Check out this article:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040301crbo_books

I think the thesis of the book reviewed, if true, has some interesting implications for RPG design. For one thing, it certainly explains why a game with a limited number of classes/clans/archetypes/splats often does better than a similar game with more freedom of choice.

It also gives some hints of how to deal with this issue without just caving into the desire to have splats, as (for example) many recent GURPS books have done by abandoning the "wide open" feel of the system and providing "templates" people can use.

Instead, assuming the game isn't particularly Gamist, the trick is for the game text in a more freeform game to encourage players to "satisfice" rather than "maximize", but in a positive way: Encourage people to pick what's "good enough" rather than trying for the "best thing", rather than just engaging in the "min-maxing is bad, mmm 'kay" anti-Gamist prejudicial text one often sees in such contexts.

(Plus, there is always the Feng Shui solution, where you're allowed to change the character after chargen to avoid "buyer's remorse".)

I've been a firm believer in a template style of design for sometime and years ago I came up with a bunch of classic fantsy templates for GURPS. It gives players who'd like the structure that classes provide something to work with, but if you want to build from scratch you can to. Personally, I've always found class systems like D&D to restrictive, but I can certainly see the appeal. Character creation is simplified and streamlined and players have a better feel how their character can fit into the setting.

Which GURPS books have been including the templates?

Nuadha wrote: Which GURPS books have been including the templates?

Even before they started doing this, I noticed that GURPS characters pretty much always followed some kind of template already, whether consciously or not. Everyone in GURPS Fantasy used their points to design a warrior character, or a mage, or a thief, etc. Occasionally you'd get someone designing a salesman, but it's still a class-like stereotype. I know I prefer games with splats. I think it's part of that instinctive need for a group identity. It can devolve into cliqueishness, but I'm surprised how much having a limited set of character "types" to choose from can often spark ideas and imagination instead of limiting them. One of the easiest formulas for making an interesting character is to take one archetype, and reverse one of the stereotypes associated with it. So I've seen sensitive Brujah, violent hobbits, atheist paladins, humorous dwarves, etc. With too many choices, the perspective gets lost, and their seems to be a paralyzation in charater ideas. From my experience, anyway.

This is why one of the most important questions to ask at the outset of any RPG (adventure, campaign, series, whatever) is "What, in general, do the characters do?"

Until everybody agrees to at least a broad outline here, you look like your list of characters are the set up for some joker to tag "They fight crime!" onto them.

Once you've got your baseline, it's like laying down a rhythm or bass in music. You can start doing all sorts of funky stuff, or stick to rock steady within the beat as deep as you like. Without it, you've got what folks think experimental jazz sounds like (it ain't, but that's a whole 'nother story).

It's also why I'm beginning to groove on laying down the conventions of a genre at the outset of a campaign, session, design, whatever. They're not rules, they're givens, the way things tend to be. De Facto, they "restrict" player choice, but simultaneously, they give what choices are made greater significance.

For a case study in progress, have a look at some of the notes coming out about the design of the new Paranoia RPG: specifically, the designers are looking to reduce the differentiation between characters statistics, because all characters are essentially in the same situation, and great differences between characters lessens one of the thematic drives of the game: you're all clones, you're all traitors by birth (mutations), you're all traitors by choice (secret societies). I remember some time ago folks complaining about games that restricted their expression through their characters, due to "forcing" certain choices on them. When Paranoia was brought up, IIRC, the reply was "Well, it's just a comedy game, you're not supposed to take any notice of comedy games..."

Paranoia play is all about how the player reacts to the restrictions of the game, pardon my synedoche, not how your perfect character expresses your inner clone... in the crucible of Alpha Complex, that expression can't help but come out.

Recently, my group had done two one-shots of classless systems (HeroQuest and Unisystem). Given the nature of the sessions and our limited time, we used pre-gens.

I was the GM for the first one, and for the three players I created fighter guy, negociating guy and spy girl. I was a player in the second and we had fighting guy, negociating guy, technical guy and local guy.

For all the openness of the games, we ended up with groups that might as well have been created with a class system.

Well, I'd fight shy of flatly defining HQ as classless: the Keyword system is too strong for that, it's got templates built in. The advantage, to my mind, is the forcing of two, usually three, keywords onto each character: Occupation and Homeland, with Religion as usual 3rd. The assumption is that everyone is from somewhere, and that's affected them, and everyone does (or at least used to do) something for a living, and that's defined them to an extent. In practice, the HQ generation system is very much "Take a template and customise it" rather than "Take a compeltely blank sheet and fill it as you wish."

I've no experience of Unisystem, but I thought it was template based...?

Can someone chime in with experience of, say, Universalis? Does everyone work "top down" from a stereotype / archetype / template and then refine?

