Well, I was left out of it so you could give me some pointers that would be nice. I was just thinking it over myself. AD&D was infamously bad as simulation, in a “not even wrong” sense, you could literally not have a fight in the game mechanics that looks anything like normal fencing (i.e. 20 rounds without damage then one killer wound, instead it would be a death from a thousand cuts bullshit), so almost every other tabletop RPG e.g. Shadowrun or Vampire The Masquarade improved on that tremendously, which improved to me the fun factor to extent that it did not feel stupid at least, but indeed in itself did not max it out. I figured out, to max it out, it is not realistic simulations you want but movie-like or novel-like. Simulate a really good movie, not real life. So study the craft of writing, screenwriting, learn the trade of writers, and base the rules on that. This is where I am currently. Where to go from here?
Not that AD&D does any better, but if you’re in a fight and you’ve exchanged blows twenty times without serious damage, at least one of the fighters isn’t trying to win. Realistic personal combat (other types of combat can be more drawn out) is like Hobbes’ state of nature, or a cannibal elf: nasty, brutal, and short.
The problem is—well, there are several problems here, but the main problem is that it’s really hard to build a multiplayer game that’s actually fun but that looks and plays like realistic fighting; the winners haven’t had time to play, and the losers feel betrayed. You can do it in single-player games, where there’s an endless supply of mooks to shank and no particular requirement that killing your avatar take you out of the fight for more than a few seconds, but you usually end up with a very hard game.
Aiming for cinematics rather than realism is indeed the correct approach, but this wasn’t clear in the tabletop RPG world for a long time; I suspect that has something to do with its roots in the strategy wargame genre, which values realism very highly and has the structure to mostly get away with it.
I found the rules of Shadowrun the most realistic and also playable, Second Edition if I remember right, I didn’t keep up - I just hate the setting and the artwork with a fury. I don’t remember all the exact details, but splitting damage into stun and health, having damage an effect on your abilities, rerolling sixes so that with good luck a weak weapon can do a lot of damage, damage modified by weapon skill (accurate aiming), adding inborn ability to learned skill together (not the most realistic but better than nothing), having dice pools reflecting what you pay more attention to, and the cleverly cinematic karma pool, are all things that seem like cinematic realism to me and IMHO playable. If only the rules were more open source like the d20 and used in different settings that make more sense… having both technology and magic is not necessarily a bad idea but somehow the Shadowrun world manages to make it very childish, and the novels that introduced the world are pretty much the weirdest fantasy I have ever read, just who comes up with the idea of a fundamentalist Christian hero who is also a peacenik hippie and refuses to use weapons in a cyberpunk-magical world?...
just who comes up with the idea of a fundamentalist Christian hero who is also a peacenik hippie and refuses to use weapons in a cyberpunk-magical world?
A liberal/progressive trying to make a “sympathetic” fundamentalist Christian, i.e., one sympathetic from the prog point of view.
I can recommend a book—A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Or look e.g. at debates between strategy grognards and people who want to have fun throwing heavy metal at each other (on screen, that is). Or look at the evolution of long-lived games like WoW—simulation inconveniences are ground away and you’re left with pure-game design.
AD&D was infamously bad as simulation
You have to think in terms of abstraction layers. AD&D is a high-level simulation and I don’t think rounds were ever meant to represent actual attacks and parries in a swordfight. Not to mention that are you asking for realism from a game that involves wizards and dragons..?
. Not to mention that are you asking for realism from a game that involves wizards and dragons..?
Realism is a poor term, but yes. The fantasy genre is strange. The very term would involve that anything goes, yet in practice what we usually have is a version of the Medieval world with the modification that the kind of legends they tended to believe in are actually true. The problem is usually having far too many wizards and dragons, Tolkien got it better with four and one, respectively, that is roughly how many of them would a superstitious medieval guy expect. So it is realistic more or less from the angle of the medieval guy who would expect to find dragons in Cathay and wizards in Hyperborea yet his ideas of a swordfight are either very realistic or he is dead.
