There is no problem with “Munchkinism.” The problem is that in old RPG’s the rules imply poorly designed (see lack of challenge upon full understanding of the system) tactical battle simulation games with some elements of strategy, while the advertising implies a social interaction and story-telling game without giving the necessary rules to support it. Thus different people think they’re playing different games together and social interaction devolves into what people imagine they would do given a hypothetical situation without consequences (at least until the consequences are made explicit, violating their expectations as you note in your example).
devolves into what people imagine they would do given a hypothetical situation without consequences
Put all my points into charisma and charm skills and go find me some wenches? Oh, you mean saving the world. Got it.
Actually that is another problem with RPG designs. There are social skills and stats provided but they are damn near pointless in practice. Even when you want to role play a lovable rogue who can charm, manipulate and deceive his way out of problems you may as well put your skills into battle axes. Because the only person that you need to use social skills on is the DM and that is an out of character action. Unless you somehow manage to find a DM who considers the interaction to be about the character trying to persuade an NPC and not the player trying to persuade him and just lets the player roll some dice already.
“What is the skill check for “seduce the maidservant and get her to show you the secret entrance to the castle”?” … “No, I don’t need to tell you what lines I’m going to use… since I would just have to lie so as to not offend the sensibilities of the company. Dice. I want to use dice and charm wenches!” … “What? Oh, this is just too much hassle. Let’s do what we know works. Guys, you take the guard on the left and I’ll take the guard on the right. Rescue the princess and kill everything that tries to stop us.”
Of course, what actions players enjoy actually role-playing out, and what actions they prefer to just encapsulate into a die-roll, varies a lot among potential players.
Most RPG systems I’ve seen seem optimized for players who enjoy making tactical decisions (do I wield a sword or cast a spell? do I go through this door or that one, and do I check it for traps before I open it?), and so devote an enormous amount of attention to the specifics of different weapon types but don’t care very much about the specifics of different wench-charming lines.
I could imagine it being different: e.g., the session starts with three or four hours of hanging out at the local tavern swapping stories, and otherwise navigating the tribal monkey politics of a simulated adventuring party, finding out which vendors have the best equipment and give the best deals, bartering with salespeople, etc., etc., etc. … and then everyone rolls against their “explore dungeon” to determine how successful they were, how much loot they got, who died, how many monsters they killed, etc. (“No, I don’t need to tell you which door I’m going to enter through. Dice. I want to use dice and explore dungeons!”)
But I expect they would appeal to a vastly different audience.
The analogy doesn’t fit. The salient difference here isn’t one of emphasis on a different aspects of adventuring. It’s that the bulk of the significant decisions for everything except the tactics boil down to guessing the DM’s password. And that just isn’t that fun. Nor is it compulsory (school) or economically worthwhile (paid employment), the other times that password guessing is the whole point of the game.
The reason the disgruntled charmer had to fall back on tactical combat is because that is the one aspect of the situation over which the players actually have influence. Because no matter how much attention you pay to that aspect it still amounts to trying to guess how some roleplaying nerd thinks you should pick up wenches! Something just isn’t right there.
On the hand designing an entire gaming system around a solid theory of social dynamics has real potential as a learning tool if run by those with solid competence themselves. “Lookt! It’s a 9 HB. They have a 30 second timeout. Quick, use a +3 neghit then follow up with that new 2d8 identity conveying routine you’ve been preparing all week! Let me run interference on the AMOG to hold agro while you establish rapport” (No, on second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. ’Tis a silly place.)
I agree completely with you that “how some roleplaying nerd thinks you should pick up wenches” bears no meaningful relationship to real social dynamics, so it’s all password-guessing.
From my perspective, the same thing was true of slicing swords through armor, raising allied morale, casting spells, praying for divine intervention, avoiding diseases in the swamp, etc. None of those simulated activities bore any meaningful relationship to the real thing they ostensibly simulated.
But I’ll grant that in the latter cases, there were usually formal rules written down, so I didn’t have to guess the passwords: I could read them in a book, memorize them, and optimize for them. (At least, assuming the GM followed them scrupulously.)
But I’ll grant that in the latter cases, there were usually formal rules written down, so I didn’t have to guess the passwords: I could read them in a book, memorize them, and optimize for them. (At least, assuming the GM followed them scrupulously.)
