Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?
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I was reading Upwind, an RPG based around fantastical airships in a late 1800s like setting. It leans very far towards players and GMs defining fictional stakes as a group creation and negotiation, then resolving which set off events happens.
(If anyone wants to see what that looks like, I can post an example from the book)Here is part of a boxed comment they made:
"It is tacitly understood in most RPGs that the players usually ultimately achieve their primary goals. Every good adventure has setbacks and challenges, but in the end the characters typically succeed. Accordingly, like the mechanics of most games, Q is biased toward player success."
(Q is the name of their game system).
I agree with the statement. There are games designed otherwise, and certain any given group of players can play most games as a survival simulation.
I don't think MU* RP is that way very often. Yes, there are games where PVP is encouraged, and more powerful players are allowed to kill off less power characters straight out of chargen and so on.
Yet even those games typically have people who like continuity of story and character growth and affecting the setting.
So - the shortest version of this question I can offer is why do we track hit points if we don't want combat to kill player characters?
Could we do something else? Spend effort on something else that creates drama, suspense, satisfaction, whatever??
Make some sort of procedure that limits fatality, or anything that makes a character deeply less able to RP?
Note that this question of tracking a number, like gathering successes for a goal, is the same. HP are just more immediate and concrete an example.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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You can define player success in a wide range of ways. I admit my instinctive reaction to this post is to feel that I wouldn't enjoy Q, and I don't feel successful as a player if I'm not enjoying something. That's not because I want to ruin other people's stories, but more because I want the story to be a mysterious surprise and negotiation feels like spoilers to me.
We use numbers like HP to help to moderate a consistent fabric of virtual reality for a large group of players that aren't all sitting around a table in real life. When the rules of the game world make sense, organic events can arise from player choices.
You can definitely have ways to make in-character losses (setbacks and challenges) less stinging out-of-character, like consent mechanics.
But I think that the closest you can get to the ideal of "everybody gets everything they want" is to have a game culture where everyone knows the expectations and how everything will be sorted out, and they are there by choice because they like that specific culture.
That way if people prefer a culture of collaborative writing, and negotiating plotlines like Q, then they can enjoy it while playing that way with their group. And if people prefer thrills and suspense and organic happenstance, they can go enjoy that elsewhere.
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If I understand the question correctly, many systems do this very thing. Take the many and varied PbtA games, for instance. For this very reason, my group used a variant of City of Mist for quite some time. Instead of a binary pass/fail or chip away at an arbitrary number of "points," it uses a much more descriptive system that encourages drama and creativity. At least, that's how we felt.
We have recently returned to using the classic D6 system, which utilizes difficulty numbers and "points" for various things. It was nothing against City of Mist. Thanks to a really nice Ares plugin, It became more convenient to use the D6 system. I don't think the enjoyment of the players on those games has diminished at all because of it.
The system is just a tool. How useful it is comes down to the players. There are a number of ways that a player can achieve a goal and, in the end, I think the ultimate goal is "to have fun." The problem is there is a large number of players out there who are concerned solely with their own fun. They give very little consideration to how someone else may be enjoying a scene.
That goes well beyond any system. It's one of the reasons I've left the superhero MU space. I got tired of everything being a fight about how OP someone wanted their character to be. It doesn't help that this seems to be the current trend in comics: all characters are "alpha mutants" or whatever. Explaining to them that we have to balance things based on the player base as a whole meant nothing to them. Worse, you'd then see it reflected in their RP. There are players out there who will see any game as "<My Character> MUSH" and no system will fix that.
If the question is, why do we track points that are just a track to inevitable success? Then the answer is that it doesn't need to be a track to inevitable success. Failure can advance RP and drama, too(often more than success). I think the issue comes back to people not wanting their character to fail. Ever. At anything. This can be frustrating to other players for a number of reasons.
First, some players may like a little failure to spice up their RP. Not everything has to be rainbows and roses. Second, in order for Character A to be the success hero they want them to be, other characters need to fail. Often, they need to fail a lot. This can make them feel like secondary characters, which is no fun. Third, these players who cannot fathom their character failing often can't fathom YOUR character succeeding, and they have no problem explaining that fact to you.
Regardless, I think it all boils down to this: the system is a tool, and bad players ruin it for people.