Consistency may be a better word, not consistency with itself, but consistency with how it modifies actual reality. Let’s call it Consistent Deltas. If it is a fight between two monsters with 143 tentacles and 5 beaks I don’t care how it is, as I have nothing to compare it with. But if it looks like a real human using something that looks like a real sword… then it should work more or less it works here.
And yet another twist—“here” does not necessary mean real reality, but believable movie / novel reality. The kind of illusions we usually believe, where veterans of battles don’t deal with PTSD and don’t kill themselves five year after retiring.
Thinking of it as a high-level simulation is new to me, perhaps true, in that case we really needed DM’s who can describe it so...
But if it looks like a real human using something that looks like a real sword… then it should work more or less it works here.
That’s the simulation argument, but I don’t think it applies. Go up one abstraction layer.
You have a conflict between your party and some creatures. You need to represent this conflict balancing (at least) three different things: (1) Resources (stat points, swords, spells); (2) Skill (ability to utilize the said resources); and (3) Luck (to prevent this from becoming a spreadsheet exercise). You can’t overdo on any of them—if resources dominate, the game becomes the search for the Sword of Pwnage. If skill dominates, the items in the game lose their attraction and you might as well play chess. If luck dominates, people tend to get frustrated and unhappy with their powerlessness.
Game mechanics are an attempt to balance all these demands and have the result be fun. For emotional engagement you also want to tie these mechanics to familiar tropes, but it’s just decoration. If the mechanics are not fun, arguments “but this is realistic” do not work. Imagine your character catching some intestinal disease so that for the next three or four days all he can do is run to the latrine every half an hour and that’s it (and no, you don’t get to wave a magic wand and say “Four days pass”). Realistic—yes. Fun—not so much.
Hm, okay, I get it, you are working from a bit of a different premises. I play both tabletop (rarely) or computer games for the immersion, for the feeling of being in a very different world. I don’t really care about excitement, winning or anything, if I wanted that I would just take a first-person shooter but in my mind RPGs are markedly different category. To me it is pretty much literally an interactive novel or movie.
I think you are working from premises that everything that is called a game is a game, is not different in essence from a shooter, or playing chess or basketball. There are rules, winners, losers and suchlike, excitement, overcoming challenges and all that.
If you work from these premises, then you are right, but from that angle there is no point in being such a thing as an RPG genre at all. “Immersion and suspension of belief in a different world that is like a movie or a novel” and “the excitement through beating challenges according to rules” are IMHO two very different categories of things. In this sense RPGs don’t even exist, because to the extent they are role-playing and thus the immersion, suspension of disbelief, and simulation elements are there, to that extent they are not fully games. In fact there is even a term “that is a too gamey move” where players pursue efficiency according to the literal letter of the rules and end up with something that is against the spirit / is too unrealistic in the simulated universe.
I am willing to admit that most players want more gaming and less role-playing than I, both in tabletop and computer games, though. In fact I wondered why doesn’t anyone makes a strategy videogame I would personally like. It would be like Medieval Total War 2, but without this hugely competitive aspect of everybody trying to conquer the known world ASAP. It would be more like just running your country. Sometimes there are wars, then you try to win them, but you are not trying be a second Alexander. You just try to keep your country in good shape. So pretty much like real history (or an optimistic reading of it). For example, amending the engine so that everybody teams up in alliances against factions that conquer more than five provinces would do it.
To me it is pretty much literally an interactive novel or movie.
There is no bright line (nowadays) separating games from interactive movies and there are certainly hybrids around. The problem with good full-immersion games is that they really hard to make, I think the screen and the controls actually get in the way and a good book is able to achieve better immersion because your imagination has more freedom.
Usually, if you want to experience a game just for the story, you can put the difficulty on Easy, one-hit everything and travel the game world. Some very successful games—like Skyrim—aren’t so much about “winning” as they are about constructing your own experience.
