buzz

When would one need Power Defense that was resistant?

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

I can easily spend up to two hours per character in pure mechanical chargen in HERO.

Does the system require you to take up to two hours, though? Or is this just trying different builds?

The only systems I've played where the required bookkeeping steps took a huge amount of time were Synnibar (*shudder*) and C&S2e, particularly when rolling up a mage.

HERO, otoh, especially with access to HD, just takes me minutes assuming I know what I'm building. If I don't, or I'm looking for the best ways to reflect a concept, then, yes, it can take longer. This is the flipside of flexibility (or crunchy flexibility, a la HERO and GURPS, at least).

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

...although' date=' as you guys now keep relimiting the selection of complaints, it does seem more relevent to a much smaller set.[/quote']

I didn't see that I was relimiting anything, barring aknowledgement that, yes, the loop model is very player-centric. You're focusing on preference, and the original quote and my commentary wasn't really talking about preference. ("Complaints about complexity", not "complaints that they don't enjoy playing HERO".)

 

Can you point me to the mass body of these threads where people are somehow claiming hero chargen length issues are not preferences but are somehow "inherent quality"?

I could point you to just about any HERO thread on RPG.net and many of the "HERO vs. M&M" threads I've seen you (and myself) in before where, intentional or no, people made objective statements ("System X is crap because") rather than subjective ones ("I don't enjoy X becasue"). The whole impetus of the ENWorld thread that started this was countering the assertion that "lite" is inherrently better design (which originated on Mearls' blog, if you want to read it).

 

From my experience' date=' reading these boards and others, chatting rpging etc, I RARELY see (frankly i dont recall ever seeing but maybe i forgot one) a complainer expressing it in those terms or anything close. [/quote']

IME, it's usually someone trying to tell me why I'm not really having fun, because HERO (or D&D, or whatever) "is bad" (or "can't do") in such-and-such ways.

 

Which is why linking "should try" and "more lengthy chargen" seems wrong to me.

FWIW, I have not been asserting that the loop model is a rationale why people "should try" HERO.

 

Agreed. But the lack of a single universal benchmark doesn't mean there aren't significant effects.

No argument there. Complexity (real or perceived) and required effort can be off-putting.

 

Read the posts on this very page...

Things did get awful heated all of a sudden.

 

Thats what he took away from the arguments on this thread. Apparently he missed the now more and more limited scope of what this thread was supposed to be about too.

Actually, I think it was you who widened the scope, and now I'm trying to bring it back to where I think I started.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

A good 1-2 hours of that time is spent with the player explaining various different approaches and how they fit into the campaign.

I'm not including "conceptual" time like this, as this is usually independant of system. Once you've decided what you want to create, IME, chargen doesn't take two hours. The possible exception is knowing what you want and then scouring through a pile of sourcebooks for mechanical bits to make it happen. I see this mostly in D&D and similar games.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

Here's what I have to say to any player who won't play a game because of a two-hour chargen when I've spent countless hours building the campaign setting...

If it's not fun for them, there's not much you can do. Ideally, a GM will assess the tastes of the players before embarking on building a campiagn. I've tried it the other way around before, and it really just ends up in frustration for both sides.

(And, again, chargen just doesn't take two hours. Not for any game in my collection, at least now that I've sold my copy of C&S2e. )

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

if the preferences of players is muddying the water in a discussion about what players should prefer' date=' then its a really odd discussion.[/quote']

The original loop model was not presented in the context of what players should prefer. It was presented within the body of a review in terms of assessing a system critically.

 

My application of the model to HERO was not to invalidate claims about preference; you can't argue preference ("Prove to me that I don't like spaghetti"). It was as a counter to claims about HERO's inherrent quality, i.e., "HERO is crap because...", not "I don't enjoy HERO because..."

 

IMX the length of chargen has a direct' date=' significant and meaningful impact on the number and type of players willing to play a game.[/quote']

It very well may, but this really has nothing to do with the quality of the game itself. Both Memoir '44 and World at War are WWII wargames. Is the former "better" becasue it's simpler than the latter? No. Will each game possibly appeal to different types of players looking for different things in their WWII wargame experience? Quite likely.

 

Which means you have ONE case to consider and compare to all the others you know and the ones you consider from other discussions. is he an exceptional case in your experience or do ALL your players have a 0 tolerance?

Simply anecdotal evidence that the threshold you're talking about can be all over the map. Barring opposite extremes, there's really no threshold you can point to and say, "RPG X is bad because it exceeds this threshold," or even "RPG X will not appeal to most people because it exceeds this threshold."

