What do we want the mechanics in a roleplaying game to accomplish? Do we really want them to tell us if an action succeeds or fails, or do we want them to show us a better story than we might have come up with on our own? Does the fact that nearly all D&D players see charisma as a dump stat tell us something important? Does the charge of ROLLplaying instead of ROLEplaying tell us something about how roleplaying and game relate?
- 0:30 Roleplay vs. Rollplay
- 2:35 Charisma, the Universal Dump-Stat
- 6:54 What do we want our mechanics to accomplish?
- 8:05 Fudging Dice
- 12:37 Counterpoint: Mouse Guard
- 14:51 Planning for every eventuality, or adapting in the moment?
- 17:26 The opposite extreme: Jeepform (Montsegur 1244)
- 20:03 Roleplaying or Gaming
- 25:55 Engines
- 33:16 “I’m not interested in you telling me a story.”
- 36:35 Roleplaying without a story
Enjoyed the podcasts! Especially enjoyed the mention of the system failing you if you have to fudge the die roll. Great point I hadn’t considered.
If you guys like storybuilding and are willing to take suggestions/requests, see if you can borrow the new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay stuff (3rd ed) from your FLGS and try out the crazy dice mechanic. The combination of dice pool you build based on different factors (skill, stance, stat, luck, etc.) really helps the player or GM describe what happened and why, and has 2-3 parallel effects that can happen for every roll that don’t necessarily have to interact. Its hard to explain, but fun to play. Just an FYI if you’re bored and looking for something new.
Anyway, good discussion on roleplaying! Thanks.
Hey, Cory. Thanks! I felt pretty good seeing those ideas make enough penetration to show up in something as mainstream as Warhammer, though I was a little disappointed, too. The dice mechanic seems like it learned a lot from Don’t Rest Your Head, but in some ways, it took a step backward by leaving it up to the GM to use the complications, whereas in DRYH, the GM rolls the pain, and the players get to choose whether to risk cranking up their exhaustion and/or madness for a better chance of success. In DRYH, that made it a risk you decided to take. In Warhammer, it seems like something the GM decides to roll or not, and that means we end up playing the GM’s story—but I’ll get to my rant on GM’s and GM-less games in the next episode! I suppose you have to expect some watering-down to happen along with wider acceptance, though, right?
That’s true, the players always roll the same dice pool for each skill type in WFRP and the GM is the one to throw in difficulty dice. But you’re right, I guess you can’t go the whole distance with something that needs to sell x amount of units to pay for the Warhammer rights license. Its still gotta be about killing orcs, after all.
Look forward to this next discussion on GM-less rpgs. Never played one of those before.
All hail the mighty GM and his magical hidden dice
Personally, it’s been many years since last time I used a GM’s screen.
As for roll or role, the standard option is roling the dice but adjusting the difficulty according to the roleplay – something you can do with almost any system.
Great show, love the jazz theme.
I think the application of a bonus for good roleplay persists so much because it presents such a quick, easy, band-aid solution. We went on in this episode precisely because I don’t think it really addresses the problem. Too often, “roleplaying” and “game” become two separate activities. Engaging in one means distracting from the other. But I don’t accept this as a given, either; if Burning Wheel has taught me anything, it’s that a well-designed game can become the same activity as roleplaying. But that means, as the indie kids say, “system matters.”
Thanks—the jazz theme is more than just aesthetic, but more on that in a future episode!
Let me guess, “bass playing”?
System matters, but “system” may not always be what it says in the book, as many groups already have their own way of doing things, no matter what RPG they are playing.