What's a game/system good for encouraging creativity in defeating encounters? E.g. like how many of the battles from Jojo play out
What's a game/system good for encouraging creativity in defeating encounters? E.g.
What's a game/system good for encouraging creativity in defeating encounters? E.g. like how many of the battles from Jojo play out
FATE
/thread
Good answer, but OP likely wanted a traditional combat game.
False, narrative systems are actually the worst for this because while they allow for unlimited creativity, they never reward it. Campaigns using rules-light narrative systems ultimately end up in a rut where players will put the least amount of effort into explaining how their vaguely defined abilities will help solve the problem because that's all they ever need to do: just posit some descriptions and roll your Cool Power dice. Sure they COULD constantly wrack their brains for new and clever uses (and I'm sure some lucky souls have gamed with such people before) but when lazy, low-effort options work just as well if not better, there's no incentive to do so and so the vast majority of people won't. I've seen this happen across three different groups with multiple systems that have these open-ended powers (FATE and WoD Mages namely, but also a longer DRYH game).
Compare this to a more detailed or grounded system, where a PC's capabilities are strictly defined and more or less limited to what's on the sheet. Suddenly, overcoming novel obstacles requires actual thought and creativity, because you can't just go "I evoke [major aspect] for the bonus" or "I damage its pattern with [magic sphere]." You are stuck with a limited set of tools that probably aren't meant to be helpful in this situation and it's up to you to make them work anyway. GURPS is unironically a better answer than FATE.
You misunderstood Fate. Comparing it to GURPS confirms that fully. Ultimately Fate is a game about what happens in the fiction and how players choose to influence that fiction through meta mechanics, not about modeling the physical capabilities of characters and equipment, or how things and actions are modeled in the in-game world. The point of Fate has never been about trying to come up with clever ways to "solve" in-game problems. Solving problems is not the point of the game, like in a very traditional game such as GURPS or D&D. The point of Fate is simply to produce scene-based fiction, very much like a TV show.
>The point of Fate has never been about trying to come up with clever ways to "solve" in-game problems
...Which is why I said it's a terrible recommendation for the OP, who is looking for a system that encourages creativity in defeating encounters. What are you on?
The thing they want to emulate is scene based fiction, true for both the manga and the tv show. I know you already showed everyone you're stupid but there's no need to double down.
I think that both of you have said ways to solve the problem that the OP has. One answer is use the "Limitations Breed Creativity" answer, which is true in a lot of circumstances. It is novel to use Mage Hand to swing a rope to a drowning sailor out at sea. And the other camp of "Scene Based Fiction" also works well as the players *should* be more invested in making the narrative take place, letting the powers and abilities of their characters facilitate the story at hand, rather than being the story that gets told, if that makes sense.
I think you are both right, and are approaching the problem from two different camps, but once again, anons, you are both intelligent when it comes to approaching OP's question.
>On principle
Fate
Burning Wheel
The Shadow of Yesterday
Wushu
Feng Shui
>Actual gameplay, but not always on principle
Wushu
Feng Shui
OVA
Hollow Earth Expedition (and other Ubiquity-based games)
Dogs in the Vineyard
Dzikie Pola 1e
>So many words
>To be completely wrong
>DitV
An unconventional suggestion but actually an inspired one. The escalation mechanic and the betting of resources would actually do shonen one-upsmanship extremely well. I'm stealing this for in the future.
Use the generic version, so you don't have to refluff mormon paladins
Which incidentally was made because the author had used DiTV to play a Jojo game, and this is what it came down from stripping the mormon parts into something that could be refluffed.
>Dogs in the Vineyard
How does it handle many vs one conflicts with its raise system? Like say the typical rpg bossfight. At least at first glance the whole thing seems aimed more at one vs one encounters.
I guess the "fight" itself can just be many conflicts rather than one big "win or lose" one.
You got it at the end, but also, most conflicts in Jojo are 1v1 fights or a series of 1v1 fights.
>Like say the typical rpg bossfigh
Question:
Is it the actual conflict?
