Game Design: Playability or Realism?

[Coyote]

I have, at various times, designed my own role-playing games, or modified existing ones. Just for fun, in-house stuff, basically, but someday I hope to make an earnest start on my website and bring my own Empires sci-fi world back out into the light of day (I've posted some fiction in the fanfics forum, a couple years ago).

But in designing a game system, I'm going to probably adapt D20 rules and possibly either D6 (ala Star Wars WEG) or a percentile system. Here's the dilemma I have always faced when creating games.

The more realistic something is, the less playable it is. I'm sure we have all run across it before:

Playable means "I shoot your character for 10 points of damage".

Realistic means: "I shoot your character, rolling windage and elevation. I have a 125grain 9mm at 10 meters range, that gives me a +1 to penetrate your armor, a hit... lessee... roll hit chart. Um, your right arm. You are knocked down for 1D4 rounds and, lessee... roll... arm bone shattered... roll...okay, you'll lose 1D4 pints of blood in 6 turns if you're not seen to..."

It bogs down in-game but it does make things more realistic. What is the consensus here? Is realism worth it for slow-motion action? How in-depth do most gamers really want to get for a night of old-fashioned dice-roll RPG'ing? I know that to an extent it is different per group but there has to be some sort of average between timely action and believability.

Hints? Suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[Ace Pace]

I think realism is fine, aslong as you don't require a paper to keep track of your calcuations. Something like you suggested would obviously be too far to the realism side.

[Hotfoot]

You need a mix of both, obviously, with a serious mind to playablity. If a game takes forever to play, it ceases to be fun. If the players are getting bored, you need more playablity, if the players want to do things that the system won't allow, then you need some more realism. Of course, you need to strike a balance within your own group between the players, because there is always going to be that ONE guy that wants to have more numbers.

It should be noted that the downfall of realism isn't always realistic. D20 is a prime example of this. Combat is really complex, but it's nowhere near realistic. Meanwhile, you can have a much simpler system that is much more realistic. I think the real question is complexity versus ease of play.

[Coyote]

I suppose what I'm looking for is, where does the line get drawn? I mean, I understand armor modifies damage reduction, but, is it worth it to get into details like "character is wearing a full breastplate (ie, plate armor bonus) but is otherwise wearing chainmail (so limbs, etc, are under chainmail armor bonuses)". Or does the vital organ/torso armor become the default armor?

And, if you hit the character-- how do people feel about "arm hit" or "chest hit" "leg hit" etc...
Hit in the leg = negative mobility modifiers
chest hit = negative con mods
etc...

Oddly, I don't have much of a problem with opposed rolls, like for skills. They seem straightforward. But combat is a real bugaboo because that is where game play tends to slow down as all the rolls are factored in. And it should be the most exciting part of the game.

[Sharp-kun]

Kind of related, I had a friend who made a tabletop RPG system for a Final Fantasy game he planned to run. In one version he ended up using logarithims to get the 9999 damage, ^^;;

[weemadando]

I struggled with this when making OIMCS. Its a pain in the fucking arse. But it all depends on the kind of game you want.

[Hotfoot]

Called shots are always a tricky spot, because in many systems, they're simply far too powerful. Headshots are the most devestating type of called shot, because if you make it too easy, well, there's no point to doing anything else, but if you make it too hard, then players will get pissed because when they should be able to pull it off, they won't be able to.

Silhouette is nice because instead of having seperate rolls for hitting and damage, it's combined in to one. How well you roll to hit determines how much damage you do. If you think about it, it's something that makes sense. The better your shot/punch/swing, the more damage you're going to do to the poor bastard who's on the recieving end. For additional simplicity, the difficulty of hitting the target is an opposed roll, with of course various modifiers worked in.

In the end, Ando is right - it depends on the game you want to make. Do you want cinematic gunfights with bullets flowing like water, or high fantasy swordfights, or gritty detective dramas?

