Hey all... 

Something ironic happened today, in that I was invited to join a Rifts group.  It was ironic because, while I got my first real start in role-playing with Rifts (and other Palladium games, I also kind of swore never to play Rifts again, because I found the rules and the text so incoherent and badly written that it was affecting my blood pressure (okay, kidding, but it was frustrating).  In fact, it was the sheer badness of Rifts (& Palladium's system in general) that actually inspired me to write my own games, convinced that I could do better (which really remains to be seen).

Anyway, my question for the Forge is, what are people's thoughts about the quality of a game, both mechanically and in terms of the text?  Where do the responsibilities of the designer end and those of the players begin?  On the one hand, I think Neil Gaiman is right when he says an creator is not a slave to his audience ( http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html ).  On the other hand, I know as a customer, I was pretty disappointed when after a couple of years of wading through poorly defined, typo-ridden rules (which one RPG.net reviewer rated "unintelligible" -- http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11645.phtml ), and trying to figure out how to patch it and reign in every new weapon or uber-powerful character class, I finally concluded that it was just too much work and gave up. 

So, my question is, how much is it the responsibility of the designer to produce a coherent and clearly explained set of mechanics, and how much of the burden is on the players to interpret the rules and generate their own enjoyment?  Is this just a decision people have to make for themselves?--is it merely an issue of social contract?

I'll probably join the group, because I'm hoping to get a little more into the local gaming scene, but I'm apprehensive about getting back into a game that caused me so much frustration.

-A.

Hi Andre - excellent topic, which has seen a lot of discussion here already.

But please, provide a quick example of play which, in your experience, illustrated an answer to that question, or rather, shows how that question was answered, well or badly, by a group you played with. It might be Rifts or any other system, doesn't matter.

If you do that, then we can have a great discussion here with links and all sorts of stuff. But without it, not.

No one else post until after Andre's reply, please.

Best, Ron

Hi Ron,

I can think of a few of examples of how we broke the game.  Hopefully that will be enough to spark discussion, since I haven't played a Palladium game in about 16 years (a full transcript of play would be difficult at this point).

I guess the first example is the ways we could really mess with the GM during character creation.  My favourite example from Rifts is the Gromek Juicer somebody created.  Juicers get two extra attacks per melee, and Gromeks (gargoyle-like winged creatures from Conversion book 1) got a number of bonuses, including another two attacks per melee.  Then, taking Hand to Hand: Assassin, it was possible to get a character with 7 or 8 attacks per melee, and an auto-dodge, by second level.  Whereas, most characters at a similar level had about half as many. 

Compare that to another player's human wilderness scout, who starts with no special powers or augmentations; just some mega-damage armour and a rifle, who is expected to compete.  It was a situation where routinely a player's character concept could get him into serious trouble, or make him unstoppable, without any seeming method or consistency across the character types.

This led to a kind of arms race in which players were constantly scouring the books to see what sort of bigger and badder character they could create.  Nobody played an ordinary person any more, since everything was geared toward combat effectiveness.  Something similar happened when every new supplement included a bigger gun or better power armour--people would always find ways to beg, borrow, or steal in order to acquire the latest and most outrageous hardware.  This in turn led to several adventures where characters would be stripped of all their possessions at the beginning of the adventure.  One game, in particular, the characters were ship-wrecked and had been forced to abandon their equipment (or drown), and found themselves more or less naked on the shore of an island.  I understand why the GM did it, but many of the players felt this was unfair.

This sort of "arms race" was repeated in Palladium's Fantasy game, where certain playable races, like Wolfen or Ogres, were considered giant creatures although they weren't much bigger than other playable races.  But it meant that they could wield giant weapons, and gain an extra die on their damage rolls.  Obviously, the designer felt these characters would have an advantage, but it's one that seemed fairly arbitrary--again, with no real method or consistency.  I hesitate to use the word "balanced" here, because I realize that's often subjective--but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.  It's like they re-wrote the rules every time they introduced a new playable race or character class.

I remember one campaign where the starting characters were all humans and elves.  As they died in play, everyone made their new characters big bruising wolfen and ogres--effectively, we had a group of monsters.  This was especially true, since when the last couple of elves in the group died, the rest of the group sold their bodies to an alchemist--since in the alchemist section it was written that elf bones could be used in magical rituals and were worth cash.  To get off track a little bit, something similar happened in a different campaign when we killed a dragon, and spent six months carving up the body in order to sell the bones and make a fortune.

