Okay, we've discussed d20 and d6 Star Wars. In the past, we've talked about d20 Call of Cthulhu. We've just started discussing the oddities of D&D balance as regards saturation of magic items in a setting. The effect of which is that you can't really model Lord of the Rings in D&D as it stands, since the Fellowship just don't have enough magic items. (Unless, of course, Tolkien cut the scene where Boromir finally decides to turn on the party not because Frodo has a nifty ring of invisibility, but because he's stuck with a lousy longsword +3, while Anduril is a bastard sword +5 of flaming burst.)
That said, D&D does Conan rather better, and is pretty decent at a general high fantasy.
So, the question I've been working towards is: to what extent do the system in use constrain the genre of the game? Conversely, how thoroughly should the intended genre influence the rules of the resulting game?
I've heard it said that a good GM can run any style of game well with any system. This is surely garbage: try running a grim 'n' gritty noir game using Toon, or a light and fast swashbuckler using Rolemaster. Granted, you could try, but there comes a point where you might be as well sticking hot pins in your fingers for kicks.
Archived comment from Mort:
ReplyDeleteThe fellowship actually had a decent number of magic items, nothing close to what a equivalent group of D&D adventures would have, but in Middle-earth standards they were pretty well off.
Now concerning the real point, a system which is designed with a particular setting in mind is usually better than one that's not. Take D&D as an example, regardless of what people say, I'm convinced that the d20 system was designed purely with D&D in mind, which means that when it is used to make CoC it just gets silly and stupid. Chaosiums system on the other hand, was basically developed in unison with the CoC game, making it a fitting system for a cold dark horror game. It's funny, because both of these systems claim to be generic resolution systems, but they are so different, and fits different specters of gaming.
Of course, sometimes you can easily take one system and run a slightly different game with it, as long as you don't try to move to extremes.
I think that the rules of a game should reflect the feeling you want to get out of the setting, and not much else. Look at Vampire, it is claimed to be a game of personal horror (or have they dropped this tagline lately?) which is more about storytelling than combat and dicerolling. Still they have included rules for hunting (dicerolling) and seduction. (more dicerolling.) To me this indicates a system which does more than needed for the game it claims to support, and thus breaks the feeling and setting the designers wanted to create, which I think is a bad thing. If it is a game of personal horror, why not have a decent sanity system with more fleshed out madness and isolation drawbacks instead of rules for rolling dice?
Archived comment from me:
ReplyDeleteVampire
I agree - I would have liked to see a better sanity system. Also, the rules for hunting and seduction should have been more fleshed out, and probably not as reliant on the dice.
That said, social traits and tasks in RPGs are inevitably difficult to model well. See, when we're sitting round a table, we clearly need metrics for the physical and magical traits of a character - we need to know whether a character has BlowStuffUp level 3 or 4, and what these do. However, since the player provides the social and mental side of a character, there is less need for such things to be modelled. How does the average person role-play an Intelligence of superhuman proportions? Conversely, what if a highly intelligent player is portraying the village idiot? How much freedom does the Storyteller allow them in running their character?
I think there is a balance that needs to be found. Firstly, if a game is going to have systems for social interactions and the like, and is trying to put as much emphasis on such things as on combat, the systems have to be enforced with some rigour, or else the munchkins are going to create pure-physical, then run their characters with all their normal charm and intelligence. However, if the Storyteller can trust his group (and that's all members of the group, so is hellish rare), they should feel free to ditch these rules, and just allow the players to role-play their traits.
Of course, if the CoC d20 sanity system was lifted directly from the Chaosium version (as I was led to believe was almost the case), there's nothing inherently scary about it. It's just a number, and some insanities that crop up occasionally, and which can largely be ignored by a munchkin. It's only through good role-play that these take on meaning.
That said, my opinion of insanity in games has probably been permanently destroyed by the Malkavians in Vampire. Or, rather, their players.