What's not to like about RPGs?
I attempt to articulate what the existing problems are with D20 specifically and RPGs in general. These are based on my experiences trying to teach and recruit new players.
Geek Factor
There is a certain geek factor associated with Role Playing Games that in my experience is untrue and unfair. Not surprising the stereotypes about non-hygienic, socially inept, devil worshiping, poorly dressed boys or scary adult men persists. I won’t pretend to have any plan to deal with that, except to say that I lead by example. Certainly myself and the people I play with exhibit none of those qualities.
Creating a Character
If a new player manages to overcome the geek factor prejudice and decides to make a go of it, without a mentor they are likely doomed to quit. They are forced to wade through an avalanche of rules, terms, lists, tables, charts, choices resulting in a near endless array of decision points whose implications are completely unknown. In my experience the player already has in mind some type of character they want to be. This is character is probably derived from a book, movie or video game.
Hit Points
This may be the number one complaint I endured, and I am not certain why it happens now and did not happen in the 1970’s. Perhaps its video games or CNN or FOX News or I do not know what. But the problem boils down to this quote from an exasperated teenager: “If I shoot an arrow into my enemies head, he is dead weather he is level 1 or level 10, but in this game my enemy could be buck naked, 10th level and take shots from my bow all day. That’s just stupid.” I am inclined to agree. As a follow up a great d20 hit points debate went on at a forum I visit.
What do I need to hit?
I believe that 3.5/D20 did a great job with armor class. It is a great improvement over before, but the flip side of armor class is “chance to hit” and that is no small feat to calculate for a novice. You have an adjustment for Strength (check a chart), adjustment for opponent size (check a chart), adjustment for weapon proficiency (check a chart), adjustments for related feats (check a chart) and finally adjustments for the quality of the weapon. Did I miss any? Probably I did but the point is, that all those adjustments are neat, perhaps more accurate, but cumbersome to know, find and use. It is not fun if it takes 10 minutes to know you need to beat a 12 to hit.
Hit Points Again
“So I have 50 hit points, and I keep taking damage in melee. But there are no adjustments to my skills until I reach zero, at which point I collapse and can’t use any of my skills.” Where as this is true, I can not say it ever bothered me personally. I think the thinking is the direct impact of video games, and 3d shooters where you ability degrades as you take damage. The comment makes sense to me but in 3.5/D20 it would be very cumbersome to account for.
Too Many Rules poorly described
The 3.5/D20 system has a lot of rules. The rules are written with excessive verbosity, a weird dual gender mode and they are poorly organized. You often need to be in two or three places in the rules to answer a single question. If you play every week that becomes less of a problem, if you are older and play less often it can get frustrating. Thank you for the internet because one resource is invaluable for making quick use of the rules: HyperText d20 SRD I often remind youngsters that the 3.5/D20 rules are a vast improvement in consistency over the AD&D rules of long ago, but a newbie does not care about yesterday!
In Conclusion
I think the problems are specifically targeted to the required interdependency of rules with regards to race, class, level, feat and skills involved with just creating a character. These complexities are revisited at the first melee. I whole hearted agree with the richness the D20 designers provided, but the complexity is a lot to digest for a newbie.
5 comments:
“So I have 50 hit points, and I keep taking damage in melee. But there are no adjustments to my skills until I reach zero, at which point I collapse and can’t use any of my skills.”
Hello,
I actually have this taken into consideration in my own, homebrew d20 system. I came at my game from a revolutionary standpoint, looking at the obvious design flaws, common complaints, and even the general nit picking.
One of the games i've played in the past was Mageknight (or Hero Clix). They had the luxury of using the turn dial on the bases to adjust characters' strength relative to their health. One of the major flaws i found with the game was how weak everything was. Seasoned warriors would fatigue after taking two actions in a row. Any high school foot ball team would put them to shame.
What i've attempted to do is separate health from fatigue, while also interlinking their effect on each other.
