Quote Originally Posted by msmyall View Post
Hello fellow Roleplayers. I go onto this forum as I know it is frequented by a multitude of tabletop players. So I wanted to come here to gather information, and player/DM opinions. So I ask all the following questions, in this order.

1. Which Die system do you believe to be superior? (D20, d10, success's vs failures, d%, etc)
I'm going to dance around this question a bit by saying what I want a dice system to do for me:

- The system should ideally have a consistent variance across the range of power-levels that the game is trying to represent. In d20+modifier, for example, the variance decreases relative to the mean as the modifier grows. For games with a small range, this doesn't matter so much. This is actually a fairly hard problem if you want to capture a huge range of scales, like having a creature with a skill of 1 and a skill of 100 and a skill of 10000 all in the same game system. For narrower games, it doesn't matter that much.

- Players should be able to invest resources to decrease their uncertainty in specific things they want to be reliable (D&D's Take 10, for example)
- Having dice outcomes be more than pass/fail is a nice touch. For example, you could have something where you roll a variable number of d6's but 1's accumulate as fatigue or something. This has to be customized to the thematics of the game though.
- Quick to assemble, execute, and evaluate. Rolling 10d6+5d4+2d12 is bad compared to rolling 1d100.

2. What do you look for most in a tabletop? (Simplicity, learning curve, immersion)
Primarily I want something that is inspiring - the execution of mechanics and thematics are tied together in a way that gives me ideas for characters to play or scenarios I want to run. This can be achieved in a number of different ways, but all are somewhat important.

- Tight integration between game mechanics and thematics. 'Universal systems' really don't do it for me. Part of this is the idea that the fluff should matter and not just be a paint job.
- Non-trivial interactions between the game mechanics. A system where there are combos/etc entices me to explore it further, whereas something where everything separates very cleanly or is mechanically identical tends to cause me to lose interest.

3. What common tabletop rules/standards would you change and why?
This is more of a feature of the player community, but I'd really like to have more systems that encourage players to learn to be proactive. Many games are structured along the lines of 'DM assigns today's scenario, players run through the scenario' but there are comparatively fewer game systems really encourage and depend on the players actively pursuing their own goals in an explicit fashion.

4. What are things you hate in most current tabletop games?
- Mechanical sameness in the name of balance is a pretty big offender these days - the so called 'wrought iron gate made of tigers' as a hard separation between crunch and fluff.

- Mismatches between what something is supposed to be in the game world and what, mechanically, it is not effectively designed to be - for example, games where the most deadly poisons can be shrugged off by 95% of significant characters. I'd rather the game say something like 'magical treatments have rendered poisons irrelevant' than claim that a poison is very deadly but then have it end up being underwhelming.

- Trap options/rules whose main function is just to reward people manipulating them. As an extreme example, 7th Sea had a character generation system where you could build a character with the exact same skills/traits/etc in two different ways for two different XP costs. If you knew the system well, you could basically start with more XP than someone who didn't know the system well.

5. What's three things you wish they would introduce into tabletop games, that they have not yet introduced?
I really like the idea of having games where there's more maneuvering and mastermind-ey things going on - that is, games where somehow the overall strategy of the story arc becomes something the players can directly interact with. I've played around a bit with this sort of thing in homebrew; for example, I've given PCs abilities that let them 'delay the target's plans for 1 day', 'retroactively have taken a trivial action', 'create a religion', etc.

I like the idea of city-builder sorts of side-games as well, things where the PCs build up a persistent thing over the course of the game that grants benefits and maybe has attendant followers/etc. I've run a game where the PCs could build facilities in their home city which would give broad benefits to them and everyone else living there - for example, if they build one structure then it changes the resale value of things they find on their adventures, but if they build another structure then they get more XP, and a third structure would let them purchase rarer items, and so on; that was kind of interesting.

The third thing I'd like to see is a game that explicitly rewards awesome character death with an in-game explanation, so that the long game becomes a balance between retaining a character and letting them go out with a bang. For example, something where the players are actually playing the current heir to a dynasty or family, and the family (and therefore their next character) gets permanent buffs based on how the current character ends up dying. This would also allow campaigns with a much longer timescale than you usually see.