Poll: RPG System for OC Hero Game

[WTFE]

Fate for me.

[WTFE]

@fatefan said in Poll: RPG System for OC Hero Game:

@ZombieGenesis As someone who's played a bit of but not run Savage Worlds, what are the barriers for new players you're identifying with that system?

I can't answer for @ZombieGenesis, but I can answer for me.

I really wanted to like Savage Worlds. A lot of people whose opinions I (used to) respect sang hymns to it. They wrote long odes of praise of it. So when I went to Canada I spent the (to me) absurd amounts of my limited Canadian money to snag a copy of Savage Worlds Deluxe: Explorer's Edition.

To say I was underwhelmed would be a criminal offense of understatement. I was strongly disappointed (and it caused me to reevaluate the opinions of people whose taste I used to trust). I just cannot see what the fuss is over this game. It's a fairly simplistic game, but it isn't a simple one. And it is further so badly written that even though it may not be the most complicated game out there, it's incredibly hard to actually get into.

First the simplistic complexity: This is another one of those games where the rules are hidden within descriptions of other things. For example, environmental rules. What is the impact of wet conditions? Can you find that in the GM section under running the game? Nope. Maybe it's under situational rules? Not really, except possibly for the drowning rules. Oh, wait! I found something about wet conditions in the climbing rules! I see! That's elegant! Don't look under "wet conditions", look under the action you're trying to attempt! What about driving? … FUCK! No, that's not in the skill description, that's in its own section 90 pages after the driving skill. Or is it in the chase rules 80 pages afterwards?…

Everything in the rules is this way. Terms are used before definition. And this can be acceptable. (They do this in Fate Core as well sometimes.) But it only works if you PROPERLY CROSS-REFERENCE these things. Which Fate Core did, but Savage Worlds didn't.

And anyway, this is all beside the point. If the system were more coherent, there'd be a set of standard modifiers and the explanations of situations and conditions would reference these without being absolutely necessary. A coherent system lets you apply on-the-fly judgement with simplicity. There is no such coherence in the Savage Worlds game system. A decent bonus/penalty is an adjustment by 2, and you see that all sorts of places. Except where you don't. Where different adjustments are used because reasons.

Here's an interesting challenge. Take someone who is an experienced role-player. Hand them the Savage Worlds rules book. Tell them to make a character. Any character. DO NOT HELP THEM WITH IT. See how long it takes them to correctly make a character. (The key word there is "correctly". There's a few pitfalls along the way caused by unclear writing and poor organization.)

What are some of the pitfalls? Well it took me ages to finally figure out what "novice" and "seasoned" and such meant in picking up edges. I mean hey, those words are used everywhere. Surely they're in the index? Nope. Well surely they're defined before first point of use? Nope. They're defined after all the edges in the advancement rules.

And that only masks the fact that edges themselves aren't really defined in a read-through of how to make a character, nor are they cross-referenced properly so you can flip forward quickly while making your character.

(Oh, for bonus marks, try and figure out how to make the Archetypes using the actual rules for making characters. Hint: as far as I can tell this is not possible. The Archetypes aren't possible in the rules. But I may be wrong; I may have missed some obscure piece buried in the section on finding lost dog bones or soemthing.)

So, let's say you read the game word for word, cover to cover. Then you read it again so you understand the rules. What do you get? You get a game that's ... nothing special. It's miniatures-focused and they SO DESPERATELY want to sell you on more things: world books, special card decks, miniatures, templates, etc. (It's a bit off-putting, that.) But the core system is a routine roll a die against a target number. The schtick is that the die type changes, as do the numbers you add or subtract to the result, but the target number is the same. Oh, and you have the "wild die" which serves mainly to make it hard to judge the odds. Oh, and you have "bennies" (which in inimitable fashion are referenced a dozen times before being described ... and then in their description refer to other undefined things; yes I'm harping on this!). It's just not that great a game system. It's OK. I mean it's not a terrible system. I've seen many worse ones. I just don't get the hype in some circles.

And that's the reason it went from "bleah" to "yuck" for me: the hype. In certain fan circles SW is the Second Coming of Gaming. I spent too much of my own, rare, Canadian currency to get a copy. And it was nothing special that was compounded by being badly written nothing special.

That being said, I love a lot of the world books. I just won't be using Savage Worlds itself with them.

[ZombieGenesis]

@WTFE I agree about the organization of their books. It can be an exercise in frustration trying to find a rule or term or the definition of a trait or keyword or whatever. To the point where I nearly gave up on the system entirely. This is present in all of their books as near as I can tell. They just have no idea how to rationally organize a rule book. Sadly I find this true in a lot of games today, however. I just got a copy of Gloomhaven and their rule book suffers from the same issues (though maybe not quite to the same extent). I've had to hit the internet more than a few times to find clarifications on things that were not really clear at all in Savage Worlds.

