Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, folks!
Lately, I put my Ptolus d20 game on hiatus after about 35 sessions and 13 levels. It's not reached the end, as I was hoping to take my players from level 1 to 20, but I found that I was foundering.
Running a campaign, or a collection of connected adventures, is a tough challenge over the long haul. I think the most important thing to remember is to keep focus. I put the game on hiatus because I found that I was wandering all over the map, throwing things at my players with little rhyme or reason. I was hoping that it would all gel, and that was not the proper way to do things. My players picked up on the lack of focus and weren't sure what they should be doing. I felt like I was desperately trying to keep my head above water. The game was not fun.
I think part of the reason I lost focus was that I had used some large published modules to fill out the campaign. When those were done, I had gotten so used to using the modules to give me direction, I wasn't sure what to do anymore.
Another problem is the length of the campaign. Dungeons and Dragons assumes that you will play the game from level 1 to 20. If you play one session a week, and it takes two or three sessions to go up one level, it can take more than a year to complete the campaign (probably closer to 2 years, as you likely won't play EVERY week.) Telling a connected story over that length of time is exhausting. Also, your players won't be able to remember everything over that length of time.
The best solution for this that I've come up with is to have story-arcs in a campaign. For a few levels, the players will deal with one story, usually involving one or two villains. They complete a few adventures revolving around this story-arc, and they get to feel a sense of completion, of closure.
I can only guess where this is going to go next, but I hope to take a few weeks off and think about where I want the campaign to go, and how I want to play it.
One last thing. While I was in Fayetteville, NC, I visited an old gaming store and picked up and old book called "Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering" by Robin D. Laws. It's a good read and has some really good advice.
Now Reading: Blood Engines by T.A. Pratt
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
Reward Mechanics
Lately, I've been considering how games provide feedback to their players.
Look at any game, and you'll see that it is set up with certain expectations. Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, expects that you will explore maps, kill the monsters, and take their treasure. That's the type of game that D&D players want, and that's the type of game the designers provide. You get experience points for killing the monsters, and the game design expects that you will have a level X magic item improving your character by the time you are level Y.
What I've been wondering is which came first, the design or the expectations? Did the D&D designers see that people wanted to explore dungeons and design the experience system to reward that play, or did the rewards come first and play changed to generate the most reward?
We are, by and large, creatures of self-interest. We will usually favor actions that improve our circumstances. So, in Dungeons and Dragons, killing monsters and taking their loot is the fastest way to advance your character, so you do it.
For another example, look at Burning Wheel. It doesn't use experience points. Instead, there are two major forms of advancement: improving skills and earning artha. You improve skills by using them, and you need to use them at varying levels of difficulty to advance. Artha is used to improve your die rolls, and you earn that by roleplaying. Your character has beliefs, instincts, and traits, and you earn artha by incorporating those beliefs, instincts, and traits into the game. You set up your own reward system, by saying "This is what I want my character to do, and I want to be rewarded for it." If you had a belief that it is better to make peace with the orcs than to fight them, you'd earn the exact same rewards as a character that has the belief that all orcs must die bloody deaths.
I've been running a Burning Wheel game for my players for the last month or so. Before that, they were only D&D players. It's been a rough learning curve, but I'm beginning to see changes in how they play. They're no longer interested only in defeating their enemies. Instead there are moral dilemmas ("Do I heal this injured man, even though he is a heathen unbeliever?"), it also helps that Burning Wheel has a rather gritty combat system, where a wound can last for a long time, which makes combat something to avoid.
Reward mechanics can also influence the genre of the game. In TORG, for example, they use a mechanic called perseverence to create the feel of a horror story in the game. Until you generate enough perseverence points, the monsters have several advantages over you. You gain the points by researching the monster's weakenesses and witnessing the atrocities it commits. This strengthens your resolve to defeat it, until you gain enough information and resolve to enable you to overpower it. The system even encourages splitting the party up, as they can gain more information that way. Just like you see in horror movies.
It's important when choosing a game to consider what sort of behavior the game expects. If this doesn't fit YOUR expectations, you should choose a different game.
Now Reading: Code of the Lifemaker, by James P. Hogan.
