Blargh
You know, there's something wrong when you describe your day as having "ups and downs" only to realize upon scrutiny that the "ups" were actually only an absence of unpleasantness - that the best part of the day was really only neutral rather than good. For the most part, it's been a minorly-sucky week. Nothing seriously bad has happened. The frustrations at work has mostly been resolved, even if some have taken longer than I would have liked. But it often times puts me in a mindset that has me dwelling on small things.
"The room is a mess..."
"The exterior improvements at home aren't done..."
"Cars are so expensive I may never been able to replace my truck..."
"People are making changes without talking to me..."
"The appraiser has to call home while I'm at work..."
All sorts of little things bouncing in my head, bugging me to the point where I become miserable about them and even passing comments can seriously compound my annoyance. Such moods pass, thankfully, but my emotional being doesn't seem nearly as sound as it once was.
Grawr!
Additional Thought: I think a failed heroic Azjol'Nerub run probably ended up as my high point of yesterday. It wasn't great, but I managed to enjoy learning from it to a small degree.
By self-definition, a roleplaying game would be a game in which the players act a role. That's the theory, right? And yet, the RPG genre may be more defined by the character advancement aspect - that's certainly true in video games, at least. Run around shooting things, gaining skill points you can spend to increase traits along the way? That's a "first-person shooter with RPG elements." In tabletop games, that might be more arguable, but most I've seen include some form of experience points.
Character advancement. The game within the game. The part that "crunch"-loving players can sink their teeth into, whether to savor the flavor or shake the game around like a limp carcass until it falls to pieces.
The mechanics, of course, vary from system to system. Games like D&D tend to use large numbers, allowing for a wide variety of rewards, with certain levels of new character capability. Most games that allow the tracked points to be spent directly tend to use smaller numbers. That makes sense. Why bother setting things up so you reward several hundred points a session and have the least increase cost 100, when you could give out single digits and have increases costing 1 and up?
Some games pay a lot of attention to character advancement and some don't. From what I've seen, the former gets to be a problem because it intimidates players with no head for the math or who simply don't care about it. The latter, on the other hand, tend to break down when players who do have a head for the system have at it. I'd hypothesize the only ideal is to pick a system that works best for the group playing, but most groups I've been in are mixed, so that doesn't seem to work.
Let me make an example of CJ Carella's Witchcraft. Taking the basic book version of the game, starting characters tend to be above average, either by virtue of stats/skills or supernatural ability. "Average" stats are about three. It's fairly simple for characters to end up with fours or maybe fives in their most important traits. There are limits built into attribute advancement, but not so much for skills. If a character focuses, 20 XP might have his most important attribute and skill at "normal" human maximums. 100 XP characters are either going to have an extreme range of abilities, or be certifiable badasses - sometimes both. That's not, in and of itself, a problem.
Things get a little more awkward in that rewards might vary. I play in multiple games. One GM commonly rewards between two and three XP per session. Another averages closer to five. Naturally, the characters in the latter game gain power and flexibility faster. This still isn't necessarily a bad thing, for two reasons that I see. 1) It's a tabletop game, so there's one GM and a handful of players. That means the GM can usually scale the challenges according to what the group can handle. 2) The setting is fairly friendly to such advancement. There are nasty supernatural critters that could gut and clean a starting character before they blink - there's enough room on the high end to offer challenge.
But there's a down side, too. The system doesn't scale very smoothly. With supernaturally-high dice pools, every attack tends to be either a miss or a awesome-hit-with-extra-damage. With rare exception, a character's ability to soak and survive damage lags well behind their ability to dish it out, making any of those hits more lethal. This generally means a GM has to be fairly careful, or risk casual slaughter of PCs. While it's possible to challenge powerful characters, it's difficult to (for example) challenge a combat-heavy character without serious risk of even accidental death to the magic-heavy character.
How games handle this varies.
- Exalted expects badassery, setting up starting exalts as well above common mortals and letting them go from there. High-power combat in the game morphs, oddly, from depletion of life totals to "whoever runs out of motes or fails a perfect defense first dies gruesomely."
- Dungeons and Dragons scales everything in levels. That seems to work okay most of the time, but is somewhat unrealistic in an open/persistant world when you really pause and look at how the kobolds that threatened the PCs' home town are only a hundred miles from the races of advanced, high-level lizardmen that are so much more dangerous they should have conquered the lower-level territories ages ago.
Furryfaire I find hard to judge accurately. It's a totally different type of game in some important ways. For one, it doesn't have the "GM and small group" dynamics. For another thing, it's been running in its current incarnation for years, and many of those initial characters are still around alongside new ones. And while the system has stuff available at higher power levels, it's doesn't appear designed for it to me. So... I can't really gauge how it would work as a tabletop game because I haven't seen it run that way save for a short time at the very beginning. Now, the total XP for characters ranges so wildly that anything is skewed. There aren't much in the way of hard mechanical limits. High-end mages could do all sorts of insane, world-altering things and no one can really stop them. On top of that, the challenges in the setting are usually "normal-level" (basic warriors, members of orders, etc.) while experienced PCs blow them away in almost every regard.
I may have made the argument somewhere before, but I feel a game like that needs hard limits and slower advancement. A player may not feel they're rewarded as quickly, but it keeps the field from becoming so ridiculously imbalanced. For comparison, I don't think MMORPGs have level caps simply because of code issues, but rather to keep gameplay under control.