Anyway--something must be said here in that we were teenagers, this was our first experience with gaming, and no one really knew how to limit things, or even say "no" to their friends' character choices--or at least, do so without sparking bitter arguments over what the rules allow versus what the GM was willing to put up with.  Clearly, an experienced GM could have put limits on all of this or made better house rules to cover these situations.  It's just that the text of the games didn't hint that this would be necessary, or explain how to go about doing it.  What they did do was provide ample opportunity for abuse.

We'd played these games because we were excited about things like Mad Max or Star Wars, in the case of Rifts; or iConan and the Lord of the Rings for Fantasy... but a group of mean Ogre protagonists selling their last elf compatriot to a shady alchemist for a little extra coin is pretty far from Tolkienesque Epic storytelling (though, in retrospect I suppose it would make for an amusing novel--by Pratchett, maybe?).  Again, a more experienced group could have established a more explicit social contract to ensure a particular type/genre of play, but the rules didn't offer much aid in this regard either.

Hopefully this will be enough to start a discussion.  I'm curious how much of this was just us being teenaged noobs, and how much the designer could have done to educate us on how to play without things getting out of hand.

Thanks for listening,

-A.

Hi Andre,

That reminds me to an extent of my own early Rifts play. Given a game where the only apparent end goal was to own a really big gat and wear the toughest armour/power armour, the ruleset allowing you to start a character with the biggest gat and toughest armour meant you'd finished play the instant you started play/finished character gen. Kind of a 'premature ejaculation' ruleset.

That said though - the players in your example don't seem to be weeping when they do this? You might say you all played these games because of mad max and star wars, but really they sound like they were pretty happy doing what they did, which was within the rules framework (such as it was). Instead it sounds more like your the non premature partner, exlaiming "What!? That's it?!??'. And your atleast partly looking to the game author, asking how much they aught to deal with this whole 'wham bam, thank you mam' thing.

Or maybe not? What's your call?

But certainly I had an issue with 'everything, straight away or practically straight away'. Though for myself I was thinking more in terms of 'Hey, how about we don't get the big trophy like, instantly, and start putting a gap in' rather than getting excited by mad max and wanted to engage the inspiration the movie gave in some sort of game format.

Heheh...  I wouldn't frame it quite that way, but there's maybe an element of what you're saying in my complaint.  But there was more to it, and I wasn't the only one in the group who was frustrated.  I remember some long earnest discussions trying to figure out just what the heck ol' Kevin was trying to say when he was explaining (or more frequently, completely failing to address) crucial points in the rules.  But that usually followed a session where a bitter shouting match had broken out when somebody's character was on the line, and quite often we never fully resolved the question. 

The group actually fractured--eventually there were two to three different groups that would meet, each with different interpretations of the rules.  Some of the same people went to all of these groups, and others attended only one or two groups, alienated by disagreements they'd had with other players & GM's.  So, nearly all of us had experienced difficulty with the game, although I was perhaps the most dissatisfied of the bunch, since here I am griping about it :) 

These disagreements were usually about something ambiguous in the rules, like automatic parries and the Juicer's auto-dodge.  For whatever reason, the text was just cryptic enough that when we started playing, we thought that everyone got only one automatic parry per melee round; and likewise for the Juicer's dodge.  The text describes each one in a sentence or two, and as far as I can tell, never again.  Of course, somebody read the rules again, and realized these sentences could be interpreted to mean that parries for trained individuals, and dodges as well as parries for Juicers, were completely free, never using up a melee action.  Moments like that were when the shit would hit the fan, because suddenly everybody wanted to be a Juicer, and the GM's are wondering how the heck they're going to deal with them, and the shouting would start.  It just seemed like a little more detail in the text could have saved this hassle.  But this sort of thing was a common occurrence.  We probably spent as much time arguing as we did playing.

But how much of that strife was just teen angst, how much was inexperience with gaming in general, and how much was legitimate frustration with the quality of the rules and the text... well, that's what I'm trying to figure out.  I've only recently gotten back into regular gaming with several different groups of people--but most of them are fairly mature, so it's tough for me to gauge what was at fault when we were kids.

