Games with a tight Risk-Reward peak can be awesome fun. Or suck.
Last week I was briefly involved in a Twitter conversation with Sean Preston, Michael Wolf, Tracy Barnett, and Marshall Smith about whether Pathfinder RPG or another system (Savage Worlds) would be a “better” system to develop a steampunk campaign setting with. Michael and Sean both had their doubts about using Pathfinder. I did not, however. This discussion inspired Sean to post over at Reality Blurs: “The Platform Matters: System Influence on Setting Design.” It’s an excellent, albiet Savage-centric, post that argues that game design, system choice (platform), and setting are intertwined. I couldn’t agree more.
“@NevermetPress @realityblurs But do you really think that Pathfinder works for Steampunk settings? I have my doubts.” – Michael Wolf
But that’s not the point of this post. What I realized when reading Sean’s post was why I am leaning away from Savage Worlds (SW) to develop Loaerth & Feywyrd (my long in development fantasy “coalpunk” setting). Why? Because developing for Savage Worlds is hard. From a GM’s point of view, my experience running Savage Worlds campaigns for the last two years supports this notion as well.
Don’t get me wrong – I love the SW system. I have a blast running it every time I play it. I’m still working with SW to develop the Dead Queens of Morvena too [1]. But, it’s slow going and requires frequent tweaking and fiddling with to get it just right. After reading Sean’s post at Reality Blurs, I think I may have figured out why. I left a comment on his blog, and this was the point that prompted me to do so:
“In Savage Worlds, someone familiar with the system knows it is an intuitive, delicate process. It is not simple number crunching. You have to to be comfortable with the system to know when you’re getting the feel right. Even then, it requires playtesting, fine-tuning, and tweaking to get things just so.” – Sean Preston.
This point nails it for me: Savage Worlds is hard to develop for. It’s hard to GM for too. It’s way too easy to create scenarios where the PCs are wiped out, sometimes without warning. You’re left scratching your head thinking “WTF happened?”. Similarly, it’s easy to go in the other direction too. Encounters that are too easy get boring quick. You can tell just by looking at how much people are checking their Twitter feed at the table. Right: BORED.
But when you hit it just right – when you hit the perfect balance between Risk and Reward with Savage Worlds – the game launches you into a totally new level of fun that other games (Pathfinder, D&D 4E, Shadowrun, all games I’ve had “fun” playing) pale in comparison to. It’s like “WTF?! I didn’t know what I was missing!” You’re hooked.
But, to hit that perfect balance requires either extremely well designed adventures (“scenarios”, whatever), or for a GM to fudge things. A LOT. What I’m basically saying is that for a GM to keep the Savage Worlds game at that pinnacle of fun you have to bend the rules. I’m not saying this without something to back it up either.
Long time readers of this blog might remember when I wrote “Ditch the Screen: Open Metagaming Is Good For Roleplaying“. Basically, I was advocating that GMs should stop using the screen (virtual or otherwise) and spill the beans on the crunchy bits (monster stats, NPC details, etc) in favor of a more collaborative storytelling style. It’s sort of like putting all your cards face up in a poker game in favor of telling a good story. Well, I tried that and it doesn’t work – at least not for dice games like SW, D&D and the like.
It wasn’t all for nothing though – getting rid of the screen made me acutely aware of how often I was fudging the results, bending the rules, changing monster stats on the fly. I was – without realizing it – seeking that perfect balance between Risk and Reward. We had fun too – but I soon stopped with the “open metagaming” approach and resumed keeping my cards only for my eyes.
That might have been the start of my doubts about Savage Worlds. Was a game really as super awesome as I thought it was if I’m always fudging the rules and adjusting things on the fly? You’ll often hear SW devotees say things like “balance doesn’t matter. learn to flee” – that may be true from a player’s perspective too, but from a Design perspective, it’s bullshit.
Balance DOES matter. So, consider Sean’s comment on Savage Worlds:
“You have to to be comfortable with the system to know when you’re getting the feel right. Even then, it requires playtesting, fine-tuning, and tweaking to get things just so.”
Is that the sign of well-designed game system? I don’t know, but it definitely makes design hard. And – personally – I would rather be designing a new game setting using a system that is easier to design with.
