Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game

[Thenomain]

To me, "gritty" is more about realism in fantasy; hunger, disease, people trying to live and survive. I've played a fairly gritty D&D campaign before, so it doesn't need to be reflected in the system. What will the GM focus on?

Since we rely on the system to fill that role on Mu*s, I'd like to add Burning Wheel to what I consider as gritty. I don't think Dungeon World is gritty, though Apocalypse World is. AW doesn't have any "survival" rules, though if you read the book you know that if you're not playing up the post-apocalypse then you are playing wrong.

This can be handled by wikis and news files, for the bolder games that are willing to make a statement like "you are playing this wrong".

@magee101: "Friday Night Firefight" has been the name of the combat system since the original Cyberpunk (2013, of all things; how we saw the future as depressing and how unexpectedly depressing it came down to be).

[golgoth]

This post is deleted!

[magee101]

@Thenomain
Ah I thought they did FNFF for 203X, thanks for the headsup!

[Finn]

@fatefan It's future based, but as a staffer on Shadowrun Denver, I can attest that plots I'm running are most definitely "gritty fantasy". Elves using car bombs. Free Spirits in hoc to infobrokers...that kind of thing.

[Ominous]

I had a random thought today about this. What about Harn? Has anyone run a Harn game?

It might have the right combination of elements for a MU*. It's math heavy which makes having a computer handle resolution an optimum strategy, and it is highly detailed and thematic, so players can get very immersed in the setting.

[JinShei]

How about fate? It's simple and story driven, so themes can easily be a match..

[fatefan]

@JinShei I don't see Fate as particularly gritty but, given my user name, it remains omnipresent in my mind.

(I also wish there were a more up-to-date version of Fate code to plug and play, but that's a different topic altogether.)

[WTFE]

@Bobotron said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

@fatefan
I recall hearing that FS3 doesn't really do anything but scifi and modern very well without serious tweaking.

And it doesn't do those particularly well either.

[faraday]

@WTFE said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

@Bobotron said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

@fatefan
I recall hearing that FS3 doesn't really do anything but scifi and modern very well without serious tweaking.

And it doesn't do those particularly well either.

Gee thanks. At any rate, yes I agree that FS3 is not the best fit for a gritty fantasy game. You can do it, but it was designed for a specific type of game - cooperative, near-modern, lightly-coded.

[WTFE]

@faraday said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

@WTFE said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

@Bobotron said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

@fatefan
I recall hearing that FS3 doesn't really do anything but scifi and modern very well without serious tweaking.

And it doesn't do those particularly well either.

Gee thanks.

Every time I've been on a game that uses FS3 (that's about a half-dozen by now), people have tried the system, right down to in one case staff having a set of LESSONS in how to use it. And in every case--no exceptions--it was deemed so unusable by most of the players that when staff wasn't running scenes (and thus forcing the issue) the players fell back to some variant on "roll a die, whoever rolls highest determines outcome" and then just posed accordingly. I would not call this a resounding success for the system.

Maybe it works well on your game. I have no idea. I've never logged on to find out. It hasn't worked on any other game I've seen it applied to and, in fact, it is now a mark against a game when I evaluate "do I want to play here?".

So, if you want me off your game, @fatefan, just use FS3!

[Seraphim73]

@WTFE That's definitely not the experience that I've had using the system for... uh... 3 games now. In each one, players have run scenes using +combat. Given that it's simpler than most tabletop systems implemented into MU*s, I'm not surprised by that fact.

[faraday]

@WTFE said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

Every time I've been on a game that uses FS3 (that's about a half-dozen by now), people have tried the system, right down to in one case staff having a set of LESSONS in how to use it. And in every case--no exceptions--it was deemed so unusable by most of the players that when staff wasn't running scenes (and thus forcing the issue) the players fell back to some variant on "roll a die, whoever rolls highest determines outcome" and then just posed accordingly. I would not call this a resounding success for the system.

The basic mechanic is a pretty simple +roll system where you get results like "Good Success" or "Great Success" so I'm honestly baffled as to what would be so confounding that people would resort to just rolling a random die.

But seriously, if you don't like it, that's cool. It's not a system that's suited for every game. It's not intended to be. That's why at @Thenomain's suggestion I wrote a new guide for 3rd edition that goes more into why you should (or shouldn't) choose FS3 for a game and how game runners can tweak it without horribly unbalancing things. Various games have used it successfully. If it turns you away, no biggie. I feel the same about D20, so - everyone's mileage will vary.

