size be one is fine (as in the BRP games) if it merits that degree of emphasis in your system. The fact that it's not easy to change (other than adding or losing body fat and to a certain degree muscle) suggests it's very much an innate characteristic of a character.

But all attributes (at least stuff like D&D's six or equivalent) can change in real life. So either you're trying to emulate real life (as suggested in your prior paragraph) or you're trying to emulate old school RPG systems with fixed attributes, but you can't have both. This is also part of the problem with framing "attributes" (or whatever) as "innate".

People have this inclination of viewing innate abilities as intrinsically unchanging, but certain abilities can change through conditioning, even if they're technically innate traits like Strength or Health. And pretty much all body building, as conceived of in modern times, is a reflection of that. NONE of those people have "inborn"/factory setting Strength. They all trained to improve on it.
 
Modeling things in the abstract, IMO, tends toward what I would call simulation. In my experience that's almost always a terrible idea. Very few people actually want complete simulation in their RPGs even when they say they do.
Just like a lot of people say they want "complete realism", but have obviously never stepped a foot into the real world.
 
One of those dice is a 1 - due to infection amputation is going to be necessary.
And save vs pure luck or else tack a -1 strength on that arm the character broke, plus a 1/20 chance that stressing it causes you to drop stuff/release your grip.
 
It goes the other way, too. Like, a small portion of "you are done fighting now" injuries are actually "you will commence dying now" injuries, and there's only a small handful of ways that a knife or a sword can leave you bleeding out dying on the floor... in under a minute.

Likewise, most bullets don't end the fight, most bullets (even in pre-medical times) don't end your life, and historically most bullets that do one or the other do not do both.

Let's not even get started on heavy armor or archery.
 
And save vs pure luck or else tack a -1 strength on that arm the character broke, plus a 1/20 chance that stressing it causes you to drop stuff/release your grip.
I once hurt my right shoulder, no joke, while sat quietly on my couch painting my nails; fairly soon afterwards, I hurt my left shoulder grabbing onto a wall to prevent myself from falling down a flight of stairs. Two years later, my left shoulder is fine, but my right one is still only about 75%.

The human body is weird, yo.
 
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