This is why I’ve chosen the Pathfinder RPG as the system of choice for Loaerth & Feywyrd. While I’m admitting that it may not be “as fun” as Savage Worlds, it’s a concession that – with Pathfinder – the balance between Risk-Reward is smoother. More predictable. There’s less risk that it will be broken from the outset. This allows for time spent on story/setting development to keep pace with system/setting development from a game system point of view. All, of course, after I’ve put the finishing touches on the Dead Queens of Morvena – which will be rolled out with Savage Worlds. It’s just meant to be that way.
“Game balance is the net under the highwire or trapeze at the circus. It’s very helpful when learning, but once you’ve got your act down the show is much more exciting without it. Of course, when you fall you’re going to wish it was there!” - Jeff Rients in 2008 at the RPGBlog II.
Yes Jeff. We agree.
I hope this doesn’t come off as a rant – it’s not. For me, it’s more of revelation about game design.
Your thoughts?
[1] Development on the Dead Queens of Morvena nearly came to a stand still last spring after receiving some important critiques from Joel Kinstle at Pinnacle Entertainment. Unfortunately, during that same period, Charles Dickey left Nevermet Press and the development of the Dead Queens of Morvena landed in my lap. In short, I’ve been working on expanding the setting and focusing on building it around a central theme: “gothic fantasy horror sandbox”. Stay tuned.
First off, I should begin with a disclaimer. I never cast any doubts upon the ability of Pathfinder to handle steampunk, nor can I recall using the word better in my discussion. In fact, if anything, I’ve given design considerations and insights to Tracy (Rolling20s)about how to approach working within the framework of the system. There are fundamental steps when creating a setting for any system. I just wanted to get that on record. If any comments I made within the confines of 140 characters on Twitter led anyone to that conclusion, I just want to clear up any potential misunderstandings. After all, better is subjective (in many cases), right?
Now, per Jonathan’s request, I’m using some of my precious word count for the day to offer up a critical response to his post. (Critical in the classic sense of a reasoned analysis of said argument.)
In this particular case, it is posited that Savage Worlds is a difficult system to develop for. My quote lends credence to this position. Upon rereading my original article, nowhere do I say difficult in regards to designing for Savage Worlds (though I do mention it once when discussing the demarcation between setting and system in design work).
It can, however, easily be inferred from my quote it is, at the very least, time consuming and, for some, difficult. I’d definitely posit it as an investment of chronological currency–to get things right, you have to put in a certain amount of time. I read the NMP article–the one you’ve read before making it down into this section (or, in your case, Jonathan, the one you wrote)–and can see your perspective. Often when dealing with Savage Worlds, you have to create your own subsystems. This is both a strength and a weakness of the system purely from a design perspective. At the table, if the publisher has shown due diligence, everything should flow swimmingly. This is true of any game system, be it Pathfinder, Fantasy Craft, M&M, Savage Worlds, FATE, or countless others.
The difference between certain systems, let’s use M&M and FATE, is they are built from different bases. The math of M&M is pure (as it is with Pathfinder) and FATE (and Savage Worlds) requires a bit more finessing in the design realm. With front-loaded, well seasoned systems, you benefit from an iterative work based off of OGL–the system has been largely refined at this point–and the beauty of math. You can calculate a new build (as I was able to do with True20) and not have to run it through the grinder to see if it is balanced. It just is.
The beauty of systems such as FATE and Savage Worlds is the nebulosity (the little open bits in the design space) can promote some gaming. Granted, you don’t have the safety net or mesh of rules available when you play more rigidly designed systems (or when you do, you’ll find mechanics nested in there as well, such as rewarding Hero Points for Complications in M&M). This doesn’t mean the game play suffers. When I use the word rigid, it doesn’t reflect on the game play. Billiards has rigid rules, but there is a lot of flexibility found with those fifteen balls and a couple of pointy sticks!
I don’t see anything volatile here regarding the design perspective, though there is a suggestive nature in the hanging question of whether Savage Worlds is a well designed system. I’ll go on record (not surprisingly, I’m sure) on defending the robustness of the system. You can do a lot with it right out of the gate. You can easily play cross-genre games with no issues whatsoever. A hobbyist or professional can design a setting rapidly, if they so desire. It’s not absolutely necessary to add much to it, if you’re seeking rapid development.
