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Originally Posted by
1337 b4k4
Further, no one is claiming that the issues that exist with D&D aren't issues, but they are saying that the fundamental change in the industry has or is in the process of happening, and that the primary list of complains in the OP are really complaints about D&D, and even further, very specific forms of D&D. A more apt analogy is that the OP is complaining that the movie industry needs to cut its action movie baseline in favor of other things because action movies make up the summer block busters, and this thread is pointing out that if action movies aren't your bag, there's a lot of movies out there that do other things, even if they're not summer block busters.
I'm not convinced that this is true, but there's not much I can do to explain why beyond pointing to my previous argument in confusion. Though I will note that, in the real world, there are plenty of non-action-blockbuster movies which make it big in movie theaters (rom-coms and anything by Disney*, for instance).
*You know what I mean, don't drag Star Wars and Marvel into this.
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Some of this is because combat is also one of the harder things to adjudicate without rules, in part because acting things out for combat is difficult, but also because most people don't have experience with combat, where as things like suspicion, argument, debate, trading, haggling, begging, and leading are things that many or most people have at least passing familiarity with and its general effects. Now we can argue over whether more rule space should be dedicated to these things, but most game makers are approaching this from the "I don't need to give you rules on how to adjudicate an argument, because most people already know how to do that".
Then why are Persuasion, Bluff, and Diplomacy skills? Your argument would only make sense if the game told players to act out conversations and left it 100% up to the DM to decide how everything played out...but there
are rules, which means that your argument is invalid. The rules are bare-bones, of course, just like the rules for appraisal, riding outside of combat, and most everything else the designers didn't think was worth the effort. The rules make
perfect sense if they were constructed out of such a view, if they thought "This isn't important enough to be worth bogging down a game with," but absolutely
no sense if they were thinking "We don't need rules for this".
But even without that, your analysis is flawed. It relies on two separate assumptions, each with its own flaws:
1. People playing RPGs have sufficient experience with the kinds of non-combat challenges their characters would come across, but not combat.
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On the surface, this makes sense, but it kinda falls apart on closer examination. I mean, anyone with rough friends, football experience, siblings, etc has some familiarity with the gist of fighting. Obviously it's not the same thing as fighting dragons with swords, but non-combat challenges don't much resemble our real-world experiences, either. A typical gamer may have negotiated a compromise between friends disagreeing about where to go for lunch, but that's not quite the same as negotiating a compromise between rebel factions disagreeing about how to overthrow the evil emperor. A gamer may have convinced a friend to upgrade his gaming console, but that's not the same as convincing your captain to upgrade his ship's weapons. A gamer may have asked someone join them at prom, but that's not the same as asking someone to join them in the fight against evil. In fact, the differences in both cases are much the same; similar actions, but with less at stake.
2. The combat rules of typical RPGs are intended to help gamers get a feel for/properly simulate what combat is actually like.
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Ah ha ha no. If this were the case, simulationist combat would be the norm, if not the only game in town. Go find some super-detailed, ultra-realistic combat system and try it out; it's probably going to play quite differently than what your group is used to, and chances are it won't be as popular. (Some groups like that, most don't.) The complaints that they have will hint at the real reason the combat mechanics are what they are—it's fun. Tabletop RPGs are based off of war games (as the title of this thread points out), and most of those made gross oversimplifications for the purpose of having a more fun experience.
And it's not as if you simply can't make more interesting mechanics for non-combat things. Look at Last Word, for instance. Its conversation system is a bit bare-bones, but entirely functional and (in my opinion) fun to play. I've thought of several possible ways to take those concepts and tweak them for various types of games. Or if you're into something more mainstream, you could probably take some of Phoenix Wright's mechanics, or look into the more sim-ey dating sims. Those mechanics are out there; tabletop RPGs just have to be willing to learn from electronic ones.
(Yes, I know the games I listed aren't all RPGs.)
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Still there are plenty of games that dole out rules on plenty of other things. Heck going all the way back to the beginning, Traveller delegates 15 pages of the 129 page rule book (The Traveller Book) to personal combat, and another 7 pages to starship combat. That's 17% of the rules, and it's actually less than that because those sections include things like general information about being wounded and how the gravity wells of planets affect ship movement. An equal 22 pages are dedicated just to the building and running of starships outside of combat.
Alright, first off, I'd like to point to my "counter-examples don't actually counter the argument" argument in confusion again. You keep seeming to think you've responded to it adequately, but you haven't really addressed it at all. Don't get me wrong—it would be a good argument if the OP was complaining about not being able to find a non-wargamey RPG, but he wasn't.
