Mick Red's feedback on the Soul's Calling freebie PDF

[Omnifray]

Quoting Mick Red's feedback posted on the Indiecon hosted forum on the Invitation to Soul's Calling PDF, downloadable here:- http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/invit ... g/16131954

...HOWEVER do you really need a defense against melee attacks and a completly different one for ranged attacks? can defense just be defense? ...

If it comes down to it, I would rather keep the detailed stats and use impressionistic combat rules. Your ability to survive melee attacks depends on how good you are at parrying and dodging as well as how tough and well-armoured you are; your ability to survive projectile attacks depends on how difficult a target you present (i.e. how small you are) as well as your toughness and armour. They are totally different things and conflating them would really bug me. It would affect my suspension of disbelief. Why would I come up with a roleplaying game which made no difference between defending against melee attacks and defending against ranged attacks? Boffer LARP and MET-LARP both reflect these differences (boffer because you actually have to hit the person; MET-LARP because you can't apply parts of your defence against missile weaponry). Why wouldn't tabletop reflect them? If you want some crappy* roleplaying game which tries to pretend that melee attacks and ranged attacks work the same way, there are hundreds such out there. Why would I spend hours and hours coming up with some mediocre* fare like that?

* ok, in seriousness, this is IMHO, YMMV - RPGs which don't make this distinction doubtless have other merits to make up for it, simplicity being one - but that kind of oversimplification is just a bridge too far for me

...Reaction times..!!!! really needed?

Have you actually played in a game with the Reaction Time system? Out of all the people who've played my games, even full-fat Omnifray with its more complicated version of the speed of action system, the vast majority actually profess to like that bit of the system (I think someone may even have lifted the general principle of it into another game?), and the version in Soul's Calling is a slimmed down and simplified system. I hate combat turns. They're so annoying and artificial. Why not use a better system if you can come up with it?

... the actual dice mechanic is simple enough so well done on that....

phew!!! ... although the single roll / double roll dice-check mechanic is lifted straight from the Lite game I took to Indiecon 2009 so it's been around for a while.

... id say just thin down the combat system a litte to perk my interest more..

This is the crucial question though Mick:- what do you think of impressionistic combat? Impressionistic combat means no Reaction Time rolls:- the impressionistic combat system for a whole combat looks like this:-

1. each player gives the ref 3 pointers about their character's tactics
2. the ref thinks about the PCs' tactics, stats and general situation and the monsters' tactics, stats and general situation
3. each player makes a straight double roll dice-check against the ref (no stats involved in the dice-check at all)
4. the ref makes a straight double roll dice-check for each (group of) monsters (that could be just one roll for all the monsters)
5. the ref basically adjudicates on what happens in his discretion (the dice checks can swing you to a better or worse outcome)
... if the ref thinks a player character is going to get seriously hurt you then get:-
6. just the one extra double-roll dice-check using stats (stats and outcomes for this dice-check are borrowed from the detailed combat system) for a monster attacking that player character, with a situational bonus decided by the ref (typically up to +4 which is quite a big difference on a d12+stat v d12+stat roll-off)

The whole game can be run without actually using the detailed combat rules at all - you use impressionistic combat, if the players are happy for their characters to be quite likely to be eventually killed off that way of course. (Or at least in serious danger of being really badly hurt that way.)

Are you in the Indie Pete camp and happy to have combat determined with a large element of GM fiat for the sake of simplicity and ease of play? Or do you prefer simple but hard-and-fast rules?

... and as for touching the table or head or nose or whatever.... is that necessary? most of us talk as out characters in most games we play.

When you put your hand forwards on the table to speak in character, you are getting yourself into that "I'm in-character" mindset. In other words, I think it's good to have a physical transition which accompanies the psychological transition from out-of-character to in-character speech - it reinforces the psychological shift. It also avoids those awkward moments when someone misinterprets something as in-character dialogue when it was meant to be out-of-character, or vice versa. In the MET-LARP game I play in, people raise their hands/fingers to talk out-of-character; whilst it would be better if people indulged in less out-of-character chat in MET-LARP, it does seem to me to serve a few useful purposes.

As for the touching the nose thing, that's just so you don't have to interrupt your in-character dialogue or general roleplay dialogue to say "oi, you, ref-boy, look at me, I'm playing my Tendencies, check me out!". Why would you need to do that? Because each character's Tendencies are different; they might include quite a few disparate elements; in practice running the similar Tendencies system in other roleplaying games (Omnifray) I've often missed the fact that players were playing their Tendencies unless they pointed it out to me, because I couldn't keep all their Tendencies in my mind at once. I do use another technique to assist the ref in dealing with this in Soul's Calling too - a kind of half-page prompter combined with a half-page "character sheet for the whole party" which the ref has with some crucial roleplay-related info on it. But I think the nose-tapping is likely to be useful too.

It's nice (IMHO, some people's mileage may vary) that you speak in-character in your games, Mick, and a lot of tabletoppers do that... but a lot don't. Soul's Calling nails its flag to the mast on that point, and the Persuasion mechanics are built around that as a result.

Cheers

Matt

[Baz King]

That's some feedback on the feedback!

So here's some more for you. On the whole defence thing: you're absolutely right, but only if simulation or realism is your goal in the design.

There are many reasons for blending them together, not just simplicity. Maybe it makes for a better *game*?

[oreso]

Are you in the Indie Pete camp and happy to have combat determined with a large element of GM fiat for the sake of simplicity and ease of play? Or do you prefer simple but hard-and-fast rules?

lolz

Mistaken labels aside, "super detailed realistic rulez!" and "GM fiat!" aren't the only options. You could just not care about all this minutia? The nuances between defence types just aren't interesting enough to waste time on (IMO, which is to say, In Mick's Opinion), neither the GM's time, nor the player's time.