Then, of course, there are the actual strategic roleplaying choices. Not the mere tactical ones of how to fight some orcs. The ones where you have to make a choice on where you go next. Roughly speaking you are often best off choosing what the rational course of action is and then picking the opposite. It’s a lot more fun, the battles are both more likely and more of a challenge and you get far more experience! If the DM already has a plan on how long his adventure will take to complete and a rough idea of what you’ll be fighting at the end then the more danger you encounter in the mean time the better. So go sleep in that haunted wood then walk into what is obviously a trap.
Does anyone remember where Eliezer joked about leaving his spare coins around under random objects? He also made a point that in roleplaying games you are usually best served by going around and doing everything else first instead of doing the thing that is the shortest path to getting what you want.
Roughly speaking you are often best off choosing what the rational course of action is and then picking the opposite.
I consider this a symptom of poor scenario design—the availability of unpredictably optimal actions is the key technical difference (there are of course social differences) between open-ended and computer-mediated games. If the setting is incompatible with the characters’ motivations, it’s impossible to maintain the fiction that they’re even really trying, and either the setting’s incentives or the characters’ motivations (or both in tandem) need revision.
Running a good open-ended game in the presence of imaginative and intelligent players is hard. You either leave lots of material unused, or rob the game of its key strength by over-constraining the set of possible actions.
Of course, it helps to be clear about what you actually want.
IME most computer RPG designers assume their players want to “beat the game”: that is, to do whatever the game makes challenging as efficiently as possible. And they design for that, clearly signaling what the assigned challenges are and providing a steadily progressing path of greater challenge and increased capacity to handle those challenges. (As you and EY point out, this often involves completely implausible strategic considerations.)
This is also true of a certain flavor of TT RPG, where the GM designs adventures as a series of challenging obstacles and puzzles which the players must overcome/solve in order to obtain various rewards. (And as you suggested earlier, one could also imagine a social RPG built on this model.)
In other (rarer) flavors of TT, and in most forum-based RPGs, it’s more like collaborating on a piece of fiction: the GM designs adventures as a narrative setting which the players must interact with in order to tell an interesting story.
It can be jarring when the two styles collide, of course.
Well, that’s portentous. Is this meant as a back-reference to the things you’ve already discussed in this thread, or as an intimation of things left unsaid?
Is this meant as a back-reference to the things you’ve already discussed in this thread, or as an intimation of things left unsaid?
The former, but I suppose both apply. Either way I thought enough had been said and wanted to exit the conversation without particularly implying agreement but without making a fuss.either. A simple assertion of position was appropriate. While strictly true saying “further conversation would just involve spinning new ways of framing stuff for the purpose of arguing for a position and generally be boring and uninformative” would represent connotations that I didn’t want to convey at the time. The conversation to that point was positive and had merely exhausted the potential. Quit before it is just an argument.
Yeah, I think roleplayers and writers share the position that sadism is one of the most important virtues.
I read some Ian Irvine a while back—the punishment he deals out to his two protagonists goes through sadistic and out the other side. But on the other hand he did let the pair hook up and have a stable, secure relationship whenever one or the other wasn’t either kidnapped or out alone on the run in the forest with no food and probably a broken leg. I didn’t quite make it through the series but I assume they lived happily (albeit in intermittent agony and constant adversity) ever after. So he’s just sadistic, not cruel. :)
From my perspective, the same thing was true of slicing swords through armor, raising allied morale, casting spells, praying for divine intervention, avoiding diseases in the swamp, etc. None of those simulated activities bore any meaningful relationship to the real thing they ostensibly simulated.
Like Melf’s Minute Meteors doing fire damage. Those things are still supercooled by the time they hit the ground. Those trolls should be fine! (Until you use Melf’s Acid Arrow).
That’s an issue that traditional-game GMs go back and forth on all the time—some say “but it’s more interesting if you role-play it out”, and some say “but you’re not making the fighter actually stab people when he wants to make an attack”. Personally, in that sort of game I like to have players in-character to an extent, but their social stats should be the thing that determines their character’s success at social tasks.
There are a ton of spectacular indie games that deal with this in other ways!
Wuthering Heights Roleplay is just incredible. Your main stats are Despair and Rage. There are general rules for matching tasks to stat rolls, and specific rules for Duels, Murder, Art, and Seduction. The general trajectory of a game is: a bunch of terrible people obsessed with their own problems (or rather, their Problems) start falling in love with each other and making dramatic revelations, until eventually they’re all hacking each other to pieces. It’s a fun evening.