When someone runs out of energy, they start rolling damage on their health. Certain actions consume this energy, such as casting spells, performing combative actions that require adrenaline, pushing themselves to move farther, faster, longer, etc... Real fatigue.
As a character's health drops, it is noted in percentages of the whole, whether that is a percent of 100 health, or a percent of 10 health, whatever the maximum health is for that character.
Calculating the percentages is a little time consuming, but only needs to be done once per level, and since a character tends to be a given level for a considerable amount of time, the time taken to calculate the percents is really minimal.
In my game, spells and skills are busted up into ranks, and some skills improve as they rank up, and other skills are unlocked as they rank up a given skill set. These ranks coincide with the percents of health, 100% health being able to use any skill rank available, while lower percentages of health are restricted to skills of lower ranks. While things like accuracy and strength aren't gauged, the miscellaneous abilities available to a character are. So, even at 1 HP, a fighter can still scrap with the best of them, but he won't be able to contribute with as much variety, restricting his tactical utility until he is healed or rested.
This might fit right in with a percentile melee system.
It turned out to be more work then we ever imagined. We now play pathfinder with some house rules and happy with it. Though I like your concept of fatigue. You check out GURPS they have a similar to model to what you described.
Wow, didn't expect a response so soon.
I've often been curious about Pathfinder, but i've already invested a lot into my own system, run several very successful campaigns with it, the people i play with already know it, so, aside from my one friend who is slowly becoming a D&D fan (mostly due to DDO i think) it's the only system i have an interest in playing at this point in time. I do have a copy of the OGL rules, Swords and Wizardry, Wayfinder (a d10 system which has been some inspiration to me) and a few other wargame systems i've never played, but look at from time to time.
I abhor charts with a passion. I feel every detail a player should know in order to play their character should be on their character sheet. I've tried to stick to this with my own system, so as i designed my character sheet i tried to leave as much room for descriptions as possible. The only failing i've had thus far was in regards to skills and spells, some of which require a good 2-3 sentence paragraph to describe. This is part of what lead me to my system of grouping skills and spells together by type, rather than investing skill points in individual abilities. On the sheet, instead of writing down each individual skill, just write the skill set down, and reference the rules for the spell/skill if you need to. There's also space on the back of the sheet to write down abilities so you don't have to reference the rulebook.
But i'm curious about Pathfinder, since you mentioned it. Does it retain the D&D feel, or has it succeeded in becoming its own game with its own world?
Also, i'd be honored if you were to take the time to even casually check out my homebrew game. It's in its final stages of development and needs an objective outside view.
Peace.
Pathfinder is a streamlined version of D&D 3.5
Streamlined is miss leading, reorganized into 1 book with clear language and a logical sequence.
Home brews are great, it is really hard to get interest beyond your circle. What we found was that, even though we wrote the rules we are still had different interpretations of what they meant!
We play tested a lot but we only ever played one actual campaign. It was a mixed bag and revealed many flaws. We set about to rewrite it, make it even simpler but careers, children... ultimately it just died. I don't feel bad about it, we learned a lot.
I was reading on your site last night. I will do so again this weekend.
Thanks!
I remember reading on a forum somewhere that they had added some things to the classes, like better capstones for reaching LV 20 and such. That might have been a homebrew Pathfinder site, and i didn't realize it though.
I should really leave my system alone, the time spent building it is incredibly disproportionate to the time spent playing, recently at least.
My friends and i have each taken turns running games, i've run 2, and my two friends have run 1 each, and each game runs about 5-8 hours! I'm not sure, but that might not include set up... Each campaign was done isolated from the others, new characters each time.
Preparation for campaigns takes a good bit of time because i haven't yet written any kind of monster manual, critter compendium, or bestiary. My general rule for creating encounters is to make them the same as the characters but with fewer skills, and maybe +/- 1 level different. I go has high as 3 levels above the party for minor boss fights.
So far it's worked well. One time i pitched a Lv 10 sorcerer against a party of three, average level 5. They won, but barely. It's an inspiring tale i won't get into here unless you want to hear it. lol.
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