Look at any game, and you'll see that it is set up with certain expectations. Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, expects that you will explore maps, kill the monsters, and take their treasure. That's the type of game that D&D players want, and that's the type of game the designers provide. You get experience points for killing the monsters, and the game design expects that you will have a level X magic item improving your character by the time you are level Y.
What I've been wondering is which came first, the design or the expectations? Did the D&D designers see that people wanted to explore dungeons and design the experience system to reward that play, or did the rewards come first and play changed to generate the most reward?
We are, by and large, creatures of self-interest. We will usually favor actions that improve our circumstances. So, in Dungeons and Dragons, killing monsters and taking their loot is the fastest way to advance your character, so you do it.
For another example, look at Burning Wheel. It doesn't use experience points. Instead, there are two major forms of advancement: improving skills and earning artha. You improve skills by using them, and you need to use them at varying levels of difficulty to advance. Artha is used to improve your die rolls, and you earn that by roleplaying. Your character has beliefs, instincts, and traits, and you earn artha by incorporating those beliefs, instincts, and traits into the game. You set up your own reward system, by saying "This is what I want my character to do, and I want to be rewarded for it." If you had a belief that it is better to make peace with the orcs than to fight them, you'd earn the exact same rewards as a character that has the belief that all orcs must die bloody deaths.
I've been running a Burning Wheel game for my players for the last month or so. Before that, they were only D&D players. It's been a rough learning curve, but I'm beginning to see changes in how they play. They're no longer interested only in defeating their enemies. Instead there are moral dilemmas ("Do I heal this injured man, even though he is a heathen unbeliever?"), it also helps that Burning Wheel has a rather gritty combat system, where a wound can last for a long time, which makes combat something to avoid.
Reward mechanics can also influence the genre of the game. In TORG, for example, they use a mechanic called perseverence to create the feel of a horror story in the game. Until you generate enough perseverence points, the monsters have several advantages over you. You gain the points by researching the monster's weakenesses and witnessing the atrocities it commits. This strengthens your resolve to defeat it, until you gain enough information and resolve to enable you to overpower it. The system even encourages splitting the party up, as they can gain more information that way. Just like you see in horror movies.
It's important when choosing a game to consider what sort of behavior the game expects. If this doesn't fit YOUR expectations, you should choose a different game.
Now Reading: Code of the Lifemaker, by James P. Hogan.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Ending a Character's Story
First off, I'd like to apologize for my long absence. I don't really have an excuse. Things got busy and I kept finding reasons to put this off. Well, here's an early New Year's resolution: I will write here more often.
OK, on to my topic of today. I recently had a character I was playing in a D&D campaign die, and it was by my choice. His story had reached its end, and I thought this was the proper way to send him off.
A little background (skip this if you hate gaming stories): My character, Borodim, was a mad druid of the sea in a pirate-themed campaign. He was once a fisherman who was caught by mind flayers and aboleths and experimented on. He later escaped and joined a party of adventurers, driven to cover the entire world in 3 inches of water. (Like I said, mad.) Recently, the party returned to the undersea city of the mind flayers and aboleths, where Borodim had to confront his past. He and the party killed the mad wizard who experimented on him, and led a mass escape for many of the abominations slaves. In the course of the battle, Borodim was wounded and, a moment of lucidity, told the party to flee while he held off their enemies. ("Fly, you fools!") He was captured and fed to the Mind Flayer's Elder Brain, where his madness drove the brain into a seizure, crippling the Mind Flayers and Aboleths plans... for a time.
I had several reasons for killing off Borodim. First, he had returned to the beginning of his story, and had a chance to confront and defeat the demons that drove him. After that, I felt that there wasn't much reason to play him any longer. Second, his mad antics, while amusing, were starting to get a little stale to me (and, I think, to the other players.) Third, and this is the game mechanics reason, he was starting to prove less effective in combat and I was getting tired of playing a spellcaster (especially one who couldn't use his spells while shapeshifted.)
So, the battle in the undersea city seemed like the perfect moment for him to go. His death would show that the abominations were a grave danger that the party would have to return to fight. His sacrifice to the Elder Brain would incapacitate them for a time and allow the other players to escape.