Second off, your analysis is incomplete. Weapons get five and a half pages in the equipment section, armor gets two and a half, but computers and communicators get one each. Two of the nine drugs are explicitly combat-oriented, as are two of the three available modifications to drones. (Not to mention that about two and a half of the ship-design pages—one-quarter of the entire section!—are for combat equipment, and that the "running of starships outside of combat" section brings up things like pirate encounter rates,
hostile boarding actions.) But this kind of raw content count isn't a good source of analysis on its own. The D&D 3.5 player's handbook spends three pages describing attributes, and three or four each describing gods and alignments. (I'm counting from memory, so I might be a page or so off. Doesn't affect my point that much.) This makes it sound like attributes, patron deity, and alignment are more or less equally important, which they obviously aren't; one is among the core mechanics of the whole game, while the others have limited to minimal effect on a character. So let's do a more detailed analysis of Traveler to see if it's really so non-combat-oriented.
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Take the Encounters and Dangers section, for instance. Nearly
five pages about wild animals (which you'd think would be a nonissue for space-age folks, given how rarely wild animals have been able to harm prepared humans for the past millennium or two), roughly one page about other survival difficulties like weather and disease...which also includes information directly relevant to combat, like how venom works and how many times you can attack in combat without getting fatigued. Then you have a page on healing, which can go either way, and information on NPCs and potential encounters or missions. Those should be an excellent way to determine how the designers expect the game to be played—it's a list of suggested adventures and obstacles, for crying out loud! Let's start with the patrons. Out of the seven patrons described, three initially appear to be intelligence-oriented (surveying planets, investigating murders, tracking smugglers), two are openly combat-focused, one is based around trade, and one is incredibly vague without any of the twists. But those twists are key, especially considering how at least half of the adventures would be boring without them. ("You deliver the cargo safely. Mission complete.")
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Half of the Planetologist's twists directly lead into violent dangers—two have hostile bugs, one has active sabotage. Two others have heightened tensions between the Scouts and the patron, which presumably blossoms into some kind of conflict, and while this isn't necessarily violent, I have trouble seeing how the players could care about or get involved in bureaucratic disputes or whatever.
Two of the Spy's twists refer to pirate attacks, one casually (as though saying "of course there are pirate attacks"). Not to mention that, despite me classifying it as an intelligence-oriented mission, it directly pits the players against a criminal organization, and the way everything is written heavily suggests that the designers expect some kind of violent confrontation—especially since the mission is explicitly described as "a lot more dangerous than Kemble initially suggests".
The Eccentric Noble is three separate missions—one with two variations, one with three. One is simply entertaining a bunch of nobles and one is just spiriting him away without anyone noticing, but one revolves around getting the characters to protect him from an assassin without their knowledge and three are based around a hunting expedition.
The Miner's mission is explicitly combat-oriented, unless you expect the PCs to try and negotiate with the people blowing up their own people's ships for political reasons.
The Merchant's mission is pretty terrible, if you're trying to argue that combat isn't a focus of Traveler. A smuggling mission can go so many directions, and yet...two involve the spawn of "a savage alien predator" escaping their mother's cage; two involve being tracked down by an Aslan "hunting party" (who are presumably not going to broker a deal for it, given that they're called a hunting party...and the twist specifically mentions that the buyer will be pissed if the party gives it away, giving an easy out); and out of the last two, one has the party lead to an "ancient automated defence system".
The Starport Administrator's mission is a murder mystery...yet rather than focus on little details like what clues the PCs can use to find the killer, it focuses on who the killer is and what he'll do next. Which, you know, fair play, but that makes it seem like the adventure is less about gathering clues and putting the murderer behind bars than it is stopping the assassin/serial killer/pirates/psion from completing their nefarious plans. The one which really stands out as maybe not being this is the "crime of passion," but that's so vague that I literally can't think of anywhere to go from there. Like, what evidence would the PCs be able to find that points to this cleaning lady above anyone else, and why wouldn't onsite security have seen it first?
The Desperate Peasant's mission is literally "help me with this coup".
And let's not forget the encounters!
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Starport encounters: Seventeen mundane. Three potential combats. One environmental danger. Two combat adventure hooks. Two trade adventure hooks. One smuggling adventure hook. Five vague/potential adventure hooks. Three security encounters. One bureaucratic obstacle. Three random guys bothering the PCs.