The landscape of games is pretty varied, though. If you want to “realistically” swing your sword you can play the Witcher series; if you want a Medieval-ish open-world sandbox without much pressure to conquer anything you can play the Mount & Blade series; Civilization-style games offer country management without the necessity to conquer everyone else...
everybody teams up in alliances against factions that conquer more than five provinces would do it.
Well, I was left out of it so you could give me some pointers that would be nice. I was just thinking it over myself. AD&D was infamously bad as simulation, in a “not even wrong” sense, you could literally not have a fight in the game mechanics that looks anything like normal fencing (i.e. 20 rounds without damage then one killer wound, instead it would be a death from a thousand cuts bullshit), so almost every other tabletop RPG e.g. Shadowrun or Vampire The Masquarade improved on that tremendously, which improved to me the fun factor to extent that it did not feel stupid at least, but indeed in itself did not max it out. I figured out, to max it out, it is not realistic simulations you want but movie-like or novel-like. Simulate a really good movie, not real life. So study the craft of writing, screenwriting, learn the trade of writers, and base the rules on that. This is where I am currently. Where to go from here?
Not that AD&D does any better, but if you’re in a fight and you’ve exchanged blows twenty times without serious damage, at least one of the fighters isn’t trying to win. Realistic personal combat (other types of combat can be more drawn out) is like Hobbes’ state of nature, or a cannibal elf: nasty, brutal, and short.
The problem is—well, there are several problems here, but the main problem is that it’s really hard to build a multiplayer game that’s actually fun but that looks and plays like realistic fighting; the winners haven’t had time to play, and the losers feel betrayed. You can do it in single-player games, where there’s an endless supply of mooks to shank and no particular requirement that killing your avatar take you out of the fight for more than a few seconds, but you usually end up with a very hard game.
Aiming for cinematics rather than realism is indeed the correct approach, but this wasn’t clear in the tabletop RPG world for a long time; I suspect that has something to do with its roots in the strategy wargame genre, which values realism very highly and has the structure to mostly get away with it.
I found the rules of Shadowrun the most realistic and also playable, Second Edition if I remember right, I didn’t keep up - I just hate the setting and the artwork with a fury. I don’t remember all the exact details, but splitting damage into stun and health, having damage an effect on your abilities, rerolling sixes so that with good luck a weak weapon can do a lot of damage, damage modified by weapon skill (accurate aiming), adding inborn ability to learned skill together (not the most realistic but better than nothing), having dice pools reflecting what you pay more attention to, and the cleverly cinematic karma pool, are all things that seem like cinematic realism to me and IMHO playable. If only the rules were more open source like the d20 and used in different settings that make more sense… having both technology and magic is not necessarily a bad idea but somehow the Shadowrun world manages to make it very childish, and the novels that introduced the world are pretty much the weirdest fantasy I have ever read, just who comes up with the idea of a fundamentalist Christian hero who is also a peacenik hippie and refuses to use weapons in a cyberpunk-magical world?...
A liberal/progressive trying to make a “sympathetic” fundamentalist Christian, i.e., one sympathetic from the prog point of view.
I can recommend a book—A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Or look e.g. at debates between strategy grognards and people who want to have fun throwing heavy metal at each other (on screen, that is). Or look at the evolution of long-lived games like WoW—simulation inconveniences are ground away and you’re left with pure-game design.
You have to think in terms of abstraction layers. AD&D is a high-level simulation and I don’t think rounds were ever meant to represent actual attacks and parries in a swordfight. Not to mention that are you asking for realism from a game that involves wizards and dragons..?
Realism is a poor term, but yes. The fantasy genre is strange. The very term would involve that anything goes, yet in practice what we usually have is a version of the Medieval world with the modification that the kind of legends they tended to believe in are actually true. The problem is usually having far too many wizards and dragons, Tolkien got it better with four and one, respectively, that is roughly how many of them would a superstitious medieval guy expect. So it is realistic more or less from the angle of the medieval guy who would expect to find dragons in Cathay and wizards in Hyperborea yet his ideas of a swordfight are either very realistic or he is dead.
