Systems with no random elements, whether resource management based, description based, "higher trait wins", etc

Go has very simple rules, and emergent complexity. Could an RPG be written with minimal / emergent rules for interesting gameplay?

Interesting gameplay, sure, but interesting gameplay is only worth something if you can tie it into the narrative of the game, which really restricts your design space (unless you make the game first and then try to build the RPG around it).

So like... maybe if the RPG is about a Go championship or something.

Active Exploits is pretty neat. It's a resource management type system. If we've brought those up, I suppose I can also mention Nobilis and Amber.

Which, now that I think about it, are all kinds of weirdly similar.

This. Post-modernism is an unfairly maligned ideological boogeyman.

Not all of the ideas have been great, but it's not a fraudulent tradition.

Chuubo's is good

I'd instead prefer something like FUDGE dice, where there's a random element, but it trends strongly towards the median, making your stats and bonuses the main features of any roll, and the dice more of an afterthought in all but the most exceptional of rolls and circumstances.

This is entirely fair.
Forge and GNS, on the other hand, deserve no such sympathy.

What's so bad about GNS? It reveals some great insights that many people are quite surprised by (e.g. that Fate isn't actually a "rules-lite" system just because it doesn't have detailed rules for bleeding out in combat)

It tries to drag games into three arbitrary categories that don't mean anything. The theory itself is disregarded even by the types who put credence in game design concepts.

Whether a game is rules light or not is strictly relative and mostly a matter of personal preference.

True, but it is something to keep in mind when people, say, recommend it as a starting game for complete newbies (for which it is infamously terrible). GNS theory isn't the ONLY way but it is a very easy way to understand and explain why this deceptively "simple" game actually isn't.

Fate however is an extremely simple game, the writers just waste a lot of time unnecessarily over-explaining.

See, here's where you're wrong, and here's where GNS theory can help explain the difference between what you think of as "simple" and actually being a good way to get people into roleplaying games. While Fate may not have a lot of rules compared to, say, GURPS, and may be MATHEMATICALLY simple, it requires a level of understanding of RPG mechanics that's actually fairly high. It's easy for people on Veeky Forums to dismiss because most people here have been gaming for decades, but to someone who is completely, absolutely new to RPGs? Some of the core mechanics of Fate are mind-bogglingly arcane.

One of the advantages of games like 3rd edition D&D or GUPRS (that is, simulationist games, where the mechanics interact solely with the game universe) is that you don't actually have to know the rules to play, at all. Sure, you wouldn't be GOOD, but it's possible to just let the GM handle all of the numbers, dice rolls, etc. and treat the game as practically "advanced pretend". This is a very convenient way of easing newbies into the game. You don't bog them down with mechanics and let them focus on actually playing a character, which at that point, is still a challenge to them (again, you might not remember this, but to complete newbies even things like "should I be acting out my character's movements?" or "what exactly is the difference between a player and a GM?" or "if I listen in on a group of monsters, do I get to say what they're saying?" are overwhelmingly confusing. They don't need further complication).

(cont.)

Fate, on the other hand, due to its "gamist" elements, is IMPOSSIBLE to play, on any level, without some understanding of the mechanics. You HAVE to know how aspects work, at minimum. And aspects aren't actually simple to explain, especially to someone inexperienced with RPGs. Hell, even some players who ARE take a long time to get used to them. What counts as an aspect? Why are they sometimes a quote, sometimes an adjective, and sometimes a phrase? How does "create an advantage" work? It might seem so natural to you that you don't even get how it could be unclear, but the fact is (and look at almost any Fate general at the questions people ask) it really isn't.

One of the biggest flaws in many d20 games is that the die is too big and modifiers too small.

The idea of using some kind of resource management system plus base modifiers instead of "die+mods" is rather interesting and something I'd be willing to at least read if not try.

My experiences are the opposite of this. People picked up FAE incredibly fast.

Explaining aspects as "things that define your character" and just reminding the players they can invoke/create them whenever they are doing something is easy as fuck, and they aren't bogged down by having to make calculations or read over classes.

It's a pretty good intro for more artsy type of people, while D&D is a pretty good intro for the more math-y types.

A simulationist system is a good introduction to roleplaying games, flat, to any kind of person because like says the point is that, perhaps ironically, you don't need any maths to start with them. From a player's persepctive it's possible to play D&D perfectly well without ever interacting with any form of mechanic whatsoever. Fate forces you to understand a mechanic, and it's not an easy one to grasp unless you already have experience with artsy games. As says, just head over to the Fate generals and see people, whom I'm assuming have years of gaming experience behind them, getting completely flabbergasted by what the hell is and isn't or should or shouldn't be an aspect, for example.

