Subject:
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Re: RPG or PBM? (Was: Elements of a brick oriented RPG)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.gaming
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Date:
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Mon, 20 May 2002 21:51:52 GMT
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27 times
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In lugnet.fun.gaming, Christopher L. Weeks writes:
> > the means of advancing in power and stature is in getting hold
> > ofbasic bricks and building things with them.
>
> This is a cool idea, but does it neccesitate no character
> advancement? Is the goal to just get away from the traditional
> RPG aspects, to simplify the rules, or something else? Would
> having both advancement mechanisms work?
I didn't really mean to exclude anything, I really just meant to raise the
idea that character advancement isn't really an absolute necessity. The
game would be a lot simpler if it were left out; in any case, with only four
possible ratings for each stat, advancement would have to be very rare and
take a lot of work.
I always try to hold real life as the standard for good role-playing; the
most boring real person will always have more depth and soul than the most
interesting fictional character. Real honest-to-god people have meaningful
relationships, strive to improve their lives, and engage in everyday heroics
without doubling or tripling their hit points every week. Yeah, a marine
finishing boot camp is going to be a hell of a lot tougher than the raw
recruits beginning it, but you're never going to have a real-life situation
where one "twentieth-level fighter" will be able to take on a couple hundred
"first-level fighters" in hand-to-hand without breaking a sweat, that's just
silly. I can almost picture some Shao-lin monk living in a remote monastery
and training from birth to hit that level, but that's a slow process that
takes several decades, far outside the timespan of any regular role-playing
campaign.
What I'm saying is that, while "character advancement" exists in real life,
most RPGs take it to an extreme that is flat-out ridiculous. It seems to me
to be a lot more realistic to let characters improve their station in life
by increasing their holdings rather than by boosting their stats.
> So, the idea is still really intriguing, but I'm not sure it's
> really an RPG. If I need my character to go to the woods to
> harvest brown bricks, what is the role playing opportunity?
If I need your character to go to a cave and whack orcs, what's the role
playing opportunity?
Role playing is about how much personality you can give to your characters,
how much meaning you can inject into their fictional lives, and what choices
you lead them to make as they try to overcome problems and accomplish their
goals. There's just as much role playing opportunity in sending out two
peasant characters on an unsuccessful fishing trip as there is in sending
two knights to storm the lich king's castle. In both cases, role-playing
depends on the skill of the GM in creating good seeds for story elements,
and the dedication of players to treat their characters as characters rather
than as lists of numbers to be increased.
There's no reason going out to the woods to harvest brown bricks is going to
be easy. Especially if they're not your woods. All good conflicts
throughout history have been about one guy trying to get at some other guy's
resources.
> > What would make the system interesting is how you limited the
> > types of constructions players could build; you could try to
> > relate it to the real world (players have to harvest forests
> > to get timber and do some quarrying to get stones), or you
> > could go full-on Lego and just say that each color of brick
> > is available in certain places and carries specific advantages
> > and disadvantages.
>
> I like the former. A complete abstraction starts to get, I
> think, too far from main stream. Though I'd be interested in
> seeing how it would work.
When the first seeds of this idea were presented to me, it was in a space
setting, and the abstraction made a pretty good amount of sense. "A hostile
alien race from another part of the galaxy attacks from nowhere, using
technology far beyond anything in the humans' arsenal. Most of Terran
civilization is destroyed before human scientists start to understand the
alien technology and the surprising uses of the new mineral compound 'ABS'
[or 'Brickonium' or whatever it was called, it was a long time ago and I've
forgotten the details]. The new material had several amazing properties..."
and so forth.
> Again, this sounds like you're not talking about an RPG in
> which a human generally plays one character. But it's still
> grooving with me as way cool.
I was thinking that hirelings would be a series of NPCs, which is why it
would be important to limit their numbers, so that the GM could keep
effective track of their various personalities and motives, and use some of
them as story seeds. For instance, your chief warden is indispensible to
your operations, and because of his incomparable skills, he could never be
replaced. Now, what do you do when you find out that he is a spy:
(a): for a band of thieves, which is planning to loot your house?