So, with my GM's permission, I narrated a little story of Borodim's end, telling of how he was captured, taken to the Brain, and how it reacted. There were no die rolls, and everyone agreed that it was a good end.
The decision to kill off a character is often a troublesome one for a party of characters. First, the group usually depends on each character to fulfill a certain role (damage dealer, healer, battlefield controller, etc.). Removing one character can throw that balance out. Second, some of the players might object to the death of ANY player character, or resent the fact that you remove a character and then get a new one of the same power level. Lastly, the changing of a character can mean that your GM has to change around their plans, which might be a chore if he or she had a large role planned for you.
The only real solution to this problem is to talk it out amongst the group. Explain your reasons for ending the character's story and try to make a replacement character that fits smoothly into the group. Hopefully you can reach an accomodation where you are not stuck playing a character that has "jumped the shark" and the other players still get to enjoy the game.
Until next time...
Now Reading: The Code of the Lifemaker by James P. Hogan
Now Watching: Emma, a Victorian Romance
OK, on to my topic of today. I recently had a character I was playing in a D&D campaign die, and it was by my choice. His story had reached its end, and I thought this was the proper way to send him off.
A little background (skip this if you hate gaming stories): My character, Borodim, was a mad druid of the sea in a pirate-themed campaign. He was once a fisherman who was caught by mind flayers and aboleths and experimented on. He later escaped and joined a party of adventurers, driven to cover the entire world in 3 inches of water. (Like I said, mad.) Recently, the party returned to the undersea city of the mind flayers and aboleths, where Borodim had to confront his past. He and the party killed the mad wizard who experimented on him, and led a mass escape for many of the abominations slaves. In the course of the battle, Borodim was wounded and, a moment of lucidity, told the party to flee while he held off their enemies. ("Fly, you fools!") He was captured and fed to the Mind Flayer's Elder Brain, where his madness drove the brain into a seizure, crippling the Mind Flayers and Aboleths plans... for a time.
I had several reasons for killing off Borodim. First, he had returned to the beginning of his story, and had a chance to confront and defeat the demons that drove him. After that, I felt that there wasn't much reason to play him any longer. Second, his mad antics, while amusing, were starting to get a little stale to me (and, I think, to the other players.) Third, and this is the game mechanics reason, he was starting to prove less effective in combat and I was getting tired of playing a spellcaster (especially one who couldn't use his spells while shapeshifted.)
So, the battle in the undersea city seemed like the perfect moment for him to go. His death would show that the abominations were a grave danger that the party would have to return to fight. His sacrifice to the Elder Brain would incapacitate them for a time and allow the other players to escape.
So, with my GM's permission, I narrated a little story of Borodim's end, telling of how he was captured, taken to the Brain, and how it reacted. There were no die rolls, and everyone agreed that it was a good end.
The decision to kill off a character is often a troublesome one for a party of characters. First, the group usually depends on each character to fulfill a certain role (damage dealer, healer, battlefield controller, etc.). Removing one character can throw that balance out. Second, some of the players might object to the death of ANY player character, or resent the fact that you remove a character and then get a new one of the same power level. Lastly, the changing of a character can mean that your GM has to change around their plans, which might be a chore if he or she had a large role planned for you.
The only real solution to this problem is to talk it out amongst the group. Explain your reasons for ending the character's story and try to make a replacement character that fits smoothly into the group. Hopefully you can reach an accomodation where you are not stuck playing a character that has "jumped the shark" and the other players still get to enjoy the game.
Until next time...
Now Reading: The Code of the Lifemaker by James P. Hogan
Now Watching: Emma, a Victorian Romance
Friday, November 28, 2008
I'm a Winner
OK, I apologize for the lack of posts this month. NaNoWriMo took up far more of my writing bandwidth than I thought. But, it's over now, for the novel and the contest. You're looking at an official NaNoWriMo 2008 winner, duly certified by the NaNoWriMo site.It's been a labor of love, and I can't say that my story of interplanetary space travel and terrorists, The Serendipity Blues, is great writing, I finished it. It was the first serious fiction writing I've done in years.
