too many choices

[xiombarg]

Perhaps I'm not understanding what y'all are driving at, but I'm not sure how what's being said relates to the focus of the thread: Preventing decision paralysis without resorting to a class system. I am less interested as to why class/template systems are the bee's knees as to how to make non-class/template systems more accessible.

I mean, these are interesting topics, and if people want to spin off into other threads about them, that's fine and I'll even participate, but this isn't what I started to thread to discuss. Again, unless I'm missing a connection here.

Edit: I missed Chris's post, which is a lot more along what I'm looking for. I think some of the techniques he mentions have promise.

[Walt Freitag]

To drag out another analogous anecdote... one of the local oriental restaurants has the usual menu with about 100 items on it... and it has the design your dish section. DYD has five bases (rice, various noodles etc), five "ingredients" (mixes of veg, pork, beef, chicken, prawn, etc), five sauces and five optional extras (spices, chillis, etc). So you've got well over 600 possible dishes, but since it's one from each column, skip the columns you don't want, the human brain can hold the whole array of options simultaneously, while the rest of the, comparatively limited, menu overwhelms.

This is a really insightful point. A single 400-way choice vs. five five-way choices.

The key to keeping such a sequence of selections non-stressful is to minimize interdependence between the choices, avoiding synergies and (whatever the opposite of a synergy is). When you have to start thinking things like "If I go with the pork, it won't taste good with the schezuan sauce that I like, and the spices make the noodles dissolve so I'd need to go with rice..." you can quickly end up with as much paralyzing bewilderment as you'd have with the 400 separate choices -- or, just as easily, collapsing into a few arechetypal combinations ("once you choose pork, you pretty much have to go with yu shiang sauce, rice, and spices").

Many elements of the char gen in Vampire (and related WW systems) seem analogous to the "design your dish" one-from-column-A-etc approach. Just about everything is picked off of menus. Some of the menus are perhaps a bit too long, but the real reason the system falls short of easily negotiable is that it does have some interdependences, cases where such-and-such discipline works better (is more effective or makes more sense) with such-and-such clan choice and such-and-such allocation of attribute points.

So, designing char gen for maximum orthogonality between choices? Sounds doable; in fact its been done. (Orthogonality appears in the most focused systems that encode only the essential characteristics: MLwM; Trollbabe.) Yet I'm not coming up with any examples of general-purpose or conventionally detailed systems that use menu choices that appear to have been designed for orthogonality. (For instance, as soon as you associate certain stats with certain skills, you've created synergies. In fact, creating synergies is the whole point of every X-gives-a-bonus-to-Y rule in every rpg that has them.) Heroquest seems to have the orthogonality but doesn't use menu choices.

Anything I'm overlooking? Is there an unfilled niche here?

- W

[Thierry Michel]

how to make non-class/template systems more accessible.

The obvious way is to randomize chargen, but I suppose that's not what you want either.

[xiombarg]

The obvious way is to randomize chargen, but I suppose that's not what you want either.

Well, I'm not sure I understand why you think it's a solution. I mean, by that same point of view, just having the GM choose characters for the players is a solution.

It certainly cuts the Gordian knot...

[Bankuei]

Hi Loki,

There's a few games that I can name right off the bat that do not use the pick and choose option of class, yet provide enough limitation for most players to pick up and go.  Over the Edge, The Pool, Donjon, and also Maelstrom/Story Engine are the ones that immediately spring to mind.

Instead of limiting your options, they narrowly define a character based on a handful of traits given by the player.  The wide open question of "be anything" becomes more managable when the player only has to think of 3-5 traits to define the character.

Chris

[M. J. Young]

O.K., I have a crazy idea; maybe I'm just too tired to think of a sane one.

I'm envisioning a character generation book that is similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure book, with a few quirks.

The character is initially outlined with attributes, a couple of physical, mental, and social characteristics. These might not even matter in play; they matter for chargen.

In the first chapter, you're a kid. The chapter is really short, and describes a bit about the world, and then asks you to answer a question about your character, and go to a specific page. Maybe the first question is which income bracket is his--wealthy, upper middle class, lower middle class, poor, impoverished, something like that. From there, you're offered choices between types of schools, courses of study, extracurricular activities, and the like--chess club or football, that sort of thing. Each choice takes you to a different page.

Sometimes the choices are delimited by your ability scores. That is, let's say you choose football, now we get to a place where you're going to go to the next level of education, and if your physical scores are at least these minimums, you can choose option A that involves going on scholarship to a good school where you will continue to play football. Similarly, you reach a point in lifepath where you apply for your first job, and what job you can get will in part depend on all the choices you've made to this point and in part on what your ability scores are.

In the end you've read a short story about your character's experience, and you've constructed a skill set that could be very realistic and detailed. For example, if you chose summer camp, you could have one set of skills, while if you chose summer job, you could have a different set.

It sounds like an immense undertaking in developing the system, and there are a couple of pitfalls (the possibility that specific life paths would play out more effective in game than others, and could be learned by players, for example). However, you'd only have to write the book once, and then it would exist for all players.

O.K., I'll go back to reading threads now, and try to get some sleep so I can post something more sane another day.

--M. J. Young

[Lorenzo Rubbo-Ferraro]

Well on the topic of CharGen, and off the topic of the post, maybe, here is what I have been tossing about. In Lila, the players choose a demi-god from the vast hindu/vedic pantheon from whose planet they descend. The demi-god has a brief description (aphorisms) with keywords. Anytime a character "buys" character advancement that is related to this keyword it is half price. E.g. A character chooses Varuna as his demi-god. Varunas description begins thus: "Varuna, sovereign of oceans, rivers and the aquatics within...." Now, if the player wants to buy a skill say "swimming" it is half price, because it links (even though sometimes it may be tenuous!) to the demi-god and will be forevermore half price to "upgrade".

This does not limit the character in any way, he can have nothing to do with water or aquatics, and develop fire magic if he so desires. It just says that where you're from is who you are. It is easier to follow your natural tendencies then someone else's. It's idea anyway.

[Thierry Michel]

Well, I'm not sure I understand why you think it's a solution

It gives the player all the items on the menu without analysis paralysis.

Dying Earth, for instance, offers the player an incentive to rely on random chargen by giving bonus points, so one could either pick every choice or pick only some and get more points to do so, letting the dice decide the rest.

[pete_darby]

MJ, depending on which way I tilt my mental prism, you've re-invented either:

the old central casting books / traveller chargen / lifepaths

or

The Babylon Project chargen...

[simon_hibbs]

I am less interested as to why class/template systems are the bee's knees as to how to make non-class/template systems more accessible.

Perhaps we're talking about different things, but so far as I understand it Templates are exactly that - ways to make the underlying system more accessible. Having templates in a system doesn't necesserily mean you must use the templates, so their presence doesn't take anything away from the base system. Therefore calling them "template systems" when the templates are just an optional element seems somewhat unfair.

Simon Hibbs