The Mountain Witch is another interesting one. All “conflicts” are decided by a simple roll-off, d6 versus d6. You get more d6s (keep the highest) if you’re working with other people. Players keep track of how much they Trust each other player, and you can spend someone else’s Trust in you to help them out with bonuses in conflicts, to gain control of the narration of the outcome of their conflicts, or to give yourself bonuses when directly opposing them. (There’s a lot more to this one, but that’s the gist of the conflict mechanic.) Cool stuff.
Instead, you use poker chips to represent trust! I find that appealing somehow...
Yeah, that one just uses d6 - though there’s an interesting “duel” mechanic where you and an opponent roll secretly, then decide together whether you’ll each roll again—to emulate two ronin staring each other down before deciding the battle with a single cut. (The game has a very specific setting—you’re a group of ronin who’ve been hired to climb Mt. Fuji and kill the Witch (though he’s a dude?) that lives on top. You all have secret ulterior motives! I think it’s been adapted to similar scenarios such as bank heists.)
Uh, Wuthering Heights uses d100, and you roll under or over your Despair / Rage depending on what you want to do. For example, killing someone means rolling below Rage (easier to do the angrier you are), whereas noticing other peoples’ feelings and stuff requires a roll over Despair. Ooh, plus, if you’re into nerdy dice-related stuff, there’s a big Random Table of Problems, like “You are an alcoholic”, “You are a homosexual”, “You are Irish”, “You are in love with a member of your family”, or “You are a poet”, and everyone has to roll d100 a few times to get their Problems.
Oh! And if you just want to chuck lots of different kinds of dice around, you can’t go wrong with Dogs in the Vineyard—where you play itinerant teenage pseudo-Mormon enforcers of the faith in a west that never was. All your traits have some amount of dice of some size next to them, and when they come up in a conflict, you roll them into your pool and can use them when raising / seeing. For instance—possessions of any sort are 1d6, 1d4 if they’re sorta worthless, 1d8 if they’re excellent (criterion: in order to be excellent, a thing has to be good enough that people might remark on how excellent it is), 2 dice if they’re big, and an extra d4 if it’s a gun (so a big, excellent pistol is 2d8+1d4).
There is no problem with “Munchkinism.” The problem is that in old RPG’s the rules imply poorly designed (see lack of challenge upon full understanding of the system) tactical battle simulation games with some elements of strategy, while the advertising implies a social interaction and story-telling game without giving the necessary rules to support it. Thus different people think they’re playing different games together and social interaction devolves into what people imagine they would do given a hypothetical situation without consequences (at least until the consequences are made explicit, violating their expectations as you note in your example).
Put all my points into charisma and charm skills and go find me some wenches? Oh, you mean saving the world. Got it.
Actually that is another problem with RPG designs. There are social skills and stats provided but they are damn near pointless in practice. Even when you want to role play a lovable rogue who can charm, manipulate and deceive his way out of problems you may as well put your skills into battle axes. Because the only person that you need to use social skills on is the DM and that is an out of character action. Unless you somehow manage to find a DM who considers the interaction to be about the character trying to persuade an NPC and not the player trying to persuade him and just lets the player roll some dice already.
“What is the skill check for “seduce the maidservant and get her to show you the secret entrance to the castle”?”
… “No, I don’t need to tell you what lines I’m going to use… since I would just have to lie so as to not offend the sensibilities of the company. Dice. I want to use dice and charm wenches!”
… “What? Oh, this is just too much hassle. Let’s do what we know works. Guys, you take the guard on the left and I’ll take the guard on the right. Rescue the princess and kill everything that tries to stop us.”
Of course, what actions players enjoy actually role-playing out, and what actions they prefer to just encapsulate into a die-roll, varies a lot among potential players.
Most RPG systems I’ve seen seem optimized for players who enjoy making tactical decisions (do I wield a sword or cast a spell? do I go through this door or that one, and do I check it for traps before I open it?), and so devote an enormous amount of attention to the specifics of different weapon types but don’t care very much about the specifics of different wench-charming lines.