I recall having a hell of a time learning FATE. I always felt like I was grasping the narrative side of the system but then the mechanical side would throw me off.

I could never figure out if this was a problem with me or with FATE.

Again, GNS isn't even taken seriously by the guys who made it. Fate would be considered a narrative system, not a gamist one by the standards of that old theory.

It's also very difficult to tell how difficult Fate would be for a genuinely new player to pick up, because fucking everyone starts with D&D, which (jokes about brain damage aside) does seem to create a very specific mindset that is very unlike Fate, and so learning Fate after D&D typically takes deprogramming.

They are flabbergasted because they have been trained to do other stuff. It's like having wrong muscle memory fucking you over when you adapt to doing something new (even something as simple as a new keyboard).

A new player with no preconceptions will just accept and understand/grasp how aspects work/supposed to work because he doesn't have any habits.

Yeah, I've been using FAE not FATE, maybe that's important? Also, a shortened version because even FAE is a bit too wordy.

You absolutely need to know the mechanics to effectively play D&D, you just think otherwise because most groups will prop up a player that doesn't know how with their own expertise. You could maybe run an old school fighter without knowing the game (and I fucking doubt it, since not knowing the game there will get your shit wrecked, and later edition fighters require actual knowledge to run), but anything beyond that will require knowing the system. Explaining Vancian casting to a new player is like pulling teeth.

>Yeah, I've been using FAE not FATE, maybe that's important? Also, a shortened version because even FAE is a bit too wordy.
Wait, what the hell is FAE? I thought you just typo-ed FATE.

Been thinking some sort of stamina system. You gain X stamina (up to Y max) you spend on attacking. When someone is attacked, he can spend stamina on dodging. Both sides to this as a blind bid (so you can spend a little on attack to make a foe over-commit to dodging, and the defender can spend none and tank the hit to have more stamina to hit back), modified by your stats.

Could replace dice in just about any combat system with little issue.

As it happens, I can at least attest to having tried both and yes, Fate confuses people a lot more. Admittedly I've only tried both on kids 12-13, so I suppose someone might be able to argue that D&D is simple at every age while Fate requires a certain level of maturity (then again, according to Piaget's theory of development by 12-13 you're cognitively basically an adult. You're still lacking experience and emotionally you're a wreck, but your brain is essentially fully baked). Fate, frankly, requires you to think like someone who plays narrativist rpgs. Not like an "actor", not like a "writer", not like anything but a person who plays narrativist rpgs (regardless of Evil Hat Games' pretensions to the contrary, writers and actors don't actually create their characters with anything even resembling "aspects" conceptually). If you have any other kind of experience or lack that particular one, it will be tough on you to learn. I'd even go as far as to say that compared to the much maligned D&D starting off with Fate cripples you further since that kind of experience will only ever be useful with a very specific kind of game whilst the basic experience of playing D&D, GURPS, BRP or Savage Worlds for that matter is universally educational.

FATE Accelerated. It's a stripped down version of FATE. Removes things like the skill pyramid.

>You absolutely need to know the mechanics to effectively play D&D

>Sure, you wouldn't be GOOD
No one said otherwise. You wouldn't be good, but you'd still be able to play. If the point of your game is teaching you what roleplaying games are, and you've never played anything like that before, that's all you're looking for. You're not looking to be good, you're looking to be competitive, you're not even looking to win. You just want to be eased into an experience that's very different from any other game you've likely ever played. These are the very basics, far more fundamental than any kind of mechanic. Ideas like "playing a character" or "what is a GM". You want to advance from that to Fate, be anyone's guest, but don't start off already asking people to think about traits, aspects and dice rolls. It's backwards thinking.

I understand that all this seems like a no brainer to you, but that's simply because it's been that long since you've started playing. You have to understand that what looks completely obvious to you may not be to people who, at best, may've come closest to roleplaying games playing an MMORPG, if even at that (and before you say "cops and robbers" - you'd be further proving my point since that game has no mechanics, and certainly no narrative mechanics. If anything, you'd be able to better simulate it with the aforementioned "D&D where the GM interacts with the rules", not Fate.).

Would be interesting to see. I have a feeling the blind bidding could either be spot-on or disastrous.

Well, that stupid fucking pyramid was one of my big complaints. Perhaps I should check this out.