[General Zod]

I like a nice balance. Called shots should always be more difficult to pull off as opposed to going for something that's vulnerable. The more damage that's scored, naturally the more severe the wounds should be. With WW's storytelling system, for example, if you score 3 points of lethal that should be enough to break a bone clean in half or have a clean bullet wound go through. Possibly deadly but treatable. 4 or more, it might hit some vital organ or cause massive tissue damage. If a player's trying to attack a certain point on an enemy, then they'll naturally be more inclined to protect that vital spot when they realise it's being targeted, so it'll be that much more difficult to hit instead of going for anything that's open. (The place hit should be left up to the GM, with some leeway for the type of combat and weaponry if any involved). So, yeah. A nice balance is what I generally prefer.

[weemadando]

Please, never EVER mention any of WW's systems as being good in any way for action/combat playability or modelling.

[General Zod]

Please, never EVER mention any of WW's systems as being good in any way for action/combat playability or modelling.

I mostly mentioned them specifically because they're the ones I'm most familiar with.

Otherwise my basic point can apply to most other systems out there for basic combat stuff. I generally prefer simplicity compared to incredibly detailed combat systems, which is what White-Wolf's good at, if nothing else.

[Hotfoot]

Please, never EVER mention any of WW's systems as being good in any way for action/combat playability or modelling.

There are a few good points in there, however, like the severity of the injury should be modelled in some way. A thousand light cuts aren't exactly the same as a sucking chest wound. Also, there should be leeway in how the wound is described. I've never liked hit location charts, especially those retarded "expanded" ones where if you roll enough times, eventually a bullet will end up through someone's eye, bounce around in their skull until what's left of the poor bastard's brain leaks out through the hole.

If something crazy or insane is going to happen as the result of a wound, it should be up to the GM to decide what it is exactly. Things like location tables only add to frustration in combat for RPGs, in my experience.

"Well, I rolled leg, but his leg's got two meters of concrete protecting it. I'll roll again...leg, damnit...and leg again! And again! AND AGAIN!"

Sure, there are ways around it, but it's really not that hard for the GM to determine where the attack hits. Hell, in gunfights, most of the rounds are going to hit the center of mass anyway (and as a result, many hit location charts are full of shit, statistically speaking...what with 10% chances of hitting the torso that some have).

[SirNitram]

Paranoia XP actually had a good system, but it's uber-simplistic. And of course, ridiculously deadly. No damage rolls, no called shots, just attack rolls. Succeed by a given amount, it's nastier.

I dunno. I can get by in the bumblefucks of D20 and Storyteller, but it's nice to see the elegent simpliticity of some systems.

[Covenant]

I'd go for realism. It's not hard to distill realistic play into simple numbers. As was stated, most shots land in the chest. There are 'most common' avenues for attack with a bladed weapon. Etc! It's not hard to figure out what is most likely to happen, have that happen the most often, and move on.

Needlessly complicated systems don't accomplish anything, and I think it's easier to build good gameplay around some simple realistic benchmarks than it is to cram realism into a bunch of other rules. And realism, if you stick to it, doesn't bite you in the ass as much as if you fall back on it occasionally.

Like the ever faithful sleeping enemy and the player saying "I wanna chop him in the head!" Okay, he's got 80 hitpoints, and your sword does 3d6. You roll an 18, and his head's bleeding. Beh? Okay, we do double damage, since it's a sneak attack. 36. Still no good. Double it again, not just to triple but to 4x, because it's a head wound. 72! Still alive!

D&D has ways around this, but it's obvious that something is amiss! I personally dislike things like hitpoints. A wounding system would be better, and easier. What people need to do is stop shoe-horning old gameplay mechanics into a setting and then wondering why they seem so crappy. If what you want to do is heroic epic fantasy, then you should get realism way the hell out of your system and use Conan as a basis. It'll be more fun that way. Same with Hong Kong blood opera based games. But if you want to make a system that follows some sort of realistic methodology, there's no reason to bog it down in facts and figures with lots of stupid little rolls. Life's not that random. Here's a better way to do bullets.