----

Power levels are an issue, too, as you said, but it wasn't so much the fact that you could start the game with god-like power, as it was the differential in power between different character concepts.  So you get the power-gamer who decides to play a dragon or other supernaturally strong character; and the more character or story driven players who wanted to play more sympathetic characters, such as Rogue Scholars, Vagabonds, or even Coalition Military Specialists.  Then the GM has to figure out what to throw at them that will be challenging for the power-gamer's dragon, but won't make the human character into a grease-stain on the first hit--especially if they get attacked while camped and the human isn't wearing his armour.

In a game which is pretty much explicitly about combat, it very quickly makes no sense to play an ordinary human character if you wanted him to survive more than a few sessions.  It might not be so bad if creating a character in Rifts was simple, but it's not--even after playing a while, it usually took people a couple of hours.  I suppose some of the problems I'm describing are challenging in any game where characters at different scales are playing on the same battlefield, but in Rifts, those differences are vast, and those situations are constantly coming up.  It might not be so bad if it wasn't all so arbitrary--there was no way to predict what kinds of special bonuses or powers a character class might offer.  Many games that followed started using point-buy systems or other mechanisms to ensure that characters were balanced, which seems a lot more rational to me; but that may simply be a personal preference of mine.  I've recently started playing D&D 3.5, and notice that it seems to be almost as arbitrary, so maybe it's not that unusual.

Bottom line, Rifts is a power gamer's paradise--which is probably fine, if you know what you're doing; but the game doesn't do much to ease beginners into the hobby.  The Game Master's section in the core book has about half a page of somewhat self-congratulatory text describing the scope and detail of the game, assuring players that they should not be intimidated and offering a paragraph or two of actual advice on how to run a game.  The rest of the section is descriptions and quick-roll tables for common monsters in the setting.  There's maybe a little bit more advice in random paragraphs throughout the rest of the book, but nothing really solid.

So, without any explicit guidelines on how to actually run a game, set consistent power levels, resolve disputes, and establish a social contract, the game in the hands of some unruly teenagers seems a bit like a loaded rail-gun tossed into the monkey cage at the local zoo.  Friendships were damaged.  Maybe that would have happened anyway as teens will be teens, but it seems like a lot of it could have been avoided if we'd gotten our start playing, say, Heavy Gear or Mekton II instead.

-A.

I should add that we didn't know about those other games until well after we'd gotten tired of playing Rifts.  The joys of living in a small town, I'm afraid--only one game store, and all they carried was Palladium and D&D (2nd ed., I think, at the time).  The really bizarre part is that now I'm living in the same small town again, almost two decades later, and all people STILL seem to play is Rifts and D&D... and maybe a little Warhammer. 

-A.

because suddenly everybody wanted to be a Juicer, and the GM's are wondering how the heck they're going to deal with them

Shit... You're right--it is a completely random game.  I knew that part, but I didn't realize the implication...

In truth, it's easy enough to accept as an adult.  As an adult, I know that "shit happens," and that there are really no rules to life; or game design, except those you set for yourself.  But as I kid, I didn't know that, and that's the real thing that still sticks in my craw...  Back when we entered the hobby with Rifts, myself, and I think a few others in my group, were looking for an escape from the random chaos prevalent in school, social, and family life--which for pretty much everybody in that gaming group; or really anybody that age, totally sucked.  I was looking for structure, consistency, fairness, balance... Some kids join the military looking for that stuff, I guess, but for us it was games.  And in a game like Rifts, it just isn't there.  Instead it's a lawless power fantasy which mirrored all the things we were (or at least I was) trying to escape.

I suppose it's pretty unfair to expect Kevin Siembieda to be the missing voice of reason in our lives.  He certainly didn't sign up for that job just by selling us a game. I just wish we'd known going in what it would be like--that what we were expecting wasn't really there.

You're right about the other stuff, too.  I did sort of miss what you were saying initially; but it's true.  You pick your character concept, and that's what you are until that character inevitably winds up a fine red mist facing the wrong end of a boom-gun.  There's no growth or development to the characters in a story sense.  Heck, leveling-up doesn't even increase your abilities much in a power / effectiveness sense, for most OCC's.

Well, anyway, you've pretty much answered my question--and in a way it was actually kind of cathartic to sort it all out--so, thank you, Callan :)    If Ron or anybody else is out there reading this--you have my thanks as well for creating a place where us psychic refugees can come and figure out what went wrong at the table.