Maybe I'll clean it up and post it someday, somwhere. Right now, I just want to get back to reviewing sci-fi books and movies and talking about roleplaying games.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Telling a Story
Sorry for the delay in writing... things have been busy.
I've had a chance to play some more games lately, including my long running Ptolus game and a playtest of How We Came To Live Here, by Brennan Taylor. I'm not going to review that game right now, because we didn't finish the game and I still don't have a handle on the rules.
However, all my gameplay has gotten me to thinking about the nature of story-telling in RPGs. If you ask anyone about roleplaying games, they'll probably tell you that it's a form of story-telling, which is true, or it's a game of miniatures combat, which is true some of the time. But what does it mean to tell a story?
Very few games will teach you how to tell stories. It's something that you're just supposed to know how to do, either from years of exposure to books, movies, and TV, or just through the instinctive way that man has told stories since we sat around those ancient campfires. There is an art and a science to telling stories, though, and not all game mechanics are equally suited to tell those stories.
Perhaps the most famous book on storytelling is Joseph Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces" where he deconstructs myth into its basic components. I've been guilty of using that book as a gaming resource. In the early days, I followed it a little too slavishly, treating each step on the Hero's Journey as a box I had to check off before moving on.
Many gaming systems don't concern themselves with the story. The mechanics are there to handle conflict, and the story gives the conflicts a framework. That and the general assumption that an antagonist (the villain of the piece) is at work and will be faces by the heroes at the end of the adventure is all that they're concerned about. They give you a means to create the villain and his minions and to determine who wins the fight. That's it.
This is fine for a certain rudimentary type of story. It tends to be very linear, however. D&D even makes a virtue of granting the illusion of choice where there really isn't one. You're in a dungeon, you can go left or right. That's a choice, right? But if the bad guy is never leaving his personal sanctum, which is to the left, all going right did was delay the final confrontation a bit, and maybe force your players to use up some resources they would have needed to face the villain.
Really, is a dungeon crawl a story? In most cases, it is merely a string of encounters, one after another. You can, and I've seen it, set up dungeons where every creature in the rulebooks is present, just hanging out in rooms waiting for the heroes to show up. That can be fun, but it's not a story.
What I would like to see is some sort of mechanic that makes where you are in the progress of the story have a concrete effect on the heroes. Maybe things are easy for them in the beginning, but everything becomes harder as they get closer to the climax. Or maybe things cycle, growing progressively harder until the heroes fail and must go back and lick their wounds.
One of the best story mechanics I've seen is probably forgotten by most people, and it has to do with the old game I'm resurrecting for my group: TORG.
In TORG, one of the other realities that invades Earth is Orrorsh, a reality of Horror. The goal of the realm of Orrorsh is to create fear, so they built game mechanics to simulate the way horror movies and stories work.
Here how TORG's "Power of Fear" works: First, the player characters are assigned a Perseverence Difficulty Number that is based on how powerful the main monster is in the adventure. Perseverance is a measure of PC confidence and resolve when dealing with the creature they are hunting. The PCs have a number of perseverence points, starting with 8. (TORG's central mechanic is to roll a d20, and then consult the result of that die roll to the bonus chart, which give them a bonus number or a penalty that they will apply, in this case, to their Perseverence Total).
In the game, the party will have to roll against their peseverence when ever they encounter a monster, see occult magic at work, and whenever something really terrible happens to the party or they encounter something horrible (and often grisly.) If the total of their Perseverence Points and the bonus from their die roll equals or exceeds the Perserverence Difficulty Number, great! If they fail, however, the monster gets a number of extra powers and can inflict severe setbacks on the party.
The party can gain Perseverence Points from a number of situations:
• They discover information about the creature they are pursuing.
• When they win a skirmish against the forces of Orrorsh.
• When they encounter people in need of help.
• When something so horrible happens that they strengthen their commitment to kill the monster.
They can lose Perseverence Points from:
• Suffer a loss at the hands of the forces of Orrorsh.
• Witness a horrible sight committed by a monster, or see a companion die.
• Witness a violent and grisly sight caused by the power of the occult.
