Skills and the Ghostbusters-inspired simple system. Also, rantage.

Dammit, I just realised that if I run a fantasy game with the GB-style rules, I'm gonna have skills.  Only four per player, but... nngh.

I believe that skills take away from a gaming experience rather than add to it.  They tell you what you can't do rather than what you can.  You can do these things, but no other ones.  You fell into a river.  What's that?  You don't have Swimming on your list of Skills/NWPs?  Oh, dear, dear me.  It looks like you're going to be able to go fishing in your lungs now!  Yay for you!  I find it far better to do away with skills entirely.  Adventurers are considered to be the unusual ones for various reasons.  If your raison d'etre includes stomping about in haunted ruins, falling into rivers and other stuff that your average citizen likes to read about but never ever actually do, you probably have all the basic skills you need for such activity.  Swimming.  Horseback riding. Knowledge of rope use.  If I didn't spend the slot/points for Rope Use, I don't know how to make a knot?  Seriously?  And doing away with skills leaves the necessary room for player agency.  If you can't fast talk your way out of a situation with a die roll, guess what?  You have to actually do the talking.  If you don't have Find Secret Doors on your character sheet, you'll have to ask the GM what things look like, whether there's a loose stone or pivot point or hollow section of wall, by interacting with the game world.  You, the player, with the soda in your hand.  Yeah, you. Because what are you here for if not to role-play?  I've often heard "roll-playing" contrasted to "role-playing", but if you just roll your dice for success all the time (combat mechanics aside, of course), you're "roll-playing".  And you might as well go play Neverwinter Nights or Worlds of Warcraft, at that rate.

I also am of the opinion that weapon proficiences are for the birds, for fighters at the least.  I just read an article by Gygax in a Dragon collection wherein he denounces weapon profs (as well as critical hit/miss systems, which I also disdain).  In my Saturday game, our group has been dropped into a place where we're being hunted and we don't have any of our equipment.  It's not kept the machine gun dart thrower from punching people to death (it only takes a few hits from a dude with +11 to damage from strength to make most opponents fall the hell over), but the others, such as the bard and the militant mage who are proficient/specialised in longsword have to wield short swords at a slightly reduced penalty due to familiarity, are having some troubles.  If you can use a sword, you can use a sword!  Use it!  I don't care if you've been in the SCA for eleventy billion years!  This is a game, not a simulation.  I don't care about 'sword and board' and how it *really* is!  Augh!  Ahem.

So... what was I originally talking about?  Right, the fantasy Ghostbusters system thing and the skills and whatnot.  That's something I'll have to deal with when I get that off the ground.  Can there be a happy application of player agency when the players have skills on their sheets, or is that just my pessimism reinforced by ten years of playing with "roll-players"?

I long for the old days...

I'm getting annoyed with my gaming group again.  Well, let me be more specific.  Two things are annoying me about the gaming group.  One is that one person who's bound and determined to ruin any game that's not run to her exact specifications.  Can't do much about that except 1) ignore her, 2) quit going to the game.  I'm doing my best to do 1 right now.    The other thing is that I come to these moments where I'm just sick to death of the method of play at my gaming group.  It's not that it's bad.  The DM is great: a really nice guy who does what he can with the time he can dedicate to the game to come up with stuff for us to play every week.  I appreciate the work he does.  I just don't agree with all his rules.

I'm not going to open up a discussion/can o' worms about things like level limits or alignment behaviour.  But I heard from the DM this week that he gives human characters a +1 on any one stat when they're created, because, as he's not using level limits, he wants to give an incentive for players to choose humans, who don't have special abilities.

In my opinion, the game is about humans.  The original game.  The original idea.  Humans form the backbone of the civilised world.  The demi-humans form the fringes around it.  Dwarves want to stay in the mountain and mine.  Halflings want to stay in the shire and do halfling things.  Elves want to stay in the forests and frolic.  It's the oddballs of these races that come out to be player characters.  (And at the same time, I love humanoids as PCs.  In the setting I'm working on I'm replacing traditional demi-humans with animal men, who ought to operate by the same rule, but I'd love to see them get out into the world as PCs.  I'm so conflicted.)

Humans like to get into everything.  Humans are curious by nature.  We like to know what's over that next rise, or why this-or-that happened in such-and-such a way.  Humans are natural adventurers.  The other races, not so much.

I find myself longing for classic gaming, for the old days, for the Old School Revival kinds of games, the games that one annoying person at my game despise.  Roll 3d6, pick a class, buy armour and weapons and a pack and a torch or whatever, use less than one side of a piece of notebook paper, and we're off.   No split stats.  No NWPs.  No WPs.  No out-of-character spell lists that take several splatbooks to contain.  No pile of splatbooks that purport to give you more options but really restrict your options.  Ever tried making something really unique in Second Edition Skills  & Powers? I have.  I always run up against something that doesn't quite work.   Sometimes I think S&P is designed for people without imagination.  They want the game company to do all their thinkin' for them.

So I want to go back to those old days, before Tieflings (blech) and five-foot steps and Disadvantages and Character Points and all.  To that end, I have in my little brain the idea to run some short sessions of Moldvay/Mentzer D&D, possibly after the chaos of the holidays has passed and there are players available.  I'm feeling rather ranty tonight (no, REALLY?)  so I'll save the details for another post.

This Might Be Considered a Rant: THAC0

I just started reading Howling Tower.  I opened up a post from January today and the author referenced a post on Critical Hits about the way the game has changed, the influence of the Internet, et cetera.  I was cruising through this post and suddenly came to a screeching halt at this sentence: "We all know that huge weight that was lifted when THAC0 went away."

What?

What's wrong with THAC0?  If I know your character's THAC0 I know what Armour Class he's going to hit.  THAC0 20?  Rolled a 12?  AC 8.  It's basic subtraction, folks.  Not rocket science.  Third Edition decided to dumb down the system and now you all can't do math?  Eh?  Sure, it's easier to go, "The monster's AC is 12 so you need a 12 to hit it," but really.  I'm an English  Major.  I don't do math like some people don't do windows, get it?  I  like rules-light systems because I don't want to spend all my time figuring out seventy billion adjustments to my roll just to see if I can successfully walk down the street without falling over.  But THAC0 is not an example of a complex rule.

I started playing D&D (red box Mentzer) around 1984 or so.  I don't recall, as a child, having a great difficulty with descending Armour Class.  I learned it, and THAC0, very quickly.  Could it be that today's players are preoccupied with having the game their way, so their characters can be the special snowflake?  That they love all the new rules that "protect" them from "nasty DMs"?  That's fine for them.  I feel sad for them, but I'm not gonna argue with them, as long as they don't come leaning over here and telling me I'm a moron for using THAC0 and descending AC.  I feel sad that they've had to play with selfish and/or killer DMs who've abused them so much that they see a complicated, bloated ruleset as their only salvation.  And honestly: if you wanna be the badass mofo who kills all the monsters flawlessly and can never ever lose?  Go play an FPS game and turn on god mode.  If you want an experience that you'll remember, a fun time with friends, by all means, play D&D.

Told you this was gonna be ranty.