The example that almost made me quite was Mega Damage/Heavy Armor. In the Rifts book they mention that Mega Damage functions just like Heavy Armor. Great. Except they don't explain that in the Rifts book. So I go to the rule book. I can find a mention of Heavy Damage under gear mentioning that it can effect Heavy Armor. No mention of Heavy Armor any where in gear. Where do I find the definition of Heavy Armor? Under the vehicles section. It just makes no sense.

Then there's use of Size which also took me a day or two to wrap my head around when and how they use size to modify things.

Savage Worlds is certainly not perfect but I find it to be the best of the "generic RPGs". Once you wrap your head around the concepts I find the game plays fantastically. It can just be getting to that point that's the difficult part.

[fatefan]

@Runescryer The superhero rules for Venture City are available in the Fate SRD: https://fate-srd.com/venture-city/making-your-character-and-powers

[Runescryer]

@ZombieGenesis I think that's true of any Superhero game, and a lot of RPG's in general. Simplicity does not in itself make a system easier to use for some players. For me, systems like FATE or Cypher just feel a bit wonky and loose for superhero games because of the sheer, nearly-unlimited potential for what you can encounter or create in the genre. Or maybe I've just had bad initial experiences that soured me on them; either or. HERO/Champions and M&M feel more 'right' to me by having more defined scales and direct comparisons and measurements (5pts in HERO is 1d6 of effect. Each point in DC Heroes is twice as powerful as the previous point. Etc.)

Superhero games in particular walk a very fine line between simplicity and complexity. If you get right down to it, both HERO and M&M are fairly simple systems rules-wise; roll, add or subtract modifiers, compare result to a target number to determine success or failure. Simple. The complexity comes in building characters and powers. If you look at a game like, say, D&D (any edition), character advancement and powers, spells or otherwise, are already pre-created for you, so there's no real need for a 'tool box' to allow you to create your own powers or abilities. Making minor changes (swapping out Fire effect for Cold on Burning Hands to create a spell that shoots shards of ice instead of flames, for example) may have negligible effects on the system. Creating new paths of advancement or classes can lead to problematic imbalances in power scale (remember how broken the Gladiator class in Dark Sun was? I'm a Fighter that can use any weapon without penalty, even that brand new homebrewed weapon the DM just created! Who cares if I'm a slave; that's just about the default state for everyone here. And who cares about armor? It's 50 Bazillion degrees out and the whole planet is a desert!). Marvel FASERIP is the one system that managed to balance that walk beautifully, but all the powers are pre-built, leading to the (admittedly rare for FASERIP) occasional situation of 'What if I want to be able to do X?' where X isn't covered already by the system.

Superhero systems that get a 'complex' rap are usually systems like HERO and M&M where the bulk of the book is a customization toolkit that tells you how to create powers, skills, abilities, etc. And, several times, they don't do very good jobs at explaining how to create what you're thinking of (HERO actually does a decent job of this, with examples for just about every power in the core book). To be fair, both HERO and M&M also put out splatbooks (UNTIL Superpowers Database/Ultimate Series & Powers Database Series, respectively) that contain numerous examples of how to recreate powers and things you see in the comics with the game system. But, these aren't in the core rules. In my experience, a lot of people look at the size of the rulebook, especially MU players used to freeform, and their eyes glaze over thinking that the entire book has to be known in order to play the game.

Doing systems like HERO or M&M on mush is more difficult because character creation takes a lot of interaction between player and Staff. And Staff also have to see potential issues and feel free to say 'No' (M&M Afflictions, anyone?). It's much easier to be one on one and fine tune concepts in a tabletop environment.

One thing I would love to see for any mush that uses a TT RPG system is a 'Training Room'; an OOC area where players can go and test out the rules and action commands. I think having a set of 'target dummies' that you can practice your +attack or +cast on for an hour or so off grid or when RP is not available would help familiarize players with the game commands and system much quicker. Also, if it's done like the Power Centers in Champions Online (the MMO), players can test new powers/abilities out and examine the effectiveness firsthand, then decide if they want to do fine tuning or scrap the new power/ability entirely before committing advancement to it, it would help cut down on the +requests for 'I want to readjust my power, it's not working out for me'.

In the end, toolbox systems are what I prefer for superhero games, but a lot of times they're implemented poorly in the design of a mush. There's not enough emphasis on actually planning out your character, for both creation and advancement, and that's an important key to HERO or M&M. Mainly, from what I've seen for TT ports to mush, it's either 1) all FC's that are pre-statted, or 2) 'Okay, the concept blurb for your OC looks good, in to CharGen you go! toss the system newbie into the shark-infested deep end of the pool and wanders off to do Staff stuff'