Because if DitV has any sort of limitation, is what's the conflict even. To put it into some perspective (and rely to the ongoing climbing gameplay): climbing a wall would just happen in the narrative of DitV. But racing against the bad guy to the peak? That's a conflict, that's where you get into mechanical side of things, rather than simply succeeding (all actions that aren't conflict succeed by default).
So the real question is: is the bossfight an actual conflict? And HOW you plan to resolve it? Because it's the sort of game where talking down the baddie is a perfectly viable solution, while violence happening is like the last fricking resort. I was playing DitV for 8 months with a single group, and I don't think we've killed in total more than 5 people during that time. The game is really something else, but it's not without flaws and requires a very specific mindset to make it work (like most narrative games)
gameplay, but not always on principle
>Dzikie Pola 1e
Kek. I see what you did here, but I will allow it. After all, that system was all about creativity to not get shanked.
>"Narrative" games are bad, because you pile up your abilities to get bonuses and this kills any effort and creativity
>"Grounded" games are good, because you pile up your abilities to get bonuses and this fosters effort and creativity
This is your post.
This is how stupid you sound.
The only thing you got right is that Fate sucks balls and boils "gameplay" to piling up +2s from any source feasible, because there is no other mechanic to it. Which I guess can work, but when it "works", you might as well just play pure narrative without any mechanics whatsoever, rather than going pic related (and it's so fricking true, it's just confusing - I'm not even American and yet I get the exact type of players as described time and again when Fate is on the table)
Check out Wushu, instead of b***hing like a gay
Amber Diceless.
Cortex in theory but needs lots of legwork.
Personally speaking I found Fate a bit too samey.
>Personally speaking I found Fate a bit too samey.
The mechanics are samey and that's by design. The fiction, situations and choices it produces isn't.
>because there is no other mechanic to it
Wrong. The most significant mechanic of Fate is a player's choice of how and whether to utilise their fate points. If a GM doesn't provide meaningful choices within the fate point economy, the game has failed.
>Wrong
>Lists another source of +2s
You didn't get the game. The point of spending a fate point for a +2 is not to succeed in a task as if you were playing D&D. The point is to have the fiction end up in a desired direction. Also, you can't simply spend a fate point and "get bonuses". If there's no established thing in the fiction that would yield such bonus, it doesn't happen. Unless you first spend points to introduce new elements into the fiction, and so on.
Like I said, people who shit on Fate almost invariably are playing it wrong. They treat the games as if it was a task resolution system like D&D. Fate is not a perfect game by any means, but 99% of the problems people write about simply don't exist. Sure, if all you want to do is roll dice, see numbers and beat the BBEG, the game will be extremely bad.
>The point of spending a fate point for a +2 is not to succeed in a task as if you were playing D&D. The point is to have the fiction end up in a desired direction
... yeah, you're a never-game. Thanks for sharing your insight on the hobby you're not participating in.
moron.
>you don't succeed tasks in FATE, the fiction just goes in your desired direction
This is an absolutely irrelevant distinction. Unless your desired direction was failure, then you are still overcoming an obstacle
The distinction is important because Fate isn't meant to do moment-by-moment task simulation found in games such as D&D and every other trad game.
You are still doing the same thing but with less granularity. It's not particularly creative
>2003+20
>Trying to defend Fate
... are you even aware this doesn't work as bait material for like a decade at this point? Or just so terminally never-game, you just don't care?
By this logic, using Fate is superfluous. After all, the system literally doesn't matter, so why bother? Especially, when more often than not, all it does is causing people a headache when trying to decipher the mechanical situation of the current scene, stopping the narration into a screeching halt every single time the mechanics have to be used.
I'd rather use any given game with auto-resolve element in it instead, just to play along with any situation that spurs out, rather than trying to make it work within the extra-restricting corset of Fate.
This game not only is samey, but makes the fundamental blunder of making everything thrice as complicated as it needs to be. It's almost as if people behind it never tried to use it for the sort of gameplay they sell with their system.
>After all, the system literally doesn't matter, so why bother?
It very much matters in stating a clear framework for how and when players can influence the fiction. Which is the point of the game.
So which one is it?