(b): for a rival guild, which is planning to steal your business?
(c): for your lord's bitterest enemy, who is laying siege to the town?
(d): for your lord, from whose mining operation you are secretly skimming
iron ore?
The possibilities are limited only by the deviousness of the GM.
> I'm also thinkig that housing would limit the number of
> folks you could control, or their level of health, or their
> free time, etc.
Of course, being minifigs, they probably aren't very demanding about their
living conditions. They never change clothes, they don't need bathrooms,
and they're willing to sleep on beds made of bricks.
> > I agree, there's no real reason that a good RPG has to
> > involve combat at all. I have a suspicion that most RPG's
> > use combat as a distraction so players don't have to do
> > any real role-playing.
>
> Ummm...I'm not sure about this. It seems that conflict is a
> part of every good tale. How do you envision removing
> conflict resolution from the game?
'Conflict resolution' doesn't have to equal 'mortal combat.' In your
everyday life, I'll guess that you probably get into some kind of conflict
every couple of days or so. How often do you resolve these issues by
resorting to mass homicide? Not too often, or I'd have heard about it.
Actually I always figured combat would play a huge role, I'm just saying
there's no real reason it needs to. In real life there are plenty of heroes
who solve conflict through tense and clever negotiations, skillful
maneuvering, and acts of selfless bravery. There aren't so many that become
heroes by killing thousands and wading thigh-deep in seas of blood. In
fact, when a guy's death toll starts to get even into the three-figure
range, we kind of stop thinking of him as a hero at all.
The fact that most RPGs use killing as the solution to every problem is, in
my opinion, kind of retarded. Killing is a solution for wargames and
first-person shooters. Problems in RPGs shouldn't have neat and simple
solutions. Killing should always be an obvious choice, but like every
potential choice there should be potentially serious consequences (besides
the obvious 'if I lose this combat then I might be killed myself' - you
can't role-play how your character deals with unfortunate consequences if
your character is dead).
On the other hand, I might be unnaturally motivated by a desire to encourage
the creation of a game as unlike BrikWars as possible.
> I guess minifigs can be said to be indestructible, that would
> change the nature of conflict to a large degree even if it
> wouldn't eliminate it.
Now that's a real interesting idea that I hadn't considered. I wonder how
that could be made to work.
> Are you imagining the special skills to be just "written down" somehow, or
> elemental in the construction of the minifig characters?
I'm thinking that the special skill would be the central purpose of the
minifig, and everything else (stats, equipment, outfit, name) would be
secondary. In fact in a hyper-simplified version of the game you might not
need any of that other stuff at all, the specialty-skill would be a
minifig's only important defining factor.
> > Cha-ching, if you could find some way to transport it to
> > a bank! Probably wouldn't even fit out through the
> > dungeon entrance.
>
> Well, you'd have to build a way to move it in situ and
> then excavate the cave entrance...
That could be an adventure all on its own - probably take a couple of days
to excavate that entrance, during which time the characters start thinking
about how easy it would be to knife each other in their sleep and take the
whole duplo for themselves!
> That's a good point. I was specifically thinking of an implementation of a
> close combat system using LEGO. Something more intrinsically brickish would
> make more sense.
A lot of the more artificial rules in close combat systems are designed to
overcome the limits of working with straight pencil and paper, player
imagination, or unposeable lead miniatures. Using minifigs overcomes so
many of those limitations that there's no real reason to retain the
artifical rules. Things like posture, facing, weapon length, etc. are no
longer stats that have to be remembered or written down on some sheet of
paper, because you've got the actual minifig on the field of play. Taking
that into consideration, any advantages offered by hex systems no longer
seem to apply.
- Mike.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | RPG or PBM? (Was: Elements of a brick oriented RPG)
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| (...) This is a cool idea, but does it neccesitate no character advancement? Is the goal to just get away from the traditional RPG aspects, to simplify the rules, or something else? Would having both advancement mechanisms work? (...) So, the idea (...) (23 years ago, 20-May-02, to lugnet.gaming)
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