We (and I’m speaking for Reality Blurs here) strive to push the system to another level. We want mechanics to mirror the exacting nature of our settings and I’m very demanding in this regard. I am regardless of the systems we develop for. We strive for excellence. Where things get tricky and, yes, even difficult, is to break them out into a sandbox style. Deconstructing elements, making them more open, always takes more work, and adding new elements altogether, naturally, requires additional playtesting. To comparison more work to difficult is not always the case. At this stage in our company’s development, we’ve made enough wheels, we can usually adapt something from our toolbox to work within the parameters of a given genre without having to reinvent something from whole cloth.
Now, the only points you bring forth are the narrow band of fun in the closing section of your argument. I don’t see it as nearly as thin a line as you do. If anything, I’ve found it quite the contrary. It’s easy to jump into the game and I’ve seen countless folk running all manners of scenarios at cons and rarely do I find someone disappointed. There are a lot of moving parts at work and, granted, designing a scenario for any system requires an experiential base and it is far more nebulous doing it for Savage Worlds than any level based system (with the possible exception of Fantasy Craft which wins, hands down, for easiest, with its built-in scalability).
I concede it takes an entirely different mindset when constructing adventures for Savage Worlds and my best advice on that is to not worry about the scenario as a scenario, but work it out as a story and then overlay the necessary mechanical bits to make it sing.
For most folk, the difficulty in design stems from a perspective shift from more traditional gaming (ingrained in all longtime gamers) to a more open flow. I, for one, found it liberating, and it suits my particular sensibilities. I know, as a developer, I have to do a lot of work to get all the moving parts in place, but once I’ve done so, there is a big payoff. An overwhelming number of folks play Pathfinder and love it. It’s not a bad market for a developer to target. What you rightfully view as its strengths, the set mechanics and predicative nature of progression enable you to tell the tales you want to tell and allow you the space to focus on the elements most important to you. For me, I enjoy the chaos and random chance certain systems offer me.
I will point out, however, once the core mechanics are out of the way, as they are with many of our settings, developing support materials can be (though not always is) quite rapid. The most challenging part of the design process in Savage Worlds is a Plot Point Campaign and, gain, this is dependent on the developer’s background and complexity of the work he’s attempting.
I presume the graph is there merely to be provocative (as it’s truly hard to substantiate subjectivity in any meaningful way)?
Best,
Sean
P.S. In any case, I wish you the best of luck with your labors and look forward to seeing your finished coalpunk setting wherever you eventually place it!
Yikes! =D
Thanks for the thoughtful response Sean. And yes- the graph is supposed to be provocative hyperbole – intended to illustrate the point that SW is a “riskier” system from a GM/design POV but greater fun can be had. Perhaps, if you fattened the peaks a bit and made it closer to PFRPG it might be more accurate. but.. as always… this is purely subjective from my own personal experiences.
It’s hard to go down this path, comparing the fun output of various systems. There are simply too many variables and subjectivity.
What comprises fun varies widely from player to player, even among a group that games regularly.
Does the group want a good story or a challenge, or both? What do the players think makes a good story? Do the rules need to take a back seat to the story?
I won’t say system doesn’t matter, because it does matter. It matters, because it has to meet the needs, in traditional refereed adventure games, of both the GM and the players. The GM has to be comfortable with running it and it has to provide the players their desired level of complexity… which may actually be at odds with each other.
The importance of balance is variable, do players like verisimilitude or sandbox type play where the world doesn’t scale with their power or do they want every encounter to be winnable?
For me, system is just part of fun. Player dynamics is far more important. From my experience, engaging peak funnitude requires a lot of trial and error and tweaking and it’s a constant battle as the desires and interests of people change over time.
(FYI, this is samldanach from Twitter.)
I think your graph there, with the accompanying explanation, finally managed to get the fundamental difference between d20-based systems (including FantasyCraft) and FATE-based systems to click in my head. When designing and running d20, it is safe. The rules provide a clear framework that everything plugs into. But, that framework can end up hobbling a GM who wants to twist the system a bit to serve the story. FATE, OTOH, strongly enables GM fiat and hand-waving at the table. Which makes for a much softer foundation to build on, and much less of a safety net when things start going wrong.
