How I learned to love the rules

Over the past year, I've been looking at combat and experimenting with trying to streamline it and even play it "freeform" (without any combat rules, just a generic, diced "roll better than X" system). As I think I've said in the past, I keep running into problems with the numbers on the character sheet... the numbers keep getting in the way of making a decision. I keep wanting to fall back on old habits, figuring skill+offensive factors versus skill+defensive factors, and doing numerical comparisons, instead of just "eyeballing" the situation and making a biased judgment call. I'm actually spending more time thinking about the judgment call than I would if I just ran the numbers.

That's a problem. My goal is to make combat run fast and wild. But I'm running into another, related problem. From a conversation I'm having with John Morrow...

One of the things I'm running into with the Fudge superhero game is giving the players the feeling that they've actually accomplished something when they fight a tough villain and win. Because if the interpretation of all the die rolls comes down to my judgment call, it means they won when I decided it was time for them to win. It's hard to realistically say that their decisions mattered. That's where I have trouble with the pure "building a story" thing, because I don't want to narrate a really great story. I want to play out a really great story, in which my character faces real challenges. And it's starting to feel like the only way those challenges can be "real" is if there is some kind of unbiased arbiter between the GM and player.

Combine this with Rob Donoghue's recent LJ post on [[http://www.livejournal.com/users/anacrusis/212259.html|his thoughts on Primetime Adventures]], where he basically says that PTA is neat, but his group just isn't that interested in narrating the story, and I'm starting to better understand my own preferences.

I think I like rules and dice. I used to think of rules as a necessary evil, and I'm beginning to wonder if they aren't so evil, but are actually an essential part of my enjoyment of the game.

I think the big division between "game" and "storytelling entertainment" is the presence or absence of a true challenge for the players. Not the characters, the players. (I am rather careful not to mix player and character... I never assess grenade damage to players' feet.) In the story, if the character is greatly challenged, that doesn't mean the player was challenged.

A question addressed on the [[http://www.dragonslanding.com/mambo/|Dragon's Landing Inn Podcast]], concerning players who can't figure out riddles that their very intelligent characters ought to be able to figure out, speaks to this.

Here's the basic situation. We generally play larger-than-life characters who are able to do all kinds of things we aren't capable of. We play them, in part, because they are better than we are. In our fantasy, we can slay dragons. So limiting my character to my personal ability to wield a sword is silly... my character is a mighty warrior! Yet if my character faces a riddle, and I'm stumped and my character has a Legendary intelligence... shouldn't my rolling dice to solve the riddle be just as satisfying as rolling dice to swing a sword?

It isn't, and I don't think it should be. My character may be a mighty warrior, but it's me calling the shots. No matter how great a warrior, unless someone is giving me help, my character is limited to my own tactical ability. And that seems right. I wouldn't want the dice to tell me what decisions to make in combat. It would take the enjoyment out of it.

And it's that little bit right there that made me decide that I like rules. Specifically, rules that let me win or lose on fair terms. (Relatively fair... I expect the GM to fudge the dice now and then when they're really wacky, but I don't want the GM turning every die roll into a biased judgment call.)

Now, I'm not above rules which deal with combat on a different level from the traditional roleplaying game. Dogs in the Vineyard has a certain appeal... but I think the system falls flat for me because it involves narrating the outcome of a conflict that was basically resolved by a single die roll before anybody in the conflict made any choices. (Yes, more dice can be introduced later. But eventually you run out, and the decisions aren't really tactical, they're on whether or not to escalate to a less socially-acceptable level of conflict in order to win.) Dogs is more about telling the story than it is about playing the story. And I want to play the story.

But still, I'm looking for mechanics that can work at more of a meta-level, and still give the player something to work with. The player may be working with an entirely meta-game system, but so long as the system provides the player with a challenge...? The jury's out on that one. I need to find or design the right system and try it out.

As an example, take [[http://www.innocence.com/games/above-the-earth.pdf|Above the Earth]] (pdf). "You have a hundred six-siders. When you run out, you run out." There's a simple rule on how to decide when you succeed at some task... more dice means greater chance of success. You lose dice when you take damage. As you use and lose dice, they are lost for that game session. So the game becomes one of resource management... you have one resource and no way to regenerate it. They define everything you can do... there aren't any meaningful numbers on your character sheet, you just describe your character's abilities in plain English.

Of course, combat here is still fairly traditional, though there isn't any worrying about this maneuver, that defense, this value plus that value minus your value. The bad guys get dice... that's the only number on their character sheet. It really simplifies combat.

And I think I could work with rules like this. It's a different kind of decision compared to exercising my tactical skills, but it still leaves me in control of deciding how many dice to roll, and the dice are neutral. So that's the space I'm exploring now... what faster, simpler way can I resolve combat that still gives the players a sense of accomplishment when the characters win, even if the rules are high-level and not immediately related to the "reality" of the game.

I've got another post coming on combat, and what I've come to think of as the "Buffy model" of combat, which is driven by cinematic need... fights last as long as they need to, which is based on how important the fight is to the story. But this post has run too long already. (Imagine... this post started out as an introduction to the next post.)