Your friends have all gathered to play a game. There are five of you, but the game is only 4 players. Someone has to sit out, and it's randomly decided that that's you. Ever had that feeling? It's a sinking frustration, because you can't really blame anyone but the randomness that chose you, and the game that put you there. So you feel helplessness, and all alone.Fortunately, this doesn't actually happen because people aren't jerks (eh, usually). They'd instead choose to play another game, because they don't want one of their friends to not play. So why then, do so many games have mechanics that do exactly that: have people not play the game?! The worst game mechanic in the world is any which causes a player of the game to do exactly the opposite of what a game design should strive for: having fun by playing the game.
The most simple example of this is the lose a turn mechanic. The affected player has to sit out for a round while everyone else plays past them. That's not at all fun! Likewise, take an extra turn is almost as bad. This is essentially forcing everyone but one player to lose a turn. This is almost obvious, yet game after game include it as an effect of some card, some ability, or some reward.
This gets me to the important part for RPG mechanics:
Never give a player more "actions" than another in any given "round".Period. I don't care about attack speeds, injuries, or status effects. This problem can be much more subtle: an extra attack here, a bonus action there, a loss of your movement action. An extra re-roll. Any mechanics that lets one player play more than the other players means that one player is hogging the spotlight. They are taking up more of everyone's time than any other player. Even if a wizard's fireball blows up the entire room, the fighter with ten attacks will be rolling for minutes, while the wizard sits back and waits for the next day to roll around (don't even get me started on 'encounter' or 'daily' powers...). Equally cool in terms of fiction, and even balanced in terms of power. But the bottom line is that the wizard just doesn't get to play as much as the fighter.
Major edit after a lot of people have pointed some things out to me:
This is not a major issue, if an issue at all, in most role playing games. Extra actions can be a lot of fun - for those who get them. But it rarely impacts the other players. In fact, the 'human factor' is a much larger contributor to players waiting around than a player's extra actions ever are. But these arguments don't disprove that such mechanics have a core problem. For science, you really have to focus in and look at things individually as well as within the big picture. Narrowed down, these mechanics have the potential to lag a game down. In the big picture, it's only a 'real problem' when one or more factors are also put on top of it: such as that one guy who takes forever to decide what he's going to do. The issue is multiplied if that guys is also the one that has multiple actions.
The idea behind the spotlight being equal per 'round' could in fact be drawn out over multiple sessions. I'm perfectly okay with games that shift major spotlights game to game, especially when it's story/fiction based. But that's not one of these mechanics that I'm talking about. The problem is that a mechanic such as 'lose a turn' could completely destroy someone's spotlight day (e.g. they get turned to stone by a Medusa), now wasting multiple game sessions for that player, rather than just one or so rounds of a combat.
The bottom line is that these types of mechanics prevent player engagement, and that's why they are not "good".
**End Edit**
Next up is stuns. My friends and I have a saying: "Stuns win games". If you've ever played a MOBA like DoTA, LoL, or HoN, you know how true this is. But it's equally true for every other game genre as well. When someone cannot act, cannot play the game, the other players have a 100% pure advantage. Sure, this can be balanced (e.g. the cost of the stun is high enough to offset the time lost), but the key here is that it is not fun. The player that is stunned gets aggravated, increased in direct relation to how long they are stunned for. Steer clear of these mechanics, and balance your game in other ways. For example, don't have "ice" stun - make it "slow". Detriments are interesting; you have to play around them, usually calling for a change in strategy. But you're still playing.
In RPGs (and other co-op games), an important thing to remember is that when players are not against other players (e.g. a GM, cards, or computer AI), these types of mechanics are okay for the players to inflict on their enemies, because enemies aren't there to have fun. It's not about them, it's about the players. So have your mage freeze that dragon; just don't let the rogue sprint, jump, attack, backflip, and attack again all in the same go.
Stuns Win Games - OPifex Gaming
Mechanics that force you to not play the game you sat down to play are the worst mechanics in game design. And there are plenty of shitty, broken, unbalanced, disruptive, un-intuitive, complex, confusing, nonsensical mechanics out there. There are things that just don't work. But none can top the mechanics that do exactly what they're intended to do: stop people from playing.
Another major edit, for more examples:
Companions/pets give players complete extra turns. They are doing more per turn than other characters, and I've seen plenty of games bog down to a crawl because of it. This is generally why we don't give the same person multiple characters to play within an RPG, unless everyone also gets multiple characters. It's hard for players to control that much - i.e. it takes too long in comparison to everyone else.