(FWIW, I have yet to enjoy a SW game. It just manages to fall neatly into a patch in between all my sweet spots.)
On the subject of balance, it is not simply a matter of making every encounter winnable. It is a matter of making every encounter predictable. You can strongly balance the encounter to be either easy or hard. The problem comes when you balance the encounter to fall on one end of the spectrum, and the vagaries of the system cause it to come out on the other end.
Lugh, your last point hits upon what I was trying to get at. Balance is NOT about what the PCs do or don’t do, it’s about the GM or designer pushing the game to the edge of the cliff and balancing it there on the edge… All the time. Without falling off into the TPK abyss.
There is a bit of an “apple versus orange” situation afoot in this debate. Rolling a D20 with modifiers is inherently alien to a variable-dice step approach. Pathfinder has mechanical depths not encountered in the Savage Worlds paradigm, whereas SW has the ability to violate genres in a way not easily accomplished with Pathfinder and similar variants. The game-playing populations served by these different mechanics are not necessarily similar.
To an extent, we need to look at the desired features from a standpoint of target audience. If one wishes extensive character development in the fantasy genre backed by significant layered mechanics, there are time-honored sets of rules in the D20 tradition. The effort that goes into each character and the possibly tedious details of each melee round support this sort of development. Character survival is a more stable matter, and each loss is correspondingly harrowing.
Alternately, should one wish to engage in cross-genre development or play, the simple mechanics and rather more ruthless probabilities of the Savage Worlds environment can easily accomodate an elf-hunting quest with floating weird-science mana cannons fired from the backs of Shoggoths, with an occasional potato masher grenade hurled over the side to mop up the stragglers. Then, of course, there are the rapidly-approaching steam-powered airships to consider. The plasma rifle equipped troops in powered armor that have just arrived through an inter-planar rift might also be an interesting consideration.
Pathfinder might be hard-pressed to accomodate such situations, which are an inherent part of the Savage Worlds paradigm.
The D20 approach serves the tastes of younger players with the leisure time to devote to more extensive preparation and game play. The Savage Worlds mechanics are possibly more suited to gamers who must measure their lives in fifteen minute increments. Developing for both worlds doubles the market, since the two viewpoints are not likely to converge in the foreseeable future. This is an environment where working both sides of the fence poses no problems beyond the effort necessary to cater to completely alien mechanics.
I’ve had the honor of playtesting original Runequest, first-edition Champions, first-edition Call of Cthulhu, Arduin Eternal, and Pathfinder. Somehow I keep coming back to Savage Worlds, but that’s just me.
I wonder, if you never fall into the TPK abyss, is there a risk?
The “risk” I’m referring to is the level of risk presented to the players by the GM. Not the actual risk. In my opinion: a well designed game behaves in a predictable way – maybe this is the crux of it all… SW is less predictable. The lack of prediction is what makes it “more fun” when it is in the favor of the players, but it also can lead to situations where a lowbie mook can one-shot your PCs with a lucky die roll. From an RPG game design perspective, I think that is one of SW’s weaknesses for running long and deep, immersive campaigns. If all you are doing is running 3 to 4 sessions episodic adventures or one-night one-shots, SW is great… but when a player has spent months building up a character’s backstory and abilities only to have them accidentally wiped out by a stray bullet in a random barfight… that sucks. (true story, player was pissed). Is that fun? I would say no. Everyone at the table was like : OH… fcuk… What was I supposed to do? i.e. see my open-metagaming post I linked to above. I wasn’t using a GM screen, so there was zero opportunity for me to fudge things/use DM fiat. This proved to be a pretty sucky situation. Now — I’ll admit that some of the players at the table LOVED this. It was like gambling and that PC simply just lost everything. A debate broke out on the virtues of exploding die rolls and rare, chance one-shot kills by mooks. This post I think is one of the fallouts from that.