 

You've made it clear that HERO chargen exceeds your threshold. HERO's decent market share (for a non-WotC company) shows that it has not exceed that of everyone.

 

even if someone tosses a theoretical formula on the internet and tells them they should? Wow! :-)

I didn't see anyone telling people what they should do.

 

The inserted assumeption that the short' date=' simpler chargen is married with IN PLAY PROBLEMS while the lengthy complex chargen is wed with BETTER IN GAME PLAY is specious.[/quote']

This assumption is not being made.

 

Its much more a quality issue than a quantity issue.

That's the basic point.

 

But most of those games provide templates for quick-use.

For many of those games, "template" = "pregen" != "chargen".

 

is anyone saying simplicity is all that matters? I don't think so.

FWIW, that was one of the arguments the guy I'm quoting was trying to counter. It was also what Mike Mearls and Ryan Dancey were trying to counter in the thread on ENWorld that gave birth to the guy's review (and thus the quote).

 

if you want to convince someone to do extra work...

No one is trying to do that.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

Now' date=' the obvious answer from the HERO crowd is "but HERO delivers better results" but while that is their subjective consideration, its not a universal truth.[/quote']

Or, "HERO delivers results and a gameplay experience that I prefer (or enjoy just as much)," which is irrefutable.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

So' date=' using it to support a notion that chargen time length isn't valid as a complaint or maybe more precisely to purport it is "relevant as a counter to the usual complaints against HERO's complexity" is rather specious.[/quote']

I think that you're muddying the issue by bringing in personal preference (even granting that system choice is a personal prefeence). The threshold for the aformentioned casual gamer in my D&D group is 0; virtually any amount of time beyond 0 spent creating a PC is going to be too much for him and he'll lose interest. This doesn't validate complaints about systems where chargen takes more than 0 seconds.

 

As I said before, all this really says is that people will not have fun doing things they consider un-fun, which is a given.

 

The loop model is simply pointing out where the majority of player time is spent. The person who concocted the model then posits that there is nothing inherrently advantageous about a system that minimizes the effort invovled in chargen, particularly (in the context of his review of C&C) if said speed is a result of rules-insufficiency that can then interfere with the majority of gameplay, i.e., time spent inside the loop. What matters more is whether chargen results in a satisfying gameplay experience for those involved. This is not a heavy/"lite" issue, but a good/poor design issue, mixed in with preference.

 

I do consider it specious to use two hours as an example, however. Barring World of Synnibar (yes, I've played it) and notoriously-complex FGU games from the '80s like Chivalry & Sorcery 2e and Space Opera, I can't think of any RPGs I've had experience with where the mechanics of chargen take anywhere near two hours.

 

Assuming familiarity with the system, heavier games like HERO and D&D only take minutes to make even powerful PCs, especially when one has access to tools like Hero Designer or PCGen. What takes time is making decisions and coming up with concepts. (And, in some cases, scouring through sourcebooks, which can be said of most games on the market.)

 

(One of the advantages to D&D is that one can bypass the concept portion of chargen. I can roll up a fighter or wizard with absolutely no knowledge of who they are as a person or what their background is. Conversely, this is impossible with both lite-er systems like Buffy and Heroquest, as well as mid-to-heavy ones like M&M, HERO, and GURPS, barring the use of templates.)

 

Lacking familiarity with the system will always make chargen take longer. (Ergo, why I reccomend skipping it altogether when teaching a system.) Some systems are certainly more readily-digested than others, but that's really irrelevant. If simplicity was all that mattered, Bobby Fischer would have focused on tic-tac-toe instead of chess.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

Nor does this point require a flawed loop model to be made.

The context of the example is player-centric, and for that it works pretty well. Sometimes even obvious things need to be pointed out.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

Players don't complain about long detailed chargen as if it happens all the time and keeps sessions dragging on over and over. At least' date=' i haven't ever seen it expressed this way.[/quote']

People do often compain about it on Web fora, however...

 

For GMs' date=' your argument falls flat really quick.[/quote']

It's not my argument; it's a comment from someone talking about some other RPG that I thought was interesting.

 

GMs do more work than players, period. Some GMs can work fast regrdless of system, some can't. My Champions GM ("with literally now decades of HERO experience") of two-odd years seems to be able to come to each game with no notes and does maybe an hour or two of prep during the week prior. I need to spend days prepping for a Buffy one-shot. YMMV.

 

So what good are the extra 15 lines or the even more for a hero guy?

As long as those 15 lines have meaning within the system, I don't see how it matters. This is a preference issue.