You have a 9mm pistol using standard 9mm rounds. The little ammo chart box says those each do 1 wound, and adjusted by the gun's range modifier of 10, that gives you penetration bonus of +1. Roll to hit, and you do, hitting him dead on with 3 to spare. This not only checks to see if you hit, but how good of a shot it was at striking a spot that causes damage. Add your penetration bonus, getting a 4, making your hit cut through armor and clothing better. Armor makes it harder to hit them--subtracted from your to-hit roll, and penetration bonuses make it easier. Distance makes it harder, like armor, so even if you do get a hit you're more likely to have it just graze. Since you add and subtract penetration and range bonuses after you confirm it's a hit, you make the guesswork go away, keep it a little random, but very organized.

Your target takes a wound, and there's a little table of 5 effects and a non-threatening body shot, which has no special effect. Roll 1d6 for each wound the weapon does and apply the effect, such as a gut wound, lung hit, or shoulder/leg hit. A human target can only take a few wounds, but some effects are more lethal and can put a target down where it will bleed to death, or something similar. Headshots, called shots, and to-hit rolls are unimportant. Weapons like sniper rifles where you have a scope and can pick out where to hit someone or shotguns where you spray a target can use their own special rule and damage effect that won't effect anyone else.

If you hit, and after penetration bonuses and range penalties it was only a 1, automatically apply a weak body shot effect. Knives and such weapons will usually create those effects as well. A cut or a scrape or a flesh wound is not considered a wound at all in the game's terms.

[Stark]

In my opinion, it simply doesn't matter. Simple systems are faster, complex systems more rewarding. That really isn't very avoidable. There's a reason old ineffcient systems avoided the idea of hit location entirely. Tacking it on as most systems do as a negative to-hit/plus to damage is lame, but it's relatively painless system wise. Some systems are built around it, like ME's simultaneous hit/location/damage/armour with-one-roll-system, and those that aren't often suffer by attempting to jam it in. But really, it's a level of accuracy that isn't necessary in 80% of games that run on hitpoints. ME needed it's system because it used mechanistic damage effects rather than hitpoints, so it couldn't use a simpler system if it wanted to.

PS, armour substracting from to-hit rolls is the worst kind of D&D absurdity.

[SirNitram]

PS, armour substracting from to-hit rolls is the worst kind of D&D absurdity.

Yea. Armour-as-damage reduction(IE, doing what it does in real life and softening the blow) is the best alternate rule they made. But it's still a system I enjoy because, most likely, I'm completely insane.

[consequences]

There's one good thing I have to say about White Wolf's system lately, and that's that if you hit someone really well, it gets reflected in how horribly you mutilate them. Compare this to D20, where you can exceed someone's AC/Defense by 557 billion, nine hundred and twelve, and unless you roll a twenty, you still scored a marginal flesh wound that knocks off 1-10 hit points.

It has to have enough realism, or at least consistency, to not break SoD for the target audience. For all that I mercilessly rag on Battletech whenever someone gets me started in a vs. context, I can play and enjoy the game without any of that ever entering my mind.

If there's one thing to avoid, it's arbitrary declarations to attempt to make the mechanics appear realistic, especially after the fact. Siembieda's 'no one can ever avoid gunfire to any meaningful extent, ever' rules clarifications stand out as an especially bad example of this type of thing.

In any case, I tend to come down more on the realism side, because I like to have better options than 'I hit the orc with my broadsword for x damage'. But this is from someone who is perfectly willing to play GURPSs, so take that how you will.

[Stark]

Yea. Armour-as-damage reduction(IE, doing what it does in real life and softening the blow) is the best alternate rule they made. But it's still a system I enjoy because, most likely, I'm completely insane.

However, it's much easier design- and play-wise to do it the way they do. It's just something for nerds to chortle about.

[consequences]

PS, armour substracting from to-hit rolls is the worst kind of D&D absurdity.