It seems like the graph is just a visual representation of “I personally find a well-balanced SW scenario much more fun than an equally well-balanced Pathfinder or 4e scenario, but harder to achieve.” Somebody else could fairly say “For me, Pathfinder is the blue line, and SW the green” and the “model” wouldn’t give you any insight as to why. It almost seems like you want to claim that because SW is hard to balance, it’s more fun when it works…
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ’0 which is not a hashcash value.
@Joshua – Sort of but not exactly. Honestly the graph is more of an representation of my own opinion.
What I’m trying to convey is that – from a scenario design perspective – it’s harder to get the balance “just right”. Whether you want a “balanced encounter” from a PC point of view or a balanced encounter from a design POV – it’s really easy to tip it too much one way or another. With Pathfinder, because the system is relatively more rigid than SW – it’s much harder to screw it up.
Good point, Mad Brew~
One of the reasons why I tend to care less about game balance no matter which side of the screen I am on is that part of the fun is derived from not being able to predict the outcomes, and from not being sure you know how things will turn out.
I am the first to admit that predictable things ought to at least have the semblance of predictability but… sometimes people choke when eating lunch, or get hit by a car in the middle of crossing the street, or discover their best friend of the last 30 years is a sleeper agent and hindsight rises up to show them just how blind they’ve been.
Being able to accurately assess the risks I take as a character, or providing challenges which my players will themselves be able to analyze and assess moves the game firmly into “not fun” territory, and practically out of “game” territory. It is not unreasonable to have a basic measure of how your character fits into the world around them, but there is a lot of truth in the saying that ‘it is not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’ To truly quantify the size of the fight, sometimes you have to wade in and start swinging on pure faith.
Personally, I think that is where the fun is, and when I am designing encounters or settings, I like to keep it in mind that even if the greenest player takes the greenest character to face the toughest challenge I have prepared… they will probably die, but… they might surprise us both, and that would totally rock.
@Runeslinger: I guess I can only say that I firmly disagree – assuming that I’m understanding you correctly. Chess has zero randomness to it. Is it “not fun”? Is it out of “game territory”? Chess is a paragon of gaming. I would argue that – as I did above in my comment/reply to Madbrew – that game mechanic predictability is the hallmark of a well designed game. Even when you gamble, good gamblers “know the odds of success”. They have a gauge of their chances. They can assess whether they are in a weak position or a strong position. The same should be true for RPGs. The RPG Designer’s goal – no: responsibility – to the players of their game is to provide the GM with tools by which the PCs can (as you say) have a “basic measure of how [their[ character fits into the world”. This is about risk assessment. Getting that balance between Risk and Reward just right requires predictable mechanics and clear indicators to the players of the level of danger involved.
Dispite what Madbrew said above: I’m NOT advocating creating a game where there is no risk. Quite the opposite. What I’m saying is that the observable level of risk should be apparent to the GM all the time, and (hopefully, if the GM is playing fair) to the PCs as well. Anyone can design an overpowered encounter with any game system, but the challenge is to create encounters in which the PCs can assess the risk upfront. That’s where the _game_ comes in: when the PCs _choose_ to take up the challenge and know wtf they are getting into.
We may have to agree to disagree and that is fine. It takes all kinds, and I enjoyed the article even though I can’t say I agreed with it. At this stage, I suppose we are not going to change each other’s minds, but it was a pleasure to discuss it.
I do agree that Chess is a paragon of games, and I agree it cannot be described as random. I think that the source of fun in engaging in a game of chess, however, is miles removed from the source of fun found in most RPGs, though. Barring illness or other external circumstances, the better chess player will win, and the fun is based on that premise. The challenge of comparing and developing skill using the clearly defined and unchanging rules of the game is the framework for enjoyment in chess. For me, the best fun is when you play an opponent for the first time… subsequent games, when we already know our relative skill levels, are not nearly so thrilling.
An RPG -to me at any rate – is built not on winning, or comparing my skill to another’s in a competition, but in what amounts to an extended run of taking risks, and being able to swing the odds in my favour – fully cognizant that I may not know enough to do so. The game system and my familiarity with it will allow me to predict outcomes fairly well, but mechanics which allow dice to explode, or otherwise mess with the predictable result is a vital factor which can introduce elements of natural tragedy, or legendary success in a totally organic way, and take us places we would have to script otherwise.