>You didn't get the game
>Fate almost invariably are playing it wrong
>They treat the games as if it was a task resolution system
or
>a clear framework for how and when players can influence the fiction
Because seems like a little bit contradictionary to me to have game both being "a clear framework" and having everyone "playing it wrong".
Besides: there is literally no difference between "create ficitonal narrative" and "task resolution", OTHER than the name. The end result is the same: the game heading in the direction chosen by player(s), using tools the players have at their disposal.
Which is another weakness of Fate - it tries to sell bog-standard gameplay as reinventing the wheel, just because it renamed things
Also:
There are other games out there than DnD, you know. No point flaunting you know none and have zero familiarity with various types of gameplays. Using "other games" rather than "unlike DnD" at least gives your posts some credibility
>Because seems like a little bit contradictionary to me to have game both being "a clear framework" and having everyone "playing it wrong".
I'll give you that, in that Fate is extremely poorly written to actually explain how it's supposed to be played and that's part of the problem why people don't get it.
I use D&D as an example because it's the most widely known traditional game, and most of the time people trying Fate are trying to play it like D&D. My most played game personally is Call of Cthulhu. But that doesn't have anything to do with the subject itself.
>But that doesn't have anything to do with the subject itself.
Quite the contrary, it just adds to the strawmen you keep making. "Oh, you are playing this brilliant game wrong, just as if you were playing the brain-dead DnD!"
>to decipher the mechanical situation of the current scene
Again, this is not what the game does. The rules are not there to specify what the mechanical/physical situation is. The game does not model or answer questions like "does my sword hit the guy?" or "is the monster caught in the dynamite blast?" or "how much damage do I do" or whatever. The mechanics inform how, when and to what direction the fictional situation shifts.
... are you missing the point on purpose or something? Here, let me walk you through it
>Actual narrative game
Player declares climbing to the mountain top in a race against the bad guy, for whoever will reach the summit first, will be able to claim the Sword Of All Doom. It goes as a back-and-forth between player and GM, for there are obstacles on the way, and eventually the goons of the bad guy show up with a chopper to makes things worse
>Fate, same situation
Player stops to check his Aspects for it. Halt of the narrative. Player invokes specific Aspect, just so he can get +2 to the dice roll on the climb. Obstacle happens. Player stops to check how to best overcome it MECHANICALLY, rather than with the flow of narrative. By the time the chopper arrives, player is left with nothing but just dice pool rolls, for he burned all the mechanical elements he had at his disposal and the game boils down to just dice rolls
... how is this improving anything, or solving any kind of narrative issue? It's literally bolting mechanics for the sake of it, but doesn't even truly resolve the situation at hand in any way, just affects a dice roll.
It's as if genuine autistic person tried to create guide rails for other autistic people, thus making Fate, and as a result, if you aren't on the spectrum and thus don't need those rails to even grasp the concept of narrative and metafiction, you will hit the wall, for the rules of the game will just wiener-block you, rather than help with anything.
Your definition of "narrative" is "without mechanics" and that's not correct. Narrative games have mechanics. You're describing freeform storytelling.
>game boils down to just dice rolls
No, the game boils down to what happened in the fiction after the dice have been rolled and each player made choices whether to spend points or not in using various narrative powers. Engaging in mechanics does not mean "halt of the narrative".
No, he actually mentioned back-and-forth. Which is what Wushu does so well: an endless auction between player(s) and the GM, creating the scene of the situation, with ever growing (or dwindling) pool of dice as a result.
The trick is to set up the scene in a way that both makes sense for the narrative, give you the edge and also allows to continue from there on, with ability of the other side to turn it against you. Mention a length of rope in the gear? The GM is in his right to make it too short to reach in a dramatic moment. GM mentioned uneven, rocky crags? Use them to make climbing easier. And so on.
That's both narrative and mechanical, because those dice pools won't make themselves. And it's also in a constant flow.
Meanwhile all Fate can do is offering you a specific, pre-definied element of your own character, that requires to bend entire set-up around said element. You can't? Well, you're shit out of luck. And all it teaches is just making the broadest, most blanket characters that can fit "any" situation, with some barely descriptive aspects to them. None of which matter, because they are utterly interchangeable, and in the same time set in stone.