 

So' date=' our experience in the regards of how beneficial the point driven detail is to actual gameplay is very different.[/quote']

To clarify, the position this guy put forth is not that the length of time it takes to create a character is irrelevant, ergo we should all be happy to have chargen take forever, but, conversely, that fast is not inherrently good, and lengthy is not inherrently bad. And stating that "if it's not fun, then it's not fun" pretty much goes without saying.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

What if someone wanted to play a ninja in D&D 3e?

They'd use the ninja class from Book X, or work with their DM to adapt the rogue or a multiclass combination.

D&D is not about flexibility. D&D is about a certain amount of flexibility within a set of archetypes designed to fit the campiagn world. HERO can become just as confining given GM parameters designed to fit a given setting. E.g., the paramters for Terran Empire don't really make room for a "ninja", either.

The point is that not everyone necessarily "wants" D&D chargen to be anything other than it is. If they did, it wouldn't dominate 60% of the market. There is nothing inherrently superior about flexibility. StoryTeller isn't particularly flexibile; it needs to be tailored for a given setting as much as d20 or BRP. However, it seems to have done a good job, once tailored, for delivering the experience promised by the specific game in question (e.g., Vampire).

What matters is simply wether the system adequately achieves the goals set forth in the product. D&D's goal isn't to present players with a multi-genre toolkit for designing any conceivable PC. It's to facilitate D&D-style fantasy, and part of that is assembling a party of certain archetypes who cooperate in adventuring scenarios. It does this extremely well, and also is robust and rigorous enough that it can take a lot of abuse for people who want to tweak but also stay within the parameters of a familiar system.

Previous genre-specific HERO incarnations (e.g., Justice, Inc.) were similar: options narrowed to facilitate a specific goal.

The converse is that HERO (and GURPS) are not particularly good at "out-of-the-box" gaming. You can't just "roll up a fighter", as it were. Parameters need to be set first: starting point totals, characteristic/AP/DC/skill guidelines, and parameters for use of Powers (such as defining a magic system for FH or "super skills" for DC). Then, unless a template is being used, you need to build the PC within those parameters from scratch.

One methodology is not superior to the other; they just serve different aims. HERO shoots for maximum flexibility, but the price is speed and complexity. D&D shoots for being playable ASAP, but the price is flexibility, and a certain "black box" aspect to the rules.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

The mechanics are not super essentail to enjoyign a system. I'll agree with that. The complexities of mechanical character generation are not important. I'll also agree with that.

 

But the conceptual creation of the character is of utmost importance. And I feel wrong taking that away from the player.

Yes, I can see this. It does often help for the newb to have some sort of investment in the character, even if it's just giving them a choice of avaiable characters: "Okay, do you want to play Buffy, Xander, Spike, Willow, or Anya?"

You can personalize this even more by making pregens, but letting the newb choose the name and gender. It takes no system knowledge, and it goes a long way to helping the player identify with the PC.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

But then to me the character generation was the most important part of the game. I was always under the impression that having a deep well thought out character was the whole point of roleplaying' date=' that as players we were supposed to assume the role of the individual we chose to play. How can I play the game if I have not created a role to play, wich satisfies me?[/quote']

As someone with theater experience, you should be used to having a fully-realized character handed to you with the expectation that you will be able to portray them.

 

When we're talking about teaching a system, especially if we're talking about teaching it to someone new to roleplaying, how characters are created is really secondary. Most other types of games don't have the expectation that the player needs to know how the game arrived to the point play begins. E.g., in Monopoly, you don't need to know anything about the little shoe; you just need to know what you're supposed to do with the shoe.

 

Also, basic "roleplaying" such as Cops n' robbers and "hypothetical situation" thought experiments generally don't start with, "Okay, let's examine first how your persona came to be." They generally start with "Okay, I'm the cop!" or "Imagine that you're a fisherman. What would you do if..."

 

Ergo, a "satisfying" role isn't really important to teaching. Chargen is usually the most complex part of any RPG, and is thus the last place a teacher should start. It's far easier to hand the newbie a character and say, e.g., "Okay, in this game you're going to be playing a pulp hero named Randall Irons. When you want Randall to act, we resolve the outcome using dice. Here's how that works. [insert mechaincs explanantion here]."

 

I.e., this is the same reason that teaching math starts with arithmetic, not the theory behind arithmetic.

 

Chargen just involves too many factors for a total newbie. Not only do you need to understand the basic mechanics of the game, you need to udnerstand the mechanics of chargen, the impact of choices made during chargen, the parameters the GM has set on chargen, and the nature of the campiagn and the genre conventions it contains. That's a lot to digest before you even understand how to actually play.