I guess what it all really means is that when I finally get my own games sorted out, I make damn sure I tell the players / customers what they're buying and what the game will do for them, and what it won't.  In big, bold letters.

Anyway, thanks.

-A.

RIFTS, in and of itself, is a wonderfully interesting and fun setting. Palladium's unified game mechanics are a combination of AD&D and RuneQuest with the worst parts of both.

If you've ever noticed, as the expansions came out, classes and races became progressively more powerful. Almost as if Kevin and the gang were creating them as their characters gained levels...

The rules for RIFTS were all "WOW! THAT'S COOL! LET'S PUT THAT IN!" and not much else, sort of like the 1st Edition AD&D Monk. :)

The responsibility of fun is squarely on the combined shoulders of the players and the GM. I think the problems you described were based on the lack of a unified contract on how to interpret the rules. I also remember the arguments about the quality of Kevin's writing and what we should do, but I was blessed with friends who enjoyed examining the game mechanics from an analytic point of view. We were power gamers, yes, but we all agreed to a particular style of play. Enemies were raised in power, situations were set up where combat wasn't the way to win, that sort of thing. We had some fun but it was a group effort.

The problem with a lot of gamers that I've met recently is that they're expecting a movie and the GM to be the director. The GM is not there to entertain you, it's a collective effort. I sort of see that in your description of events.

God, I don't think the image of RPG text handed down as stone tablets from the mount has ever "clicked" for me as strongly as it did while reading this thread. Interesting.

I mean, it's reasonable and obvious to think about adolescent experiences having a strong, long-term effect, but that feeling of being fifteen, and thinking "Home and school are uncontrollable, but within the scope of a game played within these sacred rules, life WILL make sense!" resonates with me a lot more than I thought it would.

Sorry, I'm not sure that this post advances the thread at all, but I wanted to chip in and say this particular formulation of the issue is surprisingly helpful to me. ("Surprisingly" being my response, only because I've thought about it a lot before.)

Rifts is a broken system and Shadowrun has a near broken system in many many ways.  You don't play these games because of their inherent mechanical value.  You play them for flavor.  Its easy enough for the GM to do a modification to limit attacks and balance characters to make it equal and fun for everyone.  Rifts also has a near broken level mechanic.  So keeping characters balanced becomes more difficult as time goes on.  I have found as a GM trying to run these games that the players generally whine and cry their pants off when you tell them that something is restricted or that they can't use a certain book.

So go into these games knowing that you can't keep up with the mechanics and play for flavor with a grain of salt.

Or take a nice system like, say, RuneQuest and play in the RIFTS setting.

Excalibur wrote:
The rules for RIFTS were all "WOW! THAT'S COOL! LET'S PUT THAT IN!" and not much else, sort of like the 1st Edition AD&D Monk. :)

The responsibility of fun is squarely on the combined shoulders of the players and the GM. I think the problems you described were based on the lack of a unified contract on how to interpret the rules. I also remember the arguments about the quality of Kevin's writing and what we should do, but I was blessed with friends who enjoyed examining the game mechanics from an analytic point of view. We were power gamers, yes, but we all agreed to a particular style of play. Enemies were raised in power, situations were set up where combat wasn't the way to win, that sort of thing. We had some fun but it was a group effort.

The problem with a lot of gamers that I've met recently is that they're expecting a movie and the GM to be the director. The GM is not there to entertain you, it's a collective effort. I sort of see that in your description of events.

Andrew wrote:
God, I don't think the image of RPG text handed down as stone tablets from the mount has ever "clicked" for me as strongly as it did while reading this thread. Interesting.

I mean, it's reasonable and obvious to think about adolescent experiences having a strong, long-term effect, but that feeling of being fifteen, and thinking "Home and school are uncontrollable, but within the scope of a game played within these sacred rules, life WILL make sense!" resonates with me a lot more than I thought it would.

Sorry, I'm not sure that this post advances the thread at all, but I wanted to chip in and say this particular formulation of the issue is surprisingly helpful to me. ("Surprisingly" being my response, only because I've thought about it a lot before.)