Yea. Armour-as-damage reduction(IE, doing what it does in real life and softening the blow) is the best alternate rule they made. But it's still a system I enjoy because, most likely, I'm completely insane.

I kind of like what Hackmaster did with it. AC still works as normal, representing the difficulty of getting signifigant harm past the armor's protection, but it also absorbs some of the damage done. Of course, this results in swiss cheese armor in very short order, and is about three times as complicated as D20, but what the hell.

[Covenant]

Yea. Armour-as-damage reduction(IE, doing what it does in real life and softening the blow) is the best alternate rule they made. But it's still a system I enjoy because, most likely, I'm completely insane.

However, it's much easier design- and play-wise to do it the way they do. It's just something for nerds to chortle about.

Oh yeah, it's pretty dumb to make it a hit reduction, but this was about bullets, right? Most targets don't really have much in terms of body armor that do 'partial' stops of bullets. It seems that if a bullet breaks through, you're pretty much going to take some kind of wound regardless. So for my purposes, a heavy kevlar vest stops the bullets cold and makes it--basically--as damaging as if they missed. Add some penetration and there you go.

For swords and stuff, I see the point of damage mitigation (though then you also need to deal with armor penetrating weapons) and would do that for my system. But... for bullets? I just don't see many instances where a bullet-versus-armor situation doesn't end with it either being Bullet Stopped, no wound or Bullet Not Stopped, wound taken.

For those rare situations where it's only a partial hit, a graze, that's not even worth counting as a wound in combat terms. And for those incredibly rare situations where the bullet BARELY penetrates and just doesn't connect--like the famous Teddy Roosevelt shot--there's still my automatic one for body shot.

I see people as more like bricks of wound tolerances (from shock and blood/tissue loss) and effects tolerances than hitpoints.

[Stark]

Thing is, applying any kind of rationale to hitpoints strikes me as absurd. There's not mechanical effects (broken bones, blood loss, etc), it's just hitpoints... so talking about nature of damage, armour effectiveness is just a bit silly. Plate would render all kinds of weapons useless or light impact damage... but hitpoints can't really show that, so trying is added complexity for little real benefit. If you want realistic battle and damage effects, you really should use a different engine rather than trying to shoehorn it into poor D&D.

Now ME had a system that was very fast to use and had mechanical effects... but it was complex and required quite a bit of tracking paperwork. It's worth it, to know where each of the 18-round uzi burst landed exactly on someone's body or sailed over their shoulder and killed someone else, though. You could draw a house, and know precisely where every drive-by bullet landed.

[Nephtys]

I dunno. HP could have some uses as an abstraction of your 'staying power', not really that you can take more bullets than other people.

Sorta like if you're in a swordfight, losing HP is you losing stamina, getting distracted, or your luck slowly running out. When your HP is out, that's when your opponent basically ran you through, or somesuch. In a gunfight, diving for cover and scrambling away from other people with guns is draining your HP, or as you became more exposed from enemy observation in a shoot-out, or whatever. If your HP ran out, you just ran out of luck and got plugged in the chest.

Abstractions. Really abstract abstractions. Not the best system, but the most reasonable way to imagine HP.

[Stark]

Doesn't change the fact that shoehorning these effects into hp is clunky at best. Games built around hitlocations or damage effects - even those silly mech games - can handle it, but saying 'critical, you take triple damage' is hardly 'adding realism' to an engine where the heroes can take several such hits. Things like Shadowrun tried to use modifiers to show damage, but it just slowed the game down and ended up being absurd anyway (ie, a headache gives you a -1 penalty, being shot by a .45 gives you a -2 penalty).

Of course, the real obstacle is inertia. Systems don't change as fast as I imagine they could, so I figure their community is resistant to change. I noticed in particular that SR4 was almost entirely written/drawn/designed by the same four guys. Due to this, you end up with band-aid mechanics instead of overhauls that provide those effects naturally. Who doesn't hate the way some sourcebooks use 'spot rules' you'd make up to deal with a new or tricky demand as a published rule?