>Meanwhile all Fate can do is offering you a specific, pre-definied element of your own character, that requires to bend entire set-up around said element. You can't? Well, you're shit out of luck. And all it teaches is just making the broadest, most blanket characters that can fit "any" situation, with some barely descriptive aspects to them. None of which matter, because they are utterly interchangeable, and in the same time set in stone.
That tendency towards broad aspects is against the spirit of Jojo, which is more about creative uses of narrowly scoped powers.
Which works in a weekly or monthly serialized manga, but won't work so well with typical players.
OP here, that bit about narrowly scoped powers is I think key
most systems give you a lot of tools, but I'm attracted to situations where your abilities are limited and you have to be creative with what you have
e.g. if you have a spell that lets you summon an animal of your choice, that can lead to a lot of creative uses if you know what a particular animal is good at
Good example is Giorno (and Koichi) fighting Black Sabbath; for some context Giorno was given an initiation test to sneak a lit lighter out of a prison, keep it lit for a day, and then return it to the prisoner who gave it to him inside the prison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lnNWT1StkE
>image
Why do you want someone's character to be arbitrarily punished based off the whims of some random designer? What do they know about how worthwhile your character actually be to the RP?
Feng Shui or Legends of the Wulin.
GURPS
There's a few JoJo tabletop systems floating around that might be exactly what you want.
Any good recommendation anon? I've wanted to get into one.
This one was pretty fun to work with.
narrative systems only
>What's a game/system good for encouraging creativity in defeating encounters?
Blades in the Dark, or a forged in the dark spinoff. The main mechanical gimmick is doing a flashback to how you prepared for a situation, which will let you do the back and forth you see in a JoJo battle.
The only thing FitD games encourage is sucking John Harper's wiener. They are actively anti-creative, instead being an endless bidding of "gotch'ya" between players and GM, fostering some of the most moronic behaviours on both sides of the table that weren't around since early 90s
>instead being an endless bidding of "gotch'ya" between players and GM
This is exactly how a JoJo fight plays out though
>Compare this to a more detailed or grounded system, where a PC's capabilities are strictly defined and more or less limited to what's on the sheet
This isn't how JoJo fights work. They constantly reveal new stand powers or secret gambits they didn't show setup for mid fight.
I would say Mage: The Awakening, but the flip side is the GM has to be incredibly on the ball in designing challenges and cannot come into it from the mindset of conventional systems balanced around say, damage output, attrition defence etc.
The kinds of things a starting mage can do out the gate trivialize many conventional challenges, and with the right combination of Arcana dots (though players start with only three levels usually divided between two of the ten aracana) players can pretty much do anything. But so can enemy mages.
Mage the Ascension did it better. Too bad they shoved the rest of the WoD crap into it.
In what way?
Originally, Mage the Ascension was stand alone, had nothing to do with werewolves, vampires, or anything else. You didn't have to worry about characters being balanced with each other, because magiuc was wacky enough that anyone could manage well when dealign with other mages. When they started having to codify mage spheres with the other WoD dreck to balance mages with Werewolves, Vampires and so on, they fricked up the system entirely, making it into 'you have this dot you can do exactly this and only this'.
tl;dr: They nerfed the system and removed all creativity in order to make it balanced with other WoD shit.
I'm still not entirely sure how it did it better than Awakening
I haven't seen Jojo, what is an example of such a battle?
Hero System is toolkit designed for comic book bullshit like Jojo.
None, because your players aren't that creative and don't have a week between chapters to think of something clever
Genesys. "And some other shit happens" is baked into the dice system. Having knowledge of the scene, its setpieces, and ideas on what to do with them will come up.
>What's a game/system good for encouraging creativity in defeating encounters?
No system in the world will make uncreative players into imaginative, witty problem solvers. Find the right group and you'll have your game.
Most correct posts in the thread. That being said, once you have decent, creative players, I recommend Genesys
Unofficial RWBY TTRPG or whatever it's called. Beating harder encounters relies on you pulling off creative teamwork in battle to earn extra d10s to hit higher thresholds.
why do uncreative brainlets think they need a new system and ruleset every time they want to do anything? is it a result of D&D brainrot?