Locke wrote:
Rifts is a broken system and Shadowrun has a near broken system in many many ways.  You don't play these games because of their inherent mechanical value.  You play them for flavor.  Its easy enough for the GM to do a modification to limit attacks and balance characters to make it equal and fun for everyone.  Rifts also has a near broken level mechanic.  So keeping characters balanced becomes more difficult as time goes on.  I have found as a GM trying to run these games that the players generally whine and cry their pants off when you tell them that something is restricted or that they can't use a certain book.

So go into these games knowing that you can't keep up with the mechanics and play for flavor with a grain of salt.

Excalibur wrote:
Or take a nice system like, say, RuneQuest and play in the RIFTS setting.

I think Curt (Excalibur) is blurring your own written revelation about randomness, Andre.

The way he's phrased it

The responsibility of fun is squarely on the combined shoulders of the players and the GM. I think the problems you described were based on the lack of a unified contract on how to interpret the rules.

I mean, it's reasonable and obvious to think about adolescent experiences having a strong, long-term effect, but that feeling of being fifteen, and thinking "Home and school are uncontrollable, but within the scope of a game played within these sacred rules, life WILL make sense!" resonates with me a lot more than I thought it would.

I guess the question for the thread is "were my expectations reasonable?"  To some degree they weren't (although what 15 year old has reasonable expectations?)... but on the other hand, there's certainly a question of quality control.  Sure, the game can't sort your life out for you, but maybe it should at least attempt to address what can go wrong in play.  Programmers write error checking routines into their code, to address things that can go wrong; should a game designer be expected to do the same?

I'm sure there's no perfect social contract that makes an unplayable game playable, but if the rules had simply acknowledged that it's a group activity and that disagreements are inevitable in a complex activity like an RPG (with maybe some advice how to deal with them)--I think that would have gone a long way to preventing difficulty.

All the Rifts books have disclaimers about supernatural & horror content.  If K.S. had included one about rules disputes and social dynamics; that warning alone would have allowed us to step back from the rules a bit when things got too intense.  I suppose it's just ironic that it wasn't the horror content that drove us crazy, but the mechanics.

I don't know if the game itself did damage like a rape scene might--or if we were already sort of damaged / unstable going in and the game just made it worse.  But maybe it's a lot like television.  Maybe our parents should have played the first few sessions with us to make sure we were okay (but what parent has time, and what 15 year old wants to play with their parents?); the same way a lot of people recommend watching television with your kids.  I don't really know.

Either way, it's definitely something for the industry to consider, especially in the way these games are marketed, and to whom. 

For now, I'm happy to count it as a lesson learned.  I'll just try to do better in my own games.

-A.

It's not a complex activity - it's a random set of procedural bits repeatedly acting as if it's a complete procedure. I know I'm repeating myself on that, but these books went on and on acting as if they were complete procedures, for years and years. The only approach ends up beinga a fight fire with fire thing with the usual social rules on not repeating oneself being unfair, since these books aren't following those social rules and just pumpin' out their message 24/7. So people can argue about complex activites, granted, but it's still not the real issue - it's really not to do with anything being complex. Write a program that generates a random set of rules and prints it, then on the front put an acknowledgement people disagree during complex activities - you can see such an acknowledgement is missplaced. The text has random rules, it is not complex. It generates disagreement because it presents the group with raw chaos, not because it's complex.

The parents sitting in idea is really interesting - yeah, that passing on of how to deal with crap with a real life, physically present person who has a stake in all this (someone in the group is their kid) really would be alot different. Good point. Otherwise what your getting is rather similar to lord of the flies, but to my mind with a religious angle, since people keep stabing at text in a book as some sort of authority as to how the other people have to behave. And sadly, you also make a point with '(but what parent has time, and what 15 year old wants to play with their parents?)'.

Though, and perhaps this is shocking - I'm not sure about gamer parents sitting in with their children. It'll just pass on whatever lord of the flies behaviour they learnt. Perhaps over generations it'll start to smooth out as people in latter generations stop putting up with some of the shit. But it'd no doubt evolve into much the same culture as everyone has toward boardgames, in the end, making the passing on both problematic for several generations, and in the end, pointless.

Well, I guess this new group I'm joining will be the acid test for the system's playability (or my compatibility with it).  Much more mature and experienced gamers, with far less external pressure on them, and one GM instead of several, should all lead to a clearer social contract and a unified interpretation of the rules.  I might find it's serviceable even if the system isn't my first choice, or I may find that I still can't stand it. 

The game will start in a few weeks.  I'll post my findings.

-A.