[Vendetta]

The old Pre-D20 Deadlands handled damage and HP quite well. Actual damage was dealt with by hit location and wound states, but you also had a number tracker called Grits, which went down whenever Bad Stuff happened to you, and was a measure of stamina, determination, and fate.

Of course, that was largely a symptom of Deadlands having everything under the sun, requiring all of the twiddly dice, a deck of cards and a pot of poker chips.


I think the core problem is finding a system that doesn't kill off the players too quickly, but still lets you progress combat encounters at a respectable rate.

I think it would be easy enough to adapt the Confrontation tabletop system (I think, in fact, they've done so with Cadwallon, their own RPG, but I haven't read the rules for that). It's simple as anything, all you do is roll 2d6, the lowest is always the hit location, the highest is the damage, then you modify it by the attacker's strength and the target's resilience, and look up the result on a chart. You get one of four wound states, light, serious, critical, or dead. If the target is already wounded, and you score an equal or lower wound, their wound is bumped to the next level. If you score a higher wound you go straight to that wound state. The system makes it quite easy to wound, but lets tough bastards carry on for quite some time when they are wounded (each wound state carries a -1 penalty to all rolls), as scoring a straight kill is quite difficult, because your lower roll is always the location. (unless you're massively stronger than the opponent's resilience, if you roll a 1 or 2 at all you're probably not scoring a kill that hit).

Confrontation has, I think, possibly the best melee fighting system of any tabletop game I've played. The actual combat is pretty snazz as well, you get two dice, and decide whether you want them to be attack or defence. If you have a defence dice you can make an opposed roll to the enemy's attack (D6+their attack vs. D6+your def). If you don't, they hit on anything but a 1, the person who wins initiative for the combat gets to place second, so they know what the enemy is up to. They've even got a pretty good mechanic for uneven combats as well. Outnumbered fighters get one extra dice per opponent they're facing, so they would have three vs four if in a 2 on 1 encounter, so that there's enough of an advantage to getting an opponent outnumbered to make it worthwhile, but not so much of an advantage that it breaks the game.

[Stark]

Of course, that was largely a symptom of Deadlands having everything under the sun, requiring all of the twiddly dice, a deck of cards and a pot of poker chips.

Are you serious? That's awesome.

I think the core problem is finding a system that doesn't kill off the players too quickly, but still lets you progress combat encounters at a respectable rate.

I disagree - I think this is more to the tone of the game. Frankly, most D&D players don't WANT realistic melee combat. They want 'slay orcs by the dozen' combat, 'take lightning bolts to the chest' combat. That's fine and dandy, and you don't need anything too obtuse to run combat at that level.

On the other hand, deadliness is not the inverse of playability. Deadly games simply require a mature GM (ie, not one of the 'GM vs players' kind), intelligent players are fair consequences. I find that deadlier engines usually lead to more thoughtful play, while less deadly games turn into two-fisted monkey style action movies. Both are fine, but games that can kill easily aren't automatically bad unless the players and GM are unable to adapt. It's great when you get a totally broken system like Shadowrun2, where it's slow as molasses (hours to run a combat) and both not-deadly and not-interesting.

[Mr Bean]

I prefer realism... but more in the physics department. A good DM can work things in.

For example, when a hundred and fourty pound elf in chain jumps from a third story window onto a knight in full plate and lands squarly on his next.... In normal D20 that might be some impact damage when knight hits the ground.

Rather than a sick crack and sound of a certain knights neck breaking leading to death.

So any system where I can kill someone instantly with a "sneak" attack is one I'll embrace. When I take a D6 Axe and call shot bury it into a dazed man's neck, he's dead, not taking an extra D6 worth of damage.


Or in other words, any system where I can still kill of a 20th level Fighter with a lucky hit from a 2nd Level Farmer with an extra sharp sickle.