Dislike Button: Point-Build Systems

Inspired by Facebook's "Like" button (and the often requested "Dislike" button), I thought I'd take an entry now and then to talk about things I like and dislike in RPGs. I'll tag all of these posts with "Button" so that you can see them all in one place and get an idea of whether or not my tastes are like yours, which should be useful to you if I ever review RPG products here.

Dislike Button: Point-Build Systems

Now I'm not talking about little things like buying your attributes in D&D 4e. That has a very minor impact on the direction of character creation in that game, which mostly involves picking abilities from ever-growing lists. Offenders for this crime include systems like GURPS and HERO. Games where a player can't just sit down and say, "I want my dude to throw fireballs!" and then look up the fireball power and reference it on his sheet. If you want your "dude" to "throw fireballs" in these systems, get ready to crunch some serious numbers.

"Okay. Do you see your fireball being a thing that just hits one guy or hits a bunch of guys? Area powers cost extra you know. Hits a bunch of guys? Okay, does it explode or just kind of land on them? If it explodes, maybe you could buy the knockback feature with the power. You'll need three or four levels of it to lift anyone off the ground though. How far away can you fire it from? Do guys keep burning after it hits? Alright, buy these adders too then... This is getting too expensive for your character. You'll have to buy it with endurance drain to offset the price. Ooh, or you could take an allergy to cactus jelly and a dependent NPC with chronic anemia! That should give you just enough points to buy this without having the drawback of needing a material focus to use it."

Do you see where I'm coming from? These systems often gloat of their capability to handle any genre, but you're practically making a game yourself by the time you build all of the components. And even after that, we still don't know what a fireball really is! Another player in the same game could want a fireball-throwing power and build it completely differently unless you decide that the first player's decisions are canon in your game world.

The only way I could see myself enduring one of these systems would be if the GM had, in advance, custom built all of the options in his world from the point system. This would provide a consistency and logic across powers that would make sense in the world. But even at that point I'd end up building my character by poring over a text document, and at that point, I'd just as soon use a system built for whatever genre I'm trying to play.

PDQ#: Scaling Fortes by Genre

One role-playing game that I've run and enjoyed recently is Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies (often abbreviated as S7S). The system that runs the game is called PDQ#, and it's available for free as a pdf. (Though I strongly recommend taking the plunge and buying S7S if you like what you read in the free PDQ# pdf as it has a much more extensive treatment of the rules.)

Also, I'm a big fan of shounen fighting anime shows like Naruto and Bleach. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children qualifies as well. Pretty much any anime that involves characters defying physics, throwing energy bolts, and shouting the names of special attacks while they perform them will probably go over well with me.

Recently, I had a thought on how to make PDQ# more capable of handling the gravity-defying fight scenes of my favorite shows. All you'll need to do is write a short list of genre assumptions with a single reference to game terms for each. I'll give an example here using leaping. In the anime I like, trained characters seem to be capable of easily leaping from the ground to rooftops. Using that, I'll write the following.

"For characters with an appropriate forte (ninja, acrobat, etc.), leaping from the ground to a two-story rooftop is an Average (Target Number 7) task."

Bam! Other than considering the appropriate fortes to be secret, technical, or esoteric (PDQ# p. 16), that's all you really need. Other target numbers can be easily ball-parked from there. For example, let's say that Cloud (of Final Fantasy VII fame), with the Master [+6] Ex-Soldier forte has some leaping to do.

Cloud needs to leap to a rooftop from the ground (TN 7). TN 7.

Cloud needs to leap to a rooftop from the ground (TN 7) in the dark (+2). TN 9.

Cloud needs to leap to a high (+2) rooftop from the ground (TN 7) in the dark (+2). TN 11.

Cloud needs to leap to a very (+2) high (+2) rooftop (TN 7) in the dark (+2) while Sephiroth (+2) slices free chunks of said building and sends them plummeting toward him (+2). TN 17.

And so on. I think this is a lot easier than finding out what kind of astronomical forte modifiers one might need on the normal human scale to achieve the crazy TN you'd have to come up with.

I Think About Games... a Lot.

So I'm sitting before a newly-minted blog overthinking the contents of this first post. On one hand, it sets the tone for posts to come, and it makes a critical first impression. On the other, I can think of maybe two times I've read all the way back to the first post of a blog, so it probably isn't that important.

Anyhow, on with the show...

My name is Rob, and I find myself thinking about games a lot each day. I mostly think about role-playing games. Back in my early teen years, I was introduced to RPGs by a cousin of mine during a holiday trip to our grandparents' house. He didn't have any rulebooks along during that trip, so he made up a basic dungeon-crawling game. I played some kind of blue gargoyle with a pitchfork if I remember correctly. My character wandered around some tunnels and killed some monsters. I don't really remember much about it except that it was a lot of fun. Only on a later trip did he show me his Dungeons & Dragons books, and reveal that there was a much bigger game behind the small, simple thing he'd shown me.

I wouldn't have a regular RPG group until I went off to college where I met the friends who I gamed with for six years or so. We mostly played recent editions of D&D or d20 System games, though there were a few attempts (mostly by me) to try out other games here and there. I have lots of fond memories of gaming in college, including 12-hour gaming binges and that spring break during which I stayed at a fellow player's house and we played every single day.

But those days are behind me now. I've moved back to my hometown from where I went to college, and I don't get to play nearly as often as I used to, which is a bummer. This leaves me thinking a lot about games, and happens to neatly bring me back around to my statement of purpose. I love it when that happens.

I've started this blog to share my thoughts on RPGs. Sometimes I'm daydreaming about designing my own game. Other times, I'll have ideas about how to make an existing game behave more to my (and perhaps your) liking. And yes, maybe sometimes I'll just want to tell you about my character. (I beg your pardon in advance.) This is a space for me to empty my mind. When I don't empty it, I tend to fixate on the same idea over and over again without accomplishing much. There's something I find very satisfying about writing my thoughts, but I'm pretty disorganized and rarely think to write or type things out in the heat of the moment. Maybe if I put my thoughts here, and start getting feedback, I'll feel accountable to produce more consistently, which would be great.

My (lofty) goal is to update this blog on Mondays and Thursdays. If I produce something that sparks your interest, by all means leave me a comment. I hope we get an opportunity to add fun and fascination to each others' lives through what goes on here.

So welcome. Thanks for dropping in!