Today’s random gaming thought

[swan_tower]

You can tell how much an RPG system cares about a thing by how granular the rules for it are.

I’ve known this for a while, of course. RPGs evolved out of historical war-gaming, so many of them have incredibly detailed rules for combat, and much less detailed frameworks for other activities. But there’s another angle on this that I don’t think about as often, which is: when you get a bonus, how restrictive vs. broad is the application of that bonus?

In L5R, there’s a spell that gives you a boost to Perception-based rolls. All Perception-based rolls. Vision? Hearing? Scent? Reading people’s behavior? Commanding an army in battle? (For reasons of setting philosophy, that’s based on Perception.) This spell boosts all of them. Because although L5R is better at caring about non-combat stuff than some game systems, it’s really not all that interested in the finer-grained applications of Perception. Instead of having many spells that give you bonuses to different kinds of Perception, there’s one that hits them all.

Or Pathfinder. My PC has a magic item that gives a +3 to all Charisma-based skill checks, because Pathfinder, like most D&D, fundamentally doesn’t give a damn about social interaction. There is not, to my knowledge, a magic item that gives a +3 (or a +anything) to all Dexterity-based skill checks, because that would include Stealth (good for avoiding combat or taking the enemy by surprise), Acrobatics (good for avoiding attacks of opportunity in combat), Ride (good for anybody engaging in mounted combat), Disable Device (good for picking locks and disarming traps), and Escape Artist (good for escaping entangle and grapples in combat), among others. But handing out a cheap blanket bonus to Bluff, Diplomacy, Disguise, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Perform, and Use Magic Device? Eh, why not. That last is pretty much the only one that will often matter in combat, unless you’ve taken all the feats necessary to make feinting via Bluff a useful thing to do. And the game is relatively uninterested in what happens outside of combat.

And then you get players arguing that doing X isn’t very interesting. They’re right, in a way, because the rules have made it uninteresting. All you need is this single effect and you’re great at the whole shebang. But if the rules started from the assumption that X is interesting, and treated it with the same care and complexity of flavor they use for other aspects of play, it might be a different story.

(No game can do that for every single aspect, of course. If you tried, you’d wind up with something of unplayable complexity. But it would be nice to see that care and attention given to things other than combat more often.)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[dhampyresa]

That's a really good point.

[mindstalk]

Though 3.x and PF both have items that give blanket bonuses to Dex or Cha, and thus a bonus to all skills using those. But I'd guess the pure skill item is cheaper, since it doesn't give all the stat benefits.

(Circlet of persuasion? Yeah, +3 for 4,500, vs. 36,000 for a +6 to Cha itself. Based on the prerequisites, you could justify a general Dex skill item. But there aren't many items of that price, and none of the others are such.)

[swan_tower]

Yes, circlet of persuasion. And honestly, 36,000 gp for +6 to Cha is about the worst place you can spend that money, unless you're a Charisma-based caster, because it's the one stat that doesn't have any additional effects: none of your saves are based on it, you don't get more skill points or AC or HP or attack bonus or CMD, just a bonus to some skills, most of which the game doesn't really care about. That might well be why the circlet of persuasion exists; since the skill boost is usually the only benefit of raising your Charisma, why not get all the non-caster benefits at 1/8 the price?

[beccastareyes]

(No game can do that for every single aspect, of course. If you tried, you’d wind up with something of unplayable complexity. But it would be nice to see that care and attention given to things other than combat more often.)

I suspect that's what intimidates me with Exalted -- the sheer number of options Solar characters have to modify their skills with magic. Which, yes, fits the setting of 'you are the apex of human achievement, then dialed up to 11', but makes me worry about getting all the players to be on the same page as each other about 'now have adventures', if someone is a warrior while someone has devoted his attention to social-fu, and a third character has dug into the crafting system, and I feel like the Storyteller has to understand all of that and then I freeze up.

[mindstalk]

Well, there are multiple things going on there... in theory yeah it's cool that a majority of Solar Charms aren't combat ones. OTOH, you've got like 200 Charms just in the 2e corebook, and then sorcery and Martial Arts and all the other splats and ew, so many moving parts.

OTOH you could have a simplified Excellency-only Exalted; the original quickstart was like that (spend a mote, double your dice or your successes, I forget which), even though 1e didn't have 2e's standard Excellencies. And applied to all skills, so you can be as awesome as social or crafting as in combat. Of course, the GM has to then decide what that *means*. But it's "make acceptable rulings" territory, rather than "learn complex rules and then hundreds of possible exceptions to those rules."

And either way, the game doesn't try to stop you from making an Exalt who's almost as squishy in combat as an untrained civilian, apart from a slight increase in toughness and healing speed. Vs. D&D where a 10th level magic-user is actually an utter badass in combat by 1st level standards, apart from the crappy AC.

[swan_tower]

Yeah, not only is a system that covers everything intimidating for the player, but it's intimidating to GM as well. On the other hand, there are people for whom it's more comfortable to have those rules; they freeze up when they're expected to just kind of run it by ear.

On the other other hand:

getting all the players to be on the same page as each other about 'now have adventures'

This is a problem that can be solved outside the system, by knowing what the campaign will be focused on and getting people to make characters who are compatible with that. Just because the system has rules for everything doesn't mean the characters need to use all of those rules.

[3rdragon]

Now I'm kind of curious to see a game where, I dunno, social interaction, or making stuff, or some other non-combat thing is the primary interest (though, to be honest, I'd probably get bogged down in the mechanics of it and should just stick with low-mechanics games, since one of my complaints about combat is that it's too complicated and slows way down).

[mindstalk]

Bunnies and Burrows. Despite the first martial arts system in RPGs (Bun Fu), bunnies are likely to be killed by any actual predator, so you have to depend on talking, trickery, or running fast.

I don't think Golden Sky Stories *has* a combat mechanism. It's about magical animals helping village humans in a Totoro-like village.

Ryuutama has been described as "Hayao Miyazaki's Oregon Trail"; it may have combat, but I doubt it's a big focus.

Toon characters were unkillable, AIUI.

Vampire *could* be about angst and politics.

Arguably original school D&D was about stealing treasure, with as little combat as possible.

Call of Cthulhu is about Lovecraftian investigation, though also about shotguns vs. monsters. Still, your PCs are unlikely to ever be Skilled Combatants, AIUI.