I could imagine it being different: e.g., the session starts with three or four hours of hanging out at the local tavern swapping stories, and otherwise navigating the tribal monkey politics of a simulated adventuring party, finding out which vendors have the best equipment and give the best deals, bartering with salespeople, etc., etc., etc. … and then everyone rolls against their “explore dungeon” to determine how successful they were, how much loot they got, who died, how many monsters they killed, etc. (“No, I don’t need to tell you which door I’m going to enter through. Dice. I want to use dice and explore dungeons!”)
But I expect they would appeal to a vastly different audience.
The analogy doesn’t fit. The salient difference here isn’t one of emphasis on a different aspects of adventuring. It’s that the bulk of the significant decisions for everything except the tactics boil down to guessing the DM’s password. And that just isn’t that fun. Nor is it compulsory (school) or economically worthwhile (paid employment), the other times that password guessing is the whole point of the game.
The reason the disgruntled charmer had to fall back on tactical combat is because that is the one aspect of the situation over which the players actually have influence. Because no matter how much attention you pay to that aspect it still amounts to trying to guess how some roleplaying nerd thinks you should pick up wenches! Something just isn’t right there.
On the hand designing an entire gaming system around a solid theory of social dynamics has real potential as a learning tool if run by those with solid competence themselves. “Lookt! It’s a 9 HB. They have a 30 second timeout. Quick, use a +3 neghit then follow up with that new 2d8 identity conveying routine you’ve been preparing all week! Let me run interference on the AMOG to hold agro while you establish rapport” (No, on second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. ’Tis a silly place.)
I agree completely with you that “how some roleplaying nerd thinks you should pick up wenches” bears no meaningful relationship to real social dynamics, so it’s all password-guessing.
From my perspective, the same thing was true of slicing swords through armor, raising allied morale, casting spells, praying for divine intervention, avoiding diseases in the swamp, etc. None of those simulated activities bore any meaningful relationship to the real thing they ostensibly simulated.
But I’ll grant that in the latter cases, there were usually formal rules written down, so I didn’t have to guess the passwords: I could read them in a book, memorize them, and optimize for them. (At least, assuming the GM followed them scrupulously.)
Then, of course, there are the actual strategic roleplaying choices. Not the mere tactical ones of how to fight some orcs. The ones where you have to make a choice on where you go next. Roughly speaking you are often best off choosing what the rational course of action is and then picking the opposite. It’s a lot more fun, the battles are both more likely and more of a challenge and you get far more experience! If the DM already has a plan on how long his adventure will take to complete and a rough idea of what you’ll be fighting at the end then the more danger you encounter in the mean time the better. So go sleep in that haunted wood then walk into what is obviously a trap.
Does anyone remember where Eliezer joked about leaving his spare coins around under random objects? He also made a point that in roleplaying games you are usually best served by going around and doing everything else first instead of doing the thing that is the shortest path to getting what you want.
I consider this a symptom of poor scenario design—the availability of unpredictably optimal actions is the key technical difference (there are of course social differences) between open-ended and computer-mediated games. If the setting is incompatible with the characters’ motivations, it’s impossible to maintain the fiction that they’re even really trying, and either the setting’s incentives or the characters’ motivations (or both in tandem) need revision.
Running a good open-ended game in the presence of imaginative and intelligent players is hard. You either leave lots of material unused, or rob the game of its key strength by over-constraining the set of possible actions.
Sure.
Of course, it helps to be clear about what you actually want.
IME most computer RPG designers assume their players want to “beat the game”: that is, to do whatever the game makes challenging as efficiently as possible. And they design for that, clearly signaling what the assigned challenges are and providing a steadily progressing path of greater challenge and increased capacity to handle those challenges. (As you and EY point out, this often involves completely implausible strategic considerations.)
This is also true of a certain flavor of TT RPG, where the GM designs adventures as a series of challenging obstacles and puzzles which the players must overcome/solve in order to obtain various rewards. (And as you suggested earlier, one could also imagine a social RPG built on this model.)
In other (rarer) flavors of TT, and in most forum-based RPGs, it’s more like collaborating on a piece of fiction: the GM designs adventures as a narrative setting which the players must interact with in order to tell an interesting story.
It can be jarring when the two styles collide, of course.
There is far more than a difference of styles at work.
Well, that’s portentous. Is this meant as a back-reference to the things you’ve already discussed in this thread, or as an intimation of things left unsaid?