The gesture mechanics sound interesting though. I've used similar ones myself for a Supers game, where players held up a little bubble when relaying their char's thoughts or speech (one side of the sign showed a thought bubble, the other a speech bubble). I mostly play games where there is more in-character talking than out-of-character talking nowadays though.

[Omnifray]

Are you in the Indie Pete camp and happy to have combat determined with a large element of GM fiat for the sake of simplicity and ease of play? Or do you prefer simple but hard-and-fast rules?

..."super detailed realistic rulez!" and "GM fiat!" aren't the only options. You could just not care about all this minutia? ...

If you go back and read mine / Mick's posts again, you will see that after Mick complained about (what he thought of as) complicated hard-and-fast rules, I was asking him whether he would be happy with GM fiat, or is he only happy with simple hard and fast rules. Simple hard and fast rules are surely what you're talking about when you say "you could just not care about all this minutia" and if you thought I overlooked that possibility you misread my post.

If you read my posts in the other thread, replying to some of Indie Pete's points, you will see that I specifically and very expressly do not equate "super detailed" with "realistic" in contrast to "GM fiat" as being "unrealistic". On the contrary, I specifically say that impressionistic combat produces greater "fidelity" in the sense of believable or (where realism counts) realistic outcomes, as compared to any hard-and-fast combat system, no matter how detailed. The reason for wanting detailed combat is not to produce greater believability, but rather to produce the sense of "anchoring", by which I mean that you anchor your character's stats in the events of the game by giving them a more easily perceived, more tangible impact, which gives them more of the feeling of describing real qualities that your character has, which makes your character seem more real (and I mean real, not realistic - I'm talking about reification here) which assists in-character immersion.

Do you understand the contrast between realism, believability and reification? These are three very different things. "Realism" strictly speaking means something could really happen. Mostly when people mention "realism" in the context of fantasy roleplaying they mean "believability" which is a shorthand for "does not interfere with suspension of disbelief", i.e. "essentially seems to make sense according to the logic of the setting". Reification is a totally different concept. It's about making things seem more vivid, more actual, and only in that sense more real. Things can be highly believable but utterly lack any element of reification and things can be reified without necessarily being 100% believable and certainly without being realistic.

Yes, I would say that an overly simplistic hard-and-fast combat system would be less believable than a detailed one, but you cannot correctly read my posts as contrastic "super detailed realistic rulez" with "GM fiat". That is not the contrast that I was making. In effect, you are making straw-men out of my arguments by misreading my posts and frankly reducing my arguments to cliches which, I can assure you, they are not.

I should add that I am well aware that there are entirely different ways of dealing with combat - for instance player consensus rather than GM fiat - but that these are (IMHO, YMMV) inappropriate for an immersion-focused roleplaying game as opposed to a storygame.

The nuances between defence types just aren't interesting enough to waste time on (IMO, which is to say, In Mick's Opinion), neither the GM's time, nor the player's time.

I understand that point of view. But I just don't think that incorporating those "nuances" as you describe them into the game takes up all that much time at all. For me, it's quick and painless.

(one side of the sign showed a thought bubble, the other a speech bubble).

Interesting concept. Probably ill-suited to a gritty quasi-medieval fantasy game but interesting nonetheless.

[Omnifray]

P.S. I've edited my last post a bit to add more in.

[Omnifray]

...

So here's some more for you. On the whole defence thing: you're absolutely right, but only if simulation or realism is your goal in the design.

...

The overarching goal of Soul's Calling as a game is not simulation or realism. The central goal of the game is facilitating in-character immersion and making the immersive experience an enjoyable one. In-character immersion is very different to simulation, realism or (to use my preferred term, and the nuance is very different) believability. In-character immersion is about identifying strongly with your character, empathising with him, reasoning and feeling as he would, seeing through his eyes, feeling as if you are "there", in the game-world, exploring it for real.

Immersion in this sense can be destroyed if your suspension of disbelief is destroyed through a lack of believability. For me, conflating different kinds of defence could be detrimental to my immersion in that way. It's the same for other people too, though for sure not for everyone. But I'm only interested in making games that I would really enjoy playing on a regular and fully committed basis and not just for the occasional one-shot or on a casual gaming basis.

I should add, though, that suspension of disbelief is not - and is very far from being - the sum total of what makes for immersion. Adopting an in-character perspective is key. A totally believable game can easily produce a less immersive experience because the players do not adopt an in-character perspective. An excessively detailed simulation can destroy immersion simply because the players end up too focused on the rules to focus on their characters' perspectives. Immersion and simulation are NOT the same. Sometimes they go together, but sometimes simulation can work against immersion.

I agree totally that if the goal of the game were something else - telling a great story, for instance - then it would not (necessarily) be desirable to distinguish between different kinds of defence in this way (though you might think that a great story needs to be highly believable... question of personal preference I guess). Whether it would be desirable for a wargame or a game of pure hack-n-slash is debatable:- it depends on whether your interest in thinking tactically is in thinking about tactics as if the game were real, or in thinking about tactics as if the game were purely a set of numbers and a bit of logic. Thinking about the game as if it were real could be more tactically interesting because it allows access to an infinite set of tactical possibilities known to you from your real world experience and imagination, rather than a narrowly and artificially defined set of possibilities depending on stats defined in the game. Having a more "simulationist" set of rules could produce a more tactically interesting "gamist" game from that point of view. But Soul's Calling is not about narrative, simulation or gamism. It is about immersion. That makes all the arguments very different indeed.