Magic: The Gathering has "take an extra turn" cards that, when stacked, can make opponents walk away from the table, because they don't want to sit and watch someone play solitaire cards for 10 minutes.
Dominion is a game where "extra actions" per turn is a core part of getting players' engines going. But the key to dominion is that everyone starts with an equal opportunity to gain these extra actions. The game is about that, but is not the major selling point of the game. I'd argue that strategies that get more actions are more 'fun' to play in dominion, but that doesn't stop other strategies from also being viable/fun, because the game centers around figuring out the 'optimal' card strategy, not necessarily the turn-by-turn play. Arguable - I know - and I'd then start to argue that the extra actions make some strategies more enjoyable than others, which isn't good game design.
Lastly, my favorite example from people's comments: there's an obvious line between a barbarian having a couple of extra swings with his axe and the druid who summons 8 great owls to control for the next six turns. The point - when it comes down to it - is to be careful with your game designs. These types of mechanics are awesome for the player, but generally not so much for the other players.
Having fewer turns than somebody else would be a pain if it happened all the time, but in all my years of RPGs, it hasn't ever been a serious problem (possibly because I played little D&D). I disagree with avoiding stuns/extra turns as a hard and fast rule for tabletop RPGs, because there have to be several conditions met for this to be a big deal.
ReplyDelete1) Most of game time is spent in turn-by-turn fashion or real-time action sequences (LoL). Only Larpers do real time combat in tabletop RPGs and I find turn-by-turn gets real boring real fast no matter how equal the number of rounds. So, most of my games are narrative, exploration, investigation, punctuated by combat.
2) Who gets to play more in a tabletop RPG has MUCH MUCH more to do with how decisive they are (in a combat setting), how outspoken the player is (in non-combat settings), and how well balanced the challenges are (if the GM doesn't include puzzles that cater to a character's strengths, the player isn't going to get much game time). ALL three of those are things that are better addressed by human judgment rather than: the GM setting a time limit on your decisions in combat, specifically encouraging quieter players, having a good mix of puzzles.
3) Even if you exclude mechanics that outright grant extra turns / take away turns, there's a lot of ways this can happen in directly: A stronger person than you grapples you: you can technically take a turn to try to get free, but you know it's a lost cause. You lose all your hitpoints and pass out. You fall in a pit and can't climb out. You got separated from the group. You're charmed, so you can't take a turn, but you don't get to do what you want. The underlying principle for GMs is just be very conscious of how much game time each player gets (and the quality of the game time). No hard and fast rule will eliminate players having to sit out or wait occasionally, but occasionally is not a problem.
Hi Alec, thanks for your thoughts! In the whole of it, I agree with you. You can't get away from the human factor of things, and even with the best of games you'll be waiting on that one guy, or the GM, or whatnot.
DeleteBut these types of mechanics certainly don't help the matter. I also agree that in most cases, extra actions and maybe a stun here or there don't adversely affect the game. It really only becomes a problem - when it's a problem. I believe that I've narrowed down one of the causes of that problem though, especially when designers go bonkers with the amount of extra actions they throw at one class but not others.
I do wonder how anyone ever had fun fighting a Beholder - OK you're paralyzed! You're stoned! You're charmed! Seemed like half your party would be out of play.
ReplyDeleteLOL! So true!
DeleteNo no, it just makes 'mirror' based spells much more amusing ;)
DeleteHaha yes, also true :)
DeleteActually, extra turns are only problematic in terms of spotlight time if it takes a long time to resolve each action. For example, druid animal companions are a huge problem in D&D 3e and its derivatives because there are other factors that make combat actions take forever to adjudicate. First, combat is a complex, grid-based minis skirmish game where you may have to pull out a ruler to determine line of sight or flanking bonuses.
ReplyDeleteSecond, some characters (especially spellcasters, though everybody can suffer from this problem at high levels) have so many options that it's hard to keep track of them. Because the high-level wizard's spellbook has so many spells, the wizard's player either takes all day to decide what to do or risks playing ineffectively to keep the game moving. In that sense, the wizard casting a single spell can create more spotlight imbalances than a fighter making a bunch of iterative attacks. This happens not because of the peculiarities of the players, but because the system can overwhelm the human brain and create "analysis paralysis."
It is this kind of complexity that also results in player disengagement during "lose a turn" effects. It's easy to stay engaged while passive when you can easily follow what the other players are doing. In the high-level Pathfinder game I played in, however, combat often bogged down in clarifications of both combat rules and spell and class feature descriptions. It was usually during these discussions that people tuned out.