The former, but I suppose both apply. Either way I thought enough had been said and wanted to exit the conversation without particularly implying agreement but without making a fuss.either. A simple assertion of position was appropriate. While strictly true saying “further conversation would just involve spinning new ways of framing stuff for the purpose of arguing for a position and generally be boring and uninformative” would represent connotations that I didn’t want to convey at the time. The conversation to that point was positive and had merely exhausted the potential. Quit before it is just an argument.
Since you asked.
Yeah, I think roleplayers and writers share the position that sadism is one of the most important virtues.
I read some Ian Irvine a while back—the punishment he deals out to his two protagonists goes through sadistic and out the other side. But on the other hand he did let the pair hook up and have a stable, secure relationship whenever one or the other wasn’t either kidnapped or out alone on the run in the forest with no food and probably a broken leg. I didn’t quite make it through the series but I assume they lived happily (albeit in intermittent agony and constant adversity) ever after. So he’s just sadistic, not cruel. :)
Like Melf’s Minute Meteors doing fire damage. Those things are still supercooled by the time they hit the ground. Those trolls should be fine! (Until you use Melf’s Acid Arrow).
That’s an issue that traditional-game GMs go back and forth on all the time—some say “but it’s more interesting if you role-play it out”, and some say “but you’re not making the fighter actually stab people when he wants to make an attack”. Personally, in that sort of game I like to have players in-character to an extent, but their social stats should be the thing that determines their character’s success at social tasks.
There are a ton of spectacular indie games that deal with this in other ways!
Wuthering Heights Roleplay is just incredible. Your main stats are Despair and Rage. There are general rules for matching tasks to stat rolls, and specific rules for Duels, Murder, Art, and Seduction. The general trajectory of a game is: a bunch of terrible people obsessed with their own problems (or rather, their Problems) start falling in love with each other and making dramatic revelations, until eventually they’re all hacking each other to pieces. It’s a fun evening.
The Mountain Witch is another interesting one. All “conflicts” are decided by a simple roll-off, d6 versus d6. You get more d6s (keep the highest) if you’re working with other people. Players keep track of how much they Trust each other player, and you can spend someone else’s Trust in you to help them out with bonuses in conflicts, to gain control of the narration of the outcome of their conflicts, or to give yourself bonuses when directly opposing them. (There’s a lot more to this one, but that’s the gist of the conflict mechanic.) Cool stuff.
What, no d20s? Or even a d8? Where’s the geeky fun in that? P
Instead, you use poker chips to represent trust! I find that appealing somehow...
Yeah, that one just uses d6 - though there’s an interesting “duel” mechanic where you and an opponent roll secretly, then decide together whether you’ll each roll again—to emulate two ronin staring each other down before deciding the battle with a single cut. (The game has a very specific setting—you’re a group of ronin who’ve been hired to climb Mt. Fuji and kill the Witch (though he’s a dude?) that lives on top. You all have secret ulterior motives! I think it’s been adapted to similar scenarios such as bank heists.)
Uh, Wuthering Heights uses d100, and you roll under or over your Despair / Rage depending on what you want to do. For example, killing someone means rolling below Rage (easier to do the angrier you are), whereas noticing other peoples’ feelings and stuff requires a roll over Despair. Ooh, plus, if you’re into nerdy dice-related stuff, there’s a big Random Table of Problems, like “You are an alcoholic”, “You are a homosexual”, “You are Irish”, “You are in love with a member of your family”, or “You are a poet”, and everyone has to roll d100 a few times to get their Problems.
Oh! And if you just want to chuck lots of different kinds of dice around, you can’t go wrong with Dogs in the Vineyard—where you play itinerant teenage pseudo-Mormon enforcers of the faith in a west that never was. All your traits have some amount of dice of some size next to them, and when they come up in a conflict, you roll them into your pool and can use them when raising / seeing. For instance—possessions of any sort are 1d6, 1d4 if they’re sorta worthless, 1d8 if they’re excellent (criterion: in order to be excellent, a thing has to be good enough that people might remark on how excellent it is), 2 dice if they’re big, and an extra d4 if it’s a gun (so a big, excellent pistol is 2d8+1d4).
Huh, kinda geeked out there. ^-^;
Ok, poker chips qualify as a legitimate nerd-coolness alternative. I’m convinced. :P
A Mormon with a deagle
you know that’s unheard of!
Hah! And of course, this being a roleplaying game, I defy you to find a player who won’t take a big, excellent gun.