 

I find this also holds for experienced gamers who are unfamiliar with a system. They don't need to know where the numbers on the characer sheet came from in order to grok the system; they need to know how they're used.

 

This is why demos and "basic" versions of games (e.g., the current Basic D&D) don't generally run people through chargen. They provide some characters and then start people off in a scenario. For most players, the majority of time is spent in scenario; that's the bulk of the play experience, so that's what you need to teach. Not to mention, it takes far less time. You simply could not teach HERO chargen and expect to get in much play time in the space of a typical 4-hour con demo/event.

 

(E.g., there's a guy in my D&D group who has never rolled up a PC himself. He's a casual gamer, so isn't really interested. This has not stopped him from playing and enjoying the game for a couple of years now.)

 

Now, this isn't to say that you can't often connect better with a "student" when they can make some choices, but you need to limit these choices and then, ideally, do the heavy lifting for them. E.g., if the newb says "I'd really like to play a witch!" or "Can I be Wonder Woman?", you stat up that character for them.

 

IMO, of course. This approach seems to have worked for me, on both sides of the equation.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

The guy trying to explain character creation spent more time on how different CharGen is in HERO from other systems then going with a comfort zone of how similar it is to any CharGen system.

I've run HERO events twice at ENWorld gamedays, and only one player total was familiar with HERO before playing. Ergo, I have to explain the basics before we can even start. The keys for newbies are:

• Starting in a heroic setting (less powers, less points, less dice)
  
• Giving them the two-page combat summary from the Free Stuff page
  
• Wholly ignoring chargen and points at first.
  
• Boiling down HERO to the basics: You roll 3d6 to determine success and want to roll low, you roll Xd6 for effect and want to roll high. 3 is a crit and 18 is a fumble. There's normal damamge and killing damage.
  

This method has so far resulted in one person each game buying a copy of Sidekick.

Honestly, someone's first introduction to a system should never be chargen. They should get to play it first.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

I find that the point total has little to no impact on how it takes me to me to fully create a character unless we're going really low-end' date=' i.e. under 50 points.[/quote']

Getting the ideas together in the first place is my big hurdle. With Hero Designer, making PCs of any point total is pretty quick. Filling the "Background" field is what takes me hours.

 

And ironically, this means HERO chargen is often much faster for me than for D&D, as there has yet to be a tool for D&D/d20 that works as well as HD. I find that D&D PCs of any level ahve me scouring different books for feats and magic items as well, something I do far less with HERO.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

Not true. Some very rule light game designs provide complete control of the character to the player.

Though, one could argue (and I have been on ENWorld) that lite RPGs tend towards relying on GM fiat, which inherrently takes away control from the player. E.g., Dynamic Magic in BESM/SAS/Tri-Stat is basically defined as "the player can create any effect they want, as long as the GM feels it fits within the power level they've paid ponts for."

Not that I want to start a big lite-vs-heavy debate, but I don't think that there's an inherrent superiority in this area that has to do with rules-quantity or complexity. A lite game may have a mechanic that gives the player a lot of say in the narrative flow of the game, or it maybe a glorified "Mother may I" exercise. A heavy game may provide incredible detail and PC control, or it may be an exercise in rolling on a lot of tables.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

Necessarily complex character generation daunts new players.

IMO, I don't think that this is a given. It also depends on whether "new player" means "someone new to roleplaying" or "someone new to the RPG in question".

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

Since it is based on a preexisting world that I designed years ago it is very very hard to translate into hero to my satisfaction. It doesn't help that this is a very high powered game either...most of my NPCs are 600-2200 points. And unfortunately they have to be.

 

AND since it's not a normal campaign, IE no party, and characters can go where ever they want whenever they want and create the story around each of them, any character that apprea must be ready to at least be semi reoccuring. I know I made myself a monster, but, I'm finding this system extrememly hard to create it in.

FWIW, it seems like this particular campiagn would be a good amount of work regardless of system. These parameters seem fairly "high-maintenance", as it were. This is not a fault, just an observation.

Re: Loop model of RPGs and why long chargen is okay

It is not always true for NPCs. It should not take me a year to make the characters for a couple sessions.

It doesn't have to. There are just two things you need to remember:

1.) Use published material. HERO has many "bestiaries" for each of its major genres, not to mention the FH grimoires, the USPD, etc.. There also lots of character archives out on the Web. Even if what you find is not exactly what you need, it's likely close enough to modify with minimal effort.