>why do uncreative brainlets
>think they need a new system and ruleset every time they want to do anything
You've just answered your own question, despite it not being rhetorical
Because generic systems don't do anything well, and you're best off having something specific.
If anything, the idea that one system can do everything is PEAK D&D Brainrot.
>Because generic systems don't do anything well, and you're best off having something specific.
Untrue. Gurps in particular mogs most systems attempting to do anything modern.
>Gurps in particular mogs most systems attempting to do anything modern.
That's largely because TTRPGs set in the modern world are basically non-existent, GURPS doesn't have a lot of competition to begin with. The only remotely mainstream game for that is Call of Cthulhu, which is a very specific type of campaign and not meant to be generalized the other styles of play. It's the second most popular RPG in the world BECAUSE it has such a specific focus and plays to the genre's strengths, it's one of the few games types that even totally brain-rotten D&D players can intuitively understand "how come we can't just use 5e for this?" is a moronic question when talking about being an illiterate Polack handyman in the 1920s investigating fish people.
after CoC/Delta Green the only other modern day stuff is similarly entrenched in specific genre trappings, a modern day capeshit game is still about capeshit, and World of Darkness stuff is much more about vampire swordfights and wizards teleporting people into the sun than it is drag racing even if driving is a skill
>TTRPGs set in the modern world are basically non-existent
Ask me how I know you are a clueless homosexual that either doesn't play at all, or only played ever DnD.
>This is your brain on Hasbro marketing
The fact you leap to MUH D&D is proof you have no defense against my statement and know that specially-curated systems are always superior to generic systems.
>of course they don't, creative players and GMs do.
It shouldn't be up to the GM and players to design the system piecemeal from a large range of rules and options. That's why generic systems fail, they can't give the right mechanics for specific things, just generic sort-of okay mechanics that the GM has to cobble together.
>there isn't such a thing
There are systems that exist that encourage creativity from the players by rewarding outside-the-box thinking and clever planning with metacurrency or other resources in a similar vein.
>"creativity" isn't something you should ask permission to do
Keep in mind, it is also a GAME. it needs RULES and LIMITATIONS. Creativity should be rewarded, but when it crosses the line into absurdity you need to shove the players back over that line. A jojo game has a higher bar for absurdity however.
>setting a balance ceiling so that you don't break the game
So locking it behind "some arbitrary (it isn't arbitrary) ruleset that tells you what you're allowed to do". Limits are limits.
>I said you shouldn't need rules for everything, not that you shouldn't need rules for anything.
You should however have rules for everything regarding what kind of game you want to run. It gives the players an idea of what they can and cannot accomplish within the game. It sets their expectations and boundaries accordingly.
>It shouldn't be up to the GM and players...
creativity is always up to GM and players, there's no "creativity system" that will do that for you. the system literally doesn't matter, but some give more limitations to creativity than others.
>There are systems that exist that encourage creativity from the players by rewarding outside-the-box thinking and clever planning with metacurrency
I explained why I think cookies don't work, did you even read the post before replying?
in addition to that though, if you have to dangle a carrot in front of your players for them to be creative then you have bigger problems than lacking an arbitrary mechanic that will magically make them creative. it's a big, throbbing COPE.
>Keep in mind, it is also a GAME. it needs RULES and LIMITATIONS
>So locking it behind "some arbitrary (it isn't arbitrary) ruleset that tells you what you're allowed to do". Limits are limits.
not all limits are worth the same, and some rules ARE arbitrary. stop pretending there isn't a middle ground here where one can accept one rule but deny another.
>You should however have rules for everything regarding what kind of game you want to run
see
"MORE RULES" isn't necessarily gonna make your game better, so this isn't an excuse. yeah no shit your game should have some rules, but making an active rule for creativity is what you call a perverse incentive, it is by all means counterproductive to your own goals.
The sheer irony of the fact you are parroting one of the DnD marketing pitches and yet complain about DnD brain rot is hurting my sides
>Because generic systems don't do anything well
of course they don't, creative players and GMs do.
