T. Rev ([info]st_rev) wrote,
@ 2009-08-24 15:59:00
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Entry tags:gaming

RPG Evolution
Over the last thirty years or so, the humble thief class has changed from "special tricks guy, mostly useless in a fight" to "killing machine with a few tricks that mostly support killing".

I want a special tricks guy class again.


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[info]richardthinks
2009-08-24 08:08 pm UTC (link)
I switched to GURPS, where my special tricks guys could get ever more specialized and tricky.

Grognardia agrees with you, though.

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[info]st_rev
2009-08-24 08:11 pm UTC (link)
GURPS has the fatal flaw of being generic but not actually universal, except in the time-honored RPG sense of "whatever random rules decision the grand designer makes in each particular". It shares this property with classic Gygaxian dnd, and Palladium.

It also scales really poorly.

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[info]st_rev
2009-08-24 08:12 pm UTC (link)
Thinking about it a little more, I think my favorite RPGs tend to be the ones in which everyone is a Special Tricks Guy -- Feng Shui being the best example.

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[info]akaihyo
2009-08-24 08:47 pm UTC (link)
The irony is I think that is what D&D 4e was trying to do. But instead they ended up with 31-flavors of hitting people with sticks and nothing else.

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[info]st_rev
2009-08-24 08:56 pm UTC (link)
This.

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[info]cdk
2009-08-24 09:34 pm UTC (link)
"You can have any trick you want, as long as it does Nd6 damage."

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[info]richardthinks
2009-08-24 09:58 pm UTC (link)
...and that was largely my experience with GURPS, too, which I think doesn't handle combat all that well and for which I've never seen a really good magic system.

Scaling is a problem: I think it works best for small groups between 70 and 150ish points per character, but in that area I like it, as a player. All that said, though, at the time I was playing a lot of GURPS, I never ran it: I tended to run completely systemless or secretly-systemless games.

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[info]luagha
2009-08-25 12:08 am UTC (link)

To have a useful special tricks guy you have to have a game system and universe that supports the special tricks guy.

Greyhawk of old supported the special tricks guy because it was steeped in some Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Some baddies were specifically too brutal to fight and the only chance you had of beating them was luring them under a bridge and over your tripwire so as to make ten tons of boulders fall on their heads.

Is that a combat? No. It touches combat but it is not combat. It is hunting and snaring. It is the difference between an aborigine and a Spartan.

4e is combat focused. The noncombat part of the game is close to systemless, and runs best the more systemless you make it because your only guidelines, the skills, are level dependent and thus really just level checks which means all the excitement comes from modifiers, ie, what you can con your gamemaster into.

Conning the gamemaster is the essence of the special tricks guy. Few game systems have rules for setting up a tripwire and creating a deadfall trap, or rules for how much damage it will do once you do it, or rules for what happens when the players say, "Well crap, Anthrax the wizard has that levitation spell he's always on about, and I bought a block and tackle from the players handbook even though everyone laughed at me when I did it. What happens if we load up TEN logs on our deadfall trap instead of just one?"

Conning the gamemaster is good and fun and innovative. The guys on the A-Team conned the gamemaster every damn episode. So what you're really asking is how to have a game system with a better focus on properly conning the gamemaster.

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[info]richardthinks
2009-08-25 01:55 am UTC (link)
well said: "conning the gamemaster" pretty much is the "game" in RPG, AFAIAC: it straddles the line between game and metagame. Mage was, IIRC, the first game to try to model this basic play interaction, and that was its great virtue.

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