If I, or my players, know enough to assess what is ahead effectively each and every time, or never have to fear that ‘shot in the bar’ then risk is reduced to simply making a choice to win or not try. That can be made fun, in the same way that chess can be great, but I guess we can agree that it is a wholly different type of fun.
I think that a big part of the difference comes from a much more subtle difference in how each of you are approaching the game. Jonathan (and I, for the record) want to craft a story, using the game as a medium. Runeslinger, I see you as wanting to discover the story that the game can create. I had a very similar discussion with other people a few months ago, in talking about how to deal with character death.
Basically, I want to be able to carve a big groove in my setting that represents the plot. As GM, I know pretty much where it should go, assuming I know my players and their characters reasonably well. The players get a lot of wiggle room within that groove to personalize the experience. The big details are decided ahead of time, and I can work with the players to see longer arcs with big payoffs.
With a more random system, though, my groove isn’t as deep, and not as dependable. Sometimes, despite the best efforts of both myself and the players, the plot will bounce out of the groove and go haring off across the landscape. This could generate some really amazingly cool moments. In my experience, though, it much more often ends up with a lot of story lines and character arcs getting cut prematurely short, or getting twisted completely out of shape.
To use a particular example, when the crew in Princess Bride are storming the castle, one of the four guards that Inigo dispatches could easily have killed him instead. Count Rugen would have watched and laughed. I think we can pretty much all agree that that would be a sucky ending. With some knowledge that a fencing wizard is at least two orders of magnitude better than a common mook, the GM can know that this encounter will easily show just how awesome Inigo is.
Lugh – I think you are right about the different starting points from which we are viewing this topic. Not all the details are spot on, but the starting point is solid enough. I think there are those of us who want to “run characters through a good story” meaning that we – as you say – prepare a plot and set the encounters to ensure specific outcomes we know the players will enjoy. The dice add a certain spice to this, and the mental challenges of progressing through the tale, and reacting to the things carefully placed there for us to find are the real meat of enjoyment. This is a real art, takes patience and care – as Jonathan notes in his original post – and it takes time, effort and practice to hone this skill. No argument here.
There are others of us, I feel, that use all of these same tools, but enjoy the added thrill of uncertainty, and the – as you say – ‘discovery’ of whose tale, and what sort of tale it is, after it is finished. The immunity of heroes to circumstance is no longer very interesting to me. I played that way for many years, and one of the biggest turn-offs for me as a gamer ever is the realization that dice rolls are being fudged, or that threats are being managed so that my character will survive. If I go off to face the dragon with my sling and all the awesome power that L1 provides me, then I deserve my terrible end… but I also deserve the chance to try, and if I am clever enough, lucky enough, and creative enough, and Fate takes my side then… I deserve to win – not because the GM decided it would be cool if I did, but because that is what happened in play.
As a GM, I feel that if I am plotting out the story to a set conclusion through planned beats, then I would have a greater effect writing out the tale to share it with my friends. If the characters will overcome all the challenges unless the players screw up, and the challenge comes from applying the correct strategy at the correct time, or connecting all the dots I plan for them to find, I do not get enough of a charge from this on either side of the screen for this to be rewarding.
To be clear, I am not advocating for wild randomness, no certainty, and no planning. If you check out my blog, you will see that I put a lot of thought into how campaigns are built and stories are presented. I am also a strong proponent of emulating genre conventions, so that a tale has a very specific feel and flow. On the point that players should be able to make decisions based on their expectations I feel we completely agree. Our disagreement lies – as I see it – more in the degree of accuracy those expectations should have, and the role that the unexpected failure or success should have in the arc of the story.