Rural encounters: Wild Animal x6. Nineteen mundane. One potential combat scenario. Two environmental dangers. Two vague/potential adventure hooks, one implying physical danger (ie, combat). One security encounter. One hunting party. One escort quest. One technological irritation. One set of unfriendly locals.
Urban encounters: Twenty-three mundane. Four potential combats. One vehicular crash involving PCs. One environmental danger. Three vague/potential adventure hooks. Two security encounters. Two random guys bothering the PCs.
Oh, and roughly a third of the given NPC statistics are for thugs, guards, and security officers. Moreover, they comprise most of the NPC types with multiple "levels". Now, you might argue that of
course combat-focused NPCs are going to get more statistics; statistics are for combat, you don't need to know how hard it is to kill someone you're just bartering with. But that's another point entirely—
why are so many of Traveler's core rules focused on combat, if it's so focused on out-of-combat ship maintenance? (Three of six Characteristics have primary combat applications, while only one has a primary social application.) And why are so many of those latter rules so simple, with so few player choices to make? I mean, you
can choose to skip maintenance or mortgage payments, but the game makes it clear that these are bad ideas. The same goes for the fairly extensive trade rules; for all their detail, they basically cover if a given trade is available and how much the purchase price will be, with the only player input being what they want to try and die rolls. Yawn.
TL;DR: While Traveler is not focused on violent conflict to the same extent as D&D, it receives more attention and mechanical depth than any other type of conflict.
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Some of this is because simple combat is the most basic and easiest to develop conflict. Of the 3 main conflicts, "man vs self", "man vs nature" and "man vs man", MvM is the most common one to start stories with because it's simple to develop. It requires very little setup, it requires very little plotting and it's easy to understand. Even basic fairy tales tend to focus on this, because it's simple for children to grasp the concept of one person harming another. See also comic book super heroes. The deeper concepts of self destruction and societal pressures are harder to grasp and take more legwork to produce a workable story from. As a result, those themes are explored in more "advanced" versions of media, and in RPGs that publish more than their core books, a lot of that additional material is covered in later books.
1. I disagree with the "advanced/not-advanced" dichotomy you're suggesting quite heartily.
2. "Man versus Man" does not automatically mean "man beats up man". It can also refer to ideological conflicts between different factions which result in bickering and blackmail but not actual violence, or to people on the same team arguing about the best way to handle their mutual goals, or even to antagonistic haggling.
3. Your example fails on a deeper level; while it's certainly true that low-quality comic books, literature, etc, often focus on physically violent conflicts, you hardly have to look to find counterexamples. Violence is the lazy author's solution to a lack of conflict; most manage to work other kinds of conflict in there.
4. I have never seen any such "additional material" covered in a way which detracts from the combat focus of a game. Which isn't surprising, since that would require rewriting many core systems for an experience (one which most people playing RPGs aren't in the market for).
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But what is the RPG medium as a whole if not the combination of all the pieces of that industry. D&D does not an industry make. It's one part of the industry, and yes it's a big part, but to go back to my previous analogy, summer blockbuster action movies are a big (if not the biggest) part of the movie industry. But I don't think anyone would take you seriously if you came into a forum and said "the movie industry needs to drop its action oriented roots, and the small smatterings of films that aren't action oriented don't change the fact that the medium is all about action movies"
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You are...you're serious?
First off, it's not just D&D, it's all the second-tier titles and most of the minor ones. Shadowrun, Mutants & Masterminds, even GURPS all have an unhealthy fixation on one type of conflict to the exclusion of all others. Second...well...I've already effing covered it, and your only response is "Here's an analogy which totally fits better, makes sense, and isn't basically the same!" So stop asserting that you've explained away the existence of systemic problems.
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I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that unlike almost any other medium or hobby, TTRPGs requires heavy personal investment in a single system. Let's face it, ours is a nerd hobby, which means to get the most out of it, you have to learn the little details, and people only have so much time to devote. Switching movies, video games and books is easy by comparison. But switching systems means learning completely new rules, new assumptions and often finding completely new players. So rather than go wide, TTRPG fans like to go deep. That's why character build forums exist, because it lets people invested in a particular game dig deeper.
You're kinda completely wrong. This is most obvious in the case of video games, where system mastery is considered a core engagement for many games (varying from
Dwarf Fortress to
Dark Souls), but it applies to everything. You can just read
A Song of Ice and Fire and put it down, but if you are willing to put some thought into it, you'll notice connections and details which enrich the work as a whole. (This can clearly be seen if you
read essays on the subject [the most clearly-relevant for this discussion is probably the "Untangling the Meereenese Knot" series], but that's like reading a walkthrough for literary comprehension; you should at least take a shot on your own first.)