[WTFE]

@Seraphim73 It's combats in particular that had people throwing up their hands and giving up in games that I tried. For a "rules light" system it has a whole metric fuckton of shit to deal with (http://aresmush.com/fs3/fs3-3/combat/ cites: attack, aim, suppress, reload, subdue, escape, rally, treat, and pass) that nobody wanted to deal with in a simple combat--especially given that most of the things people wanted to do seemed to always fall into the "pass and resolve manually" column. And that's just the possible actions. It doesn't cover things like stances, hit locations, cover, armour, individual wound tracking, knockouts, healing, etc.

I mean the system has a COMBAT HUD for crying out loud!

And note in the combat HUD the section for vehicles? Note how in the rules I linked for combat there's nothing mentioned about vehicles? In fact there's a whole bunch of stuff in the combat rules section that turn out to be in the actual system when you look over the commands for running a combat. And they're largely undocumented (like vehicles).

I'm serious about how in literally every game I've tried that used some version of FS3 or another people just stopped using the game system until forced to by staff plots.

[faraday]

@WTFE Thank you for pointing out that the main combat intro has no section on vehicles. That was just an oversight, which I'll fix. 3rd edition and its documentation are still in beta. The feedback is appreciated.

And yes, although the +roll system is simple, the combat system is robust. It is designed for big combats in war games like Battlestar to give players some flexibility in their actions so it's not just 'shoot shoot shoot' over and over. There is indeed a learning curve, absolutely.

I'm sorry to hear you've had poor experiences with it, though. My experience has been quite different. On BSGU last night we just ran through a massive combat with 12 PCs and dozens of NPCs and got through it all in three hours. In only one round did anybody do anything that required a manual pass/roll. There were several players who had never been in a combat before and they picked it up pretty quickly. This is what FS3 +combat is for. Even I don't use it for 1-on-1 sparring sessions or simple crap like that. A simple +roll will suffice.

I don't want to derail the thread further, so anyone with any specific feedback about improving FS3 is welcome to PM me.

[WTFE]

I can see how FS3 would suit a game that's oriented toward battles and, in particular, large battles. For that, I would likely withdraw any objections I have to FS3. Thing is, the games I've seen it used in weren't oriented to large battles.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

I generally use opposed rolls for one-on-one sparring and the like on FS3 games (opposed rolls are actually one of my favorite aspects of Fara games). I don't think the +combat is suited for everything, though for what it is suited for, I think it does it well. It made learning to GM large combats on BS Cerberus pretty painless (I did some player GMing before I was a staffer there, and my experience player-side made me more sure I could handle it), and I thought it worked well for small group combat on X-Factor, even if the mutant powers still had to be +roll'd and up to some GM discretion.

[faraday]

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

... I thought it worked well for small group combat on X-Factor, even if the mutant powers still had to be +roll'd and up to some GM discretion.

Yeah I mean... the whole point of it is to automate the combat resolutions to make combat scenes go quickly. If you're having to resort to manual +rolls for a lot of stuff, I honestly don't know what real benefit you're getting from it. FS3 can be used without +combat, though. It's an optional add-on.

[ThatGuyThere]

@WTFE
Then those players might have issues understanding any mechanics. Heck the documentation on how the system works is available and except for the +combat parts it not complicated at all and the +combat parts are entirely handled by the code. Certainly not more complicated than WoD or Shadowrun or D+D 2.5/Pathfinder which have all been used for multiple games.
I have been on I two games that used it, and while i will admit most scenes did not use the mechanics, the same has been true for any game I have been on, mechanics tend to be brought out only when the randomness is wanted or when disagreements arise regardless of the system in play.

[JinShei]

@fatefan The benefit is that it can be anything - on the note of fate code, the folks starting a new mush have some that they have promised to post. Theirs is a mix of the fate systems. I'm sure that the other game coming up with fate will share theirs too You've seen Exeter's stuff?

[Ganymede]

@WTFE said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

I can see how FS3 would suit a game that's oriented toward battles and, in particular, large battles. For that, I would likely withdraw any objections I have to FS3. Thing is, the games I've seen it used in weren't oriented to large battles.

So, FS3 might not be good for them. We get that.

Do you have any suggestions on what to use? Frankly, I don't think one exists. I think you have to go homebrew because everyone has their own idea as to what sort of fantasy world they want to create. A Final Fantasy game is going to need different code and systems than a Witcher game, for instance.