Hello,

I strongly recommend that people review the discussion in The class issue, which I think provides some necessary groundwork for this discussion to make the most sense.

Also, the general principle at work has led me to think that many RPGs have fallen into the trap of maximizing the lengths of their "column A, column B" lists in the mistaken assumption that diversity of character design is a consumer draw.

One of the design goals of Trollbabe was to focus mechanical character definition down to near-minimum - simply to remove the options outside of playing a wandering fighter/magic-er trollbabe, case closed. Is this what I'd recommend for all role-playing? No. But it's surprising how far you can push it to the "closed-option" extreme and still have a game which appeals to a lot of people.

Best,
Ron

Also, I think we're wandering a bit. I'm less interested in how a large amount of freedom leads to sterotypes anyway than ideas on focusing thinking about a more freeform design in such a way to prevent decision paralysis, and to make reasonable use of the options available.

According to Saussure and later linguists, words function less to set what that word means and more to set off what that word doesn't mean. That is, the word "boat" is more important in excluding all things which are not boats than it is in defining what a boat is.

The same principle stands in the relationship between the individual (and on one level, every person is a unique individual) and the normatives of her/his society.

In other words, we understand and operate by way of contrasts.

If there are no pre-existing templates to play off for, to use as springboards, to interact with (the old vision of interaction notion), then there are not any immediate pre-existing contrasts right off the bat.

I recall that one of my old gaming group used to love using the classes in AD&D specifically because of the joy in playing off them and varying from them and contrasting our independently created classes from them.

Without templates, of course many an RPGer can create her/his own characters, but then normatives and springboards have to be created first or the player has to operate completely independently of any such templates, springboards, pre-existing groundings, etc. (the old vision of independence notion). I think in those cases, the game master (or gaming group if GMless) actually end creating de facto templates of a sort, normatives as it were, even if they don't have any official ones.

Doctor Xero

I think it's important for each character to have his "specialty," the one area where he or she shines and has the spotlight. When describing a splat, it is usually described in terms of the role such a character would play in a group. So whatever roles are needed would dictate what templates would fill them. Generally, some kind of fighting specialty, healing specialty, stealth specialty, magic specialty, social specialty, nature specialty, technology specialty, etc. They can also reflect more social roles, such as a clan/tribe/race for rebels, for aristocrats, for crazy people, for scholars, etc. So whether using a class syste, or not, it's a good idea to keep in mind what specialties people will want to develop in their characters to make them distinct.

Thanks fr te link to the orriginal New Yorker article, it's a very good read.

Ron Edwards wrote: Is this what I'd recommend for all role-playing? No. But it's surprising how far you can push it to the "closed-option" extreme and still have a game which appeals to a lot of people.

Personally, I was more objecting to the classification of HQ as "freeform" as opposed to "classed", and, given that little false dichotomy, I was pointing out how much each character must have a couple of usually pre-defined, dominant traits that broadly define them.

Of course, the great HQ get out clause is that you can define your own keywords...[shakes fist] curse you, Laws and Stafford!

But I think that trying to claim a great difference between a class and a template system is a little futile until we get down to which precise game rules we're talking about... AD&D (multi-class rare) or D&D 3+ (multi-class so common as to be a given)? The confusion between class, job and role (both diagetic and non-diagetic) that Ron discussed on the other thread has cursed the designs, and is raining it's curse on the discussion too.

That aside, and to extend Simon's analogy, many "open" character design systems don't even give you 25 different sports cars... they give you a handbook of vehicle design!

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.

It seems to me that there is big difference between system applied stereotypes and perception applied stereotypes. If the system has a class for "fast guy" and 20 players make characters using that class, they will be largely the same. If you take a classless system like GURPS (ignoring current trend to templates) and find 20 charaters that you perceive as a "fast guy" they could be wildly different. Even if you ask your 20 players ahead of time to make a "fast guy" with GURPS you will still probably get 20 wildly different characters. The human mind likes to find patterns and we will call something a "fast guy" b/c it certainly isn't a "buff guy". The 20 characters that you may call "fast guys" made in GURPS aren't "fast guys" at all except that that is what you label them. I doubt that a class system could be made to incompass them all. I hope everyone sees this difference.

As to the point of selling better: I am sure that a simpler system does sell better. Just as Jello sells better than creme brule. Jello is fine for tuesday dessert, but sometimes I really like creame brule.

xiombarg wrote: Also, I think we're wandering a bit. I'm less interested in how a large amount of freedom leads to sterotypes anyway than ideas on focusing thinking about a more freeform design in such a way to prevent decision paralysis, and to make reasonable use of the options available.

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.

pete_darby wrote: 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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...

xiombarg wrote: 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.