Sure, you need to spend time learning mechanics and whatnot whenever you pick up an RPG, but isn't the same true of everything? It's just that tutorials and exposition are considered part of the experience, while learning RPG rules isn't.
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You're experience is very different from mine. I've found (even in D&D combat heavy games) that camaraderie and teamwork is in plenty of abundance. Then again, it probably depends largely on whether one is gaming to play RPGs, or gaming to socialize. I tend to game to socialize.
I also game to socialize. It's just that my social circles realize that D&D is kind of a terrible game to do that with, since the game gets in the way of the socializing too often. Something simpler and more elegant, designed for a social experience instead of being a retooled wargame, works better.
Which is a problem in and of itself, I guess. If RPGs can't figure out what role they want to play, and decide on one that fits the medium, they're gonna have a bad time.
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It seems rather unfair to state on the one hand that one can't use the indie RPG scene to describe the state of RPGs and the RPG industry, but then on the other hand use the indie video game scene to describe the state of video games and the VG industry. Either indie's count or they don't. I'm of the opinion they do.
Where's the reading comprehension?
First, I was describing
all of my TRPG experience and
all of my video gaming experience. I wasn't excluding all the indie TRPGs I've played, because I've never even had a chance to play any indie RPGs (aside from some D&D knockoffs).
Second, and more importantly, equating the indie scenes of TRPGs and video games is deeply fallacious. D&D is an industry titan whom everyone else gets the scraps from, and even the second tier of TRPGs is chock-full of long-running franchises (GURPS, Shadowrun, World of Darkness...the only newcomer of comparable scale which I can think of comparably easily is FATE, and I still argue that it's more like a set of make-believe guidelines than typical RPG systems). A world with Minecraft, or even with Undertale, is a world whose indie video game scene is far more vibrant, healthy, and
relevant than our indie TRPG scene.
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The question is, what can we come up with for the TTRPG industry that makes finding the indie stuff easier too? We already sort of have a "steam", it's rpgnow.com.
There are a lot of "TRPG Steam" services. The problem is that most don't offer the same quality of service as Steam (which is partly because that level of service is much harder to achieve with RPGs, but I've yet to see anything that even tries to go beyond "Here are your PDFs, good luck finding someone to play with").
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We need the Nintendo of the TTRPG world to. The company that's not concerned with what the industry as a whole is doing, they're concerned with making their own fun, first party off the wall stuff, but with the clout and exposure to get shelf space next to the dinosaurs (yes I know technically Nintendo is older than the Sony and Microsoft and (modern) PC gaming scene, but in this context dinosaur is referring to the size and pondering slowness)
Nintendo has a different strategy than Microsoft or Sony, but it's not different in that way. In particular, I don't think it's accurate to say that they don't care about what the industry is doing as a whole; that would be suicidal (not to mention all but disproved by things like
Splatoon and
Breath of the Wild, which are pretty clearly inspired by non-Nintendo sources). They are just more likely to come up with big gameplay innovations these days (motion controls, DS, etc), which wasn't always the case and has more to do with necessity than anything (see
here for more information).
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A last thought, I think we need to put some serious effort into stamping out gate-keeping in the industry. Edition flamewars are not just internally destructive, when they leak into the public they're off-putting to those looking to get in. Fate, or PbtA, or Mouseguard, or GURPS or D&D, or Dread or CoC, it shouldn't matter. By the book, or a comedy of errors and mistakes, it shouldn't matter. Causal and silly or deep and introspective, it shouldn't matter. And yes, heavy combat focus, or investigation or politics, it shouldn't matter. What should matter is that you're playing, that they're playing, and that we're doing everything we can to make it easier for them to play. Even if that means sometimes we go out of our way to learn something new and play it. We're the old guard, and we're the computer, we have a responsibility to help give new players the steps to get into the community. I'm not saying if you love D&D, or you love FATE and someone comes along and wants to do Hero that you have to give up FATE and D&D. But I'm saying maybe invest in some HERO, learn it, give the player a chance to play (and be honest that you're learning too) and then help give them the resources the community and the industry has to let them find more and let them fly.
A noble sentiment, but given the context it sounds a lot like "Stop complaining, I'm happy so there's nothing wrong with the industry."