Gah. That's longer than I would have thought, but I think I'm done rambling for the moment.
"The room is a mess..."
"The exterior improvements at home aren't done..."
"Cars are so expensive I may never been able to replace my truck..."
"People are making changes without talking to me..."
"The appraiser has to call home while I'm at work..."
All sorts of little things bouncing in my head, bugging me to the point where I become miserable about them and even passing comments can seriously compound my annoyance. Such moods pass, thankfully, but my emotional being doesn't seem nearly as sound as it once was.
Grawr!
Additional Thought: I think a failed heroic Azjol'Nerub run probably ended up as my high point of yesterday. It wasn't great, but I managed to enjoy learning from it to a small degree.
By self-definition, a roleplaying game would be a game in which the players act a role. That's the theory, right? And yet, the RPG genre may be more defined by the character advancement aspect - that's certainly true in video games, at least. Run around shooting things, gaining skill points you can spend to increase traits along the way? That's a "first-person shooter with RPG elements." In tabletop games, that might be more arguable, but most I've seen include some form of experience points.
Character advancement. The game within the game. The part that "crunch"-loving players can sink their teeth into, whether to savor the flavor or shake the game around like a limp carcass until it falls to pieces.
The mechanics, of course, vary from system to system. Games like D&D tend to use large numbers, allowing for a wide variety of rewards, with certain levels of new character capability. Most games that allow the tracked points to be spent directly tend to use smaller numbers. That makes sense. Why bother setting things up so you reward several hundred points a session and have the least increase cost 100, when you could give out single digits and have increases costing 1 and up?
Some games pay a lot of attention to character advancement and some don't. From what I've seen, the former gets to be a problem because it intimidates players with no head for the math or who simply don't care about it. The latter, on the other hand, tend to break down when players who do have a head for the system have at it. I'd hypothesize the only ideal is to pick a system that works best for the group playing, but most groups I've been in are mixed, so that doesn't seem to work.
Let me make an example of CJ Carella's Witchcraft. Taking the basic book version of the game, starting characters tend to be above average, either by virtue of stats/skills or supernatural ability. "Average" stats are about three. It's fairly simple for characters to end up with fours or maybe fives in their most important traits. There are limits built into attribute advancement, but not so much for skills. If a character focuses, 20 XP might have his most important attribute and skill at "normal" human maximums. 100 XP characters are either going to have an extreme range of abilities, or be certifiable badasses - sometimes both. That's not, in and of itself, a problem.
Things get a little more awkward in that rewards might vary. I play in multiple games. One GM commonly rewards between two and three XP per session. Another averages closer to five. Naturally, the characters in the latter game gain power and flexibility faster. This still isn't necessarily a bad thing, for two reasons that I see. 1) It's a tabletop game, so there's one GM and a handful of players. That means the GM can usually scale the challenges according to what the group can handle. 2) The setting is fairly friendly to such advancement. There are nasty supernatural critters that could gut and clean a starting character before they blink - there's enough room on the high end to offer challenge.
But there's a down side, too. The system doesn't scale very smoothly. With supernaturally-high dice pools, every attack tends to be either a miss or a awesome-hit-with-extra-damage. With rare exception, a character's ability to soak and survive damage lags well behind their ability to dish it out, making any of those hits more lethal. This generally means a GM has to be fairly careful, or risk casual slaughter of PCs. While it's possible to challenge powerful characters, it's difficult to (for example) challenge a combat-heavy character without serious risk of even accidental death to the magic-heavy character.
How games handle this varies.
- Exalted expects badassery, setting up starting exalts as well above common mortals and letting them go from there. High-power combat in the game morphs, oddly, from depletion of life totals to "whoever runs out of motes or fails a perfect defense first dies gruesomely."
- Dungeons and Dragons scales everything in levels. That seems to work okay most of the time, but is somewhat unrealistic in an open/persistant world when you really pause and look at how the kobolds that threatened the PCs' home town are only a hundred miles from the races of advanced, high-level lizardmen that are so much more dangerous they should have conquered the lower-level territories ages ago.
Furryfaire I find hard to judge accurately. It's a totally different type of game in some important ways. For one, it doesn't have the "GM and small group" dynamics. For another thing, it's been running in its current incarnation for years, and many of those initial characters are still around alongside new ones. And while the system has stuff available at higher power levels, it's doesn't appear designed for it to me. So... I can't really gauge how it would work as a tabletop game because I haven't seen it run that way save for a short time at the very beginning. Now, the total XP for characters ranges so wildly that anything is skewed. There aren't much in the way of hard mechanical limits. High-end mages could do all sorts of insane, world-altering things and no one can really stop them. On top of that, the challenges in the setting are usually "normal-level" (basic warriors, members of orders, etc.) while experienced PCs blow them away in almost every regard.
I may have made the argument somewhere before, but I feel a game like that needs hard limits and slower advancement. A player may not feel they're rewarded as quickly, but it keeps the field from becoming so ridiculously imbalanced. For comparison, I don't think MMORPGs have level caps simply because of code issues, but rather to keep gameplay under control.
Gah. That's longer than I would have thought, but I think I'm done rambling for the moment.
One might describe the escalation of character power in Faire to that of a malignant tumorous growth, something that, while contained and small at onset is something that can be worked with, but once it has spread out and grown, it becomes a problem that may one day kill its host. :D
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