Fair warning about the mechanics of FAE: it uses Approaches instead of Skills for most rolls, with the idea being you roll the one that best fits how you describe your action. Unfortunately, one of them is "cleverly", which is essentially always applicable (as someone once pointed out, the correct action in any situation is "clever" by definition) so you got to establish some kind of honor rules with your players about when to use or not use it. Otherwise they'll just maximize it and never roll anything else.

>sure you wouldn't be GOOD

Mealy-mouthed ass-covering. In OSR editions you'll need to have a basic idea of concepts like hitpoints or saving throws to make an effective risk/reward calculus to actually play the game, (assuming the only class that could be argued to require no mechanical knowledge, because some versions didn't have fuck all in the way of special abilities, the fighter) and in later editions you'll need to understand concepts like feats and special abilities, some of which enter into more detailed areas of the game. Even a Champion fighter in 5th will require you to know how action surge works.

This is like arguing that you don't need to know the mechanics of Fate, because you could just squeak by with never spending Fate points, which is technically possible.

You yourself started with D&D (or something comparable), so you may have done a poor job explaining it due to your own initial programming.

Truly new players would be a group just picking up the books and figuring it out themselves.

Just to make it clear, you are arguing with at least 2 people.

>You want to advance from that to Fate, be anyone's guest, but don't start off already asking people to think about traits, aspects and dice rolls. It's backwards thinking.

But I actually tried it in practice and it works?

Like, you can have this theory about how FATE is bad for beginners, but all the (more artsy) beginners I tried it with grasped it pretty well.

Again, it depends of the type of players they are.

I had even more polarizing results with PbtA, where one of the (less experienced) players instantly bought into it, while the other half (experienced players in D&D, Deathwatch, WoD) have thrown a hissyfit of epic proportions.

Not him, but that's the main thing that turned me off FAE. The approaches system basically boils down to "how can I asspull putting my highest approach to every situation ever?"

>Mealy-mouthed ass-covering. In OSR editions you'll need to have a basic idea of concepts like hitpoints or saving throws to make an effective risk/reward calculus to actually play the game,
Doesn't matter, by now you're either completely missing the point or deliberately avoiding it. Nobody's aiming to play well. You're facing with someone who has NEVER played an RPG. Someone to whom you need to explain what is a GM. Someone who is presently not even fully comfortable sitting around a bunch of geeks and speaking in character (for that matter, someone who doesn't even know what speaking in character MEANS). You're merely looking to explain to them those basic things, that's all, nothing else. You might as well use freeform (in fact, you probably should, but the point was that from a player's persepctive a game like that is actually closer to freeform than Fate since you don't have to handle any rules to basically do it).

Did you miss the second paragraph? What you are arguing is like arguing you could play Fate without spending Fate points, which is actually rule. You could just hand someone a character and ask them to periodically roll dice the same way as you do in D&D. Fate is after all just FUDGE with an additional system on top.

I mean, they're just going to play Fate, it's not like they have to do it well. :^)

Sure is convenient to be able to claim anyone who disagrees with you is unqualified to argue in the first place. You'd say that to anyone who doesn't say they've started with Fate (good luck finding those people), and those people wouldn't be here if the game confused them so much they weren't able to continue.

In other words, there's no arguing with you. Go along with your day, I'm done.

Aspects always need tinkering, it's best to fit them to the setting (like PbtA games do).

You could even do something like use MtG color-pie as your aspects.

This is sorta intentional. The idea is that different characters deal in different ways with the situation at hand, but they can deal with it (and they may still need some setup to help deal with it in their preferred way).

Still, you should set hard limits and be strict about "no stretching". Also add the "discover" action to curb Clever abuse a bit.

>I'm done.

You're awfully butthurt about a simple point. You haven't empirically verified shit with these tests, because they're fundamentally flawed.

>Fate is after all just FUDGE with an additional system on top.
A system which is absolutely, completely and utterly essential to any and all facets of the game. You might as well be playing freeform at this point (which, surprise, surprise, is what I myself said before). The experience would still be closer to playing bad D&D than any kind of Fate, though.

Eh, honestly I'll just stick with Fate Core. The idea behind FAE is alright, but I don't find Core difficult to work with at all, and Core includes some support for other edge cases that FAE doesn't.

>You haven't empirically verified shit with these tests,because they're fundamentally flawed.
>Only a Thetan infiltrator would question the word of Xenu
>One mustn't listen to Thetan infilitrators
>checkmate atheists

But it really isn't. You want to pop a guy in the mouth, you can roll fighting, you want to climb a fence, drive a car, or persuade a dude, you just roll the appropriate skill.