OP LITERALLY asked for systems that "encourage creativity". there isn't such a thing, "creativity" isn't something you should ask permission to do, a system can only limit it by locking it behind some arbitrary ruleset that tells you what you're allowed to do instead of just setting a balance ceiling so that you don't break the game. even "cookies" aren't a good option for encouraging creativity because what they really do is disincourage any solution that DOESN'T give you these cookies.
>the idea that one system can do everything is PEAK D&D Brainrot
I said you shouldn't need rules for everything, not that you shouldn't need rules for anything.
>I said you shouldn't need rules for everything, not that you shouldn't need rules for anything.
Nta and ESL, please explain. Because it literally doesn't translate into my native as distinction between two options
anything and everything are different in the way that anon is using them.
>You shouldn't need rules for EVERYTHING
the game doesn't need autistic specifically detailed charts and tables for every possible circumstance, you don't need a different GURPS flowchart for every possible vehicle a player wants to drive or fly
>You shouldn't need rules for ANYTHING
The game should still have specific, detailed rules for what it DOES focus on. He doesn't want just a mushy vague freeform game where everything is equally vague the way lots of story games are. The best modern example is dungeons and dragons, where there's detailed rules for combat and spellcasting and fighting monsters in initiative because that's what 99% of the game is about while social interaction has basically zero rules and is often handwaved or done purely with roleplaying or at most one skill check because that's not the narrative or mechanical focus. Contrast this with Vampire the Masquerade, which has full on social combat rules and "empathy" and "etiquette" are skills considered equally valid and with the same investment required as "firearms" or "brawl" because accidentally offending a thousand year old vampire in a tense social situation is just as likely to get you fricking murdered as getting into a shootout with a bunch of ghoul henchmen will, and the game doesn't even have a grid and all combat is done theater of the mind with abstracted movement.
A game doesn't need rules for EVERYTHING, but that's not the same as it doesn't need rules for ANYTHING, it should still have rules for its specific focus and what you're meant to care about. A lot of "rules-lite" and narrative games end up going the "lol you don't need rules for anything" route in an attempt to come across as approachable or trendy and encourage """"creativity""" but at that point you're basically in Lasers and Feelings territory and might as well just resolve everything by flipping a coin.
what I mean is that not everything warrants a specific, written rule, and that sometimes not having a rule opens more options than having one.
for instance, in a general sense, if there's a skill for "walking", it may seem at first glance like there's a new option for players to explore, but it actually limits the possibilities by forcing everyone to waste points on this skill or not being able to walk at all.
20 year old flamewars from the indy rpg side of the community
>"Noooo, you've got to play my dicepool shitbrew with metacurrency and crunch I didn't playtest. It's designed for [genre], and rules-lite, so it's better bro."
Lords of Gossamer and Shadow.
No dice, no randomizers. Power vs Power ends up being a null value, unless you have some tricks up your sleeve to outsmart or twist the situation to your advantage. No gimmicky builds to help you, unless you seek out new and strange powers on your own, which means creatively deciding how you want to defeat future or past opponents already.
It's not for anyone who needs their hands held to play a game, you Hasbeen D&D players.
If you want to encourage actual creativity from your players, GURPS. Their PCs' capabilities will be clearly defined and victory will be dependent on how they use them. If you just want to emulate the ~feeling~ of creativity, you can use whatever system and just roll dice while having your players come up with some nonsense on the fly.
ars magicka
mage
geist
orpheus
wraith
changeling
the long journey home
Play Genesys
Is there any system that’s robust like GURPS but offloads most of the rules onto the GM, so players are free to describe what they want to do, and the GM can match up what they said to an actual mechanic without the players having to memorize all of them? Am I being moronic?
This seems like something you describe when utilizing mechanics, rather than try to emulate exactly. It does help to use a system that doesn't overtly force a specific flavor.
Or you could just freeform roleplay with someone who isn't an butthole.
OSR OD&D ---> 1E AD&D with a open system referee allows this.
Bait the orcs onto a ledge and log roll them with a trap.
Barricade the wizard in his Tower and set it on fire.