I like the example of the Princess Bride in your comment, Lugh. It illustrates both points nicely. In our understanding of the tale, having seen it from start to finish and having out attachments to the characters and their ways we love how effortlessly Inigo dispatches the guards and then finally gets his revenge on Count Rubin. It is stirring heroics, and the triumph of the little man over the forces of oppression. Great stuff. (The Rhetorical Gamer has a great entry on this scene and the significance of the door, BTW, called Rolling Dice at the Most Important Door in the World – Here )
On the other hand, if Inigo were to perish in his pursuit of revenge then tale would not be as we know it to be, it would be something else, and we would need to compare Inigo’s role in it to an entirely different set of ending circumstances. Ones, perhaps, in which the tale’s strong themes of True Love, may reveal that Inigo was not motivated and empowered by his love for his father, but rather motivated out of guilt and the selfish desire for revenge… and so – met a just end, as all such selfish men should. It is not even remotely the same story, and as we sit here, we have no idea what fate would have befallen the 6-fingered man, or anyone else. The outcomes may not be predictable, but the underlying themes remain, and good stories reveal themselves, entertaining and surprising on both sides of the screen. The character arcs are not being twisted or distorted – they are being revealed. The skill at work in this way of GMing is not in pre-planning the risk, but in creating sense from the results.
So yes – we are looking at things differently, and our enjoyment of the medium is based on different foundations.
Thanks for the willingness to discuss this difference intelligently, rather than… the other way.
This response is somewhat belated, due to a major disturbance in my own life (everything is fine now). I recently went through a similar pattern of change, from the point of view of a DM. First running a 4E D&D game, then Savage Worlds, and ultimately moving to Pathfinder. Several things precipitated my “break” with 4E. The biggest factor was the change of the “insider” tools to the online only model. I knew that with my group of players (including two teenagers, one of them my own daughter) I would be the one paying for insider every month. I tried making 4E characters with paper and pencil, and found another place where the fun factor was at the bottom of the graph. When you find yourself thinking how much easier it would be to make GURPS characters, and how much more usable those characters would be, with enough information on the sheet and no need to make out a pile of power cards.
Meanwhile, Savage Worlds characters build very quickly, with only character sheet and pencil, but the actual running of the game, is, as you say a balancing act. Like driving a high preformance car it requires lightening reflexes, concentration, and perhaps most of all, the operator’s full attention. Then my schedule at work changed, leaving me a great deal less time to prepare my game sessions, and more tired and less able to focus on the “highwire act” of running Savage Worlds. It quickly became clear that I wouldn’t be able to maintain the “fun level” running Savage Worlds, and need to switch to a system with readily available and plentiful modules, so that I would be able to continue to run a game with reduced prep-time. 4E has plenty of modules, but there was the character generation and maintanance problem combined with the “all combat, all the time,” nature of the WoTC modules. While I am not in the “4E is only good for combat” camp, I do blame its publishers for the combat only tone set in the books and all the modules. This was not the right tone to satisfy my players, and I was out of time and energy to make adventures and characters for 4E.
I bought the Pathfinder beginners boxed set and decided to give it a try. The included module ran well, and presented my players with chances to negotiate, bribe, or bully their way out of some, but not all, of the fights. Meanwhile the sort of stabby rogue character that my daughter’s boyfriend favors proved useful both in and out of combat, which was a welcome change from attempts to provide him a roll in non-combat activites in other systems…. Than I ran the “We Be Goblins” module that Paizo provided for Free RPG Day, and was amazed by the fun levels as everyone played goblin characters. Paizo’s goblins have a distinct feel that made for wonderful roleplaying. So I bought the PDF version of of the Patthfinder core rulebook (fortunately Paizo also have a more rational view about PDF publishing in the modern economy), and the starting module of the “Jade Regent” adventure path. Now I am looking forward to running the next session of my game, the familiarity of the 3.5E style rules, which harken back to 2nd edition more than forward to 4E also makes the game reasonably easy for me to run based on my own experience.
So I find that the fun curve also applies to runnig the different games. If I had the time and energy I could have more fun running Savage Worlds (and I hope at some time to be able to run some other favorite systems of my own, like “Castle Falkenstein” and GURPS) but pathfinder offers the best balance of “easy operation” and fun for both me and my players.
Thanks for stopping by @timewind. Good to know someone shares my POV! =D
Interesting and thought-provoking post. You’ve helped us sort out some of the ins-and-outs of Savage Worlds that we’ve been navigating on our own. some of the follow-up comments have been very helpful as well. Eye-opening, even.
Thanks a million!
Glad you enjoyed it Jim. See you around these parts again soon!