There is some overlap there, but that's intentional. First they see something horrible and lose Perseverence. If they survive and think about the incident, they regain that lost Perseverence and then the same amount again, to show their newfound resolve.
The mechanic of Perseverence even encourages the party to split up, as each smaller group can gain Perseverence, and the points are all added together when they rejoin.
So, you can see how some game mechanics can create a story. I'd like to see more stuff like that.
I've had a chance to play some more games lately, including my long running Ptolus game and a playtest of How We Came To Live Here, by Brennan Taylor. I'm not going to review that game right now, because we didn't finish the game and I still don't have a handle on the rules.
However, all my gameplay has gotten me to thinking about the nature of story-telling in RPGs. If you ask anyone about roleplaying games, they'll probably tell you that it's a form of story-telling, which is true, or it's a game of miniatures combat, which is true some of the time. But what does it mean to tell a story?
Very few games will teach you how to tell stories. It's something that you're just supposed to know how to do, either from years of exposure to books, movies, and TV, or just through the instinctive way that man has told stories since we sat around those ancient campfires. There is an art and a science to telling stories, though, and not all game mechanics are equally suited to tell those stories.
Perhaps the most famous book on storytelling is Joseph Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces" where he deconstructs myth into its basic components. I've been guilty of using that book as a gaming resource. In the early days, I followed it a little too slavishly, treating each step on the Hero's Journey as a box I had to check off before moving on.
Many gaming systems don't concern themselves with the story. The mechanics are there to handle conflict, and the story gives the conflicts a framework. That and the general assumption that an antagonist (the villain of the piece) is at work and will be faces by the heroes at the end of the adventure is all that they're concerned about. They give you a means to create the villain and his minions and to determine who wins the fight. That's it.
This is fine for a certain rudimentary type of story. It tends to be very linear, however. D&D even makes a virtue of granting the illusion of choice where there really isn't one. You're in a dungeon, you can go left or right. That's a choice, right? But if the bad guy is never leaving his personal sanctum, which is to the left, all going right did was delay the final confrontation a bit, and maybe force your players to use up some resources they would have needed to face the villain.
Really, is a dungeon crawl a story? In most cases, it is merely a string of encounters, one after another. You can, and I've seen it, set up dungeons where every creature in the rulebooks is present, just hanging out in rooms waiting for the heroes to show up. That can be fun, but it's not a story.
What I would like to see is some sort of mechanic that makes where you are in the progress of the story have a concrete effect on the heroes. Maybe things are easy for them in the beginning, but everything becomes harder as they get closer to the climax. Or maybe things cycle, growing progressively harder until the heroes fail and must go back and lick their wounds.
One of the best story mechanics I've seen is probably forgotten by most people, and it has to do with the old game I'm resurrecting for my group: TORG.
In TORG, one of the other realities that invades Earth is Orrorsh, a reality of Horror. The goal of the realm of Orrorsh is to create fear, so they built game mechanics to simulate the way horror movies and stories work.
Here how TORG's "Power of Fear" works: First, the player characters are assigned a Perseverence Difficulty Number that is based on how powerful the main monster is in the adventure. Perseverance is a measure of PC confidence and resolve when dealing with the creature they are hunting. The PCs have a number of perseverence points, starting with 8. (TORG's central mechanic is to roll a d20, and then consult the result of that die roll to the bonus chart, which give them a bonus number or a penalty that they will apply, in this case, to their Perseverence Total).
In the game, the party will have to roll against their peseverence when ever they encounter a monster, see occult magic at work, and whenever something really terrible happens to the party or they encounter something horrible (and often grisly.) If the total of their Perseverence Points and the bonus from their die roll equals or exceeds the Perserverence Difficulty Number, great! If they fail, however, the monster gets a number of extra powers and can inflict severe setbacks on the party.
The party can gain Perseverence Points from a number of situations:
• They discover information about the creature they are pursuing.
• When they win a skirmish against the forces of Orrorsh.
• When they encounter people in need of help.
• When something so horrible happens that they strengthen their commitment to kill the monster.
They can lose Perseverence Points from:
• Suffer a loss at the hands of the forces of Orrorsh.