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I agree that player behaviors can be a pain. Players can ruin any setup, or make any but the most extreme setup work. You can't system that way,
@ZombieGenesis said in Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?:
If the question is, why do we track points that are just a track to inevitable success? Then the answer is that it doesn't need to be a track to inevitable success. Failure can advance RP and drama, too(often more than success).
This is what all systems do currently.
Every MU* I have played on, the system has been used. BUT the ST sets up what is faced and how events evolve, players avoid things where it looks really challenging even if they think there is a tacit understanding they won't lose characters. Combined, that is the "mechanism" by which this inevitable success trend seems to happen.
My question is if a literal countdown to death (that never comes) or to success is rigged towards player success, maybe it would be a better use of system engagement time to have something that spent more effort suggesting WHAT the drama/complications/dilemmas are.
Or maybe it's all too much effort for the gain, atop that players often sabotage such things.
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@Misadventure said in Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?:
So - the shortest version of this question I can offer is why do we track hit points if we don't want combat to kill player characters?
There are plenty of systems where "0 hit points" doesn't mean death, where combat tracks wounds and not hit points, or where some manner of 'luck/karma/whatever points' exist to save you when things go awry.
The key is to design systems that support your goals. FS3 combat was designed to provide some 'gritty' combat simulations of large scale battles, but it is deliberately slanted towards PC heroics.
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@ZombieGenesis said in Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?:
The system is just a tool. How useful it is comes down to the players. There are a number of ways that a player can achieve a goal and, in the end, I think the ultimate goal is "to have fun." The problem is there is a large number of players out there who are concerned solely with their own fun. They give very little consideration to how someone else may be enjoying a scene.
This. I was recently involved in a Pathfinder game with some friends that I get along real well with. I never felt part of the group, though, because I don't really like the min-max, class-based sort of way they interpreted the system.
@faraday said in Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?:
FS3 combat was designed to provide some 'gritty' combat simulations of large scale battles, but it is deliberately slanted towards PC heroics.
I think what you mean to say is that FS3 was designed with awesomeness in mind and that is why it is awesome in what it does because it is awesome.
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@faraday said in [Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?]
The key is to design systems that support your goals.
Yes.
My perception is I have played on a lot of MU's where death was the zero HP option for combat, yet that doesn't seem to be the goal, so what else could game designers do with the topic, and would MU* RP work with whatever this new approach was?If saying zeroing out some resource (health, willpower, patience, public support, whatever) is the better choice that death or complete failure, why aren't MU*s explicit about that goal?
Or is this really in the realm of no player cares in the least, so you may as well just throw whatever makes them think they know what to expect from the "system" and not bother?
What happens when you "lose" in FS3?
Also, MU*s M U asterisk S is formatting as italic per typical markup, which I don't recall it doing before.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@Misadventure said in Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?:
My perception is I have played on a lot of MU's where death was the zero HP option for combat, yet that doesn't seem to be the goal, so what else could game designers do with the topic, and would MU* RP work with whatever this new approach was?
I don't know the specific games you speak of, so I can only speculate. But some players/GMs like the illusion of risk. Like how many TV shows want you to believe the characters are in peril even though deep down you know that they're most likely going to win.
Of course, just like some shows are known for killing off main characters at the drop of a hat (ala Game of Thrones), so are some games. There you really can lose your characters, and that risk is a feature. Some players love that level of stakes.
@Misadventure said in Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?:
If saying zeroing out some resource (health, willpower, patience, public support, whatever) is the better choice that death or complete failure, why aren't MU*s explicit about that goal?
MUs (along with most RPGs and media) are often geared towards the main characters being Big Darn Heroes. The goal is that they struggle but eventually win, and in doing so gain something (fame, glory, skill, loot... depends on the game). Zeroing out resources isn't in line with that goal any more than death is.
You could certainly design a game with depleting resources, though, and some have. Shadowrun has an expendable karma pool; WoD has expendable Willpower; etc.
@Misadventure said in Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?:
What happens when you "lose" in FS3?
FS3 is just a system. "Lose" is more of a story effect. The worst the combat system does is a "knockout". What that means is open to interpretation (your fighter plane is disabled, or your PC is unconscious, subdued, or otherwise unable to continue the fight), but it's all in support of the story.
@Ganymede said in Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?:
I think what you mean to say is that FS3 was designed with awesomeness in mind and that is why it is awesome in what it does because it is awesome.
Daww.