2.) NPCs don't always need to add up. All you need to stat out is what characteristics and powers are relevant to the scenario: SPD, BODY, STUN, CV, notable CHR rolls, powers, skills, and relevant distads. And you can just assign appropriate values; you don't have to go through the actual chargen process. At least not for every single NPC. Save the full-blown chargen for the big NPCs who will be recurring characters in the campiagn.

I saw this interesting tidbit in an ENWorld review of Castles & Crusades:

I’m a computer programmer by trade. To be a good computer programmer, you have to write efficient programs. If you write a program that processes a million records, and it does this inside a loop, anything that doesn’t add value inside that loop just eats up time as it is processed. In a million loops, unnecessary processing can end up wasting a lot of time. Let’s consider the basic model of an RPG:

 

Build_characters() ;

Do {

Play_the_game() ;

If (TPK)

end_of_campaign = true ;

}

While ! (end_of_campaign) ;

 

That’s it in a nutshell. Obviously, there are other factors that can cause “end_of_campaign†to be true, like people moving away, or one of your players having an affair with your wife. An individual character can die in the middle of a game, so that player will have to build a new character in the middle of the campaign as well. Hopefully that doesn’t happen often. The point I’m trying to make is this: things that happen outside of the loop only get executed once. Character creation doesn’t *need* to be a 15 minute process. It can take 3 hours, and it doesn’t affect the speed of the inner loop – the campaign loop. It’s nice when it *can* happen quickly. Like if Joe gets eaten by Beholder 1 hour into Saturday night’s game, it might be nice if Joe can come back in with a new character before 1 am. But this doesn’t happen very often (character death in the middle of a game, that is; Beholders eat people all the freaking time). There is very little value add in shortening the character creation process because it really has little affect on the actual game play.

This seemed relevant as a counter to the usual complaints against HERO's complexity. It's one most of us are familiar with ("The complexity is in chargen, but then in gameplay it's no biggie"), but I thought this was a good expression of it. Particularly because it's a good argument in *favor* of complexity as long as that complexity pays off in simplicity and enhanced gameplay while in the "campiagn loop". I find this very true in HERO.

I find that, by the time I'm done with creating a HERO PC, I know it like the back of my hand. Every capability is spelled out in very exacting terms, and I know very explicitly how said capabilties interact with other characters' and the game environment.

Anyway, I just thought this was a nifty observation.

Re: Anyone get DC: TAS yet?

I did get to look though it and it looked like it was full of great ideas for' date=' oddly enough, a campaign somehwat in the style of the Adam West [i']Batman[/i] series.

I agree. I actually found it much more in that vein than B:TAS.

Re: Anyone get DC: TAS yet?

Can someone give me a rouster with a couple of sentences of each villian in the book? I want to know exactly who is in the darn thing before I think about picking it up.

There are two sample campaigns. Hudson City Knights is the official DT:TAS setting, and is akin to Batman, i.e., no real superpowers. Hudson City Powers is more like early Spider-Man, i.e., low-level supers. I've only read the former so far.

The Hudson City Knights villains are:

Adonis: Aging brick model who's has too much surgery and now must steal to support his surgery "habit."

Anagram: Female Riddler with a crossword puzzle motif.

Astrologer: Toymaker turned mystic villain with a high-tech quarterstaff.

Beatlemania: Beatle fan who commits crimes to pay for all the memorabilia he covets.

Chitchat: Failed TV show host with a microphone that can control audio systems. Nuisance villain.

Copycat: Copies the crimes of other villains.

Doctor Enigma: Faceless villain who paralyzes people with The Unanswerable Question. Best villain in the book, IMO.

Facet: Gem-loving cat burglar extraordinaire.

The Human Capitalist: Wonder where villains hire all their goons? Here's your answer.

Last Call: 1920s gangster-themed villain who's an ace shot with a Tommy gun.

Midas: Goldfinger.

The Missing Link: Runaway circus freak brick who uses gorillas as goons.

Penny Dreadful: Literary snob who commits literature-themed crimes.

Raptor: radical ecoterrorist with a Batman-esque getup.

Red Eyes: Hyper-violent pugilist, victim of drug experimentation.

Three of a Kind: Criminal triplets

Re: S. John Ross

I saw it right after I posted.

Just wanted to say that I didn't realize S. John Ross was going to contribute to PH until I read today's front page.

Booyah!

Can we get him to do some graphic design work for DOJ, too? E.g., Fief is gorgeous.

Re: Appropriate challenges: how many points?

Would that I were wise enough to think of that.

Thanks, Z!