• Witness a horrible sight committed by a monster, or see a companion die.
• Witness a violent and grisly sight caused by the power of the occult.
There is some overlap there, but that's intentional. First they see something horrible and lose Perseverence. If they survive and think about the incident, they regain that lost Perseverence and then the same amount again, to show their newfound resolve.
The mechanic of Perseverence even encourages the party to split up, as each smaller group can gain Perseverence, and the points are all added together when they rejoin.
So, you can see how some game mechanics can create a story. I'd like to see more stuff like that.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
NaNoWriMo
As if I don't have enough to do, I seem to be writing a novel.
I decided to join the NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth, or NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write 50,000 words by November 30. I most post more about it here, but who knows. Still, I've tried to put a counter here, so you can see how I do. Wish me luck, or heap scorn on me if I fall behind.
I decided to join the NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth, or NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write 50,000 words by November 30. I most post more about it here, but who knows. Still, I've tried to put a counter here, so you can see how I do. Wish me luck, or heap scorn on me if I fall behind.
Friday, October 31, 2008
How Games Mold Play
Happy Halloween! Sorry I haven't posted lately, but things have been busy at work and at home.
My brain has been about to explode lately because it's trying to hold in three radically different game rule sets. These games are Dungeons and Dragons (3.5, though 4E has infected it slightly), Burning Wheel, and TORG. One is the granddaddy of gaming, one is arguably the most popular indie-game out there, and the last is a game from the '90s that I've been a fan of for a long time.
As I study these rules (and I'll even admit that TORG might not be played, but hope springs eternal), I'm noticing how the assumptions these games make can affect play at the table. I've already touched on how differently D&D and Burning Wheel treat failure in another post, but that's not the only way that they shape play.
D&D is, always, a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff. Heck, back in first edition you got one experience point for every gold piece of treasure. Sure, 4E has introduced a "skill challenge" system, but that's just defeating enemies (though the enemies are no longer limited to monsters and NPCs) with different weapons (skills instead of spells or swords). You get experience for defeating or circumventing the monsters. The GM might give you a story award for accomplishing some goal, but let's face it; you had to beat up some monsters to do that, so he's really just giving you a bonus. The only type of reward that is NOT tied to beating up monsters is if your GM gives you experience for role-playing your character, but that's usually so small and hard to get that it's not worthwhile.
Burning Wheel, on the other hand, does not have an experience system. You improve your character by trying to do things (and often failing at them). You can also practice your skills or find an instructor, but the quickest way to learn something is to just go out and try to do it. The other reward in Burning Wheel is called artha, which is used to modify die rolls. You earn this by incorporating your character's beliefs into the story of the game. These beliefs can be almost anything, as long as they provide a hook to drive the story. They don't have to involve fighting, and given that Burning Wheel's system for recovering from wounds can lay your character up for months, that's a good thing.
TORG uses a resource management style of advancement. You earn possibility points through play. These points can be used to modify rolls, pay for super powers, or spent to advance skills. It takes more points to advance a high-level skill than a low-level one. So, you're always trying to figure out if you should use them on your rolls or save them to advance your character. Points are award based on accomplishing adventures, which are broken into "acts." You get a few for completing an act, and more when the entire adventure is completed.
In short, D&D encourages players to kill things, BW encourages players to accomplish their personal goals, and TORG encourages players to accomplish goals set by the GM.
However, there's more to it than that. Let's now take a look at combat and its results.
In D&D, divine magic can easily heal any wound, and even death cannot really stop a determined adventurer's career. Even the dreaded Total Party Kill might not stop things, if the GM is feeling generous. There seldom is any real consequence from combat, as even the most debilitating condition can be cured, somehow.
In BW, combat can be very deadly, if you roll badly and your opponent rolls well. Spending artha can keep your character alive once he has received a mortal wound, but he'll be a long time recovering from it. If things go really badly, he might even gain traits such as "Missing Limb" or "One Eye" and, like in the real world, he'll have to deal with that (or retire the character). The author himself admits that the reason for this is to make sure that no one enters combat without feeling the tension. Even if you don't die, wounds can exact large penalties on your character.