No, more like someone with a background in a completely different game would have his own hangups that may inhibit his ability to effectively teach a game totally unlike what he initially learned. Difficulty in learning can quite as easily be a matter of the teacher rather than student or material.

Actually, if you're doing that you're playing a simulationist system, albeit an extremely simplistic one. So is still right. D&D was obviously only used as an example (GURPS was also given). The point that simulationist systems are easier to start with remains.

Yes, but given that by your standards you'd only apparently listen to someone who themselves started with Fate, taught it to others, and saw it work (otherwise the example is invalid since THEIR EXPERIENCE WAS CLEARLY SIMPLY CORRUPTED BY D&D), you've basically already decided to only regard examples that support your opinion. You might as well be arguing religion.

He hasn't actually effectively established the only relevant consideration "does GNS theory describe anything?" We can see here that this supposedly narrativist system is now simulationist if you ignore one of its mechanical subsystems, which weakens the initial theory.

Reminder: GNS theory is not taken seriously even by the guys who made it.

Fair enuff. I prefer re-adding systems to a simpler base over removing/rewriting systems I dislike, but it basically ends up the same.

Actually, I'd only consider tests that had some sort of methodological validity to be anything more than anecdotal hearsay. If you got groups of new players together, handed them the books, and let them figure out the games themselves, and then observed which had the easier time picking it up, and then repeated the tests, you might actually be on to something.

Well, it's not like the basic systems in Core are much more complicated. I just like its skill list better.

The way I see it, less rules equals more dependancy on th way the GM sees the world... the GM's job is to make up rules on the spot for whatever doesn't have a table, chart or list.

not too in to it, makes gameplay too chesslike, where you can see the outcome a mile away

Okay there Deep Blue

Which is something that's never been done and you know full well nobody will do. The only thing you'll ever have to go by is people's personal experience, which you've made clear you're going to shut down as soon as it contradicts your claims.

I'm writing a game with token based combat system. It's like a gross bastardization of FFG SW, Ryuutama and ... IN SPACE.

You roll dice once per round, and they only give you some tokens in addition of your equipment and some other factors.

Non-combat does happen with dice though. Having no randomization with static obstacles makes the game either too easy or your GM an asshole.

>Would be interesting to see. I have a feeling the blind bidding could either be spot-on or disastrous.

Probably use SW as base.

>Replace the dice with average modifiers
>Raising still exists if you "overshoot" by multiples of 4
>Every turn, you get, say, 5 stamina, up to 10 (can be modified by edges). Enemies can get more or less, depending on size / how capable they are supposed to be.
>Whenever you'd make a roll, you can instead spend X stamina to raise it by X.
>Whenever a roll is made against you (and you are aware) you do the bid thing.
> Bennies can be spent as a 5 (but they don't regen).
> Help actions can pass stamina to others.
> Assess actions can be used to figure out how much stamina someone has?

You could use that silent bidding, stamina resource idea that was mentioned earlier. If you want to perform X action, bid an amount of stamina. The DM bids the "cost" of the action. If you fail the bid, you get a notch on the Bad Stuff track. After enough failures, Bad Stuff happens. If you run out of stamina Bad Stuff automatically happens. You'd ideally price things for a scene instead of a single action so that you can't get away with bidding 99% all the time. Either that, or you have a rest mechanic that bakes in scenes for you.

The first edition of Conspiracy X wasn't quite without random elements, but it was designed for them to be extremely minimal. I don't remember the exact numbers but basically if someone's trait is 2 or higher than the opposition then they succeed every time. If it's equal or 1 higher, there's a dice roll involved but the odds aren't in their favor (something like rolling a 10+ on 2d6 or something). It was really meant to push the idea that you should never, ever confront the aliens directly because you WILL lose.

Nah, the system runs on symbol dice, so the idea is that you get one symbol token you can use per die, but you always got to roleplay how you use that specific token.

The risk in the game is more in using the "bad" tokens that you can use at any point, and using them means you do something evil.

So it's basically "We're all paladins now": The Game. But it's supposed to be a game about fairy tales, so it works.

My game also already had a bidding system like that. As said, I bastardized IN SPAAACE into it. That just happens only when a direct contest (i.e you get attacked or something to the effect). Using "evil" tokens of course means that you cheat or throw a sucker punch, something to that effect.