Fenixius said:
Alex_P said:
In my opinion, most pen-and-paper games are critically flawed because they don't really focus on the stuff the medium does well -- like that story thing we keep mentioning. Instead they give you rules for rolling dice to see if you got a headshot!
What do you mean? How would it support storytelling in a way more meaningful than providing a framework for pretty much any kind of challenge?
The true beauty of pen-and-paper roleplaying is in the flexibility of the narrative. It's improvised, collaborative storytelling, which means you do it differently from sit-down-and-write-something storytelling, but there are a lot of similarities. You can frame any scene -- start the game with Conan old and wise and then cut right back to him treading thrones with his sandalled feet. As you play, you can add details to a scene as it develops, like a novelist does (compare to a video game, where all the background details are evident from the get-go). You've even got some ability to go back and change some elements of the fiction if you need to.
Traditional RPGs don't give you the tools to do this stuff. Groups basically have to make them up themselves. That's not necessarily a problem -- formal rules and less-formal rules both get the same thing done in the end. But what annoys me a lot is that the structure that a typical RPG book
does give you often gets in the way of fully exploiting the medium, too. And I think the cardinal problem there is that most RPGs are trying too hard to simulate events ("rolling dice to see if you got a headshot," above), which is not the medium's strong suit.
For example...
(Here I'm going to meander a bit. This isn't comprehensive, nor are all points of equal importance. These are criticisms that apply to a variety of games. D&D, old and new Vampire, GURPS, and pretty much anything that looks like them. If a game says things like "make an attack roll," it's definitely one of these.)
Most RPGs model a character in terms of competencies. Nowadays that pretty much means a mix of broad-base attributes and more narrow skills, and then a bunch of usually-even-more-narrow special abilities (like magic or magic vampire powers). The character sheet is a big list of everything that a character can do, in other words. One problem with this is that anytime you have a character do something not on that sheet she'll tend to suck at it -- making it that much harder to move a character out of her established niche. In most cases, you can't really discover things about a character as you go. (This method of representing characters is one of the reasons that magic pretty much invariably sucks and doesn't feel at all "magical" in most pen-and-paper RPGs and fantasy-themed video game.)
Most RPGs incorporate advancement -- raising various stats as you play. Now, I certainly think that the basic idea of having the stuff on the sheet change over time is a great thing. But the standard way to do it? Bleh! It's pretty much always set up as escalating power: as you level / earn skill points / whatever, you pump up your numbers or add new abilities to your already-elaborate sheet. Two problems here. For starters, most stories aren't about peasants turning into kick-ass dragonslayers. Because of the "either it's on the sheet or you suck at it" problem mentioned above and the complexity of all the stats you've got floating around, it's pretty hard to do anything but a linear-time story -- that shuts down a lot of storytelling possibilities, too.
Focusing on
what a character can do really screws up stories, too. An action-movie gunslinger always has the ability to shoot a guy in the face from a hundred feet away. You probably see him doing it constantly to the mooks. But we don't want him to just shoot the bad guy in the face halfway through the film, do we? And it's not that he can't -- later on, at the end, he'll be able to do that same thing just fine (probably while bleeding profusely and trying to recover from three concussions, too)! It's all about the right dramatic moment. (Meanwhile, the bad guy probably likewise can shoot a guy between the eyes at a hundred feet away, but, for 99% of all action movies out there, he's never going to be able to do that to the hero.) The standard RPG structure doesn't have that. Game rules try to compensate with stuff like hit points -- that kind of approach boils down to "shooting the bad guy in the face only counts if you've shot him in the face five previous times," which just delays the problem a bit and also makes shooting the bad guy in the face
less cool. GMs have also tried to compensate for this fundamental deficiency in a lot of ways, like "fudging" (GM cheating on dice -- some groups consider it okay, some groups consider it a power trip or a violation of trust), only ever introducing bad guys at the very very end, immediately replacing the bad guy with another bad guy, or making death itself trivial. That's a lot of work to fix one very simple problem with the rules: a story isn't a simulation, so a simulation is not going to magically create a good story.
Now, not all this stuff is a bad idea universally. Linear-time narrative, characters represented in terms of a narrow set of things they know how to do, and rules that only really handle one kind of scene well are all fine if all you want is to play some tactical skirmishes in a dungeon. But using this kind of structure for almost every game around? Really not good for the medium.
Limits aren't bad, either. Like an improv game, an effective roleplaying session needs well-placed constraints to make things more interesting. All the limitations I mention above
aren't well-placed, however. They're just there because they've been blindly inherited from the games' predecessors. Imagine every mainstream video game using a first-person shooter interface, regardless of what kind of gameplay the developers wanted to create and what kind of story the game was exploring. That's pretty much what pen-and-paper RPGs are like right now.
Most importantly of all, it's a lot of work to actually turn a clunky simulation into a good story -- at some point you really should look around and say "How is the clunky simulation actually helping, anyway?" Maybe it does help, at times, but most RPG writers and most RPG players don't really seem to seriously ask that question to begin with, and that's really hurting the medium.
-- Alex