Consistency may be a better word, not consistency with itself, but consistency with how it modifies actual reality. Let’s call it Consistent Deltas. If it is a fight between two monsters with 143 tentacles and 5 beaks I don’t care how it is, as I have nothing to compare it with. But if it looks like a real human using something that looks like a real sword… then it should work more or less it works here.
And yet another twist—“here” does not necessary mean real reality, but believable movie / novel reality. The kind of illusions we usually believe, where veterans of battles don’t deal with PTSD and don’t kill themselves five year after retiring.
Thinking of it as a high-level simulation is new to me, perhaps true, in that case we really needed DM’s who can describe it so...
Thanks for the book idea.
That’s the simulation argument, but I don’t think it applies. Go up one abstraction layer.
You have a conflict between your party and some creatures. You need to represent this conflict balancing (at least) three different things: (1) Resources (stat points, swords, spells); (2) Skill (ability to utilize the said resources); and (3) Luck (to prevent this from becoming a spreadsheet exercise). You can’t overdo on any of them—if resources dominate, the game becomes the search for the Sword of Pwnage. If skill dominates, the items in the game lose their attraction and you might as well play chess. If luck dominates, people tend to get frustrated and unhappy with their powerlessness.
Game mechanics are an attempt to balance all these demands and have the result be fun. For emotional engagement you also want to tie these mechanics to familiar tropes, but it’s just decoration. If the mechanics are not fun, arguments “but this is realistic” do not work. Imagine your character catching some intestinal disease so that for the next three or four days all he can do is run to the latrine every half an hour and that’s it (and no, you don’t get to wave a magic wand and say “Four days pass”). Realistic—yes. Fun—not so much.
Hm, okay, I get it, you are working from a bit of a different premises. I play both tabletop (rarely) or computer games for the immersion, for the feeling of being in a very different world. I don’t really care about excitement, winning or anything, if I wanted that I would just take a first-person shooter but in my mind RPGs are markedly different category. To me it is pretty much literally an interactive novel or movie.
I think you are working from premises that everything that is called a game is a game, is not different in essence from a shooter, or playing chess or basketball. There are rules, winners, losers and suchlike, excitement, overcoming challenges and all that.
If you work from these premises, then you are right, but from that angle there is no point in being such a thing as an RPG genre at all. “Immersion and suspension of belief in a different world that is like a movie or a novel” and “the excitement through beating challenges according to rules” are IMHO two very different categories of things. In this sense RPGs don’t even exist, because to the extent they are role-playing and thus the immersion, suspension of disbelief, and simulation elements are there, to that extent they are not fully games. In fact there is even a term “that is a too gamey move” where players pursue efficiency according to the literal letter of the rules and end up with something that is against the spirit / is too unrealistic in the simulated universe.
I am willing to admit that most players want more gaming and less role-playing than I, both in tabletop and computer games, though. In fact I wondered why doesn’t anyone makes a strategy videogame I would personally like. It would be like Medieval Total War 2, but without this hugely competitive aspect of everybody trying to conquer the known world ASAP. It would be more like just running your country. Sometimes there are wars, then you try to win them, but you are not trying be a second Alexander. You just try to keep your country in good shape. So pretty much like real history (or an optimistic reading of it). For example, amending the engine so that everybody teams up in alliances against factions that conquer more than five provinces would do it.
There is no bright line (nowadays) separating games from interactive movies and there are certainly hybrids around. The problem with good full-immersion games is that they really hard to make, I think the screen and the controls actually get in the way and a good book is able to achieve better immersion because your imagination has more freedom.
Usually, if you want to experience a game just for the story, you can put the difficulty on Easy, one-hit everything and travel the game world. Some very successful games—like Skyrim—aren’t so much about “winning” as they are about constructing your own experience.
The landscape of games is pretty varied, though. If you want to “realistically” swing your sword you can play the Witcher series; if you want a Medieval-ish open-world sandbox without much pressure to conquer anything you can play the Mount & Blade series; Civilization-style games offer country management without the necessity to conquer everyone else...
That’s Total War Shogun 2 :-)