TORG takes a middle ground, as things can go badly, and penalties mount, but they can be healed completely and with no after-effects (or at least your can get cyberware replacements). Possibility points can also reduce wounds (so more resource management.)
So, in D&D, you can run blithely into battle, sure that you can probably recover from whatever happens. In BW, combat is fraught with peril, and you might be paying for your rashness for a long time (as you would in Real Life). In TORG, things can go badly quickly, but there probably will be no long-term consequences.
I think I'll end this here, but I hope this helps you see how your game of choice will affect your play at the table. Next time, maybe I'll review TORG, for those who have never heard of it.
My brain has been about to explode lately because it's trying to hold in three radically different game rule sets. These games are Dungeons and Dragons (3.5, though 4E has infected it slightly), Burning Wheel, and TORG. One is the granddaddy of gaming, one is arguably the most popular indie-game out there, and the last is a game from the '90s that I've been a fan of for a long time.
As I study these rules (and I'll even admit that TORG might not be played, but hope springs eternal), I'm noticing how the assumptions these games make can affect play at the table. I've already touched on how differently D&D and Burning Wheel treat failure in another post, but that's not the only way that they shape play.
D&D is, always, a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff. Heck, back in first edition you got one experience point for every gold piece of treasure. Sure, 4E has introduced a "skill challenge" system, but that's just defeating enemies (though the enemies are no longer limited to monsters and NPCs) with different weapons (skills instead of spells or swords). You get experience for defeating or circumventing the monsters. The GM might give you a story award for accomplishing some goal, but let's face it; you had to beat up some monsters to do that, so he's really just giving you a bonus. The only type of reward that is NOT tied to beating up monsters is if your GM gives you experience for role-playing your character, but that's usually so small and hard to get that it's not worthwhile.
Burning Wheel, on the other hand, does not have an experience system. You improve your character by trying to do things (and often failing at them). You can also practice your skills or find an instructor, but the quickest way to learn something is to just go out and try to do it. The other reward in Burning Wheel is called artha, which is used to modify die rolls. You earn this by incorporating your character's beliefs into the story of the game. These beliefs can be almost anything, as long as they provide a hook to drive the story. They don't have to involve fighting, and given that Burning Wheel's system for recovering from wounds can lay your character up for months, that's a good thing.
TORG uses a resource management style of advancement. You earn possibility points through play. These points can be used to modify rolls, pay for super powers, or spent to advance skills. It takes more points to advance a high-level skill than a low-level one. So, you're always trying to figure out if you should use them on your rolls or save them to advance your character. Points are award based on accomplishing adventures, which are broken into "acts." You get a few for completing an act, and more when the entire adventure is completed.
In short, D&D encourages players to kill things, BW encourages players to accomplish their personal goals, and TORG encourages players to accomplish goals set by the GM.
However, there's more to it than that. Let's now take a look at combat and its results.
In D&D, divine magic can easily heal any wound, and even death cannot really stop a determined adventurer's career. Even the dreaded Total Party Kill might not stop things, if the GM is feeling generous. There seldom is any real consequence from combat, as even the most debilitating condition can be cured, somehow.
In BW, combat can be very deadly, if you roll badly and your opponent rolls well. Spending artha can keep your character alive once he has received a mortal wound, but he'll be a long time recovering from it. If things go really badly, he might even gain traits such as "Missing Limb" or "One Eye" and, like in the real world, he'll have to deal with that (or retire the character). The author himself admits that the reason for this is to make sure that no one enters combat without feeling the tension. Even if you don't die, wounds can exact large penalties on your character.
TORG takes a middle ground, as things can go badly, and penalties mount, but they can be healed completely and with no after-effects (or at least your can get cyberware replacements). Possibility points can also reduce wounds (so more resource management.)
So, in D&D, you can run blithely into battle, sure that you can probably recover from whatever happens. In BW, combat is fraught with peril, and you might be paying for your rashness for a long time (as you would in Real Life). In TORG, things can go badly quickly, but there probably will be no long-term consequences.
I think I'll end this here, but I hope this helps you see how your game of choice will affect your play at the table. Next time, maybe I'll review TORG, for those who have never heard of it.
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